1.1. Conflicto Cultural en el Perú
1.1.2. Conflicto Cultural y Educación en el Perú
a holy ephod bound on me, I am a gifted seer; The unseen grows more clear;
Still their indwelling Deity Speaks plainer in mine ear. Oh holy high the mission is Which thought to thinking brings!
Thy web, the nursing chrysalis Round Psyche’s folded wings, To them transfers the loveliness
Of its inwoven things. (“My Heart”) i) Reflecting Insights
i) Revisioning Stories Iii) Responsive Reception iv) Revealing Repetitions
As stated, the examination of some of the elements of Seaboard and how they relate to Ruskin
helps lay the groundwork for a better understanding how MacDonald explores the
transformational potential of Story, and particularly of how this is effected in Lilith.221 Although
one of the most discussed works by MacDonald, Lilith has not been discussed in relation to either
Seaboard or to Ruskin. Yet the shared elements make blatant some of the themes in Lilith – not the least in the Dantean references and allusions that, if not as arresting, nonetheless pervade the
text of Seaboard. The book’s audience already knows that the narrator – a vicar away from his
home parish – is a reader of Dante, for that was established when he was the protagonist of the
prequel, Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood.
i) Reflecting Insights
The most extensive discussion of Dante in this sequel occurs when the narrating vicar and the young landscape artist first converse. The discussion revolves around the manner in which a certain rock on the shore evokes Dante’s Purgatory, and specifically, the place of Ulysses’ demise. In the artist’s painting of the rock the seven circles of Purgatory are clearly evident. (245) A translation of the referenced passage is given – presumably MacDonald’s own. During the
221Seaboard and Lilith are not the only texts that share striking images. For example, the vicar’s dream in Seaboard comes right out
of The Portent, and in Lilith Vane also canters on a Düreresque horse that dissolves as he crosses a barrier. The end vision of
Cumbermede appears to lead right into the book of Lilith, with Charley and Mary lying in a cold sleeping chamber (following an
incident with the horse ‘Lilith’). Also in Seaboard the vicar’s boys have “a huge gilt ball” with “an eagle of brass with outspread wings on the top of it.” (134) Nothing more is said of the eagle (familiar to members of European churches, in which it bears up the lectern that is to hold the Word of God), but it is in description very similar to the eagle which sits upon the mirror through which Vane enters the region of seven dimensions.
conversation it is established that not only both men but – unusually for the period – the vicar’s
daughter as well, read Dante in the original.222 The painter stresses that careful reading and
knowledge of an artist, a Makar, allows one even further into the truths of his work: “if anybody only glanced at my little picture, he would take those for sea-birds; but if he looked into it, and began to suspect me, he would find out that they were Dante and Beatrice on their way to the sphere of the moon.” (245) It is not long before the daughter and the painter – both readers of
Modern Painters, and both in personal conflict with the Christian faith – fall in love. As the young man – Charles Percivale – spends more time with the narrator’s family, the vicar-narrator – Henry Walton – has long conversations with him about theories of landscape painting. The narrator also spends much time reflecting to the reader both upon the surrounding vistas of dramatic land, sea, and sky (with particular attention to Ruskin’s favoured topic of clouds), as well as upon theories
of their power to affect the human observer.223 (One of the vicar’s discussion partners is a
Wordsworth-loving doctor by the name of none other than ‘Turner.’224) The ‘word-painting’
employed by the narrator throughout the novel is not unlike that used by Ruskin in his efforts to
reproduce visual experiences in Modern Painters. In a manner that surely would have pleased
Ruskin, the reader feels like he or she is not only beginning to visualize the scenes described, but is coming to better understand what the characters see. And as the vicar and the artist both converse over the paintings – in addition to landscapes, he paints Pre-Raphaelite style romances
(one is specifically inspired, MacDonald adds in a footnote, by Arthur Hughes’ Knight of the Sun)225
– the explanations and interpretations, and their literary, mythological, philosophical, and moral elements are also redolent with Ruskin. Ruskin’s gift of the Turner engravings to MacDonald
came the year Seaboard was published – perhaps the gift was in part a response to the book.
Modern Painters is noted for its emphasis on the visual and on seeing – and these are also
persistent themes through Seaboard. The narrator explains that his own acuity of sight, despite
an inborn short-sightedness, has developed “because I have trained myself to observe. The degree of power in the sight is of less consequence than the habit of seeing.” (196) For the reflecting vicar, this is further fodder for comprehending the means of revelation:
222 Says the painter, probably alluding to Rossetti: “A friend of mine, a brother painter, an Italian, set me going with that, and
once going with Dante, nobody could well stop. I never knew what intensity per se was till I began to read Dante.” (245)
223 The word ‘cloud,’ or variations upon it, appears over seventy times. Ruskin’s iconic “The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth
Century” was first delivered as a lecture in 1884.
224 Ruskin used an extract of Wordsworth’s The Excursion for his epigraph to each edition of MP.
225 The piece is described in great detail and declared: “a grand picture, full of feeling – a picture and a parable.” (615) Other
narrative paintings of more sombre character and of less skill are also discussed. The Knight of the Sun (c. 1859) was well-received, and Hughes inscribed upon the frame a stanza from MacDonald’s poem “Better Things” (1857). Hughes partnered other paintings with MacDonald quotations, such as The Heavenly Stair (c. 1888). (Roberts 204) Detailed information on the painting is found in Leonard Robert’s catalogue, Arthur Hughes: His Life and Works, which also gives extensive attention to various paintings either owned by the MacDonalds or for which the children modelled.
My eye could not be filled with seeing. I stood in speechless delight for a while, gazing at the “endless ending” which was “the humour of the game,” and thinking how in all God's works the laws of beauty are wrought out in evanishment, in birth and death. There, there is no hoarding, but an ever-fresh creating, an eternal flow of life from the heart of the All-beautiful. Hence even the heart of man cannot hoard words, not in meaning, for the words can bear no meaning but the one which reveals its own reality. (443)
For him the output of poets such as Wordsworth (whose “To the Daisy” discusses “the humour of the game,/ While I am gazing”), or of Philip Sidney (“endless ending” is how Sidney translates a phrase in Psalm LXV), are expressions of their apprehension and response
– their relation – to God’s own poetry:“More and more nature becomes to me one of God's
books of poetry – not his grandest – that is history – but his loveliest, perhaps.”226 (140)
MacDonald is reminding his readers again that, like the Christian Fathers (and Mothers) before him, like the Celts of his heritage and his Scottish mentors, he understands both Nature and History to be mediums of poetic communication from God to his people: God is “the world's great Author.” (407) In the pervasive discussions of sight, MacDonald – like Ruskin –
continues to refer to the necessary enabler: Light. Many discussions take place between the doubting young painter and the literary pastor that intertwine the concepts of sight, light, and faith. Percivale echoes Ruskin in his plaintive: “I wish I could believe as you do, Mr. Walton,” (445) and also in his confiding: “I know you are able to distinguish between a glad unbelief and
a sorrowful doubt.” 227 (443) The vicar – harkening Erskine’s discussions on Light and
conscience, while playing with Ruskin’s concepts of light in landscape painting228 – explains:
The heart of man is not able, without more and more light, to understand that all vision is in the light of the Father. Because Jesus went to the Father, therefore the disciples saw him tenfold more. His body no longer in their eyes, his very being, his very self was in their hearts – not in their affections only – in their spirits, their heavenly consciousness. (459)
226 In Antiphon MacDonald discusses “endless ending” at length – the psalm ends with a phrase reminiscent of Lilith: “That buried
seed through yielding grave doth grow.” Ruskin also revered Sidney’s Psalter, producing an edition called Bibliotheca Pastorum, included in his select library for the Guild of St George. (Hilton 535; Collingwood 396) “The ‘Endless Ending’” is itself a chapter title in Lilith. McGillis references the title in his discussion of “the importance of poetry as a way of knowing.” He references post- Macdonald Northrop Fry and Paul Ricoeur, concluding that this title means: “Poetry truly never ends. The idea of the endless story is strong in MacDonald.” (“Language” 155; 146) He seems unaware of the phrase’s pre-MacDonald source.
227 Elsewhere the vicar declares: “The very fact that he doubts, shows that he has some faith. When I find anyone hard upon
doubters, I always doubt the quality of his faith.” (578)
228 For Erskine, Scott, and Maurice ‘Light’ is a key word and concept. This is clearly the case for MacDonald too. These men seek
to “bear witness to the Light,” constantly drawing attention to the “Word become flesh.” (John 1:9; 14) The entire gospel of John
was one that Ruskin almost knew by heart. His 1881 Epilogue to MP III, in addition to berating the ill-equipped viewer who dares approach classical painting without being familiar with iconography or knowing the Patristics, classical literature, and Scripture, adds that he has read John “some thousands of times, syllable by syllable.”
He further expounds on this by way of quoting a poem of Novalis – one of the Hymns of the Night – “for which I had and have an especial affection.” (459) It is the poem MacDonald had
shared with Ruskin in the past, and one that he would share with Ruskin again.229
ii) Revisioning Stories
In a conversation directly relating to the passion MacDonald shared with Scott, Percivale the artist challenges the vicar that one “can hardly expect experience to be of use to any but those who have had it. It seems to me that its influences cannot be imparted.” (455) As
MacDonald had through the format of Cathcart he now reiterates through his reflective
narrator an argument for the vicarious educational nature of Story, of relating tradition and experience. And again, there is an echo of Balbo:
That depends on the amount of faith in those to whom its results are offered. Of course, as experience, it can have no weight with another; for it is no longer experience. One remove, and it ceases. But faith in the person who has experienced can draw over or derive – to use an old Italian word – some of its benefits to him who has the faith. Experience may thus, in a sense, be accumulated, and we may go on to fresh experience of our own. (456)
The narrating vicar – as he explained to his readers in the first chapter – is enabling exactly this: he is telling a story, his story, so that others can learn from it. Throughout his telling, he retells other retellings – stories of the neighbourhood, stories from the Bible, stories from mythology, stories from Shakespeare – and typical to any MacDonald novel, he references many many
more. When he tells his daughter the story of her parents’ courtship (one the readers of Annals
already know), it not only dispels fears and girds her sense of identity, but “it made her trust us more.” (622) When he retells Gospel stories, he weaves in images from the myths of “old painters and poets.” (578) When retelling of the infancy of Christ he encourages his children to “rest and brood” their thoughts upon
the fragments that are given us, and, believing that the imagination is one of the most powerful of all the faculties for aiding the growth of truth in the mind, I would ask them questions as to what they thought he might have said or done in ordinary family occurrences. (578) 230
229 Cf.. May 30, 1875, written upon the occasion of Rose’s death. (Kings 1/1/48) Novalis’ poems were written while grieving his
own betrothed.
230 This recalls a passage published the year before Seaboard: “Nowhere can the imagination be more healthily and rewardingly
occupied than in endeavouring to construct the life of an individual out of the fragments which are all that can reach us of the history of even the noblest of our race. How this will apply to the reading of the gospel story we leave to the earnest thought of our readers.” (“Fantastic” 18)
Ruskin has encouraged a similar thing in Modern Painters III, when he declares that the reason humans have an imagination is, “above all, to call up the scenes and facts in which we are
commanded to believe, and be present, as if in the body, at every recorded event of the history of
the Redeemer.” (MP III 46) But the vicar pushes the imaginative engagement a little further, and
he explains why: he hopes that his children, in participating in these stories, will learn to choose to
be shaped by them: “If we do not thus employ our imagination on sacred things, his example can be of no use to us except in exactly corresponding circumstances – and when can such occur from one end to another of our lives?” (71) The vicar firmly believes that this practiced and imaginative engagement with stories will “help thereby in the actual training of their imaginations to truth and wisdom” (71) – and this holds whether it is the veritable stories of the gospels that inspire reflection, or fictive tales. The vicar also explains to Percivale that even when a person is not yet able to learn from their response to a work of art – visual, aural, or literary – it yet does them good just to recognize expressions of what might be “their own thoughts, or feelings, or something like them” that they had yet been unable to consider – thus enabling their “waking up.” (480) “Even when [the reader/viewer/listener] is not aware of it, [the art is] working upon him, – for good, if he has chosen what is good, which alone shall be our supposition.” (481) In a
later essay, published during the crafting of Lilith, MacDonald would explain this to be the best
thing humans can do for one another: “next to rousing his conscience, is – not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for
himself.” (“Fantastic” 319)
The vicar adds an interesting element to his response to Percivale, one perhaps implicit in Balbo, and certainly congruent with Scott’s emphasis on the importance of knowing an author by his body of work: the element of trust. It is not an element brought up directly in the discussions of Mythopoesis put forth by Tolkien and Lewis, but a hint of it lies in Lewis’ comment on re-
reading, for he says that it is in the re-reading – once he already is somewhat sure of the tale – that he finds wisdom and strength. Should the listener or reader have reason to distrust the teller of a tale, the opportunity for transformation (be that transformation for good or ill) through
apprehension can be undermined. This emphasis thus underscores that MacDonald considers the transformative power of Story – Mythopoesis – to be necessarily relational. Should something exist to impede the story’s reception, then that story – one that may yet transform another person – will not transform the non-receptive listener/reader; clearly the extent to which the story may transform the listener depends on how receptive that reader is to it. A story may then be
not enough, the open trap-door is not enough, if the door of the heart is not open likewise.” (181)
If the reader/listener is receptive, then they are able to accumulate the experience proffered
through a tale that has itself been shaped by another’s accumulated experience – and thus, as
MacDonald says, “may go on to fresh experiences of our own.”231 (181) Constant is the reminder
that a story and what it has to offer is not meant to stagnate: a relational medium, it is meant to
produce a response – and must, if it is to prove the occurrence of Mythopoesis. ‘He who has ears,
let him hear.’
iii) Responsive Reception
After discussing engagement with the Gospel, the vicar explains that “the one poet, the one maker,” has also enabled such a relationship with his Book of Nature: “For our comfort, education, training, he has put into form for us all the otherwise hidden thoughts and feelings of our heart. Even when he speaks of the hidden things of the Spirit of God, he uses the forms or pictures of Nature.” (362; 481) And this enables humanity’s own communication one to another. Without it: “Metaphysics could have no existence, not to speak of poetry, not to speak of the commonest language of affection.” For,
it affords but the material which the thinking, feeling soul can use, interpret, and apply for its own purposes of speech. It is, as it were, the forms of thought cast into a lovely chaos by the inferior laws of matter, thence to be withdrawn by what we call the creative genius that God has given to men, and moulded, and modelled, and arranged, and built up to its own shapes and its own purposes. (481)
And thus, says MacDonald, the argument that real art can never merely be a ‘copy’ finds support for it must be an interpretation of what the artist sees, or, as MacDonald – and Ruskin
– would have it, a response.232 “If to this they can add some teaching for humanity, then indeed
they may claim to belong to the higher order of art, however imperfect they may be in their