No More Learning

Now it is a picture
of some great room full of merriment, now of the wine-press, now of
the golden threshing-floor, now of an old mill among apple-trees, now
of cool water after the heat of the sun, now of some well-sheltered,
well-tilled place among woods or mountains, where men and women live
happily, knowing of nothing that is too far off or too great for the
affections. He has but one story to tell us, how some man or woman lost
and found again the happiness that is always half of the body; and
even when they are wandering from it, leaves must fall over them, and
flowers make fragrances about them, and warm winds fan them, and birds
sing to them, for being of Habundia's kin they must not forget the
shadow of her Green Tree even for a moment, and the waters of her Well
must be always wet upon their sandals. His poetry often wearies us as
the unbroken green of July wearies us, for there is something in us,
some bitterness because of the Fall it may be, that takes a little from
the sweetness of Eve's apple after the first mouthful; but he who did
all things gladly and easily, who never knew the curse of labour, found
it always as sweet as it was in Eve's mouth. All kinds of associations
have gathered about the pleasant things of the world and half taken the
pleasure out of them for the greater number of men, but he saw them as
when they came from the Divine Hand. I often see him in my mind as I
saw him once at Hammersmith holding up a glass of claret towards the
light and saying, 'Why do people say it is prosaic to get inspiration
out of wine? Is it not the sunlight and the sap in the leaves? Are not
grapes made by the sunlight and the sap? '


V

In one of his little socialistic pamphlets he tells us how he sat
under an elm-tree and watched the starlings and thought of an old
horse and an old labourer that had passed him by, and of the men and
women he had seen in towns; and he wondered how all these had come to
be as they were. He saw that the starlings were beautiful and merry
and that men and the old horse they had subdued to their service were
ugly and miserable, and yet the starlings, he thought, were of one
kind whether there or in the south of England, and the ugly men and
women were of one kind with those whose nobility and beauty had moved
the ancient sculptors and poets to imagine the gods and the heroes
after the images of men. Then he began, he tells us, to meditate how
this great difference might be ended and a new life, which would
permit men to have beauty in common among them as the starlings have,
be built on the wrecks of the old life. In other words, his mind was
illuminated from within and lifted into prophecy in the full right
sense of the word, and he saw the natural things he was alone gifted
to see in their perfect form; and having that faith which is alone
worth having, for it includes all others, a sure knowledge established
in the constitution of his mind that perfect things are final things,
he announced that all he had seen would come to pass. I do not think
he troubled to understand books of economics, and Mr. Mackail says,
I think, that they vexed him and wearied him. He found it enough to
hold up, as it were, life as it is to-day beside his visions, and to
show how faded its colours were and how sapless it was. And if we had
not enough artistic feeling, enough feeling for the perfect that is,
to admit the authority of the vision; or enough faith to understand
that all that is imperfect passes away, he would not, as I think, have
argued with us in a serious spirit. Though I think that he never used
the kinds of words I use in writing of him, though I think he would
even have disliked a word like faith with its theological associations,
I am certain that he understood thoroughly, as all artists understand
a little, that the important things, the things we must believe in or
perish, are beyond argument. We can no more reason about them than
can the pigeon, come but lately from the egg, about the hawk whose
shadow makes it cower among the grass. His vision is true because it
is poetical, because we are a little happier when we are looking at
it; and he knew as Shelley knew by an act of faith that the economists
should take their measurements not from life as it is, but from the
vision of the world made perfect that is buried under all minds. The
early Christians were of the kin of the Wilderness and of the Dry Tree,
and they saw an unearthly Paradise, but he was of the kin of the Well
and of the Green Tree and he saw an Earthly Paradise.

He obeyed his vision when he tried to make first his own house, for he
was in this matter also like a child playing with the world, and then
houses of other people, places where one could live happily; and he
obeyed it when he wrote essays about the nature of happy work, and when
he spoke at street corners about the coming changes.

He knew clearly what he was doing towards the end, for he lived at a
time when poets and artists have begun again to carry the burdens that
priests and theologians took from them angrily some few hundred years
ago. His art was not more essentially religious than Rossetti's art,
but it was different, for Rossetti, drunken with natural beauty, saw
the supernatural beauty, the impossible beauty, in his frenzy, while he
being less intense and more tranquil would show us a beauty that would
wither if it did not set us at peace with natural things, and if we did
not believe that it existed always a little, and would some day exist
in its fulness. He may not have been, indeed he was not, among the
very greatest of the poets, but he was among the greatest of those who
prepare the last reconciliation when the Cross shall blossom with roses.

1902.




THE PHILOSOPHY OF SHELLEY'S POETRY


I. HIS RULING IDEAS

WHEN I was a boy in Dublin I was one of a group who rented a room in
a mean street to discuss philosophy. My fellow-students got more and
more interested in certain modern schools of mystical belief, and I
never found anybody to share my one unshakable belief. I thought that
whatever of philosophy has been made poetry is alone permanent, and
that one should begin to arrange it in some regular order, rejecting
nothing as the make-believe of the poets. I thought, so far as I can
recollect my thoughts after so many years, that if a powerful and
benevolent spirit has shaped the destiny of this world, we can better
discover that destiny from the words that have gathered up the heart's
desire of the world, than from historical records, or from speculation,
wherein the heart withers. Since then I have observed dreams and
visions very carefully, and am now certain that the imagination has
some way of lighting on the truth that the reason has not, and that its
commandments, delivered when the body is still and the reason silent,
are the most binding we can ever know. I have re-read _Prometheus
Unbound_, which I had hoped my fellow-students would have studied as a
sacred book, and it seems to me to have an even more certain place than
I had thought, among the sacred books of the world. I remember going
to a learned scholar to ask about its deep meanings, which I felt more
than understood, and his telling me that it was Godwin's _Political
Justice_ put into rhyme, and that Shelley was a crude revolutionist,
and believed that the overturning of kings and priests would regenerate
mankind. I quoted the lines which tell how the halcyons ceased to
prey on fish, and how poisonous leaves became good for food, to show
that he foresaw more than any political regeneration, but was too
timid to push the argument. I still believe that one cannot help
believing him, as this scholar I know believes him, a vague thinker,
who mixed occasional great poetry with a phantastic rhetoric, unless
one compares such passages, and above all such passages as describe
the liberty he praised, till one has discovered the system of belief
that lay behind them. It should seem natural to find his thought full
of subtlety, for Mrs. Shelley has told how he hesitated whether he
should be a metaphysician or a poet, and has spoken of his 'huntings
after the obscure' with regret, and said of that _Prometheus Unbound_,
which so many for three generations have thought _Political Justice_
put into rhyme, 'It requires a mind as subtle and penetrating as his
own to understand the mystic meanings scattered throughout the poem.
They elude the ordinary reader by their abstraction and delicacy of
distinction, but they are far from vague. It was his design to write
prose metaphysical essays on the Nature of Man, which would have served
to explain much of what is obscure in his poetry; a few scattered
fragments of observation and remarks alone remain. He considered
these philosophical views of mind and nature to be instinct with
the intensest spirit of poetry. ' From these scattered fragments and
observations, and from many passages read in their light, one soon
comes to understand that his liberty was so much more than the liberty
of _Political Justice_ that it was one with Intellectual Beauty, and
that the regeneration he foresaw was so much more than the regeneration
many political dreamers have foreseen, that it could not come in its
perfection till the hours bore 'Time to his grave in eternity. ' In _A
Defence of Poetry_, the profoundest essay on the foundation of poetry
in English, he shows that the poet and the lawgiver hold their station
by the right of the same faculty, the one uttering in words and the
other in the forms of society, his vision of the divine order, the
Intellectual Beauty. 'Poets, according to the circumstances of the age
and nation in which they appeared, were called in the earliest epoch
of the world legislators or prophets, and a poet essentially comprises
and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely
the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which
present things are to be ordained, but he beholds the future in the
present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flowers and the fruit of
latest time. ' 'Language, colour, form, and religious and civil habits
of action are all the instruments and materials of poetry. ' Poetry
is 'the creation of actions according to the unchangeable process of
human nature as existing in the mind of the creator, which is itself
the image of all other minds. ' 'Poets have been challenged to resign
the civic crown to reasoners and merchants. . . . It is admitted that
the exercise of the imagination is the most delightful, but it is
alleged that that of reason is the more useful. . . . Whilst the mechanist
abridges and the political economist combines labour, let them be sure
that their speculations, for want of correspondence with those first
principles which belong to the imagination, do not tend, as they have
in modern England, to exasperate at once the extremes of luxury and
want. . . . The rich have become richer, the poor have become poorer, . . .
such are the effects which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise
of the calculating faculty. ' The speaker of these things might almost
be Blake, who held that the Reason not only created Ugliness, but all
other evils. The books of all wisdom are hidden in the cave of the
Witch of Atlas, who is one of his personifications of beauty, and when
she moves over the enchanted river that is an image of all life, the
priests cast aside their deceits, and the king crowns an ape to mock
his own sovereignty, and the soldiers gather about the anvils to beat
their swords to ploughshares, and lovers cast away their timidity, and
friends are united; while the power which in _Laon and Cythna_ awakens
the mind of the reformer to contend, and itself contends, against the
tyrannies of the world, is first seen as the star of love or beauty.
And at the end of _The Ode to Naples_, he cries out to 'the spirit of
beauty' to overturn the tyrannies of the world, or to fill them with
its 'harmonizing ardours. ' He calls the spirit of beauty liberty,
because despotism, and perhaps, as 'the man of virtuous soul commands
not nor obeys,' all authority, pluck virtue from her path towards
beauty, and because it leads us by that love whose service is perfect
freedom. It leads all things by love, for he cries again and again
that love is the perception of beauty in thought and things, and it
orders all things by love, for it is love that impels the soul to its
expressions in thought and in action, by making us 'seek to awaken
in all things that are, a community with what we experience within
ourselves. ' 'We are born into the world, and there is something within
us which, from the instant that we live, more and more thirsts after
its likeness. ' We have 'a soul within our soul that describes a circle
around its proper paradise which pain and sorrow and evil dare not
overleap,' and we labour to see this soul in many mirrors, that we may
possess it the more abundantly. He would hardly seek the progress of
the world by any less gentle labour, and would hardly have us resist
evil itself. He bids the reformers in _The Philosophical Review of
Reform_ receive 'the onset of the cavalry,' if it be sent to disperse
their meetings, 'with folded arms,' and 'not because active resistance
is not justifiable, but because temperance and courage would produce
greater advantages than the most decisive victory;' and he gives them
like advice in _The Masque of Anarchy_, for liberty, the poem cries,
'is love,' and can make the rich man kiss its feet, and, like those who
followed Christ, give away his goods and follow it throughout the world.

He does not believe that the reformation of society can bring this
beauty, this divine order, among men without the regeneration of the
hearts of men. Even in _Queen Mab_, which was written before he had
found his deepest thought, or rather perhaps before he had found words
to utter it, for I do not think men change much in their deepest
thought, he is less anxious to change men's beliefs, as I think, than
to cry out against that serpent more subtle than any beast of the
field, 'the cause and the effect of tyranny. ' He affirms again and
again that the virtuous, those who have 'pure desire and universal
love,' are happy in the midst of tyranny, and he foresees a day when
'the spirit of nature,' the spirit of beauty of his later poems, who
has her 'throne of power unappealable in every human heart,' shall
have made men so virtuous that 'kingly glare will lose its power to
dazzle and silently pass by,' and as it seems commerce, 'the venal
interchange of all that human art or nature yields, which wealth should
purchase not,' come as silently to an end.

He was always, indeed in chief, a witness for that 'power
unappealable. ' Maddalo, in _Julian and Maddalo_, says that the soul is
powerless, and can only, like a 'dreary bell hung in a heaven-illumined
tower, toll our thoughts and our desires to meet round the rent heart
and pray;' but Julian, who is Shelley himself, replies, as the makers
of all religions have replied--

'Where is the love, beauty and truth we seek
But in our mind? And if we were not weak,
Should we be less in deed than in desire? '

while _Mont Blanc_ is an intricate analogy to affirm that the soul has
its sources in 'the secret strength of things,' 'which governs thought
and to the infinite heavens is a law. ' He even thought that men might
be immortal were they sinless, and his Cythna bids the sailors be
without remorse, for all that live are stained as they are. It is thus,
she says, that time marks men and their thoughts for the tomb. And the
'Red Comet,' the image of evil in _Laon and Cythna_, when it began its
war with the star of beauty, brought not only 'Fear, Hatred, Fraud and
Tyranny,' but 'Death, Decay, Earthquake, and Blight and Madness pale. '

When the Red Comet is conquered, when Jupiter is overthrown by
Demogorgon, when the prophecy of Queen Mab is fulfilled, visible
nature will put on perfection again. He declares, in one of the notes
to _Queen Mab_, that 'there is no great extravagance in presuming . . .
that there should be a perfect identity between the moral and physical
improvement of the human species,' and thinks it 'certain that wisdom
is not compatible with disease, and that, in the present state of the
climates of the earth, health in the true and comprehensive sense of
the word is out of the reach of civilized man. ' In _Prometheus Unbound_
he sees, as in the ecstasy of a saint, the ships moving among the seas
of the world without fear of danger

'by the light
Of wave-reflected flowers, and floating odours,
And music soft,'

and poison dying out of the green things, and cruelty out of all living
things, and even the toads and efts becoming beautiful, and at last
Time being borne 'to his tomb in eternity. '

This beauty, this divine order, whereof all things shall become a part
in a kind of resurrection of the body, is already visible to the dead
and to souls in ecstasy, for ecstasy is a kind of death. The dying
Lionel hears the song of the nightingale, and cries--

'Heardst thou not sweet words among
That heaven-resounding minstrelsy?
Heardst thou not, that those who die
Awake in a world of ecstasy?
That love, when limbs are interwoven,
And sleep, when the night of life is cloven,
And thought, to the world's dim boundaries clinging,
And music, when one beloved is singing,
Is death? Let us drain right joyously
The cup which the sweet bird fills for me. '

And in the most famous passage in all his poetry he sings of Death as
of a mistress. 'Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, stains the
white radiance of eternity. ' 'Die, if thou wouldst be with that which
thou wouldst seek;' and he sees his own soon-coming death in a rapture
of prophecy, for 'the fire for which all thirst' beams upon him,
'consuming the last clouds of cold mortality. ' When he is dead he will
still influence the living, for though Adonais has fled 'to the burning
fountains whence he came,' and 'is a portion of the eternal which must
glow through time and change unquenchably the same,' and has 'awaked
from the dream of life,' he has not gone from 'the young dawn,' or the
'caverns in the forests,' or 'the faint flowers and the fountains. ' He
has been 'made one with nature,' and his voice is 'heard in all her
music,' and his presence is felt wherever 'that power may move which
has withdrawn his being to its own,' and he bears 'his part' when it is
compelling mortal things to their appointed forms, and he overshadows
men's minds at their supreme moments, for

'when lofty thought
Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair,
And love and life contend in it for what
Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there,
And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air. '

'Of his speculations as to what will befall this inestimable spirit
when we appear to die,' Mrs. Shelley has written, 'a mystic ideality
tinged these speculations in Shelley's mind; certain stanzas in the
poem of _The Sensitive Plant_ express, in some degree, the almost
inexpressible idea, not that we die into another state, when this
state is no longer, from some reason, unapparent as well as apparent,
accordant with our being--but that those who rise above the ordinary
nature of man, fade from before our imperfect organs; they remain in
their "love, beauty, and delight," in a world congenial to them, and
we, clogged by "error, ignorance, and strife," see them not till we
are fitted by purification and improvement to their higher state. ' Not
merely happy souls, but all beautiful places and movements and gestures
and events, when we think they have ceased to be, have become portions
of the eternal.

'In this life
Of error, ignorance, and strife,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
And we the shadow of the dream,

It is a modest creed, and yet
Pleasant, if one considers it,
To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.

That garden sweet, that lady fair,
And all sweet shapes and odours there,
In truth have never passed away;
'Tis we, 'tis ours are changed, not they.

For love and beauty and delight
There is no death, nor change; their might
Exceeds our organs, which endure
No light, being themselves obscure. '

He seems in his speculations to have lit on that memory of nature the
visionaries claim for the foundation of their knowledge; but I do not
know whether he thought, as they do, that all things good and evil
remain for ever, 'thinking the thought and doing the deed,' though
not, it may be, self-conscious; or only thought that 'love and beauty
and delight' remain for ever. The passage where Queen Mab awakes 'all
knowledge of the past,' and the good and evil 'events of old and
wondrous times,' was no more doubtless than a part of the machinery
of the poem, but all the machineries of poetry are parts of the
convictions of antiquity, and readily become again convictions in minds
that dwell upon them in a spirit of intense idealism.

Intellectual Beauty has not only the happy dead to do her will, but
ministering spirits who correspond to the Devas of the East, and the
Elemental Spirits of 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 isle,'

could not but have had more than a metaphorical and picturesque being
to one who had spoken in terror with an image of himself, and who had
fainted at the apparition of a woman with eyes in her breasts, and who
had tried to burn down a wood, if we can trust Mrs. Williams' account,
because he believed a devil, who had first tried to kill him, had
sought refuge there.

It seems to me, indeed, that Shelley had reawakened in himself the age
of faith, though there were times when he would doubt, as even the
saints have doubted, and that he was a revolutionist, because he had
heard the commandment, 'If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye
do them. ' I have re-read his _Prometheus Unbound_ for the first time
for many years, in the woods of Drim-da-rod, among the Echte hills,
and sometimes I have looked towards Slieve-nan-Orr, where the country
people say the last battle of the world shall be fought till the third
day, when a priest shall lift a chalice, and the thousand years of
peace begin. And I think this mysterious song utters a faith as simple
and as ancient as the faith of those country people, in a form suited
to a new age, that will understand with Blake that the holy spirit is
'an intellectual fountain,' and that the kinds and degrees of beauty
are the images of its authority.


II. HIS RULING SYMBOLS

At a comparatively early time Shelley made his imprisoned Cythna become
wise in all human wisdom through the contemplation of her own mind,
and write out this wisdom upon the sands in 'signs' that were 'clear
elemental shapes whose smallest change' made 'a subtler language
within language,' and were 'the key of truths, which once were dimly
taught in old Crotona. ' His early romances and much throughout his
poetry show how strong a fascination the traditions of magic and of
the magical philosophy had cast over his mind, and one can hardly
suppose that he had not brooded over their doctrine of symbols or
signatures, though I do not find anything to show that he gave it any
deep study. One finds in his poetry, besides innumerable images that
have not the definiteness of symbols, many images that are certainly
symbols, and as the years went by he began to use these with a more
and more deliberately symbolic purpose. I imagine that, when he wrote
his earlier poems he allowed the subconscious life to lay its hands so
firmly upon the rudder of his imagination, that he was little conscious
of the abstract meaning of the images that rose in what seemed the
idleness of his mind. Any one who has any experience of any mystical
state of the soul knows how there float up in the mind profound
symbols,[A] whose meaning, if indeed they do not delude one into the
dream that they are meaningless, one does not perhaps understand for
years. Nor I think has anyone, who has known that experience with any
constancy, failed to find some day in some old book or on some old
monument, a strange or intricate image, that had floated up before
him, and grow perhaps dizzy with the sudden conviction that our little
memories are but a part of some great memory that renews the world and
men's thoughts age after age, and that our thoughts are not, as we
suppose, the deep but a little foam upon the deep. Shelley understood
this as is proved by what he says of the eternity of beautiful things
and of the influence of the dead, but whether he understood that the
great memory is also a dwelling-house of symbols, of images that are
living souls, I cannot tell. He had certainly experience of all but
the most profound of the mystical states, of that union with created
things which assuredly must precede the soul's union with the uncreated
spirit. He says, in his fragment of an essay 'On Life,' mistaking a
unique experience for the common experience of all: 'Let us recollect
our sensations as children . . . we less habitually distinguished
all that we saw and felt from ourselves. They seemed as it were to
constitute one mass. There are some persons who in this respect are
always children. Those who are subject to the state called reverie,
feel as if their nature were resolved into the surrounding universe, or
as if the surrounding universe were resolved into their being,' and he
must have expected to receive thoughts and images from beyond his own
mind, just in so far as that mind transcended its preoccupation with
particular time and place, for he believed inspiration a kind of death;
and he could hardly have helped perceiving that an image that has
transcended particular time and place becomes a symbol, passes beyond
death, as it were, and becomes a living soul.

When Shelley went to the Continent with Godwin's daughter in 1812 they
sailed down certain great rivers in an open boat, and when he summed up
in his preface to _Laon and Cythna_ the things that helped to make him
a poet, he spoke of these voyages: 'I have sailed down mighty rivers
and seen the sun rise and set and the stars come forth whilst I sailed
night and day down a rapid stream among mountains. '

He may have seen some cave that was the bed of a rivulet by some river
side, or have followed some mountain stream to its source in a cave,
for from his return to England rivers and streams and wells, flowing
through caves or rising in them, came into every poem of his that
was of any length, and always with the precision of symbols. Alastor
passed in his boat along a river in a cave; and when for the last time
he felt the presence of the spirit he loved and followed, it was when
he watched his image in a silent well; and when he died it was where
a river fell into 'an abysmal chasm'; and the Witch of Atlas in her
gladness, as he in his sadness, passed in her boat along a river in a
cave, and it was where it bubbled out of a cave that she was born; and
when Rousseau, the typical poet of _The Triumph of Life_, awoke to the
vision that was life, it was where a rivulet bubbled out of a cave; and
the poet of _Epipsychidion_ met the evil beauty 'by a well under blue
nightshade bowers'; and Cythna bore her child imprisoned in a great
cave beside 'a fountain round and vast, in which the wave imprisoned
leaped and boiled perpetually'; and her lover Laon was brought to
his prison in a high column through a cave where there was 'a putrid
pool,' and when he went to see the conquered city he dismounted beside
a polluted fountain in the market-place, foreshadowing thereby that
spirit who at the end of _Prometheus Unbound_ gazes at a regenerated
city from 'within a fountain in the public square'; and when Laon and
Cythna are dead they awake beside a fountain and drift into Paradise
along a river; and at the end of things Prometheus and Asia are to live
amid a happy world in a cave where a fountain 'leaps with an awakening
sound'; and it was by a fountain, the meeting-place of certain unhappy
lovers, that Rosalind and Helen told their unhappiness to one another;
and it was under a willow by a fountain that the enchantress and her
lover began their unhappy love; while his lesser poems and his prose
fragments use caves and rivers and wells and fountains continually
as metaphors. It may be that his subconscious life seized upon some
passing scene, and moulded it into an ancient symbol without help from
anything but that great memory; but so good a Platonist as Shelley
could hardly have thought of any cave as a symbol, without thinking
of Plato's cave that was the world; and so good a scholar may well
have had Porphyry on 'the Cave of the Nymphs' in his mind. When I
compare Porphyry's description of the cave where the 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 evermore. Two gates
there are to the cave, the one set towards the North wind, whereby men
may go down, but the portals towards the South pertain rather to the
gods, whereby men may not enter: it is the way of the immortals. "' He
goes on to argue that the cave was a temple before Homer wrote, and
that 'the ancients did not establish temples without fabulous symbols,'
and then begins to interpret Homer's description in all its detail.
The ancients, he says, 'consecrated a cave to the world' and held 'the
flowing waters' and the 'obscurity of the cavern' 'apt symbols of what
the world contains,' and he calls to witness Zoroaster's cave with
fountains; and often caves are, he says, symbols of 'all invisible
power; because as caves are obscure and dark, so the essence of all
these powers is occult,' and quotes a lost hymn to Apollo to prove
that nymphs living in caves fed men 'from intellectual fountains';
and he contends that fountains and rivers symbolize generation, and
that the word nymph 'is commonly applied to all souls descending into
generation,' and that the two gates of Homer's cave are the gate of
generation and the gate of ascent through death to the gods, the gate
of cold and moisture, and the gate of heat and fire. Cold, he says,
causes life in the world, and heat causes life among the gods, and the
constellation of the Cup is set in the heavens near the sign Cancer,
because it is there that the souls descending from the Milky Way
receive their draught of the intoxicating cold drink of generation.
'The mixing bowls and jars of stone' are consecrated to the Naiads,
and are also, as it seems, symbolical of Bacchus, and are of stone
because of the rocky beds of the rivers. And 'the looms of stone' are
the symbols of the 'souls that descend into generation. ' 'For the
formation of the flesh is on or about the bones, which in the bodies
of animals resemble stones,' and also because 'the body is a garment'
not only about the soul, but about all essences that become visible,
for 'the heavens are called by the ancients a veil, in consequence of
being as it were the vestments of the celestial gods. ' The bees hive
in the mixing bowls and jars of stone, for so Porphyry understands
the passage, because honey was the symbol adopted by the ancients for
'pleasure arising from generation. ' The ancients, he says, called souls
not only Naiads but bees, 'as the efficient cause of sweetness'; but
not all souls 'proceeding into generation' are called bees, 'but those
who will live in it justly and who after having performed such things
as are acceptable to the gods will again return (to their kindred
stars). For this insect loves to return to the place from whence it
came and is eminently just and sober. ' I find all these details in the
cave of the Witch of Atlas, the most elaborately described of Shelley's
caves, except the two gates, and these have a far-off echo in her
summer journeys on her cavern river and in her winter sleep in 'an
inextinguishable well of crimson fire. ' We have for the mixing bowls,
and jars of stone full of honey, those delights of the senses, 'sounds
of air' 'folded in cells of crystal silences,' 'liquors clear and
sweet' 'in crystal vials,' and for the bees, visions 'each in his thin
sheath like a chrysalis,' and for 'the looms of stone' and 'raiment
of purple stain' the Witch's spinning and embroidering; and the Witch
herself is a Naiad, and was born from one of the Atlantides, who lay
in 'a chamber of grey rock' until she was changed by the sun's embrace
into a cloud.

When one turns to Shelley for an explanation of the cave and fountain
one finds how close his thought was to Porphyry's. He looked upon
thought as a condition of life in generation and believed that the
reality beyond was something other than thought. He wrote in his
fragment 'On Life,' 'That the basis of all things cannot be, as the
popular philosophy alleges, mind, is sufficiently evident. Mind, as
far as we have any experience of its properties, and beyond that
experience how vain is argument, cannot create, it can only perceive;'
and in another passage he defines mind as existence. Water is his great
symbol of existence, and he continually meditates over its mysterious
source. In his prose he tells how 'thought can with difficulty visit
the intricate and winding chambers which it inhabits. It is like a
river, whose rapid and perpetual stream flows outward. . . . The caverns
of the mind are obscure and shadowy; or pervaded with a lustre,
beautiful and bright indeed, but shining not beyond their portals. '
When the Witch has passed in her boat from the caverned river, that is
doubtless her own destiny, she passes along the Nile 'by Moeris and
the Mareotid lakes,' and sees all human life shadowed upon its waters
in shadows that 'never are erased but tremble ever'; and in many a
dark and subterranean street under the Nile--new caverns--and along the
bank of the Nile; and as she bends over the unhappy, she compares
unhappiness to the 'strife that stirs the liquid surface of man's
life'; and because she can see the reality of things she is described
as journeying 'in the calm depths' of 'the wide lake' we journey over
unpiloted. Alastor calls the river that he follows an image of his
mind, and thinks that it will be as hard to say where his thought will
be when he is dead as where its waters will be in ocean or cloud in a
little while. In _Mont Blanc_, a poem so overladen with descriptions
in parentheses that one loses sight of its logic, Shelley compares
the flowing through our mind of 'the universe of things,' which are,
he has explained elsewhere, but thoughts, to the flowing of the Arne
through the ravine, and compares the unknown sources of our thoughts
in some 'remoter world' whose 'gleams' 'visit the soul in sleep,' to
Arne's sources among the glaciers on the mountain heights. Cythna in
the passage where she speaks of making signs 'a subtle language within
language' on the sand by the 'fountain' of sea water in the cave where
she is imprisoned, speaks of the 'cave' of her mind which gave its
secrets to her, and of 'one mind the type of all' which is a 'moveless
wave' reflecting 'all moveless things that are;' and then passing more
completely under the power of the symbol, she speaks of growing wise
through contemplation of the images that rise out of the fountain at
the call of her will. Again and again one finds some passing allusion
to the cave of man's mind, or to the caves of his youth, or to the
cave of mysteries we enter at death, for to Shelley as to Porphyry it
is more than an image of life in the world. It may mean any enclosed
life, as when it is the dwelling-place of Asia and Prometheus, or when
it is 'the still cave of poetry,' and it may have all meanings at once,
or it may have as little meaning as some ancient religious symbol
enwoven from the habit of centuries with the patterns of a carpet or a
tapestry.

As Shelley sailed along those great rivers and saw or imagined the cave
that associated itself with rivers in his mind, he saw half-ruined
towers upon the hilltops, and once at any rate a tower is used to
symbolize a meaning that is the contrary to the meaning symbolized by
caves. Cythna's lover is brought through the cave where there is a
polluted fountain to a high tower, for being man's far-seeing mind,
when the world has cast him out he must to the 'towers of thought's
crowned powers'; nor is it possible for Shelley to have forgotten
this first imprisonment when he made men imprison Lionel in a tower
for a like offence; and because I know how hard it is to forget a
symbolical meaning, once one has found it, I believe Shelley had more
than a romantic scene in his mind when he made Prince Athanase follow
his mysterious studies in a lighted tower above the sea, and when he
made the old hermit watch over Laon in his sickness in a half-ruined
tower, wherein the sea, here doubtless as to Cythna, 'the one mind,'
threw 'spangled sands' and 'rarest sea shells. ' The tower, important
in Maeterlinck, as in Shelley, is, like the sea, and rivers, and caves
with fountains, a very ancient symbol, and would perhaps, as years went
by, have grown more important in his poetry. The contrast between
it and the cave in _Laon and Cythna_ suggests a contrast between the
mind looking outward upon men and things and the mind looking inward
upon itself, which may or may not have been in Shelley's mind, but
certainly helps, with one knows not how many other dim meanings, to
give the poem mystery and shadow. It is only by ancient symbols, by
symbols that have numberless meanings beside the one or two the writer
lays an emphasis upon, or the half-score he knows of, that any highly
subjective art can escape from the barrenness and shallowness of a too
conscious arrangement, into the abundance and depth of nature. The poet
of essences and pure ideas must seek in the half-lights that glimmer
from symbol to symbol as if to the ends of the earth, all that the
epic and dramatic poet finds of mystery and shadow in the accidental
circumstance of life.

The most important, the most precise of all Shelley's symbols, the one
he uses with the fullest knowledge of its meaning, is the Morning and
Evening Star. It rises and sets for ever over the towers and rivers,
and is the throne of his genius. Personified as a woman it leads
Rousseau, the typical poet of _The Triumph of Life_, under the power
of the destroying hunger of life, under the power of the sun that
we shall find presently as a symbol of life, and it is the Morning
Star that wars against the principle of evil in _Laon and Cythna_,
at first as a star with a red comet, here a symbol of all evil as
it is of disorder in _Epipsychidion_, and then as a serpent with an
eagle--symbols in Blake too and in the Alchemists; and it is the Morning
Star that appears as a winged youth to a woman, who typifies humanity
amid its sorrows, in the first canto of _Laon and Cythna_; and it is
invoked by the wailing women of _Hellas_, who call it 'lamp of the
free' and 'beacon of love' and would go where it hides flying from the
deepening night among those 'kingless continents sinless as Eden,' and
'mountains and islands' 'prankt on the sapphire sea' that are but the
opposing hemispheres to the senses but, as I think, the ideal world,
the world of the dead, to the imagination; and in the _Ode to Liberty_,
Liberty is bid lead wisdom out of the inmost cave of man's mind as
the Morning Star leads the sun out of the waves. We know too that had
_Prince Athanase_ been finished it would have described the finding of
Pandemus, the stars' lower genius, and the growing weary of her, and
the coming to its true genius Urania at the coming of death, as the
day finds the Star at evening. There is hardly indeed a poem of any
length in which one does not find it as a symbol of love, or liberty,
or wisdom, or beauty, or of some other expression of that Intellectual
Beauty, which was to Shelley's mind the central power of the world; and
to its faint and fleeting light he offers up all desires, that are as

'The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow. '

When its genius comes to Rousseau, shedding dew with one hand, and
treading out the stars with her feet, for she is also the genius of the
dawn, she brings him a cup full of oblivion and love. He drinks and his
mind becomes like sand 'on desert Labrador' marked by the feet of deer
and a wolf. And then the new vision, life, the cold light of day moves
before him, and the first vision becomes an invisible presence. The
same image was in his mind too when he wrote

'Hesperus flies from awakening night
And pants in its beauty and speed with light,
Fast fleeting, soft and bright. '

Though I do not think that Shelley needed to go to Porphyry's account
of the cold intoxicating cup, given to the souls in the constellation
of the Cup near the constellation Cancer, for so obvious a symbol as
the cup, or that he could not have found the wolf and the deer and
the continual flight of his Star in his own mind, his poetry becomes
the richer, the more emotional, and loses something of its appearance
of idle phantasy when I remember that these are ancient symbols, and
still come to visionaries in their dreams. Because the wolf is but a
more violent symbol of longing and desire than the hound, his wolf and
deer remind me of the hound and deer that Usheen saw in the Gaelic poem
chasing one another on the water before he saw the young man following
the woman with the golden apple; and of a Galway tale that tells how
Niam, whose name means brightness or beauty, came to Usheen as a deer;
and of a vision that a friend of mine saw when gazing at a dark-blue
curtain. I was with a number of Hermetists, and one of them said to
another, 'Do you see something in the curtain? ' The other gazed at the
curtain for a while and saw presently a man led through a wood by a
black hound, and then the hound lay dead at a place the seer knew was
called, without knowing why, 'the Meeting of the Suns,' and the man
followed a red hound, and then the red hound was pierced by a spear.
A white fawn watched the man out of the wood, but he did not look at
it, for a white hound came and he followed it trembling, but the seer
knew that he would follow the fawn at last, and that it would lead him
among the gods. The most learned of the Hermetists said, 'I cannot tell
the meaning of the hounds or where the Meeting of the Suns is, but I
think the fawn is the Morning and Evening Star. ' I have little doubt
that when the man saw the white fawn he was coming out of the darkness
and passion of the world into some day of partial regeneration, and
that it was the Morning Star and would be the Evening Star at its
second coming. I have little doubt that it was but the story of Prince
Athanase and what may have been the story of Rousseau in _The Triumph
of Life_, thrown outward once again from that great memory, which is
still the mother of the Muses, though men no longer believe in it.

It may have been this memory, or it may have been some impulse of
his nature too subtle for his mind to follow, that made Keats, with
his love of embodied things, of precision of form and colouring, of
emotions made sleepy by the flesh, see Intellectual Beauty in the Moon;
and Blake, who lived in that energy he called eternal delight, see it
in the Sun, where his personification of poetic genius labours at a
furnace. I think there was certainly some reason why these men took so
deep a pleasure in lights that Shelley thought of with weariness and
trouble. The Moon is the most changeable of symbols, and not merely
because it is the symbol of change. As mistress of the waters she
governs the life of instinct and the generation of things, for, as
Porphyry says, even 'the apparition of images' in the 'imagination' is
through 'an excess of moisture'; and, as a cold and changeable fire
set in the bare heavens, she governs alike chastity and the joyless
idle drifting hither and thither of generated things.
She may give God
a body and have Gabriel to bear her messages, or she may come to men
in their happy moments as she came to Endymion, or she may deny life
and shoot her arrows; but because she only becomes beautiful in giving
herself, and is no flying ideal, she is not loved by the children of
desire.

Shelley could not help but see her with unfriendly eyes. He is believed
to have described Mary Shelley at a time when she had come to seem
cold in his eyes, in that passage of _Epipsychidion_ which tells how
a woman like the Moon led him to her cave and made 'frost' creep over
the sea of his mind, and so bewitched Life and Death with 'her silver
voice' that they ran from him crying, 'Away, he is not of our crew. '
When he describes the Moon as part of some beautiful scene he can call
her beautiful, but when he personifies, when his words come under the
influence of that great memory or of some mysterious tide in the depth
of our being, he grows unfriendly or not truly friendly or at the
most pitiful. The Moon's lips 'are pale and waning,' it is 'the cold
Moon,' or 'the frozen and inconstant Moon,' or it is 'forgotten' and
'waning,' or it 'wanders' and is 'weary,' or it is 'pale and grey,' or
it is 'pale for weariness,' and 'wandering companionless' and 'ever
changing,' and finding 'no object worth' its 'constancy,' or it is like
a 'dying lady' who 'totters' 'out of her chamber led by the insane and
feeble wanderings of her fading brain,' and even when it is no more
than a star, it casts an evil influence that makes the lips of lovers
'lurid' or pale. It only becomes a thing of delight when Time is being
borne to his tomb in eternity, for then the spirit of the Earth, man's
procreant mind, fills it with his own joyousness. He describes the
spirit of the Earth and of the Moon, moving above the rivulet of their
lives in a passage which reads like a half-understood vision. Man has
become 'one harmonious soul of many a soul' and 'all things flow to
all' and 'familiar acts are beautiful through love,' and an 'animation
of delight' at this change flows from spirit to spirit till the snow
'is loosened from the Moon's lifeless mountains. '

Some old magical writer, I forget who, says if you wish to be
melancholy hold in your left hand an image of the Moon made out of
silver, and if you wish to be happy hold in your right hand an image of
the Sun made out of gold. The Sun is the symbol of sensitive life, and
of belief and joy and pride and energy, of indeed the whole life of the
will, and of that beauty which neither lures from far off, nor becomes
beautiful in giving itself, but makes all glad because it is beauty.
Taylor quotes Proclus as calling it 'the Demiurgos of everything
sensible. ' It was therefore natural that Blake, who was always praising
energy, and all exalted over-flowing of oneself, and who thought art an
impassioned labour to keep men from doubt and despondency, and woman's
love an evil, when it would trammel the man's will, should see the
poetic genius not in a woman star but in the Sun, and should rejoice
throughout his poetry in 'the Sun in his strength. ' Shelley, however,
except when he uses it to describe the peculiar beauty of Emilia
Viviani, who was 'like an incarnation of the Sun when light is changed
to love,' saw it with less friendly eyes. He seems to have seen it with
perfect happiness only when veiled in mist, or glimmering upon water,
or when faint enough to do no more than veil the brightness of his own
Star; and in _The Triumph of Life_, the one poem in which it is part
of the avowed symbolism, its power is the being and the source of all
tyrannies. When the woman personifying the Morning Star has faded from
before his eyes, Rousseau sees a 'new vision' in 'a cold bright car'
with a rainbow hovering over her, and as she comes the shadow passes
from 'leaf and stone' and the souls she has enslaved seem in 'that
light like atomies to dance within a sunbeam,' or they dance among
the flowers that grow up newly 'in the grassy verdure of the desert,'
unmindful of the misery that is to come upon them. 'These are the
great, the unforgotten,' all who have worn 'mitres and helms and crowns
or wreaths of light,' and yet have not known themselves. Even 'great
Plato' is there because he knew joy and sorrow, because life that
could not subdue him by gold or pain, by 'age or sloth or slavery,'
subdued him by love. All who have ever lived are there except Christ
and Socrates and the 'sacred few' who put away all life could give,
being doubtless followers throughout their lives of the forms borne by
the flying ideal, or who, 'as soon as they had touched the world with
living flame, flew back like eagles to their native noon. '

In ancient times, it seems to me that Blake, who for all his protest
was glad to be alive, and ever spoke of his gladness, would have
worshipped in some chapel of the Sun, and that Keats, who accepted
life gladly though with 'a delicious diligent indolence,' would have
worshipped in some chapel of the Moon, but that Shelley, who hated
life because he sought 'more in life than any understood,' would have
wandered, lost in a ceaseless reverie, in some chapel of the Star of
infinite desire.

I think too that as he knelt before an altar, where a thin flame burnt
in a lamp made of green agate, a single vision would have come to him
again and again, a vision of a boat drifting down a broad river between
high hills where there were caves and towers, and following the light
of one Star; and that voices would have told him how there is for every
man some one scene, some one adventure, some one picture that is the
image of his secret life, for wisdom first speaks in images, and that
this one image, if he would but brood over it his life long, would
lead his soul, disentangled from unmeaning circumstance and the ebb
and flow of the world, into that far household, where the undying gods
await all whose souls have become simple as flame, whose bodies have
become quiet as an agate lamp.

But he was born in a day when the old wisdom had vanished and was
content merely to write verses, and often with little thought of more
than verses.

1900.

FOOTNOTE:

[Footnote A: 'Marianne's Dream' was certainly copied from a real dream
of somebody's, but like images come to the mystic in his waking state. ]




AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON


I

I HAVE been hearing Shakespeare, as the traveller in _News from
Nowhere_ might have heard him, had he not been hurried back into
our noisy time. One passes through quiet streets, where gabled and
red-tiled houses remember the Middle Age, to a theatre that has been
made not to make money, but for the pleasure of making it, like the
market houses that set the traveller chuckling; nor does one find it
among hurrying cabs and ringing pavements, but in a green garden by
a river side. Inside I have to be content for a while with a chair,
for I am unexpected, and there is not an empty seat but this; and yet
there is no one who has come merely because one must go somewhere after
dinner. All day, too, one does not hear or see an incongruous or noisy
thing, but spends the hours reading the plays, and the wise and foolish
things men have said of them, in the library of the theatre, with its
oak-panelled walls and leaded windows of tinted glass; or one rows by
reedy banks and by old farm-houses, and by old churches among great
trees. It is certainly one's fault if one opens a newspaper, for Mr.
Benson gives one a new play every night, and one need talk of nothing
but the play in the inn-parlour, under the oak beams blackened by time
and showing the mark of the adze that shaped them. I have seen this
week _King John_, _Richard II. _, the second part of _Henry IV. _, _Henry
V. _, the second part of _Henry VI. _, and _Richard III. _ played in their
right order, with all the links that bind play to play unbroken; and
partly because of a spirit in the place, and partly because of the
way play supports play, the theatre has moved me as it has never done
before. That strange procession of kings and queens, of warring nobles,
of insurgent crowds, of courtiers, and of people of the gutter has been
to me almost too visible, too audible, too full of an unearthly energy.
I have felt as I have sometimes felt on grey days on the Galway shore,
when a faint mist has hung over the grey sea and the grey stones, as
if the world might suddenly vanish and leave nothing behind, not even
a little dust under one's feet. The people my mind's eye has seen have
too much of the extravagance of dreams, like all the inventions of art
before our crowded life had brought moderation and compromise, to seem
more than a dream, and yet all else has grown dim before them.

In London the first man one meets puts any high dream out of one's
head, for he will talk to one of something at once vapid and exciting,
some one of those many subjects of thought that build up our social
unity. But here he gives back one's dream like a mirror. If we do not
talk of the plays, we talk of the theatre, and how more people may be
got to come, and our isolation from common things makes the future
become grandiose and important. One man tells how the theatre and the
library were at their foundation but part of a scheme the future is
to fulfil. To them will be added a school where speech, and gesture,
and fencing, and all else that an actor needs will be taught, and the
council, which will have enlarged its Festivals to some six weeks,
will engage all the chief players of Shakespeare, and perhaps of other
great dramatists in this and other countries. These chief players will
need to bring but few of their supporters, for the school will be able
to fill all the lesser parts with players who are slowly recovering
the lost tradition of musical speech. Another man is certain that
the Festival, even without the school, which would require a new
endowment, will grow in importance year by year, and that it may become
with favouring chance the supreme dramatic event of the world; and when
I suggest that it may help to break the evil prestige of London he
becomes enthusiastic.

Surely a bitter hatred of London is becoming a mark of those that love
the arts, and all that have this hatred should help anything that looks
like a beginning of a centre of art elsewhere. The easiness of travel,
which is always growing, began by emptying the country, but it may end
by filling it; for adventures like this of Stratford-on-Avon show that
people are ready to journey from all parts of England and Scotland and
Ireland, and even from America, to live with their favourite art as
shut away from the world as though they were 'in retreat,' as Catholics
say. Nobody but an impressionist painter, who hides it in light and
mist, even pretends to love a street for its own sake; and could we
meet our friends and hear music and poetry in the country, none of us
that are not captive would ever leave the thrushes. In London, we hear
something that we like some twice or thrice in a winter, and among
people who are thinking the while of a music-hall singer or of a member
of parliament, but there we would hear it and see it among people
who liked it well enough to have travelled some few hours to find it;
and because those who care for the arts have few near friendships
among those that do not, we would hear and see it among near friends.
We would escape, too, from those artificial tastes and interests we
cultivate, that we may have something to talk about among people we
meet for a few minutes and not again, and the arts would grow serious
as the Ten Commandments.


II

I do not think there is anything I disliked in Stratford, beside
certain new houses, but the shape of the theatre; and as a larger
theatre must be built sooner or later, that would be no great matter if
one could put a wiser shape into somebody's head. I cannot think there
is any excuse for a half-round theatre, where land is not expensive,
or no very great audience to be seated within earshot of the stage; or
that it was adopted for a better reason than because it has come down
to us, though from a time when the art of the stage was a different
art. The Elizabethan theatre was a half-round, because the players were
content to speak their lines on a platform, as if they were speakers at
a public meeting, and we go on building in the same shape, although
our art of the stage is the art of making a succession of pictures.
Were our theatres of the shape of a half-closed fan, like Wagner's
theatre, where the audience sit on seats that rise towards the broad
end while the play is played at the narrow end, their pictures could
be composed for eyes at a small number of points of view, instead of
for eyes at many points of view, above and below and at the sides,
and what is no better than a trade might become an art. With the eyes
watching from the sides of a half-round, on the floor and in the boxes
and galleries, would go the solid-built houses and the flat trees that
shake with every breath of air; and we could make our pictures with
robes that contrasted with great masses of colour in the back cloth
and such severe or decorative forms of hills and trees and houses as
would not overwhelm, as our naturalistic scenery does, the idealistic
art of the poet, and all at a little price. Naturalistic scene-painting
is not an art, but a trade, because it is, at best, an attempt to copy
the more obvious effects of nature by the methods of the ordinary
landscape-painter, and by his methods made coarse and summary. It is
but flashy landscape-painting and lowers the taste it appeals to,
for the taste it appeals to has been formed by a more delicate art.
Decorative scene-painting would be, on the other hand, as inseparable
from the movements as from the robes of the players and from the
falling of the light; and being in itself a grave and quiet thing it
would mingle with the tones of the voices and with the sentiment of
the play, without overwhelming them under an alien interest. It would
be a new and legitimate art appealing to a taste formed by itself and
copying nothing but itself. Mr. Gordon Craig used scenery of this kind
at the Purcell Society performance the other day, and despite some
marring of his effects by the half-round shape of the theatre, it was
the first beautiful scenery our stage has seen. He created an ideal
country where everything was possible, even speaking in verse, or
speaking in music, or the expression of the whole of life in a dance,
and I would like to see Stratford-on-Avon decorate its Shakespeare with
like scenery. As we cannot, it seems, go back to the platform and the
curtain, and the argument for doing so is not without weight, we can
only get rid of the sense of unreality, which most of us feel when we
listen to the conventional speech of Shakespeare, by making scenery as
conventional. Time after time his people use at some moment of deep
emotion an elaborate or deliberate metaphor, or do some improbable
thing which breaks an emotion of reality we have imposed upon him by an
art that is not his, nor in the spirit of his. It also is an essential
part of his method to give slight or obscure motives of many actions
that our attention may dwell on what is of chief importance, and we set
these cloudy actions among solid-looking houses, and what we hope are
solid-looking trees, and illusion comes to an end, slain by our desire
to increase it. In his art, as in all the older art of the world,
there was much make-believe, and our scenery, too, should remember
the time when, as my nurse used to tell me, herons built their nests
in old men's beards! Mr. Benson did not venture to play the scene in
_Richard III. _ where the ghosts walk, as Shakespeare wrote it, but had
his scenery been as simple as Mr. Gordon Craig's purple back cloth that
made Dido and 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 Holinshed, and had given life a new
luxury, a new splendour, and been 'too friendly' to his friends, 'too
favorable' to his enemies. And certainly Shakespeare had these things
in his head when he made his King fail, a little because he lacked
some qualities that were doubtless common among his scullions, but
more because he had certain qualities that are uncommon in all ages.
To suppose that Shakespeare preferred the men who deposed his King is
to suppose that Shakespeare judged men with the eyes of a Municipal
Councillor weighing the merits of a Town Clerk; and that had he been
by when Verlaine cried out from his bed, 'Sir, you have been made by
the stroke of a pen, but I have been made by the breath of God,' he
would have thought the Hospital Superintendent the better man. He saw
indeed, as I think, in Richard II. the defeat that awaits all, whether
they be Artist or Saint, who find themselves where men ask of them a
rough energy and have nothing to give but some contemplative virtue,
whether lyrical phantasy, or sweetness of temper, or dreamy dignity, or
love of God, or love of His creatures. He saw that such a man through
sheer bewilderment and impatience can become as unjust or as violent as
any common man, any Bolingbroke or Prince John, and yet remain 'that
sweet lovely rose. ' The courtly and saintly ideals of the Middle Ages
were fading, and the practical ideals of the modern age had begun to
threaten the unuseful dome of the sky; Merry England was fading, and
yet it was not so faded that the Poets could not watch the procession
of the world with that untroubled sympathy for men as they are, as
apart from all they do and seem, which is the substance of tragic irony.

Shakespeare cared little for the State, the source of all our
judgments, apart from its shows and splendours, its turmoils and
battles, its flamings out of the uncivilized heart. He did indeed
think it wrong to overturn a King, and thereby to swamp peace in civil
war, and the historical plays from _Henry IV. _ to _Richard III. _, that
monstrous birth and last sign of the wrath of Heaven, are a fulfilment
of the prophecy of the Bishop of Carlisle, who was 'raised up by God'
to make it; but he had no nice sense of utilities, no ready balance
to measure deeds, like that fine instrument, with all the latest
improvements, Gervinus and Professor Dowden handle so skilfully. He
meditated as Solomon, not as Bentham meditated, upon blind ambitions,
untoward accidents, and capricious passions, and the world was almost
as empty in his eyes as it must be in the eyes of God.

'Tired with all these, for restful death I cry;--
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And Art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone. '


V

The Greeks, a certain scholar has told me, considered that myths are
the activities of the 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 of things for whose speaking he could find no models
in the world about him. He announced the religion of art, of which no
man dreamed in the world about him; and he understood it more perfectly
than the thousands of subtle spirits who have received its baptism in
the world about us, because, in the beginning of important things--in
the beginning of love, in the beginning of the day, in the beginning of
any work, there is a moment when we understand more perfectly than we
understand again until all is finished. In his time educated people
believed that they amused themselves with books of imagination, but
that they 'made their souls' by listening to sermons and by doing or
by not doing certain things. When they had to explain why serious
people like themselves honoured the great poets greatly they were hard
put to it for lack of good reasons. In our time we are agreed that we
'make our souls' out of some one of the great poets of ancient times,
or out of Shelley or Wordsworth, or Goethe or Balzac, or Flaubert, or
Count Tolstoy, in the books he wrote before he became a prophet and
fell into a lesser order, or out of Mr. Whistler's pictures, while we
amuse ourselves, or, at best, make a poorer sort of soul, by listening
to sermons or by doing or by not doing certain things. We write of
great writers, even of writers whose beauty would once have seemed an
unholy beauty, with rapt sentences like those our fathers kept for the
beatitudes and mysteries of the Church; and no matter what we believe
with our lips, we believe with our hearts that beautiful things, as
Browning said in his one prose essay that was not in verse, have 'lain
burningly on the Divine hand,' and that when time has begun to wither,
the Divine hand will fall heavily on bad taste and vulgarity. When no
man believed these things William Blake believed them, and began that
preaching against the Philistine, which is as the preaching of the
Middle Ages against the Saracen.

He had learned from Jacob Boehme and from old alchemist writers that
imagination was the first emanation of divinity, 'the body of God,'
'the Divine members,' and he drew the deduction, which they did not
draw, that the imaginative arts were therefore the greatest of Divine
revelations, and that the sympathy with all living things, sinful and
righteous alike, which the imaginative arts awaken, is that forgiveness
of sins commanded by Christ. The reason, and by the reason he meant
deductions from the observations of the senses, binds us to mortality
because it binds us to the senses, and divides us from each other by
showing us our clashing interests; but imagination divides us from
mortality by the immortality of beauty, and binds us to each other
by opening the secret doors of all hearts. He cried again and again
that every thing that lives is holy, and that nothing is unholy except
things that do not live--lethargies, and cruelties, and timidities, and
that denial of imagination which is the root they grew from in old
times. Passions, because most living, are most holy--and this was a
scandalous paradox in his time--and man shall enter eternity borne upon
their wings.

And he understood this so literally that certain drawings to _Vala_,
had he carried them beyond the first faint pencillings, the first
faint washes of colour, would have been a pretty scandal to his time
and to our time. The sensations of this 'foolish body,' this 'phantom
of the earth and water,' were in themselves but half-living things,
'vegetative' things, but passion that 'eternal glory' made them a part
of the body of God.

This philosophy kept him more simply a poet than any poet of his time,
for it made him content to express every beautiful feeling that came
into his head without troubling about its utility or chaining it to
any utility. Sometimes one feels, even when one is reading poets of a
better time--Tennyson or Wordsworth, let us say--that they have troubled
the energy and simplicity of their imaginative passions by asking
whether they were for the helping or for the hindrance of the world,
instead of believing that all beautiful things have 'lain burningly on
the Divine hand. ' But when one reads Blake, it is as though the spray
of an inexhaustible fountain of beauty was blown into our faces, and
not merely when one reads the _Songs of Innocence_, or the lyrics he
wished to call 'The Ideas of Good and Evil,' but when one reads those
'Prophetic Works' in which he spoke confusedly and obscurely because
he spoke of things for whose speaking he could find no models in the
world about him. He was a symbolist who had to invent his symbols;
and his counties of England, with their correspondence to tribes of
Israel, and his mountains and rivers, with their correspondence to
parts of a man's body, are arbitrary as some of the symbolism in the
_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 Professor Rhys,
that pathway into Welsh mythology which he found in 'Jerusalem'; or
have gone to Ireland--and he was probably an Irishman--and chosen for
his symbols the sacred mountains, along whose sides the peasant still
sees enchanted fires, and the divinities which have not faded from the
belief, if they have faded from the prayers of simple hearts; and have
spoken without mixing incongruous things because he spoke of things
that had been long steeped in emotion; and have been less obscure
because a traditional mythology stood on the threshold of his meaning
and on the margin of his sacred darkness. If 'Enitharmon' had been
named Freia, or Gwydeon, or Danu, and made live in Ancient Norway, or
Ancient Wales, or Ancient Ireland, we would have forgotten that her
maker was a mystic; and the hymn of her harping, that is in _Vala_,
would but have reminded us of many ancient hymns.

'The joy of woman in the death of her most beloved,
Who dies for love of her,
In torments of fierce jealousy and pangs of adoration.
The lover's night bears on my song,
And the nine spheres rejoice beneath my powerful control.

They sing unwearied to the notes of my immortal hand.
The solemn, silent moon
Reverberates the long harmony sounding upon my limbs.
The birds and beasts rejoice and play,
And every one seeks for his mate to prove his inmost joy.

Furious and terrible they sport and rend the nether deep.
The deep lifts up his rugged head,
And lost in infinite hovering wings vanishes with a cry.
The fading cry is ever dying,
The living voice is ever living in its inmost joy. '

1897.




WILLIAM BLAKE AND HIS ILLUSTRATIONS TO _THE DIVINE COMEDY_.


I. HIS OPINIONS UPON ART.

WILLIAM BLAKE was the first writer of modern times to preach the
indissoluble marriage of all great art with symbol. There had been
allegorists and teachers of allegory in plenty, but the symbolic
imagination, or, as Blake preferred to call it, 'vision,' is not
allegory, being 'a representation of what actually exists really and
unchangeably. ' A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some
invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while
allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing,
or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination:
the one is a revelation, the other an amusement. It is happily no part
of my purpose to expound in detail the relations he believed to exist
between symbol and mind, for in doing so I should come upon not a few
doctrines which, though they have not been difficult to many simple
persons, ascetics wrapped in skins, women who had cast away all common
knowledge, peasants dreaming by their sheepfolds upon the hills, are
full of obscurity to the man of modern culture; but it is necessary to
just touch upon these relations, because in them was the fountain of
much of the practice and of all the precept of his artistic life.

If a man would enter into 'Noah's rainbow,' he has written, and 'make a
friend' of one of 'the images of wonder' which dwell there, and which
always entreat him 'to leave mortal things,' 'then would he arise
from the grave and meet the Lord in the air'; and by this rainbow,
this sign of a covenant granted to him who is with Shem and Japhet,
'painting, poetry and music,' 'the three powers in man of conversing
with Paradise which the flood "of time and space" did not sweep
away,' Blake represented the shapes of beauty haunting our moments of
inspiration: shapes held by most for the frailest of ephemera, but by
him for a people older than the world, citizens of eternity, appearing
and reappearing in the minds of artists and of poets, creating all
we touch and see by casting distorted images of themselves upon 'the
vegetable glass of nature'; and because beings, none the less symbols,
blossoms, as it were, growing from invisible immortal roots, hands, as
it were, pointing the way into some divine labyrinth. If 'the world of
imagination' was 'the world of eternity,' as this doctrine implied, it
was of less importance to know men and nature than to distinguish the
beings and substances of imagination from those of a more perishable
kind, created by the phantasy, in uninspired moments, out of memory
and whim; and this could best be done by purifying one's mind, as with
a flame, in study of the works of the great masters, who were great
because they had been granted by divine favour a vision of the unfallen
world from which others are kept apart by the flaming sword that turns
every way; and by flying from the painters who studied 'the vegetable
glass' for its own sake, and not to discover there the shadows of
imperishable beings and substances, and who entered into their own
minds, not to make the unfallen world a test of all they heard and
saw and felt with the senses, but to cover the naked spirit with 'the
rotten rags of memory' of older sensations. The struggle of the first
part of his life had been to distinguish between these two schools, and
to cleave always to the Florentine, and so to escape the fascination of
those who seemed to him to offer the sleep of nature to a spirit weary
with the labours of inspiration; but it was only after his return to
London from Felpham in 1804 that he finally escaped from 'temptations
and perturbations' which sought to destroy 'the imaginative power' at
'the hands of Venetian and Flemish Demons. ' 'The spirit of Titian'--and
one must always remember that he had only seen poor engravings, and
what his disciple, Palmer, has called 'picture-dealers' Titians'--'was
particularly active in raising doubts concerning the possibility of
executing without a model; and when once he had raised the doubt it
became easy for him to snatch away the vision time after time'; and
Blake's imagination 'weakened' and 'darkened' until a 'memory of
nature and of the pictures of various schools possessed his mind,
instead of appropriate execution' flowing from the vision itself. But
now he wrote, 'O glory, and O delight! I have entirely reduced that
spectrous fiend to his station'--he had overcome the merely reasoning
and sensual portion of the mind--'whose annoyance has been the ruin
of my labours for the last twenty years of my life. . . . I speak with
perfect confidence and certainty of the fact which has passed upon me.
Nebuchadnezzar had seven times passed over him, I have had twenty;
thank God I was not altogether a beast as he was. . . . Suddenly, on
the day after visiting the Truchsessian Gallery of pictures'--this
was a gallery containing pictures by Albert Durer 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. . . .