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+Project Gutenberg's Ideas of Good and Evil, by William Butler Yeats
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Ideas of Good and Evil
+
+Author: William Butler Yeats
+
+Release Date: June 18, 2010 [EBook #32884]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Brian Foley and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
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+
+
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+
+
+
+
+Ideas of Good and Evil
+
+
+
+
+  _BY THE SAME WRITER--_
+      THE SECRET ROSE
+      THE CELTIC TWILIGHT
+      POEMS
+      THE WIND AMONG THE REEDS
+      THE SHADOWY WATERS
+      PLAYS FOR AN IRISH THEATRE
+          VOL. I.  WHERE THERE IS NOTHING
+          VOL. II. SHORTER PLAYS
+
+
+
+
+Ideas of Good and Evil
+
+
+Second Edition
+
+
+
+
+Ideas of Good and Evil.
+
+By W. B. Yeats
+
+
+A. H. BULLEN, 47 Great Russell
+
+Street, London, W.C. MCMIII
+
+
+
+
+Contents.
+
+
+  WHAT IS 'POPULAR POETRY'?                                        1
+
+  SPEAKING TO THE PSALTERY                                        16
+
+  MAGIC                                                           29
+
+  THE HAPPIEST OF THE POETS                                       70
+
+  THE PHILOSOPHY OF SHELLEY'S POETRY                              90
+
+  AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON                                           142
+
+  WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE IMAGINATION                              168
+
+  WILLIAM BLAKE AND HIS ILLUSTRATIONS TO _THE DIVINE COMEDY_     176
+
+  SYMBOLISM IN PAINTING                                          226
+
+  THE SYMBOLISM OF POETRY                                        237
+
+  THE THEATRE                                                    257
+
+  THE CELTIC ELEMENT IN LITERATURE                               270
+
+  THE AUTUMN OF THE BODY                                         296
+
+  THE MOODS                                                      306
+
+  THE BODY OF THE FATHER CHRISTIAN ROSENCRUX                     308
+
+  _THE RETURN OF ULYSSES_                                        312
+
+  IRELAND AND THE ARTS                                           320
+
+  THE GALWAY PLAINS                                              333
+
+  EMOTION OF MULTITUDE                                           339
+
+
+
+
+_Note._--The Essay on _Symbolism in Painting_ originally formed part of an
+Introduction to _A Book of Images drawn by W. T. Horton_ (Unicorn Press),
+1898.
+
+
+
+
+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 my 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 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: Song and music.]
+
+
+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 efforts 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 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 gravestones 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 hare-bells
+drenched with dew 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 mind 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 fowl 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 indeed 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
+wind-swept 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 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 a
+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
+Phoenix 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 in 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 shalt thou 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 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 its 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 socialist pamphlets he tells 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 men like him, 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 even 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 beauty, love and truth we seek
+  But in our minds? 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?
+  How 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 shadows 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.
+
+  This 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 vale,'
+
+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 sand 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,[1] 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 any one, 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 upon 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 and
+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 ever more. Two gates there are to the cave, the one set
+towards the North wind, whereby men may go down, but the portals toward
+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 evoked 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,
+  The desire for 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 with speed and 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 overflowing 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.
+
+
+
+
+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 farmhouses, 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 Hollingshead, and had given life a new luxury, a new
+splendour, and been 'too friendly' to his friends, 'too favourable' 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 disgrac'd,
+    And strength by limping sway disabled,
+  And Art made tongue-tied by authority,
+    And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,
+  And simple truth miscalled simplicity,
+    And captive good attending captain ill:
+  Tired with all these, from these would I begone
+  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
+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 Prof. 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 is the death of her 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 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 literal 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 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 medieval
+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 sternly 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 Faery Queen_ 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 storytelling, 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 star-gazers, 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 pre-destinated 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 recognized 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 is perhaps 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
+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 all 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
+recognized, 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 be 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
+earthen 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 OEdipus, 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 _Kalavala_, 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 _Kalavala_, 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
+meadow-sweet, 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 St. 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 may be 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 herself.
+
+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; sharp 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[2] 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 S. 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.
+
+
+
+
+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 had 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 fireside, 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 his 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 that 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 Shakespearean 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 noon-light 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.
+
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+[1] 'Marianne's Dream' was certainly copied from a real dream of
+somebody's, but like images come to the mystic in his waking state.
+
+[2] This essay was first published in the _United Irishman_.
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+Unmatched quotation marks and spelling variants are presented as in
+the original text.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Ideas of Good and Evil, by William Butler Yeats
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+Project Gutenberg's Ideas of Good and Evil, by William Butler Yeats
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
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+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
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+Title: Ideas of Good and Evil
+
+Author: William Butler Yeats
+
+Release Date: June 18, 2010 [EBook #32884]
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+
+
+<h1>Ideas of Good and Evil</h1>
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="other books">
+<tr><td><i>BY THE SAME WRITER&mdash;</i><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">THE SECRET ROSE</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">THE CELTIC TWILIGHT</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">POEMS</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">THE WIND AMONG THE REEDS</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">THE SHADOWY WATERS</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">PLAYS FOR AN IRISH THEATRE</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">Vol. I.&nbsp;&nbsp; Where there is Nothing</span></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;"><span class="smcap">Vol. II. Shorter Plays</span></span></td></tr></table>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h2>Ideas of Good and Evil</h2>
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><strong>Second Edition</strong></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h2>Ideas of Good and Evil.</h2>
+<h3>By W. B. Yeats</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center">A. H. BULLEN, 47 Great Russell<br />
+Street, London, W.C. <span class="smcaplc">MCMIII</span></p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<h2>Contents.</h2>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="contents">
+<tr><td>WHAT IS &#8216;POPULAR POETRY&#8217;?</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>SPEAKING TO THE PSALTERY</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_16">16</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>MAGIC</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_29">29</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>THE HAPPIEST OF THE POETS</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_70">70</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>THE PHILOSOPHY OF SHELLEY&#8217;S POETRY</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_90">90</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_142">142</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE IMAGINATION</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_168">168</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>WILLIAM BLAKE AND HIS ILLUSTRATIONS TO <i>THE DIVINE COMEDY</i></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_176">176</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>SYMBOLISM IN PAINTING</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_226">226</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>THE SYMBOLISM OF POETRY</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_237">237</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>THE THEATRE</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_257">257</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>THE CELTIC ELEMENT IN LITERATURE</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_270">270</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>THE AUTUMN OF THE BODY</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_296">296</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>THE MOODS</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_306">306</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>THE BODY OF THE FATHER CHRISTIAN ROSENCRUX</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_308">308</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td><i>THE RETURN OF ULYSSES</i></td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_312">312</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>IRELAND AND THE ARTS</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_320">320</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>THE GALWAY PLAINS</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_333">333</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>EMOTION OF MULTITUDE</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_339">339</a></td></tr></table>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="note"><i>Note.</i>&mdash;The Essay on <i>Symbolism in Painting</i> originally formed part of an
+Introduction to <i>A Book of Images drawn by W. T. Horton</i> (Unicorn Press), 1898.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+<h2>WHAT IS &#8216;POPULAR POETRY&#8217;?</h2>
+
+<p>I think it was a Young Ireland Society that set my mind running on
+&#8216;popular poetry.&#8217; 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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span> and yet I do not think Shelley or Spenser ever moved me as did
+these poets. I thought one day&mdash;I can remember the very day when I thought
+it&mdash;&#8216;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.&#8217; Then a little later on I
+thought, &#8216;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.&#8217; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> down into Connaught to
+sit by turf fires. I wanted to write &#8216;popular poetry&#8217; 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&#8217;s
+verses should hold, as in a mirror, the colours of one&#8217;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 my 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span> 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&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> 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
+<i>Lays</i>, 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> 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
+<i>Epipsychidion</i> of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> Shelley, or in Spenser&#8217;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 &#8216;Warming his five wits, the white owl in the belfry sits,&#8217; and once
+when I read out Omar Khayyam to one of the best of candlestick-makers, he
+said, &#8216;What is the meaning of &#8220;we come like water and like wind we go&#8221;?&#8217;
+Or go down into the street with some thought whose bare meaning must be
+plain to everybody; take with you Ben Jonson&#8217;s &#8216;Beauty like sorrow
+dwelleth everywhere,&#8217; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span> bare meaning also there is nothing to stumble
+over, and find out what men lose who are not in love with Helen.</p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8216;Brightness falls from the air,<br />
+Queens have died young and fair,<br />
+Dust hath closed Helen&#8217;s eye.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> mock at strangely-dressed people and at old men
+who talk to themselves.</p>
+
+<p>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 &#8216;popular poetry,&#8217; glimmer with thoughts and images whose
+&#8216;ancestors were stout and wise,&#8217; &#8216;anigh to Paradise&#8217; &#8216;ere yet men knew the
+gift of corn.&#8217; It may be that we know as little of their descent as men
+knew of &#8216;the man born to be a king&#8217; 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&#8217; 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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> it may be,
+if the worship of sun and moon had not left a faint reverence behind it,
+what Aran fisher-girl would sing&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&#8216;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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8216;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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8216;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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8216;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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8216;My mother said to me not to be talking<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> 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....</p>
+
+<p>&#8216;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.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">I bathe thy palms<br />
+In showers of wine,<br />
+In the cleansing fire,<br />
+In the juice of raspberries,<br />
+In the milk of honey.<br />
+<span class="spacer">&#183;</span><span class="spacer">&#183;</span><span class="spacer">&#183;</span><span class="spacer">&#183;</span><span class="spacer">&#183;</span><br />
+Thou art the joy of all joyous things,<br />
+Thou art the light of the beam of the sun,<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>Thou art the door of the chief of hospitality,<br />
+Thou art the surpassing pilot star,<br />
+Thou art the step of the deer of the hill,<br />
+Thou art the step of the horse of the plain,<br />
+Thou art the grace of the sun rising,<br />
+Thou art the loveliness of all lovely desires.<br />
+<br />
+The lovely likeness of the Lord<br />
+Is in thy pure face,<br />
+The loveliest likeness that was upon earth.</p>
+
+<p>I soon learned to cast away one other illusion of &#8216;popular poetry.&#8217; 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 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &#8216;popular poetry.&#8217; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> 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 &#8216;the imagination is the man himself,&#8217; and that the
+world as imagination sees it is the durable world, and have won men as did
+the disciples of Him who&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">His seventy disciples sent<br />
+Against religion and government.</p>
+
+<p class="right">1901.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span></p>
+<h2>SPEAKING TO THE PSALTERY</h2>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>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&#8217;s <i>Skylark</i> and Sir Ector&#8217;s lamentation over the dead
+Launcelot out of the <i>Morte d&#8217;Arthur</i> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> 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, &#8216;lo-o-o-o-o-ve,&#8217; or even if he said &#8216;love,&#8217;
+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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> 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 <i>The Celtic Twilight</i>, 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> 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 <i>Songs of Innocence</i> in
+Mrs. Williams&#8217; 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&#8217;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the notations he taught us&mdash;those in which there is no lilt, no
+recurring pattern of sounds&mdash;are like this notation for a song out of the
+first Act of <i>The Countess Cathleen</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/music.jpg" alt="" /></div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>Even when one is speaking to a single note sounded faintly on the
+Psaltery,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> 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 efforts 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 is the glimmer, the fragrance, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> 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&#8217;s voices till
+poetry and rhythm had come nearer to common life.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>
+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 <i>File</i>, 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p class="right">1902.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span></p>
+<h2>MAGIC</h2>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>(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.</p>
+
+<p>(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.</p>
+
+<p>(3) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>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&#8217;s had taken such a hold upon his imagination that he was
+going to give much of his time and all his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> 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,
+&#8216;Let him be blotted out,&#8217; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> see the man with a strange vividness. The story unfolded
+itself chiefly before the mind&#8217;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, &#8216;He is a
+clergyman, I can hear his words. They sound like Low Dutch.&#8217; Then after a
+little silence, &#8216;No, I am wrong. I can see the listeners; he is a doctor
+lecturing among his pupils.&#8217; I said, &#8216;Do you see anything near the door?&#8217;
+and she said, &#8216;Yes, I see a subject for dissection.&#8217; Then we saw him go
+out again into the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> 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&#8217;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> 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, &#8216;I hear little squeals.&#8217; Then the evoker of spirits
+heard them, but said, &#8216;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.&#8217;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> 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, &#8216;They are the images of his terror.&#8217;
+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&#8217;s hand he said, &#8216;I have taken
+from it the magical life, but you must take from it the life you gave.&#8217;
+Somebody saw<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The story was finished, and I looked at my acquaintance. He was white and
+awestruck. He said, as nearly as I can remember, &#8216;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> galvanizing a corpse into
+life.&#8217; Presently he said, &#8216;Perhaps my bad health in this life comes from
+that experiment.&#8217; I asked if he had read <i>Frankenstein</i>, and he answered
+that he had. He was the only one of us who had, and he had taken no part
+in the vision.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> 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&mdash;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&#8217;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&#8217;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> 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 gravestones the man
+in chain mail had passed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&#8217;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> revealing for a moment what I must
+call a supernatural artist.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>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, &#8216;Why, the <i>bonne</i> has
+just told us you had your arm in a sling. We thought something must have
+happened to you last night, that you had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> been run over maybe&#8217;&mdash;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&#8217;s eye.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> casting an
+imagination upon one so far away.</p>
+
+<p>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&#8217;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&#8217;s description of the Scholar Gipsy. Joseph
+Glanvil is dead, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> will not mind unbelief and misbelief and ridicule.</p>
+
+<p>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, &#8216;at some lone ale-house in the
+Berkshire moors, on the warm ingle-bench,&#8217; or &#8216;crossing the stripling
+Thames at Bablock Hithe,&#8217; &#8216;trailing his fingers in the cool stream,&#8217; or
+&#8216;giving store of flowers&mdash;the frail-leaf&#8217;d white anemone, dark hare-bells
+drenched with dew of summer eves,&#8217; to the girls &#8216;who from the distant
+hamlets come to dance around the Fyfield elm in May,&#8217; or &#8216;sitting upon the
+river bank o&#8217;ergrown,&#8217; living on through time &#8216;with a free onward
+impulse.&#8217; This is Joseph Glanvil&#8217;s story&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>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&#8217;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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>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&#8217;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.</p></div>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> 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&#8217;s imagination? what
+matter &#8216;if God himself only acts or is in existing beings or men,&#8217; 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&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span></p>
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<p>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 <i>Making of
+Religion</i>, contends that the memories of primitive man and his thoughts of
+distant places must have had the intensity of hallucination, because there
+was nothing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> in his mind to draw his attention away from them&mdash;an
+explanation that does not seem to me complete&mdash;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&#8217;s
+mind, &#8216;that he knew not how to make use of his eyes, since things
+altogether distant were present to them.&#8217; 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. &#8216;There is no man mowing a meadow but
+sees them at one time or another,&#8217; said a man in a different district.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> 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 <i>Morte d&#8217;Arthur</i> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> of old rope seem like devouring serpents? Why should not that
+medi&aelig;val enchanter have made summer and all its blossoms seem to break
+forth in middle winter?</p>
+
+<p>May we not learn some day to rewrite our histories, when they touch upon
+these things too?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> 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 mind 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> they were always praising the one mind, their foundation of all
+perfection.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>VI</h3>
+
+<p>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&#8217;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 fowl 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
+<i>The Book of Concealed Mystery</i>, an old Jewish book, and cutting the pages
+came upon this passage, which I cannot think I had ever read: &#8216;The Tree,
+... is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and of Evil ... in its branches
+the birds lodge and build<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> their nests, the souls and the angels have
+their place.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>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&#8217;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 &#8216;two miles high.&#8217; 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 medi&aelig;val diagram, which pictured
+Eden as a walled garden upon a high mountain.</p>
+
+<p>Where did these intricate symbols come<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> from? Neither I nor the one or two
+people present or the seers had ever seen, I am convinced, the description
+in <i>The Book of Concealed Mystery</i>, or the medi&aelig;val 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 indeed read of
+these images and forgotten it, that the supernatural artist&#8217;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 &#8216;a glittering and wriggling serpent,&#8217;
+and yet I feel certain that neither I nor he knew anything of her
+association with the serpent until <i>Carmina Gadelica</i> was published a few
+months ago. And an old Irish woman who can neither read nor write has
+described to me a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> 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 &#8216;Paracelsus&#8217; and in some Indian
+book that describes the people of past days as still living within it,
+&#8216;Thinking the thought and doing the deed.&#8217; And I have found it in the
+prophetic books of William Blake, who calls its images &#8216;the bright
+sculptures of Los&#8217;s Halls&#8217;; and says that all events, &#8216;all love stories,&#8217;
+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?</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span></p>
+<h3>VII</h3>
+
+<p>I find in my diary of magical events for 1899 that I awoke at 3 <span class="smcaplc">A.M.</span> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> symbol I gave by mistake that
+produced the vision. Then I met with a seer who could say to me, &#8216;I have a
+vision of a square pond, but I can see your thought, and you expect me to
+see an oblong pond,&#8217; or, &#8216;The symbol you are imagining has made me see a
+woman holding a crystal, but it was a moonlight sea I should have seen.&#8217; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>VIII</h3>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>
+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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> 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&mdash;&#8216;The Land of the Living Heart.&#8217; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> 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?</p>
+
+<p class="right">1901.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE HAPPIEST OF THE POETS</h2>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>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&#8217;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> 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&#8217;s warmth and
+softness. His genius like Shelley&#8217;s can hardly stir but to the rejection
+of nature, whose delight is profusion, but never intensity, and like
+Shelley&#8217;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 &#8216;a
+wind-swept valley of the Apennine.&#8217; 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&#8217;s emotion must never break the bonds of life, one&#8217;s hands
+must never labour to loosen the silver<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> cord, one&#8217;s ears must never strain
+to catch the sound of Michael&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>I do not think it was accident, so subtle are the threads that lead the
+soul, that made William Morris, who seems to me 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 <i>The
+Well at the World&#8217;s End</i> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> that gives a long and a
+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 &#8216;energy&#8217; that is not the less &#8216;eternal delight&#8217;
+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 &#8216;Wanderers&#8217; 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 <i>The Hollow
+Land</i> to its end in <i>The Sundering Flood</i>, 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> have praised the martyrs of religion or of passion, men with lucky
+eyes and men whom all women love.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>The Sundering Flood</i>. No mighty poet
+in his misery dead could have delighted enough to make us delight in men
+&#8216;who knew no vain desire of foolish fame,&#8217; but who thought the dance upon
+&#8216;the stubble field&#8217; and &#8216;the battle with the earth&#8217; better than &#8216;the
+bitter war&#8217; &#8216;where right and wrong are mixed together.&#8217; &#8216;Oh the trees, the
+trees!&#8217; he wrote in one of his early letters, and it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> 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 <i>News from Nowhere</i>, 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 &#8216;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> 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.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>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 &#8216;The Bride&#8217; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> not seek in love that ecstasy, which Shelley&#8217;s nightingale called
+death, that extremity of life in which life seems to pass away like the
+Ph&oelig;nix 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> 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&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p>Birdalone has never seen her image but in &#8216;a broad latten-dish,&#8217; so the
+wood woman must tell her of her body and praise it.</p>
+
+<p>&#8216;Thus it is with thee; thou standest before me a tall and slim maiden,
+some<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>what 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 in 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> solemn? Yet at least I know it of thee that they be hale
+and true and sweet.</p>
+
+<p>&#8216;My friend, when thou hast a mirror, some of all this shalt thou 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.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>All his good women, whether it is Dana&euml; in her tower, or that woman in
+<i>The Wood beyond the World</i> 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 cruel as wild creatures are cruel and they have
+unbridled desires.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> 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 &#8216;isle of the old and the young,&#8217; 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 &#8216;like images&#8217;
+or like &#8216;the rabbits on the grass.&#8217; 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.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> 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 <i>Golden Wings</i> that begin&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8216;Midways of a walled garden<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">In the happy poplar land</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">Did an ancient castle stand,</span><br />
+With an old knight for a warden.<br />
+<br />
+Many scarlet bricks there were<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">In its walls, and old grey stone;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">Over which red apples shone</span><br />
+At the right time of the year.<br />
+<br />
+On the bricks the green moss grew,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">Yellow lichen on the stone,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">Over which red apples shone;</span><br />
+Little war that castle knew.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>When William Morris describes a house of any kind, and makes his
+description<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> 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, &#8216;I decorate modern
+houses for people, but the house that would please me would be some great
+room where one talked to one&#8217;s friends in one corner and eat in another
+and slept in another and worked in another.&#8217; 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 its 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> 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&#8217;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&#8217;s apple after the first mouthful; but
+he who did all things gladly and easily, who never knew the curse of
+labour, found it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> always as sweet as it was in Eve&#8217;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, &#8216;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?&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<p>In one of his little socialist pamphlets he tells 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> 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 men like him, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> wrote essays about the nature of happy work, and when he spoke at
+street corners about the coming changes.</p>
+
+<p>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&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p class="right">1902.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE PHILOSOPHY OF SHELLEY&#8217;S POETRY</h2>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>I. HIS RULING IDEAS</h3>
+
+<p>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&#8217;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> 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 <i>Prometheus Unbound</i>, 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&#8217;s
+<i>Political Justice</i> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> 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 &#8216;huntings after the
+obscure&#8217; with regret, and said of that <i>Prometheus Unbound</i>, which so many
+for three generations have thought <i>Political Justice</i> put into rhyme, &#8216;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> 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.&#8217; 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 <i>Political Justice</i> 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 &#8216;Time to his grave in eternity.&#8217; In
+<i>A Defence of Poetry</i>, 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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> &#8216;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.&#8217; &#8216;Language, colour,
+form, and religious and civil habits of action, are all the instruments
+and materials of poetry.&#8217; Poetry is &#8216;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.&#8217; &#8216;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> 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.&#8217; 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;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> while the power, which in <i>Laon and Cythna</i>, 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
+<i>The Ode to Naples</i>, he cries out to &#8216;the spirit of beauty&#8217; to overturn
+the tyrannies of the world, or to fill them with its &#8216;harmonizing
+ardours.&#8217; He calls the spirit of beauty liberty, because despotism, and
+perhaps, as &#8216;the man of virtuous soul commands not nor obeys,&#8217; 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 &#8216;seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we
+experience within ourselves.&#8217; &#8216;We are born into the world, and there is
+something<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> within us which, from the instant that we live, more and more
+thirsts after its likeness.&#8217; We have &#8216;a soul within our soul that
+describes a circle around its proper paradise which pain and sorrow and
+evil dare not overleap,&#8217; 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 <i>The Philosophical Review of
+Reform</i> receive &#8216;the onset of the cavalry,&#8217; if it be sent to disperse
+their meetings, &#8216;with folded arms,&#8217; and &#8216;not because active resistance is
+not justifiable, but because temperance and courage would produce greater
+advantages than the most decisive victory;&#8217; and he gives them like advice
+in <i>The Masque of Anarchy</i>, for liberty, the poem cries, &#8216;is love,&#8217; 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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span>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 <i>Queen Mab</i>, 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&#8217;s beliefs, as I think, than to cry out against that
+serpent more subtle than any beast of the field, &#8216;the cause and the effect
+of tyranny.&#8217; He affirms again and again that the virtuous, those who have
+&#8216;pure desire and universal love,&#8217; are happy in the midst of tyranny, and
+he foresees a day when &#8216;the spirit of nature,&#8217; the spirit of beauty of his
+later poems, who has her &#8216;throne of power unappealable in every human
+heart,&#8217; shall have made men so virtuous that &#8216;kingly glare will lose its
+power to dazzle and silently pass by,&#8217; and as it seems even commerce, &#8216;the
+venal interchange of all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> that human art or nature yields, which wealth
+should purchase not,&#8217; come as silently to an end.</p>
+
+<p>He was always, indeed in chief, a witness for that &#8216;power unappealable.&#8217;
+Maddalo, in <i>Julian and Maddalo</i>, says that the soul is powerless, and can
+only, like a &#8216;dreary bell hung in a heaven-illumined tower, toll our
+thoughts and our desires to meet round the rent heart and pray&#8217;; but
+Julian, who is Shelley himself, replies, as the makers of all religions
+have replied&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8216;Where is the beauty, love and truth we seek<br />
+But in our minds? And if we were not weak,<br />
+Should we be less in deed than in desire?&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>while <i>Mont Blanc</i> is an intricate analogy to affirm that the soul has its
+sources in &#8216;the secret strength of things,&#8217; &#8216;which governs thought and to
+the infinite heavens is a law.&#8217; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> men and their thoughts for the tomb. And the &#8216;Red Comet,&#8217; the image
+of evil in <i>Laon and Cythna</i>, when it began its war with the star of
+beauty, brought not only &#8216;Fear, Hatred, Fraud, and Tyranny,&#8217; but &#8216;Death,
+Decay, Earthquake, and Blight and Madness pale.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Queen Mab</i>, that
+&#8216;there is no great extravagance in presuming ... that there should be a
+perfect identity between the moral and physical improvement of the human
+species,&#8217; and thinks it &#8216;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.&#8217; In <i>Prometheus Unbound</i> he sees, as in the ecstasy of a
+saint, the ships moving among<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> the seas of the world without fear of
+danger</p>
+
+<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 12em;">&#8216;by the light</span><br />
+Of wave-reflected flowers, and floating odours,<br />
+And music soft,&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>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 &#8216;to his tomb in eternity.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8216;Heardst thou not sweet words among<br />
+That heaven-resounding minstrelsy?<br />
+Heardst thou not that those who die<br />
+Awake in a world of ecstasy?<br />
+How love, when limbs are interwoven,<br />
+And sleep, when the night of life is cloven,<br />
+And thought to the world&#8217;s dim boundaries clinging,<br />
+And music when one beloved is singing,<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span>Is death? Let us drain right joyously<br />
+The cup which the sweet bird fills for me.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>And in the most famous passage in all his poetry he sings of Death as of a
+mistress. &#8216;Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, stains the white
+radiance of eternity.&#8217; &#8216;Die, if thou wouldst be with that which thou
+wouldst seek;&#8217; and he sees his own soon-coming death in a rapture of
+prophecy, for &#8216;the fire for which all thirst&#8217; beams upon him, &#8216;consuming
+the last clouds of cold mortality.&#8217; When he is dead he will still
+influence the living, for though Adonais has fled &#8216;to the burning
+fountains whence he came,&#8217; and &#8216;is a portion of the eternal which must
+glow through time and change unquenchably the same,&#8217; and has &#8216;awaked from
+the dream of life,&#8217; he has not gone from &#8216;the young dawn,&#8217; or the &#8216;caverns
+in the forests,&#8217; or &#8216;the faint flowers and the fountains.&#8217; He has been
+&#8216;made one with nature,&#8217; and his voice is &#8216;heard in all her music,&#8217; and his
+presence is felt wherever &#8216;that power may move<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> which has withdrawn his
+being to its own,&#8217; and he bears &#8216;his part&#8217; when it is compelling mortal
+things to their appointed forms, and he overshadows men&#8217;s minds at their
+supreme moments, for</p>
+
+<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 5em;">&#8216;when lofty thought</span><br />
+Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair,<br />
+And love and life contend in it for what<br />
+Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there,<br />
+And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&#8216;Of his speculations as to what will befall this inestimable spirit when
+we appear to die,&#8217; Mrs. Shelley has written, &#8216;a mystic ideality tinged
+these speculations in Shelley&#8217;s mind; certain stanzas in the poem of <i>The
+Sensitive Plant</i> 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&mdash;but
+that those who rise above the ordinary nature of man, fade from before our
+imperfect organs; they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> remain in their &#8220;love, beauty, and delight,&#8221; in a
+world congenial to them, and we, clogged by &#8220;error, ignorance, and
+strife,&#8221; see them not till we are fitted by purification and improvement
+to their higher state.&#8217; 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.</p>
+
+<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 6em;">&#8216;In this life</span><br />
+Of error, ignorance, and strife,<br />
+Where nothing is, but all things seem,<br />
+And we the shadows of the dream,<br />
+<br />
+It is a modest creed, and yet<br />
+Pleasant, if one considers it,<br />
+To own that death itself must be,<br />
+Like all the rest, a mockery.<br />
+<br />
+This garden sweet, that lady fair,<br />
+And all sweet shapes and odours there,<br />
+In truth have never passed away;<br />
+&#8217;Tis we, &#8217;tis ours are changed, not they.<br />
+<br />
+For love and beauty and delight<br />
+There is no death, nor change; their might<br />
+Exceeds our organs, which endure<br />
+No light, being themselves obscure.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>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, &#8216;thinking the thought and doing the deed,&#8217; though not, it may be,
+self-conscious; or only thought that &#8216;love and beauty and delight&#8217; remain
+for ever. The passage where Queen Mab awakes &#8216;all knowledge of the past,&#8217;
+and the good and evil &#8216;events of old and wondrous times,&#8217; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 medi&aelig;val Europe, and the Sidhe of ancient Ireland,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span>
+and whose too constant presence, and perhaps Shelley&#8217;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 &#8216;gleams of a remoter world which visit us in
+sleep,&#8217; spiritual essences whose shadows are the delights of all the
+senses, sounds &#8216;folded in cells of crystal silence,&#8217; &#8216;visions swift and
+sweet and quaint,&#8217; which lie waiting their moment &#8216;each in his thin sheath
+like a chrysalis,&#8217; &#8216;odours&#8217; among &#8216;ever-blooming eden trees&#8217;, &#8216;liquors&#8217;
+that can give &#8216;happy sleep,&#8217; or can make tears &#8216;all wonder and delight&#8217;;
+&#8216;The golden genii who spoke to the poets of Greece in dreams&#8217;; &#8216;the
+phantoms&#8217; which become the forms of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> the arts when &#8216;the mind, arising
+bright from the embrace of beauty,&#8217; &#8216;casts on them the gathered rays which
+are reality&#8217;; the &#8216;guardians&#8217; who move in &#8216;the atmosphere of human
+thought&#8217; as &#8216;the birds within the wind, or the fish within the wave,&#8217; or
+man&#8217;s thought itself through all things; and who join the throng of the
+happy hours when Time is passing away&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 2em;">&#8216;As the flying fish leap</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">From the Indian deep,</span><br />
+And mix with the seabirds half asleep.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>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 &#8216;all spirits on that secret way,&#8217; by the &#8216;dying
+odours&#8217; of flowers and by &#8216;the sunlight of the sphered dew,&#8217; beyond the
+gates of birth and death to awake Demogorgon, eternity, that &#8216;the painted
+veil&#8217; &#8216;called life&#8217; may be &#8216;torn aside.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>There are also ministers of ugliness and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> all evil, like those that came
+to Prometheus&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8216;As from the rose which the pale priestess kneels<br />
+To gather for her festal crown of flowers,<br />
+The a&euml;rial crimson falls, flushing her cheek,<br />
+So from our victim&#8217;s destined agony<br />
+The shade which is our form invests us round;<br />
+Else we are shapeless as our mother Night.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>Or like those whose shapes the poet sees in <i>The Triumph of Life</i>, coming
+from the procession that follows the car of life, as &#8216;hope&#8217; changes to
+&#8216;desire,&#8217; shadows &#8216;numerous as the dead leaves blown in autumn evening
+from a poplar tree&#8217;; and resembling those they come from, until, if I
+understand an obscure phrase aright, they are &#8216;wrapt&#8217; round &#8216;all the busy
+phantoms that live there as the sun shapes the clouds.&#8217; Some to sit
+&#8216;chattering like apes,&#8217; and some like &#8216;old anatomies&#8217; &#8216;hatching their bare
+broods under the shade of d&aelig;mons&#8217; wings,&#8217; laughing &#8216;to reassume the
+delegated powers&#8217; they had given to the tyrants of the earth, and some
+&#8216;like small gnats and flies&#8217; to throng<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> &#8216;about the brow of lawyers,
+statesmen, priest and theorist,&#8217; and some &#8216;like discoloured shapes of
+snow&#8217; to fall &#8216;on fairest bosoms and the sunniest hair,&#8217; to be &#8216;melted by
+the youthful glow which they extinguish,&#8217; and many to &#8216;fling shadows of
+shadows yet unlike themselves,&#8217; shadows that are shaped into new forms by
+that &#8216;creative ray&#8217; in which all move like motes.</p>
+
+<p>These ministers of beauty and ugliness were certainly more than metaphors
+or picturesque phrases to one who believed the &#8216;thoughts which are called
+real or external objects&#8217; differed but in regularity of recurrence from
+&#8216;hallucinations, dreams, and the ideas of madness,&#8217; and lessened this
+difference by telling how he had dreamed &#8216;three several times, between
+intervals of two or more years, the same precise dream,&#8217; and who had seen
+images with the mind&#8217;s eye that left his nerves shaken for days together.
+Shadows that were as when there</p>
+
+<p class="poem"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 10em;">&#8216;hovers</span><br />
+A flock of vampire bats before the glare<br />
+Of the tropic sun, bringing, ere evening,<br />
+Strange night upon some Indian vale,&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>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&#8217; account, because he
+believed a devil, who had first tried to kill him, had sought refuge
+there.</p>
+
+<p>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, &#8216;If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them.&#8217; I have
+re-read his <i>Prometheus Unbound</i> for the first time for many years, in the
+woods of Drim-da-rod, among the Echte hills, and sometimes I have looked
+towards<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> 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 &#8216;an intellectual fountain,&#8217; and that
+the kinds and degrees of beauty are the images of its authority.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>II. HIS RULING SYMBOLS</h3>
+
+<p>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 sand in &#8216;signs&#8217; that were &#8216;clear elemental
+shapes whose smallest change&#8217; made &#8216;a subtler language within language&#8217;
+and were &#8216;the key<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> of truths, which once were dimly taught in old
+Crotona.&#8217; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> mind profound
+symbols,<small><a name="f1.1" id="f1.1" href="#f1">[1]</a></small> 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 any one, 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&#8217;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> 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&#8217;s union with the uncreated spirit. He says in his
+fragment of an essay upon life, mistaking a unique experience for the
+common experience of all: &#8216;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,&#8217; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>When Shelley went to the Continent with Godwin&#8217;s daughter in 1812 they
+sailed down certain great rivers in an open boat, and when he summed up in
+his preface to <i>Laon and Cythna</i> the things that helped to make him a
+poet, he spoke of these voyages: &#8216;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.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> 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
+&#8216;an abysmal chasm&#8217;; 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 <i>The Triumph of Life</i>, awoke to the vision that was life, it was
+where a rivulet bubbled out of a cave; and the poet of <i>Epipsychidion</i> met
+the evil beauty &#8216;by a well under blue nightshade bowers&#8217;; and Cythna bore
+her child imprisoned in a great cave beside &#8216;a fountain round and vast and
+in which the wave imprisoned leaped and boiled perpetually&#8217;; and her lover
+Laon was brought to his prison in a high column through a cave where there
+was &#8216;a putrid pool,&#8217; and when he went to see the conquered city he
+dismounted beside a polluted fountain in the market-place, foreshadowing
+thereby<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> that spirit who at the end of <i>Prometheus Unbound</i> gazes at a
+regenerated city from &#8216;within a fountain in the public square&#8217;; 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 &#8216;leaps with an
+awakening sound&#8217;; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> Plato&#8217;s cave
+that was the world; and so good a scholar may well have had Porphyry on
+&#8216;the Cave of the Nymphs&#8217; in his mind. When I compare Porphyry&#8217;s
+description of the cave where the Ph&aelig;acian boat left Odysseus, with
+Shelley&#8217;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&#8217;s translation,
+only putting Mr. Lang&#8217;s prose for Taylor&#8217;s bad verse. &#8216;What does Homer
+obscurely signify by the cave in Ithaca which he describes in the
+following verses? &#8220;Now at the harbour&#8217;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 ever more. Two gates there are to the cave, the one set
+towards the North wind,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> whereby men may go down, but the portals toward
+the South pertain rather to the gods, whereby men may not enter: it is the
+way of the immortals.&#8221;&#8217; He goes on to argue that the cave was a temple
+before Homer wrote, and that &#8216;the ancients did not establish temples
+without fabulous symbols,&#8217; and then begins to interpret Homer&#8217;s
+description in all its detail. The ancients, he says, &#8216;consecrated a cave
+to the world&#8217; and held &#8216;the flowing waters&#8217; and the &#8216;obscurity of the
+cavern&#8217; &#8216;apt symbols of what the world contains,&#8217; and he calls to witness
+Zoroaster&#8217;s cave with fountains; and often caves are, he says, symbols of
+&#8216;all invisible power; because as caves are obscure and dark, so the
+essence of all these powers is occult,&#8217; and quotes a lost hymn to Apollo
+to prove that nymphs living in caves fed men &#8216;from intellectual
+fountains&#8217;; and he contends that fountains and rivers symbolize
+generation, and that the word nymph &#8216;is commonly applied to all souls
+descending into<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> generation,&#8217; and that the two gates of Homer&#8217;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. &#8216;The mixing
+bowls and jars of stone&#8217; 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 &#8216;the looms of stone&#8217; are the symbols of the &#8216;souls
+that descend into generation.&#8217; &#8216;For the formation of the flesh is on or
+about the bones, which in the bodies of animals resemble stones,&#8217; and also
+because &#8216;the body is a garment&#8217; not only about the soul, but about all
+essences that become visible, for &#8216;the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> heavens are called by the ancients
+a veil, in consequence of being as it were the vestments of the celestial
+gods.&#8217; 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 &#8216;pleasure arising from generation.&#8217; The ancients, he
+says, called souls not only Naiads but bees, &#8216;as the efficient cause of
+sweetness&#8217;; but not all souls &#8216;proceeding into generation&#8217; are called
+bees, &#8216;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.&#8217; I find all these details in the
+cave of the Witch of Atlas, the most elaborately described of Shelley&#8217;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 &#8216;an
+inextinguishable well of crimson fire.&#8217; We<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> have for the mixing bowls, and
+jars of stone full of honey, those delights of the senses, &#8216;sounds of air&#8217;
+&#8216;folded in cells of crystal silences,&#8217; &#8216;liquors clear and sweet&#8217; &#8216;in
+crystal vials,&#8217; and for the bees, visions &#8216;each in his thin sheath like a
+chrysalis,&#8217; and for &#8216;the looms of stone&#8217; and &#8216;raiment of purple stain&#8217; the
+Witch&#8217;s spinning and embroidering; and the Witch herself is a Naiad, and
+was born from one of the Atlantides, who lay in &#8216;a chamber of grey rock&#8217;
+until she was changed by the sun&#8217;s embrace into a cloud.</p>
+
+<p>When one turns to Shelley for an explanation of the cave and fountain one
+finds how close his thought was to Porphyry&#8217;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 &#8216;On Life,&#8217; &#8216;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span>
+its properties, and beyond that experience how vain is argument, cannot
+create, it can only perceive;&#8217; 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 &#8216;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.&#8217; When the Witch has passed in her boat from the caverned river,
+that is doubtless her own destiny, she passes along the Nile &#8216;by Moeris
+and the Mareotid lakes,&#8217; and sees all human life shadowed upon its waters
+in shadows that &#8216;never are erased but tremble ever&#8217;; and in many a dark
+and subterranean street under the Nile&mdash;new caverns&mdash;and along the bank of
+the Nile; and as she<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> bends over the unhappy, she compares unhappiness to
+&#8216;the strife that stirs the liquid surface of man&#8217;s life&#8217;; and because she
+can see the reality of things she is described as journeying &#8216;in the calm
+depths&#8217; of &#8216;the wide lake&#8217; 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 <i>Mont Blanc</i>, a poem so
+overladen with descriptions in parentheses that one loses sight of its
+logic, Shelley compares the flowing through our mind of &#8216;the universe of
+things,&#8217; 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 &#8216;remoter world&#8217; whose &#8216;gleams&#8217; &#8216;visit the soul in
+sleep,&#8217; to Arne&#8217;s sources among the glaciers on the mountain heights.
+Cythna in the passage where she speaks of making signs<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> &#8216;a subtle language
+within language&#8217; on the sand by the &#8216;fountain&#8217; of sea water in the cave
+where she is imprisoned, speaks of the &#8216;cave&#8217; of her mind which gave its
+secrets to her, and of &#8216;one mind the type of all&#8217; which is a &#8216;moveless
+wave&#8217; reflecting &#8216;all moveless things that are&#8217;; 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&#8217;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 &#8216;the still
+cave of poetry,&#8217; and it may have all meanings at once, or it may have as
+little meaning as some ancient religious symbol enwoven from the habit<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> of
+centuries with the patterns of a carpet or a tapestry.</p>
+
+<p>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&#8217;s
+lover is brought through the cave where there is a polluted fountain to a
+high tower, for being man&#8217;s far-seeing mind, when the world has cast him
+out he must to the &#8216;towers of thought&#8217;s crowned powers&#8217;; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> the old hermit watch over Laon in his sickness in a
+half-ruined tower, wherein the sea, here doubtless as to Cythna, &#8216;the one
+mind,&#8217; threw &#8216;spangled sands&#8217; and &#8216;rarest sea shells.&#8217; 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 <i>Laon and Cythna</i> 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&#8217;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>The most important, the most precise of all Shelley&#8217;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 <i>The Triumph of Life</i>, 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 <i>Laon and Cythna</i>, at first as a star with a red
+comet, here a symbol of all evil as it is of disorder in <i>Epipsychidion</i>,
+and then as a serpent<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> with an eagle&mdash;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 <i>Laon
+and Cythna</i>; and it is evoked by the wailing women of <i>Hellas</i>, who call
+it &#8216;lamp of the free&#8217; and &#8216;beacon of love&#8217; and would go where it hides
+flying from the deepening night among those &#8216;kingless continents sinless
+as Eden,&#8217; and &#8216;mountains and islands&#8217; &#8216;prankt on the sapphire sea&#8217; 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 <i>Ode to
+Liberty</i>, Liberty is bid lead wisdom out of the inmost cave of man&#8217;s mind
+as the Morning Star leads the sun out of the waves. We know too that had
+<i>Prince Athanase</i> been finished it would have described the finding of
+Pandemus, the stars&#8217; lower genius, and the growing weary of her, and the
+coming to its true genius Urania at the coming of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> 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&#8217;s mind the central power of the world; and to its faint and
+fleeting light he offers up all desires, that are as</p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8216;The desire of the Moth for the star,<br />
+The desire for something afar<br />
+From the sphere of our sorrow.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>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 &#8216;on desert Labrador&#8217; 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</p>
+
+<p class="poem"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>
+&#8216;Hesperus flies from awakening night<br />
+And pants in its beauty with speed and light,<br />
+Fast fleeting, soft and bright.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>Though I do not think that Shelley needed to go to Porphyry&#8217;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> 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, &#8216;Do you see something in
+the curtain?&#8217; 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, &#8216;the Meeting of the
+Suns,&#8217; 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, &#8216;I
+cannot tell the meaning of the hounds or where the Meeting of the Suns is,
+but I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> think the fawn is the Morning and Evening Star.&#8217; 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 <i>The Triumph of
+Life</i>, thrown outward once again from that great memory, which is still
+the mother of the Muses, though men no longer believe in it.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> 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 &#8216;the apparition of
+images&#8217; in the &#8216;imagination&#8217; is through &#8216;an excess of moisture&#8217;; 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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> she is not loved by the
+children of desire.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Epipsychidion</i> which tells how a woman like
+the Moon led him to her cave and made &#8216;frost&#8217; creep over the sea of his
+mind, and so bewitched life and death with &#8216;her silver voice&#8217; that they
+ran from him crying, &#8216;Away, he is not of our crew.&#8217; 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&#8217;s lips
+&#8216;are pale and waning,&#8217; it is &#8216;the cold Moon,&#8217; or &#8216;the frozen and
+inconstant Moon,&#8217; or it is &#8216;forgotten&#8217; and &#8216;waning,&#8217; or it
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> &#8216;wanders&#8217; and
+is &#8216;weary,&#8217; or it is &#8216;pale and grey,&#8217; or it is &#8216;pale for weariness,&#8217; and
+&#8216;wandering companionless&#8217; and &#8216;ever changing,&#8217; and finding &#8216;no object
+worth&#8217; its &#8216;constancy,&#8217; or it is like a &#8216;dying lady&#8217; who &#8216;totters&#8217; &#8216;out of
+her chamber led by the insane and feeble wanderings of her fading brain,&#8217;
+and even when it is no more than a star, it casts an evil influence that
+makes the lips of lovers &#8216;lurid&#8217; 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&#8217;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 &#8216;one harmonious soul of many a
+soul&#8217; and &#8216;all things flow to all&#8217; and &#8216;familiar acts are beautiful
+through love,&#8217; and an &#8216;animation of delight&#8217; at this change<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> flows from
+spirit to spirit till the snow &#8216;is loosened from the Moon&#8217;s lifeless
+mountains.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>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 &#8216;the Demiurgos of everything sensible.&#8217; It was therefore natural that
+Blake, who was always praising energy, and all exalted overflowing of
+oneself, and who thought art an impassioned labour to keep men from doubt
+and despondency, and woman&#8217;s love an evil, when it would trammel the man&#8217;s
+will,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> should see the poetic genius not in a woman star but in the Sun,
+and should rejoice throughout his poetry in &#8216;the Sun in his strength.&#8217;
+Shelley, however, except when he uses it to describe the peculiar beauty
+of Emilia Viviani, who was &#8216;like an incarnation of the Sun when light is
+changed to love,&#8217; 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 <i>The Triumph of Life</i>, 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 &#8216;new vision&#8217; in &#8216;a cold bright car&#8217; with
+a rainbow hovering over her, and as she comes the shadow passes from &#8216;leaf
+and stone,&#8217; and the souls she has enslaved seem in &#8216;that light like
+atomies<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> to dance within a sunbeam,&#8217; or they dance among the flowers that
+grow up newly &#8216;in the grassy verdure of the desert,&#8217; unmindful of the
+misery that is to come upon them. &#8216;These are the great, the unforgotten,&#8217;
+all who have worn &#8216;mitres and helms and crowns or wreaths of light,&#8217; and
+yet have not known themselves. Even &#8216;great Plato&#8217; is there because he knew
+joy and sorrow, because life that could not subdue him by gold or pain, by
+&#8216;age or sloth or slavery,&#8217; subdued him by love. All who have ever lived
+are there except Christ and Socrates and &#8216;the sacred few&#8217; who put away all
+life could give, being doubtless followers throughout their lives of the
+forms borne by the flying ideal, or who, &#8216;as soon as they had touched the
+world with living flame, flew back like eagles to their native noon.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> would have worshipped
+in some chapel of the Sun, and that Keats, who accepted life gladly though
+&#8216;with a delicious diligent indolence,&#8217; would have worshipped in some
+chapel of the Moon, but that Shelley, who hated life because he sought
+&#8216;more in life than any understood,&#8217; would have wandered, lost in a
+ceaseless reverie, in some chapel of the Star of infinite desire.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p class="right">1900.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span></p>
+<h2>AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON</h2>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>I have been hearing Shakespeare, as the traveller in <i>News from Nowhere</i>
+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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> of the theatre, with its oak-panelled walls and leaded windows of
+tinted glass; or one rows by reedy banks and by old farmhouses, and by old
+churches among great trees. It is certainly one&#8217;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 <i>King John</i>, <i>Richard II.</i>, the second part of <i>Henry
+IV.</i>, <i>Henry V.</i>, the second part of <i>Henry VI.</i>, and <i>Richard III.</i>
+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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> 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&#8217;s feet. The people my mind&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p>In London the first man one meets puts any high dream out of one&#8217;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&#8217;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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> it may help to break the evil prestige of
+London he becomes enthusiastic.</p>
+
+<p>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 &#8216;in retreat,&#8217; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>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&#8217;s<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> 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&#8217;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> 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;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> 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&#8217;s
+beards! Mr. Benson did not venture to play the scene in <i>Richard III.</i>
+where the ghosts walk, as Shakespeare wrote it, but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> had his scenery been
+as simple as Mr. Gordon Craig&#8217;s purple back cloth that made Dido and &AElig;neas
+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, &#8216;Art is art, because it is not nature!&#8217; It brings us near to the
+archetypal ideas themselves, and away from nature, which is but their
+looking-glass.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>In <i>La Peau de Chagrin</i> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> 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&#8217;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> Hierarchies? Blake
+has said that &#8216;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,&#8217; 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., &#8216;sentimental,&#8217; &#8216;weak,&#8217;
+&#8216;selfish,&#8217; &#8216;insincere,&#8217; and Henry V., &#8216;Shakespeare&#8217;s only hero.&#8217; These
+books took the same delight in abasing Richard II. that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> 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&#8217;
+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, &#8216;cows beyond the water
+have long horns.&#8217; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> 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&#8217;s victories. In Professor
+Dowden&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span></p>
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>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, &#8216;a wild creature&#8217; as Pater has called him. The
+man on whom Shakespeare modelled him had been full of French elegancies,
+as he knew from Hollingshead, and had given life a new luxury, a new
+splendour, and been &#8216;too friendly&#8217; to his friends, &#8216;too favourable&#8217; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> 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, &#8216;Sir, you have been made by the stroke of a pen, but I have been made
+by the breath of God,&#8217; 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
+&#8216;that sweet lovely rose.&#8217; The courtly and saintly ideals of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Henry IV.</i> to <i>Richard III.</i>, that monstrous birth
+and last sign of the wrath of Heaven, are a fulfilment of the prophecy of
+the Bishop of Carlisle, who was &#8216;raised up by God&#8217; to make it; but he had
+no nice sense of utilities, no ready balance to measure<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8216;Tired with all these, for restful death I cry;&mdash;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">As, to behold desert a beggar born,</span><br />
+And needy nothing trimm&#8217;d in jollity,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And purest faith unhappily forsworn,</span><br />
+And gilded honour shamefully misplaced,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,</span><br />
+And right perfection wrongfully disgrac&#8217;d,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And strength by limping sway disabled,</span><br />
+And Art made tongue-tied by authority,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,</span><br />
+And simple truth miscalled simplicity,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And captive good attending captain ill:</span><br />
+Tired with all these, from these would I begone<br />
+Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<p>The Greeks, a certain scholar has told me, considered that myths are the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>
+activities of the D&aelig;mons, and that the D&aelig;mons 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&#8217;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 &#8216;a little patch of
+ground&#8217; so poor that one of his Captains would not give &#8216;six ducats&#8217; to
+&#8216;farm it,&#8217; 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&#8217;s art, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> 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 &#8216;too friendly&#8217; 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&#8217;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> 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 &#8216;compound,&#8217; &#8216;half
+French, half English,&#8217; &#8216;that&#8217; was to &#8216;go to Constantinople and take the
+Turk by the beard,&#8217; turns out a Saint, and loses all his father had built
+up at home and his own life.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>VI</h3>
+
+<p>The five plays, that are but one play, have, when played one after
+another, something extravagant and superhuman,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The people of Stratford-on-Avon have remembered little about him, and
+invented<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p class="right">May 1901.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span></p>
+<h2>WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE IMAGINATION</h2>
+
+<p>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
+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&mdash;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> amused
+themselves with books of imagination but that they &#8216;made their souls&#8217; 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 &#8216;make our souls&#8217; 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&#8217;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> with our hearts that beautiful things,
+as Browning said in his one prose essay that was not in verse, have &#8216;lain
+burningly on the Divine hand,&#8217; 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.</p>
+
+<p>He had learned from Jacob Boehme and from old alchemist writers that
+imagination was the first emanation of divinity, &#8216;the body of God,&#8217; &#8216;the
+Divine members,&#8217; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> 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&mdash;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&mdash;and this was a scandalous paradox in his time&mdash;and man shall enter
+eternity borne upon their wings.</p>
+
+<p>And he understood this so literally that certain drawings to <i>Vala</i>, 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> &#8216;foolish body,&#8217; this &#8216;phantom of the earth and
+water,&#8217; were in themselves but half-living things, &#8216;vegetative&#8217; things,
+but passion that &#8216;eternal glory&#8217; made them a part of the body of God.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;Tennyson or Wordsworth, let us say&mdash;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 &#8216;lain burningly on the Divine
+hand.&#8217; 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 <i>Songs<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> of Innocence</i>, or the lyrics he wished to call
+&#8216;The Ideas of Good and Evil,&#8217; but when one reads those &#8216;Prophetic Works&#8217;
+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&#8217;s body, are arbitrary as some
+of the symbolism in the <i>Ax&euml;l</i> of the symbolist Villiers De L&#8217;Isle Adam is
+arbitrary, while they mix incongruous things as <i>Ax&euml;l</i> 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&#8217;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> Wagner took his, from
+Norse mythology; or have followed, with the help of Prof. Rhys, that
+pathway into Welsh mythology which he found in &#8216;Jerusalem&#8217;; or have gone
+to Ireland&mdash;and he was probably an Irishman&mdash;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 &#8216;Enitharmon&#8217; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> <i>Vala</i>, would but have reminded us of many
+ancient hymns.</p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8216;The joy of woman is the death of her beloved,<br />
+Who dies for love of her,<br />
+In torments of fierce jealousy and pangs of adoration.<br />
+The lover&#8217;s night bears on my song,<br />
+And the nine spheres rejoice beneath my powerful control.<br />
+<br />
+They sing unwearied to the notes of my immortal hand.<br />
+The solemn, silent moon<br />
+Reverberates the long harmony sounding upon my limbs.<br />
+The birds and beasts rejoice and play,<br />
+And every one seeks for his mate to prove his inmost joy.<br />
+<br />
+Furious and terrible they rend the nether deep,<br />
+The deep lifts up his rugged head,<br />
+And lost in infinite hovering wings vanishes with a cry.<br />
+The fading cry is ever dying,<br />
+The living voice is ever living in its inmost joy.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p class="right">1897.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span></p>
+<h2>WILLIAM BLAKE AND HIS ILLUSTRATIONS TO <i>THE DIVINE COMEDY</i></h2>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>I. HIS OPINIONS UPON ART</h3>
+
+<p>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, &#8216;vision,&#8217; is not allegory,
+being &#8216;a representation of what actually exists really and unchangeably.&#8217;
+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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>If a man would enter into &#8216;Noah&#8217;s rainbow,&#8217; he has written, and &#8216;make a
+friend&#8217; of one of &#8216;the images of wonder&#8217; which dwell there, and which
+always entreat him &#8216;to leave mortal things,&#8217; &#8216;then would he arise from the
+grave and meet the Lord in the air&#8217;; and by this rainbow, this sign of a
+covenant granted to him who is with Shem and Japhet, &#8216;painting, poetry and
+music,&#8217; &#8216;the three powers in man of conversing with Paradise which the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span>
+flood &#8220;of time and space&#8221; did not sweep away,&#8217; 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 &#8216;the vegetable glass of nature&#8217;; 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 &#8216;the world of imagination&#8217; was &#8216;the world of
+eternity,&#8217; 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&#8217;s mind, as with a flame, in study of the works of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> 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 &#8216;the vegetable glass&#8217; 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 &#8216;the
+rotten rags of memory&#8217; 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 &#8216;temptations and
+perturbations&#8217; which sought to destroy<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> &#8216;the imaginative power&#8217; at &#8216;the
+hands of Venetian and Flemish Demons.&#8217; &#8216;The spirit of Titian&#8217;&mdash;and one
+must always remember that he had only seen poor engravings, and what his
+disciple, Palmer, has called &#8216;picture-dealers&#8217; Titians&#8217;&mdash;&#8216;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&#8217;; and Blake&#8217;s imagination
+&#8216;weakened&#8217; and &#8216;darkened&#8217; until a &#8216;memory of nature and of the pictures of
+various schools possessed his mind, instead of appropriate execution&#8217;
+flowing from the vision itself. But now he wrote, &#8216;O glory, and O delight!
+I have entirely reduced that spectrous fiend to his station&#8217;&mdash;he had
+overcome the merely reasoning and sensual portion of the mind&mdash;&#8216;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> 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&#8217;&mdash;this was
+a gallery containing pictures by Albert D&uuml;rer and by the great
+Florentines&mdash;&#8216;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.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>This letter may have been the expression of a moment&#8217;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> 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 <i>Descriptive
+Catalogue</i>, in <i>The Address to the Public</i>, in the notes on Sir Joshua
+Reynolds, in <i>The Book of Moonlight</i>&mdash;of which some not very dignified
+rhymes alone remain&mdash;in beautiful detached passages in <i>The MS. Book</i>, 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&#8217;s eye, when exalted by
+inspiration, were &#8216;eternal existences,&#8217; symbols of divine essences, he
+hated every grace of style that might obscure their lineaments. To wrap
+them<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> 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 &#8216;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.&#8217; 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. &#8216;Great inventors in all ages knew this.
+Protogenes and Apelles knew each other by their line. Raphael and Michael
+Angelo and Albert D&uuml;rer 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> 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.&#8217; He even insisted that &#8216;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&#8217;&mdash;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> sense of this you cannot draw true beauty at all, but only
+&#8216;the beauty that is appended to folly,&#8217; a beauty of mere voluptuous
+softness, &#8216;a lamentable accident of the mortal and perishing life,&#8217; for
+&#8216;the beauty proper for sublime art is lineaments, or forms and features
+capable of being the receptacles of intellect,&#8217; and &#8216;the face or limbs
+that alter least from youth to old age are the face and limbs of the
+greatest beauty and perfection.&#8217; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> 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?</p>
+
+<p>To cover the imperishable lineaments of beauty with shadows and reflected
+lights was to fall into the power of his &#8216;Vala,&#8217; the indolent fascination
+of nature, the woman divinity who is so often described in &#8216;the prophetic
+books&#8217; as &#8216;sweet pestilence,&#8217; and whose children weave webs to take the
+souls of men; but there was yet a more lamentable chance, for nature has
+also a &#8216;masculine portion&#8217; or &#8216;spectre&#8217; which kills instead of merely
+hiding, and is continually at war with inspiration. To &#8216;generalize&#8217; forms
+and shadows, to &#8216;smooth out&#8217; spaces and lines in obedience to &#8216;laws of
+composition,&#8217; and of painting; founded,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> 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&#8217;s day had done, and as
+he understood Sir Joshua Reynolds to advise, was to fall into &#8216;Entuthon
+Benithon,&#8217; or &#8216;the Lake of Udan Adan,&#8217; or some other of those regions
+where the imagination and the flesh are alike dead, that he names by so
+many resonant phantastical names. &#8216;General knowledge is remote knowledge,&#8217;
+he wrote; &#8216;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> 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.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>Against another desire of his time, derivative also from what he has
+called &#8216;corporeal reason,&#8217; the desire for a &#8216;tepid moderation,&#8217; for a
+lifeless &#8216;sanity in both art and life,&#8217; he had protested years before with
+a paradoxical violence. &#8216;The roadway of excess leads to the palace of
+wisdom,&#8217; and we must only &#8216;bring out weight and measure in time of
+dearth.&#8217; This protest, carried, in the notes on Sir Joshua Reynolds, to
+the point of dwelling with pleasure on the thought that &#8216;The <i>Lives of the
+Painters</i> say that Raphael died of dissipation,&#8217; 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:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> &#8216;Excess is
+the essential vivifying spirit, vital spark, embalming spice of the finest
+art. There are many mediums in the <i>means</i>&mdash;none, oh, not a jot, not a
+shadow of a jot, in the <i>end</i> of great art. In a picture whose merit is to
+be excessively brilliant, it can&#8217;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.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>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 &#8216;demons&#8217; and &#8216;villains,&#8217; &#8216;hired&#8217; by the wealthy and the idle; but in
+private, Palmer has told us, he could find &#8216;sources of delight throughout
+the whole range of art,&#8217; and was ever ready to praise excellence in any
+school, finding, doubtless, among friends,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> no need for the emphasis of
+exaggeration. There is a beautiful passage in &#8216;Jerusalem&#8217; in which the
+merely mortal part of the mind, &#8216;the spectre,&#8217; creates &#8216;pyramids of
+pride,&#8217; and &#8216;pillars in the deepest hell to reach the heavenly arches,&#8217;
+and seeks to discover wisdom in &#8216;the spaces between the stars,&#8217; not &#8216;in
+the stars,&#8217; where it is, but the immortal part makes all his labours vain,
+and turns his pyramids to &#8216;grains of sand,&#8217; his &#8216;pillars&#8217; to &#8216;dust on the
+fly&#8217;s wing,&#8217; and makes of &#8216;his starry heavens a moth of gold and silver
+mocking his anxious grasp.&#8217; So when man&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p>It was during and after the writing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> 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&#8217;s <i>Night Thoughts</i>&mdash;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&mdash;and almost all the illustrations to &#8216;the
+prophetic books,&#8217; 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, &#8216;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&#8217;; not merely the shadows
+cast by the powers who had closed the light from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> him as &#8216;with a door and
+window shutters,&#8217; 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 <i>Paradise Regained</i>; the reproductions of those to <i>Comus</i>, published,
+I think, by Mr. Quaritch; and the three or four to <i>Paradise Lost</i>,
+engraved by Bell Scott&mdash;a series of designs which one good judge considers
+his greatest work; the illustrations to Blair&#8217;s <i>Grave</i>, whose gravity and
+passion struggle with the mechanical softness and trivial smoothness of
+Schiavonetti&#8217;s engraving; the illustrations to Thornton&#8217;s <i>Virgil</i>, 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
+<i>eclogue</i>: &#8216;There is in all such a misty and dreamy glimmer as penetrates
+and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> kindles the inmost soul and gives complete and unreserved delight,
+unlike the gaudy daylight of this world. They are like all this wonderful
+artist&#8217;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.&#8217; Now, too, he did the great
+series, the crowning work of his life, the illustrations to <i>The Book of
+Job</i> and the illustrations to <i>The Divine Comedy</i>. Hitherto he had
+protested against the mechanical &#8216;dots and lozenges&#8217; and &#8216;blots and blurs&#8217;
+of Woollett and Strange, but had himself used both &#8216;dot and lozenge,&#8217;
+&#8216;blot and blur,&#8217; though always in subordination &#8216;to a firm and determinate
+outline&#8217;; 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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> attack the &#8216;dots and lozenges&#8217; with
+even more than usually quaint symbolism, and praise expressive lines. &#8216;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&#8217;&mdash;since the reign of reason began, that is&mdash;&#8216;Englishmen are all
+intermeasurable with one another, certainly a happy state of agreement in
+which I do not agree.&#8217; 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 &#8216;Francesca and Paolo&#8217; 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&#8217;s mastery over elemental things,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> the swirl in which
+the lost spirits are hurried, &#8216;a watery flame&#8217; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> 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. &#8216;I am,&#8217;
+wrote Blake, &#8216;like others, just equal in invention and execution.&#8217; And
+again, &#8216;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, &#8220;Give me the ideas; it
+is no matter what words you put them into;&#8221; and others say, &#8220;Give me the
+designs; it is no matter for the execution.&#8221;... Ideas cannot be given but
+in their minutely appropriate words, nor can a design be made without its
+minutely appropriate execution.&#8217; Living in a time when technique and
+imagination are continually perfect and complete, because they no longer
+strive to bring fire from heaven,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span> we forget how imperfect and incomplete
+they were in even the greatest masters, in Botticelli, in Orcagna, and in
+Giotto.</p>
+
+<p>The errors in the handiwork of exalted spirits are as the more
+phantastical errors in their lives; as Coleridge&#8217;s opium cloud; as
+Villiers De L&#8217;Isle Adam&#8217;s candidature for the throne of Greece; as Blake&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>II. HIS OPINIONS ON DANTE</h3>
+
+<p>As Blake sat bent over the great drawing-book, in which he made his
+designs to <i>The Divine Comedy</i>, he was very certain that he and Dante
+represented spiritual states which face one another in an eternal enmity.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span>
+Dante, because a great poet, was &#8216;inspired by the Holy Ghost&#8217;; 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&#8217;s symbolic language, had to &#8216;take after his mother,&#8217; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> 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 &#8216;laws of prudence&#8217; &#8216;the laws of God,&#8217;
+was a necessity, because &#8216;you cannot have liberty in this world without
+what you call moral virtue&#8217;; the other was divine, and established for the
+peace of the imagination and the unfallen will, and, even when obeyed with
+a too literal 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 &#8216;war, princedom,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> and victory,&#8217; 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 &#8216;pagan&#8217; 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 na&iuml;ve tumult, but
+Blake was the first to announce its successor, and he did this, as must
+needs be with revolutionists who have &#8216;the law&#8217; for &#8216;mother,&#8217; with a firm
+conviction that the things his opponents held white were indeed black, and
+that the things they held<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> black, white; with a strong persuasion that all
+busy with government are men darkness and &#8216;something other than human
+life&#8217;; 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&#8217;s thought has worn.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span>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 &#8216;sympathize&#8217; with her &#8216;to a certain extent,&#8217; being taken in a
+theological net. &#8216;It seems as if Dante,&#8217; Blake wrote, &#8216;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&#8217;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.&#8217; And again, &#8216;Whatever task is of vengeance and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> whatever is
+against forgiveness of sin is not of the Father but of Satan, the accuser,
+the father of Hell.&#8217; And again, and this time to Crabb Robinson, &#8216;Dante
+saw devils where I saw none. I see good only.&#8217; &#8216;I have never known a very
+bad man who had not something very good about him.&#8217; 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, &#8216;that the imagination is the man himself,&#8217; 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 &#8216;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.&#8217; &#8216;Everything is atheism,&#8217; he has already
+explained, &#8216;which assumed the reality of the natural<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> and unspiritual
+world.&#8217; Dante, he held, assumed its reality when he made obedience to its
+laws a condition of man&#8217;s happiness hereafter, and he set Swedenborg
+beside Dante in misbelief for calling Nature &#8216;the ultimate of Heaven,&#8217; a
+lowest rung, as it were, of Jacob&#8217;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 &#8216;Homer,&#8217; and in the next circle
+&#8216;Swedenborg,&#8217; and on the margin these words: &#8216;Everything in Dante&#8217;s
+Paradise shows that he has made the earth the foundation<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> of all, and its
+goddess Nature, memory,&#8217; memory of sensations, &#8216;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.&#8217; 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 <i>The Marriage
+of Heaven and Hell</i>. &#8216;In Milton the Father is destiny, the son a ratio of
+the five senses,&#8217; Blake&#8217;s definition of the reason which is the enemy of
+the imagination, &#8216;and the Holy Ghost vacuum.&#8217; Dante, like other medieval
+mystics, symbolized the highest order of created beings by the fixed
+stars, and God by the darkness beyond them, the <i>Primum Mobile</i>. Blake,
+absorbed in his very different vision, in which God took always a human
+shape, believed that to think of God under a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> 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&mdash;it being a creation of the ruining reason, &#8216;generalizing&#8217; away
+&#8216;the minute particulars of life.&#8217; Instead of seeking God in the deserts of
+time and space, in exterior immensities, in what he called &#8216;the abstract
+void,&#8217; 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&#8217;s &#8216;breathing garden,&#8217; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> he gave many names,
+&#8216;Jerusalem,&#8217; &#8216;Liberty,&#8217; &#8216;Eden,&#8217; &#8216;The Divine Vision,&#8217; &#8216;The Body of God,&#8217;
+&#8216;The Human Form Divine,&#8217; &#8216;The Divine Members,&#8217; and whose most intimate
+expression was art and poetry. He always sang of God under this symbol:</p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8216;For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Is God Our Father dear;</span><br />
+And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Is man, His child and care.</span><br />
+<br />
+For Mercy has a human heart;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Pity a human face;</span><br />
+And Love the human form divine;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And Peace, the human dress.</span><br />
+<br />
+Then every man of every clime,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">That prays in his distress,</span><br />
+Prays to the human form divine&mdash;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.&#8217;</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span>By thus contrasting Blake and Dante by the light of Blake&#8217;s paradoxical
+wisdom, and as though there was no important truth hung from Dante&#8217;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 Ph&aelig;acians, who told Odysseus that they had set their hearts in
+nothing but in &#8216;the dance and changes of raiment, and love and sleep,&#8217;
+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, &#8216;the minute particulars of life,&#8217; the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> 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.
+&#8216;Every space smaller than a globule of man&#8217;s blood,&#8217; he wrote, &#8216;opens into
+eternity of which this vegetable earth is but a shadow.&#8217; And again, &#8216;Every
+time less than a pulsation of the artery is equal&#8217; in its tenor and value
+&#8216;to six thousand years, for in this period the poet&#8217;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.&#8217; Dante, indeed,
+taught, in the &#8216;Purgatorio,&#8217; 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. &#8216;I know<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> 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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> 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.&#8217; 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. &#8216;I care
+not whether a man is good or bad,&#8217; are the words they put into the mouth
+of God, &#8216;all I care is whether he is a wise man or a fool. Go put off
+holiness and put on intellect.&#8217; This cultivated life, which seems to us so
+artificial a thing, is really, according to them, the laborious
+re-discovery of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> golden age, of the primeval simplicity, of the simple
+world in which Christ taught and lived, and its lawlessness is the
+lawlessness of Him &#8216;who being all virtue, acted from impulse and not from
+rules,&#8217;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">And his seventy disciples sent<br />
+Against religion and government.</p>
+
+<p>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. &#8216;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> 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&#8217;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.&#8217; After a time man has &#8216;to return to the dark valley whence he
+came and begin his labours anew,&#8217; but before that return he dwells in the
+freedom of imagination, in the peace of the &#8216;divine image,&#8217; &#8216;the divine
+vision,&#8217; in the peace that passes understanding and is the peace of art.
+&#8216;I have been very near the gates of death,&#8217; Blake wrote in his last
+letter, &#8216;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> 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,&#8217; the multiplicity of
+nature, &#8216;into the mind in which every one is king and priest in his own
+house.&#8217; The phrase about the king and priest is a memory of the crown and
+mitre set upon Dante&#8217;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 &#8216;immortal man.&#8217; &#8216;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span>
+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.&#8217; Mere sympathy for living things is not
+enough because we must learn to separate their &#8216;infected&#8217; 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 &#8216;Christ&#8217;s apostles were artists,&#8217; that
+&#8216;Christianity is Art,&#8217; and that &#8216;the whole business of man is the arts.&#8217;
+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 &#8216;corporeal reason&#8217; for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span>
+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 &#8216;the captivity in Egypt.&#8217; 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 &#8216;become infinite and holy.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>III. THE ILLUSTRATIONS OF DANTE</h3>
+
+<p>The late Mr. John Addington Symonds wrote&mdash;in a preface to certain Dante
+illustrations by Stradanus, a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> sixteenth-century artist of no great
+excellence, published in phototype by Mr. Unwin in 1892&mdash;that the
+illustrations of Gustave Dor&eacute;, &#8216;in spite of glaring artistic defects,
+must, I think, be reckoned first among numerous attempts to translate
+Dante&#8217;s conceptions into terms of plastic art.&#8217; 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 &#8216;the graceful
+and affected Botticelli,&#8217;&mdash;although &#8216;Dor&eacute; was fitted for his task, not by
+dramatic vigour, by feeling for beauty, or by anything sternly in sympathy
+with the supreme poet&#8217;s soul, but by a very effective sense of luminosity
+and gloom,&#8217;&mdash;but preferring them because &#8216;he created a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> fanciful world,
+which makes the movement of Dante&#8217;s <i>dramatis person&aelig;</i> conceivable,
+introducing the ordinary intelligence into those vast regions thronged
+with destinies of souls and creeds and empires.&#8217; 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. Dor&eacute; 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&#8217;s&mdash;as if Dante&#8217;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&#8217;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> poet or painter or musician
+could be other than an enchanter calling with a persuasive or compelling
+ritual, creatures, noble or ignoble, divine or d&aelig;monic, 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.</p>
+
+<p>Let us therefore put away the designs to <i>The Divine Comedy</i>, in which
+there is &#8216;an ordinary intelligence,&#8217; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> in the &#8216;formal&#8217; &#8216;generalized&#8217; way
+which Blake hated, and which is spiritually ridiculous. Penelli has
+transformed the &#8216;Inferno&#8217; 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 &#8216;Inferno,&#8217;
+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 Dor&eacute; has touched in
+the nineteenth.</p>
+
+<p>Though with many doubts, I am tempted to value Flaxman&#8217;s designs to the
+&#8216;Inferno,&#8217; the &#8216;Purgatorio,&#8217; and the &#8216;Paradiso,&#8217; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> of his Homer and Hesiod. His designs to <i>The Divine
+Comedy</i> 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 &#8216;The Angel,&#8217; 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 St&uuml;rler, 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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> 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 St&uuml;rler&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p>The only designs that compete with Blake&#8217;s are those of Botticelli and
+Giulio Clovio, and these contrast rather than compete; for Blake did not
+live to carry his &#8216;Paradiso&#8217; beyond the first faint pencillings, the first
+thin washes of colour,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> while Botticelli only, as I think, became
+supremely imaginative in his &#8216;Paradiso,&#8217; and Clovio never attempted the
+&#8216;Inferno&#8217; and &#8216;Purgatorio&#8217; 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&#8217;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 &#8216;Inferno&#8217; and the &#8216;Purgatorio&#8217; 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&#8217;s dual nature,
+but is a fragment of some medi&aelig;val pageant pictured with a merely
+technical inspiration. Clovio, the illuminator of missals, has tried to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span>
+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 &#8216;Inferno&#8217; and the &#8216;Purgatorio&#8217;: in the serene and
+rapturous emptiness of Dante&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p class="right">1897.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span></p>
+<h2>SYMBOLISM IN PAINTING</h2>
+
+<p>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&#8217;s Dictionary sees no great difference, for it calls a Symbol
+&#8216;That which comprehends in its figure a representation of something else&#8217;;
+and an Allegory, &#8216;A figurative discourse, in which something other is
+intended than is contained in the words literally taken.&#8217; It is only a
+very modern Dictionary that calls a Symbol &#8216;the sign or representation of
+any moral thing by the images or properties of natural things,&#8217; which,
+though an imperfect definition, is not unlike &#8216;The things below are as the
+things above&#8217; of the Emerald Tablet of Hermes! <i>The Faery Queen</i> and <i>The
+Pilgrim&#8217;s Progress</i> have been so important in England that Allegory has
+overtopped Symbolism, and for a time has overwhelmed it in its own
+downfall. William<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> 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&#8217;s, of
+whom he knew nothing. William Blake has written, &#8216;Vision or
+imagination&#8217;&mdash;meaning symbolism by these words&mdash;&#8216;is a representation of
+what actually exists, really or unchangeably. Fable or Allegory is formed
+by the daughters of Memory.&#8217; 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&mdash;which had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> never lacked its voice or its body&mdash;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&#8217;s
+&#8216;Vision of Bloodthirstiness,&#8217; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> his meaning without becoming an allegorist. I think I
+quoted the lily in the hand of the angel in Rossetti&#8217;s &#8216;Annunciation,&#8217; and
+the lily in the jar in his &#8216;Childhood of Mary Virgin,&#8217; and thought they
+made the more important symbols, the women&#8217;s bodies, and the angels&#8217;
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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&#8217;s &#8216;Moses,&#8217; one need not doubt that its symbolism has helped
+to awaken the modern imagination; while Tintoretto&#8217;s &#8216;Origin of the Milky
+Way,&#8217; which is Allegory without any Symbolism, is, apart from its fine
+painting, but a moment&#8217;s amusement for our fancy. A hundred<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> 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, &#8216;That woman there is Juno, and the milk out of her
+breast is making the Milky Way,&#8217; you have told the meaning of the other,
+and the fine painting, which has added so much irrelevant beauty, has not
+told it better.</p>
+
+<p>All Art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic,
+and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medi&aelig;val 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Wagner&#8217;s dramas, Keats&#8217; odes, Blake&#8217;s pictures and poems, Calvert&#8217;s
+pictures, Rossetti&#8217;s pictures, Villiers De l&#8217;Isle Adam&#8217;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> 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 star-gazers, 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, &#8216;in a certain order, suited&#8217; to his &#8216;imaginative energy.&#8217;
+If you<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> paint a beautiful woman and fill her face, as Rossetti filled so
+many faces, with an infinite love, a perfected love, &#8216;one&#8217;s eyes meet no
+mortal thing when they meet the light of her peaceful eyes,&#8217; as Michael
+Angelo said of Vittoria Colonna; but one&#8217;s thoughts stray to mortal
+things, and ask, maybe, &#8216;Has her lover gone from her, or is he coming?&#8217; or
+&#8216;What pre-destinated unhappiness has made the shadow in her eyes?&#8217; If you
+paint the same face, and set a winged rose or a rose of gold somewhere
+about her, one&#8217;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> 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: &#8216;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.&#8217; And again, &#8216;The world of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> 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.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>Every visionary knows that the mind&#8217;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 recognized one of the company by his square, black curling
+beard. I have often seen him;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Are he and his blue-robed companions, and their like, &#8216;the Eternal
+realities&#8217; of which we are the reflection &#8216;in the vegetable glass of
+nature,&#8217; 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.</p>
+
+<p class="right">1898.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE SYMBOLISM OF POETRY</h2>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>&#8216;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,&#8217; writes Mr. Arthur Symons in <i>The Symbolist Movement
+in Literature</i>, 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&#8217;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> 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,
+&#8216;a poet needs all philosophy, but he must keep it out of his work,&#8217; 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 is perhaps for this reason that great
+art, now that vulgarity has armed itself and multiplied itself, is perhaps
+dead in England.</p>
+
+<p>All writers, all artists of any kind, in so far as they have had any
+philosophical or critical power, perhaps just in so<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> 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 &#8216;to
+build in brick and mortar inside the covers of a book&#8217;; and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> now writers
+have begun to dwell upon the element of evocation, of suggestion, upon
+what we call the symbolism in great writers.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>In &#8216;Symbolism in Painting&#8217; 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.</p>
+
+<p>There are no lines with more melancholy beauty than these by Burns&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8216;The white moon is setting behind the white wave,<br />
+And Time is setting with me, O!&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> and whiteness and setting Time and the
+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 all like those by Burns. Begin with this
+line by Blake&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8216;The gay fishes on the wave when the moon sucks up the dew;&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>or these lines by Nash&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8216;Brightness falls from the air,<br />
+Queens have died young and fair,<br />
+Dust hath closed Helen&#8217;s eye;&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>or these lines by Shakespeare&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span>
+&#8216;Timon hath made his everlasting mansion<br />
+Upon the beached verge of the salt flood;<br />
+Who once a day with his embossed froth<br />
+The turbulent surge shall cover;&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span>
+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&#8217;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span>
+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, &#8216;the
+devastation of peoples and the overwhelming of cities.&#8217; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span> itself, for does not &#8216;the
+eye altering alter all&#8217;?</p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8216;Our towns are copied fragments from our breast;<br />
+And all man&#8217;s Babylons strive but to impart<br />
+The grandeurs of his Babylonian heart.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span>
+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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>Besides emotional symbols, symbols that evoke emotions alone,&mdash;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,&mdash;there are intellectual<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> 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 &#8216;white&#8217; or
+&#8216;purple&#8217; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span>
+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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> sitting upon the hilltop, the fool of faery with
+his shining cup full of dreams, and it may be &#8216;make a friend of one of
+these images of wonder,&#8217; and &#8216;meet the Lord in the air.&#8217; 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. &#8216;I then saw,&#8217; wrote
+G&eacute;rard de Nerval of his madness, &#8216;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.&#8217; In an earlier time he would have been of that multitude,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span>
+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&#8217;Isle Adam in <i>Ax&euml;l</i>, 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&#8217;s hearts that we call the progress of the world, and lay their hands
+upon men&#8217;s heart-strings again, without becoming the garment of religion
+as in old times.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<p>If people were to accept the theory that poetry moves us because of its
+symbolism,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p class="right">1900.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE THEATRE</h2>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>I remember, some years ago, advising a distinguished, though too little
+recognized, 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&#8217;s women are &#8216;guys,&#8217; that Rodin&#8217;s women are
+&#8216;ugly,&#8217; and that Ibsen is &#8216;immoral,&#8217; and who only want to be left<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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: &#8216;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> failed the managers. If poets mean to serve the
+stage, their dramas must be dramatic.&#8217; 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 &#8216;an old poet telling
+his sins,&#8217; and about &#8216;the five young men who were drowned last year,&#8217; and
+about &#8216;the lovers that were drowned going to America,&#8217; or to some tale of
+Oisin and his three hundred<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span> years in <i>Tir nan Oge</i>. Mr. Bridges&#8217; <i>Return
+of Ulysses</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+earthen vessels of cities, before the coming of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> 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&#8217;s
+<i>Locrine</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>As audiences and actors changed, managers learned to substitute
+meretricious<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> 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 &OElig;dipus, or to see &#8216;the
+pendent bed and procreant cradle&#8217; of the &#8216;martlet&#8217; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &#8216;It is dawn,&#8217; or &#8216;It is raining,&#8217; or &#8216;The wind is shaking the trees&#8217;;
+and dresses of so little irrelevant magnificence that the mortal actors<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>It will take a generation, and perhaps generations, to restore the theatre
+of Art; for one must get one&#8217;s actors, and perhaps one&#8217;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&#8217;s painters and one&#8217;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> verses in the world; but he
+has no practical knowledge of the stage, and probably despises it.</p>
+
+<p class="right">May 1899.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>Dionysius, the Areopagite, wrote that &#8216;He has set the borders of the
+nations according to His angels.&#8217; 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&mdash;as in ancient Greece, or in Elizabethan England, or
+in contemporary Scandinavia&mdash;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span> 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&mdash;countless images of a fading light&mdash;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> one studies one&#8217;s own mind, one comes to
+think with Blake, that &#8216;every time less than a pulsation of the artery is
+equal to six thousand years, for in this period the poet&#8217;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.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p class="right">February 1900.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE CELTIC ELEMENT IN LITERATURE</h2>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>Ernest Renan described what he held to be Celtic characteristics in <i>The
+Poetry of the Celtic Races</i>. I must repeat the well-known sentences: &#8216;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.&#8217; The Celtic race had &#8216;a
+realistic naturalism,&#8217; &#8216;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.&#8217; &#8216;It has worn itself out in mistaking dreams for
+realities,&#8217; and &#8216;compared with the classical imagination the Celtic
+imagination is indeed the infinite contrasted with the finite.&#8217; &#8216;Its
+history is one long lament, it still recalls its exiles, its flights
+across the seas.&#8217; &#8216;If at times it seems to be cheerful, its tear<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span> 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.&#8217;
+Matthew Arnold, in <i>The Study of Celtic Literature</i>, 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 &#8216;mystery&#8217; than of
+her &#8216;beauty,&#8217; and it adds &#8216;charm and magic&#8217; to nature, and the Celtic
+imaginativeness and melancholy are alike &#8216;a passionate, turbulent,
+indomitable reaction against the despotism of fact.&#8217; The Celt is not
+melancholy, as Faust or Werther are melancholy, from &#8216;a perfectly definite
+motive,&#8217; but because of something about him &#8216;unaccountable, defiant and
+titanic.&#8217; How well one knows these sentences, better even than Renan&#8217;s,
+and how well one knows the passages of prose and verse which he uses to
+prove that wherever English literature has the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> 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&#8217;s and Arnold&#8217;s argument.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>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;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span> 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 <i>Kalevala</i> said of himself, &#8216;I have learned my songs from the music of
+many birds, and from the music of many waters.&#8217; When a mother in the
+<i>Kalevala</i> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span> sing, the one &#8216;love, love,&#8217; the one &#8216;suitor, suitor,&#8217; the one
+&#8216;consolation, consolation.&#8217; 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 <i>Kalavala</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>The old Irish and the old Welsh, though they had less of the old way than
+the makers of the <i>Kalavala</i>, had more of it than the makers of the Sagas,
+and it is this that distinguishes the examples Matthew Arnold quotes of
+their &#8216;natural magic,&#8217; of their sense of &#8216;the mystery&#8217; more than of &#8216;the
+beauty&#8217; of nature.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span> 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 &#8216;natural magic&#8217; 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&#8217;s minds. The ancient religion is in that passage of the
+<i>Mabinogion</i> about the making of &#8216;Flower Aspect.&#8217; Gwydion and Math made
+her &#8216;by charms and illusions&#8217; &#8216;out of flowers.&#8217; &#8216;They took the blossoms of
+the oak, and the blossoms of the broom, and the blossoms of the
+meadow-sweet, and produced from them a maiden the fairest and most
+graceful that man ever saw; and they baptized her, and called her Flower
+Aspect&#8217;; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span> and beautiful a
+thing than flame: &#8216;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.&#8217; And one finds it very certainly in the quotations
+he makes from English poets to prove a Celtic influence in English poetry;
+in Keats&#8217;s &#8216;magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in faery
+lands forlorn&#8217;; in his &#8216;moving waters at their priest-like task of pure
+ablution round earth&#8217;s human shore&#8217;; in Shakespeare&#8217;s &#8216;floor of heaven,&#8217;
+&#8216;inlaid with patens of bright gold&#8217;; and in his Dido standing &#8216;on the wild
+sea banks,&#8217; &#8216;a willow in her hand,&#8217; and waving it in the ritual of the old
+worship of nature and the spirits of nature, to wave &#8216;her love to come
+again to Carthage.&#8217; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span> of Olwen in the <i>Mabinogion</i>: &#8216;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.&#8217; And is there not such delight and wonder in&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8216;Meet we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,<br />
+By paved fountain or by rushy brook,<br />
+Or on the beached margent of the sea&#8217;?</p>
+
+<p>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 &#8216;the faithful way,&#8217; or in what he calls &#8216;the Greek
+way,&#8217; 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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span> which adds lightness and brightness to
+nature&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8216;What little town by river or sea-shore<br />
+Or mountain built with quiet citadel,<br />
+Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn&#8217;;</p>
+
+<p>when Shakespeare wrote in the Greek way&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8216;I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,<br />
+Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows&#8217;;</p>
+
+<p>when Virgil wrote in the Greek way&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8216;Muscosi fontes et somno mollior herba,&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>and</p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8216;Pallentes violas et summa papavera carpens<br />
+Narcissum et florem jungit bene olentis anethi&#8217;;</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span> pleasant, the way of people who have
+forgotten the ancient religion.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> strait limits, and were nearer to ancient chaos, every man&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p>All folk literature, and all literature that keeps the folk tradition,
+delights in unbounded and immortal things. The <i>Kalevala</i> delights in the
+seven hundred years that Luonaton wanders in the depths of the sea with
+W&auml;in&auml;m&ouml;inen in her womb, and the Mahomedan king in the Song of Roland,
+pondering upon the greatness of Charlemagne, repeats over and over, &#8216;He is
+three hundred years old, when will he weary of war?&#8217; Cuchulain<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span> 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 St. 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?</p>
+
+<p>All folk literature has indeed a passion whose like is not in modern
+literature and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> 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 <i>The Songs of Connacht</i>
+that is like a death cry: &#8216;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span> 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.&#8217; There is another song
+that ends, &#8216;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.&#8217; Nor do the old Irish weigh and measure
+their hatred. The nurse of O&#8217;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: &#8216;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> in the one
+noose.&#8217; 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 &#8216;A. E.,&#8217; &#8216;A vast desire awakes and grows into
+forgetfulness of thee.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span> 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
+&#8216;mistaking dreams,&#8217; which are perhaps essences, for &#8216;realities&#8217; which are
+perhaps accidents, from this &#8216;passionate, turbulent reaction against the
+despotism of fact,&#8217; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span> 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
+&#8216;melancholy a man knows when he is face to face&#8217; with nature, and thinks
+&#8216;he hears her communing with him about&#8217; the mournfulness of being born and
+of dying; and how can it do otherwise than call into his mind &#8216;its exiles,
+its flights across the seas,&#8217; that it may stir the ever-smouldering ashes?
+No Gaelic poetry is so popular in Gaelic-speaking places as the
+lamentations<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span> 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: &#8216;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&mdash;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.&#8217; 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; &#8216;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> 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&mdash;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.&#8217; An Elizabethan writer
+describes extravagant sorrow by calling it &#8216;to weep Irish&#8217;; 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. &#8216;The same man,&#8217; writes Dr. Hyde in the beautiful prose which
+he first writes in Gaelic, &#8216;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span> hopes, lost life, the vanity of this world, and the coming of
+death.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>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, &#8216;Excess is the vivifying spirit of the finest art, and we
+must always seek to make excess more abundantly excessive.&#8217; Matthew Arnold
+has said that if he were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> asked &#8216;where English got its turn for melancholy
+and its turn for natural magic,&#8217; he &#8216;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.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>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 &#8216;the vivifying spirit&#8217; &#8216;of excess&#8217; into the arts of Europe. Ernest
+Renan has told how the visions of purgatory seen by pilgrims to Lough
+Derg&mdash;once visions of the pagan under-world, as the boat made<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span> out of a
+hollow tree that bore the pilgrim to the holy island were alone enough to
+prove&mdash;gave European thought new symbols of a more abundant penitence; and
+had so great an influence that he has written, &#8216;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.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>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 may be changed, as it were, the very roots of man&#8217;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span> over all romance
+that they seem romance herself.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span> 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. &#8216;The Celtic movement,&#8217; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span> 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&#8217;Isle Adam, and Mallarm&eacute;, and Maeterlinck, and has
+stirred the imagination of Ibsen and D&#8217;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p class="right">1897.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>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, <i>Cuchulain of Muirthemne</i>, a book to set
+beside the <i>Morte D&#8217;Arthur</i> and the <i>Mabinogion</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="right">1902.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE AUTUMN OF THE BODY</h2>
+
+<p>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 &#8216;externality&#8217; which a time of
+scientific and political thought has brought into literature. This
+struggle has been going on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> 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, <i>The Temptation of
+S. Anthony</i>, the last great dramatic invention of the old romanticism,
+contrasts very plainly with <i>Ax&euml;l</i>, the first great dramatic invention of
+the new; and Maeterlinck has followed Count Villiers de l&#8217;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&#8217;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span> spiritual passion in words and types and metaphors that
+draw one&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p>I see, indeed, in the arts of every country those faint lights and faint
+colours and faint outlines and faint energies which many call &#8216;the
+decadence,&#8217; 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, &#8216;The very sunlight&#8217;s weary, and it&#8217;s time to quit the
+plough.&#8217; Its importance is the greater because it comes to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span> 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
+<i>Kalevala</i>, had not Homer&#8217;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span> of verse and of drama that he might fill them with
+things and their accidental relations to one another.</p>
+
+<p>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,
+&#8216;These things that I touch and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span> see and hear are alone real,&#8217; 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. Mallarm&eacute;&#8217;s method, and has quoted him as saying that
+we should &#8216;abolish the pretension, &aelig;sthetically an error, despite its
+dominion over almost all the masterpieces, to enclose<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span> within the subtle
+pages other than&mdash;for example&mdash;the horror of the forest or the silent
+thunder in the leaves, not the intense dense wood of the trees,&#8217; and as
+desiring to substitute for the old lyric afflatus or the enthusiastic
+personal direction of the phrase&#8217; words &#8216;that take light from mutual
+reflection, like an actual trail of fire over precious stones,&#8217; and &#8216;to
+make an entire word hitherto unknown to the language&#8217; &#8216;out of many
+vocables.&#8217; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span> 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 &#8216;take light by mutual reflection, like an actual trail of
+fire over precious stones,&#8217; and become &#8216;an entire word,&#8217; the signature or
+symbol of a mood of the divine imagination as imponderable as &#8216;the horror
+of the forest or the silent thunder in the leaves.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p class="right">1898.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE MOODS</h2>
+
+<p>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 &#8216;little devils who fight for themselves,&#8217; 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 imagina<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span>tive 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.</p>
+
+<p class="right">1895.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE BODY OF THE FATHER CHRISTIAN ROSENCRUX</h2>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span>
+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
+&#8216;phantoms of the earth and water&#8217; 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 &#8216;uncurbed in their
+eternal glory,&#8217; even in their labour for the ending of man&#8217;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 &#8216;to sum up&#8217; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span> saying, &#8216;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.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p class="right">1895.</p>
+
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE RETURN OF ULYSSES</h2>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>M. Maeterlinck, in his beautiful <i>Treasure of the Humble</i>, 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. &#8216;The true artist,&#8217; he says, &#8216;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.&#8217; I
+do not understand him to mean that our dramas should have no victories or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span>
+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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span> 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, <i>The Return of Ulysses</i>,
+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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span> suitors, at which she looks through the open door, I tremble
+with excitement.</p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8216;<i>Penelope</i>: Alas! what cries! Say, is the prince still safe?<br />
+<br />
+<i>The Maid</i>: He shieldeth himself well, and striketh surely;<br />
+His foes fall down before him. Ah! now what can I see?<br />
+Who cometh? Lo! a dazzling helm, a spear<br />
+Of silver or electron; sharp and swift<br />
+The piercings. How they fall! Ha! shields are raised<br />
+In vain. I am blinded, or the beggar-man<br />
+Hath waxed in strength. He is changed, he is young. O strange!<br />
+He is all in golden armour. These are gods<br />
+That slay the suitors. (<i>Runs to Penelope.</i>) O lady, forgive me.<br />
+Tis Ares&#8217; self. I saw his crisp&egrave;d beard;<br />
+I saw beneath his helm his curl&egrave;d locks.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>The coming of Athene helmed &#8216;in silver or electron&#8217; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bridges has written it in what is practically the classical manner, as
+he has done in <i>Achilles in Scyros</i>&mdash;a placid and charming setting for
+many placid and charming lyrics&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8216;And ever we keep a feast of delight<br />
+The betrothal of hearts, when spirits unite,<br />
+Creating an offspring of joy, a treasure<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Unknown to the bad, for whom</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">The gods foredoom</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">The glitter of pleasure</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">And a dark tomb.&#8217;</span></p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span> 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 <i>Return of Ulysses</i> is admirable in beauty,
+because its classical gravity of speech, which does not, like
+Shakespeare&#8217;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 <i>Nero:
+Second Part</i> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span> drowned that subtle voice that speaks
+amid our heterogeneous lives of a life lived in obedience to a lonely and
+distinguished ideal.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p class="right">1896.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span></p>
+<h2>IRELAND AND THE ARTS</h2>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span> we must find the passions among the people. We must
+baptize as well as preach.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span>
+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&#8217;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span> now and then, at seeing no market at all.</p>
+
+<p>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&#8217;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span> 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 Jud&aelig;a, 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.</p>
+
+<p>I think that my reader<small><a name="f2.1" id="f2.1" href="#f2">[2]</a></small> will
+have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 S. 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&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8216;The oration is to the orator, the acting is to the actor and actress, not to the audience:<br />
+And no man understands any greatness or goodness but his own or the indication of his own.&#8217;</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span>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 &#8216;excellent beauty without strangeness.&#8217; 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 &#8216;The end of art is
+peace,&#8217; and out of the one as out of the other comes the cry: <i>Sero te
+amavi, Pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova! Sero te amavi!</i></p>
+
+<p>The Catholic Church is not the less the Church of the people because the
+Mass is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span> 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, &#8216;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.&#8217; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span> 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&#8217;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span> 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&#8217; beautiful, piteous <i>Orpheus and Eurydice</i> with an unquestioning
+mind. I say with my lips, &#8216;The Spirit made it,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span> for it is beautiful, and
+the Spirit bloweth where it listeth,&#8217; but I say in my heart, &#8216;Aengus and
+Etain would have served his turn;&#8217; but one cannot, perhaps, love or
+believe at all if one does not love or believe a little too much.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Art and scholarship like these I have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span> 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&mdash;and in a few
+generations they would come into the life of all, rich and poor&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p class="right">1901.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE GALWAY PLAINS</h2>
+
+<p>Lady Gregory has just given me her beautiful <i>Poets and Dreamers</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>I asked the old countryman about<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span> 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 had 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, &#8216;Sometimes when I look over to the hill,
+I see a mist lying on the top of it, that goes away after a while.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>A great part of the poems and stories in Lady Gregory&#8217;s book were made or
+gathered between Burren and Cruachmaa. It was here that Raftery, the
+wander<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span>ing 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.</p>
+
+<p>&#8216;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!&#8217; 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 fireside, and sending one of His
+Saints to anoint the dying.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The emotion has become not less, but more noble, by the change, for the
+man who goes to his death with the thought&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8216;It is with the people I was,<br />
+It is not with the law I was,&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>has behind him generations of poetry and poetical life.</p>
+
+<p>The poets of to-day speak with the voice of the unknown priest who wrote,
+some two hundred years ago, that <i>Sorrowful Lament for Ireland</i>, Lady
+Gregory has put into passionate and rhythmical prose&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="poem">&#8216;I do not know of anything under the sky<br />
+That is friendly or favourable to the Gael,<br />
+But only the sea that our need brings us to,<br />
+Or the wind that blows to the harbour<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span>The ship that is bearing us away from Ireland;<br />
+And there is reason that these are reconciled with us,<br />
+For we increase the sea with our tears,<br />
+And the wandering wind with our sighs.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>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;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span> 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 that 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.</p>
+
+<p class="right">1903.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span></p>
+<h2>EMOTION OF MULTITUDE</h2>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span> 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 Shakespearean 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&#8217;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&#8217;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 <i>Hamlet</i>, one hardly notices, so
+subtly is the web woven, that the murder of Hamlet&#8217;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span> 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 noon-light 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?</p>
+
+<p class="right">1903.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><b>Footnotes:</b></p>
+
+<p><a name="f1" id="f1" href="#f1.1">[1]</a> &#8216;Marianne&#8217;s Dream&#8217; was certainly copied from a real dream of
+somebody&#8217;s, but like images come to the mystic in his waking state.</p>
+
+<p><a name="f2" id="f2" href="#f2.1">[2]</a> This essay was first published in the <i>United Irishman</i>.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 50%;" />
+<p><b>Transcriber&#8217;s Note:</b> Unmatched quotation marks and spelling variants are presented as in the original text.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Ideas of Good and Evil, by William Butler Yeats
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+Project Gutenberg's Ideas of Good and Evil, by William Butler Yeats
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Ideas of Good and Evil
+
+Author: William Butler Yeats
+
+Release Date: June 18, 2010 [EBook #32884]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Brian Foley and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Ideas of Good and Evil
+
+
+
+
+  _BY THE SAME WRITER--_
+      THE SECRET ROSE
+      THE CELTIC TWILIGHT
+      POEMS
+      THE WIND AMONG THE REEDS
+      THE SHADOWY WATERS
+      PLAYS FOR AN IRISH THEATRE
+          VOL. I.  WHERE THERE IS NOTHING
+          VOL. II. SHORTER PLAYS
+
+
+
+
+Ideas of Good and Evil
+
+
+Second Edition
+
+
+
+
+Ideas of Good and Evil.
+
+By W. B. Yeats
+
+
+A. H. BULLEN, 47 Great Russell
+
+Street, London, W.C. MCMIII
+
+
+
+
+Contents.
+
+
+  WHAT IS 'POPULAR POETRY'?                                        1
+
+  SPEAKING TO THE PSALTERY                                        16
+
+  MAGIC                                                           29
+
+  THE HAPPIEST OF THE POETS                                       70
+
+  THE PHILOSOPHY OF SHELLEY'S POETRY                              90
+
+  AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON                                           142
+
+  WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE IMAGINATION                              168
+
+  WILLIAM BLAKE AND HIS ILLUSTRATIONS TO _THE DIVINE COMEDY_     176
+
+  SYMBOLISM IN PAINTING                                          226
+
+  THE SYMBOLISM OF POETRY                                        237
+
+  THE THEATRE                                                    257
+
+  THE CELTIC ELEMENT IN LITERATURE                               270
+
+  THE AUTUMN OF THE BODY                                         296
+
+  THE MOODS                                                      306
+
+  THE BODY OF THE FATHER CHRISTIAN ROSENCRUX                     308
+
+  _THE RETURN OF ULYSSES_                                        312
+
+  IRELAND AND THE ARTS                                           320
+
+  THE GALWAY PLAINS                                              333
+
+  EMOTION OF MULTITUDE                                           339
+
+
+
+
+_Note._--The Essay on _Symbolism in Painting_ originally formed part of an
+Introduction to _A Book of Images drawn by W. T. Horton_ (Unicorn Press),
+1898.
+
+
+
+
+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 my 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 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: Song and music.]
+
+
+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 efforts 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 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 gravestones 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 hare-bells
+drenched with dew 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
+mediaeval 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 mind 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 fowl 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 mediaeval 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 mediaeval 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 indeed 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
+wind-swept 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 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 a
+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
+Phoenix 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 in 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 shalt thou 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 Danae 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 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 its 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 socialist pamphlets he tells 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 men like him, 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 even 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 beauty, love and truth we seek
+  But in our minds? 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?
+  How 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 shadows 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.
+
+  This 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 mediaeval 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 aerial 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 daemons' 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 vale,'
+
+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 sand 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,[1] 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 any one, 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 upon 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 and
+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 Phaeacian 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 ever more. Two gates there are to the cave, the one set
+towards the North wind, whereby men may go down, but the portals toward
+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 evoked 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,
+  The desire for 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 with speed and 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 overflowing 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.
+
+
+
+
+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 farmhouses, 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 AEneas
+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 Hollingshead, and had given life a new luxury, a new
+splendour, and been 'too friendly' to his friends, 'too favourable' 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 disgrac'd,
+    And strength by limping sway disabled,
+  And Art made tongue-tied by authority,
+    And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,
+  And simple truth miscalled simplicity,
+    And captive good attending captain ill:
+  Tired with all these, from these would I begone
+  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 Daemons, and that the Daemons 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
+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 _Axel_ of the symbolist Villiers De L'Isle Adam is
+arbitrary, while they mix incongruous things as _Axel_ 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 Prof. 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 is the death of her 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 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 Duerer 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 Duerer 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 literal 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 naive 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 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 medieval
+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 Phaeacians, 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 Dore, '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 'Dore was fitted for his task, not by
+dramatic vigour, by feeling for beauty, or by anything sternly 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 personae_ 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. Dore 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 daemonic, 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 Dore 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 Stuerler, 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 Stuerler'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 mediaeval 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 Faery Queen_ 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 storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic,
+and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which mediaeval 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 star-gazers, 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 pre-destinated 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 recognized 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 is perhaps 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
+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 all 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
+Gerard 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 _Axel_, 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
+recognized, 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 be 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
+earthen 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 OEdipus, 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 _Kalavala_, 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 _Kalavala_, 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
+meadow-sweet, 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
+Waeinaemoeinen 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 St. 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 may be 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 herself.
+
+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 Mallarme, 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 _Axel_, 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. Mallarme's method, and has quoted him as saying that
+we should 'abolish the pretension, aesthetically 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; sharp 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 crisped beard;
+  I saw beneath his helm his curled 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 Judaea, 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[2] 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 S. 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.
+
+
+
+
+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 had 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 fireside, 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 his 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 that 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 Shakespearean 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 noon-light 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.
+
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+[1] 'Marianne's Dream' was certainly copied from a real dream of
+somebody's, but like images come to the mystic in his waking state.
+
+[2] This essay was first published in the _United Irishman_.
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+Unmatched quotation marks and spelling variants are presented as in
+the original text.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Ideas of Good and Evil, by William Butler Yeats
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