No More Learning

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 Sturler, 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 Sturler'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 Faerie Queene_ and _The Pilgrim's Progress_ have been
so important in England that Allegory has overtopped Symbolism, and
for a time has overwhelmed it in its own downfall. William Blake was
perhaps the first modern to insist on a difference; and the other
day, when I sat for my portrait to a German Symbolist in Paris, whose
talk was all of his love for Symbolism and his hatred for Allegory,
his definitions were the same as William Blake's, of whom he knew
nothing. William Blake has written, 'Vision or imagination'--meaning
symbolism by these words--'is a representation of what actually exists,
really or unchangeably. Fable or Allegory is formed by the daughters
of Memory. ' The German insisted with many determined gestures, that
Symbolism said things which could not be said so perfectly in any other
way, and needed but a right instinct for its understanding; while
Allegory said things which could be said as well, or better, in another
way, and needed a right knowledge for its understanding. The one gave
dumb things voices, and bodiless things bodies; while the other read
a meaning--which had never lacked its voice or its body--into something
heard or seen, and loved less for the meaning than for its own sake.
The only symbols he cared for were the shapes and motions of the body;
ears hidden by the hair, to make one think of a mind busy with inner
voices; and a head so bent that back and neck made the one curve, as in
Blake's 'Vision of Bloodthirstiness,' to call up an emotion of bodily
strength; and he would not put even a lily, or a rose, or a poppy into
a picture to express purity, or love, or sleep, because he thought
such emblems were allegorical, and had their meaning by a traditional
and not by a natural right. I said that the rose, and the lily, and
the poppy were so married, by their colour and their odour, and their
use, to love and purity and sleep, or to other symbols of love and
purity and sleep, and had been so long a part of the imagination of the
world, that a symbolist might use them to help out his meaning without
becoming an allegorist. I think I quoted the lily in the hand of the
angel in Rossetti's 'Annunciation,' and the lily in the jar in his
'Childhood of Mary Virgin,' and thought they made the more important
symbols, the women's bodies, and the angels' bodies, and the clear
morning light, take that place, in the great procession of Christian
symbols, where they can alone have all their meaning and all their
beauty.

It is hard to say where Allegory and Symbolism melt into one another,
but it is not hard to say where either comes to its perfection; and
though one may doubt whether Allegory or Symbolism is the greater
in the horns of Michael Angelo's 'Moses,' one need not doubt that
its symbolism has helped to awaken the modern imagination; while
Tintoretto's 'Origin of the Milky Way,' which is Allegory without any
Symbolism, is, apart from its fine painting, but a moment's amusement
for our fancy. A hundred generations might write out what seemed the
meaning of the one, and they would write different meanings, for no
symbol tells all its meaning to any generation; but when you have said,
'That woman there is Juno, and the milk out of her breast is making
the Milky Way,' you have told the meaning of the other, and the fine
painting, which has added so much irrelevant beauty, has not told it
better.

All Art that is not mere story-telling, or mere portraiture, is
symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which
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 stargazers, that symbolism of bodily beauty which seemed a wicked
thing to Fra Angelico, the symbolism in day and night, and winter
and summer, spring and autumn, once so great a part of an older
religion than Christianity; and in having accepted all the Divine
Intellect, its anger and its pity, its waking and its sleep, its love
and its lust, for the substance of their art. A Keats or a Calvert is
as much a symbolist as a Blake or a Wagner; but he is a fragmentary
symbolist, for while he evokes in his persons and his landscapes an
infinite emotion, a perfected emotion, a part of the Divine Essence,
he does not set his symbols in the great procession as Blake would
have him, 'in a certain order, suited' to his 'imaginative energy. '
If you paint a beautiful woman and fill her face, as Rossetti filled
so many faces, with an infinite love, a perfected love, 'one's eyes
meet no mortal thing when they meet the light of her peaceful eyes,'
as Michael Angelo said of Vittoria Colonna; but one's thoughts stray
to mortal things, and ask, maybe, 'Has her lover gone from her, or is
he coming? ' or 'What predestinated unhappiness has made the shadow
in her eyes? ' If you paint the same face, and set a winged rose or a
rose of gold somewhere about her, one's thoughts are of her immortal
sisters, Pity and Jealousy, and of her mother, Ancestral Beauty, and of
her high kinsmen, the Holy Orders, whose swords make a continual music
before her face. The systematic mystic is not the greatest of artists,
because his imagination is too great to be bounded by a picture or
a song, and because only imperfection in a mirror of perfection, or
perfection in a mirror of imperfection, delight our frailty. There
is indeed a systematic mystic in every poet or painter who, like
Rossetti, delights in a traditional Symbolism, or, like Wagner,
delights in a personal Symbolism; and such men often fall into trances,
or have waking dreams. Their thought wanders from the woman who is
Love herself, to her sisters and her forebears, and to all the great
procession; and so august a beauty moves before the mind, that they
forget the things which move before the eyes. William Blake, who was
the chanticleer of the new dawn, has written: 'If the spectator could
enter into one of these images of his imagination, approaching them on
the fiery chariot of his contemplative thought, if . . . he could make
a friend and companion of one of these images of wonder, which always
entreat him to leave mortal things (as he must know), then would he
arise from the grave, then would he meet the Lord in the air, and then
he would be happy. ' And again, 'The world of imagination is the world
of Eternity. It is the Divine bosom into which we shall all go after
the death of the vegetated body. The world of imagination is infinite
and eternal, whereas the world of generation or vegetation is finite
and temporal. There exist in that eternal world the eternal realities
of everything which we see reflected in the vegetable glass of nature. '

Every visionary knows that the mind's eye soon comes to see a
capricious and variable world, which the will cannot shape or change,
though it can call it up and banish it again. I closed my eyes a
moment ago, and a company of people in blue robes swept by me in a
blinding light, and had gone before I had done more than see little
roses embroidered on the hems of their robes, and confused, blossoming
apple-boughs somewhere beyond them, and recognised one of the company
by his square black, curling beard. I have often seen him; and one
night a year ago, I asked him questions which he answered by showing me
flowers and precious stones, of whose meaning I had no knowledge, and
he seemed too perfected a soul for any knowledge that cannot be spoken
in symbol or metaphor.

Are he and his blue-robed companions, and their like, 'the Eternal
realities' of which we are the reflection 'in the vegetable glass of
nature,' or a momentary dream? To answer is to take sides in the only
controversy in which it is greatly worth taking sides, and in the only
controversy which may never be decided.

1898.




THE SYMBOLISM OF POETRY


I

'SYMBOLISM, as seen in the writers of our day, would have no value
if it were not seen also, under one disguise or another, in every
great imaginative writer,' writes Mr. Arthur Symons in _The Symbolist
Movement in Literature_, a subtle book which I cannot praise as I
would, because it has been dedicated to me; and he goes on to show
how many profound writers have in the last few years sought for a
philosophy of poetry in the doctrine of symbolism, and how even in
countries where it is almost scandalous to seek for any philosophy
of poetry, new writers are following them in their search. We do not
know what the writers of ancient times talked of among themselves,
and one bull is all that remains of Shakespeare's talk, who was on
the edge of modern times; and the journalist is convinced, it seems,
that they talked of wine and women and politics, but never about their
art, or never quite seriously about their art. He is certain that
no one, who had a philosophy of his art or a theory of how he should
write, has ever made a work of art, that people have no imagination
who do not write without forethought and afterthought as he writes
his own articles. He says this with enthusiasm, because he has heard
it at so many comfortable dinner-tables, where some one had mentioned
through carelessness, or foolish zeal, a book whose difficulty had
offended indolence, or a man who had not forgotten that beauty is an
accusation. Those formulas and generalizations, in which a hidden
sergeant has drilled the ideas of journalists and through them the
ideas of all but all the modern world, have created in their turn a
forgetfulness like that of soldiers in battle, so that journalists and
their readers have forgotten, among many like events, that Wagner spent
seven years arranging and explaining his ideas before he began his
most characteristic music; that opera, and with it modern music, arose
from certain talks at the house of one Giovanni Bardi of Florence;
and that the Pleiade laid the foundations of modern French literature
with a pamphlet. Goethe has said, 'a poet needs all philosophy, but he
must keep it out of his work,' though that is not always necessary;
and certainly he cannot know too much, whether about his own work, or
about the procreant waters of the soul where the breath first moved, or
about the waters under the earth that are the life of passing things;
and almost certainly no great art, outside England, where journalists
are more powerful and ideas less plentiful than elsewhere, has arisen
without a great criticism, for its herald or its interpreter and
protector, and it may be for this reason that great art, now that
vulgarity has armed itself and multiplied itself, is perhaps dead in
England.

All writers, all artists of any kind, in so far as they have had
any philosophical or critical power, perhaps just in so far as they
have been deliberate artists at all, have had some philosophy, some
criticism of their art; and it has often been this philosophy, or this
criticism, that has evoked their most startling inspiration, calling
into outer life some portion of the divine life, of the buried reality,
which could alone extinguish in the emotions what their philosophy or
their criticism would extinguish in the intellect. They have sought
for no new thing, it may be, but only to understand and to copy the
pure inspiration of early times, but because the divine life wars upon
our outer life, and must needs change its weapons and its movements
as we change ours, inspiration has come to them in beautiful startling
shapes. The scientific movement brought with it a literature, which
was always tending to lose itself in externalities of all kinds, in
opinion, in declamation, in picturesque writing, in word-painting, or
in what Mr. Symons has called an attempt 'to build in brick and mortar
inside the covers of a book'; and now writers have begun to dwell
upon the element of evocation, of suggestion, upon what we call the
symbolism in great writers.


II

In 'Symbolism in Painting,' I tried to describe the element of
symbolism that is in pictures and sculpture, and described a little
the symbolism in poetry, but did not describe at all the continuous
indefinable symbolism which is the substance of all style.

There are no lines with more melancholy beauty than these by Burns--

'The white moon is setting behind the white wave,
And Time is setting with me, O! '

and these lines are perfectly symbolical. Take from them the whiteness
of the moon and of the wave, whose relation to the setting of Time
is too subtle for the intellect, and you take from them their beauty.
But, when all are together, moon and wave and whiteness and setting
Time and the last melancholy cry, they evoke an emotion which cannot be
evoked by any other arrangement of colours and sounds and forms. We may
call this metaphorical writing, but it is better to call it symbolical
writing, because metaphors are not profound enough to be moving, when
they are not symbols, and when they are symbols they are the most
perfect, because the most subtle, outside of pure sound, and through
them one can the best find out what symbols are. If one begins the
reverie with any beautiful lines that one can remember, one finds they
are like those by Burns. Begin with this line by Blake--

'The gay fishes on the wave when the moon sucks up the dew';

or these lines by Nash--

'Brightness falls from the air,
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust hath closed Helen's eye';

or these lines by Shakespeare--

'Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beached verge of the salt flood;
Who once a day with his embossed froth
The turbulent surge shall cover';

or take some line that is quite simple, that gets its beauty from its
place in a story, and see how it flickers with the light of the many
symbols that have given the story its beauty, as a sword-blade may
flicker with the light of burning towers.

All sounds, all colours, all forms, either because of their
pre-ordained energies or because of long association, evoke indefinable
and yet precise emotions, or, as I prefer to think, call down among
us certain disembodied powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we
call emotions; and when sound, and colour, and form are in a musical
relation, a beautiful relation to one another, they become as it were
one sound, one colour, one form, and evoke an emotion that is made out
of their distinct evocations and yet is one emotion. The same relation
exists between all portions of every work of art, whether it be an
epic or a song, and the more perfect it is, and the more various and
numerous the elements that have flowed into its perfection, the more
powerful will be the emotion, the power, the god it calls among us.
Because an emotion does not exist, or does not become perceptible and
active among us, till it has found its expression, in colour or in
sound or in form, or in all of these, and because no two modulations or
arrangements of these evoke the same emotion, poets and painters and
musicians, and in a less degree because their effects are momentary,
day and night and cloud and shadow, are continually making and
unmaking mankind. It is indeed only those things which seem useless
or very feeble that have any power, and all those things that seem
useful or strong, armies, moving wheels, modes of architecture, modes
of government, speculations of the reason, would have been a little
different if some mind long ago had not given itself to some emotion,
as a woman gives herself to her lover, and shaped sounds or colours or
forms, or all of these, into a musical relation, that their emotion
might live in other minds. A little lyric evokes an emotion, and this
emotion gathers others about it and melts into their being in the
making of some great epic; and at last, needing an always less delicate
body, or symbol, as it grows more powerful, it flows out, with all it
has gathered, among the blind instincts of daily life, where it moves
a power within powers, as one sees ring within ring in the stem of an
old tree. This is maybe what Arthur O'Shaughnessy meant when he made
his poets say they had built Nineveh with their sighing; and I am
certainly never certain, when I hear of some war, or of some religious
excitement, or of some new manufacture, or of anything else that
fills the ear of the world, that it has not all happened because of
something that a boy piped in Thessaly. I remember once asking a seer
to ask one among the gods who, as she believed, were standing about her
in their symbolic bodies, what would come of a charming but seeming
trivial labour of a friend, and the form answering, 'the devastation of
peoples and the overwhelming of cities. ' I doubt indeed if the crude
circumstance of the world, which seems to create all our emotions, does
more than reflect, as in multiplying mirrors, the emotions that have
come to solitary men in moments of poetical contemplation; or that
love itself would be more than an animal hunger but for the poet and
his shadow the priest, for unless we believe that outer things are the
reality, we must believe that the gross is the shadow of the subtle,
that things are wise before they become foolish, and secret before they
cry out in the market-place. Solitary men in moments of contemplation
receive, as I think, the creative impulse from the lowest of the Nine
Hierarchies, and so make and unmake mankind, and even the world itself,
for does not 'the eye altering alter all'?

'Our towns are copied fragments from our breast;
And all man's Babylons strive but to impart
The grandeurs of his Babylonian heart. '


III

The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the
moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake,
which is the one moment of creation, by hushing us with an alluring
monotony, while it holds us waking by variety, to keep us in that state
of perhaps real trance, in which the mind liberated from the pressure
of the will is unfolded in symbols. If certain sensitive persons listen
persistently to the ticking of a watch, or gaze persistently on the
monotonous flashing of a light, they fall into the hypnotic trance;
and rhythm is but the ticking of a watch made softer, that one must
needs listen, and various, that one may not be swept beyond memory or
grow weary of listening; while the patterns of the artist are but the
monotonous flash woven to take the eyes in a subtler enchantment. I
have heard in meditation voices that were forgotten the moment they had
spoken; and I have been swept, when in more profound meditation, beyond
all memory but of those things that came from beyond the threshold of
waking life. I was writing once at a very symbolical and abstract poem,
when my pen fell on the ground; and as I stooped to pick it up, I
remembered some phantastic adventure that yet did not seem phantastic,
and then another like adventure, and when I asked myself when these
things had happened, I found that I was remembering my dreams for many
nights. I tried to remember what I had done the day before, and then
what I had done that morning; but all my waking life had perished from
me, and it was only after a struggle that I came to remember it again,
and as I did so that more powerful and startling life perished in its
turn. Had my pen not fallen on the ground and so made me turn from the
images that I was weaving into verse, I would never have known that
meditation had become trance, for I would have been like one who does
not know that he is passing through a wood because his eyes are on the
pathway. So I think that in the making and in the understanding of a
work of art, and the more easily if it is full of patterns and symbols
and music, we are lured to the threshold of sleep, and it may be far
beyond it, without knowing that we have ever set our feet upon the
steps of horn or of ivory.


IV

Besides emotional symbols, symbols that evoke emotions alone,--and in
this sense all alluring or hateful things are symbols, although their
relations with one another are too subtle to delight us fully, away
from rhythm and pattern,--there are intellectual symbols, symbols that
evoke ideas alone, or ideas mingled with emotions; and outside the
very definite traditions of mysticism and the less definite criticism
of certain modern poets, these alone are called symbols. Most things
belong to one or another kind, according to the way we speak of them
and the companions we give them, for symbols, associated with ideas
that are more than fragments of the shadows thrown upon the intellect
by the emotions they evoke, are the playthings of the allegorist or
the pedant, and soon pass away. If I say 'white' or 'purple' in an
ordinary line of poetry, they evoke emotions so exclusively that I
cannot say why they move me; but if I say them in the same mood, in
the same breath with such obvious intellectual symbols as a cross or a
crown of thorns, I think of purity and sovereignty; while innumerable
other meanings, which are held to one another by the bondage of subtle
suggestion, and alike in the emotions and in the intellect, move
visibly through my mind, and move invisibly beyond the threshold of
sleep, casting lights and shadows of an indefinable wisdom on what
had seemed before, it may be, but sterility and noisy violence. It
is the intellect that decides where the reader shall ponder over the
procession of the symbols, and if the symbols are merely emotional,
he gazes from amid the accidents and destinies of the world; but if
the symbols are intellectual too, he becomes himself a part of pure
intellect, and he is himself mingled with the procession. If I watch
a rushy pool in the moonlight, my emotion at its beauty is mixed with
memories of the man that I have seen ploughing by its margin, or of the
lovers I saw there a night ago; but if I look at the moon herself and
remember any of her ancient names and meanings, I move among divine
people, and things that have shaken off our mortality, the tower of
ivory, the queen of waters, the shining stag among enchanted woods, the
white hare sitting upon the hilltop, the fool of faery with his shining
cup full of dreams, and it may be 'make a friend of one of these images
of wonder,' and 'meet the Lord in the air. ' So, too, if one is moved by
Shakespeare, who is content with emotional symbols that he may come
the nearer to our sympathy, one is mixed with the whole spectacle of
the world; while if one is moved by Dante, or by the myth of Demeter,
one is mixed into the shadow of God or of a goddess. So too one is
furthest from symbols when one is busy doing this or that, but the soul
moves among symbols and unfolds in symbols when trance, or madness, or
deep meditation has withdrawn it from every impulse but its own. 'I
then saw,' wrote 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
recognised, writer of poetical plays to write a play as unlike ordinary
plays as possible, that it might be judged with a fresh mind, and to
put it on the stage in some small suburban theatre, where a small
audience would pay its expenses. I said that he should follow it the
year after, at the same time of the year, with another play, and so
on from year to year; and that the people who read books, and do not
go to the theatre, would gradually find out about him. I suggested
that he should begin with a pastoral play, because nobody would expect
from a pastoral play the succession of nervous tremours which the
plays of commerce, like the novels of commerce, have substituted for
the purification that comes with pity and terror to the imagination
and intellect. He followed my advice in part, and had a small but
perfect success, filling his small theatre for twice the number of
performances he had announced; but instead of being content with the
praise of his equals, and waiting to win their praise another year,
he hired immediately a big London theatre, and put his pastoral play
and a new play before a meagre and unintelligent audience. I still
remember his pastoral play with delight, because, if not always of a
high excellence, it was always poetical; but I remember it at the small
theatre, where my pleasure was magnified by the pleasure of those about
me, and not at the big theatre, where it made me uncomfortable, as an
unwelcome guest always makes one uncomfortable.

Why should we thrust our works, which we have written with imaginative
sincerity and filled with spiritual desire, before those quite
excellent people who think that Rossetti's women are 'guys,' that
Rodin's women are 'ugly,' and that Ibsen is 'immoral,' and who only
want to be left at peace to enjoy the works so many clever men have
made especially to suit them? We must make a theatre for ourselves and
our friends, and for a few simple people who understand from sheer
simplicity what we understand from scholarship and thought. We have
planned the Irish Literary Theatre with this hospitable emotion, and,
that the right people may find out about us, we hope to act a play or
two in the spring of every year; and that the right people may escape
the stupefying memory of the theatre of commerce which clings even to
them, our plays will be for the most part remote, spiritual, and ideal.

A common opinion is that the poetic drama has come to an end, because
modern poets have no dramatic power; and Mr. Binyon seems to accept
this opinion when he says: 'It has been too often assumed that it is
the manager who bars the way to poetic plays. But it is much more
probable that the poets have failed the managers. If poets mean to
serve the stage, their dramas must he dramatic. ' I find it easier
to believe that audiences, who have learned, as I think, from the
life of crowded cities to live upon the surface of life, and actors
and managers, who study to please them, have changed, than that
imagination, which is the voice of what is eternal in man, has changed.
The arts are but one Art; and why should all intense painting and
all intense poetry have become not merely unintelligible but hateful
to the greater number of men and women, and intense drama move them
to pleasure? The audiences of Sophocles and of Shakespeare and of
Calderon were not unlike the audiences I have heard listening in Irish
cabins to songs in Gaelic about 'an old poet telling his sins,' and
about 'the five young men who were drowned last year,' and about 'the
lovers that were drowned going to America,' or to some tale of Oisin
and his three hundred years in _Tir nan Oge_. Mr. Bridges' _Return of
Ulysses_, one of the most beautiful and, as I think, dramatic of modern
plays, might have some success in the Aran Islands, if the Gaelic
League would translate it into Gaelic, but I am quite certain that it
would have no success in the Strand.

Blake has said that all Art is a labour to bring again the Golden Age,
and all culture is certainly a labour to bring again the simplicity
of the first ages, with knowledge of good and evil added to it. The
drama has need of cities that it may find men in sufficient numbers,
and cities destroy the emotions to which it appeals, and therefore
the days of the drama are brief and come but seldom. It has one day
when the emotions of cities still remember the emotions of sailors and
husbandmen and shepherds and users of the spear and the bow; as the
houses and furniture and earthern vessels of cities, before the coming
of machinery, remember the rocks and the woods and the hillside;
and it has another day, now beginning, when thought and scholarship
discover their desire. In the first day, it is the Art of the people;
and in the second day, like the dramas acted of old times in the hidden
places of temples, it is the preparation of a Priesthood. It may be,
though the world is not old enough to show us any example, that this
Priesthood will spread their Religion everywhere, and make their Art
the Art of the people.

When the first day of the drama had passed by, actors found that an
always larger number of people were more easily moved through the eyes
than through the ears. The emotion that comes with the music of words
is exhausting, like all intellectual emotions, and few people like
exhausting emotions; and therefore actors began to speak as if they
were reading something out of the newspapers. They forgot the noble art
of oratory, and gave all their thought to the poor art of acting, that
is content with the sympathy of our nerves; until at last those who
love poetry found it better to read alone in their rooms what they had
once delighted to hear sitting friend by friend, lover by beloved. I
once asked Mr. William Morris if he had thought of writing a play, and
he answered that he had, but would not write one, because actors did
not know how to speak poetry with the half-chant men spoke it with in
old times. Mr. Swinburne's _Locrine_ was acted a month ago, and it was
not badly acted, but nobody could tell whether it was fit for the stage
or not, for not one rhythm, not one cry of passion, was spoken with a
musical emphasis, and verse spoken without a musical emphasis seems but
an artificial and cumbersome way of saying what might be said naturally
and simply in prose.

As audiences and actors changed, managers learned to substitute
meretricious landscapes, painted upon wood and canvas, for the
descriptions of poetry, until the painted scenery, which had in Greece
been a charming explanation of what was least important in the story,
became as important as the story. It needed some imagination, some gift
for day-dreams, to see the horses and the fields and flowers of Colonus
as one listened to the elders gathered about 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 _Kalevala_, for they lived in a more crowded
and complicated world, and were learning the abstract meditation which
lures men from visible beauty, and were unlearning, it may be, the
impassioned meditation which brings men beyond the edge of trance and
makes trees, and beasts, and dead things talk with human voices.

The old Irish and the old Welsh, though they had less of the old way
than the makers of the _Kalevala_, had more of it than the makers of
the Sagas, and it is this that distinguishes the examples Matthew
Arnold quotes of their 'natural magic,' of their sense of 'the
mystery' more than of 'the beauty' of nature. When Matthew Arnold wrote
it was not easy to know as much as we know now of folk song and folk
belief, and I do not think he understood that our 'natural magic' is
but the ancient religion of the world, the ancient worship of nature
and that troubled ecstasy before her, that certainty of all beautiful
places being haunted, which it brought into men's minds. The ancient
religion is in that passage of the _Mabinogion_ about the making of
'Flower Aspect. ' Gwydion and Math made her 'by charms and illusions'
'out of flowers. ' 'They took the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms
of the broom, and the blossoms of the meadowsweet, and produced from
them a maiden the fairest and most graceful that man ever saw; and
they baptized her, and called her Flower Aspect'; and one finds it in
the not less beautiful passage about the burning Tree, that has half
its beauty from calling up a fancy of leaves so living and beautiful,
they can be of no less living and beautiful a thing than flame: 'They
saw a tall tree by the side of the river, one half of which was in
flames from the root to the top, and the other half was green and in
full leaf. ' And one finds it very certainly in the quotations he makes
from English poets to prove a Celtic influence in English poetry; in
Keats's 'magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in faery
lands forlorn'; in his 'moving waters at their priest-like task of
pure ablution round earth's human shore'; in Shakespeare's 'floor of
heaven,' 'inlaid with patens of bright gold'; and in his Dido standing
'on the wild sea banks,' 'a willow in her hand,' and waving it in the
ritual of the old worship of nature and the spirits of nature, to wave
'her love to come again to Carthage. ' And his other examples have the
delight and wonder of devout worshippers among the haunts of their
divinities. Is there not such delight and wonder in the description of
Olwen in the _Mabinogion_: 'More yellow was her hair than the flower
of the broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave,
and fairer were her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the
wood-anemone amidst the spray of the meadow fountains. ' And is there
not such delight and wonder in--

'Meet we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,
By paved fountain or by rushy brook,
Or on the beached margent of the sea'?

If men had never dreamed that fair women could be made out of flowers,
or rise up out of meadow fountains and paved fountains, neither passage
could have been written. Certainly the descriptions of nature made in
what Matthew Arnold calls 'the faithful way,' or in what he calls 'the
Greek way,' would have lost nothing if all the meadow fountains or
paved fountains were meadow fountains and paved fountains and nothing
more. When Keats wrote, in the Greek way, which adds lightness and
brightness to nature--

'What little town by river or sea-shore
Or mountain built with quiet citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn';

when Shakespeare wrote in the Greek way--

'I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows';

when Virgil wrote in the Greek way--

'Muscosi fontes et somno mollior herba,'

and

'Pallentes violas et summa papavera carpens
Narcissum et florem jungit bene olentis anethi';

they looked at nature without ecstasy, but with the affection a man
feels for the garden where he has walked daily and thought pleasant
thoughts. They looked at nature in the modern way, the way of people
who are poetical, but are more interested in one another than in a
nature which has faded to be but friendly and pleasant, the way of
people who have forgotten the ancient religion.


III

Men who lived in a world where anything might flow and change, and
become any other thing; and among great gods whose passions were in
the flaming sunset, and in the thunder and the thunder-shower, had
not our thoughts of weight and measure. They worshipped nature and
the abundance of nature, and had always, as it seems, for a supreme
ritual that tumultuous dance among the hills or in the depths of the
woods, where unearthly ecstasy fell upon the dancers, until they seemed
the gods or the godlike beasts, and felt their souls overtopping the
moon; and, as some think, imagined for the first time in the world the
blessed country of the gods and of the happy dead. They had imaginative
passions because they did not live within our own strait limits, and
were nearer to ancient chaos, every man's desire, and had immortal
models about them. The hare that ran by among the dew might have sat
upon his haunches when the first man was made, and the poor bunch of
rushes under their feet might have been a goddess laughing among the
stars; and with but a little magic, a little waving of the hands, a
little murmuring of the lips, they too could become a hare or a bunch
of rushes, and know immortal love and immortal hatred.

All folk literature, and all literature that keeps the folk tradition,
delights in unbounded and immortal things. The _Kalevala_ delights in
the seven hundred years that Luonaton wanders in the depths of the
sea with Wainamoinen in her womb, and the Mahomedan king in the Song
of Roland, pondering upon the greatness of Charlemagne, repeats over
and over, 'He is three hundred years old, when will he weary of war? '
Cuchulain in the Irish folk tale had the passion of victory, and he
overcame all men, and died warring upon the waves, because they alone
had the strength to overcome him. The lover in the Irish folk song bids
his beloved come with him into the woods, and see the salmon leap in
the rivers, and hear the cuckoo sing, because death will never find
them in the heart of the woods. Oisin, new come from his three hundred
years of faeryland, and of the love that is in faeryland, bids Saint
Patrick cease his prayers a while and listen to the blackbird, because
it is the blackbird of Darrycarn that Finn brought from Norway, three
hundred years before, and set its nest upon the oak-tree with his own
hands. Surely if one goes far enough into the woods, one will find
there all that one is seeking? Who knows how many centuries the birds
of the woods have been singing?

All folk literature has indeed a passion whose like is not in modern
literature and music and art, except where it has come by some straight
or crooked way out of ancient times.
Love was held to be a fatal
sickness in ancient Ireland, and there is a love-poem in _The Songs of
Connacht_ that is like a death cry: 'My love, O she is my love, the
woman who is most for destroying me, dearer is she for making me ill
than the woman who would be for making me well. She is my treasure, O
she is my treasure, the woman of the grey eyes . . . a woman who would
not lay a hand under my head. . . . She is my love, O she is my love, the
woman who left no strength in me; a woman who would not breathe a sigh
after me, a woman who would not raise a stone at my tomb. . . . She is my
secret love, O she is my secret love. A woman who tells me nothing, . . .
a woman who does not remember me to be out. . . . She is my choice, O she
is my choice, the woman who would not look back at me, the woman who
would not make peace with me. . . . She is my desire, O she is my desire:
a woman dearest to me under the sun, a woman who would not pay me heed,
if I were to sit by her side. It is she ruined my heart and left a sigh
for ever in me. ' There is another song that ends, 'The Erne shall be
in strong flood, the hills shall be torn down, and the sea shall have
red waves, and blood shall be spilled, and every mountain valley and
every moor shall be on high, before you shall perish, my little black
rose. ' Nor do the old Irish weigh and measure their hatred. The nurse
of O'Sullivan Bere in the folk song prays that the bed of his betrayer
may be the red hearth-stone of hell for ever. And an Elizabethan Irish
poet cries: 'Three things are waiting for my death. The devil, who is
waiting for my soul and cares nothing for my body or my wealth; the
worms, who are waiting for my body but care nothing for my soul or my
wealth; my children, who are waiting for my wealth and care nothing for
my body or my soul. O Christ, hang all three in the one noose. ' Such
love and hatred seek no mortal thing but their own infinity, and such
love and hatred soon become love and hatred of the idea. The lover who
loves so passionately can soon sing to his beloved like the lover in
the poem by 'A. E. ,' 'A vast desire awakes and grows into forgetfulness
of thee. '

When an early Irish poet calls the Irishman famous for much loving,
and a proverb, a friend has heard in the Highlands of Scotland, talks
of the lovelessness of the Irishman, they may say but the same thing,
for if your passion is but great enough it leads you to a country where
there are many cloisters. The hater who hates with too good a heart
soon comes also to hate the idea only; and from this idealism in love
and hatred comes, as I think, a certain power of saying and forgetting
things, especially a power of saying and forgetting things in politics,
which others do not say and forget. The ancient farmers and herdsmen
were full of love and hatred, and made their friends gods, and their
enemies the enemies of gods, and those who keep their tradition are
not less mythological. From this 'mistaking dreams,' which are perhaps
essences, for 'realities' which are perhaps accidents, from this
'passionate, turbulent reaction against the despotism of fact,' comes,
it may be, that melancholy which made all ancient peoples delight in
tales that end in death and parting, as modern peoples delight in
tales that end in marriage bells; and made all ancient peoples, who
like the old Irish had a nature more lyrical than dramatic, delight
in wild and beautiful lamentations. Life was so weighed down by the
emptiness of the great forests and by the mystery of all things, and by
the greatness of its own desires, and, as I think, by the loneliness
of much beauty; and seemed so little and so fragile and so brief,
that nothing could be more sweet in the memory than a tale that ended
in death and parting, and than a wild and beautiful lamentation. Men
did not mourn merely because their beloved was married to another, or
because learning was bitter in the mouth, for such mourning believes
that life might be happy were it different, and is therefore the less
mourning; but because they had been born and must die with their great
thirst unslaked. And so it is that all the august sorrowful persons
of literature, Cassandra and Helen and Deirdre, and Lear and Tristan,
have come out of legends and are indeed but the images of the primitive
imagination mirrored in the little looking-glass of the modern and
classic imagination. This is that 'melancholy a man knows when he is
face to face' with nature, and thinks 'he hears her communing with him
about' the mournfulness of being born and of dying; and how can it do
otherwise than call into his mind 'its exiles, its flights across the
seas,' that it may stir the ever-smouldering ashes? No Gaelic poetry is
so popular in Gaelic-speaking places as the lamentations of Oisin, old
and miserable, remembering the companions and the loves of his youth,
and his three hundred years in faeryland, and his faery love: all
dreams withering in the winds of time lament in his lamentations: 'The
clouds are long above me this night; last night was a long night to me;
although I find this day long, yesterday was still longer. Every day
that comes to me is long. . . . No one in this great world is like me--a
poor old man dragging stones. The clouds are long above me this night.
I am the last man of the Fianna, the great Oisin, the son of Finn,
listening to the sound of bells. The clouds are long above me this
night. ' Matthew Arnold quotes the lamentation of Leyrach Hen as a type
of the Celtic melancholy, but I prefer to quote it as a type of the
primitive melancholy; 'O my crutch, is it not autumn when the fern is
red and the water flag yellow? Have I not hated that which I love? . . .
Behold, old age, which makes sport of me, from the hair of my head and
my teeth, to my eyes which women loved. The four things I have all my
life most hated fall upon me together--coughing and old age, sickness
and sorrow. I am old, I am alone, shapeliness and warmth are gone from
me, the couch of honour shall be no more mine; I am miserable, I am
bent on my crutch. How evil was the lot allotted to Leyrach, the night
he was brought forth! Sorrows without end and no deliverance from his
burden. ' An Elizabethan writer describes extravagant sorrow by calling
it 'to weep Irish'; and Oisin and Leyrach Hen are, I think, a little
nearer even to us modern Irish than they are to most people. That is
why our poetry and much of our thought is melancholy. 'The same man,'
writes Dr. Hyde in the beautiful prose which he first writes in Gaelic,
'who will to-day be dancing, sporting, drinking, and shouting, will be
soliloquizing by himself to-morrow, heavy and sick and sad in his own
lonely little hut, making a croon over departed hopes, lost life, the
vanity of this world, and the coming of death. '


IV

Matthew Arnold asks how much of the Celt must one imagine in the ideal
man of genius. I prefer to say, how much of the ancient hunters and
fishers and of the ecstatic dancers among hills and woods must one
imagine in the ideal man of genius. Certainly a thirst for unbounded
emotion and a wild melancholy are troublesome things in the world,
and do not make its life more easy or orderly, but it may be the arts
are founded on the life beyond the world, and that they must cry in
the ears of our penury until the world has been consumed and become a
vision. Certainly, as Samuel Palmer wrote, 'Excess is the vivifying
spirit of the finest art, and we must always seek to make excess more
abundantly excessive. ' Matthew Arnold has said that if he were asked
'where English got its turn for melancholy and its turn for natural
magic,' he 'would answer with little doubt that it got much of its
melancholy from a Celtic source, with no doubt at all that from a
Celtic source is got nearly all its natural magic. '

I will put this differently and say that literature dwindles to a mere
chronicle of circumstance, or passionless phantasies, and passionless
meditations, unless it is constantly flooded with the passions and
beliefs of ancient times, and that of all the fountains of the passions
and beliefs of ancient times in Europe, the Sclavonic, the Finnish, the
Scandinavian, and the Celtic, the Celtic alone has been for centuries
close to the main river of European literature. It has again and again
brought 'the vivifying spirit' 'of excess' into the arts of Europe.
Ernest Renan has told how the visions of purgatory seen by pilgrims to
Lough Derg--once visions of the pagan under-world, as the boat made out
of a hollow tree that bore the pilgrim to the holy island were alone
enough to prove--gave European thought new symbols of a more abundant
penitence; and had so great an influence that he has written, 'It
cannot be doubted for a moment that to the number of poetical themes
Europe owes to the genius of the Celt is to be added the framework of
the divine comedy. '

A little later the legends of Arthur and his table, and of the Holy
Grail, once it seems the cauldron of an Irish god, changed the
literature of Europe, and it maybe changed, as it were, the very roots
of man's emotions by their influence on the spirit of chivalry and
on the spirit of romance; and later still Shakespeare found his Mab,
and probably his Puck, and one knows not how much else of his faery
kingdom, in Celtic legend; while at the beginning of our own day Sir
Walter Scott gave Highland legends and Highland excitability so great a
mastery over all romance that they seem romance itself.

In our own time Scandinavian tradition, because of the imagination
of Richard Wagner and of William Morris and of the earlier and, as I
think, greater Heinrich Ibsen, has created a new romance, and through
the imagination of Richard Wagner, become all but the most passionate
element in the arts of the modern world. There is indeed but one other
element as passionate, the still unfaded legends of Arthur and of the
Holy Grail; and now a new fountain of legends, and, as I think, a
more abundant fountain than any in Europe, is being opened, the great
fountain of Gaelic legends; the tale of Deirdre, who alone among the
women who have set men mad was at once the white flame and the red
flame, wisdom and loveliness; the tale of the Sons of Tuireann, with
its unintelligible mysteries, an old Grail Quest as I think; the tale
of the four children changed into four swans, and lamenting over many
waters; the tale of the love of Cuchulain for an immortal goddess, and
his coming home to a mortal woman in the end; the tale of his many
battles at the ford with that dear friend he kissed before the battles,
and over whose dead body he wept when he had killed him; the tale of
his death and of the lamentations of Emer; the tale of the flight of
Grainne with Diarmuid, strangest of all tales of the fickleness of
woman, and the tale of the coming of Oisin out of faeryland, and of
his memories and lamentations. 'The Celtic movement,' as I understand
it, is principally the opening of this fountain, and none can measure
of how great importance it may be to coming times, for every new
fountain of legends is a new intoxication for the imagination of the
world. It comes at a time when the imagination of the world is as
ready, as it was at the coming of the tales of Arthur and of the Grail,
for a new intoxication. The reaction against the rationalism of the
eighteenth century has mingled with a reaction against the materialism
of the nineteenth century, and the symbolical movement, which has come
to perfection in Germany in Wagner, in England in the Pre-Raphaelites,
and in France in Villiers de L'Isle Adam, and 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; share and swift
The piercings. How they fall! Ha! shields are raised
In vain. I am blinded, or the beggar-man
Hath waxed in strength. He is changed, he is young. O strange!
He is all in golden armour. These are gods
That slay the suitors. (_Runs to Penelope. _) O lady, forgive me.
'Tis Ares' self. I saw his 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.