The Place of the Lion: Chapters 4 - 7

In Chapter Four, when Mr. Foster visits Anthony and Quentin, the mystery of the lion and the snake begins to unfold.  Williams is drawing upon Platonic metaphysics.  Plato taught that every object in this created world is derived from an archetypal idea.  For instance, behind all the trees in this world is the idea of Tree.  The infinite variety of individual trees is the result of a creating demigod trying to copy the idea and never getting it quite right; hence, all the incredible varieties of trees.  Because all individual trees are imitations of the idea of Tree, they are inferior to the idea.   

In our novel, Williams is asking, what idea or principle makes all things hold together; that is, makes things cohere?  Is there not a principle of Strength? And is there not a principle of Beauty, that makes some things, such as butterflies, beautiful?  What if these Ideas could be summoned by someone who concentrates on them?  Foster’s explanations begin to unfold the kernel idea of the novel.  Speaking of Berringer, he explains:

He believes . . . that the world is created, and all men and women are created, by the entrance of certain great principles of aboriginal matter.  We call them by cold  names: wisdom and courage and beauty and strength and so on, but actually they are very great and mighty Powers.   It may be they are the angels and archangels of which the Christian Church talks. . . .  Now this world in which they exist is truly a real world, and to see it is a very difficult and dangerous thing.  But our master held that it could be done . . . .

By intensity of concentration, Berringer has summoned the principle of strength, which has come in the form of a lion, and he has suffered severely for doing so; hence the condition Anthony and Quentin find him it: lying unconscious in his garden.

The quibbling in which Anthony and Quentin indulge as to whether what they saw was a lion or a lioness is also explained by Foster:    “. . . the temporal and spatial thing may be masculine or feminine, but the immortal being must in itself appear as masculine to us . . . .”  So Anthony is  more in harmony with the eternal spiritual world when he knows he has seen a lion.  Quentin sees a lioness because he has a cowardly attitude towards reality.  People react according to their pre-eminent faulty attitudes.  The shortcomings of Damaris’s attitudes come into sharpest focus later in the narrative.

As Anthony and Quentin continue puzzling over what they have seen and Foster’s explanations, Quentin becomes more and more frightened and flees, thinking the world has “gone mad,” whereas Anthony remains calm and feels that there is a source in his manhood to deal with it.  He quietly takes a rational approach to the problem.  He is concerned about Quentin, and especially Damaris, whose danger is that she takes coldly intellectual attitude.  She is simply playing with pictures of dead ideas, not realizing that ideas represent living realities.  Her attitudes are the salient ones of the times in this “lost and imbecile century.”

Anthony knows that man–as a child of Adam–was given the authority to be in control, to not let the powers of the universe get out of hand.  But as he visits Miss Wilmot and finds Foster there, their snake-like characteristics rebel against his assumed authority; they attach him, and he escapes.