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  • The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of
  • William Butler Yeats, Vol. 6 (of 8), by William Butler Yeats
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  • Title: The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, Vol. 6 (of 8)
  • Ideas of Good and Evil
  • Author: William Butler Yeats
  • Release Date: August 5, 2015 [EBook #49613]
  • Language: English
  • Character set encoding: UTF-8
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  • THE COLLECTED WORKS OF WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
  • IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
  • BEING THE SIXTH VOLUME OF
  • THE COLLECTED WORKS IN
  • VERSE & PROSE OF WILLIAM
  • BUTLER YEATS :: IMPRINTED
  • AT THE SHAKESPEARE HEAD
  • PRESS STRATFORD-ON-AVON
  • MCMVIII
  • LONDON:
  • CHAPMAN & HALL
  • LIMITED
  • CONTENTS
  • PAGE
  • WHAT IS ‘POPULAR POETRY’? 1
  • SPEAKING TO THE PSALTERY 13
  • MAGIC 23
  • THE HAPPIEST OF THE POETS 55
  • THE PHILOSOPHY OF SHELLEY’S POETRY 71
  • AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON 111
  • WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE IMAGINATION 131
  • WILLIAM BLAKE AND HIS ILLUSTRATIONS TO THE
  • ‘DIVINE COMEDY’ 138
  • SYMBOLISM IN PAINTING 176
  • THE SYMBOLISM OF POETRY 185
  • THE THEATRE 200
  • THE CELTIC ELEMENT IN LITERATURE 210
  • THE AUTUMN OF THE BODY 230
  • THE MOODS 238
  • THE BODY OF THE FATHER CHRISTIAN ROSENCRUX 240
  • THE RETURN OF ULYSSES 243
  • IRELAND AND THE ARTS 249
  • THE GALWAY PLAINS 259
  • EMOTION OF MULTITUDE 264
  • WHAT IS ‘POPULAR POETRY’?
  • I THINK it was a Young Ireland Society that set my mind running on
  • ‘popular poetry.’ We used to discuss everything that was known to us
  • about Ireland, and especially Irish literature and Irish history. We
  • had no Gaelic, but paid great honour to the Irish poets who wrote in
  • English, and quoted them in our speeches. I could have told you at that
  • time the dates of the birth and death, and quoted the chief poems, of
  • men whose names you have not heard, and perhaps of some whose names I
  • have forgotten. I knew in my heart that the most of them wrote badly,
  • and yet such romance clung about them, such a desire for Irish poetry
  • was in all our minds, that I kept on saying, not only to others but
  • to myself, that most of them wrote well, or all but well. I had read
  • Shelley and Spenser and had tried to mix their styles together in a
  • pastoral play which I have not come to dislike much, and yet I do not
  • think Shelley or Spenser ever moved me as did these poets. I thought
  • one day—I can remember the very day when I thought it—‘If somebody
  • could make a style which would not be an English style and yet would
  • be musical and full of colour, many others would catch fire from him,
  • and we would have a really great school of ballad poetry in Ireland.
  • If these poets, who have never ceased to fill the newspapers and the
  • ballad-books with their verses, had a good tradition they would write
  • beautifully and move everybody as they move me.’ Then a little later on
  • I thought, ‘If they had something else to write about besides political
  • opinions, if more of them would write about the beliefs of the people
  • like Allingham, or about old legends like Ferguson, they would find
  • it easier to get a style.’ Then, with a deliberateness that still
  • surprises me, for in my heart of hearts I have never been quite certain
  • that one should be more than an artist, that even patriotism is more
  • than an impure desire in an artist, I set to work to find a style and
  • things to write about that the ballad writers might be the better.
  • They are no better, I think, and my desire to make them so was, it may
  • be, one of the illusions Nature holds before one, because she knows
  • that the gifts she has to give are not worth troubling about. It is for
  • her sake that we must stir ourselves, but we would not trouble to get
  • out of bed in the morning, or to leave our chairs once we are in them,
  • if she had not her conjuring bag. She wanted a few verses from me, and
  • because it would not have seemed worth while taking so much trouble
  • to see my books lie on a few drawing-room tables, she filled my head
  • with thoughts of making a whole literature, and plucked me out of the
  • Dublin art schools where I should have stayed drawing from the round,
  • and sent me into a library to read bad translations from the Irish,
  • and at last down into Connaught to sit by turf fires. I wanted to
  • write ‘popular poetry’ like those Irish poets, for I believed that all
  • good literatures were popular, and even cherished the fancy that the
  • Adelphi melodrama, which I had never seen, might be good literature,
  • and I hated what I called the coteries. I thought that one must write
  • without care, for that was of the coteries, but with a gusty energy
  • that would put all straight if it came out of the right heart. I had
  • a conviction, which indeed I have still, that one’s verses should
  • hold, as in a mirror, the colours of one’s own climate and scenery in
  • their right proportion; and, when I found my verses too full of the
  • reds and yellows Shelley gathered in Italy, I thought for two days of
  • setting things right, not as I should now by making rhythms faint
  • and nervous and filling my images with a certain coldness, a certain
  • wintry wildness, but by eating little and sleeping upon a board. I felt
  • indignant with Matthew Arnold because he complained that somebody,
  • who had translated Homer into a ballad measure, had tried to write
  • epic to the tune of Yankee Doodle. It seemed to me that it did not
  • matter what tune one wrote to, so long as that gusty energy came often
  • enough and strongly enough. And I delighted in Victor Hugo’s book
  • upon Shakespeare, because he abused critics and coteries and thought
  • that Shakespeare wrote without care or premeditation and to please
  • everybody. I would indeed have had every illusion had I believed in
  • that straightforward logic, as of newspaper articles, which so tickles
  • the ears of the shopkeepers; but I always knew that the line of Nature
  • is crooked, that, though we dig the canal beds as straight as we can,
  • the rivers run hither and thither in their wildness.
  • From that day to this I have been busy among the verses and stories
  • that the people make for themselves, but I had been busy a very little
  • while before I knew that what we call popular poetry never came from
  • the people at all. Longfellow, and Campbell, and Mrs. Hemans, and
  • Macaulay in his _Lays_, and Scott in his longer poems are the poets
  • of the middle class, of people who have unlearned the unwritten
  • tradition which binds the unlettered, so long as they are masters of
  • themselves, to the beginning of time and to the foundation of the
  • world, and who have not learned the written tradition which has been
  • established upon the unwritten. I became certain that Burns, whose
  • greatness has been used to justify the littleness of others, was in
  • part a poet of the middle class, because though the farmers he sprang
  • from and lived among had been able to create a little tradition of
  • their own, less a tradition of ideas than of speech, they had been
  • divided by religious and political changes from the images and emotions
  • which had once carried their memories backward thousands of years.
  • Despite his expressive speech which sets him above all other popular
  • poets, he has the triviality of emotion, the poverty of ideas, the
  • imperfect sense of beauty of a poetry whose most typical expression is
  • in Longfellow. Longfellow has his popularity, in the main, because he
  • tells his story or his idea so that one needs nothing but his verses
  • to understand it. No words of his borrow their beauty from those that
  • used them before, and one can get all that there is in story and
  • idea without seeing them as if moving before a half-faded curtain
  • embroidered with kings and queens, their loves and battles and their
  • days out hunting, or else with holy letters and images of so great
  • antiquity that nobody can tell the god or goddess they would commend
  • to an unfading memory. Poetry that is not popular poetry presupposes,
  • indeed, more than it says, though we, who cannot know what it is to be
  • disinherited, only understand how much more, when we read it in its
  • most typical expressions, in the _Epipsychidion_ of Shelley, or in
  • Spenser’s description of the gardens of Adonis, or when we meet the
  • misunderstandings of others. Go down into the street and read to your
  • baker or your candlestick-maker any poem which is not popular poetry.
  • I have heard a baker, who was clever enough with his oven, deny that
  • Tennyson could have known what he was writing when he wrote ‘Warming
  • his five wits, the white owl in the belfry sits,’ and once when I read
  • out Omar Khayyam to one of the best of candlestick-makers, he said,
  • ‘What is the meaning of “we come like water and like wind we go”?’ Or
  • go down into the street with some thought whose bare meaning must be
  • plain to everybody; take with you Ben Jonson’s ‘Beauty like sorrow
  • dwelleth everywhere,’ and find out how utterly its enchantment depends
  • on an association of beauty with sorrow which written tradition has
  • from the unwritten, which had it in its turn from ancient religion; or
  • take with you these lines in whose bare meaning also there is nothing
  • to stumble over, and find out what men lose who are not in love with
  • Helen.
  • ‘Brightness falls from the air,
  • Queens have died young and fair,
  • Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.’
  • I pick my examples at random, for I am writing where I have no books to
  • turn the pages of, but one need not go east of the sun or west of the
  • moon in so simple a matter.
  • On the other hand, when Walt Whitman writes in seeming defiance of
  • tradition, he needs tradition for his protection, for the butcher and
  • the baker and the candlestick-maker grow merry over him when they meet
  • his work by chance. Nature, which cannot endure emptiness, has made
  • them gather conventions which cannot disguise their low birth though
  • they copy, as from far off, the dress and manners of the well-bred and
  • the well-born. The gatherers mock all expression that is wholly unlike
  • their own, just as little boys in the street mock at strangely-dressed
  • people and at old men who talk to themselves.
  • There is only one kind of good poetry, for the poetry of the coteries,
  • which presupposes the written tradition, does not differ in kind
  • from the true poetry of the people, which presupposes the unwritten
  • tradition. Both are alike strange and obscure, and unreal to all who
  • have not understanding, and both, instead of that manifest logic,
  • that clear rhetoric of the ‘popular poetry,’ glimmer with thoughts
  • and images whose ‘ancestors were stout and wise,’ ‘anigh to Paradise’
  • ‘ere yet men knew the gift of corn.’ It may be that we know as little
  • of their descent as men knew of ‘the man born to be a king’ when they
  • found him in that cradle marked with the red lion crest, and yet we
  • know somewhere in the heart that they have been sung in temples, in
  • ladies’ chambers, and our nerves quiver with a recognition they were
  • shaped to by a thousand emotions. If men did not remember or half
  • remember impossible things, and, it may be, if the worship of sun and
  • moon had not left a faint reverence behind it, what Aran fisher-girl
  • would sing—
  • ‘It is late last night the dog was speaking of you; the snipe was
  • speaking of you in her deep marsh. It is you are the lonely bird
  • throughout the woods; and that you may be without a mate until you find
  • me.
  • ‘You promised me and you said a lie to me, that you would be before me
  • where the sheep are flocked. I gave a whistle and three hundred cries
  • to you; and I found nothing there but a bleating lamb.
  • ‘You promised me a thing that was hard for you, a ship of gold under a
  • silver mast; twelve towns and a market in all of them, and a fine white
  • court by the side of the sea.
  • ‘You promised me a thing that is not possible; that you would give me
  • gloves of the skin of a fish; that you would give me shoes of the skin
  • of a bird, and a suit of the dearest silk in Ireland.
  • ‘My mother said to me not to be talking with you, to-day or to-morrow
  • or on Sunday. It was a bad time she took for telling me that, it was
  • shutting the door after the house was robbed....
  • ‘You have taken the east from me, you have taken the west from me, you
  • have taken what is before me and what is behind me; you have taken the
  • moon, you have taken the sun from me, and my fear is great you have
  • taken God from me.’
  • The Gael of the Scottish islands could not sing his beautiful song
  • over a bride, had he not a memory of the belief that Christ was the
  • only man who measured six feet and not a little more or less, and was
  • perfectly shaped in all other ways, and if he did not remember old
  • symbolical observances—
  • I bathe thy palms
  • In showers of wine,
  • In the cleansing fire,
  • In the juice of raspberries,
  • In the milk of honey.
  • * * * * *
  • Thou art the joy of all joyous things,
  • Thou art the light of the beam of the sun,
  • Thou art the door of the chief of hospitality,
  • Thou art the surpassing pilot star,
  • Thou art the step of the deer of the hill,
  • Thou art the step of the horse of the plain,
  • Thou art the grace of the sun rising,
  • Thou art the loveliness of all lovely desires.
  • The lovely likeness of the Lord
  • Is in thy pure face,
  • The loveliest likeness that was upon earth.
  • I soon learned to cast away one other illusion of ‘popular poetry.’ I
  • learned from the people themselves, before I learned it from any book,
  • that they cannot separate the idea of an art or a craft from the idea
  • of a cult with ancient technicalities and mysteries. They can hardly
  • separate mere learning from witchcraft, and are fond of the words and
  • verses that keep half their secret to themselves. Indeed, it is certain
  • that before the counting-house had created a new class and a new art
  • without breeding and without ancestry, and set this art and this class
  • between the hut and the castle, and between the hut and the cloister,
  • the art of the people was as closely mingled with the art of the
  • coteries as was the speech of the people that delighted in rhythmical
  • animation, in idiom, in images, in words full of far-off suggestion,
  • with the unchanging speech of the poets.
  • Now I see a new generation in Ireland which discusses Irish literature
  • and history in Young Ireland societies, and societies with newer names,
  • and there are far more than when I was a boy who would make verses for
  • the people. They have the help, too, of a vigorous journalism, and this
  • journalism sometimes urges them to desire the direct logic, the clear
  • rhetoric, of ‘popular poetry.’ It sees that Ireland has no cultivated
  • minority, and it does not see, though it would cast out all English
  • things, that its literary ideal belongs more to England than to other
  • countries. I have hope that the new writers will not fall into its
  • illusion, for they write in Irish, and for a people the counting-house
  • has not made forgetful. Among the seven or eight hundred thousand who
  • have had Irish from the cradle, there is, perhaps, nobody who has not
  • enough of the unwritten tradition to know good verses from bad ones, if
  • he have enough mother-wit. Among all that speak English in Australia,
  • in America, in Great Britain, are there many more than the ten thousand
  • the prophet saw, who have enough of the written tradition education has
  • set in room of the unwritten to know good verses from bad ones, even
  • though their mother-wit has made them Ministers of the Crown or what
  • you will? Nor can things be better till that ten thousand have gone
  • hither and thither to preach their faith that ‘the imagination is the
  • man himself,’ and that the world as imagination sees it is the durable
  • world, and have won men as did the disciples of Him who
  • His seventy disciples sent
  • Against religion and government.
  • 1901.
  • SPEAKING TO THE PSALTERY.
  • I
  • I HAVE always known that there was something I disliked about singing,
  • and I naturally dislike print and paper, but now at last I understand
  • why, for I have found something better. I have just heard a poem spoken
  • with so delicate a sense of its rhythm, with so perfect a respect for
  • its meaning, that if I were a wise man and could persuade a few people
  • to learn the art I would never open a book of verses again. A friend,
  • who was here a few minutes ago, has sat with a beautiful stringed
  • instrument upon her knee, her fingers passing over the strings, and
  • has spoken to me some verses from Shelley’s _Skylark_ and Sir Ector’s
  • lamentation over the dead Launcelot out of the _Morte d’ Arthur_ and
  • some of my own poems. Wherever the rhythm was most delicate, wherever
  • the emotion was most ecstatic, her art was the most beautiful, and yet,
  • although she sometimes spoke to a little tune, it was never singing,
  • as we sing to-day, never anything but speech. A singing note, a word
  • chanted as they chant in churches, would have spoiled everything; nor
  • was it reciting, for she spoke to a notation as definite as that of
  • song, using the instrument which murmured sweetly and faintly, under
  • the spoken sounds, to give her the changing notes. Another speaker
  • could have repeated all her effects, except those which came from her
  • own beautiful voice that would have given her fame if the only art that
  • gives the speaking voice its perfect opportunity were as well known
  • among us as it was known in the ancient world.
  • II
  • Since I was a boy I have always longed to hear poems spoken to a harp,
  • as I imagined Homer to have spoken his, for it is not natural to enjoy
  • an art only when one is by oneself. Whenever one finds a fine verse
  • one wants to read it to somebody, and it would be much less trouble
  • and much pleasanter if we could all listen, friend by friend, lover
  • by beloved. Images used to rise up before me, as I am sure they have
  • arisen before nearly everybody else who cares for poetry, of wild-eyed
  • men speaking harmoniously to murmuring wires while audiences in
  • many-coloured robes listened, hushed and excited. Whenever I spoke of
  • my desire to anybody they said I should write for music, but when
  • I heard anything sung I did not hear the words, or if I did their
  • natural pronunciation was altered and their natural music was altered,
  • or it was drowned in another music which I did not understand. What
  • was the good of writing a love-song if the singer pronounced love,
  • ‘lo-o-o-o-o-ve,’ or even if he said ‘love,’ but did not give it its
  • exact place and weight in the rhythm? Like every other poet, I spoke
  • verses in a kind of chant when I was making them, and sometimes, when
  • I was alone on a country road, I would speak them in a loud chanting
  • voice, and feel that if I dared I would speak them in that way to
  • other people. One day I was walking through a Dublin street with the
  • Visionary I have written about in _The Celtic Twilight_, and he began
  • speaking his verses out aloud with the confidence of those who have
  • the inner light. He did not mind that people stopped and looked after
  • him even on the far side of the road, but went on through poem after
  • poem. Like myself, he knew nothing of music, but was certain that he
  • had written them to a manner of music, and he had once asked somebody
  • who played on a wind instrument of some kind, and then a violinist,
  • to write out the music and play it. The violinist had played it,
  • or something like it, but had not written it down; but the man with
  • the wind instrument said it could not be played because it contained
  • quarter-tones and would be out of tune. We were not at all convinced
  • by this, and one day, when we were staying with a Galway friend who is
  • a learned musician, I asked him to listen to our verses, and to the
  • way we spoke them. The Visionary found to his surprise that he did
  • not make every poem to a different tune, and to the surprise of the
  • musician that he did make them all to two quite definite tunes, which
  • are, it seems, like very simple Arabic music. It was, perhaps, to some
  • such music, I thought, that Blake sang his _Songs of Innocence_ in Mrs.
  • Williams’ drawing-room, and perhaps he, too, spoke rather than sang. I,
  • on the other hand, did not often compose to a tune, though I sometimes
  • did, yet always to notes that could be written down and played on my
  • friend’s organ, or turned into something like a Gregorian hymn if one
  • sang them in the ordinary way. I varied more than the Visionary, who
  • never forgot his two tunes, one for long and one for short lines,
  • and could not always speak a poem in the same way, but always felt
  • that certain ways were right, and that I would know one of them if I
  • remembered the way I first spoke the poem. When I got to London I gave
  • the notation, as it had been played on the organ, to the friend who has
  • just gone out, and she spoke it to me, giving my words a new quality by
  • the beauty of her voice.
  • III
  • Then we began to wander through the wood of error; we tried speaking
  • through music in the ordinary way under I know not whose evil
  • influence, until we got to hate the two competing tunes and rhythms
  • that were so often at discord with one another, the tune and rhythm
  • of the verse and the tune and rhythm of the music. Then we tried,
  • persuaded by somebody who thought quarter-tones and less intervals
  • the especial mark of speech as distinct from singing, to write out
  • what we did in wavy lines. On finding something like these lines in
  • Tibetan music, we became so confident that we covered a large piece
  • of pasteboard, which now blows up my fire in the morning, with a
  • notation in wavy lines as a demonstration for a lecture; but at last
  • Mr. Dolmetsch put us back to our first thought. He made us a beautiful
  • instrument half psaltery half lyre which contains, I understand, all
  • the chromatic intervals within the range of the speaking voice; and he
  • taught us to regulate our speech by the ordinary musical notes.
  • Some of the notations he taught us—those in which there is no lilt, no
  • recurring pattern of sounds—are like this notation for a song out of
  • the first Act of _The Countess Cathleen_.
  • It is written in the old C clef, which is, I am told, the most
  • reasonable way to write it, for it would be below the stave on the
  • treble clef or above it on the bass clef. The central line of the stave
  • corresponds to the middle C of the piano; the first note of the poem
  • is therefore D. The marks of long and short over the syllables are not
  • marks of scansion, but show the syllables one makes the voice hurry or
  • linger over.
  • [Illustration: Music]
  • Impetuous heart, be still, be still;
  • Your sorrowful love may never be told;
  • Cover it with a lonely tune
  • He who could bend all things to his will
  • Has covered the door of the infinite fold
  • With the pale stars and the wandering moon
  • One needs, of course, a far less complicated notation than a singer,
  • and one is even permitted slight modifications of the fixed note when
  • dramatic expression demands it and the instrument is not sounding. The
  • notation which regulates the general form of the sound leaves it free
  • to add a complexity of dramatic expression from its own incommunicable
  • genius which compensates the lover of speech for the lack of complex
  • musical expression. Ordinary speech is formless, and its variety is
  • like the variety which separates bad prose from the regulated speech
  • of Milton, or anything that is formless and void from anything that has
  • form and beauty. The orator, the speaker who has some little of the
  • great tradition of his craft, differs from the debater very largely
  • because he understands how to assume that subtle monotony of voice
  • which runs through the nerves like fire.
  • Even when one is speaking to a single note sounded faintly on the
  • Psaltery, if one is sufficiently practised to speak on it without
  • thinking about it one can get an endless variety of expression. All
  • art is, indeed, a monotony in external things for the sake of an
  • interior variety, a sacrifice of gross effects to subtle effects, an
  • asceticism of the imagination. But this new art, new in modern life
  • I mean, will have to train its hearers as well as its speakers, for
  • it takes time to surrender gladly the gross effects one is accustomed
  • to, and one may well find mere monotony at first where one soon learns
  • to find a variety as incalculable as in the outline of faces or in
  • the expression of eyes. Modern acting and recitation have taught us
  • to fix our attention on the gross effects till we have come to think
  • gesture and the intonation that copies the accidental surface of life
  • more important than the rhythm; and yet we understand theoretically
  • that it is precisely this rhythm that separates good writing from
  • bad, that it is the glimmer, the fragrance, the spirit of all intense
  • literature. I do not say that we should speak our plays to musical
  • notes, for dramatic verse will need its own method, and I have hitherto
  • experimented with short lyric poems alone; but I am certain that, if
  • people would listen for a while to lyrical verse spoken to notes, they
  • would soon find it impossible to listen without indignation to verse
  • as it is spoken in our leading theatres. They would get a subtlety of
  • hearing that would demand new effects from actors and even from public
  • speakers, and they might, it may be, begin even to notice one another’s
  • voices till poetry and rhythm had come nearer to common life.
  • I cannot tell what changes this new art is to go through, or to what
  • greatness or littleness of fortune; but I can imagine little stories in
  • prose with their dialogues in metre going pleasantly to the strings.
  • I am not certain that I shall not see some Order naming itself from
  • the Golden Violet of the Troubadours or the like, and having among its
  • members none but well-taught and well-mannered speakers who will keep
  • the new art from disrepute. They will know how to keep from singing
  • notes and from prosaic lifeless intonations, and they will always
  • understand, however far they push their experiments, that poetry and
  • not music is their object; and they will have by heart, like the Irish
  • _File_, so many poems and notations that they will never have to bend
  • their heads over the book to the ruin of dramatic expression and of
  • that wild air the bard had always about him in my boyish imagination.
  • They will go here and there speaking their verses and their little
  • stories wherever they can find a score or two of poetical-minded people
  • in a big room, or a couple of poetical-minded friends sitting by the
  • hearth, and poets will write them poems and little stories to the
  • confounding of print and paper. I, at any rate, from this out mean to
  • write all my longer poems for the stage, and all my shorter ones for
  • the Psaltery, if only some strong angel keep me to my good resolutions.
  • 1902.
  • MAGIC.
  • I
  • I BELIEVE in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call
  • magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not
  • know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the
  • visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed;
  • and I believe in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been handed
  • down from early times, and been the foundations of nearly all magical
  • practices. These doctrines are—
  • (1) That the borders of our minds are ever shifting, and that many
  • minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a
  • single mind, a single energy.
  • (2) That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our
  • memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.
  • (3) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.
  • I often think I would put this belief in magic from me if I could,
  • for I have come to see or to imagine, in men and women, in houses, in
  • handicrafts, in nearly all sights and sounds, a certain evil, a certain
  • ugliness, that comes from the slow perishing through the centuries of a
  • quality of mind that made this belief and its evidences common over the
  • world.
  • II
  • Some ten or twelve years ago, a man with whom I have since quarrelled
  • for sound reasons, a very singular man who had given his life to
  • studies other men despised, asked me and an acquaintance, who is now
  • dead, to witness a magical work. He lived a little way from London,
  • and on the way my acquaintance told me that he did not believe in
  • magic, but that a novel of Bulwer Lytton’s had taken such a hold upon
  • his imagination that he was going to give much of his time and all his
  • thought to magic. He longed to believe in it, and had studied though
  • not learnedly, geomancy, astrology, chiromancy, and much cabalistic
  • symbolism, and yet doubted if the soul outlived the body. He awaited
  • the magical work full of scepticism. He expected nothing more than an
  • air of romance, an illusion as of the stage, that might capture the
  • consenting imagination for an hour. The evoker of spirits and his
  • beautiful wife received us in a little house, on the edge of some kind
  • of garden or park belonging to an eccentric rich man, whose curiosities
  • he arranged and dusted, and he made his evocation in a long room that
  • had a raised place on the floor at one end, a kind of dais, but was
  • furnished meagrely and cheaply. I sat with my acquaintance in the
  • middle of the room, and the evoker of spirits on the dais, and his wife
  • between us and him. He held a wooden mace in his hand, and turning to a
  • tablet of many-coloured squares, with a number on each of the squares,
  • that stood near him on a chair, he repeated a form of words. Almost
  • at once my imagination began to move of itself and to bring before me
  • vivid images that, though never too vivid to be imagination, as I had
  • always understood it, had yet a motion of their own, a life I could
  • not change or shape. I remember seeing a number of white figures, and
  • wondering whether their mitred heads had been suggested by the mitred
  • head of the mace, and then, of a sudden, the image of my acquaintance
  • in the midst of them. I told what I had seen, and the evoker of spirits
  • cried in a deep voice, ‘Let him be blotted out,’ and as he said it the
  • image of my acquaintance vanished, and the evoker of spirits or his
  • wife saw a man dressed in black with a curious square cap standing
  • among the white figures. It was my acquaintance, the seeress said, as
  • he had been in a past life, the life that had moulded his present,
  • and that life would now unfold before us. I too seemed to see the man
  • with a strange vividness. The story unfolded itself chiefly before
  • the mind’s eye of the seeress, but sometimes I saw what she described
  • before I heard her description. She thought the man in black was
  • perhaps a Fleming of the sixteenth century, and I could see him pass
  • along narrow streets till he came to a narrow door with some rusty
  • ironwork above it. He went in, and wishing to find out how far we had
  • one vision among us, I kept silent when I saw a dead body lying upon
  • the table within the door. The seeress described him going down a long
  • hall and up into what she called a pulpit, and beginning to speak. She
  • said, ‘He is a clergyman, I can hear his words. They sound like Low
  • Dutch.’ Then after a little silence, ‘No, I am wrong. I can see the
  • listeners; he is a doctor lecturing among his pupils.’ I said, ‘Do you
  • see anything near the door?’ and she said, ‘Yes, I see a subject for
  • dissection.’ Then we saw him go out again into the narrow streets, I
  • following the story of the seeress, sometimes merely following her
  • words, but sometimes seeing for myself. My acquaintance saw nothing; I
  • think he was forbidden to see, it being his own life, and I think could
  • not in any case. His imagination had no will of its own. Presently the
  • man in black went into a house with two gables facing the road, and up
  • some stairs into a room where a hump-backed woman gave him a key; and
  • then along a corridor, and down some stairs into a large cellar full of
  • retorts and strange vessels of all kinds. Here he seemed to stay a long
  • while, and one saw him eating bread that he took down from a shelf. The
  • evoker of spirits and the seeress began to speculate about the man’s
  • character and habits, and decided, from a visionary impression, that
  • his mind was absorbed in naturalism, but that his imagination had been
  • excited by stories of the marvels wrought by magic in past times, and
  • that he was trying to copy them by naturalistic means. Presently one of
  • them saw him go to a vessel that stood over a slow fire, and take out
  • of the vessel a thing wrapped up in numberless cloths, which he partly
  • unwrapped, showing at length what looked like the image of a man made
  • by somebody who could not model. The evoker of spirits said that the
  • man in black was trying to make flesh by chemical means, and though he
  • had not succeeded, his brooding had drawn so many evil spirits about
  • him, that the image was partly alive. He could see it moving a little
  • where it lay upon a table. At that moment I heard something like little
  • squeals, but kept silent, as when I saw the dead body. In a moment more
  • the seeress said, ‘I hear little squeals.’ Then the evoker of spirits
  • heard them, but said, ‘They are not squeals; he is pouring a red liquid
  • out of a retort through a slit in the cloth; the slit is over the mouth
  • of the image and the liquid is gurgling in rather a curious way.’ Weeks
  • seemed to pass by hurriedly, and somebody saw the man still busy in
  • his cellar. Then more weeks seemed to pass, and now we saw him lying
  • sick in a room up-stairs, and a man in a conical cap standing beside
  • him. We could see the image too. It was in the cellar, but now it could
  • move feebly about the floor. I saw fainter images of the image passing
  • continually from where it crawled to the man in his bed, and I asked
  • the evoker of spirits what they were. He said, ‘They are the images
  • of his terror.’ Presently the man in the conical cap began to speak,
  • but who heard him I cannot remember. He made the sick man get out of
  • bed and walk, leaning upon him, and in much terror till they came to
  • the cellar. There the man in the conical cap made some symbol over
  • the image, which fell back as if asleep, and putting a knife into the
  • other’s hand he said, ‘I have taken from it the magical life, but you
  • must take from it the life you gave.’ Somebody saw the sick man stoop
  • and sever the head of the image from its body, and then fall as if he
  • had given himself a mortal wound, for he had filled it with his own
  • life. And then the vision changed and fluttered, and he was lying sick
  • again in the room up-stairs. He seemed to lie there a long time with
  • the man in the conical cap watching beside him, and then, I cannot
  • remember how, the evoker of spirits discovered that though he would in
  • part recover, he would never be well, and that the story had got abroad
  • in the town and shattered his good name. His pupils had left him and
  • men avoided him. He was accursed. He was a magician.
  • The story was finished, and I looked at my acquaintance. He was white
  • and awestruck. He said, as nearly as I can remember, ‘All my life I
  • have seen myself in dreams making a man by some means like that. When
  • I was a child I was always thinking out contrivances for galvanizing
  • a corpse into life.’ Presently he said, ‘Perhaps my bad health in
  • this life comes from that experiment.’ I asked if he had read
  • _Frankenstein_, and he answered that he had. He was the only one of us
  • who had, and he had taken no part in the vision.
  • III
  • Then I asked to have some past life of mine revealed, and a new
  • evocation was made before the tablet full of little squares. I cannot
  • remember so well who saw this or that detail, for now I was interested
  • in little but the vision itself. I had come to a conclusion about the
  • method. I knew that the vision may be in part common to several people.
  • A man in chain armour passed through a castle door, and the seeress
  • noticed with surprise the bareness and rudeness of castle rooms. There
  • was nothing of the magnificence or the pageantry she had expected.
  • The man came to a large hall and to a little chapel opening out of
  • it, where a ceremony was taking place. There were six girls dressed
  • in white, who took from the altar some yellow object—I thought it was
  • gold, for though, like my acquaintance, I was told not to see, I could
  • not help seeing. Somebody else thought that it was yellow flowers, and
  • I think the girls, though I cannot remember clearly, laid it between
  • the man’s hands. He went out after a time, and as he passed through
  • the great hall one of us, I forget whom, noticed that he passed over
  • two gravestones. Then the vision became broken, but presently he stood
  • in a monk’s habit among men-at-arms in the middle of a village reading
  • from a parchment. He was calling villagers about him, and presently
  • he and they and the men-at-arms took ship for some long voyage. The
  • vision became broken again, and when we could see clearly they had
  • come to what seemed the Holy Land. They had begun some kind of sacred
  • labour among palm-trees. The common men among them stood idle, but the
  • gentlemen carried large stones, bringing them from certain directions,
  • from the cardinal points I think, with a ceremonious formality. The
  • evoker of spirits said they must be making some kind of masonic house.
  • His mind, like the minds of so many students of these hidden things,
  • was always running on masonry and discovering it in strange places.
  • We broke the vision that we might have supper, breaking it with some
  • form of words which I forget. When supper had ended the seeress cried
  • out that while we had been eating they had been building, and they
  • had built not a masonic house but a great stone cross. And now they
  • had all gone away but the man who had been in chain armour and two
  • monks we had not noticed before. He was standing against the cross,
  • his feet upon two stone rests a little above the ground, and his arms
  • spread out. He seemed to stand there all day, but when night came he
  • went to a little cell, that was beside two other cells. I think they
  • were like the cells I have seen in the Aran Islands, but I cannot be
  • certain. Many days seemed to pass, and all day every day he stood upon
  • the cross, and we never saw anybody there but him and the two monks.
  • Many years seemed to pass, making the vision flutter like a drift of
  • leaves before our eyes, and he grew old and white-haired, and we saw
  • the two monks, old and white-haired, holding him upon the cross. I
  • asked the evoker of spirits why the man stood there, and before he had
  • time to answer I saw two people, a man and a woman, rising like a dream
  • within a dream, before the eyes of the man upon the cross. The evoker
  • of spirits saw them too, and said that one of them held up his arms and
  • they were without hands. I thought of the two grave-stones the man in
  • chain mail had passed over in the great hall when he came out of the
  • chapel, and asked the evoker of spirits if the knight was undergoing a
  • penance for violence, and while I was asking him, and he was saying
  • that it might be so but he did not know, the vision, having completed
  • its circle, vanished.
  • It had not, so far as I could see, the personal significance of the
  • other vision, but it was certainly strange and beautiful, though I
  • alone seemed to see its beauty. Who was it that made the story, if it
  • were but a story? I did not, and the seeress did not, and the evoker
  • of spirits did not and could not. It arose in three minds, for I
  • cannot remember my acquaintance taking any part, and it rose without
  • confusion, and without labour, except the labour of keeping the mind’s
  • eye awake, and more swiftly than any pen could have written it out.
  • It may be, as Blake said of one of his poems, that the author was in
  • eternity. In coming years I was to see and hear of many such visions,
  • and though I was not to be convinced, though half convinced once or
  • twice, that they were old lives, in an ordinary sense of the word
  • life, I was to learn that they have almost always some quite definite
  • relation to dominant moods and moulding events in this life. They are,
  • perhaps, in most cases, though the vision I have but just described was
  • not, it seems, among the cases, symbolical histories of these moods and
  • events, or rather symbolical shadows of the impulses that have made
  • them, messages as it were out of the ancestral being of the questioner.
  • At the time these two visions meant little more to me, if I can
  • remember my feeling at the time, than a proof of the supremacy of
  • imagination, of the power of many minds to become one, overpowering one
  • another by spoken words and by unspoken thought till they have become a
  • single intense, unhesitating energy. One mind was doubtless the master,
  • I thought, but all the minds gave a little, creating or revealing for a
  • moment what I must call a supernatural artist.
  • IV
  • Some years afterwards I was staying with some friends in Paris. I had
  • got up before breakfast and gone out to buy a newspaper. I had noticed
  • the servant, a girl who had come from the country some years before,
  • laying the table for breakfast. As I had passed her I had been telling
  • myself one of those long foolish tales which one tells only to oneself.
  • If something had happened that had not happened, I would have hurt my
  • arm, I thought. I saw myself with my arm in a sling in the middle of
  • some childish adventures. I returned with the newspaper and met my host
  • and hostess in the door. The moment they saw me they cried out, ‘Why,
  • the _bonne_ has just told us you had your arm in a sling. We thought
  • something must have happened to you last night, that you had been run
  • over maybe’—or some such words. I had been dining out at the other end
  • of Paris, and had come in after everybody had gone to bed. I had cast
  • my imagination so strongly upon the servant that she had seen it, and
  • with what had appeared to be more than the mind’s eye.
  • One afternoon, about the same time, I was thinking very intently of
  • a certain fellow-student for whom I had a message, which I hesitated
  • about writing. In a couple of days I got a letter from a place some
  • hundreds of miles away where that student was. On the afternoon when
  • I had been thinking so intently I had suddenly appeared there amid a
  • crowd of people in a hotel and as seeming solid as if in the flesh. My
  • fellow-student had seen me, but no one else, and had asked me to come
  • again when the people had gone. I had vanished, but had come again
  • in the middle of the night and given the message. I myself had no
  • knowledge of casting an imagination upon one so far away.
  • I could tell of stranger images, of stranger enchantments, of
  • stranger imaginations, cast consciously or unconsciously over as
  • great distances by friends or by myself, were it not that the greater
  • energies of the mind seldom break forth but when the deeps are
  • loosened. They break forth amid events too private or too sacred for
  • public speech, or seem themselves, I know not why, to belong to hidden
  • things. I have written of these breakings forth, these loosenings of
  • the deep, with some care and some detail, but I shall keep my record
  • shut. After all, one can but bear witness less to convince him who
  • won’t believe than to protect him who does, as Blake puts it, enduring
  • unbelief and misbelief and ridicule as best one may. I shall be content
  • to show that past times have believed as I do, by quoting Joseph
  • Glanvil’s description of the Scholar Gipsy. Joseph Glanvil is dead, and
  • will not mind unbelief and misbelief and ridicule.
  • The Scholar Gipsy, too, is dead, unless indeed perfectly wise magicians
  • can live till it please them to die, and he is wandering somewhere,
  • even if one cannot see him, as Arnold imagined, ‘at some lone ale-house
  • in the Berkshire moors, on the warm ingle-bench,’ or ‘crossing the
  • stripling Thames at Bablock Hithe,’ ‘trailing his fingers in the cool
  • stream,’ or ‘giving store of flowers—the frail-leaf’d white anemone,
  • dark bluebells drenched with dews of summer eves,’ to the girls ‘who
  • from the distant hamlets come to dance around the Fyfield elm in May,’
  • or ‘sitting upon the river bank o’ergrown,’ living on through time
  • ‘with a free onward impulse.’ This is Joseph Glanvil’s story—
  • There was very lately a lad in the University of
  • Oxford, who being of very pregnant and ready parts and
  • yet wanting the encouragement of preferment, was by
  • his poverty forced to leave his studies there, and to
  • cast himself upon the wide world for a livelihood. Now
  • his necessities growing daily on him, and wanting the
  • help of friends to relieve him, he was at last forced
  • to join himself to a company of vagabond gipsies,
  • whom occasionally he met with, and to follow their
  • trade for a maintenance.... After he had been a pretty
  • while well exercised in the trade, there chanced to
  • ride by a couple of scholars, who had formerly been
  • of his acquaintance. The scholar had quickly spied
  • out these old friends among the gipsies, and their
  • amazement to see him among such society had well-nigh
  • discovered him; but by a sign he prevented them owning
  • him before that crew, and taking one of them aside
  • privately desired him with his friend to go to an inn,
  • not far distant, promising there to come to them. They
  • accordingly went thither and he follows: after their
  • first salutation his friends inquire how he came to
  • lead so odd a life as that was, and so joined himself
  • into such a beggarly company. The scholar gipsy having
  • given them an account of the necessity which drove
  • him to that kind of life, told them that the people
  • he went with were not such impostors as they were
  • taken for, but that they had a traditional kind of
  • learning among them and could do wonders by the power
  • of imagination, and that himself had learned much of
  • their art and improved it further than themselves
  • could. And to evince the truth of what he told them,
  • he said he’d remove into another room, leaving them to
  • discourse together; and upon his return tell them the
  • sense of what they had talked of; which accordingly
  • he performed, giving them a full account of what had
  • passed between them in his absence. The scholars
  • being amazed at so unexpected a discovery, earnestly
  • desired him to unriddle the mystery. In which he gave
  • them satisfaction by telling them that what he did
  • was by the power of imagination, his phantasy leading
  • theirs; and that himself had dictated to them the
  • discourse they had held together while he was from
  • them; that there were warrantable ways of heightening
  • the imagination to that pitch as to bend another’s, and
  • that when he had compassed the whole secret, some parts
  • of which he was yet ignorant of, he intended to leave
  • their company and give the world an account of what he
  • had learned.
  • If all who have described events like this have not dreamed, we should
  • rewrite our histories, for all men, certainly all imaginative men,
  • must be for ever casting forth enchantments, glamours, illusions; and
  • all men, especially tranquil men who have no powerful egotistic life,
  • must be continually passing under their power. Our most elaborate
  • thoughts, elaborate purposes, precise emotions, are often, as I think,
  • not really ours, but have on a sudden come up, as it were, out of
  • hell or down out of heaven. The historian should remember, should he
  • not? angels and devils not less than kings and soldiers, and plotters
  • and thinkers. What matter if the angel or devil, as indeed certain
  • old writers believed, first wrapped itself with an organized shape in
  • some man’s imagination? what matter ‘if God himself only acts or is in
  • existing beings or men,’ as Blake believed? we must none the less admit
  • that invisible beings, far wandering influences, shapes that may have
  • floated from a hermit of the wilderness, brood over council-chambers
  • and studies and battle-fields. We should never be certain that it was
  • not some woman treading in the wine-press who began that subtle change
  • in men’s minds, that powerful movement of thought and imagination about
  • which so many Germans have written; or that the passion, because of
  • which so many countries were given to the sword, did not begin in the
  • mind of some shepherd boy, lighting up his eyes for a moment before it
  • ran upon its way.
  • V
  • We cannot doubt that barbaric people receive such influences more
  • visibly and obviously, and in all likelihood more easily and fully
  • than we do, for our life in cities, which deafens or kills the passive
  • meditative life, and our education that enlarges the separated,
  • self-moving mind, have made our souls less sensitive. Our souls that
  • were once naked to the winds of heaven are now thickly clad, and have
  • learned to build a house and light a fire upon its hearth, and shut
  • to the doors and windows. The winds can, indeed, make us draw near
  • to the fire, or can even lift the carpet and whistle under the door,
  • but they could do worse out on the plains long ago. A certain learned
  • man, quoted by Mr. Lang in his _Making of Religion_, contends that the
  • memories of primitive man and his thoughts of distant places must have
  • had the intensity of hallucination, because there was nothing in his
  • mind to draw his attention away from them—an explanation that does not
  • seem to me complete—and Mr. Lang goes on to quote certain travellers to
  • prove that savages live always on the edges of vision. One Laplander
  • who wished to become a Christian, and thought visions but heathenish,
  • confessed to a traveller, to whom he had given a minute account of many
  • distant events, read doubtless in that traveller’s mind, ‘that he knew
  • not how to make use of his eyes, since things altogether distant were
  • present to them.’ I myself could find in one district in Galway but one
  • man who had not seen what I can but call spirits, and he was in his
  • dotage. ‘There is no man mowing a meadow but sees them at one time or
  • another,’ said a man in a different district.
  • If I can unintentionally cast a glamour, an enchantment, over persons
  • of our own time who have lived for years in great cities, there is
  • no reason to doubt that men could cast intentionally a far stronger
  • enchantment, a far stronger glamour, over the more sensitive people
  • of ancient times, or that men can still do so where the old order of
  • life remains unbroken. Why should not the Scholar Gipsy cast his spell
  • over his friends? Why should not St. Patrick, or he of whom the story
  • was first told, pass his enemies, he and all his clerics, as a herd
  • of deer? Why should not enchanters like him in the _Morte d’Arthur_
  • make troops of horse seem but grey stones? Why should not the Roman
  • soldiers, though they came of a civilization which was ceasing to be
  • sensitive to these things, have trembled for a moment before the
  • enchantments of the Druids of Mona? Why should not the Jesuit father,
  • or the Count Saint Germain, or whoever the tale was first told of, have
  • really seemed to leave the city in a coach and four by all the Twelve
  • Gates at once? Why should not Moses and the enchanters of Pharaoh have
  • made their staffs as the medicine men of many primitive peoples make
  • their pieces of old rope seem like devouring serpents? Why should not
  • that mediæval enchanter have made summer and all its blossoms seem to
  • break forth in middle winter?
  • May we not learn some day to rewrite our histories, when they touch
  • upon these things too?
  • Men who are imaginative writers to-day may well have preferred to
  • influence the imagination of others more directly in past times.
  • Instead of learning their craft with paper and a pen they may have
  • sat for hours imagining themselves to be stocks and stones and beasts
  • of the wood, till the images were so vivid that the passers-by became
  • but a part of the imagination of the dreamer, and wept or laughed or
  • ran away as he would have them. Have not poetry and music arisen,
  • as it seems, out of the sounds the enchanters made to help their
  • imagination to enchant, to charm, to bind with a spell themselves and
  • the passers-by? These very words, a chief part of all praises of music
  • or poetry, still cry to us their origin. And just as the musician or
  • the poet enchants and charms and binds with a spell his own mind when
  • he would enchant the minds of others, so did the enchanter create or
  • reveal for himself as well as for others the supernatural artist or
  • genius, the seeming transitory mind made out of many minds, whose work
  • I saw, or thought I saw, in that suburban house. He kept the doors too,
  • as it seems, of those less transitory minds, the genius of the family,
  • the genius of the tribe, or it may be, when he was mighty-souled
  • enough, the genius of the world. Our history speaks of opinions and
  • discoveries, but in ancient times when, as I think, men had their eyes
  • ever upon those doors, history spoke of commandments and revelations.
  • They looked as carefully and as patiently towards Sinai and its
  • thunders as we look towards parliaments and laboratories. We are always
  • praising men in whom the individual life has come to perfection,
  • but they were always praising the one mind, their foundation of all
  • perfection.
  • VI
  • I once saw a young Irish woman, fresh from a convent school, cast into
  • a profound trance, though not by a method known to any hypnotist. In
  • her waking state she thought the apple of Eve was the kind of apple
  • you can buy at the greengrocer’s, but in her trance she saw the Tree
  • of Life with ever-sighing souls moving in its branches instead of sap,
  • and among its leaves all the fowls of the air, and on its highest bough
  • one white fowl bearing a crown. When I went home I took from the shelf
  • a translation of _The Book of Concealed Mystery_, an old Jewish book,
  • and cutting the pages came upon this passage, which I cannot think I
  • had ever read: ‘The Tree, ... is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and
  • of Evil ... in its branches the birds lodge and build their nests, the
  • souls and the angels have their place.’
  • I once saw a young Church of Ireland man, a bank clerk in the west of
  • Ireland, thrown in a like trance. I have no doubt that he, too, was
  • quite certain that the apple of Eve was a greengrocer’s apple, and yet
  • he saw the tree and heard the souls sighing through its branches, and
  • saw apples with human faces, and laying his ear to an apple heard
  • a sound as of fighting hosts within. Presently he strayed from the
  • tree and came to the edge of Eden, and there he found himself not by
  • the wilderness he had learned of at the Sunday-school, but upon the
  • summit of a great mountain, of a mountain ‘two miles high.’ The whole
  • summit, in contradiction to all that would have seemed probable to his
  • waking mind, was a great walled garden. Some years afterwards I found
  • a mediæval diagram, which pictured Eden as a walled garden upon a high
  • mountain.
  • Where did these intricate symbols come from? Neither I nor the one
  • or two people present or the seers had ever seen, I am convinced,
  • the description in _The Book of Concealed Mystery_, or the mediæval
  • diagram. Remember that the images appeared in a moment perfect in
  • all their complexity. If one can imagine that the seers or that I
  • myself or another had read of these images and forgotten it, that the
  • supernatural artist’s knowledge of what was in our buried memories
  • accounted for these visions, there are numberless other visions to
  • account for. One cannot go on believing in improbable knowledge for
  • ever. For instance, I find in my diary that on December 27, 1897, a
  • seer to whom I had given a certain old Irish symbol, saw Brigit, the
  • goddess, holding out ‘a glittering and wriggling serpent,’ and yet I
  • feel certain that neither I nor he knew anything of her association
  • with the serpent until _Carmina Gadelica_ was published a few months
  • ago. And an old Irish woman who can neither read nor write has
  • described to me a woman dressed like Dian, with helmet, and short skirt
  • and sandals, and what seemed to be buskins. Why, too, among all the
  • countless stories of visions that I have gathered in Ireland, or that
  • a friend has gathered for me, are there none that mix the dress of
  • different periods? The seers when they are but speaking from tradition
  • will mix everything together, and speak of Finn mac Cool going to the
  • Assizes at Cork. Almost every one who has ever busied himself with such
  • matters has come, in trance or dream, upon some new and strange symbol
  • or event, which he has afterwards found in some work he had never read
  • or heard of. Examples like this are as yet too little classified, too
  • little analyzed, to convince the stranger, but some of them are proof
  • enough for those they have happened to, proof that there is a memory of
  • nature that reveals events and symbols of distant centuries. Mystics
  • of many countries and many centuries have spoken of this memory; and
  • the honest men and charlatans, who keep the magical traditions which
  • will some day be studied as a part of folk-lore, base most that is
  • of importance in their claims upon this memory. I have read of it in
  • Paracelsus and in some Indian book that describes the people of past
  • days as still living within it, ‘Thinking the thought and doing the
  • deed.’ And I have found it in the prophetic books of William Blake, who
  • calls its images ‘the bright sculptures of Los’s Halls’; and says that
  • all events, ‘all love stories,’ renew themselves from those images. It
  • is perhaps well that so few believe in it, for if many did many would
  • go out of parliaments and universities and libraries and run into the
  • wilderness to so waste the body, and to so hush the unquiet mind that,
  • still living, they might pass the doors the dead pass daily; for who
  • among the wise would trouble himself with making laws or in writing
  • history or in weighing the earth if the things of eternity seemed ready
  • to hand?
  • VII
  • I find in my diary of magical events for 1899 that I awoke at 3 A.M.
  • out of a nightmare, and imagined one symbol to prevent its recurrence,
  • and imagined another, a simple geometrical form, which calls up dreams
  • of luxuriant vegetable life, that I might have pleasant dreams. I
  • imagined it faintly, being very sleepy, and went to sleep. I had
  • confused dreams which seemed to have no relation with the symbol. I
  • awoke about eight, having for the time forgotten both nightmare and
  • symbol. Presently I dozed off again and began half to dream and half
  • to see, as one does between sleep and waking, enormous flowers and
  • grapes. I awoke and recognized that what I had dreamed or seen was the
  • kind of thing appropriate to the symbol before I remembered having
  • used it. I find another record, though made some time after the event,
  • of having imagined over the head of a person, who was a little of a
  • seer, a combined symbol of elemental air and elemental water. This
  • person, who did not know what symbol I was using, saw a pigeon flying
  • with a lobster in his bill. I find that on December 13, 1898, I used a
  • certain star-shaped symbol with a seeress, getting her to look at it
  • intently before she began seeing. She saw a rough stone house, and in
  • the middle of the house the skull of a horse. I find that I had used
  • the same symbol a few days before with a seer, and that he had seen
  • a rough stone house, and in the middle of the house something under
  • a cloth marked with the Hammer of Thor. He had lifted the cloth and
  • discovered a skeleton of gold with teeth of diamonds, and eyes of some
  • unknown dim precious stones. I had made a note to this last vision,
  • pointing out that we had been using a Solar symbol a little earlier.
  • Solar symbols often call up visions of gold and precious stones. I
  • do not give these examples to prove my arguments, but to illustrate
  • them. I know that my examples will awaken in all who have not met the
  • like, or who are not on other grounds inclined towards my arguments,
  • a most natural incredulity. It was long before I myself would admit
  • an inherent power in symbols, for it long seemed to me that one could
  • account for everything by the power of one imagination over another,
  • telepathy as it is called with that separation of knowledge and life,
  • of word and emotion, which is the sterility of scientific speech.
  • The symbol seemed powerful, I thought, merely because we thought it
  • powerful, and we would do just as well without it. In those days I used
  • symbols made with some ingenuity instead of merely imagining them. I
  • used to give them to the person I was experimenting with, and tell him
  • to hold them to his forehead without looking at them; and sometimes I
  • made a mistake. I learned from these mistakes that if I did not myself
  • imagine the symbol, in which case he would have a mixed vision, it
  • was the symbol I gave by mistake that produced the vision. Then I met
  • with a seer who could say to me, ‘I have a vision of a square pond,
  • but I can see your thought, and you expect me to see an oblong pond,’
  • or ‘The symbol you are imagining has made me see a woman holding a
  • crystal, but it was a moonlight sea I should have seen.’ I discovered
  • that the symbol hardly ever failed to call up its typical scene, its
  • typical event, its typical person, but that I could practically never
  • call up, no matter how vividly I imagined it, the particular scene, the
  • particular event, the particular person I had in my own mind, and that
  • when I could, the two visions rose side by side.
  • I cannot now think symbols less than the greatest of all powers
  • whether they are used consciously by the masters of magic, or half
  • unconsciously by their successors, the poet, the musician and the
  • artist. At first I tried to distinguish between symbols and symbols,
  • between what I called inherent symbols and arbitrary symbols, but the
  • distinction has come to mean little or nothing. Whether their power
  • has arisen out of themselves, or whether it has an arbitrary origin,
  • matters little, for they act, as I believe, because the great memory
  • associates them with certain events and moods and persons. Whatever
  • the passions of man have gathered about, becomes a symbol in the great
  • memory, and in the hands of him who has the secret, it is a worker of
  • wonders, a caller-up of angels or of devils. The symbols are of all
  • kinds, for everything in heaven or earth has its association, momentous
  • or trivial, in the great memory, and one never knows what forgotten
  • events may have plunged it, like the toadstool and the ragweed, into
  • the great passions. Knowledgeable men and women in Ireland sometimes
  • distinguish between the simples that work cures by some medical
  • property in the herb, and those that do their work by magic. Such
  • magical simples as the husk of the flax, water out of the fork of an
  • elm-tree, do their work, as I think, by awaking in the depths of the
  • mind where it mingles with the great mind, and is enlarged by the great
  • memory, some curative energy, some hypnotic command. They are not what
  • we call faith cures, for they have been much used and successfully,
  • the traditions of all lands affirm, over children and over animals,
  • and to me they seem the only medicine that could have been committed
  • safely to ancient hands. To pluck the wrong leaf would have been to go
  • uncured, but, if one had eaten it, one might have been poisoned.
  • VIII
  • I have now described that belief in magic which has set me all but
  • unwilling among those lean and fierce minds who are at war with their
  • time, who cannot accept the days as they pass, simply and gladly; and
  • I look at what I have written with some alarm, for I have told more
  • of the ancient secret than many among my fellow-students think it
  • right to tell. I have come to believe so many strange things because
  • of experience, that I see little reason to doubt the truth of many
  • things that are beyond my experience; and it may be that there are
  • beings who watch over that ancient secret, as all tradition affirms,
  • and resent, and perhaps avenge, too fluent speech. They say in the
  • Aran Islands that if you speak overmuch of the things of Faery your
  • tongue becomes like a stone, and it seems to me, though doubtless
  • naturalistic reason would call it Auto-suggestion or the like, that I
  • have often felt my tongue become just so heavy and clumsy. More than
  • once, too, as I wrote this very essay I have become uneasy, and have
  • torn up some paragraph, not for any literary reason, but because some
  • incident or some symbol that would perhaps have meant nothing to the
  • reader, seemed, I know not why, to belong to hidden things. Yet I must
  • write or be of no account to any cause, good or evil; I must commit
  • what merchandise of wisdom I have to this ship of written speech, and
  • after all, I have many a time watched it put out to sea with not less
  • alarm when all the speech was rhyme. We who write, we who bear witness,
  • must often hear our hearts cry out against us, complaining because
  • of their hidden things, and I know not but he who speaks of wisdom
  • may not sometimes in the change that is coming upon the world, have
  • to fear the anger of the people of Faery, whose country is the heart
  • of the world—‘The Land of the Living Heart.’ Who can keep always to
  • the little pathway between speech and silence, where one meets none
  • but discreet revelations? And surely, at whatever risk, we must cry
  • out that imagination is always seeking to remake the world according
  • to the impulses and the patterns in that great Mind, and that great
  • Memory? Can there be anything so important as to cry out that what we
  • call romance, poetry, intellectual beauty, is the only signal that the
  • supreme Enchanter, or some one in His councils, is speaking of what has
  • been, and shall be again, in the consummation of time?
  • 1901.
  • THE HAPPIEST OF THE POETS.
  • I
  • ROSSETTI in one of his letters numbers his favourite colours in the
  • order of his favour, and throughout his work one feels that he loved
  • form and colour for themselves and apart from what they represent. One
  • feels sometimes that he desired a world of essences, of unmixed powers,
  • of impossible purities. It is as though the last judgment had already
  • begun in his mind and that the essences and powers, which the divine
  • hand had mixed into one another to make the loam of life, fell asunder
  • at his touch. If he painted a flame or a blue distance, he painted as
  • though he had seen the flame out of whose heart all flames had been
  • taken, or the blue of the abyss that was before all life; and if he
  • painted a woman’s face he painted it in some moment of intensity when
  • the ecstasy of the lover and of the saint are alike, and desire becomes
  • wisdom without ceasing to be desire. He listens to the cry of the flesh
  • till it becomes proud and passes beyond the world where some immense
  • desire that the intellect cannot understand mixes with the desire of a
  • body’s warmth and softness. His genius like Shelley’s can hardly stir
  • but to the rejection of nature, whose delight is profusion, but never
  • intensity, and like Shelley’s it follows the Star of the Magi, the
  • Morning and Evening Star, the mother of impossible hope, although it
  • follows through deep woods, where the star glimmers among dew-drenched
  • boughs and not through ‘a windswept valley of the Apennine.’ Men like
  • him cannot be happy as we understand happiness, for to be happy one
  • must delight like nature in mere profusion, in mere abundance, in
  • making and doing things, and if one sets an image of the perfect before
  • one it must be the image that draws her perpetually, the image of a
  • perfect fulness of natural life, of an Earthly Paradise. One’s emotion
  • must never break the bonds of life, one’s hands must never labour to
  • loosen the silver cord, one’s ears must never strain to catch the sound
  • of Michael’s trumpet. That is to say, one must not be among those that
  • would have prayed in old times in some chapel of the Star, but among
  • those who would have prayed under the shadow of the Green Tree, and on
  • the wet stones of the Well, among the worshippers of natural abundance.
  • II
  • I do not think it was accident, so subtle are the threads that lead the
  • soul, that made William Morris, who seems to me to be the one perfectly
  • happy and fortunate poet of modern times, celebrate the Green Tree and
  • the goddess Habundia, and wells and enchanted waters in so many books.
  • In _The Well at the World’s End_ green trees and enchanted waters are
  • shown to us, as they were understood by old writers, who thought that
  • the generation of all things was through water; for when the water that
  • gives a long and fortunate life and that can be found by none but such
  • a one as all women love is found at last, the Dry Tree, the image of
  • the ruined land, becomes green. To him indeed as to older writers Well
  • and Tree are all but images of the one thing, of an ‘energy’ that is
  • not the less ‘eternal delight’ because it is half of the body. He never
  • wrote, and could not have written, of a man or woman who was not of the
  • kin of Well or Tree. Long before he had named either he had made his
  • ‘Wanderers’ follow a dream indeed, but a dream of natural happiness,
  • and all the people of all his poems and stories from the confused
  • beginning of his art in _The Hollow Land_ to its end in _The Sundering
  • Flood_, are full of the heavy sweetness of this dream. He wrote indeed
  • of nothing but of the quest of the Grail, but it was the Heathen Grail
  • that gave every man his chosen food, and not the Grail of Malory or
  • Wagner; and he came at last to praise, as other men have praised the
  • martyrs of religion or of passion, men with lucky eyes and men whom all
  • women love.
  • We know so little of man and of the world that we cannot be certain
  • that the same invisible hands, that gave him an imagination preoccupied
  • with good fortune, gave him also health and wealth, and the power to
  • create beautiful things without labour, that he might honour the Green
  • Tree. It pleases me to imagine the copper mine which brought, as Mr.
  • Mackail has told, so much unforeseen wealth and in so astonishing a
  • way, as no less miraculous than the three arrows in _The Sundering
  • Flood_. No mighty poet in his misery dead could have delighted enough
  • to make us delight in men ‘who knew no vain desire of foolish fame,’
  • but who thought the dance upon ‘the stubble field’ and ‘the battle
  • with the earth’ better than ‘the bitter war’ ‘where right and wrong
  • are mixed together.’ ‘Oh the trees, the trees!’ he wrote in one of his
  • early letters, and it was his work to make us, who had been taught to
  • sympathize with the unhappy till we had grown morbid, to sympathize
  • with men and women who turned everything into happiness because they
  • had in them something of the abundance of the beechen boughs or of the
  • bursting wheat-ear. He alone, I think, has told the story of Alcestis
  • with perfect sympathy for Admetus, with so perfect a sympathy that he
  • cannot persuade himself that one so happy died at all; and he, unlike
  • all other poets, has delighted to tell us that the men after his own
  • heart, the men of his _News from Nowhere_, sorrowed but a little while
  • over unhappy love. He cannot even think of nobility and happiness
  • apart, for all his people are like his men of Burg Dale who lived ‘in
  • much plenty and ease of life, though not delicately or desiring things
  • out of measure. They wrought with their hands and wearied themselves;
  • and they rested from their toil and feasted and were merry; to-morrow
  • was not a burden to them, nor yesterday a thing which they would fain
  • forget; life shamed them not nor did death make them afraid. As for the
  • Dale wherein they dwelt, it was indeed most fair and lovely and they
  • deemed it the Blessing of the earth, and they trod the flowery grass
  • beside its rippled stream amidst the green tree-boughs proudly and
  • joyfully with goodly bodies and merry hearts.’
  • III
  • I think of his men as with broad brows and golden beards and mild eyes
  • and tranquil speech, and of his good women as like ‘The Bride’ in
  • whose face Rossetti saw and painted for once the abundance of earth
  • and not the half-hidden light of his star. They are not in love with
  • love for its own sake, with a love that is apart from the world or at
  • enmity with it, as Swinburne imagines Mary Stuart and as all men have
  • imagined Helen. They do not seek in love that ecstasy, which Shelley’s
  • nightingale called death, that extremity of life in which life seems
  • to pass away like the Phœnix in flame of its own lighting, but rather
  • a gentle self-surrender that would lose more than half its sweetness
  • if it lost the savour of coming days. They are good house-wives; they
  • sit often at the embroidery frame, and they have wisdom in flocks and
  • herds and they are before all fruitful mothers. It seems at times as
  • if their love was less a passion for one man out of the world than
  • submission to the hazard of destiny, and the hope of motherhood and the
  • innocent desire of the body. They accept changes and chances of life
  • as gladly as they accept spring and summer and autumn and winter, and
  • because they have sat under the shadow of the Green Tree and drunk the
  • Waters of Abundance out of their hollow hands, the barren blossoms do
  • not seem to them the most beautiful. When Habundia takes the shape of
  • Birdalone she comes first as a young naked girl standing among great
  • trees, and then as an old carline, Birdalone in stately old age. And
  • when she praises Birdalone’s naked body, and speaks of the desire it
  • shall awaken, praise and desire are innocent because they would not
  • break the links that chain the days to one another. The desire seems
  • not other than the desire of the bird for its mate in the heart of the
  • wood, and we listen to that joyous praise as though a bird watching its
  • plumage in still water had begun to sing in its joy, or as if we heard
  • hawk praising hawk in the middle air, and because it is the praise of
  • one made for all noble life and not for pleasure only, it seems, though
  • it is the praise of the body, that it is the noblest praise.
  • Birdalone has never seen her image but in ‘a broad latten dish,’ so the
  • wood woman must tell her of her body and praise it.
  • ‘Thus it is with thee; thou standest before me a tall and slim maiden,
  • somewhat thin as befitteth thy seventeen summers; where thy flesh
  • is bare of wont, as thy throat and thine arms and thy legs from the
  • middle down, it is tanned a beauteous colour, but otherwhere it is
  • even as fair a white, wholesome and clean as if the golden sunlight
  • which fulfilleth the promise of the earth were playing therein....
  • Delicate and clean-made is the little trench that goeth from thy mouth
  • to thy lips, and sweet it is, and there is more might in it than sweet
  • words spoken. Thy lips they are of the finest fashion, yet rather thin
  • than full; and some would not have it so; but I would, whereas I see
  • therein a sign of thy valiancy and friendliness. Surely he who did thy
  • carven chin had a mind to a master work and did no less. Great was the
  • deftness of thine imaginer, and he would have all folk who see thee
  • wonder at thy deep thinking and thy carefulness and thy kindness. Ah,
  • maiden! is it so that thy thoughts are ever deep and solemn? Yet at
  • least I know it of thee that they be hale and true and sweet.
  • ‘My friend, when thou hast a mirror, some of all this thou shalt see,
  • but not all; and when thou hast a lover some deal wilt thou hear, but
  • not all. But now thy she-friend may tell it thee all, if she have eyes
  • to see it, as have I; whereas no man could say so much of thee before
  • the mere love should overtake him, and turn his speech into the folly
  • of love and the madness of desire.’
  • All his good women, whether it is Danaë in her tower, or that woman in
  • _The Wood beyond the World_ who can make the withered flowers in her
  • girdle grow young again by the touch of her hand, are of the kin of the
  • wood woman. All his bad women too and his half-bad women are of her
  • kin. The evils their enchantments make are a disordered abundance like
  • that of weedy places and they are as cruel as wild creatures are cruel
  • and they have unbridled desires. One finds these evils in their typical
  • shape in that isle of the Wondrous Isles, where the wicked witch has
  • her pleasure-house and her prison, and in that ‘isle of the old and the
  • young,’ where until her enchantment is broken second childhood watches
  • over children who never grow old and who seem to the bystander who
  • knows their story ‘like images’ or like ‘the rabbits on the grass.’ It
  • is as though Nature spoke through him at all times in the mood that is
  • upon her when she is opening the apple-blossom or reddening the apple
  • or thickening the shadow of the boughs, and that the men and women of
  • his verse and of his stories are all the ministers of her mood.
  • IV
  • When I was a child I often heard my elders talking of an old turreted
  • house where an old great-uncle of mine lived, and of its gardens and
  • its long pond where there was an island with tame eagles; and one day
  • somebody read me some verses and said they made him think of that old
  • house where he had been very happy. The verses ran in my head for years
  • and became to me the best description of happiness in the world, and
  • I am not certain that I know a better even now. They were those first
  • dozen verses of _Golden Wings_ that begin—
  • ‘Midways of a walled garden
  • In the happy poplar land
  • Did an ancient castle stand,
  • With an old knight for a warden.
  • Many scarlet bricks there were
  • In its walls, and old grey stone;
  • Over which red apples shone
  • At the right time of the year.
  • On the bricks the green moss grew,
  • Yellow lichen on the stone,
  • Over which red apples shone;
  • Little war that castle knew.’
  • When William Morris describes a house of any kind, and makes his
  • description poetical, it is always, I think, some house that he would
  • have liked to have lived in, and I remember him saying about the time
  • when he was writing of that great house of the Wolfings, ‘I decorate
  • modern houses for people, but the house that would please me would be
  • some great room where one talked to one’s friends in one corner and eat
  • in another and slept in another and worked in another.’ Indeed all he
  • writes seems to me like the make-believe of a child who is remaking the
  • world, not always in the same way, but always after his own heart; and
  • so unlike all other modern writers he makes his poetry out of unending
  • pictures of a happiness that is often what a child might imagine, and
  • always a happiness that sets mind and body at ease. Now it is a picture
  • of some great room full of merriment, now of the wine-press, now of
  • the golden threshing-floor, now of an old mill among apple-trees, now
  • of cool water after the heat of the sun, now of some well-sheltered,
  • well-tilled place among woods or mountains, where men and women live
  • happily, knowing of nothing that is too far off or too great for the
  • affections. He has but one story to tell us, how some man or woman lost
  • and found again the happiness that is always half of the body; and
  • even when they are wandering from it, leaves must fall over them, and
  • flowers make fragrances about them, and warm winds fan them, and birds
  • sing to them, for being of Habundia’s kin they must not forget the
  • shadow of her Green Tree even for a moment, and the waters of her Well
  • must be always wet upon their sandals. His poetry often wearies us as
  • the unbroken green of July wearies us, for there is something in us,
  • some bitterness because of the Fall it may be, that takes a little from
  • the sweetness of Eve’s apple after the first mouthful; but he who did
  • all things gladly and easily, who never knew the curse of labour, found
  • it always as sweet as it was in Eve’s mouth. All kinds of associations
  • have gathered about the pleasant things of the world and half taken the
  • pleasure out of them for the greater number of men, but he saw them as
  • when they came from the Divine Hand. I often see him in my mind as I
  • saw him once at Hammersmith holding up a glass of claret towards the
  • light and saying, ‘Why do people say it is prosaic to get inspiration
  • out of wine? Is it not the sunlight and the sap in the leaves? Are not
  • grapes made by the sunlight and the sap?’
  • V
  • In one of his little socialistic pamphlets he tells us how he sat
  • under an elm-tree and watched the starlings and thought of an old
  • horse and an old labourer that had passed him by, and of the men and
  • women he had seen in towns; and he wondered how all these had come to
  • be as they were. He saw that the starlings were beautiful and merry
  • and that men and the old horse they had subdued to their service were
  • ugly and miserable, and yet the starlings, he thought, were of one
  • kind whether there or in the south of England, and the ugly men and
  • women were of one kind with those whose nobility and beauty had moved
  • the ancient sculptors and poets to imagine the gods and the heroes
  • after the images of men. Then he began, he tells us, to meditate how
  • this great difference might be ended and a new life, which would
  • permit men to have beauty in common among them as the starlings have,
  • be built on the wrecks of the old life. In other words, his mind was
  • illuminated from within and lifted into prophecy in the full right
  • sense of the word, and he saw the natural things he was alone gifted
  • to see in their perfect form; and having that faith which is alone
  • worth having, for it includes all others, a sure knowledge established
  • in the constitution of his mind that perfect things are final things,
  • he announced that all he had seen would come to pass. I do not think
  • he troubled to understand books of economics, and Mr. Mackail says,
  • I think, that they vexed him and wearied him. He found it enough to
  • hold up, as it were, life as it is to-day beside his visions, and to
  • show how faded its colours were and how sapless it was. And if we had
  • not enough artistic feeling, enough feeling for the perfect that is,
  • to admit the authority of the vision; or enough faith to understand
  • that all that is imperfect passes away, he would not, as I think, have
  • argued with us in a serious spirit. Though I think that he never used
  • the kinds of words I use in writing of him, though I think he would
  • even have disliked a word like faith with its theological associations,
  • I am certain that he understood thoroughly, as all artists understand
  • a little, that the important things, the things we must believe in or
  • perish, are beyond argument. We can no more reason about them than
  • can the pigeon, come but lately from the egg, about the hawk whose
  • shadow makes it cower among the grass. His vision is true because it
  • is poetical, because we are a little happier when we are looking at
  • it; and he knew as Shelley knew by an act of faith that the economists
  • should take their measurements not from life as it is, but from the
  • vision of the world made perfect that is buried under all minds. The
  • early Christians were of the kin of the Wilderness and of the Dry Tree,
  • and they saw an unearthly Paradise, but he was of the kin of the Well
  • and of the Green Tree and he saw an Earthly Paradise.
  • He obeyed his vision when he tried to make first his own house, for he
  • was in this matter also like a child playing with the world, and then
  • houses of other people, places where one could live happily; and he
  • obeyed it when he wrote essays about the nature of happy work, and when
  • he spoke at street corners about the coming changes.
  • He knew clearly what he was doing towards the end, for he lived at a
  • time when poets and artists have begun again to carry the burdens that
  • priests and theologians took from them angrily some few hundred years
  • ago. His art was not more essentially religious than Rossetti’s art,
  • but it was different, for Rossetti, drunken with natural beauty, saw
  • the supernatural beauty, the impossible beauty, in his frenzy, while he
  • being less intense and more tranquil would show us a beauty that would
  • wither if it did not set us at peace with natural things, and if we did
  • not believe that it existed always a little, and would some day exist
  • in its fulness. He may not have been, indeed he was not, among the
  • very greatest of the poets, but he was among the greatest of those who
  • prepare the last reconciliation when the Cross shall blossom with roses.
  • 1902.
  • THE PHILOSOPHY OF SHELLEY’S POETRY
  • I. HIS RULING IDEAS
  • WHEN I was a boy in Dublin I was one of a group who rented a room in
  • a mean street to discuss philosophy. My fellow-students got more and
  • more interested in certain modern schools of mystical belief, and I
  • never found anybody to share my one unshakable belief. I thought that
  • whatever of philosophy has been made poetry is alone permanent, and
  • that one should begin to arrange it in some regular order, rejecting
  • nothing as the make-believe of the poets. I thought, so far as I can
  • recollect my thoughts after so many years, that if a powerful and
  • benevolent spirit has shaped the destiny of this world, we can better
  • discover that destiny from the words that have gathered up the heart’s
  • desire of the world, than from historical records, or from speculation,
  • wherein the heart withers. Since then I have observed dreams and
  • visions very carefully, and am now certain that the imagination has
  • some way of lighting on the truth that the reason has not, and that its
  • commandments, delivered when the body is still and the reason silent,
  • are the most binding we can ever know. I have re-read _Prometheus
  • Unbound_, which I had hoped my fellow-students would have studied as a
  • sacred book, and it seems to me to have an even more certain place than
  • I had thought, among the sacred books of the world. I remember going
  • to a learned scholar to ask about its deep meanings, which I felt more
  • than understood, and his telling me that it was Godwin’s _Political
  • Justice_ put into rhyme, and that Shelley was a crude revolutionist,
  • and believed that the overturning of kings and priests would regenerate
  • mankind. I quoted the lines which tell how the halcyons ceased to
  • prey on fish, and how poisonous leaves became good for food, to show
  • that he foresaw more than any political regeneration, but was too
  • timid to push the argument. I still believe that one cannot help
  • believing him, as this scholar I know believes him, a vague thinker,
  • who mixed occasional great poetry with a phantastic rhetoric, unless
  • one compares such passages, and above all such passages as describe
  • the liberty he praised, till one has discovered the system of belief
  • that lay behind them. It should seem natural to find his thought full
  • of subtlety, for Mrs. Shelley has told how he hesitated whether he
  • should be a metaphysician or a poet, and has spoken of his ‘huntings
  • after the obscure’ with regret, and said of that _Prometheus Unbound_,
  • which so many for three generations have thought _Political Justice_
  • put into rhyme, ‘It requires a mind as subtle and penetrating as his
  • own to understand the mystic meanings scattered throughout the poem.
  • They elude the ordinary reader by their abstraction and delicacy of
  • distinction, but they are far from vague. It was his design to write
  • prose metaphysical essays on the Nature of Man, which would have served
  • to explain much of what is obscure in his poetry; a few scattered
  • fragments of observation and remarks alone remain. He considered
  • these philosophical views of mind and nature to be instinct with
  • the intensest spirit of poetry.’ From these scattered fragments and
  • observations, and from many passages read in their light, one soon
  • comes to understand that his liberty was so much more than the liberty
  • of _Political Justice_ that it was one with Intellectual Beauty, and
  • that the regeneration he foresaw was so much more than the regeneration
  • many political dreamers have foreseen, that it could not come in its
  • perfection till the hours bore ‘Time to his grave in eternity.’ In _A
  • Defence of Poetry_, the profoundest essay on the foundation of poetry
  • in English, he shows that the poet and the lawgiver hold their station
  • by the right of the same faculty, the one uttering in words and the
  • other in the forms of society, his vision of the divine order, the
  • Intellectual Beauty. ‘Poets, according to the circumstances of the age
  • and nation in which they appeared, were called in the earliest epoch
  • of the world legislators or prophets, and a poet essentially comprises
  • and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely
  • the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which
  • present things are to be ordained, but he beholds the future in the
  • present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flowers and the fruit of
  • latest time.’ ‘Language, colour, form, and religious and civil habits
  • of action are all the instruments and materials of poetry.’ Poetry
  • is ‘the creation of actions according to the unchangeable process of
  • human nature as existing in the mind of the creator, which is itself
  • the image of all other minds.’ ‘Poets have been challenged to resign
  • the civic crown to reasoners and merchants.... It is admitted that
  • the exercise of the imagination is the most delightful, but it is
  • alleged that that of reason is the more useful.... Whilst the mechanist
  • abridges and the political economist combines labour, let them be sure
  • that their speculations, for want of correspondence with those first
  • principles which belong to the imagination, do not tend, as they have
  • in modern England, to exasperate at once the extremes of luxury and
  • want.... The rich have become richer, the poor have become poorer, ...
  • such are the effects which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise
  • of the calculating faculty.’ The speaker of these things might almost
  • be Blake, who held that the Reason not only created Ugliness, but all
  • other evils. The books of all wisdom are hidden in the cave of the
  • Witch of Atlas, who is one of his personifications of beauty, and when
  • she moves over the enchanted river that is an image of all life, the
  • priests cast aside their deceits, and the king crowns an ape to mock
  • his own sovereignty, and the soldiers gather about the anvils to beat
  • their swords to ploughshares, and lovers cast away their timidity, and
  • friends are united; while the power which in _Laon and Cythna_ awakens
  • the mind of the reformer to contend, and itself contends, against the
  • tyrannies of the world, is first seen as the star of love or beauty.
  • And at the end of _The Ode to Naples_, he cries out to ‘the spirit of
  • beauty’ to overturn the tyrannies of the world, or to fill them with
  • its ‘harmonizing ardours.’ He calls the spirit of beauty liberty,
  • because despotism, and perhaps, as ‘the man of virtuous soul commands
  • not nor obeys,’ all authority, pluck virtue from her path towards
  • beauty, and because it leads us by that love whose service is perfect
  • freedom. It leads all things by love, for he cries again and again
  • that love is the perception of beauty in thought and things, and it
  • orders all things by love, for it is love that impels the soul to its
  • expressions in thought and in action, by making us ‘seek to awaken
  • in all things that are, a community with what we experience within
  • ourselves.’ ‘We are born into the world, and there is something within
  • us which, from the instant that we live, more and more thirsts after
  • its likeness.’ We have ‘a soul within our soul that describes a circle
  • around its proper paradise which pain and sorrow and evil dare not
  • overleap,’ and we labour to see this soul in many mirrors, that we may
  • possess it the more abundantly. He would hardly seek the progress of
  • the world by any less gentle labour, and would hardly have us resist
  • evil itself. He bids the reformers in _The Philosophical Review of
  • Reform_ receive ‘the onset of the cavalry,’ if it be sent to disperse
  • their meetings, ‘with folded arms,’ and ‘not because active resistance
  • is not justifiable, but because temperance and courage would produce
  • greater advantages than the most decisive victory;’ and he gives them
  • like advice in _The Masque of Anarchy_, for liberty, the poem cries,
  • ‘is love,’ and can make the rich man kiss its feet, and, like those who
  • followed Christ, give away his goods and follow it throughout the world.
  • He does not believe that the reformation of society can bring this
  • beauty, this divine order, among men without the regeneration of the
  • hearts of men. Even in _Queen Mab_, which was written before he had
  • found his deepest thought, or rather perhaps before he had found words
  • to utter it, for I do not think men change much in their deepest
  • thought, he is less anxious to change men’s beliefs, as I think, than
  • to cry out against that serpent more subtle than any beast of the
  • field, ‘the cause and the effect of tyranny.’ He affirms again and
  • again that the virtuous, those who have ‘pure desire and universal
  • love,’ are happy in the midst of tyranny, and he foresees a day when
  • ‘the spirit of nature,’ the spirit of beauty of his later poems, who
  • has her ‘throne of power unappealable in every human heart,’ shall
  • have made men so virtuous that ‘kingly glare will lose its power to
  • dazzle and silently pass by,’ and as it seems commerce, ‘the venal
  • interchange of all that human art or nature yields, which wealth should
  • purchase not,’ come as silently to an end.
  • He was always, indeed in chief, a witness for that ‘power
  • unappealable.’ Maddalo, in _Julian and Maddalo_, says that the soul is
  • powerless, and can only, like a ‘dreary bell hung in a heaven-illumined
  • tower, toll our thoughts and our desires to meet round the rent heart
  • and pray;’ but Julian, who is Shelley himself, replies, as the makers
  • of all religions have replied—
  • ‘Where is the love, beauty and truth we seek
  • But in our mind? And if we were not weak,
  • Should we be less in deed than in desire?’
  • while _Mont Blanc_ is an intricate analogy to affirm that the soul has
  • its sources in ‘the secret strength of things,’ ‘which governs thought
  • and to the infinite heavens is a law.’ He even thought that men might
  • be immortal were they sinless, and his Cythna bids the sailors be
  • without remorse, for all that live are stained as they are. It is thus,
  • she says, that time marks men and their thoughts for the tomb. And the
  • ‘Red Comet,’ the image of evil in _Laon and Cythna_, when it began its
  • war with the star of beauty, brought not only ‘Fear, Hatred, Fraud and
  • Tyranny,’ but ‘Death, Decay, Earthquake, and Blight and Madness pale.’
  • When the Red Comet is conquered, when Jupiter is overthrown by
  • Demogorgon, when the prophecy of Queen Mab is fulfilled, visible
  • nature will put on perfection again. He declares, in one of the notes
  • to _Queen Mab_, that ‘there is no great extravagance in presuming ...
  • that there should be a perfect identity between the moral and physical
  • improvement of the human species,’ and thinks it ‘certain that wisdom
  • is not compatible with disease, and that, in the present state of the
  • climates of the earth, health in the true and comprehensive sense of
  • the word is out of the reach of civilized man.’ In _Prometheus Unbound_
  • he sees, as in the ecstasy of a saint, the ships moving among the seas
  • of the world without fear of danger
  • ‘by the light
  • Of wave-reflected flowers, and floating odours,
  • And music soft,’
  • and poison dying out of the green things, and cruelty out of all living
  • things, and even the toads and efts becoming beautiful, and at last
  • Time being borne ‘to his tomb in eternity.’
  • This beauty, this divine order, whereof all things shall become a part
  • in a kind of resurrection of the body, is already visible to the dead
  • and to souls in ecstasy, for ecstasy is a kind of death. The dying
  • Lionel hears the song of the nightingale, and cries—
  • ‘Heardst thou not sweet words among
  • That heaven-resounding minstrelsy?
  • Heardst thou not, that those who die
  • Awake in a world of ecstasy?
  • That love, when limbs are interwoven,
  • And sleep, when the night of life is cloven,
  • And thought, to the world’s dim boundaries clinging,
  • And music, when one beloved is singing,
  • Is death? Let us drain right joyously
  • The cup which the sweet bird fills for me.’
  • And in the most famous passage in all his poetry he sings of Death as
  • of a mistress. ‘Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, stains the
  • white radiance of eternity.’ ‘Die, if thou wouldst be with that which
  • thou wouldst seek;’ and he sees his own soon-coming death in a rapture
  • of prophecy, for ‘the fire for which all thirst’ beams upon him,
  • ‘consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.’ When he is dead he will
  • still influence the living, for though Adonais has fled ‘to the burning
  • fountains whence he came,’ and ‘is a portion of the eternal which must
  • glow through time and change unquenchably the same,’ and has ‘awaked
  • from the dream of life,’ he has not gone from ‘the young dawn,’ or the
  • ‘caverns in the forests,’ or ‘the faint flowers and the fountains.’ He
  • has been ‘made one with nature,’ and his voice is ‘heard in all her
  • music,’ and his presence is felt wherever ‘that power may move which
  • has withdrawn his being to its own,’ and he bears ‘his part’ when it is
  • compelling mortal things to their appointed forms, and he overshadows
  • men’s minds at their supreme moments, for
  • ‘when lofty thought
  • Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair,
  • And love and life contend in it for what
  • Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there,
  • And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.’
  • ‘Of his speculations as to what will befall this inestimable spirit
  • when we appear to die,’ Mrs. Shelley has written, ‘a mystic ideality
  • tinged these speculations in Shelley’s mind; certain stanzas in the
  • poem of _The Sensitive Plant_ express, in some degree, the almost
  • inexpressible idea, not that we die into another state, when this
  • state is no longer, from some reason, unapparent as well as apparent,
  • accordant with our being—but that those who rise above the ordinary
  • nature of man, fade from before our imperfect organs; they remain in
  • their “love, beauty, and delight,” in a world congenial to them, and
  • we, clogged by “error, ignorance, and strife,” see them not till we
  • are fitted by purification and improvement to their higher state.’ Not
  • merely happy souls, but all beautiful places and movements and gestures
  • and events, when we think they have ceased to be, have become portions
  • of the eternal.
  • ‘In this life
  • Of error, ignorance, and strife,
  • Where nothing is, but all things seem,
  • And we the shadow of the dream,
  • It is a modest creed, and yet
  • Pleasant, if one considers it,
  • To own that death itself must be,
  • Like all the rest, a mockery.
  • That garden sweet, that lady fair,
  • And all sweet shapes and odours there,
  • In truth have never passed away;
  • ’Tis we, ’tis ours are changed, not they.
  • For love and beauty and delight
  • There is no death, nor change; their might
  • Exceeds our organs, which endure
  • No light, being themselves obscure.’
  • He seems in his speculations to have lit on that memory of nature the
  • visionaries claim for the foundation of their knowledge; but I do not
  • know whether he thought, as they do, that all things good and evil
  • remain for ever, ‘thinking the thought and doing the deed,’ though
  • not, it may be, self-conscious; or only thought that ‘love and beauty
  • and delight’ remain for ever. The passage where Queen Mab awakes ‘all
  • knowledge of the past,’ and the good and evil ‘events of old and
  • wondrous times,’ was no more doubtless than a part of the machinery
  • of the poem, but all the machineries of poetry are parts of the
  • convictions of antiquity, and readily become again convictions in minds
  • that dwell upon them in a spirit of intense idealism.
  • Intellectual Beauty has not only the happy dead to do her will, but
  • ministering spirits who correspond to the Devas of the East, and the
  • Elemental Spirits of mediæval Europe, and the Sidhe of ancient Ireland,
  • and whose too constant presence, and perhaps Shelley’s ignorance
  • of their more traditional forms, give some of his poetry an air of
  • rootless phantasy. They change continually in his poetry, as they do
  • in the visions of the mystics everywhere and of the common people in
  • Ireland, and the forms of these changes display, in an especial sense,
  • the glowing forms of his mind when freed from all impulse not out of
  • itself or out of supersensual power. These are ‘gleams of a remoter
  • world which visit us in sleep,’ spiritual essences whose shadows are
  • the delights of all the senses, sounds ‘folded in cells of crystal
  • silence,’ ‘visions swift and sweet and quaint,’ which lie waiting their
  • moment ‘each in his thin sheath like a chrysalis,’ ‘odours’ among
  • ‘ever-blooming eden trees,’ ‘liquors’ that can give ‘happy sleep,’ or
  • can make tears ‘all wonder and delight’; ‘the golden genii who spoke to
  • the poets of Greece in dreams’; ‘the phantoms’ which become the forms
  • of the arts when ‘the mind, arising bright from the embrace of beauty,’
  • ‘casts on them the gathered rays which are reality’; ‘the guardians’
  • who move in ‘the atmosphere of human thought,’ as ‘the birds within the
  • wind, or the fish within the wave,’ or man’s thought itself through all
  • things; and who join the throng of the happy hours when Time is passing
  • away—
  • ‘As the flying fish leap
  • From the Indian deep,
  • And mix with the seabirds half asleep.’
  • It is these powers which lead Asia and Panthea, as they would lead all
  • the affections of humanity, by words written upon leaves, by faint
  • songs, by eddies of echoes that draw ‘all spirits on that secret
  • way,’ by the ‘dying odours’ of flowers and by ‘the sunlight of the
  • sphered dew,’ beyond the gates of birth and death to awake Demogorgon,
  • eternity, that ‘the painted veil called life’ may be ‘torn aside.’
  • There are also ministers of ugliness and all evil, like those that came
  • to Prometheus—
  • ‘As from the rose which the pale priestess kneels
  • To gather for her festal crown of flowers,
  • The aërial crimson falls, flushing her cheek,
  • So from our victim’s destined agony
  • The shade which is our form invests us round;
  • Else we are shapeless as our mother Night.’
  • Or like those whose shapes the poet sees in _The Triumph of Life_,
  • coming from the procession that follows the car of life, as ‘hope’
  • changes to ‘desire,’ shadows ‘numerous as the dead leaves blown in
  • autumn evening from a poplar tree’; and resembling those they come
  • from, until, if I understand an obscure phrase aright, they are
  • ‘wrapt’ round ‘all the busy phantoms that live there as the sun shapes
  • the clouds.’ Some to sit ‘chattering like apes,’ and some like ‘old
  • anatomies’ ‘hatching their bare broods under the shade of dæmons’
  • wings,’ laughing ‘to reassume the delegated powers’ they had given to
  • the tyrants of the earth, and some ‘like small gnats and flies’ to
  • throng ‘about the brow of lawyers, statesmen, priest and theorist,’
  • and some ‘like discoloured shapes of snow’ to fall ‘on fairest bosoms
  • and the sunniest hair,’ to be ‘melted by the youthful glow which
  • they extinguish,’ and many to ‘fling shadows of shadows yet unlike
  • themselves,’ shadows that are shaped into new forms by that ‘creative
  • ray’ in which all move like motes.
  • These ministers of beauty and ugliness were certainly more than
  • metaphors or picturesque phrases to one who believed the ‘thoughts
  • which are called real or external objects’ differed but in regularity
  • of recurrence from ‘hallucinations, dreams, and the ideas of madness,’
  • and lessened this difference by telling how he had dreamed ‘three
  • several times, between intervals of two or more years, the same precise
  • dream,’ and who had seen images with the mind’s eye that left his
  • nerves shaken for days together. Shadows that were as when there
  • ‘hovers
  • A flock of vampire bats before the glare
  • Of the tropic sun, bringing, ere evening,
  • Strange night upon some Indian isle,’
  • could not but have had more than a metaphorical and picturesque being
  • to one who had spoken in terror with an image of himself, and who had
  • fainted at the apparition of a woman with eyes in her breasts, and who
  • had tried to burn down a wood, if we can trust Mrs. Williams’ account,
  • because he believed a devil, who had first tried to kill him, had
  • sought refuge there.
  • It seems to me, indeed, that Shelley had reawakened in himself the age
  • of faith, though there were times when he would doubt, as even the
  • saints have doubted, and that he was a revolutionist, because he had
  • heard the commandment, ‘If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye
  • do them.’ I have re-read his _Prometheus Unbound_ for the first time
  • for many years, in the woods of Drim-da-rod, among the Echte hills,
  • and sometimes I have looked towards Slieve-nan-Orr, where the country
  • people say the last battle of the world shall be fought till the third
  • day, when a priest shall lift a chalice, and the thousand years of
  • peace begin. And I think this mysterious song utters a faith as simple
  • and as ancient as the faith of those country people, in a form suited
  • to a new age, that will understand with Blake that the holy spirit is
  • ‘an intellectual fountain,’ and that the kinds and degrees of beauty
  • are the images of its authority.
  • II. HIS RULING SYMBOLS
  • At a comparatively early time Shelley made his imprisoned Cythna become
  • wise in all human wisdom through the contemplation of her own mind,
  • and write out this wisdom upon the sands in ‘signs’ that were ‘clear
  • elemental shapes whose smallest change’ made ‘a subtler language
  • within language,’ and were ‘the key of truths, which once were dimly
  • taught in old Crotona.’ His early romances and much throughout his
  • poetry show how strong a fascination the traditions of magic and of
  • the magical philosophy had cast over his mind, and one can hardly
  • suppose that he had not brooded over their doctrine of symbols or
  • signatures, though I do not find anything to show that he gave it any
  • deep study. One finds in his poetry, besides innumerable images that
  • have not the definiteness of symbols, many images that are certainly
  • symbols, and as the years went by he began to use these with a more
  • and more deliberately symbolic purpose. I imagine that, when he wrote
  • his earlier poems he allowed the subconscious life to lay its hands so
  • firmly upon the rudder of his imagination, that he was little conscious
  • of the abstract meaning of the images that rose in what seemed the
  • idleness of his mind. Any one who has any experience of any mystical
  • state of the soul knows how there float up in the mind profound
  • symbols,[A] whose meaning, if indeed they do not delude one into the
  • dream that they are meaningless, one does not perhaps understand for
  • years. Nor I think has anyone, who has known that experience with any
  • constancy, failed to find some day in some old book or on some old
  • monument, a strange or intricate image, that had floated up before
  • him, and grow perhaps dizzy with the sudden conviction that our little
  • memories are but a part of some great memory that renews the world and
  • men’s thoughts age after age, and that our thoughts are not, as we
  • suppose, the deep but a little foam upon the deep. Shelley understood
  • this as is proved by what he says of the eternity of beautiful things
  • and of the influence of the dead, but whether he understood that the
  • great memory is also a dwelling-house of symbols, of images that are
  • living souls, I cannot tell. He had certainly experience of all but
  • the most profound of the mystical states, of that union with created
  • things which assuredly must precede the soul’s union with the uncreated
  • spirit. He says, in his fragment of an essay ‘On Life,’ mistaking a
  • unique experience for the common experience of all: ‘Let us recollect
  • our sensations as children ... we less habitually distinguished
  • all that we saw and felt from ourselves. They seemed as it were to
  • constitute one mass. There are some persons who in this respect are
  • always children. Those who are subject to the state called reverie,
  • feel as if their nature were resolved into the surrounding universe, or
  • as if the surrounding universe were resolved into their being,’ and he
  • must have expected to receive thoughts and images from beyond his own
  • mind, just in so far as that mind transcended its preoccupation with
  • particular time and place, for he believed inspiration a kind of death;
  • and he could hardly have helped perceiving that an image that has
  • transcended particular time and place becomes a symbol, passes beyond
  • death, as it were, and becomes a living soul.
  • When Shelley went to the Continent with Godwin’s daughter in 1812 they
  • sailed down certain great rivers in an open boat, and when he summed up
  • in his preface to _Laon and Cythna_ the things that helped to make him
  • a poet, he spoke of these voyages: ‘I have sailed down mighty rivers
  • and seen the sun rise and set and the stars come forth whilst I sailed
  • night and day down a rapid stream among mountains.’
  • He may have seen some cave that was the bed of a rivulet by some river
  • side, or have followed some mountain stream to its source in a cave,
  • for from his return to England rivers and streams and wells, flowing
  • through caves or rising in them, came into every poem of his that
  • was of any length, and always with the precision of symbols. Alastor
  • passed in his boat along a river in a cave; and when for the last time
  • he felt the presence of the spirit he loved and followed, it was when
  • he watched his image in a silent well; and when he died it was where
  • a river fell into ‘an abysmal chasm’; and the Witch of Atlas in her
  • gladness, as he in his sadness, passed in her boat along a river in a
  • cave, and it was where it bubbled out of a cave that she was born; and
  • when Rousseau, the typical poet of _The Triumph of Life_, awoke to the
  • vision that was life, it was where a rivulet bubbled out of a cave; and
  • the poet of _Epipsychidion_ met the evil beauty ‘by a well under blue
  • nightshade bowers’; and Cythna bore her child imprisoned in a great
  • cave beside ‘a fountain round and vast, in which the wave imprisoned
  • leaped and boiled perpetually’; and her lover Laon was brought to
  • his prison in a high column through a cave where there was ‘a putrid
  • pool,’ and when he went to see the conquered city he dismounted beside
  • a polluted fountain in the market-place, foreshadowing thereby that
  • spirit who at the end of _Prometheus Unbound_ gazes at a regenerated
  • city from ‘within a fountain in the public square’; and when Laon and
  • Cythna are dead they awake beside a fountain and drift into Paradise
  • along a river; and at the end of things Prometheus and Asia are to live
  • amid a happy world in a cave where a fountain ‘leaps with an awakening
  • sound’; and it was by a fountain, the meeting-place of certain unhappy
  • lovers, that Rosalind and Helen told their unhappiness to one another;
  • and it was under a willow by a fountain that the enchantress and her
  • lover began their unhappy love; while his lesser poems and his prose
  • fragments use caves and rivers and wells and fountains continually
  • as metaphors. It may be that his subconscious life seized upon some
  • passing scene, and moulded it into an ancient symbol without help from
  • anything but that great memory; but so good a Platonist as Shelley
  • could hardly have thought of any cave as a symbol, without thinking
  • of Plato’s cave that was the world; and so good a scholar may well
  • have had Porphyry on ‘the Cave of the Nymphs’ in his mind. When I
  • compare Porphyry’s description of the cave where the Phæacian boat left
  • Odysseus, with Shelley’s description of the cave of the Witch of Atlas,
  • to name but one of many, I find it hard to think otherwise. I quote
  • Taylor’s translation, only putting Mr. Lang’s prose for Taylor’s bad
  • verse. ‘What does Homer obscurely signify by the cave in Ithaca which
  • he describes in the following verses? “Now at the harbour’s head is a
  • long-leaved olive tree, and hard by is a pleasant cave and shadowy,
  • sacred to the nymphs, that are called Naiads. And therein are mixing
  • bowls and jars of stone, and there moreover do bees hive. And there are
  • great looms of stone, whereon the nymphs weave raiment of purple stain,
  • a marvel to behold; and there are waters welling evermore. Two gates
  • there are to the cave, the one set towards the North wind, whereby men
  • may go down, but the portals towards the South pertain rather to the
  • gods, whereby men may not enter: it is the way of the immortals.”’ He
  • goes on to argue that the cave was a temple before Homer wrote, and
  • that ‘the ancients did not establish temples without fabulous symbols,’
  • and then begins to interpret Homer’s description in all its detail.
  • The ancients, he says, ‘consecrated a cave to the world’ and held ‘the
  • flowing waters’ and the ‘obscurity of the cavern’ ‘apt symbols of what
  • the world contains,’ and he calls to witness Zoroaster’s cave with
  • fountains; and often caves are, he says, symbols of ‘all invisible
  • power; because as caves are obscure and dark, so the essence of all
  • these powers is occult,’ and quotes a lost hymn to Apollo to prove
  • that nymphs living in caves fed men ‘from intellectual fountains’;
  • and he contends that fountains and rivers symbolize generation, and
  • that the word nymph ‘is commonly applied to all souls descending into
  • generation,’ and that the two gates of Homer’s cave are the gate of
  • generation and the gate of ascent through death to the gods, the gate
  • of cold and moisture, and the gate of heat and fire. Cold, he says,
  • causes life in the world, and heat causes life among the gods, and the
  • constellation of the Cup is set in the heavens near the sign Cancer,
  • because it is there that the souls descending from the Milky Way
  • receive their draught of the intoxicating cold drink of generation.
  • ‘The mixing bowls and jars of stone’ are consecrated to the Naiads,
  • and are also, as it seems, symbolical of Bacchus, and are of stone
  • because of the rocky beds of the rivers. And ‘the looms of stone’ are
  • the symbols of the ‘souls that descend into generation.’ ‘For the
  • formation of the flesh is on or about the bones, which in the bodies
  • of animals resemble stones,’ and also because ‘the body is a garment’
  • not only about the soul, but about all essences that become visible,
  • for ‘the heavens are called by the ancients a veil, in consequence of
  • being as it were the vestments of the celestial gods.’ The bees hive
  • in the mixing bowls and jars of stone, for so Porphyry understands
  • the passage, because honey was the symbol adopted by the ancients for
  • ‘pleasure arising from generation.’ The ancients, he says, called souls
  • not only Naiads but bees, ‘as the efficient cause of sweetness’; but
  • not all souls ‘proceeding into generation’ are called bees, ‘but those
  • who will live in it justly and who after having performed such things
  • as are acceptable to the gods will again return (to their kindred
  • stars). For this insect loves to return to the place from whence it
  • came and is eminently just and sober.’ I find all these details in the
  • cave of the Witch of Atlas, the most elaborately described of Shelley’s
  • caves, except the two gates, and these have a far-off echo in her
  • summer journeys on her cavern river and in her winter sleep in ‘an
  • inextinguishable well of crimson fire.’ We have for the mixing bowls,
  • and jars of stone full of honey, those delights of the senses, ‘sounds
  • of air’ ‘folded in cells of crystal silences,’ ‘liquors clear and
  • sweet’ ‘in crystal vials,’ and for the bees, visions ‘each in his thin
  • sheath like a chrysalis,’ and for ‘the looms of stone’ and ‘raiment
  • of purple stain’ the Witch’s spinning and embroidering; and the Witch
  • herself is a Naiad, and was born from one of the Atlantides, who lay
  • in ‘a chamber of grey rock’ until she was changed by the sun’s embrace
  • into a cloud.
  • When one turns to Shelley for an explanation of the cave and fountain
  • one finds how close his thought was to Porphyry’s. He looked upon
  • thought as a condition of life in generation and believed that the
  • reality beyond was something other than thought. He wrote in his
  • fragment ‘On Life,’ ‘That the basis of all things cannot be, as the
  • popular philosophy alleges, mind, is sufficiently evident. Mind, as
  • far as we have any experience of its properties, and beyond that
  • experience how vain is argument, cannot create, it can only perceive;’
  • and in another passage he defines mind as existence. Water is his great
  • symbol of existence, and he continually meditates over its mysterious
  • source. In his prose he tells how ‘thought can with difficulty visit
  • the intricate and winding chambers which it inhabits. It is like a
  • river, whose rapid and perpetual stream flows outward.... The caverns
  • of the mind are obscure and shadowy; or pervaded with a lustre,
  • beautiful and bright indeed, but shining not beyond their portals.’
  • When the Witch has passed in her boat from the caverned river, that is
  • doubtless her own destiny, she passes along the Nile ‘by Moeris and
  • the Mareotid lakes,’ and sees all human life shadowed upon its waters
  • in shadows that ‘never are erased but tremble ever’; and in many a
  • dark and subterranean street under the Nile—new caverns—and along the
  • bank of the Nile; and as she bends over the unhappy, she compares
  • unhappiness to the ‘strife that stirs the liquid surface of man’s
  • life’; and because she can see the reality of things she is described
  • as journeying ‘in the calm depths’ of ‘the wide lake’ we journey over
  • unpiloted. Alastor calls the river that he follows an image of his
  • mind, and thinks that it will be as hard to say where his thought will
  • be when he is dead as where its waters will be in ocean or cloud in a
  • little while. In _Mont Blanc_, a poem so overladen with descriptions
  • in parentheses that one loses sight of its logic, Shelley compares
  • the flowing through our mind of ‘the universe of things,’ which are,
  • he has explained elsewhere, but thoughts, to the flowing of the Arne
  • through the ravine, and compares the unknown sources of our thoughts
  • in some ‘remoter world’ whose ‘gleams’ ‘visit the soul in sleep,’ to
  • Arne’s sources among the glaciers on the mountain heights. Cythna in
  • the passage where she speaks of making signs ‘a subtle language within
  • language’ on the sand by the ‘fountain’ of sea water in the cave where
  • she is imprisoned, speaks of the ‘cave’ of her mind which gave its
  • secrets to her, and of ‘one mind the type of all’ which is a ‘moveless
  • wave’ reflecting ‘all moveless things that are;’ and then passing more
  • completely under the power of the symbol, she speaks of growing wise
  • through contemplation of the images that rise out of the fountain at
  • the call of her will. Again and again one finds some passing allusion
  • to the cave of man’s mind, or to the caves of his youth, or to the
  • cave of mysteries we enter at death, for to Shelley as to Porphyry it
  • is more than an image of life in the world. It may mean any enclosed
  • life, as when it is the dwelling-place of Asia and Prometheus, or when
  • it is ‘the still cave of poetry,’ and it may have all meanings at once,
  • or it may have as little meaning as some ancient religious symbol
  • enwoven from the habit of centuries with the patterns of a carpet or a
  • tapestry.
  • As Shelley sailed along those great rivers and saw or imagined the cave
  • that associated itself with rivers in his mind, he saw half-ruined
  • towers upon the hilltops, and once at any rate a tower is used to
  • symbolize a meaning that is the contrary to the meaning symbolized by
  • caves. Cythna’s lover is brought through the cave where there is a
  • polluted fountain to a high tower, for being man’s far-seeing mind,
  • when the world has cast him out he must to the ‘towers of thought’s
  • crowned powers’; nor is it possible for Shelley to have forgotten
  • this first imprisonment when he made men imprison Lionel in a tower
  • for a like offence; and because I know how hard it is to forget a
  • symbolical meaning, once one has found it, I believe Shelley had more
  • than a romantic scene in his mind when he made Prince Athanase follow
  • his mysterious studies in a lighted tower above the sea, and when he
  • made the old hermit watch over Laon in his sickness in a half-ruined
  • tower, wherein the sea, here doubtless as to Cythna, ‘the one mind,’
  • threw ‘spangled sands’ and ‘rarest sea shells.’ The tower, important
  • in Maeterlinck, as in Shelley, is, like the sea, and rivers, and caves
  • with fountains, a very ancient symbol, and would perhaps, as years went
  • by, have grown more important in his poetry. The contrast between
  • it and the cave in _Laon and Cythna_ suggests a contrast between the
  • mind looking outward upon men and things and the mind looking inward
  • upon itself, which may or may not have been in Shelley’s mind, but
  • certainly helps, with one knows not how many other dim meanings, to
  • give the poem mystery and shadow. It is only by ancient symbols, by
  • symbols that have numberless meanings beside the one or two the writer
  • lays an emphasis upon, or the half-score he knows of, that any highly
  • subjective art can escape from the barrenness and shallowness of a too
  • conscious arrangement, into the abundance and depth of nature. The poet
  • of essences and pure ideas must seek in the half-lights that glimmer
  • from symbol to symbol as if to the ends of the earth, all that the
  • epic and dramatic poet finds of mystery and shadow in the accidental
  • circumstance of life.
  • The most important, the most precise of all Shelley’s symbols, the one
  • he uses with the fullest knowledge of its meaning, is the Morning and
  • Evening Star. It rises and sets for ever over the towers and rivers,
  • and is the throne of his genius. Personified as a woman it leads
  • Rousseau, the typical poet of _The Triumph of Life_, under the power
  • of the destroying hunger of life, under the power of the sun that
  • we shall find presently as a symbol of life, and it is the Morning
  • Star that wars against the principle of evil in _Laon and Cythna_,
  • at first as a star with a red comet, here a symbol of all evil as
  • it is of disorder in _Epipsychidion_, and then as a serpent with an
  • eagle—symbols in Blake too and in the Alchemists; and it is the Morning
  • Star that appears as a winged youth to a woman, who typifies humanity
  • amid its sorrows, in the first canto of _Laon and Cythna_; and it is
  • invoked by the wailing women of _Hellas_, who call it ‘lamp of the
  • free’ and ‘beacon of love’ and would go where it hides flying from the
  • deepening night among those ‘kingless continents sinless as Eden,’ and
  • ‘mountains and islands’ ‘prankt on the sapphire sea’ that are but the
  • opposing hemispheres to the senses but, as I think, the ideal world,
  • the world of the dead, to the imagination; and in the _Ode to Liberty_,
  • Liberty is bid lead wisdom out of the inmost cave of man’s mind as
  • the Morning Star leads the sun out of the waves. We know too that had
  • _Prince Athanase_ been finished it would have described the finding of
  • Pandemus, the stars’ lower genius, and the growing weary of her, and
  • the coming to its true genius Urania at the coming of death, as the
  • day finds the Star at evening. There is hardly indeed a poem of any
  • length in which one does not find it as a symbol of love, or liberty,
  • or wisdom, or beauty, or of some other expression of that Intellectual
  • Beauty, which was to Shelley’s mind the central power of the world; and
  • to its faint and fleeting light he offers up all desires, that are as
  • ‘The desire of the moth for the star,
  • Of the night for the morrow,
  • The devotion to something afar
  • From the sphere of our sorrow.’
  • When its genius comes to Rousseau, shedding dew with one hand, and
  • treading out the stars with her feet, for she is also the genius of the
  • dawn, she brings him a cup full of oblivion and love. He drinks and his
  • mind becomes like sand ‘on desert Labrador’ marked by the feet of deer
  • and a wolf. And then the new vision, life, the cold light of day moves
  • before him, and the first vision becomes an invisible presence. The
  • same image was in his mind too when he wrote
  • ‘Hesperus flies from awakening night
  • And pants in its beauty and speed with light,
  • Fast fleeting, soft and bright.’
  • Though I do not think that Shelley needed to go to Porphyry’s account
  • of the cold intoxicating cup, given to the souls in the constellation
  • of the Cup near the constellation Cancer, for so obvious a symbol as
  • the cup, or that he could not have found the wolf and the deer and
  • the continual flight of his Star in his own mind, his poetry becomes
  • the richer, the more emotional, and loses something of its appearance
  • of idle phantasy when I remember that these are ancient symbols, and
  • still come to visionaries in their dreams. Because the wolf is but a
  • more violent symbol of longing and desire than the hound, his wolf and
  • deer remind me of the hound and deer that Usheen saw in the Gaelic poem
  • chasing one another on the water before he saw the young man following
  • the woman with the golden apple; and of a Galway tale that tells how
  • Niam, whose name means brightness or beauty, came to Usheen as a deer;
  • and of a vision that a friend of mine saw when gazing at a dark-blue
  • curtain. I was with a number of Hermetists, and one of them said to
  • another, ‘Do you see something in the curtain?’ The other gazed at the
  • curtain for a while and saw presently a man led through a wood by a
  • black hound, and then the hound lay dead at a place the seer knew was
  • called, without knowing why, ‘the Meeting of the Suns,’ and the man
  • followed a red hound, and then the red hound was pierced by a spear.
  • A white fawn watched the man out of the wood, but he did not look at
  • it, for a white hound came and he followed it trembling, but the seer
  • knew that he would follow the fawn at last, and that it would lead him
  • among the gods. The most learned of the Hermetists said, ‘I cannot tell
  • the meaning of the hounds or where the Meeting of the Suns is, but I
  • think the fawn is the Morning and Evening Star.’ I have little doubt
  • that when the man saw the white fawn he was coming out of the darkness
  • and passion of the world into some day of partial regeneration, and
  • that it was the Morning Star and would be the Evening Star at its
  • second coming. I have little doubt that it was but the story of Prince
  • Athanase and what may have been the story of Rousseau in _The Triumph
  • of Life_, thrown outward once again from that great memory, which is
  • still the mother of the Muses, though men no longer believe in it.
  • It may have been this memory, or it may have been some impulse of
  • his nature too subtle for his mind to follow, that made Keats, with
  • his love of embodied things, of precision of form and colouring, of
  • emotions made sleepy by the flesh, see Intellectual Beauty in the Moon;
  • and Blake, who lived in that energy he called eternal delight, see it
  • in the Sun, where his personification of poetic genius labours at a
  • furnace. I think there was certainly some reason why these men took so
  • deep a pleasure in lights that Shelley thought of with weariness and
  • trouble. The Moon is the most changeable of symbols, and not merely
  • because it is the symbol of change. As mistress of the waters she
  • governs the life of instinct and the generation of things, for, as
  • Porphyry says, even ‘the apparition of images’ in the ‘imagination’ is
  • through ‘an excess of moisture’; and, as a cold and changeable fire
  • set in the bare heavens, she governs alike chastity and the joyless
  • idle drifting hither and thither of generated things. She may give God
  • a body and have Gabriel to bear her messages, or she may come to men
  • in their happy moments as she came to Endymion, or she may deny life
  • and shoot her arrows; but because she only becomes beautiful in giving
  • herself, and is no flying ideal, she is not loved by the children of
  • desire.
  • Shelley could not help but see her with unfriendly eyes. He is believed
  • to have described Mary Shelley at a time when she had come to seem
  • cold in his eyes, in that passage of _Epipsychidion_ which tells how
  • a woman like the Moon led him to her cave and made ‘frost’ creep over
  • the sea of his mind, and so bewitched Life and Death with ‘her silver
  • voice’ that they ran from him crying, ‘Away, he is not of our crew.’
  • When he describes the Moon as part of some beautiful scene he can call
  • her beautiful, but when he personifies, when his words come under the
  • influence of that great memory or of some mysterious tide in the depth
  • of our being, he grows unfriendly or not truly friendly or at the
  • most pitiful. The Moon’s lips ‘are pale and waning,’ it is ‘the cold
  • Moon,’ or ‘the frozen and inconstant Moon,’ or it is ‘forgotten’ and
  • ‘waning,’ or it ‘wanders’ and is ‘weary,’ or it is ‘pale and grey,’ or
  • it is ‘pale for weariness,’ and ‘wandering companionless’ and ‘ever
  • changing,’ and finding ‘no object worth’ its ‘constancy,’ or it is like
  • a ‘dying lady’ who ‘totters’ ‘out of her chamber led by the insane and
  • feeble wanderings of her fading brain,’ and even when it is no more
  • than a star, it casts an evil influence that makes the lips of lovers
  • ‘lurid’ or pale. It only becomes a thing of delight when Time is being
  • borne to his tomb in eternity, for then the spirit of the Earth, man’s
  • procreant mind, fills it with his own joyousness. He describes the
  • spirit of the Earth and of the Moon, moving above the rivulet of their
  • lives in a passage which reads like a half-understood vision. Man has
  • become ‘one harmonious soul of many a soul’ and ‘all things flow to
  • all’ and ‘familiar acts are beautiful through love,’ and an ‘animation
  • of delight’ at this change flows from spirit to spirit till the snow
  • ‘is loosened from the Moon’s lifeless mountains.’
  • Some old magical writer, I forget who, says if you wish to be
  • melancholy hold in your left hand an image of the Moon made out of
  • silver, and if you wish to be happy hold in your right hand an image of
  • the Sun made out of gold. The Sun is the symbol of sensitive life, and
  • of belief and joy and pride and energy, of indeed the whole life of the
  • will, and of that beauty which neither lures from far off, nor becomes
  • beautiful in giving itself, but makes all glad because it is beauty.
  • Taylor quotes Proclus as calling it ‘the Demiurgos of everything
  • sensible.’ It was therefore natural that Blake, who was always praising
  • energy, and all exalted over-flowing of oneself, and who thought art an
  • impassioned labour to keep men from doubt and despondency, and woman’s
  • love an evil, when it would trammel the man’s will, should see the
  • poetic genius not in a woman star but in the Sun, and should rejoice
  • throughout his poetry in ‘the Sun in his strength.’ Shelley, however,
  • except when he uses it to describe the peculiar beauty of Emilia
  • Viviani, who was ‘like an incarnation of the Sun when light is changed
  • to love,’ saw it with less friendly eyes. He seems to have seen it with
  • perfect happiness only when veiled in mist, or glimmering upon water,
  • or when faint enough to do no more than veil the brightness of his own
  • Star; and in _The Triumph of Life_, the one poem in which it is part
  • of the avowed symbolism, its power is the being and the source of all
  • tyrannies. When the woman personifying the Morning Star has faded from
  • before his eyes, Rousseau sees a ‘new vision’ in ‘a cold bright car’
  • with a rainbow hovering over her, and as she comes the shadow passes
  • from ‘leaf and stone’ and the souls she has enslaved seem in ‘that
  • light like atomies to dance within a sunbeam,’ or they dance among
  • the flowers that grow up newly ‘in the grassy verdure of the desert,’
  • unmindful of the misery that is to come upon them. ‘These are the
  • great, the unforgotten,’ all who have worn ‘mitres and helms and crowns
  • or wreaths of light,’ and yet have not known themselves. Even ‘great
  • Plato’ is there because he knew joy and sorrow, because life that
  • could not subdue him by gold or pain, by ‘age or sloth or slavery,’
  • subdued him by love. All who have ever lived are there except Christ
  • and Socrates and the ‘sacred few’ who put away all life could give,
  • being doubtless followers throughout their lives of the forms borne by
  • the flying ideal, or who, ‘as soon as they had touched the world with
  • living flame, flew back like eagles to their native noon.’
  • In ancient times, it seems to me that Blake, who for all his protest
  • was glad to be alive, and ever spoke of his gladness, would have
  • worshipped in some chapel of the Sun, and that Keats, who accepted
  • life gladly though with ‘a delicious diligent indolence,’ would have
  • worshipped in some chapel of the Moon, but that Shelley, who hated
  • life because he sought ‘more in life than any understood,’ would have
  • wandered, lost in a ceaseless reverie, in some chapel of the Star of
  • infinite desire.
  • I think too that as he knelt before an altar, where a thin flame burnt
  • in a lamp made of green agate, a single vision would have come to him
  • again and again, a vision of a boat drifting down a broad river between
  • high hills where there were caves and towers, and following the light
  • of one Star; and that voices would have told him how there is for every
  • man some one scene, some one adventure, some one picture that is the
  • image of his secret life, for wisdom first speaks in images, and that
  • this one image, if he would but brood over it his life long, would
  • lead his soul, disentangled from unmeaning circumstance and the ebb
  • and flow of the world, into that far household, where the undying gods
  • await all whose souls have become simple as flame, whose bodies have
  • become quiet as an agate lamp.
  • But he was born in a day when the old wisdom had vanished and was
  • content merely to write verses, and often with little thought of more
  • than verses.
  • 1900.
  • FOOTNOTE:
  • [Footnote A: ‘Marianne’s Dream’ was certainly copied from a real dream
  • of somebody’s, but like images come to the mystic in his waking state.]
  • AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON
  • I
  • I HAVE been hearing Shakespeare, as the traveller in _News from
  • Nowhere_ might have heard him, had he not been hurried back into
  • our noisy time. One passes through quiet streets, where gabled and
  • red-tiled houses remember the Middle Age, to a theatre that has been
  • made not to make money, but for the pleasure of making it, like the
  • market houses that set the traveller chuckling; nor does one find it
  • among hurrying cabs and ringing pavements, but in a green garden by
  • a river side. Inside I have to be content for a while with a chair,
  • for I am unexpected, and there is not an empty seat but this; and yet
  • there is no one who has come merely because one must go somewhere after
  • dinner. All day, too, one does not hear or see an incongruous or noisy
  • thing, but spends the hours reading the plays, and the wise and foolish
  • things men have said of them, in the library of the theatre, with its
  • oak-panelled walls and leaded windows of tinted glass; or one rows by
  • reedy banks and by old farm-houses, and by old churches among great
  • trees. It is certainly one’s fault if one opens a newspaper, for Mr.
  • Benson gives one a new play every night, and one need talk of nothing
  • but the play in the inn-parlour, under the oak beams blackened by time
  • and showing the mark of the adze that shaped them. I have seen this
  • week _King John_, _Richard II._, the second part of _Henry IV._, _Henry
  • V._, the second part of _Henry VI._, and _Richard III._ played in their
  • right order, with all the links that bind play to play unbroken; and
  • partly because of a spirit in the place, and partly because of the
  • way play supports play, the theatre has moved me as it has never done
  • before. That strange procession of kings and queens, of warring nobles,
  • of insurgent crowds, of courtiers, and of people of the gutter has been
  • to me almost too visible, too audible, too full of an unearthly energy.
  • I have felt as I have sometimes felt on grey days on the Galway shore,
  • when a faint mist has hung over the grey sea and the grey stones, as
  • if the world might suddenly vanish and leave nothing behind, not even
  • a little dust under one’s feet. The people my mind’s eye has seen have
  • too much of the extravagance of dreams, like all the inventions of art
  • before our crowded life had brought moderation and compromise, to seem
  • more than a dream, and yet all else has grown dim before them.
  • In London the first man one meets puts any high dream out of one’s
  • head, for he will talk to one of something at once vapid and exciting,
  • some one of those many subjects of thought that build up our social
  • unity. But here he gives back one’s dream like a mirror. If we do not
  • talk of the plays, we talk of the theatre, and how more people may be
  • got to come, and our isolation from common things makes the future
  • become grandiose and important. One man tells how the theatre and the
  • library were at their foundation but part of a scheme the future is
  • to fulfil. To them will be added a school where speech, and gesture,
  • and fencing, and all else that an actor needs will be taught, and the
  • council, which will have enlarged its Festivals to some six weeks,
  • will engage all the chief players of Shakespeare, and perhaps of other
  • great dramatists in this and other countries. These chief players will
  • need to bring but few of their supporters, for the school will be able
  • to fill all the lesser parts with players who are slowly recovering
  • the lost tradition of musical speech. Another man is certain that
  • the Festival, even without the school, which would require a new
  • endowment, will grow in importance year by year, and that it may become
  • with favouring chance the supreme dramatic event of the world; and when
  • I suggest that it may help to break the evil prestige of London he
  • becomes enthusiastic.
  • Surely a bitter hatred of London is becoming a mark of those that love
  • the arts, and all that have this hatred should help anything that looks
  • like a beginning of a centre of art elsewhere. The easiness of travel,
  • which is always growing, began by emptying the country, but it may end
  • by filling it; for adventures like this of Stratford-on-Avon show that
  • people are ready to journey from all parts of England and Scotland and
  • Ireland, and even from America, to live with their favourite art as
  • shut away from the world as though they were ‘in retreat,’ as Catholics
  • say. Nobody but an impressionist painter, who hides it in light and
  • mist, even pretends to love a street for its own sake; and could we
  • meet our friends and hear music and poetry in the country, none of us
  • that are not captive would ever leave the thrushes. In London, we hear
  • something that we like some twice or thrice in a winter, and among
  • people who are thinking the while of a music-hall singer or of a member
  • of parliament, but there we would hear it and see it among people
  • who liked it well enough to have travelled some few hours to find it;
  • and because those who care for the arts have few near friendships
  • among those that do not, we would hear and see it among near friends.
  • We would escape, too, from those artificial tastes and interests we
  • cultivate, that we may have something to talk about among people we
  • meet for a few minutes and not again, and the arts would grow serious
  • as the Ten Commandments.
  • II
  • I do not think there is anything I disliked in Stratford, beside
  • certain new houses, but the shape of the theatre; and as a larger
  • theatre must be built sooner or later, that would be no great matter if
  • one could put a wiser shape into somebody’s head. I cannot think there
  • is any excuse for a half-round theatre, where land is not expensive,
  • or no very great audience to be seated within earshot of the stage; or
  • that it was adopted for a better reason than because it has come down
  • to us, though from a time when the art of the stage was a different
  • art. The Elizabethan theatre was a half-round, because the players were
  • content to speak their lines on a platform, as if they were speakers at
  • a public meeting, and we go on building in the same shape, although
  • our art of the stage is the art of making a succession of pictures.
  • Were our theatres of the shape of a half-closed fan, like Wagner’s
  • theatre, where the audience sit on seats that rise towards the broad
  • end while the play is played at the narrow end, their pictures could
  • be composed for eyes at a small number of points of view, instead of
  • for eyes at many points of view, above and below and at the sides,
  • and what is no better than a trade might become an art. With the eyes
  • watching from the sides of a half-round, on the floor and in the boxes
  • and galleries, would go the solid-built houses and the flat trees that
  • shake with every breath of air; and we could make our pictures with
  • robes that contrasted with great masses of colour in the back cloth
  • and such severe or decorative forms of hills and trees and houses as
  • would not overwhelm, as our naturalistic scenery does, the idealistic
  • art of the poet, and all at a little price. Naturalistic scene-painting
  • is not an art, but a trade, because it is, at best, an attempt to copy
  • the more obvious effects of nature by the methods of the ordinary
  • landscape-painter, and by his methods made coarse and summary. It is
  • but flashy landscape-painting and lowers the taste it appeals to,
  • for the taste it appeals to has been formed by a more delicate art.
  • Decorative scene-painting would be, on the other hand, as inseparable
  • from the movements as from the robes of the players and from the
  • falling of the light; and being in itself a grave and quiet thing it
  • would mingle with the tones of the voices and with the sentiment of
  • the play, without overwhelming them under an alien interest. It would
  • be a new and legitimate art appealing to a taste formed by itself and
  • copying nothing but itself. Mr. Gordon Craig used scenery of this kind
  • at the Purcell Society performance the other day, and despite some
  • marring of his effects by the half-round shape of the theatre, it was
  • the first beautiful scenery our stage has seen. He created an ideal
  • country where everything was possible, even speaking in verse, or
  • speaking in music, or the expression of the whole of life in a dance,
  • and I would like to see Stratford-on-Avon decorate its Shakespeare with
  • like scenery. As we cannot, it seems, go back to the platform and the
  • curtain, and the argument for doing so is not without weight, we can
  • only get rid of the sense of unreality, which most of us feel when we
  • listen to the conventional speech of Shakespeare, by making scenery as
  • conventional. Time after time his people use at some moment of deep
  • emotion an elaborate or deliberate metaphor, or do some improbable
  • thing which breaks an emotion of reality we have imposed upon him by an
  • art that is not his, nor in the spirit of his. It also is an essential
  • part of his method to give slight or obscure motives of many actions
  • that our attention may dwell on what is of chief importance, and we set
  • these cloudy actions among solid-looking houses, and what we hope are
  • solid-looking trees, and illusion comes to an end, slain by our desire
  • to increase it. In his art, as in all the older art of the world,
  • there was much make-believe, and our scenery, too, should remember
  • the time when, as my nurse used to tell me, herons built their nests
  • in old men’s beards! Mr. Benson did not venture to play the scene in
  • _Richard III._ where the ghosts walk, as Shakespeare wrote it, but had
  • his scenery been as simple as Mr. Gordon Craig’s purple back cloth that
  • made Dido and Æneas seem wandering on the edge of eternity, he would
  • have found nothing absurd in pitching the tents of Richard and Richmond
  • side by side. Goethe has said, ‘Art is art, because it is not nature!’
  • It brings us near to the archetypal ideas themselves, and away from
  • nature, which is but their looking-glass.
  • III
  • In _La Peau de Chagrin_ Balzac spends many pages in describing a
  • coquette, who seems the image of heartlessness, and then invents an
  • improbable incident that her chief victim may discover how beautifully
  • she can sing. Nobody had ever heard her sing, and yet in her singing,
  • and in her chatter with her maid, Balzac tells us, was her true self.
  • He would have us understand that behind the momentary self, which acts
  • and lives in the world, and is subject to the judgment of the world,
  • there is that which cannot be called before any mortal Judgment seat,
  • even though a great poet, or novelist, or philosopher be sitting upon
  • it. Great literature has always been written in a like spirit, and
  • is, indeed, the Forgiveness of Sin, and when we find it becoming the
  • Accusation of Sin, as in George Eliot, who plucks her Tito in pieces
  • with as much assurance as if he had been clockwork, literature has
  • begun to change into something else. George Eliot had a fierceness one
  • hardly finds but in a woman turned argumentative, but the habit of mind
  • her fierceness gave its life to was characteristic of her century, and
  • is the habit of mind of the Shakespearian critics. They and she grew
  • up in a century of utilitarianism, when nothing about a man seemed
  • important except his utility to the State, and nothing so useful to
  • the State as the actions whose effect can be weighed by the reason.
  • The deeds of Coriolanus, Hamlet, Timon, Richard II. had no obvious
  • use, were, indeed, no more than the expression of their personalities,
  • and so it was thought Shakespeare was accusing them, and telling us
  • to be careful lest we deserve the like accusations. It did not occur
  • to the critics that you cannot know a man from his actions because
  • you cannot watch him in every kind of circumstance, and that men are
  • made useless to the State as often by abundance as by emptiness, and
  • that a man’s business may at times be revelation, and not reformation.
  • Fortinbras was, it is likely enough, a better King than Hamlet would
  • have been, Aufidius was a more reasonable man than Coriolanus, Henry
  • V. was a better man-at-arms than Richard II., but after all, were not
  • those others who changed nothing for the better and many things for
  • the worse greater in the Divine Hierarchies? Blake has said that ‘the
  • roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea,
  • and the destructive sword are portions of Eternity, too great for the
  • eye of man,’ but Blake belonged by right to the ages of Faith, and
  • thought the State of less moment than the Divine Hierarchies. Because
  • reason can only discover completely the use of those obvious actions
  • which everybody admires, and because every character was to be judged
  • by efficiency in action, Shakespearian criticism became a vulgar
  • worshipper of Success. I have turned over many books in the library at
  • Stratford-on-Avon, and I have found in nearly all an antithesis, which
  • grew in clearness and violence as the century grew older, between two
  • types, whose representatives were Richard II., ‘sentimental,’ ‘weak,’
  • ‘selfish,’ ‘insincere,’ and Henry V., ‘Shakespeare’s only hero.’ These
  • books took the same delight in abasing Richard II. that school-boys do
  • in persecuting some boy of fine temperament, who has weak muscles and
  • a distaste for school games. And they had the admiration for Henry V.
  • that school-boys have for the sailor or soldier hero of a romance in
  • some boys’ paper. I cannot claim any minute knowledge of these books,
  • but I think that these emotions began among the German critics, who
  • perhaps saw something French and Latin in Richard II., and I know that
  • Professor Dowden, whose book I once read carefully, first made these
  • emotions eloquent and plausible. He lived in Ireland, where everything
  • has failed, and he meditated frequently upon the perfection of
  • character which had, he thought, made England successful, for, as we
  • say, ‘cows beyond the water have long horns.’ He forgot that England,
  • as Gordon has said, was made by her adventurers, by her people of
  • wildness and imagination and eccentricity; and thought that Henry V.,
  • who only seemed to be these things because he had some commonplace
  • vices, was not only the typical Anglo-Saxon, but the model Shakespeare
  • held up before England; and he even thought it worth while pointing
  • out that Shakespeare himself was making a large fortune while he was
  • writing about Henry’s victories. In Professor Dowden’s successors
  • this apotheosis went further; and it reached its height at a moment
  • of imperialistic enthusiasm, of ever-deepening conviction that the
  • commonplace shall inherit the earth, when somebody of reputation,
  • whose name I cannot remember, wrote that Shakespeare admired this
  • one character alone out of all his characters. The Accusation of
  • Sin produced its necessary fruit, hatred of all that was abundant,
  • extravagant, exuberant, of all that sets a sail for shipwreck, and
  • flattery of the commonplace emotions and conventional ideals of the
  • mob, the chief Paymaster of accusation.
  • IV
  • I cannot believe that Shakespeare looked on his Richard II. with any
  • but sympathetic eyes, understanding indeed how ill-fitted he was to be
  • King, at a certain moment of history, but understanding that he was
  • lovable and full of capricious fancy, ‘a wild creature’ as Pater has
  • called him. The man on whom Shakespeare modelled him had been full of
  • French elegancies, as he knew from Holinshed, and had given life a new
  • luxury, a new splendour, and been ‘too friendly’ to his friends, ‘too
  • favorable’ to his enemies. And certainly Shakespeare had these things
  • in his head when he made his King fail, a little because he lacked
  • some qualities that were doubtless common among his scullions, but
  • more because he had certain qualities that are uncommon in all ages.
  • To suppose that Shakespeare preferred the men who deposed his King is
  • to suppose that Shakespeare judged men with the eyes of a Municipal
  • Councillor weighing the merits of a Town Clerk; and that had he been
  • by when Verlaine cried out from his bed, ‘Sir, you have been made by
  • the stroke of a pen, but I have been made by the breath of God,’ he
  • would have thought the Hospital Superintendent the better man. He saw
  • indeed, as I think, in Richard II. the defeat that awaits all, whether
  • they be Artist or Saint, who find themselves where men ask of them a
  • rough energy and have nothing to give but some contemplative virtue,
  • whether lyrical phantasy, or sweetness of temper, or dreamy dignity, or
  • love of God, or love of His creatures. He saw that such a man through
  • sheer bewilderment and impatience can become as unjust or as violent as
  • any common man, any Bolingbroke or Prince John, and yet remain ‘that
  • sweet lovely rose.’ The courtly and saintly ideals of the Middle Ages
  • were fading, and the practical ideals of the modern age had begun to
  • threaten the unuseful dome of the sky; Merry England was fading, and
  • yet it was not so faded that the Poets could not watch the procession
  • of the world with that untroubled sympathy for men as they are, as
  • apart from all they do and seem, which is the substance of tragic irony.
  • Shakespeare cared little for the State, the source of all our
  • judgments, apart from its shows and splendours, its turmoils and
  • battles, its flamings out of the uncivilized heart. He did indeed
  • think it wrong to overturn a King, and thereby to swamp peace in civil
  • war, and the historical plays from _Henry IV._ to _Richard III._, that
  • monstrous birth and last sign of the wrath of Heaven, are a fulfilment
  • of the prophecy of the Bishop of Carlisle, who was ‘raised up by God’
  • to make it; but he had no nice sense of utilities, no ready balance
  • to measure deeds, like that fine instrument, with all the latest
  • improvements, Gervinus and Professor Dowden handle so skilfully. He
  • meditated as Solomon, not as Bentham meditated, upon blind ambitions,
  • untoward accidents, and capricious passions, and the world was almost
  • as empty in his eyes as it must be in the eyes of God.
  • ‘Tired with all these, for restful death I cry;—
  • As, to behold desert a beggar born,
  • And needy nothing trimm’d in jollity,
  • And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
  • And gilded honour shamefully misplaced,
  • And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
  • And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
  • And strength by limping sway disabled,
  • And Art made tongue-tied by authority,
  • And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,
  • And simple truth miscall’d simplicity,
  • And captive good attending captain ill:
  • Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
  • Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.’
  • V
  • The Greeks, a certain scholar has told me, considered that myths are
  • the activities of the Dæmons, and that the Dæmons shape our characters
  • and our lives. I have often had the fancy that there is some one Myth
  • for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all
  • he did and thought. Shakespeare’s Myth, it may be, describes a wise man
  • who was blind from very wisdom, and an empty man who thrust him from
  • his place, and saw all that could be seen from very emptiness. It is in
  • the story of Hamlet, who saw too great issues everywhere to play the
  • trivial game of life, and of Fortinbras, who came from fighting battles
  • about ‘a little patch of ground’ so poor that one of his captains
  • would not give ‘six ducats’ to ‘farm it,’ and who was yet acclaimed by
  • Hamlet and by all as the only befitting King. And it is in the story
  • of Richard II., that unripened Hamlet, and of Henry V., that ripened
  • Fortinbras. To poise character against character was an element in
  • Shakespeare’s art, and scarcely a play is lacking in characters that
  • are the complement of one another, and so, having made the vessel of
  • porcelain Richard II., he had to make the vessel of clay Henry V. He
  • makes him the reverse of all that Richard was. He has the gross vices,
  • the coarse nerves, of one who is to rule among violent people, and he
  • is so little ‘too friendly’ to his friends that he bundles them out of
  • doors when their time is over. He is as remorseless and undistinguished
  • as some natural force, and the finest thing in his play is the way his
  • old companions fall out of it broken-hearted or on their way to the
  • gallows; and instead of that lyricism which rose out of Richard’s mind
  • like the jet of a fountain to fall again where it had risen, instead
  • of that phantasy too enfolded in its own sincerity to make any thought
  • the hour had need of, Shakespeare has given him a resounding rhetoric
  • that moves men, as a leading article does to-day. His purposes are
  • so intelligible to everybody that everybody talks of him as if he
  • succeeded, although he fails in the end, as all men great and little
  • fail in Shakespeare, and yet his conquests abroad are made nothing by a
  • woman turned warrior, and that boy he and Katherine were to ‘compound,’
  • ‘half French, half English,’ ‘that’ was to ‘go to Constantinople and
  • take the Turk by the beard,’ turns out a Saint and loses all his father
  • had built up at home and his own life.
  • Shakespeare watched Henry V. not indeed as he watched the greater
  • souls in the visionary procession, but cheerfully, as one watches some
  • handsome spirited horse, and he spoke his tale, as he spoke all tales,
  • with tragic irony.
  • VI
  • The five plays, that are but one play, have, when played one after
  • another, something extravagant and superhuman, something almost
  • mythological. Those nobles with their indifference to death and their
  • immense energy seem at times no nearer the common stature of men
  • than do the Gods and the heroes of Greek plays. Had there been no
  • Renaissance and no Italian influence to bring in the stories of other
  • lands English history would, it may be, have become as important to
  • the English imagination as the Greek Myths to the Greek imagination;
  • and many plays by many poets would have woven it into a single story
  • whose contours, vast as those of Greek myth, would have made living men
  • and women seem like swallows building their nests under the architrave
  • of some Temple of the Giants. English literature, because it would
  • have grown out of itself, might have had the simplicity and unity of
  • Greek literature, for I can never get out of my head that no man, even
  • though he be Shakespeare, can write perfectly when his web is woven of
  • threads that have been spun in many lands. And yet, could those foreign
  • tales have come in if the great famine, the sinking down of popular
  • imagination, the dying out of traditional phantasy, the ebbing out of
  • the energy of race, had not made them necessary? The metaphors and
  • language of Euphuism, compounded of the natural history and mythology
  • of the classics, were doubtless a necessity also that something might
  • be poured into the emptiness. Yet how they injured the simplicity and
  • unity of the speech! Shakespeare wrote at a time when solitary great
  • men were gathering to themselves the fire that had once flowed hither
  • and thither among all men, when individualism in work and thought
  • and emotion was breaking up the old rhythms of life, when the common
  • people, no longer uplifted by the myths of Christianity and of still
  • older faiths, were sinking into the earth.
  • The people of Stratford-on-Avon have remembered little about him, and
  • invented no legend to his glory. They have remembered a drinking-bout
  • of his, and invented some bad verses for him, and that is about
  • all. Had he been some hard-drinking, hard-living, hard-riding,
  • loud-blaspheming Squire they would have enlarged his fame by a legend
  • of his dealings with the devil; but in his day the glory of a Poet,
  • like that of all other imaginative powers, had ceased, or almost
  • ceased, outside a narrow class. The poor Gaelic rhymer leaves a
  • nobler memory among his neighbours, who will talk of Angels standing
  • like flames about his death-bed, and of voices speaking out of
  • bramble-bushes that he may have the wisdom of the world. The Puritanism
  • that drove the theatres into Surrey was but part of an inexplicable
  • movement that was trampling out the minds of all but some few thousands
  • born to cultivated ease.
  • May, 1901.
  • WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE IMAGINATION.
  • THERE have been men who loved the future like a mistress, and the
  • future mixed her breath into their breath and shook her hair about
  • them, and hid them from the understanding of their times. William Blake
  • was one of these men, and if he spoke confusedly and obscurely it was
  • because he spoke of things for whose speaking he could find no models
  • in the world about him. He announced the religion of art, of which no
  • man dreamed in the world about him; and he understood it more perfectly
  • than the thousands of subtle spirits who have received its baptism in
  • the world about us, because, in the beginning of important things—in
  • the beginning of love, in the beginning of the day, in the beginning of
  • any work, there is a moment when we understand more perfectly than we
  • understand again until all is finished. In his time educated people
  • believed that they amused themselves with books of imagination, but
  • that they ‘made their souls’ by listening to sermons and by doing or
  • by not doing certain things. When they had to explain why serious
  • people like themselves honoured the great poets greatly they were hard
  • put to it for lack of good reasons. In our time we are agreed that we
  • ‘make our souls’ out of some one of the great poets of ancient times,
  • or out of Shelley or Wordsworth, or Goethe or Balzac, or Flaubert, or
  • Count Tolstoy, in the books he wrote before he became a prophet and
  • fell into a lesser order, or out of Mr. Whistler’s pictures, while we
  • amuse ourselves, or, at best, make a poorer sort of soul, by listening
  • to sermons or by doing or by not doing certain things. We write of
  • great writers, even of writers whose beauty would once have seemed an
  • unholy beauty, with rapt sentences like those our fathers kept for the
  • beatitudes and mysteries of the Church; and no matter what we believe
  • with our lips, we believe with our hearts that beautiful things, as
  • Browning said in his one prose essay that was not in verse, have ‘lain
  • burningly on the Divine hand,’ and that when time has begun to wither,
  • the Divine hand will fall heavily on bad taste and vulgarity. When no
  • man believed these things William Blake believed them, and began that
  • preaching against the Philistine, which is as the preaching of the
  • Middle Ages against the Saracen.
  • He had learned from Jacob Boehme and from old alchemist writers that
  • imagination was the first emanation of divinity, ‘the body of God,’
  • ‘the Divine members,’ and he drew the deduction, which they did not
  • draw, that the imaginative arts were therefore the greatest of Divine
  • revelations, and that the sympathy with all living things, sinful and
  • righteous alike, which the imaginative arts awaken, is that forgiveness
  • of sins commanded by Christ. The reason, and by the reason he meant
  • deductions from the observations of the senses, binds us to mortality
  • because it binds us to the senses, and divides us from each other by
  • showing us our clashing interests; but imagination divides us from
  • mortality by the immortality of beauty, and binds us to each other
  • by opening the secret doors of all hearts. He cried again and again
  • that every thing that lives is holy, and that nothing is unholy except
  • things that do not live—lethargies, and cruelties, and timidities, and
  • that denial of imagination which is the root they grew from in old
  • times. Passions, because most living, are most holy—and this was a
  • scandalous paradox in his time—and man shall enter eternity borne upon
  • their wings.
  • And he understood this so literally that certain drawings to _Vala_,
  • had he carried them beyond the first faint pencillings, the first
  • faint washes of colour, would have been a pretty scandal to his time
  • and to our time. The sensations of this ‘foolish body,’ this ‘phantom
  • of the earth and water,’ were in themselves but half-living things,
  • ‘vegetative’ things, but passion that ‘eternal glory’ made them a part
  • of the body of God.
  • This philosophy kept him more simply a poet than any poet of his time,
  • for it made him content to express every beautiful feeling that came
  • into his head without troubling about its utility or chaining it to
  • any utility. Sometimes one feels, even when one is reading poets of a
  • better time—Tennyson or Wordsworth, let us say—that they have troubled
  • the energy and simplicity of their imaginative passions by asking
  • whether they were for the helping or for the hindrance of the world,
  • instead of believing that all beautiful things have ‘lain burningly on
  • the Divine hand.’ But when one reads Blake, it is as though the spray
  • of an inexhaustible fountain of beauty was blown into our faces, and
  • not merely when one reads the _Songs of Innocence_, or the lyrics he
  • wished to call ‘The Ideas of Good and Evil,’ but when one reads those
  • ‘Prophetic Works’ in which he spoke confusedly and obscurely because
  • he spoke of things for whose speaking he could find no models in the
  • world about him. He was a symbolist who had to invent his symbols;
  • and his counties of England, with their correspondence to tribes of
  • Israel, and his mountains and rivers, with their correspondence to
  • parts of a man’s body, are arbitrary as some of the symbolism in the
  • _Axël_ of the symbolist Villiers De L’Isle Adam is arbitrary, while
  • they mix incongruous things as _Axël_ does not. He was a man crying
  • out for a mythology, and trying to make one because he could not find
  • one to his hand. Had he been a Catholic of Dante’s time he would have
  • been well content with Mary and the angels; or had he been a scholar of
  • our time he would have taken his symbols where Wagner took his, from
  • Norse mythology; or have followed, with the help of Professor Rhys,
  • that pathway into Welsh mythology which he found in ‘Jerusalem’; or
  • have gone to Ireland—and he was probably an Irishman—and chosen for
  • his symbols the sacred mountains, along whose sides the peasant still
  • sees enchanted fires, and the divinities which have not faded from the
  • belief, if they have faded from the prayers of simple hearts; and have
  • spoken without mixing incongruous things because he spoke of things
  • that had been long steeped in emotion; and have been less obscure
  • because a traditional mythology stood on the threshold of his meaning
  • and on the margin of his sacred darkness. If ‘Enitharmon’ had been
  • named Freia, or Gwydeon, or Danu, and made live in Ancient Norway, or
  • Ancient Wales, or Ancient Ireland, we would have forgotten that her
  • maker was a mystic; and the hymn of her harping, that is in _Vala_,
  • would but have reminded us of many ancient hymns.
  • ‘The joy of woman in the death of her most beloved,
  • Who dies for love of her,
  • In torments of fierce jealousy and pangs of adoration.
  • The lover’s night bears on my song,
  • And the nine spheres rejoice beneath my powerful control.
  • They sing unwearied to the notes of my immortal hand.
  • The solemn, silent moon
  • Reverberates the long harmony sounding upon my limbs.
  • The birds and beasts rejoice and play,
  • And every one seeks for his mate to prove his inmost joy.
  • Furious and terrible they sport and rend the nether deep.
  • The deep lifts up his rugged head,
  • And lost in infinite hovering wings vanishes with a cry.
  • The fading cry is ever dying,
  • The living voice is ever living in its inmost joy.’
  • 1897.
  • WILLIAM BLAKE AND HIS ILLUSTRATIONS TO _THE DIVINE COMEDY_.
  • I. HIS OPINIONS UPON ART.
  • WILLIAM BLAKE was the first writer of modern times to preach the
  • indissoluble marriage of all great art with symbol. There had been
  • allegorists and teachers of allegory in plenty, but the symbolic
  • imagination, or, as Blake preferred to call it, ‘vision,’ is not
  • allegory, being ‘a representation of what actually exists really and
  • unchangeably.’ A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some
  • invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while
  • allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing,
  • or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination:
  • the one is a revelation, the other an amusement. It is happily no part
  • of my purpose to expound in detail the relations he believed to exist
  • between symbol and mind, for in doing so I should come upon not a few
  • doctrines which, though they have not been difficult to many simple
  • persons, ascetics wrapped in skins, women who had cast away all common
  • knowledge, peasants dreaming by their sheepfolds upon the hills, are
  • full of obscurity to the man of modern culture; but it is necessary to
  • just touch upon these relations, because in them was the fountain of
  • much of the practice and of all the precept of his artistic life.
  • If a man would enter into ‘Noah’s rainbow,’ he has written, and ‘make a
  • friend’ of one of ‘the images of wonder’ which dwell there, and which
  • always entreat him ‘to leave mortal things,’ ‘then would he arise
  • from the grave and meet the Lord in the air’; and by this rainbow,
  • this sign of a covenant granted to him who is with Shem and Japhet,
  • ‘painting, poetry and music,’ ‘the three powers in man of conversing
  • with Paradise which the flood “of time and space” did not sweep
  • away,’ Blake represented the shapes of beauty haunting our moments of
  • inspiration: shapes held by most for the frailest of ephemera, but by
  • him for a people older than the world, citizens of eternity, appearing
  • and reappearing in the minds of artists and of poets, creating all
  • we touch and see by casting distorted images of themselves upon ‘the
  • vegetable glass of nature’; and because beings, none the less symbols,
  • blossoms, as it were, growing from invisible immortal roots, hands, as
  • it were, pointing the way into some divine labyrinth. If ‘the world of
  • imagination’ was ‘the world of eternity,’ as this doctrine implied, it
  • was of less importance to know men and nature than to distinguish the
  • beings and substances of imagination from those of a more perishable
  • kind, created by the phantasy, in uninspired moments, out of memory
  • and whim; and this could best be done by purifying one’s mind, as with
  • a flame, in study of the works of the great masters, who were great
  • because they had been granted by divine favour a vision of the unfallen
  • world from which others are kept apart by the flaming sword that turns
  • every way; and by flying from the painters who studied ‘the vegetable
  • glass’ for its own sake, and not to discover there the shadows of
  • imperishable beings and substances, and who entered into their own
  • minds, not to make the unfallen world a test of all they heard and
  • saw and felt with the senses, but to cover the naked spirit with ‘the
  • rotten rags of memory’ of older sensations. The struggle of the first
  • part of his life had been to distinguish between these two schools, and
  • to cleave always to the Florentine, and so to escape the fascination of
  • those who seemed to him to offer the sleep of nature to a spirit weary
  • with the labours of inspiration; but it was only after his return to
  • London from Felpham in 1804 that he finally escaped from ‘temptations
  • and perturbations’ which sought to destroy ‘the imaginative power’ at
  • ‘the hands of Venetian and Flemish Demons.’ ‘The spirit of Titian’—and
  • one must always remember that he had only seen poor engravings, and
  • what his disciple, Palmer, has called ‘picture-dealers’ Titians’—‘was
  • particularly active in raising doubts concerning the possibility of
  • executing without a model; and when once he had raised the doubt it
  • became easy for him to snatch away the vision time after time’; and
  • Blake’s imagination ‘weakened’ and ‘darkened’ until a ‘memory of
  • nature and of the pictures of various schools possessed his mind,
  • instead of appropriate execution’ flowing from the vision itself. But
  • now he wrote, ‘O glory, and O delight! I have entirely reduced that
  • spectrous fiend to his station’—he had overcome the merely reasoning
  • and sensual portion of the mind—‘whose annoyance has been the ruin
  • of my labours for the last twenty years of my life.... I speak with
  • perfect confidence and certainty of the fact which has passed upon me.
  • Nebuchadnezzar had seven times passed over him, I have had twenty;
  • thank God I was not altogether a beast as he was.... Suddenly, on
  • the day after visiting the Truchsessian Gallery of pictures’—this
  • was a gallery containing pictures by Albert Dürer and by the great
  • Florentines—‘I was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my
  • youth, and which had for exactly twenty years been closed from me,
  • as by a door and window shutters.... Excuse my enthusiasm, or rather
  • madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take
  • a pencil or graver in my hand, as I used to be in my youth.’
  • This letter may have been the expression of a moment’s enthusiasm,
  • but was more probably rooted in one of those intuitions of coming
  • technical power which every creator feels, and learns to rely upon;
  • for all his greatest work was done, and the principles of his art
  • were formulated, after this date. Except a word here and there, his
  • writings hitherto had not dealt with the principles of art except
  • remotely and by implication; but now he wrote much upon them, and not
  • in obscure symbolic verse, but in emphatic prose, and explicit if not
  • very poetical rhyme. In his _Descriptive Catalogue_, in _The Address
  • to the Public_, in the notes on Sir Joshua Reynolds, in _The Book of
  • Moonlight_—of which some not very dignified rhymes alone remain—in
  • beautiful detached passages in _The MS. Book_, he explained spiritual
  • art, and praised the painters of Florence and their influence, and
  • cursed all that has come of Venice and Holland. The limitation of
  • his view was from the very intensity of his vision; he was a too
  • literal realist of imagination, as others are of nature; and because
  • he believed that the figures seen by the mind’s eye, when exalted by
  • inspiration, were ‘eternal existences,’ symbols of divine essences,
  • he hated every grace of style that might obscure their lineaments.
  • To wrap them about in reflected lights was to do this, and to dwell
  • over-fondly upon any softness of hair or flesh was to dwell upon that
  • which was least permanent and least characteristic, for ‘The great and
  • golden rule of art, as of life, is this: that the more distinct, sharp
  • and wiry the boundary-line, the more perfect the work of art; and the
  • less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imitation,
  • plagiarism and bungling.’ Inspiration was to see the permanent and
  • characteristic in all forms, and if you had it not, you must needs
  • imitate with a languid mind the things you saw or remembered, and so
  • sink into the sleep of nature where all is soft and melting. ‘Great
  • inventors in all ages knew this. Protogenes and Apelles knew each
  • other by their line. Raphael and Michael Angelo and Albert Dürer
  • are known by this and this alone. How do we distinguish the owl
  • from the beast, the horse from the ox, but by the bounding outline?
  • How do we distinguish one face or countenance from another but by
  • the bounding-line and its infinite inflections and movements? What
  • is it that builds a house and plants a garden but the definite and
  • determinate? What is it that distinguished honesty from knavery but
  • the hard and wiry line of rectitude and certainty in the actions and
  • intentions? Leave out this line and you leave out life itself; and all
  • is chaos again, and the line of the Almighty must be drawn out upon it
  • before man or beast can exist.’ He even insisted that ‘colouring does
  • not depend upon where the colours are put, but upon where the light
  • and dark are put, and all depends upon the form or outline’—meaning,
  • I suppose, that a colour gets its brilliance or its depth from being
  • in light or in shadow. He does not mean by outline the bounding-line
  • dividing a form from its background, as one of his commentators has
  • thought, but the line that divides it from surrounding space, and
  • unless you have an overmastering sense of this you cannot draw true
  • beauty at all, but only ‘the beauty that is appended to folly,’ a
  • beauty of mere voluptuous softness, ‘a lamentable accident of the
  • mortal and perishing life,’ for ‘the beauty proper for sublime art is
  • lineaments, or forms and features capable of being the receptacles of
  • intellect,’ and ‘the face or limbs that alter least from youth to old
  • age are the face and limbs of the greatest beauty and perfection.’
  • His praise of a severe art had been beyond price had his age rested
  • a moment to listen, in the midst of its enthusiasm for Correggio and
  • the later Renaissance, for Bartolozzi and for Stothard; and yet in
  • his visionary realism, and in his enthusiasm for what, after all, is
  • perhaps the greatest art, and a necessary part of every picture that
  • is art at all, he forgot how he who wraps the vision in lights and
  • shadows, in iridescent or glowing colour, having in the midst of his
  • labour many little visions of these secondary essences, until form be
  • half lost in pattern, may compel the canvas or paper to become itself a
  • symbol of some not indefinite because unsearchable essence; for is not
  • the Bacchus and Ariadne of Titian a talisman as powerfully charged with
  • intellectual virtue as though it were a jewel-studded door of the city
  • seen on Patmos?
  • To cover the imperishable lineaments of beauty with shadows and
  • reflected lights was to fall into the power of his ‘Vala,’ the
  • indolent fascination of nature, the woman divinity who is so often
  • described in ‘the prophetic books’ as ‘sweet pestilence,’ and whose
  • children weave webs to take the souls of men; but there was yet a
  • more lamentable chance, for nature has also a ‘masculine portion’ or
  • ‘spectre’ which kills instead of merely hiding, and is continually at
  • war with inspiration. To ‘generalize’ forms and shadows, to ‘smooth
  • out’ spaces and lines in obedience to ‘laws of composition,’ and of
  • painting; founded, not upon imagination, which always thirsts for
  • variety and delights in freedom, but upon reasoning from sensation
  • which is always seeking to reduce everything to a lifeless and slavish
  • uniformity; as the popular art of Blake’s day had done, and as he
  • understood Sir Joshua Reynolds to advise, was to fall into ‘Entuthon
  • Benithon,’ or ‘the Lake of Udan Adan,’ or some other of those regions
  • where the imagination and the flesh are alike dead, that he names by
  • so many resonant phantastical names. ‘General knowledge is remote
  • knowledge,’ he wrote; ‘it is in particulars that wisdom consists, and
  • happiness too. Both in art and life general masses are as much art as a
  • pasteboard man is human. Every man has eyes, nose and mouth; this every
  • idiot knows. But he who enters into and discriminates most minutely
  • the manners and intentions, the characters in all their branches, is
  • the alone wise or sensible man, and on this discrimination all art is
  • founded.... As poetry admits not a letter that is insignificant, so
  • painting admits not a grain of sand or a blade of grass insignificant,
  • much less an insignificant blot or blur.’
  • Against another desire of his time, derivative also from what he has
  • called ‘corporeal reason,’ the desire for ‘a tepid moderation,’ for a
  • lifeless ‘sanity in both art and life,’ he had protested years before
  • with a paradoxical violence. ‘The roadway of excess leads to the palace
  • of wisdom,’ and we must only ‘bring out weight and measure in time of
  • dearth.’ This protest, carried, in the notes on Sir Joshua Reynolds,
  • to the point of dwelling with pleasure on the thought that ‘The _Lives
  • of the Painters_ say that Raphael died of dissipation,’ because
  • dissipation is better than emotional penury, seemed as important to his
  • old age as to his youth. He taught it to his disciples, and one finds
  • it in its purely artistic shape in a diary written by Samuel Palmer, in
  • 1824: ‘Excess is the essential vivifying spirit, vital spark, embalming
  • spice of the finest art. There are many mediums in the _means_—none,
  • oh, not a jot, not a shadow of a jot, in the _end_ of great art. In a
  • picture whose merit is to be excessively brilliant, it can’t be too
  • brilliant, but individual tints may be too brilliant.... We must not
  • begin with medium, but think always on excess and only use medium to
  • make excess more abundantly excessive.’
  • These three primary commands, to seek a determinate outline, to avoid a
  • generalized treatment, and to desire always abundance and exuberance,
  • were insisted upon with vehement anger, and their opponents called
  • again and again ‘demons’ and ‘villains,’ ‘hired’ by the wealthy and
  • the idle; but in private, Palmer has told us, he could find ‘sources
  • of delight throughout the whole range of art,’ and was ever ready to
  • praise excellence in any school, finding, doubtless, among friends, no
  • need for the emphasis of exaggeration. There is a beautiful passage in
  • ‘Jerusalem’ in which the merely mortal part of the mind, ‘the spectre,’
  • creates ‘pyramids of pride,’ and ‘pillars in the deepest hell to reach
  • the heavenly arches,’ and seeks to discover wisdom in ‘the spaces
  • between the stars,’ not ‘in the stars,’ where it is, but the immortal
  • part makes all his labours vain, and turns his pyramids to ‘grains of
  • sand,’ his ‘pillars’ to ‘dust on the fly’s wing,’ and makes of ‘his
  • starry heavens a moth of gold and silver mocking his anxious grasp.’
  • So when man’s desire to rest from spiritual labour, and his thirst
  • to fill his art with mere sensation and memory, seem upon the point
  • of triumph, some miracle transforms them to a new inspiration; and
  • here and there among the pictures born of sensation and memory is the
  • murmuring of a new ritual, the glimmering of new talismans and symbols.
  • It was during and after the writing of these opinions that Blake did
  • the various series of pictures which have brought him the bulk of his
  • fame. He had already completed the illustrations to Young’s _Night
  • Thoughts_—in which the great sprawling figures, a little wearisome even
  • with the luminous colours of the original water-colour, became nearly
  • intolerable in plain black and white—and almost all the illustrations
  • to ‘the prophetic books,’ which have an energy like that of the
  • elements, but are rather rapid sketches taken while some phantasmic
  • procession swept over him, than elaborate compositions, and in whose
  • shadowy adventures one finds not merely, as did Dr. Garth Wilkinson,
  • ‘the hells of the ancient people, the Anakim, the Nephalim, and the
  • Rephaim ... gigantic petrifactions from which the fires of lust and
  • intense selfish passion have long dissipated what was animal and
  • vital’; not merely the shadows cast by the powers who had closed the
  • light from him as ‘with a door and window shutters,’ but the shadows
  • of those who gave them battle. He did now, however, the many designs
  • to Milton, of which I have only seen those to _Paradise Regained_; the
  • reproductions of those to _Comus_, published, I think, by Mr. Quaritch;
  • and the three or four to _Paradise Lost_, engraved by Bell Scott—a
  • series of designs which one good judge considers his greatest work; the
  • illustrations to Blair’s _Grave_, whose gravity and passion struggle
  • with the mechanical softness and trivial smoothness of Schiavonetti’s
  • engraving; the illustrations to Thornton’s _Virgil_, whose influence
  • is manifest in the work of the little group of landscape-painters who
  • gathered about him in his old age and delighted to call him master. The
  • member of the group, whom I have already so often quoted, has alone
  • praised worthily these illustrations to the first _eclogue_: ‘There is
  • in all such a misty and dreamy glimmer as penetrates and kindles the
  • inmost soul and gives complete and unreserved delight, unlike the gaudy
  • daylight of this world. They are like all this wonderful artist’s work,
  • the drawing aside of the fleshly curtain, and the glimpse which all the
  • most holy, studious saints and sages have enjoyed, of the rest which
  • remains to the people of God.’ Now, too, he did the great series, the
  • crowning work of his life, the illustrations to _The Book of Job_ and
  • the illustrations to _The Divine Comedy_. Hitherto he had protested
  • against the mechanical ‘dots and lozenges’ and ‘blots and blurs’ of
  • Woollett and Strange, but had himself used both ‘dot and lozenge,’
  • ‘blot and blur,’ though always in subordination ‘to a firm and
  • determinate outline’; but in Marc Antonio, certain of whose engravings
  • he was shown by Linnell, he found a style full of delicate lines, a
  • style where all was living and energetic, strong and subtle. And almost
  • his last words, a letter written upon his death-bed, attack the ‘dots
  • and lozenges’ with even more than usually quaint symbolism, and praise
  • expressive lines. ‘I know that the majority of Englishmen are bound
  • by the indefinite ... a line is a line in its minutest particulars,
  • straight or crooked. It is itself not intermeasurable by anything else
  • ... but since the French Revolution’—since the reign of reason began,
  • that is—‘Englishmen are all intermeasurable with one another, certainly
  • a happy state of agreement in which I do not agree.’ The Dante series
  • occupied the last years of his life; even when too weak to get out of
  • bed he worked on, propped up with the great drawing-book before him.
  • He sketched a hundred designs, but left all incomplete, some very
  • greatly so, and partly engraved seven plates, of which the ‘Francesca
  • and Paolo’ is the most finished. It is not, I think, inferior to
  • any but the finest in the Job, if indeed to them, and shows in its
  • perfection Blake’s mastery over elemental things, the swirl in which
  • the lost spirits are hurried, ‘a watery flame’ he would have called it,
  • the haunted waters and the huddling shapes. In the illustrations of
  • Purgatory there is a serene beauty, and one finds his Dante and Virgil
  • climbing among the rough rocks under a cloudy sun, and in their sleep
  • upon the smooth steps towards the summit, a placid, marmoreal, tender,
  • starry rapture.
  • All in this great series are in some measure powerful and moving, and
  • not, as it is customary to say of the work of Blake, because a flaming
  • imagination pierces through a cloudy and indecisive technique, but
  • because they have the only excellence possible in any art, a mastery
  • over artistic expression. The technique of Blake was imperfect,
  • incomplete, as is the technique of well-nigh all artists who have
  • striven to bring fires from remote summits; but where his imagination
  • is perfect and complete, his technique has a like perfection, a like
  • completeness. He strove to embody more subtle raptures, more elaborate
  • intuitions than any before him; his imagination and technique are
  • more broken and strained under a great burden than the imagination
  • and technique of any other master. ‘I am,’ wrote Blake, ‘like others,
  • just equal in invention and execution.’ And again, ‘No man can improve
  • an original invention; nor can an original invention exist without
  • execution, organized, delineated and articulated either by God or
  • man ... I have heard people say, “Give me the ideas; it is no matter
  • what words you put them into”; and others say, “Give me the designs;
  • it is no matter for the execution.”... Ideas cannot be given but in
  • their minutely appropriate words, nor can a design be made without
  • its minutely appropriate execution.’ Living in a time when technique
  • and imagination are continually perfect and complete, because they no
  • longer strive to bring fire from heaven, we forget how imperfect and
  • incomplete they were in even the greatest masters, in Botticelli, in
  • Orcagna, and in Giotto.
  • The errors in the handiwork of exalted spirits are as the more
  • phantastical errors in their lives; as Coleridge’s opium cloud; as
  • Villiers De L’Isle Adam’s candidature for the throne of Greece; as
  • Blake’s anger against causes and purposes he but half understood;
  • as the flickering madness an Eastern scripture would allow in august
  • dreamers; for he who half lives in eternity endures a rending of the
  • structures of the mind, a crucifixion of the intellectual body.
  • II. HIS OPINIONS ON DANTE.
  • As Blake sat bent over the great drawing-book, in which he made his
  • designs to _The Divine Comedy_, he was very certain that he and Dante
  • represented spiritual states which face one another in an eternal
  • enmity. Dante, because a great poet, was ‘inspired by the Holy Ghost’;
  • but his inspiration was mingled with a certain philosophy, blown up
  • out of his age, which Blake held for mortal and the enemy of immortal
  • things, and which from the earliest times has sat in high places and
  • ruled the world. This philosophy was the philosophy of soldiers, of
  • men of the world, of priests busy with government, of all who, because
  • of the absorption in active life, have been persuaded to judge and to
  • punish, and partly also, he admitted, the philosophy of Christ, who
  • in descending into the world had to take on the world; who, in being
  • born of Mary, a symbol of the law in Blake’s symbolic language, had
  • to ‘take after his mother,’ and drive the money-changers out of the
  • Temple. Opposed to this was another philosophy, not made by men of
  • action, drudges of time and space, but by Christ when wrapped in the
  • divine essence, and by artists and poets, who are taught by the nature
  • of their craft to sympathize with all living things, and who, the more
  • pure and fragrant is their lamp, pass the further from all limitations,
  • to come at last to forget good and evil in an absorbing vision of the
  • happy and the unhappy. The one philosophy was worldly, and established
  • for the ordering of the body and the fallen will, and so long as it did
  • not call its ‘laws of prudence’ ‘the laws of God,’ was a necessity,
  • because ‘you cannot have liberty in this world without what you call
  • moral virtue’; the other was divine, and established for the peace of
  • the imagination and the unfallen will, and, even when obeyed with a too
  • little reverence, could make men sin against no higher principality
  • than prudence. He called the followers of the first philosophy pagans,
  • no matter by what name they knew themselves, because the pagans, as he
  • understood the word pagan, believed more in the outward life, and in
  • what he called ‘war, princedom, and victory,’ than in the secret life
  • of the spirit; and the followers of the second philosophy Christians,
  • because only those whose sympathies had been enlarged and instructed
  • by art and poetry could obey the Christian command of unlimited
  • forgiveness. Blake had already found this ‘pagan’ philosophy in
  • Swedenborg, in Milton, in Wordsworth, in Sir Joshua Reynolds, in many
  • persons, and it had roused him so constantly and to such angry paradox
  • that its overthrow became the signal passion of his life, and filled
  • all he did and thought with the excitement of a supreme issue. Its
  • kingdom was bound to grow weaker so soon as life began to lose a little
  • in crude passion and naïve tumult, but Blake was the first to announce
  • its successor, and he did this, as must needs be with revolutionists
  • who have ‘the law’ for ‘mother,’ with a firm conviction that the
  • things his opponents held white were indeed black, and that the things
  • they held black, white; with a strong persuasion that all busy with
  • government are men of darkness and ‘something other than human life’;
  • one is reminded of Shelley, who was the next to take up the cry, though
  • with a less abundant philosophic faculty, but still more of Nietzsche,
  • whose thought flows always, though with an even more violent current,
  • in the bed Blake’s thought has worn.
  • The kingdom that was passing was, he held, the kingdom of the Tree of
  • Knowledge; the kingdom that was coming was the kingdom of the Tree of
  • Life: men who ate from the Tree of Knowledge wasted their days in anger
  • against one another, and in taking one another captive in great nets;
  • men who sought their food among the green leaves of the Tree of Life
  • condemned none but the unimaginative and the idle, and those who forget
  • that even love and death and old age are an imaginative art.
  • In these opposing kingdoms is the explanation of the petulant sayings
  • he wrote on the margins of the great sketch-book, and of those others,
  • still more petulant, which Crabb Robinson has recorded in his diary.
  • The sayings about the forgiveness of sins have no need for further
  • explanation, and are in contrast with the attitude of that excellent
  • commentator, Herr Hettinger, who, though Dante swooned from pity at
  • the tale of Francesca, will only ‘sympathize’ with her ‘to a certain
  • extent,’ being taken in a theological net. ‘It seems as if Dante,’
  • Blake wrote, ‘supposes God was something superior to the Father of
  • Jesus; for if He gives rain to the evil and the good, and His sun to
  • the just and the unjust, He can never have builded Dante’s Hell, nor
  • the Hell of the Bible, as our parsons explain it. It must have been
  • framed by the dark spirit itself, and so I understand it.’ And again,
  • ‘Whatever task is of vengeance and whatever is against forgiveness
  • of sin is not of the Father but of Satan, the accuser, the father of
  • Hell.’ And again, and this time to Crabb Robinson, ‘Dante saw devils
  • where I saw none. I see good only.’ ‘I have never known a very bad man
  • who had not something very good about him.’ This forgiveness was not
  • the forgiveness of the theologian who has received a commandment from
  • afar off, but of the poet and artist, who believes he has been taught,
  • in a mystical vision, ‘that the imagination is the man himself,’ and
  • believes he has discovered in the practice of his art that without a
  • perfect sympathy there is no perfect imagination, and therefore no
  • perfect life. At another moment he called Dante ‘an atheist, a mere
  • politician busied about this world, as Milton was, till, in his old
  • age, returned to God whom he had had in his childhood.’ ‘Everything is
  • atheism,’ he has already explained, ‘which assumed the reality of the
  • natural and unspiritual world.’ Dante, he held, assumed its reality
  • when he made obedience to its laws a condition of man’s happiness
  • hereafter, and he set Swedenborg beside Dante in misbelief for
  • calling Nature ‘the ultimate of Heaven,’ a lowest rung, as it were,
  • of Jacob’s ladder, instead of a net woven by Satan to entangle our
  • wandering joys and bring our hearts into captivity. There are certain
  • curious unfinished diagrams scattered here and there among the now
  • separated pages of the sketch-book, and of these there is one which,
  • had it had all its concentric rings filled with names, would have
  • been a systematic exposition of his animosities and of their various
  • intensity. It represents Paradise, and in the midst, where Dante
  • emerges from the earthly Paradise, is written ‘Homer,’ and in the next
  • circle ‘Swedenborg,’ and on the margin these words: ‘Everything in
  • Dante’s Paradise shows that he has made the earth the foundation of
  • all, and its goddess Nature, memory,’ memory of sensations, ‘not the
  • Holy Ghost.... Round Purgatory is Paradise, and round Paradise vacuum.
  • Homer is the centre of all, I mean the poetry of the heathen.’ The
  • statement that round Paradise is vacuum is a proof of the persistence
  • of his ideas, and of his curiously literal understanding of his own
  • symbols; for it is but another form of the charge made against Milton
  • many years before in _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_. ‘In Milton
  • the Father is destiny, the Son a ratio of the five senses,’ Blake’s
  • definition of the reason which is the enemy of the imagination, ‘and
  • the Holy Ghost vacuum.’ Dante, like other mediæval mystics, symbolized
  • the highest order of created beings by the fixed stars, and God by the
  • darkness beyond them, the _Primum Mobile_. Blake, absorbed in his very
  • different vision, in which God took always a human shape, believed
  • that to think of God under a symbol drawn from the outer world was in
  • itself idolatry, but that to imagine Him as an unpeopled immensity
  • was to think of Him under the one symbol furthest from His essence—it
  • being a creation of the ruining reason, ‘generalizing’ away ‘the minute
  • particulars of life.’ Instead of seeking God in the deserts of time
  • and space, in exterior immensities, in what he called ‘the abstract
  • void,’ he believed that the further he dropped behind him memory of
  • time and space, reason builded upon sensation, morality founded for the
  • ordering of the world; and the more he was absorbed in emotion; and,
  • above all, in emotion escaped from the impulse of bodily longing and
  • the restraints of bodily reason, in artistic emotion; the nearer did
  • he come to Eden’s ‘breathing garden,’ to use his beautiful phrase, and
  • to the unveiled face of God. No worthy symbol of God existed but the
  • inner world, the true humanity, to whose various aspects he gave many
  • names, ‘Jerusalem,’ ‘Liberty,’ ‘Eden,’ ‘The Divine Vision,’ ‘The Body
  • of God,’ ‘The Human Form Divine,’ ‘The Divine Members,’ and whose most
  • intimate expression was art and poetry. He always sang of God under
  • this symbol:
  • ‘For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
  • Is God our Father dear;
  • And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
  • Is man, His child and care.
  • For Mercy has a human heart;
  • Pity a human face;
  • And Love the human form divine;
  • And Peace, the human dress.
  • Then every man of every clime,
  • That prays in his distress,
  • Prays to the human form divine—
  • Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.’
  • Whenever he gave this symbol a habitation in space he set it in the
  • sun, the father of light and life; and set in the darkness beyond the
  • stars, where light and life die away, Og and Anak and the giants that
  • were of old, and the iron throne of Satan.
  • By thus contrasting Blake and Dante by the light of Blake’s
  • paradoxical wisdom, and as though there was no important truth
  • hung from Dante’s beam of the balance, I but seek to interpret a
  • little-understood philosophy rather than one incorporate in the thought
  • and habits of Christendom. Every philosophy has half its truth from
  • times and generations; and to us one-half of the philosophy of Dante
  • is less living than his poetry, while the truth Blake preached and
  • sang and painted is the root of the cultivated life, of the fragile
  • perfect blossom of the world born in ages of leisure and peace, and
  • never yet to last more than a little season; the life those Phæacians,
  • who told Odysseus that they had set their hearts in nothing but in
  • ‘the dance and changes of raiment, and love and sleep,’ lived before
  • Poseidon heaped a mountain above them; the lives of all who, having
  • eaten of the Tree of Life, love, more than did the barbarous ages when
  • none had time to live, ‘the minute particulars of life,’ the little
  • fragments of space and time, which are wholly flooded by beautiful
  • emotion because they are so little they are hardly of time and space
  • at all. ‘Every space smaller than a globule of man’s blood,’ he wrote,
  • ‘opens into eternity of which this vegetable earth is but a shadow.’
  • And again, ‘Every time less than a pulsation of the artery is equal’
  • in its tenor and value ‘to six thousand years, for in this period the
  • poet’s work is done, and all the great events of time start forth,
  • and are conceived: in such a period, within a moment, a pulsation of
  • the artery.’ Dante, indeed, taught, in the ‘Purgatorio,’ that sin and
  • virtue are alike from love, and that love is from God; but this love
  • he would restrain by a complex eternal law, a complex external Church.
  • Blake upon the other hand cried scorn upon the whole spectacle of
  • external things, a vision to pass away in a moment, and preached the
  • cultivated life, the internal Church which has no laws but beauty,
  • rapture and labour. ‘I know of no other Christianity, and of no other
  • gospel, than the liberty, both of body and mind, to exercise the
  • divine arts of imagination, the real and eternal world of which this
  • vegetable universe is but a faint shadow, and in which we shall live in
  • our eternal or imaginative bodies when these vegetable mortal bodies
  • are no more. The Apostles knew of no other gospel. What are all their
  • spiritual gifts? What is the divine spirit? Is the Holy Ghost any other
  • than an intellectual fountain? What is the harvest of the gospel and
  • its labours? What is the talent which it is a curse to hide? What are
  • the treasures of heaven which we are to lay up for ourselves? Are
  • they any other than mental studies and performances? What are all the
  • gifts of the gospel, are they not all mental gifts? Is God a spirit
  • who must be worshipped in spirit and truth? Are not the gifts of the
  • spirit everything to man? O ye religious! discountenance every one
  • among you who shall pretend to despise art and science. I call upon you
  • in the name of Jesus! What is the life of man but art and science? Is
  • it meat and drink? Is not the body more than raiment? What is mortality
  • but the things relating to the body which dies? What is immortality
  • but the things relating to the spirit which lives immortally? What is
  • the joy of Heaven but improvement in the things of the spirit? What
  • are the pains of Hell but ignorance, idleness, bodily lust, and the
  • devastation of the things of the spirit? Answer this for yourselves,
  • and expel from amongst you those who pretend to despise the labours
  • of art and science, which alone are the labours of the gospel. Is not
  • this plain and manifest to the thought? Can you think at all, and not
  • pronounce heartily that to labour in knowledge is to build Jerusalem,
  • and to despise knowledge is to despise Jerusalem and her builders? And
  • remember, he who despises and mocks a mental gift in another, calling
  • it pride, and selfishness, and sin, mocks Jesus, the giver of every
  • mental gift, which always appear to the ignorance-loving hypocrites
  • as sins. But that which is sin in the sight of cruel man is not sin
  • in the sight of our kind God. Let every Christian as much as in him
  • lies engage himself openly and publicly before all the world in some
  • mental pursuit for the building of Jerusalem.’ I have given the whole
  • of this long passage because, though the very keystone of his thought,
  • it is little known, being sunk, like nearly all of his most profound
  • thoughts, in the mysterious prophetic books. Obscure about much else,
  • they are always lucid on this one point, and return to it again and
  • again. ‘I care not whether a man is good or bad,’ are the words they
  • put into the mouth of God, ‘all I care is whether he is a wise man or
  • a fool. Go put off holiness and put on intellect.’ This cultivated
  • life, which seems to us so artificial a thing, is really, according to
  • them, the laborious re-discovery of the golden age, of the primeval
  • simplicity, of the simple world in which Christ taught and lived, and
  • its lawlessness is the lawlessness of Him ‘who being all virtue, acted
  • from impulse and not from rules,’
  • And his seventy disciples sent
  • Against religion and government.
  • The historical Christ was indeed no more than the supreme symbol of
  • the artistic imagination, in which, with every passion wrought to
  • perfect beauty by art and poetry, we shall live, when the body has
  • passed away for the last time; but before that hour man must labour
  • through many lives and many deaths. ‘Men are admitted into heaven not
  • because they have curbed and governed their passions, but because
  • they have cultivated their understandings. The treasures of heaven
  • are not negations of passion but realities of intellect from which
  • the passions emanate uncurbed in their eternal glory. The fool shall
  • not enter into heaven, let him be ever so holy. Holiness is not the
  • price of entering into heaven. Those who are cast out are all those
  • who, having no passions of their own, because no intellect, have
  • spent their lives in curbing and governing other people’s lives by
  • the various arts of poverty and cruelty of all kinds. The modern
  • Church crucifies Christ with the head downwards. Woe, woe, woe to you
  • hypocrites.’ After a time man has ‘to return to the dark valley whence
  • he came and begin his labours anew,’ but before that return he dwells
  • in the freedom of imagination, in the peace of the ‘divine image,’
  • ‘the divine vision,’ in the peace that passes understanding and is
  • the peace of art. ‘I have been very near the gates of death,’ Blake
  • wrote in his last letter, ‘and have returned very weak and an old man,
  • feeble and tottering but not in spirit and life, not in the real man,
  • the imagination which liveth for ever. In that I grow stronger and
  • stronger as this foolish body decays.... Flaxman is gone, and we must
  • all soon follow, every one to his eternal home, leaving the delusions
  • of goddess Nature and her laws, to get into freedom from all the laws
  • of the numbers,’ the multiplicity of nature, ‘into the mind in which
  • every one is king and priest in his own house.’ The phrase about the
  • king and priest is a memory of the crown and mitre set upon Dante’s
  • head before he entered Paradise. Our imaginations are but fragments of
  • the universal imagination, portions of the universal body of God, and
  • as we enlarge our imagination by imaginative sympathy, and transform
  • with the beauty and peace of art, the sorrows and joys of the world, we
  • put off the limited mortal man more and more and put on the unlimited
  • ‘immortal man.’ ‘As the seed waits eagerly watching for its flower
  • and fruit, anxious its little soul looks out into the clear expanse
  • to see if hungry winds are abroad with their invisible array, so man
  • looks out in tree, and herb, and fish, and bird, and beast, collecting
  • up the fragments of his immortal body into the elemental forms of
  • everything that grows.... In pain he sighs, in pain he labours in his
  • universe, sorrowing in birds over the deep, or howling in the wolf
  • over the slain, and moaning in the cattle, and in the winds.’ Mere
  • sympathy for living things is not enough, because we must learn to
  • separate their ‘infected’ from their eternal, their satanic from their
  • divine part; and this can only be done by desiring always beauty, the
  • one mask through which can be seen the unveiled eyes of eternity. We
  • must then be artists in all things, and understand that love and old
  • age and death are first among the arts. In this sense he insists that
  • ‘Christ’s apostles were artists,’ that ‘Christianity is Art,’ and
  • that ‘the whole business of man is the arts.’ Dante, who deified law,
  • selected its antagonist, passion, as the most important of sins, and
  • made the regions where it was punished the largest. Blake, who deified
  • imaginative freedom, held ‘corporeal reason’ for the most accursed of
  • things, because it makes the imagination revolt from the sovereignty
  • of beauty and pass under the sovereignty of corporeal law, and this
  • is ‘the captivity in Egypt.’ True art is expressive and symbolic,
  • and makes every form, every sound, every colour, every gesture, a
  • signature of some unanalyzable imaginative essence. False art is not
  • expressive, but mimetic, not from experience but from observation, and
  • is the mother of all evil, persuading us to save our bodies alive at no
  • matter what cost of rapine and fraud. True art is the flame of the last
  • day, which begins for every man, when he is first moved by beauty, and
  • which seeks to burn all things until they become ‘infinite and holy.’
  • III. THE ILLUSTRATIONS OF DANTE.
  • The late Mr. John Addington Symonds wrote—in a preface to certain
  • Dante illustrations by Stradanus, a sixteenth-century artist of no
  • great excellence, published in phototype by Mr. Unwin in 1892—that
  • the illustrations of Gustave Doré, ‘in spite of glaring artistic
  • defects, must, I think, be reckoned first among numerous attempts to
  • translate Dante’s conceptions into terms of plastic art.’ One can only
  • account for this praise of a noisy and demagogic art by supposing
  • that a temperament, strong enough to explore with unfailing alertness
  • the countless schools and influences of the Renaissance in Italy, is
  • of necessity a little lacking in delicacy of judgment and in the
  • finer substances of emotion. It is more difficult to account for so
  • admirable a scholar not only preferring these illustrations to the work
  • of what he called ‘the graceful and affected Botticelli,’—although
  • ‘Doré was fitted for his task, not by dramatic vigour, by feeling for
  • beauty, or by anything sterling in sympathy with the supreme poet’s
  • soul, but by a very effective sense of luminosity and gloom’—but
  • preferring them because ‘he created a fanciful world, which makes the
  • movement of Dante’s _dramatis personæ_ conceivable, introducing the
  • ordinary intelligence into those vast regions thronged with destinies
  • of souls and creeds and empires.’ When the ordinary student finds
  • this intelligence in an illustrator, he thinks, because it is his
  • own intelligence, that it is an accurate interpretation of the text,
  • while work of the extraordinary intelligences is merely an expression
  • of their own ideas and feelings. Doré and Stradanus, he will tell
  • you, have given us something of the world of Dante, but Blake and
  • Botticelli have builded worlds of their own and called them Dante’s—as
  • if Dante’s world were more than a mass of symbols of colour and form
  • and sound which put on humanity, when they arouse some mind to an
  • intense and romantic life that is not theirs; as if it was not one’s
  • own sorrows and angers and regrets and terrors and hopes that awaken to
  • condemnation or repentance while Dante treads his eternal pilgrimage;
  • as if any poet or painter or musician could be other than an enchanter
  • calling with a persuasive or compelling ritual, creatures, noble or
  • ignoble, divine or dæmonic, covered with scales or in shining raiment,
  • that he never imagined, out of the bottomless deeps of imaginations he
  • never foresaw; as if the noblest achievement of art was not when the
  • artist enfolds himself in darkness, while he casts over his readers a
  • light as of a wild and terrible dawn.
  • Let us therefore put away the designs to _The Divine Comedy_, in which
  • there is ‘an ordinary intelligence,’ and consider only the designs
  • in which the magical ritual has called up extraordinary shapes, the
  • magical light glimmered upon a world, different from the Dantesque
  • world of our own intelligence in its ordinary and daily moods, upon
  • a difficult and distinguished world. Most of the series of designs
  • to Dante, and there are a good number, need not busy any one for a
  • moment. Genelli has done a copious series, which is very able in
  • the ‘formal’ ‘generalized’ way which Blake hated, and which is
  • spiritually ridiculous. Penelli has transformed the ‘Inferno’ into a
  • vulgar Walpurgis night, and a certain Schuler, whom I do not find in
  • the biographical dictionaries, but who was apparently a German, has
  • prefaced certain flaccid designs with some excellent charts, while
  • Stradanus has made a series for the ‘Inferno,’ which has so many of
  • the more material and unessential powers of art, and is so extremely
  • undistinguished in conception, that one supposes him to have touched
  • in the sixteenth century the same public Doré has touched in the
  • nineteenth.
  • Though with many doubts, I am tempted to value Flaxman’s designs to the
  • ‘Inferno,’ the ‘Purgatorio,’ and the ‘Paradiso,’ only a little above
  • the best of these, because he does not seem to have ever been really
  • moved by Dante, and so to have sunk into a formal manner, which is a
  • reflection of the vital manner of his Homer and Hesiod. His designs to
  • _The Divine Comedy_ will be laid, one imagines, with some ceremony in
  • that immortal wastepaper-basket in which Time carries with many sighs
  • the failures of great men. I am perhaps wrong, however, because Flaxman
  • even at his best has not yet touched me very deeply, and I hardly ever
  • hope to escape this limitation of my ruling stars. That Signorelli
  • does not seem greatly more interesting except here and there, as in the
  • drawing of ‘The Angel,’ full of innocence and energy, coming from the
  • boat which has carried so many souls to the foot of the mountain of
  • purgation, can only be because one knows him through poor reproductions
  • from frescoes half mouldered away with damp. A little-known series,
  • drawn by Adolph Stürler, an artist of German extraction, who was
  • settled in Florence in the first half of this century, are very
  • poor in drawing, very pathetic and powerful in invention, and full
  • of most interesting pre-Raphaelitic detail. There are admirable and
  • moving figures, who, having set love above reason, listen in the
  • last abandonment of despair to the judgment of Minos, or walk with a
  • poignant melancholy to the foot of his throne through a land where owls
  • and strange beasts move hither and thither with the sterile content of
  • the evil that neither loves nor hates, and a Cerberus full of patient
  • cruelty. All Stürler’s designs have, however, the languor of a mind
  • that does its work by a succession of delicate critical perceptions
  • rather than the decision and energy of true creation, and are more a
  • curious contribution to artistic methods than an imaginative force.
  • The only designs that compete with Blake’s are those of Botticelli and
  • Giulio Clovio, and these contrast rather than compete; for Blake did
  • not live to carry his ‘Paradiso’ beyond the first faint pencillings,
  • the first thin washes of colour, while Botticelli only, as I think,
  • became supremely imaginative in his ‘Paradiso,’ and Clovio never
  • attempted the ‘Inferno’ and ‘Purgatorio’ at all. The imaginations of
  • Botticelli and Clovio were overshadowed by the cloister, and it was
  • only when they passed beyond the world or into some noble peace, which
  • is not the world’s peace, that they won a perfect freedom. Blake had
  • not such mastery over figure and drapery as had Botticelli, but he
  • could sympathize with the persons and delight in the scenery of the
  • ‘Inferno’ and the ‘Purgatorio’ as Botticelli could not, and could
  • fill them with a mysterious and spiritual significance born perhaps
  • of mystical pantheism. The flames of Botticelli give one no emotion,
  • and his car of Beatrice is no symbolic chariot of the Church led by
  • the gryphon, half eagle, half lion, of Christ’s dual nature, but is
  • a fragment of some mediæval pageant pictured with a merely technical
  • inspiration. Clovio, the illuminator of missals, has tried to create
  • with that too easy hand of his a Paradise of serene air reflected in a
  • little mirror, a heaven of sociability and humility and prettiness,
  • a heaven of women and of monks; but one cannot imagine him deeply
  • moved, as the modern world is moved, by the symbolism of bird and
  • beast, of tree and mountain, of flame and darkness. It was a profound
  • understanding of all creatures and things, a profound sympathy with
  • passionate and lost souls, made possible in their extreme intensity
  • by his revolt against corporeal law, and corporeal reason, which made
  • Blake the one perfectly fit illustrator for the ‘Inferno’ and the
  • ‘Purgatorio’; in the serene and rapturous emptiness of Dante’s Paradise
  • he would find no symbols but a few abstract emblems, and he had no love
  • for the abstract, while with the drapery and the gestures of Beatrice
  • and Virgil, he would have prospered less than Botticelli or even Clovio.
  • 1897.
  • SYMBOLISM IN PAINTING
  • IN England, which has made great Symbolic Art, most people dislike
  • an art if they are told it is symbolic, for they confuse symbol and
  • allegory. Even Johnson’s Dictionary sees no great difference, for it
  • calls a Symbol ‘That which comprehends in its figure a representation
  • of something else’; and an Allegory, ‘A figurative discourse, in which
  • something other is intended than is contained in the words literally
  • taken.’ It is only a very modern Dictionary that calls a Symbol ‘the
  • sign or representation of any moral thing by the images or properties
  • of natural things,’ which, though an imperfect definition, is not
  • unlike ‘The things below are as the things above’ of the Emerald Tablet
  • of Hermes! _The Faerie Queene_ and _The Pilgrim’s Progress_ have been
  • so important in England that Allegory has overtopped Symbolism, and
  • for a time has overwhelmed it in its own downfall. William Blake was
  • perhaps the first modern to insist on a difference; and the other
  • day, when I sat for my portrait to a German Symbolist in Paris, whose
  • talk was all of his love for Symbolism and his hatred for Allegory,
  • his definitions were the same as William Blake’s, of whom he knew
  • nothing. William Blake has written, ‘Vision or imagination’—meaning
  • symbolism by these words—‘is a representation of what actually exists,
  • really or unchangeably. Fable or Allegory is formed by the daughters
  • of Memory.’ The German insisted with many determined gestures, that
  • Symbolism said things which could not be said so perfectly in any other
  • way, and needed but a right instinct for its understanding; while
  • Allegory said things which could be said as well, or better, in another
  • way, and needed a right knowledge for its understanding. The one gave
  • dumb things voices, and bodiless things bodies; while the other read
  • a meaning—which had never lacked its voice or its body—into something
  • heard or seen, and loved less for the meaning than for its own sake.
  • The only symbols he cared for were the shapes and motions of the body;
  • ears hidden by the hair, to make one think of a mind busy with inner
  • voices; and a head so bent that back and neck made the one curve, as in
  • Blake’s ‘Vision of Bloodthirstiness,’ to call up an emotion of bodily
  • strength; and he would not put even a lily, or a rose, or a poppy into
  • a picture to express purity, or love, or sleep, because he thought
  • such emblems were allegorical, and had their meaning by a traditional
  • and not by a natural right. I said that the rose, and the lily, and
  • the poppy were so married, by their colour and their odour, and their
  • use, to love and purity and sleep, or to other symbols of love and
  • purity and sleep, and had been so long a part of the imagination of the
  • world, that a symbolist might use them to help out his meaning without
  • becoming an allegorist. I think I quoted the lily in the hand of the
  • angel in Rossetti’s ‘Annunciation,’ and the lily in the jar in his
  • ‘Childhood of Mary Virgin,’ and thought they made the more important
  • symbols, the women’s bodies, and the angels’ bodies, and the clear
  • morning light, take that place, in the great procession of Christian
  • symbols, where they can alone have all their meaning and all their
  • beauty.
  • It is hard to say where Allegory and Symbolism melt into one another,
  • but it is not hard to say where either comes to its perfection; and
  • though one may doubt whether Allegory or Symbolism is the greater
  • in the horns of Michael Angelo’s ‘Moses,’ one need not doubt that
  • its symbolism has helped to awaken the modern imagination; while
  • Tintoretto’s ‘Origin of the Milky Way,’ which is Allegory without any
  • Symbolism, is, apart from its fine painting, but a moment’s amusement
  • for our fancy. A hundred generations might write out what seemed the
  • meaning of the one, and they would write different meanings, for no
  • symbol tells all its meaning to any generation; but when you have said,
  • ‘That woman there is Juno, and the milk out of her breast is making
  • the Milky Way,’ you have told the meaning of the other, and the fine
  • painting, which has added so much irrelevant beauty, has not told it
  • better.
  • All Art that is not mere story-telling, or mere portraiture, is
  • symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which
  • mediæval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade
  • their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it
  • entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.
  • A person or a landscape that is a part of a story or a portrait, evokes
  • but so much emotion as the story or the portrait can permit without
  • loosening the bonds that make it a story or a portrait; but if you
  • liberate a person or a landscape from the bonds of motives and their
  • actions, causes and their effects, and from all bonds but the bonds
  • of your love, it will change under your eyes, and become a symbol
  • of an infinite emotion, a perfected emotion, a part of the Divine
  • Essence; for we love nothing but the perfect, and our dreams make all
  • things perfect, that we may love them. Religious and visionary people,
  • monks and nuns, and medicine-men and opium-eaters, see symbols in
  • their trances; for religious and visionary thought is thought about
  • perfection and the way to perfection; and symbols are the only things
  • free enough from all bonds to speak of perfection.
  • Wagner’s dramas, Keats’ odes, Blake’s pictures and poems, Calvert’s
  • pictures, Rossetti’s pictures, Villiers De L’Isle Adam’s plays, and
  • the black-and-white art of Mr. Beardsley and Mr. Ricketts, and the
  • lithographs of Mr. Shannon, and the pictures of Mr. Whistler, and
  • the plays of M. Maeterlinck, and the poetry of Verlaine, in our own
  • day, but differ from the religious art of Giotto and his disciples in
  • having accepted all symbolisms, the symbolism of the ancient shepherds
  • and stargazers, that symbolism of bodily beauty which seemed a wicked
  • thing to Fra Angelico, the symbolism in day and night, and winter
  • and summer, spring and autumn, once so great a part of an older
  • religion than Christianity; and in having accepted all the Divine
  • Intellect, its anger and its pity, its waking and its sleep, its love
  • and its lust, for the substance of their art. A Keats or a Calvert is
  • as much a symbolist as a Blake or a Wagner; but he is a fragmentary
  • symbolist, for while he evokes in his persons and his landscapes an
  • infinite emotion, a perfected emotion, a part of the Divine Essence,
  • he does not set his symbols in the great procession as Blake would
  • have him, ‘in a certain order, suited’ to his ‘imaginative energy.’
  • If you paint a beautiful woman and fill her face, as Rossetti filled
  • so many faces, with an infinite love, a perfected love, ‘one’s eyes
  • meet no mortal thing when they meet the light of her peaceful eyes,’
  • as Michael Angelo said of Vittoria Colonna; but one’s thoughts stray
  • to mortal things, and ask, maybe, ‘Has her lover gone from her, or is
  • he coming?’ or ‘What predestinated unhappiness has made the shadow
  • in her eyes?’ If you paint the same face, and set a winged rose or a
  • rose of gold somewhere about her, one’s thoughts are of her immortal
  • sisters, Pity and Jealousy, and of her mother, Ancestral Beauty, and of
  • her high kinsmen, the Holy Orders, whose swords make a continual music
  • before her face. The systematic mystic is not the greatest of artists,
  • because his imagination is too great to be bounded by a picture or
  • a song, and because only imperfection in a mirror of perfection, or
  • perfection in a mirror of imperfection, delight our frailty. There
  • is indeed a systematic mystic in every poet or painter who, like
  • Rossetti, delights in a traditional Symbolism, or, like Wagner,
  • delights in a personal Symbolism; and such men often fall into trances,
  • or have waking dreams. Their thought wanders from the woman who is
  • Love herself, to her sisters and her forebears, and to all the great
  • procession; and so august a beauty moves before the mind, that they
  • forget the things which move before the eyes. William Blake, who was
  • the chanticleer of the new dawn, has written: ‘If the spectator could
  • enter into one of these images of his imagination, approaching them on
  • the fiery chariot of his contemplative thought, if ... he could make
  • a friend and companion of one of these images of wonder, which always
  • entreat him to leave mortal things (as he must know), then would he
  • arise from the grave, then would he meet the Lord in the air, and then
  • he would be happy.’ And again, ‘The world of imagination is the world
  • of Eternity. It is the Divine bosom into which we shall all go after
  • the death of the vegetated body. The world of imagination is infinite
  • and eternal, whereas the world of generation or vegetation is finite
  • and temporal. There exist in that eternal world the eternal realities
  • of everything which we see reflected in the vegetable glass of nature.’
  • Every visionary knows that the mind’s eye soon comes to see a
  • capricious and variable world, which the will cannot shape or change,
  • though it can call it up and banish it again. I closed my eyes a
  • moment ago, and a company of people in blue robes swept by me in a
  • blinding light, and had gone before I had done more than see little
  • roses embroidered on the hems of their robes, and confused, blossoming
  • apple-boughs somewhere beyond them, and recognised one of the company
  • by his square black, curling beard. I have often seen him; and one
  • night a year ago, I asked him questions which he answered by showing me
  • flowers and precious stones, of whose meaning I had no knowledge, and
  • he seemed too perfected a soul for any knowledge that cannot be spoken
  • in symbol or metaphor.
  • Are he and his blue-robed companions, and their like, ‘the Eternal
  • realities’ of which we are the reflection ‘in the vegetable glass of
  • nature,’ or a momentary dream? To answer is to take sides in the only
  • controversy in which it is greatly worth taking sides, and in the only
  • controversy which may never be decided.
  • 1898.
  • THE SYMBOLISM OF POETRY
  • I
  • ‘SYMBOLISM, as seen in the writers of our day, would have no value
  • if it were not seen also, under one disguise or another, in every
  • great imaginative writer,’ writes Mr. Arthur Symons in _The Symbolist
  • Movement in Literature_, a subtle book which I cannot praise as I
  • would, because it has been dedicated to me; and he goes on to show
  • how many profound writers have in the last few years sought for a
  • philosophy of poetry in the doctrine of symbolism, and how even in
  • countries where it is almost scandalous to seek for any philosophy
  • of poetry, new writers are following them in their search. We do not
  • know what the writers of ancient times talked of among themselves,
  • and one bull is all that remains of Shakespeare’s talk, who was on
  • the edge of modern times; and the journalist is convinced, it seems,
  • that they talked of wine and women and politics, but never about their
  • art, or never quite seriously about their art. He is certain that
  • no one, who had a philosophy of his art or a theory of how he should
  • write, has ever made a work of art, that people have no imagination
  • who do not write without forethought and afterthought as he writes
  • his own articles. He says this with enthusiasm, because he has heard
  • it at so many comfortable dinner-tables, where some one had mentioned
  • through carelessness, or foolish zeal, a book whose difficulty had
  • offended indolence, or a man who had not forgotten that beauty is an
  • accusation. Those formulas and generalizations, in which a hidden
  • sergeant has drilled the ideas of journalists and through them the
  • ideas of all but all the modern world, have created in their turn a
  • forgetfulness like that of soldiers in battle, so that journalists and
  • their readers have forgotten, among many like events, that Wagner spent
  • seven years arranging and explaining his ideas before he began his
  • most characteristic music; that opera, and with it modern music, arose
  • from certain talks at the house of one Giovanni Bardi of Florence;
  • and that the Pleiade laid the foundations of modern French literature
  • with a pamphlet. Goethe has said, ‘a poet needs all philosophy, but he
  • must keep it out of his work,’ though that is not always necessary;
  • and certainly he cannot know too much, whether about his own work, or
  • about the procreant waters of the soul where the breath first moved, or
  • about the waters under the earth that are the life of passing things;
  • and almost certainly no great art, outside England, where journalists
  • are more powerful and ideas less plentiful than elsewhere, has arisen
  • without a great criticism, for its herald or its interpreter and
  • protector, and it may be for this reason that great art, now that
  • vulgarity has armed itself and multiplied itself, is perhaps dead in
  • England.
  • All writers, all artists of any kind, in so far as they have had
  • any philosophical or critical power, perhaps just in so far as they
  • have been deliberate artists at all, have had some philosophy, some
  • criticism of their art; and it has often been this philosophy, or this
  • criticism, that has evoked their most startling inspiration, calling
  • into outer life some portion of the divine life, of the buried reality,
  • which could alone extinguish in the emotions what their philosophy or
  • their criticism would extinguish in the intellect. They have sought
  • for no new thing, it may be, but only to understand and to copy the
  • pure inspiration of early times, but because the divine life wars upon
  • our outer life, and must needs change its weapons and its movements
  • as we change ours, inspiration has come to them in beautiful startling
  • shapes. The scientific movement brought with it a literature, which
  • was always tending to lose itself in externalities of all kinds, in
  • opinion, in declamation, in picturesque writing, in word-painting, or
  • in what Mr. Symons has called an attempt ‘to build in brick and mortar
  • inside the covers of a book’; and now writers have begun to dwell
  • upon the element of evocation, of suggestion, upon what we call the
  • symbolism in great writers.
  • II
  • In ‘Symbolism in Painting,’ I tried to describe the element of
  • symbolism that is in pictures and sculpture, and described a little
  • the symbolism in poetry, but did not describe at all the continuous
  • indefinable symbolism which is the substance of all style.
  • There are no lines with more melancholy beauty than these by Burns—
  • ‘The white moon is setting behind the white wave,
  • And Time is setting with me, O!’
  • and these lines are perfectly symbolical. Take from them the whiteness
  • of the moon and of the wave, whose relation to the setting of Time
  • is too subtle for the intellect, and you take from them their beauty.
  • But, when all are together, moon and wave and whiteness and setting
  • Time and the last melancholy cry, they evoke an emotion which cannot be
  • evoked by any other arrangement of colours and sounds and forms. We may
  • call this metaphorical writing, but it is better to call it symbolical
  • writing, because metaphors are not profound enough to be moving, when
  • they are not symbols, and when they are symbols they are the most
  • perfect, because the most subtle, outside of pure sound, and through
  • them one can the best find out what symbols are. If one begins the
  • reverie with any beautiful lines that one can remember, one finds they
  • are like those by Burns. Begin with this line by Blake—
  • ‘The gay fishes on the wave when the moon sucks up the dew’;
  • or these lines by Nash—
  • ‘Brightness falls from the air,
  • Queens have died young and fair,
  • Dust hath closed Helen’s eye’;
  • or these lines by Shakespeare—
  • ‘Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
  • Upon the beached verge of the salt flood;
  • Who once a day with his embossed froth
  • The turbulent surge shall cover’;
  • or take some line that is quite simple, that gets its beauty from its
  • place in a story, and see how it flickers with the light of the many
  • symbols that have given the story its beauty, as a sword-blade may
  • flicker with the light of burning towers.
  • All sounds, all colours, all forms, either because of their
  • pre-ordained energies or because of long association, evoke indefinable
  • and yet precise emotions, or, as I prefer to think, call down among
  • us certain disembodied powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we
  • call emotions; and when sound, and colour, and form are in a musical
  • relation, a beautiful relation to one another, they become as it were
  • one sound, one colour, one form, and evoke an emotion that is made out
  • of their distinct evocations and yet is one emotion. The same relation
  • exists between all portions of every work of art, whether it be an
  • epic or a song, and the more perfect it is, and the more various and
  • numerous the elements that have flowed into its perfection, the more
  • powerful will be the emotion, the power, the god it calls among us.
  • Because an emotion does not exist, or does not become perceptible and
  • active among us, till it has found its expression, in colour or in
  • sound or in form, or in all of these, and because no two modulations or
  • arrangements of these evoke the same emotion, poets and painters and
  • musicians, and in a less degree because their effects are momentary,
  • day and night and cloud and shadow, are continually making and
  • unmaking mankind. It is indeed only those things which seem useless
  • or very feeble that have any power, and all those things that seem
  • useful or strong, armies, moving wheels, modes of architecture, modes
  • of government, speculations of the reason, would have been a little
  • different if some mind long ago had not given itself to some emotion,
  • as a woman gives herself to her lover, and shaped sounds or colours or
  • forms, or all of these, into a musical relation, that their emotion
  • might live in other minds. A little lyric evokes an emotion, and this
  • emotion gathers others about it and melts into their being in the
  • making of some great epic; and at last, needing an always less delicate
  • body, or symbol, as it grows more powerful, it flows out, with all it
  • has gathered, among the blind instincts of daily life, where it moves
  • a power within powers, as one sees ring within ring in the stem of an
  • old tree. This is maybe what Arthur O’Shaughnessy meant when he made
  • his poets say they had built Nineveh with their sighing; and I am
  • certainly never certain, when I hear of some war, or of some religious
  • excitement, or of some new manufacture, or of anything else that
  • fills the ear of the world, that it has not all happened because of
  • something that a boy piped in Thessaly. I remember once asking a seer
  • to ask one among the gods who, as she believed, were standing about her
  • in their symbolic bodies, what would come of a charming but seeming
  • trivial labour of a friend, and the form answering, ‘the devastation of
  • peoples and the overwhelming of cities.’ I doubt indeed if the crude
  • circumstance of the world, which seems to create all our emotions, does
  • more than reflect, as in multiplying mirrors, the emotions that have
  • come to solitary men in moments of poetical contemplation; or that
  • love itself would be more than an animal hunger but for the poet and
  • his shadow the priest, for unless we believe that outer things are the
  • reality, we must believe that the gross is the shadow of the subtle,
  • that things are wise before they become foolish, and secret before they
  • cry out in the market-place. Solitary men in moments of contemplation
  • receive, as I think, the creative impulse from the lowest of the Nine
  • Hierarchies, and so make and unmake mankind, and even the world itself,
  • for does not ‘the eye altering alter all’?
  • ‘Our towns are copied fragments from our breast;
  • And all man’s Babylons strive but to impart
  • The grandeurs of his Babylonian heart.’
  • III
  • The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the
  • moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake,
  • which is the one moment of creation, by hushing us with an alluring
  • monotony, while it holds us waking by variety, to keep us in that state
  • of perhaps real trance, in which the mind liberated from the pressure
  • of the will is unfolded in symbols. If certain sensitive persons listen
  • persistently to the ticking of a watch, or gaze persistently on the
  • monotonous flashing of a light, they fall into the hypnotic trance;
  • and rhythm is but the ticking of a watch made softer, that one must
  • needs listen, and various, that one may not be swept beyond memory or
  • grow weary of listening; while the patterns of the artist are but the
  • monotonous flash woven to take the eyes in a subtler enchantment. I
  • have heard in meditation voices that were forgotten the moment they had
  • spoken; and I have been swept, when in more profound meditation, beyond
  • all memory but of those things that came from beyond the threshold of
  • waking life. I was writing once at a very symbolical and abstract poem,
  • when my pen fell on the ground; and as I stooped to pick it up, I
  • remembered some phantastic adventure that yet did not seem phantastic,
  • and then another like adventure, and when I asked myself when these
  • things had happened, I found that I was remembering my dreams for many
  • nights. I tried to remember what I had done the day before, and then
  • what I had done that morning; but all my waking life had perished from
  • me, and it was only after a struggle that I came to remember it again,
  • and as I did so that more powerful and startling life perished in its
  • turn. Had my pen not fallen on the ground and so made me turn from the
  • images that I was weaving into verse, I would never have known that
  • meditation had become trance, for I would have been like one who does
  • not know that he is passing through a wood because his eyes are on the
  • pathway. So I think that in the making and in the understanding of a
  • work of art, and the more easily if it is full of patterns and symbols
  • and music, we are lured to the threshold of sleep, and it may be far
  • beyond it, without knowing that we have ever set our feet upon the
  • steps of horn or of ivory.
  • IV
  • Besides emotional symbols, symbols that evoke emotions alone,—and in
  • this sense all alluring or hateful things are symbols, although their
  • relations with one another are too subtle to delight us fully, away
  • from rhythm and pattern,—there are intellectual symbols, symbols that
  • evoke ideas alone, or ideas mingled with emotions; and outside the
  • very definite traditions of mysticism and the less definite criticism
  • of certain modern poets, these alone are called symbols. Most things
  • belong to one or another kind, according to the way we speak of them
  • and the companions we give them, for symbols, associated with ideas
  • that are more than fragments of the shadows thrown upon the intellect
  • by the emotions they evoke, are the playthings of the allegorist or
  • the pedant, and soon pass away. If I say ‘white’ or ‘purple’ in an
  • ordinary line of poetry, they evoke emotions so exclusively that I
  • cannot say why they move me; but if I say them in the same mood, in
  • the same breath with such obvious intellectual symbols as a cross or a
  • crown of thorns, I think of purity and sovereignty; while innumerable
  • other meanings, which are held to one another by the bondage of subtle
  • suggestion, and alike in the emotions and in the intellect, move
  • visibly through my mind, and move invisibly beyond the threshold of
  • sleep, casting lights and shadows of an indefinable wisdom on what
  • had seemed before, it may be, but sterility and noisy violence. It
  • is the intellect that decides where the reader shall ponder over the
  • procession of the symbols, and if the symbols are merely emotional,
  • he gazes from amid the accidents and destinies of the world; but if
  • the symbols are intellectual too, he becomes himself a part of pure
  • intellect, and he is himself mingled with the procession. If I watch
  • a rushy pool in the moonlight, my emotion at its beauty is mixed with
  • memories of the man that I have seen ploughing by its margin, or of the
  • lovers I saw there a night ago; but if I look at the moon herself and
  • remember any of her ancient names and meanings, I move among divine
  • people, and things that have shaken off our mortality, the tower of
  • ivory, the queen of waters, the shining stag among enchanted woods, the
  • white hare sitting upon the hilltop, the fool of faery with his shining
  • cup full of dreams, and it may be ‘make a friend of one of these images
  • of wonder,’ and ‘meet the Lord in the air.’ So, too, if one is moved by
  • Shakespeare, who is content with emotional symbols that he may come
  • the nearer to our sympathy, one is mixed with the whole spectacle of
  • the world; while if one is moved by Dante, or by the myth of Demeter,
  • one is mixed into the shadow of God or of a goddess. So too one is
  • furthest from symbols when one is busy doing this or that, but the soul
  • moves among symbols and unfolds in symbols when trance, or madness, or
  • deep meditation has withdrawn it from every impulse but its own. ‘I
  • then saw,’ wrote Gérard de Nerval of his madness, ‘vaguely drifting
  • into form, plastic images of antiquity, which outlined themselves,
  • became definite, and seemed to represent symbols of which I only seized
  • the idea with difficulty.’ In an earlier time he would have been of
  • that multitude, whose souls austerity withdrew, even more perfectly
  • than madness could withdraw his soul, from hope and memory, from desire
  • and regret, that they might reveal those processions of symbols that
  • men bow to before altars, and woo with incense and offerings. But being
  • of our time, he has been like Maeterlinck, like Villiers de L’Isle Adam
  • in _Axël_, like all who are preoccupied with intellectual symbols in
  • our time, a foreshadower of the new sacred book, of which all the arts,
  • as somebody has said, are begging to dream, and because, as I think,
  • they cannot overcome the slow dying of men’s hearts that we call the
  • progress of the world, and lay their hands upon men’s heart-strings
  • again, without becoming the garment of religion as in old times.
  • V
  • If people were to accept the theory that poetry moves us because of its
  • symbolism, what change should one look for in the manner of our poetry?
  • A return to the way of our fathers, a casting out of descriptions of
  • nature for the sake of nature, of the moral law for the sake of the
  • moral law, a casting out of all anecdotes and of that brooding over
  • scientific opinion that so often extinguished the central flame in
  • Tennyson, and of that vehemence that would make us do or not do certain
  • things; or, in other words, we should come to understand that the beryl
  • stone was enchanted by our fathers that it might unfold the pictures
  • in its heart, and not to mirror our own excited faces, or the boughs
  • waving outside the window. With this change of substance, this return
  • to imagination, this understanding that the laws of art, which are
  • the hidden laws of the world, can alone bind the imagination, would
  • come a change of style, and we would cast out of serious poetry those
  • energetic rhythms, as of a man running, which are the invention of
  • the will with its eyes always on something to be done or undone; and
  • we would seek out those wavering, meditative, organic rhythms, which
  • are the embodiment of the imagination, that neither desires nor hates,
  • because it has done with time, and only wishes to gaze upon some
  • reality, some beauty; nor would it be any longer possible for anybody
  • to deny the importance of form, in all its kinds, for although you can
  • expound an opinion, or describe a thing when your words are not quite
  • well chosen, you cannot give a body to something that moves beyond
  • the senses, unless your words are as subtle, as complex, as full of
  • mysterious life, as the body of a flower or of a woman. The form of
  • sincere poetry, unlike the form of the popular poetry, may indeed be
  • sometimes obscure, or ungrammatical as in some of the best of the Songs
  • of Innocence and Experience, but it must have the perfections that
  • escape analysis, the subtleties that have a new meaning every day, and
  • it must have all this whether it be but a little song made out of a
  • moment of dreamy indolence, or some great epic made out of the dreams
  • of one poet and of a hundred generations whose hands were never weary
  • of the sword.
  • 1900.
  • THE THEATRE
  • I
  • I REMEMBER, some years ago, advising a distinguished, though too little
  • recognised, writer of poetical plays to write a play as unlike ordinary
  • plays as possible, that it might be judged with a fresh mind, and to
  • put it on the stage in some small suburban theatre, where a small
  • audience would pay its expenses. I said that he should follow it the
  • year after, at the same time of the year, with another play, and so
  • on from year to year; and that the people who read books, and do not
  • go to the theatre, would gradually find out about him. I suggested
  • that he should begin with a pastoral play, because nobody would expect
  • from a pastoral play the succession of nervous tremours which the
  • plays of commerce, like the novels of commerce, have substituted for
  • the purification that comes with pity and terror to the imagination
  • and intellect. He followed my advice in part, and had a small but
  • perfect success, filling his small theatre for twice the number of
  • performances he had announced; but instead of being content with the
  • praise of his equals, and waiting to win their praise another year,
  • he hired immediately a big London theatre, and put his pastoral play
  • and a new play before a meagre and unintelligent audience. I still
  • remember his pastoral play with delight, because, if not always of a
  • high excellence, it was always poetical; but I remember it at the small
  • theatre, where my pleasure was magnified by the pleasure of those about
  • me, and not at the big theatre, where it made me uncomfortable, as an
  • unwelcome guest always makes one uncomfortable.
  • Why should we thrust our works, which we have written with imaginative
  • sincerity and filled with spiritual desire, before those quite
  • excellent people who think that Rossetti’s women are ‘guys,’ that
  • Rodin’s women are ‘ugly,’ and that Ibsen is ‘immoral,’ and who only
  • want to be left at peace to enjoy the works so many clever men have
  • made especially to suit them? We must make a theatre for ourselves and
  • our friends, and for a few simple people who understand from sheer
  • simplicity what we understand from scholarship and thought. We have
  • planned the Irish Literary Theatre with this hospitable emotion, and,
  • that the right people may find out about us, we hope to act a play or
  • two in the spring of every year; and that the right people may escape
  • the stupefying memory of the theatre of commerce which clings even to
  • them, our plays will be for the most part remote, spiritual, and ideal.
  • A common opinion is that the poetic drama has come to an end, because
  • modern poets have no dramatic power; and Mr. Binyon seems to accept
  • this opinion when he says: ‘It has been too often assumed that it is
  • the manager who bars the way to poetic plays. But it is much more
  • probable that the poets have failed the managers. If poets mean to
  • serve the stage, their dramas must he dramatic.’ I find it easier
  • to believe that audiences, who have learned, as I think, from the
  • life of crowded cities to live upon the surface of life, and actors
  • and managers, who study to please them, have changed, than that
  • imagination, which is the voice of what is eternal in man, has changed.
  • The arts are but one Art; and why should all intense painting and
  • all intense poetry have become not merely unintelligible but hateful
  • to the greater number of men and women, and intense drama move them
  • to pleasure? The audiences of Sophocles and of Shakespeare and of
  • Calderon were not unlike the audiences I have heard listening in Irish
  • cabins to songs in Gaelic about ‘an old poet telling his sins,’ and
  • about ‘the five young men who were drowned last year,’ and about ‘the
  • lovers that were drowned going to America,’ or to some tale of Oisin
  • and his three hundred years in _Tir nan Oge_. Mr. Bridges’ _Return of
  • Ulysses_, one of the most beautiful and, as I think, dramatic of modern
  • plays, might have some success in the Aran Islands, if the Gaelic
  • League would translate it into Gaelic, but I am quite certain that it
  • would have no success in the Strand.
  • Blake has said that all Art is a labour to bring again the Golden Age,
  • and all culture is certainly a labour to bring again the simplicity
  • of the first ages, with knowledge of good and evil added to it. The
  • drama has need of cities that it may find men in sufficient numbers,
  • and cities destroy the emotions to which it appeals, and therefore
  • the days of the drama are brief and come but seldom. It has one day
  • when the emotions of cities still remember the emotions of sailors and
  • husbandmen and shepherds and users of the spear and the bow; as the
  • houses and furniture and earthern vessels of cities, before the coming
  • of machinery, remember the rocks and the woods and the hillside;
  • and it has another day, now beginning, when thought and scholarship
  • discover their desire. In the first day, it is the Art of the people;
  • and in the second day, like the dramas acted of old times in the hidden
  • places of temples, it is the preparation of a Priesthood. It may be,
  • though the world is not old enough to show us any example, that this
  • Priesthood will spread their Religion everywhere, and make their Art
  • the Art of the people.
  • When the first day of the drama had passed by, actors found that an
  • always larger number of people were more easily moved through the eyes
  • than through the ears. The emotion that comes with the music of words
  • is exhausting, like all intellectual emotions, and few people like
  • exhausting emotions; and therefore actors began to speak as if they
  • were reading something out of the newspapers. They forgot the noble art
  • of oratory, and gave all their thought to the poor art of acting, that
  • is content with the sympathy of our nerves; until at last those who
  • love poetry found it better to read alone in their rooms what they had
  • once delighted to hear sitting friend by friend, lover by beloved. I
  • once asked Mr. William Morris if he had thought of writing a play, and
  • he answered that he had, but would not write one, because actors did
  • not know how to speak poetry with the half-chant men spoke it with in
  • old times. Mr. Swinburne’s _Locrine_ was acted a month ago, and it was
  • not badly acted, but nobody could tell whether it was fit for the stage
  • or not, for not one rhythm, not one cry of passion, was spoken with a
  • musical emphasis, and verse spoken without a musical emphasis seems but
  • an artificial and cumbersome way of saying what might be said naturally
  • and simply in prose.
  • As audiences and actors changed, managers learned to substitute
  • meretricious landscapes, painted upon wood and canvas, for the
  • descriptions of poetry, until the painted scenery, which had in Greece
  • been a charming explanation of what was least important in the story,
  • became as important as the story. It needed some imagination, some gift
  • for day-dreams, to see the horses and the fields and flowers of Colonus
  • as one listened to the elders gathered about Œdipus, or to see ‘the
  • pendent bed and procreant cradle’ of the ‘martlet’ as one listened to
  • Duncan before the castle of Macbeth; but it needs no imagination to
  • admire a painting of one of the more obvious effects of nature painted
  • by somebody who understands how to show everything to the most hurried
  • glance. At the same time the managers made the costumes of the actors
  • more and more magnificent, that the mind might sleep in peace, while
  • the eye took pleasure in the magnificence of velvet and silk and in the
  • physical beauty of women. These changes gradually perfected the theatre
  • of commerce, the masterpiece of that movement towards externality in
  • life and thought and Art, against which the criticism of our day is
  • learning to protest.
  • Even if poetry were spoken as poetry, it would still seem out of place
  • in many of its highest moments upon a stage, where the superficial
  • appearances of nature are so closely copied; for poetry is founded
  • upon convention, and becomes incredible the moment painting or gesture
  • remind us that people do not speak verse when they meet upon the
  • highway. The theatre of Art, when it comes to exist, must therefore
  • discover grave and decorative gestures, such as delighted Rossetti and
  • Madox Brown, and grave and decorative scenery, that will be forgotten
  • the moment an actor has said ‘It is dawn,’ or ‘It is raining,’ or
  • ‘The wind is shaking the trees’; and dresses of so little irrelevant
  • magnificence that the mortal actors and actresses may change without
  • much labour into the immortal people of romance. The theatre began in
  • ritual, and it cannot come to its greatness again without recalling
  • words to their ancient sovereignty.
  • It will take a generation, and perhaps generations, to restore the
  • theatre of Art; for one must get one’s actors, and perhaps one’s
  • scenery, from the theatre of commerce, until new actors and new
  • painters have come to help one; and until many failures and imperfect
  • successes have made a new tradition, and perfected in detail the ideal
  • that is beginning to float before our eyes. If one could call one’s
  • painters and one’s actors from where one would, how easy it would be!
  • I know some painters, who have never painted scenery, who could paint
  • the scenery I want, but they have their own work to do; and in Ireland
  • I have heard a red-haired orator repeat some bad political verses with
  • a voice that went through one like flame, and made them seem the most
  • beautiful verses in the world; but he has no practical knowledge of the
  • stage, and probably despises it.
  • May, 1899.
  • II
  • Dionysius, the Areopagite, wrote that ‘He has set the borders of
  • the nations according to His angels.’ It is these angels, each one
  • the genius of some race about to be unfolded, that are the founders
  • of intellectual traditions; and as lovers understand in their first
  • glance all that is to befall them, and as poets and musicians see the
  • whole work in its first impulse, so races prophesy at their awakening
  • whatever the generations that are to prolong their traditions shall
  • accomplish in detail. It is only at the awakening—as in ancient Greece,
  • or in Elizabethan England, or in contemporary Scandinavia—that great
  • numbers of men understand that a right understanding of life and of
  • destiny is more important than amusement. In London, where all the
  • intellectual traditions gather to die, men hate a play if they are told
  • it is literature, for they will not endure a spiritual superiority; but
  • in Athens, where so many intellectual traditions were born, Euripides
  • once changed hostility to enthusiasm by asking his playgoers whether
  • it was his business to teach them, or their business to teach him.
  • New races understand instinctively, because the future cries in their
  • ears, that the old revelations are insufficient, and that all life
  • is revelation beginning in miracle and enthusiasm, and dying out as
  • it unfolds itself in what we have mistaken for progress. It is one of
  • our illusions, as I think, that education, the softening of manners,
  • the perfecting of law—countless images of a fading light—can create
  • nobleness and beauty, and that life moves slowly and evenly towards
  • some perfection. Progress is miracle, and it is sudden, because
  • miracles are the work of an all-powerful energy, and nature in herself
  • has no power except to die and to forget. If one studies one’s own
  • mind, one comes to think with Blake, that ‘every time less than a
  • pulsation of the artery is equal to six thousand years, for in this
  • period the poet’s work is done; and all the great events of time start
  • forth and are conceived in such a period, within a pulsation of the
  • artery.’
  • February, 1900.
  • THE CELTIC ELEMENT IN LITERATURE
  • I
  • ERNEST RENAN described what he held to be Celtic characteristics
  • in _The Poetry of the Celtic Races_. I must repeat the well-known
  • sentences: ‘No race communed so intimately as the Celtic race with the
  • lower creation, or believed it to have so big a share of moral life.’
  • The Celtic race had ‘a realistic naturalism,’ ‘a love of nature for
  • herself, a vivid feeling for her magic, commingled with the melancholy
  • a man knows when he is face to face with her, and thinks he hears her
  • communing with him about his origin and his destiny.’ ‘It has worn
  • itself out in mistaking dreams for realities,’ and ‘compared with the
  • classical imagination the Celtic imagination is indeed the infinite
  • contrasted with the finite.’ ‘Its history is one long lament, it
  • still recalls its exiles, its flights across the seas.’ ‘If at times
  • it seems to be cheerful, its tear is not slow to glisten behind the
  • smile. Its songs of joy end as elegies; there is nothing to equal the
  • delightful sadness of its national melodies.’ Matthew Arnold, in _The
  • Study of Celtic Literature_, has accepted this passion for nature, this
  • imaginativeness, this melancholy, as Celtic characteristics, but has
  • described them more elaborately. The Celtic passion for nature comes
  • almost more from a sense of her ‘mystery’ than of her ‘beauty,’ and it
  • adds ‘charm and magic’ to nature, and the Celtic imaginativeness and
  • melancholy are alike ‘a passionate, turbulent, indomitable reaction
  • against the despotism of fact.’ The Celt is not melancholy, as Faust or
  • Werther are melancholy, from ‘a perfectly definite motive,’ but because
  • of something about him ‘unaccountable, defiant and titanic.’ How well
  • one knows these sentences, better even than Renan’s, and how well one
  • knows the passages of prose and verse which he uses to prove that
  • wherever English literature has the qualities these sentences describe,
  • it has them from a Celtic source. Though I do not think any of us who
  • write about Ireland have built any argument upon them, it is well to
  • consider them a little, and see where they are helpful and where they
  • are hurtful. If we do not, we may go mad some day, and the enemy root
  • up our rose-garden and plant a cabbage-garden instead. Perhaps we must
  • restate a little, Renan’s and Arnold’s argument.
  • II
  • Once every people in the world believed that trees were divine, and
  • could take a human or grotesque shape and dance among the shadows; and
  • that deer, and ravens and foxes, and wolves and bears, and clouds and
  • pools, almost all things under the sun and moon, and the sun and moon,
  • were not less divine and changeable. They saw in the rainbow the still
  • bent bow of a god thrown down in his negligence; they heard in the
  • thunder the sound of his beaten water-jar, or the tumult of his chariot
  • wheels; and when a sudden flight of wild duck, or of crows, passed
  • over their heads, they thought they were gazing at the dead hastening
  • to their rest; while they dreamed of so great a mystery in little
  • things that they believed the waving of a hand, or of a sacred bough,
  • enough to trouble far-off hearts, or hood the moon with darkness. All
  • old literatures are full of these or of like imaginations, and all
  • the poets of races, who have not lost this way of looking at things,
  • could have said of themselves, as the poet of the _Kalevala_ said of
  • himself, ‘I have learned my songs from the music of many birds, and
  • from the music of many waters.’ When a mother in the _Kalevala_ weeps
  • for a daughter, who was drowned flying from an old suitor, she weeps so
  • greatly that her tears become three rivers, and cast up three rocks,
  • on which grow three birch-trees, where three cuckoos sit and sing,
  • the one ‘love, love,’ the one ‘suitor, suitor,’ the one ‘consolation,
  • consolation.’ And the makers of the Sagas made the squirrel run up and
  • down the sacred ash-tree carrying words of hatred from the eagle to the
  • worm, and from the worm to the eagle; although they had less of the old
  • way than the makers of the _Kalevala_, for they lived in a more crowded
  • and complicated world, and were learning the abstract meditation which
  • lures men from visible beauty, and were unlearning, it may be, the
  • impassioned meditation which brings men beyond the edge of trance and
  • makes trees, and beasts, and dead things talk with human voices.
  • The old Irish and the old Welsh, though they had less of the old way
  • than the makers of the _Kalevala_, had more of it than the makers of
  • the Sagas, and it is this that distinguishes the examples Matthew
  • Arnold quotes of their ‘natural magic,’ of their sense of ‘the
  • mystery’ more than of ‘the beauty’ of nature. When Matthew Arnold wrote
  • it was not easy to know as much as we know now of folk song and folk
  • belief, and I do not think he understood that our ‘natural magic’ is
  • but the ancient religion of the world, the ancient worship of nature
  • and that troubled ecstasy before her, that certainty of all beautiful
  • places being haunted, which it brought into men’s minds. The ancient
  • religion is in that passage of the _Mabinogion_ about the making of
  • ‘Flower Aspect.’ Gwydion and Math made her ‘by charms and illusions’
  • ‘out of flowers.’ ‘They took the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms
  • of the broom, and the blossoms of the meadowsweet, and produced from
  • them a maiden the fairest and most graceful that man ever saw; and
  • they baptized her, and called her Flower Aspect’; and one finds it in
  • the not less beautiful passage about the burning Tree, that has half
  • its beauty from calling up a fancy of leaves so living and beautiful,
  • they can be of no less living and beautiful a thing than flame: ‘They
  • saw a tall tree by the side of the river, one half of which was in
  • flames from the root to the top, and the other half was green and in
  • full leaf.’ And one finds it very certainly in the quotations he makes
  • from English poets to prove a Celtic influence in English poetry; in
  • Keats’s ‘magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in faery
  • lands forlorn’; in his ‘moving waters at their priest-like task of
  • pure ablution round earth’s human shore’; in Shakespeare’s ‘floor of
  • heaven,’ ‘inlaid with patens of bright gold’; and in his Dido standing
  • ‘on the wild sea banks,’ ‘a willow in her hand,’ and waving it in the
  • ritual of the old worship of nature and the spirits of nature, to wave
  • ‘her love to come again to Carthage.’ And his other examples have the
  • delight and wonder of devout worshippers among the haunts of their
  • divinities. Is there not such delight and wonder in the description of
  • Olwen in the _Mabinogion_: ‘More yellow was her hair than the flower
  • of the broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave,
  • and fairer were her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the
  • wood-anemone amidst the spray of the meadow fountains.’ And is there
  • not such delight and wonder in—
  • ‘Meet we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,
  • By paved fountain or by rushy brook,
  • Or on the beached margent of the sea’?
  • If men had never dreamed that fair women could be made out of flowers,
  • or rise up out of meadow fountains and paved fountains, neither passage
  • could have been written. Certainly the descriptions of nature made in
  • what Matthew Arnold calls ‘the faithful way,’ or in what he calls ‘the
  • Greek way,’ would have lost nothing if all the meadow fountains or
  • paved fountains were meadow fountains and paved fountains and nothing
  • more. When Keats wrote, in the Greek way, which adds lightness and
  • brightness to nature—
  • ‘What little town by river or sea-shore
  • Or mountain built with quiet citadel,
  • Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn’;
  • when Shakespeare wrote in the Greek way—
  • ‘I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
  • Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows’;
  • when Virgil wrote in the Greek way—
  • ‘Muscosi fontes et somno mollior herba,’
  • and
  • ‘Pallentes violas et summa papavera carpens
  • Narcissum et florem jungit bene olentis anethi’;
  • they looked at nature without ecstasy, but with the affection a man
  • feels for the garden where he has walked daily and thought pleasant
  • thoughts. They looked at nature in the modern way, the way of people
  • who are poetical, but are more interested in one another than in a
  • nature which has faded to be but friendly and pleasant, the way of
  • people who have forgotten the ancient religion.
  • III
  • Men who lived in a world where anything might flow and change, and
  • become any other thing; and among great gods whose passions were in
  • the flaming sunset, and in the thunder and the thunder-shower, had
  • not our thoughts of weight and measure. They worshipped nature and
  • the abundance of nature, and had always, as it seems, for a supreme
  • ritual that tumultuous dance among the hills or in the depths of the
  • woods, where unearthly ecstasy fell upon the dancers, until they seemed
  • the gods or the godlike beasts, and felt their souls overtopping the
  • moon; and, as some think, imagined for the first time in the world the
  • blessed country of the gods and of the happy dead. They had imaginative
  • passions because they did not live within our own strait limits, and
  • were nearer to ancient chaos, every man’s desire, and had immortal
  • models about them. The hare that ran by among the dew might have sat
  • upon his haunches when the first man was made, and the poor bunch of
  • rushes under their feet might have been a goddess laughing among the
  • stars; and with but a little magic, a little waving of the hands, a
  • little murmuring of the lips, they too could become a hare or a bunch
  • of rushes, and know immortal love and immortal hatred.
  • All folk literature, and all literature that keeps the folk tradition,
  • delights in unbounded and immortal things. The _Kalevala_ delights in
  • the seven hundred years that Luonaton wanders in the depths of the
  • sea with Wäinämöinen in her womb, and the Mahomedan king in the Song
  • of Roland, pondering upon the greatness of Charlemagne, repeats over
  • and over, ‘He is three hundred years old, when will he weary of war?’
  • Cuchulain in the Irish folk tale had the passion of victory, and he
  • overcame all men, and died warring upon the waves, because they alone
  • had the strength to overcome him. The lover in the Irish folk song bids
  • his beloved come with him into the woods, and see the salmon leap in
  • the rivers, and hear the cuckoo sing, because death will never find
  • them in the heart of the woods. Oisin, new come from his three hundred
  • years of faeryland, and of the love that is in faeryland, bids Saint
  • Patrick cease his prayers a while and listen to the blackbird, because
  • it is the blackbird of Darrycarn that Finn brought from Norway, three
  • hundred years before, and set its nest upon the oak-tree with his own
  • hands. Surely if one goes far enough into the woods, one will find
  • there all that one is seeking? Who knows how many centuries the birds
  • of the woods have been singing?
  • All folk literature has indeed a passion whose like is not in modern
  • literature and music and art, except where it has come by some straight
  • or crooked way out of ancient times. Love was held to be a fatal
  • sickness in ancient Ireland, and there is a love-poem in _The Songs of
  • Connacht_ that is like a death cry: ‘My love, O she is my love, the
  • woman who is most for destroying me, dearer is she for making me ill
  • than the woman who would be for making me well. She is my treasure, O
  • she is my treasure, the woman of the grey eyes ... a woman who would
  • not lay a hand under my head.... She is my love, O she is my love, the
  • woman who left no strength in me; a woman who would not breathe a sigh
  • after me, a woman who would not raise a stone at my tomb.... She is my
  • secret love, O she is my secret love. A woman who tells me nothing, ...
  • a woman who does not remember me to be out.... She is my choice, O she
  • is my choice, the woman who would not look back at me, the woman who
  • would not make peace with me.... She is my desire, O she is my desire:
  • a woman dearest to me under the sun, a woman who would not pay me heed,
  • if I were to sit by her side. It is she ruined my heart and left a sigh
  • for ever in me.’ There is another song that ends, ‘The Erne shall be
  • in strong flood, the hills shall be torn down, and the sea shall have
  • red waves, and blood shall be spilled, and every mountain valley and
  • every moor shall be on high, before you shall perish, my little black
  • rose.’ Nor do the old Irish weigh and measure their hatred. The nurse
  • of O’Sullivan Bere in the folk song prays that the bed of his betrayer
  • may be the red hearth-stone of hell for ever. And an Elizabethan Irish
  • poet cries: ‘Three things are waiting for my death. The devil, who is
  • waiting for my soul and cares nothing for my body or my wealth; the
  • worms, who are waiting for my body but care nothing for my soul or my
  • wealth; my children, who are waiting for my wealth and care nothing for
  • my body or my soul. O Christ, hang all three in the one noose.’ Such
  • love and hatred seek no mortal thing but their own infinity, and such
  • love and hatred soon become love and hatred of the idea. The lover who
  • loves so passionately can soon sing to his beloved like the lover in
  • the poem by ‘A.E.,’ ‘A vast desire awakes and grows into forgetfulness
  • of thee.’
  • When an early Irish poet calls the Irishman famous for much loving,
  • and a proverb, a friend has heard in the Highlands of Scotland, talks
  • of the lovelessness of the Irishman, they may say but the same thing,
  • for if your passion is but great enough it leads you to a country where
  • there are many cloisters. The hater who hates with too good a heart
  • soon comes also to hate the idea only; and from this idealism in love
  • and hatred comes, as I think, a certain power of saying and forgetting
  • things, especially a power of saying and forgetting things in politics,
  • which others do not say and forget. The ancient farmers and herdsmen
  • were full of love and hatred, and made their friends gods, and their
  • enemies the enemies of gods, and those who keep their tradition are
  • not less mythological. From this ‘mistaking dreams,’ which are perhaps
  • essences, for ‘realities’ which are perhaps accidents, from this
  • ‘passionate, turbulent reaction against the despotism of fact,’ comes,
  • it may be, that melancholy which made all ancient peoples delight in
  • tales that end in death and parting, as modern peoples delight in
  • tales that end in marriage bells; and made all ancient peoples, who
  • like the old Irish had a nature more lyrical than dramatic, delight
  • in wild and beautiful lamentations. Life was so weighed down by the
  • emptiness of the great forests and by the mystery of all things, and by
  • the greatness of its own desires, and, as I think, by the loneliness
  • of much beauty; and seemed so little and so fragile and so brief,
  • that nothing could be more sweet in the memory than a tale that ended
  • in death and parting, and than a wild and beautiful lamentation. Men
  • did not mourn merely because their beloved was married to another, or
  • because learning was bitter in the mouth, for such mourning believes
  • that life might be happy were it different, and is therefore the less
  • mourning; but because they had been born and must die with their great
  • thirst unslaked. And so it is that all the august sorrowful persons
  • of literature, Cassandra and Helen and Deirdre, and Lear and Tristan,
  • have come out of legends and are indeed but the images of the primitive
  • imagination mirrored in the little looking-glass of the modern and
  • classic imagination. This is that ‘melancholy a man knows when he is
  • face to face’ with nature, and thinks ‘he hears her communing with him
  • about’ the mournfulness of being born and of dying; and how can it do
  • otherwise than call into his mind ‘its exiles, its flights across the
  • seas,’ that it may stir the ever-smouldering ashes? No Gaelic poetry is
  • so popular in Gaelic-speaking places as the lamentations of Oisin, old
  • and miserable, remembering the companions and the loves of his youth,
  • and his three hundred years in faeryland, and his faery love: all
  • dreams withering in the winds of time lament in his lamentations: ‘The
  • clouds are long above me this night; last night was a long night to me;
  • although I find this day long, yesterday was still longer. Every day
  • that comes to me is long.... No one in this great world is like me—a
  • poor old man dragging stones. The clouds are long above me this night.
  • I am the last man of the Fianna, the great Oisin, the son of Finn,
  • listening to the sound of bells. The clouds are long above me this
  • night.’ Matthew Arnold quotes the lamentation of Leyrach Hen as a type
  • of the Celtic melancholy, but I prefer to quote it as a type of the
  • primitive melancholy; ‘O my crutch, is it not autumn when the fern is
  • red and the water flag yellow? Have I not hated that which I love?...
  • Behold, old age, which makes sport of me, from the hair of my head and
  • my teeth, to my eyes which women loved. The four things I have all my
  • life most hated fall upon me together—coughing and old age, sickness
  • and sorrow. I am old, I am alone, shapeliness and warmth are gone from
  • me, the couch of honour shall be no more mine; I am miserable, I am
  • bent on my crutch. How evil was the lot allotted to Leyrach, the night
  • he was brought forth! Sorrows without end and no deliverance from his
  • burden.’ An Elizabethan writer describes extravagant sorrow by calling
  • it ‘to weep Irish’; and Oisin and Leyrach Hen are, I think, a little
  • nearer even to us modern Irish than they are to most people. That is
  • why our poetry and much of our thought is melancholy. ‘The same man,’
  • writes Dr. Hyde in the beautiful prose which he first writes in Gaelic,
  • ‘who will to-day be dancing, sporting, drinking, and shouting, will be
  • soliloquizing by himself to-morrow, heavy and sick and sad in his own
  • lonely little hut, making a croon over departed hopes, lost life, the
  • vanity of this world, and the coming of death.’
  • IV
  • Matthew Arnold asks how much of the Celt must one imagine in the ideal
  • man of genius. I prefer to say, how much of the ancient hunters and
  • fishers and of the ecstatic dancers among hills and woods must one
  • imagine in the ideal man of genius. Certainly a thirst for unbounded
  • emotion and a wild melancholy are troublesome things in the world,
  • and do not make its life more easy or orderly, but it may be the arts
  • are founded on the life beyond the world, and that they must cry in
  • the ears of our penury until the world has been consumed and become a
  • vision. Certainly, as Samuel Palmer wrote, ‘Excess is the vivifying
  • spirit of the finest art, and we must always seek to make excess more
  • abundantly excessive.’ Matthew Arnold has said that if he were asked
  • ‘where English got its turn for melancholy and its turn for natural
  • magic,’ he ‘would answer with little doubt that it got much of its
  • melancholy from a Celtic source, with no doubt at all that from a
  • Celtic source is got nearly all its natural magic.’
  • I will put this differently and say that literature dwindles to a mere
  • chronicle of circumstance, or passionless phantasies, and passionless
  • meditations, unless it is constantly flooded with the passions and
  • beliefs of ancient times, and that of all the fountains of the passions
  • and beliefs of ancient times in Europe, the Sclavonic, the Finnish, the
  • Scandinavian, and the Celtic, the Celtic alone has been for centuries
  • close to the main river of European literature. It has again and again
  • brought ‘the vivifying spirit’ ‘of excess’ into the arts of Europe.
  • Ernest Renan has told how the visions of purgatory seen by pilgrims to
  • Lough Derg—once visions of the pagan under-world, as the boat made out
  • of a hollow tree that bore the pilgrim to the holy island were alone
  • enough to prove—gave European thought new symbols of a more abundant
  • penitence; and had so great an influence that he has written, ‘It
  • cannot be doubted for a moment that to the number of poetical themes
  • Europe owes to the genius of the Celt is to be added the framework of
  • the divine comedy.’
  • A little later the legends of Arthur and his table, and of the Holy
  • Grail, once it seems the cauldron of an Irish god, changed the
  • literature of Europe, and it maybe changed, as it were, the very roots
  • of man’s emotions by their influence on the spirit of chivalry and
  • on the spirit of romance; and later still Shakespeare found his Mab,
  • and probably his Puck, and one knows not how much else of his faery
  • kingdom, in Celtic legend; while at the beginning of our own day Sir
  • Walter Scott gave Highland legends and Highland excitability so great a
  • mastery over all romance that they seem romance itself.
  • In our own time Scandinavian tradition, because of the imagination
  • of Richard Wagner and of William Morris and of the earlier and, as I
  • think, greater Heinrich Ibsen, has created a new romance, and through
  • the imagination of Richard Wagner, become all but the most passionate
  • element in the arts of the modern world. There is indeed but one other
  • element as passionate, the still unfaded legends of Arthur and of the
  • Holy Grail; and now a new fountain of legends, and, as I think, a
  • more abundant fountain than any in Europe, is being opened, the great
  • fountain of Gaelic legends; the tale of Deirdre, who alone among the
  • women who have set men mad was at once the white flame and the red
  • flame, wisdom and loveliness; the tale of the Sons of Tuireann, with
  • its unintelligible mysteries, an old Grail Quest as I think; the tale
  • of the four children changed into four swans, and lamenting over many
  • waters; the tale of the love of Cuchulain for an immortal goddess, and
  • his coming home to a mortal woman in the end; the tale of his many
  • battles at the ford with that dear friend he kissed before the battles,
  • and over whose dead body he wept when he had killed him; the tale of
  • his death and of the lamentations of Emer; the tale of the flight of
  • Grainne with Diarmuid, strangest of all tales of the fickleness of
  • woman, and the tale of the coming of Oisin out of faeryland, and of
  • his memories and lamentations. ‘The Celtic movement,’ as I understand
  • it, is principally the opening of this fountain, and none can measure
  • of how great importance it may be to coming times, for every new
  • fountain of legends is a new intoxication for the imagination of the
  • world. It comes at a time when the imagination of the world is as
  • ready, as it was at the coming of the tales of Arthur and of the Grail,
  • for a new intoxication. The reaction against the rationalism of the
  • eighteenth century has mingled with a reaction against the materialism
  • of the nineteenth century, and the symbolical movement, which has come
  • to perfection in Germany in Wagner, in England in the Pre-Raphaelites,
  • and in France in Villiers de L’Isle Adam, and Mallarmé, and
  • Maeterlinck, and has stirred the imagination of Ibsen and D’Annunzio,
  • is certainly the only movement that is saying new things. The arts
  • by brooding upon their own intensity have become religious, and are
  • seeking, as I think Verhaeren has said, to create a sacred book. They
  • must, as religious thought has always done, utter themselves through
  • legends; and the Sclavonic and Finnish legends tell of strange woods
  • and seas, and the Scandinavian legends are held by a great master, and
  • tell also of strange woods and seas, and the Welsh legends are held
  • by almost as many great masters as the Greek legends, while the Irish
  • legends move among known woods and seas, and have so much of a new
  • beauty, that they may well give the opening century its most memorable
  • symbols.
  • 1897.
  • I could have written this essay with much more precision and have much
  • better illustrated my meaning if I had waited until Lady Gregory had
  • finished her book of legends, _Cuchulain of Muirthemne_, a book to set
  • beside the _Morte d’Arthur_ and the _Mabinogion_.
  • 1902.
  • THE AUTUMN OF THE BODY
  • OUR thoughts and emotions are often but spray flung up from hidden
  • tides that follow a moon no eye can see. I remember that when I first
  • began to write I desired to describe outward things as vividly as
  • possible, and took pleasure, in which there was, perhaps, a little
  • discontent, in picturesque and declamatory books. And then quite
  • suddenly I lost the desire of describing outward things, and found
  • that I took little pleasure in a book unless it was spiritual and
  • unemphatic. I did not then understand that the change was from beyond
  • my own mind, but I understand now that writers are struggling all over
  • Europe, though not often with a philosophic understanding of their
  • struggle, against that picturesque and declamatory way of writing,
  • against that ‘externality’ which a time of scientific and political
  • thought has brought into literature. This struggle has been going on
  • for some years, but it has only just become strong enough to draw
  • within itself the little inner world which alone seeks more than
  • amusement in the arts. In France, where movements are more marked,
  • because the people are pre-eminently logical, _The Temptation of S.
  • Anthony_, the last great dramatic invention of the old romanticism,
  • contrasts very plainly with _Axël_, the first great dramatic invention
  • of the new; and Maeterlinck has followed Count Villiers de L’Isle
  • Adam. Flaubert wrote unforgettable descriptions of grotesque, bizarre,
  • and beautiful scenes and persons, as they show to the ear and to the
  • eye, and crowded them with historic and ethnographical details; but
  • Count Villiers de L’Isle Adam swept together, by what seemed a sudden
  • energy, words behind which glimmered a spiritual and passionate mood,
  • as the flame glimmers behind the dusky blue and red glass in an Eastern
  • lamp; and created persons from whom has fallen all even of personal
  • characteristic except a thirst for that hour when all things shall pass
  • away like a cloud, and a pride like that of the Magi following their
  • star over many mountains; while Maeterlinck has plucked away even this
  • thirst and this pride and set before us faint souls, naked and pathetic
  • shadows already half vapour and sighing to one another upon the border
  • of the last abyss. There has been, as I think, a like change in French
  • painting, for one sees everywhere, instead of the dramatic stories and
  • picturesque moments of an older school, frail and tremulous bodies
  • unfitted for the labour of life, and landscape where subtle rhythms of
  • colour and of form have overcome the clear outline of things as we see
  • them in the labour of life.
  • There has been a like change in England, but it has come more gradually
  • and is more mixed with lesser changes than in France. The poetry which
  • found its expression in the poems of writers like Browning and of
  • Tennyson, and even of writers, who are seldom classed with them, like
  • Swinburne, and like Shelley in his earlier years, pushed its limits
  • as far as possible, and tried to absorb into itself the science and
  • politics, the philosophy and morality of its time; but a new poetry,
  • which is always contracting its limits, has grown up under the shadow
  • of the old. Rossetti began it, but was too much of a painter in his
  • poetry to follow it with a perfect devotion; and it became a movement
  • when Mr. Lang and Mr. Gosse and Mr. Dobson devoted themselves to
  • the most condensed of lyric poems, and when Mr. Bridges, a more
  • considerable poet, elaborated a rhythm too delicate for any but an
  • almost bodiless emotion, and repeated over and over the most ancient
  • notes of poetry, and none but these. The poets who followed have
  • either, like Mr. Kipling, turned from serious poetry altogether, and
  • so passed out of the processional order, or speak out of some personal
  • or spiritual passion in words and types and metaphors that draw one’s
  • imagination as far as possible from the complexities of modern life and
  • thought. The change has been more marked in English painting, which,
  • when intense enough to belong to the procession order, began to cast
  • out things, as they are seen by minds plunged in the labour of life, so
  • much before French painting that ideal art is sometimes called English
  • art upon the Continent.
  • I see, indeed, in the arts of every country those faint lights and
  • faint colours and faint outlines and faint energies which many call
  • ‘the decadence,’ and which I, because I believe that the arts lie
  • dreaming of things to come, prefer to call the autumn of the body.
  • An Irish poet whose rhythms are like the cry of a sea-bird in autumn
  • twilight has told its meaning in the line, ‘The very sunlight’s weary,
  • and it’s time to quit the plough.’ Its importance is the greater
  • because it comes to us at the moment when we are beginning to be
  • interested in many things which positive science, the interpreter
  • of exterior law, has always denied: communion of mind with mind in
  • thought and without words, foreknowledge in dreams and in visions, and
  • the coming among us of the dead, and of much else. We are, it may be,
  • at a crowning crisis of the world, at the moment when man is about
  • to ascend, with the wealth, he has been so long gathering, upon his
  • shoulders, the stairway he has been descending from the first days.
  • The first poets, if one may find their images in the _Kalevala_, had
  • not Homer’s preoccupation with things, and he was not so full of their
  • excitement as Virgil. Dante added to poetry a dialectic which, although
  • he made it serve his laborious ecstasy, was the invention of minds
  • trained by the labour of life, by a traffic among many things, and
  • not a spontaneous expression of an interior life; while Shakespeare
  • shattered the symmetry of verse and of drama that he might fill them
  • with things and their accidental relations to one another.
  • Each of these writers had come further down the stairway than those
  • who had lived before him, but it was only with the modern poets, with
  • Goethe and Wordsworth and Browning, that poetry gave up the right to
  • consider all things in the world as a dictionary of types and symbols
  • and began to call itself a critic of life and an interpreter of things
  • as they are. Painting, music, science, politics, and even religion,
  • because they have felt a growing belief that we know nothing but the
  • fading and flowering of the world, have changed in numberless elaborate
  • ways. Man has wooed and won the world, and has fallen weary, and not,
  • I think, for a time, but with a weariness that will not end until the
  • last autumn, when the stars shall be blown away like withered leaves.
  • He grew weary when he said, ‘These things that I touch and see and hear
  • are alone real,’ for he saw them without illusion at last, and found
  • them but air and dust and moisture. And now he must be philosophical
  • above everything, even about the arts, for he can only return the way
  • he came, and so escape from weariness, by philosophy. The arts are,
  • I believe, about to take upon their shoulders the burdens that have
  • fallen from the shoulders of priests, and to lead us back upon our
  • journey by filling our thoughts with the essences of things, and not
  • with things. We are about to substitute once more the distillation of
  • alchemy for the analyses of chemistry and for some other sciences; and
  • certain of us are looking everywhere for the perfect alembic that no
  • silver or golden drop may escape. Mr. Symons has written lately on M.
  • Mallarmé’s method, and has quoted him as saying that we should ‘abolish
  • the pretension, æsthetically an error, despite its dominion over
  • almost all the masterpieces, to enclose within the subtle pages other
  • than—for example—the horror of the forest or the silent thunder in the
  • leaves, not the intense dense wood of the trees,’ and as desiring to
  • substitute for ‘the old lyric afflatus or the enthusiastic personal
  • direction of the phrase’ words ‘that take light from mutual reflection,
  • like an actual trail of fire over precious stones,’ and ‘to make an
  • entire word hitherto unknown to the language’ ‘out of many vocables.’
  • Mr. Symons understands these and other sentences to mean that poetry
  • will henceforth be a poetry of essences, separated one from another in
  • little and intense poems. I think there will be much poetry of this
  • kind, because of an ever more arduous search for an almost disembodied
  • ecstasy, but I think we will not cease to write long poems, but rather
  • that we will write them more and more as our new belief makes the world
  • plastic under our hands again. I think that we will learn again how to
  • describe at great length an old man wandering among enchanted islands,
  • his return home at last, his slow-gathering vengeance, a flitting shape
  • of a goddess, and a flight of arrows, and yet to make all of these
  • so different things ‘take light by mutual reflection, like an actual
  • trail of fire over precious stones,’ and become ‘an entire word,’ the
  • signature or symbol of a mood of the divine imagination as imponderable
  • as ‘the horror of the forest or the silent thunder in the leaves.’
  • 1898.
  • THE MOODS
  • LITERATURE differs from explanatory and scientific writing in being
  • wrought about a mood, or a community of moods, as the body is wrought
  • about an invisible soul; and if it uses argument, theory, erudition,
  • observation, and seems to grow hot in assertion or denial, it does so
  • merely to make us partakers at the banquet of the moods. It seems to me
  • that these moods are the labourers and messengers of the Ruler of All,
  • the gods of ancient days still dwelling on their secret Olympus, the
  • angels of more modern days ascending and descending upon their shining
  • ladder; and that argument, theory, erudition, observation, are merely
  • what Blake called ‘little devils who fight for themselves,’ illusions
  • of our visible passing life, who must be made serve the moods, or
  • we have no part in eternity. Everything that can be seen, touched,
  • measured, explained, understood, argued over, is to the imaginative
  • artist nothing more than a means, for he belongs to the invisible
  • life, and delivers its ever new and ever ancient revelation. We hear
  • much of his need for the restraints of reason, but the only restraint
  • he can obey is the mysterious instinct that has made him an artist,
  • and that teaches him to discover immortal moods in mortal desires,
  • an undecaying hope in our trivial ambitions, a divine love in sexual
  • passion.
  • 1895.
  • THE BODY OF THE FATHER CHRISTIAN ROSENCRUX
  • THE followers of the Father Christian Rosencrux, says the old
  • tradition, wrapped his imperishable body in noble raiment and laid it
  • under the house of their order, in a tomb containing the symbols of all
  • things in heaven and earth, and in the waters under the earth, and set
  • about him inextinguishable magical lamps, which burnt on generation
  • after generation, until other students of the order came upon the
  • tomb by chance. It seems to me that the imagination has had no very
  • different history during the last two hundred years, but has been laid
  • in a great tomb of criticism, and had set over it inextinguishable
  • magical lamps of wisdom and romance, and has been altogether so nobly
  • housed and apparelled that we have forgotten that its wizard lips
  • are closed, or but opened for the complaining of some melancholy and
  • ghostly voice. The ancients and the Elizabethans abandoned themselves
  • to imagination as a woman abandons herself to love, and created great
  • beings who made the people of this world seem but shadows, and great
  • passions which made our loves and hatreds appear but ephemeral and
  • trivial phantasies; but now it is not the great persons, or the great
  • passions we imagine, which absorb us, for the persons and passions in
  • our poems are mainly reflections our mirror has caught from older poems
  • or from the life about us, but the wise comments we make upon them, the
  • criticism of life we wring from their fortunes. Arthur and his Court
  • are nothing, but the many-coloured lights that play about them are as
  • beautiful as the lights from cathedral windows; Pompilia and Guido are
  • but little, while the ever-recurring meditations and expositions which
  • climax in the mouth of the Pope are among the wisest of the Christian
  • age. I cannot get it out of my mind that this age of criticism is
  • about to pass, and an age of imagination, of emotion, of moods, of
  • revelation, about to come in its place; for certainly belief in a
  • supersensual world is at hand again; and when the notion that we are
  • ‘phantoms of the earth and water’ has gone down the wind, we will trust
  • our own being and all it desires to invent; and when the external
  • world is no more the standard of reality, we will learn again that the
  • great Passions are angels of God, and that to embody them ‘uncurbed
  • in their eternal glory,’ even in their labour for the ending of man’s
  • peace and prosperity, is more than to comment, however wisely, upon the
  • tendencies of our time, or to express the socialistic, or humanitarian,
  • or other forces of our time, or even ‘to sum up’ our time, as the
  • phrase is; for Art is a revelation, and not a criticism, and the life
  • of the artist is in the old saying, ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth,
  • and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh
  • and whither it goeth; so is every one that is born of the spirit.’
  • 1895.
  • _THE RETURN OF ULYSSES_
  • I
  • M. MAETERLINCK, in his beautiful _Treasure of the Humble_, compares
  • the dramas of our stage to the paintings of an obsolete taste; and the
  • dramas of the stage for which he hopes, to the paintings of a taste
  • that cannot become obsolete. ‘The true artist,’ he says, ‘no longer
  • chooses Marius triumphing over the Cimbrians, or the assassination
  • of the Duke of Guise, as fit subjects for his art; for he is well
  • aware that the psychology of victory or murder is but elementary and
  • exceptional, and that the solemn voice of men and things, the voice
  • that issues forth so timidly and hesitatingly, cannot be heard amidst
  • the idle uproar of acts of violence. And therefore will he place on his
  • canvas a house lost in the heart of the country, a door open at the end
  • of a passage, a face or hands at rest.’ I do not understand him to mean
  • that our dramas should have no victories or murders, for he quotes
  • for our example plays that have both, but only that their victories
  • and murders shall not be to excite our nerves, but to illustrate the
  • reveries of a wisdom which shall be as much a part of the daily life of
  • the wise as a face or hands at rest. And certainly the greater plays
  • of the past ages have been built after such a fashion. If this fashion
  • is about to become our fashion also, and there are signs that it is,
  • plays like some of Mr. Robert Bridges will come out of that obscurity
  • into which all poetry, that is not lyrical poetry, has fallen, and even
  • popular criticism will begin to know something about them. Some day
  • the few among us, who care for poetry more than any temporal thing,
  • and who believe that its delights cannot be perfect when we read it
  • alone in our rooms and long for one to share its delights, but that
  • they might be perfect in the theatre, when we share them friend with
  • friend, lover with beloved, will persuade a few idealists to seek
  • out the lost art of speaking, and seek out ourselves the lost art,
  • that is perhaps nearest of all arts to eternity, the subtle art of
  • listening. When that day comes we will talk much of Mr. Bridges; for
  • did he not write scrupulous, passionate poetry to be sung and to be
  • spoken, when there were few to sing and as yet none to speak? There
  • is one play especially, _The Return of Ulysses_, which we will praise
  • for perfect after its kind, the kind of our new drama of wisdom, for
  • it moulds into dramatic shape, and with as much as possible of literal
  • translation, those closing books of the Odyssey which are perhaps the
  • most perfect poetry of the world, and compels that great tide of song
  • to flow through delicate dramatic verse, with little abatement of its
  • own leaping and clamorous speed. As I read, the gathering passion
  • overwhelms me, as it did when Homer himself was the singer, and when
  • I read at last the lines in which the maid describes to Penelope the
  • battle with the suitors, at which she looks through the open door, I
  • tremble with excitement.
  • ‘_Penelope_: Alas! what cries! Say, is the prince still safe?
  • _The Maid_: He shieldeth himself well, and striketh surely;
  • His foes fall down before him. Ah! now what can I see?
  • Who cometh? Lo! a dazzling helm, a spear
  • Of silver or electron; share and swift
  • The piercings. How they fall! Ha! shields are raised
  • In vain. I am blinded, or the beggar-man
  • Hath waxed in strength. He is changed, he is young. O strange!
  • He is all in golden armour. These are gods
  • That slay the suitors. (_Runs to Penelope._) O lady, forgive me.
  • ’Tis Ares’ self. I saw his crispèd beard;
  • I saw beneath his helm his curlèd locks.’
  • The coming of Athene helmed ‘in silver or electron’ and her
  • transformation of Ulysses are not, as the way is with the only modern
  • dramas that popular criticism holds to be dramatic, the climax of an
  • excitement of the nerves, but of that unearthly excitement which has
  • wisdom for fruit, and is of like kind with the ecstasy of the seers,
  • an altar flame, unshaken by the winds of the world, and burning every
  • moment with whiter and purer brilliance.
  • Mr. Bridges has written it in what is practically the classical manner,
  • as he has done in _Achilles in Scyros_—a placid and charming setting
  • for many placid and charming lyrics—
  • ‘And ever we keep a feast of delight
  • The betrothal of hearts, when spirits unite,
  • Creating an offspring of joy, a treasure
  • Unknown to the bad, for whom
  • The gods foredoom
  • The glitter of pleasure
  • And a dark tomb.’
  • The poet who writes best in the Shakespearian manner is a poet with
  • a circumstantial and instinctive mind, who delights to speak with
  • strange voices and to see his mind in the mirror of Nature; while Mr.
  • Bridges, like most of us to-day, has a lyrical and meditative mind, and
  • delights to speak with his own voice and to see Nature in the mirror of
  • his mind. In reading his plays in a Shakespearian manner, I find that
  • he is constantly arranging his story in such and such a way because he
  • has read that the persons he is writing of did such and such things,
  • and not because his soul has passed into the soul of their world and
  • understood its unchangeable destinies. His _Return of Ulysses_ is
  • admirable in beauty, because its classical gravity of speech, which
  • does not, like Shakespeare’s verse, desire the vivacity of common
  • life, purifies and subdues all passion into lyrical and meditative
  • ecstasies, and because the unity of place and time in the late acts
  • compels a logical rather than instinctive procession of incidents; and
  • if the Shakespearian _Nero: Second Part_ approaches it in beauty and in
  • dramatic power, it is because it eddies about Nero and Seneca, who had
  • both, to a great extent, lyrical and meditative minds. Had Mr. Bridges
  • been a true Shakespearian, the pomp and glory of the world would have
  • drowned that subtle voice that speaks amid our heterogeneous lives of
  • a life lived in obedience to a lonely and distinguished ideal.
  • II
  • The more a poet rids his verses of heterogeneous knowledge and
  • irrelevant analysis, and purifies his mind with elaborate art, the
  • more does the little ritual of his verse resemble the great ritual of
  • Nature, and become mysterious and inscrutable. He becomes, as all the
  • great mystics have believed, a vessel of the creative power of God; and
  • whether he be a great poet or a small poet, we can praise the poems,
  • which but seem to be his, with the extremity of praise that we give
  • this great ritual which is but copied from the same eternal model.
  • There is poetry that is like the white light of noon, and poetry that
  • has the heaviness of woods, and poetry that has the golden light of
  • dawn or of sunset; and I find in the poetry of Mr. Bridges in the
  • plays, but still more in the lyrics, the pale colours, the delicate
  • silence, the low murmurs of cloudy country days, when the plough is in
  • the earth, and the clouds darkening towards sunset; and had I the great
  • gift of praising, I would praise it as I would praise these things.
  • 1896.
  • IRELAND AND THE ARTS
  • THE arts have failed; fewer people are interested in them every
  • generation. The mere business of living, of making money, of amusing
  • oneself, occupies people more and more, and makes them less and less
  • capable of the difficult art of appreciation. When they buy a picture
  • it generally shows a long-current idea, or some conventional form that
  • can be admired in that lax mood one admires a fine carriage in or fine
  • horses in; and when they buy a book it is so much in the manner of the
  • picture that it is forgotten, when its moment is over, as a glass of
  • wine is forgotten. We who care deeply about the arts find ourselves
  • the priesthood of an almost forgotten faith, and we must, I think, if
  • we would win the people again, take upon ourselves the method and the
  • fervour of a priesthood. We must be half humble and half proud. We see
  • the perfect more than others, it may be, but we must find the passions
  • among the people. We must baptize as well as preach.
  • The makers of religions have established their ceremonies, their form
  • of art, upon fear of death, on the hope of the father in his child,
  • upon the love of man and woman. They have even gathered into their
  • ceremonies the ceremonies of more ancient faiths, for fear a grain of
  • the dust turned into crystal in some past fire, a passion that had
  • mingled with the religious idea, might perish if the ancient ceremony
  • perished. They have renamed wells and images and given new meanings to
  • ceremonies of spring and midsummer and harvest. In very early days the
  • arts were so possessed by this method that they were almost inseparable
  • from religion, going side by side with it into all life. But, to-day,
  • they have grown, as I think, too proud, too anxious to live alone
  • with the perfect, and so one sees them, as I think, like charioteers
  • standing by deserted chariots and holding broken reins in their hands,
  • or seeking to go upon their way drawn by the one passion which alone
  • remains to them out of the passions of the world. We should not blame
  • them, but rather a mysterious tendency in things which will have its
  • end some day. In England, men like William Morris, seeing about them
  • passions so long separated from the perfect that it seemed as if they
  • could not be changed until society had been changed, tried to unite the
  • arts once more to life by uniting them to use. They advised painters to
  • paint fewer pictures upon canvas, and to burn more of them on plates;
  • and they tried to persuade sculptors that a candlestick might be as
  • beautiful as a statue. But here in Ireland, when the arts have grown
  • humble, they will find two passions ready to their hands, love of
  • the Unseen Life and love of country. I would have a devout writer or
  • painter often content himself with subjects taken from his religious
  • beliefs; and if his religious beliefs are those of the majority, he
  • may at last move hearts in every cottage. While even if his religious
  • beliefs are those of some minority, he will have a better welcome
  • than if he wrote of the rape of Persephone, or painted the burning
  • of Shelley’s body. He will have founded his work on a passion which
  • will bring him to many besides those who have been trained to care
  • for beautiful things by a special education. If he is a painter or a
  • sculptor he will find churches awaiting his hand everywhere, and if he
  • follows the masters of his craft our other passion will come into his
  • work also, for he will show his Holy Family winding among hills like
  • those of Ireland, and his Bearer of the Cross among faces copied from
  • the faces of his own town. Our art teachers should urge their pupils
  • into this work, for I can remember, when I was myself a Dublin art
  • student, how I used to despond, when eagerness burned low, as it always
  • must now and then, at seeing no market at all.
  • But I would rather speak to those who, while moved in other things
  • than the arts by love of country, are beginning to write, as I was
  • some sixteen years ago, without any decided impulse to one thing more
  • than another, and especially to those who are convinced, as I was
  • convinced, that art is tribeless, nationless, a blossom gathered in No
  • Man’s Land. The Greeks, the only perfect artists of the world, looked
  • within their own borders, and we, like them, have a history fuller than
  • any modern history of imaginative events; and legends which surpass,
  • as I think, all legends but theirs in wild beauty, and in our land,
  • as in theirs, there is no river or mountain that is not associated in
  • the memory with some event or legend; while political reasons have
  • made love of country, as I think, even greater among us than among
  • them. I would have our writers and craftsmen of many kinds master this
  • history and these legends, and fix upon their memory the appearance
  • of mountains and rivers and make it all visible again in their arts,
  • so that Irishmen, even though they had gone thousands of miles away,
  • would still be in their own country. Whether they chose for the subject
  • the carrying off of the Brown Bull, or the coming of Patrick, or the
  • political struggle of later times, the other world comes so much into
  • it all that their love of it would move in their hands also, and as
  • much, it may be, as in the hands of the Greek craftsmen. In other
  • words, I would have Ireland recreate the ancient arts, the arts as they
  • were understood in Judæa, in India, in Scandinavia, in Greece and Rome,
  • in every ancient land; as they were understood when they moved a whole
  • people and not a few people who have grown up in a leisured class and
  • made this understanding their business.
  • I think that my reader[B] will have agreed with most that I have said
  • up till now, for we all hope for arts like these. I think indeed I
  • first learned to hope for them myself in Young Ireland Societies,
  • or in reading the essays of Davis. An Englishman, with his belief
  • in progress, with his instinctive preference for the cosmopolitan
  • literature of the last century, may think arts like these parochial,
  • but they are the arts we have begun the making of.
  • I will not, however, have all my readers with me when I say that no
  • writer, no artist, even though he choose Brian Boroihme or Saint
  • Patrick for his subject, should try to make his work popular. Once he
  • has chosen a subject he must think of nothing but giving it such an
  • expression as will please himself. As Walt Whitman has written—
  • ‘The oration is to the orator, the acting is to the
  • actor and actress, not to the audience:
  • And no man understands any greatness or goodness,
  • but his own or the indication of his own.’
  • He must make his work a part of his own journey towards beauty and
  • truth. He must picture saint or hero, or hillside, as he sees them, not
  • as he is expected to see them, and he must comfort himself, when others
  • cry out against what he has seen, by remembering that no two men are
  • alike, and that there is no ‘excellent beauty without strangeness.’
  • In this matter he must be without humility. He may, indeed, doubt the
  • reality of his vision if men do not quarrel with him as they did with
  • the Apostles, for there is only one perfection and only one search for
  • perfection, and it sometimes has the form of the religious life and
  • sometimes of the artistic life; and I do not think these lives differ
  • in their wages, for ‘The end of art is peace,’ and out of the one as
  • out of the other comes the cry: _Sero te amavi, Pulchritudo tam antiqua
  • et tam nova! Sero te amavi!_
  • The Catholic Church is not the less the Church of the people because
  • the Mass is spoken in Latin, and art is not less the art of the people
  • because it does not always speak in the language they are used to.
  • I once heard my friend Mr. Ellis say, speaking at a celebration in
  • honour of a writer whose fame had not come till long after his death,
  • ‘It is not the business of a poet to make himself understood, but it
  • is the business of the people to understand him. That they are at last
  • compelled to do so is the proof of his authority.’ And certainly if
  • you take from art its martyrdom, you will take from it its glory. It
  • might still reflect the passing modes of mankind, but it would cease to
  • reflect the face of God.
  • If our craftsmen were to choose their subjects under what we may call,
  • if we understand faith to mean that belief in a spiritual life which is
  • not confined to one Church, the persuasion of their faith and their
  • country, they would soon discover that although their choice seemed
  • arbitrary at first, it had obeyed what was deepest in them. I could
  • not now write of any other country but Ireland, for my style has been
  • shaped by the subjects I have worked on, but there was a time when
  • my imagination seemed unwilling, when I found myself writing of some
  • Irish event in words that would have better fitted some Italian or
  • Eastern event, for my style had been shaped in that general stream of
  • European literature which has come from so many watersheds, and it was
  • slowly, very slowly, that I made a new style. It was years before I
  • could rid myself of Shelley’s Italian light, but now I think my style
  • is myself. I might have found more of Ireland if I had written in
  • Irish, but I have found a little, and I have found all myself. I am
  • persuaded that if the Irishmen who are painting conventional pictures
  • or writing conventional books on alien subjects, which have been worn
  • away like pebbles on the shore, would do the same, they, too, might
  • find themselves. Even the landscape-painter, who paints a place that he
  • loves, and that no other man has painted, soon discovers that no style
  • learned in the studios is wholly fitted to his purpose. And I cannot
  • but believe that if our painters of Highland cattle and moss-covered
  • barns were to care enough for their country to care for what makes it
  • different from other countries, they would discover, when struggling,
  • it may be, to paint the exact grey of the bare Burren Hills, and of a
  • sudden it may be, a new style, their very selves. And I admit, though
  • in this I am moved by some touch of fanaticism, that even when I see an
  • old subject written of or painted in a new way, I am yet jealous for
  • Cuchulain, and for Baile, and Aillinn, and for those grey mountains
  • that still are lacking their celebration. I sometimes reproach myself
  • because I cannot admire Mr. Hughes’ beautiful, piteous _Orpheus and
  • Eurydice_ with an unquestioning mind. I say with my lips, ‘The Spirit
  • made it, for it is beautiful, and the Spirit bloweth where it listeth,’
  • but I say in my heart, ‘Aengus and Etain would have served his turn’;
  • but one cannot, perhaps, love or believe at all if one does not love or
  • believe a little too much.
  • And I do not think with unbroken pleasure of our scholars who write
  • about German writers or about periods of Greek history. I always
  • remember that they could give us a number of little books which would
  • tell, each book for some one country, or some one parish, the verses,
  • or the stories, or the events that would make every lake or mountain
  • a man can see from his own door an excitement in his imagination. I
  • would have some of them leave that work of theirs which will never
  • lack hands, and begin to dig in Ireland, the garden of the future,
  • understanding that here in Ireland the spirit of man may be about to
  • wed the soil of the world.
  • Art and scholarship like these I have described would give Ireland
  • more than they received from her, for they would make love of the
  • unseen more unshakable, more ready to plunge deep into the abyss, and
  • they would make love of country more fruitful in the mind, more a part
  • of daily life. One would know an Irishman into whose life they had
  • come—and in a few generations they would come into the life of all,
  • rich and poor—by something that set him apart among men. He himself
  • would understand that more was expected of him than of others because
  • he had greater possessions. The Irish race would have become a chosen
  • race, one of the pillars that uphold the world.
  • 1901.
  • FOOTNOTE:
  • [Footnote B: This essay was first published in the _United Irishman_.]
  • THE GALWAY PLAINS
  • LADY GREGORY has just given me her beautiful _Poets and Dreamers_, and
  • it has brought to mind a day two or three years ago when I stood on the
  • side of Slieve Echtge, looking out over Galway. The Burren Hills were
  • to my left, and though I forget whether I could see the cairn over Bald
  • Conan of the Fianna, I could certainly see many places there that are
  • in poems and stories. In front of me, over many miles of level Galway
  • plains, I saw a low blue hill flooded with evening light. I asked a
  • countryman who was with me what hill that was, and he told me it was
  • Cruachmaa of the Sidhe. I had often heard of Cruachmaa of the Sidhe
  • even as far north as Sligo, for the country people have told me a great
  • many stories of the great host of the Sidhe who live there, still
  • fighting and holding festivals.
  • I asked the old countryman about it, and he told me of strange women
  • who had come from it, and who would come into a house having the
  • appearance of countrywomen, but would know all that happened in that
  • house; and how they would always pay back with increase, though not by
  • their own hands, whatever was given to them. And he had heard, too, of
  • people who had been carried away into the hill, and how one man went to
  • look for his wife there, and dug into the hill and all but got his wife
  • again, but at the very moment she was coming out to him, the pick he
  • was digging with struck her upon the head and killed her. I asked him
  • if he had himself seen any of its enchantments, and he said, ‘Sometimes
  • when I look over to the hill, I see a mist lying on the top of it, that
  • goes away after a while.’
  • A great part of the poems and stories in Lady Gregory’s book were made
  • or gathered between Burren and Cruachmaa. It was here that Raftery,
  • the wandering country poet of ninety years ago, praised and blamed,
  • chanting fine verses, and playing badly on his fiddle. It is here
  • the ballads of meeting and parting have been sung, and some whose
  • lamentations for defeat are still remembered may have passed through
  • this plain flying from the battle of Aughrim.
  • ‘I will go up on the mountain alone; and I will come hither from it
  • again. It is there I saw the camp of the Gael, the poor troop thinned,
  • not keeping with one another; Och Ochone!’ And here, if one can believe
  • many devout people whose stories are in the book, Christ has walked
  • upon the roads, bringing the needy to some warm fire-side, and sending
  • one of His Saints to anoint the dying.
  • I do not think these country imaginations have changed much for
  • centuries, for they are still busy with those two themes of the ancient
  • Irish poets, the sternness of battle and the sadness of parting and
  • death. The emotion that in other countries has made many love songs has
  • here been given, in a long wooing, to danger, that ghostly bride. It is
  • not a difference in the substance of things that the lamentations that
  • were sung after battles are now sung for men who have died upon the
  • gallows.
  • The emotion has become not less, but more noble, by the change, for the
  • man who goes to death with the thought—
  • ‘It is with the people I was,
  • It is not with the law I was,’
  • has behind him generations of poetry and poetical life.
  • The poets of to-day speak with the voice of the unknown priest who
  • wrote, some two hundred years ago, that _Sorrowful Lament for Ireland_,
  • Lady Gregory has put into passionate and rhythmical prose—
  • ‘I do not know of anything under the sky
  • That is friendly or favourable to the Gael,
  • But only the sea that our need brings us to,
  • Or the wind that blows to the harbour
  • The ship that is bearing us away from Ireland;
  • And there is reason that these are reconciled with us,
  • For we increase the sea with our tears,
  • And the wandering wind with our sighs.’
  • There is still in truth upon these great level plains a people, a
  • community bound together by imaginative possessions, by stories and
  • poems which have grown out of its own life, and by a past of great
  • passions which can still waken the heart to imaginative action. One
  • could still, if one had the genius, and had been born to Irish, write
  • for these people plays and poems like those of Greece. Does not the
  • greatest poetry always require a people to listen to it? England or
  • any other country which takes its tune from the great cities and gets
  • its taste from schools and not from old custom, may have a mob, but it
  • cannot have a people. In England there are a few groups of men and
  • women who have good taste, whether in cookery or in books; and the
  • great multitudes but copy them or their copiers. The poet must always
  • prefer the community where the perfected minds express the people, to a
  • community that is vainly seeking to copy the perfected minds. To have
  • even perfectly the thoughts than can be weighed, the knowledge that
  • can be got from books, the precision that can be learned at school, to
  • belong to any aristocracy, is to be a little pool that will soon dry
  • up. A people alone are a great river; and that is why I am persuaded
  • that where a people has died, a nation is about to die.
  • 1903.
  • EMOTION OF MULTITUDE
  • I HAVE been thinking a good deal about plays lately, and I have been
  • wondering why I dislike the clear and logical construction which seems
  • necessary if one is to succeed on the Modern Stage. It came into my
  • head the other day that this construction, which all the world has
  • learnt from France, has everything of high literature except the
  • emotion of multitude. The Greek drama has got the emotion of multitude
  • from its chorus, which called up famous sorrows, long-leaguered Troy,
  • much-enduring Odysseus, and all the gods and heroes to witness, as it
  • were, some well-ordered fable, some action separated but for this from
  • all but itself. The French play delights in the well-ordered fable,
  • but by leaving out the chorus it has created an art where poetry and
  • imagination, always the children of far-off multitudinous things,
  • must of necessity grow less important than the mere will. This is
  • why, I said to myself, French dramatic poetry is so often a little
  • rhetorical, for rhetoric is the will trying to do the work of the
  • imagination. The Shakespearian Drama gets the emotion of multitude out
  • of the sub-plot which copies the main plot, much as a shadow upon the
  • wall copies one’s body in the firelight. We think of King Lear less
  • as the history of one man and his sorrows than as the history of a
  • whole evil time. Lear’s shadow is in Gloster, who also has ungrateful
  • children, and the mind goes on imagining other shadows, shadow beyond
  • shadow till it has pictured the world. In _Hamlet_, one hardly notices,
  • so subtly is the web woven, that the murder of Hamlet’s father and the
  • sorrow of Hamlet are shadowed in the lives of Fortinbras and Ophelia
  • and Laertes, whose fathers, too, have been killed. It is so in all the
  • plays, or in all but all, and very commonly the sub-plot is the main
  • plot working itself out in more ordinary men and women, and so doubly
  • calling up before us the image of multitude. Ibsen and Maeterlinck
  • have on the other hand created a new form, for they get multitude from
  • the Wild Duck in the Attic, or from the Crown at the bottom of the
  • Fountain, vague symbols that set the mind wandering from idea to idea,
  • emotion to emotion. Indeed all the great Masters have understood,
  • that there cannot be great art without the little limited life of the
  • fable, which is always the better the simpler it is, and the rich,
  • far-wandering, many-imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it. There
  • are some who understand that the simple unmysterious things living as
  • in a clear noonlight are of the nature of the sun, and that vague,
  • many-imaged things have in them the strength of the moon. Did not the
  • Egyptian carve it on emerald that all living things have the sun for
  • father and the moon for mother, and has it not been said that a man of
  • genius takes the most after his mother?
  • 1903.
  • _Printed by_ A. H. BULLEN, _at The Shakespeare Head Press,
  • Stratford-on-Avon._
  • * * * * *
  • Transcriber’s Notes:
  • Obvious punctuation errors repaired.
  • Page 33, “spirit” changed to “spirits” (spirits did not and)
  • Page 39, “battle-fielde” changed to “battle-fields” (studies and
  • battle-fields)
  • Page 139, “difcult” changed to “difficult” (have not been difficult)
  • Page 246, “Shakepearian” changed to “Shakespearian” (best in the
  • Shakespearian)
  • End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Collected Works in Verse and Prose
  • of William Butler Yeats, Vol. 6 (of 8), by William Butler Yeats
  • *** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WORKS OF W B YEATS, VOL 6 ***
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