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diff --git a/32884.txt b/32884.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..05c56b4 --- /dev/null +++ b/32884.txt @@ -0,0 +1,5530 @@ +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 + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL *** + +***** This file should be named 32884.txt or 32884.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/3/2/8/8/32884/ + +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.) + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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