No More Learning

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. . . . Excuse my enthusiasm, or rather
madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take
a pencil or graver in my hand, as I used to be in my youth. '

This letter may have been the expression of a moment's enthusiasm,
but was more probably rooted in one of those intuitions of coming
technical power which every creator feels, and learns to rely upon;
for all his greatest work was done, and the principles of his art
were formulated, after this date. Except a word here and there, his
writings hitherto had not dealt with the principles of art except
remotely and by implication; but now he wrote much upon them, and not
in obscure symbolic verse, but in emphatic prose, and explicit if not
very poetical rhyme. In his _Descriptive Catalogue_, in _The Address
to the Public_, in the notes on Sir Joshua Reynolds, in _The Book of
Moonlight_--of which some not very dignified rhymes alone remain--in
beautiful detached passages in _The MS. Book_, he explained spiritual
art, and praised the painters of Florence and their influence, and
cursed all that has come of Venice and Holland. The limitation of
his view was from the very intensity of his vision; he was a too
literal realist of imagination, as others are of nature; and because
he believed that the figures seen by the mind's eye, when exalted by
inspiration, were 'eternal existences,' symbols of divine essences,
he hated every grace of style that might obscure their lineaments.
To wrap them about in reflected lights was to do this, and to dwell
over-fondly upon any softness of hair or flesh was to dwell upon that
which was least permanent and least characteristic, for 'The great and
golden rule of art, as of life, is this: that the more distinct, sharp
and wiry the boundary-line, the more perfect the work of art; and the
less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imitation,
plagiarism and bungling. ' Inspiration was to see the permanent and
characteristic in all forms, and if you had it not, you must needs
imitate with a languid mind the things you saw or remembered, and so
sink into the sleep of nature where all is soft and melting. 'Great
inventors in all ages knew this. Protogenes and Apelles knew each
other by their line. Raphael and Michael Angelo and Albert Durer
are known by this and this alone. How do we distinguish the owl
from the beast, the horse from the ox, but by the bounding outline?
How do we distinguish one face or countenance from another but by
the bounding-line and its infinite inflections and movements? What
is it that builds a house and plants a garden but the definite and
determinate? What is it that distinguished honesty from knavery but
the hard and wiry line of rectitude and certainty in the actions and
intentions? Leave out this line and you leave out life itself; and all
is chaos again, and the line of the Almighty must be drawn out upon it
before man or beast can exist. ' He even insisted that 'colouring does
not depend upon where the colours are put, but upon where the light
and dark are put, and all depends upon the form or outline'--meaning,
I suppose, that a colour gets its brilliance or its depth from being
in light or in shadow. He does not mean by outline the bounding-line
dividing a form from its background, as one of his commentators has
thought, but the line that divides it from surrounding space, and
unless you have an overmastering sense of this you cannot draw true
beauty at all, but only 'the beauty that is appended to folly,' a
beauty of mere voluptuous softness, 'a lamentable accident of the
mortal and perishing life,' for 'the beauty proper for sublime art is
lineaments, or forms and features capable of being the receptacles of
intellect,' and 'the face or limbs that alter least from youth to old
age are the face and limbs of the greatest beauty and perfection. '
His praise of a severe art had been beyond price had his age rested
a moment to listen, in the midst of its enthusiasm for Correggio and
the later Renaissance, for Bartolozzi and for Stothard; and yet in
his visionary realism, and in his enthusiasm for what, after all, is
perhaps the greatest art, and a necessary part of every picture that
is art at all, he forgot how he who wraps the vision in lights and
shadows, in iridescent or glowing colour, having in the midst of his
labour many little visions of these secondary essences, until form be
half lost in pattern, may compel the canvas or paper to become itself a
symbol of some not indefinite because unsearchable essence; for is not
the Bacchus and Ariadne of Titian a talisman as powerfully charged with
intellectual virtue as though it were a jewel-studded door of the city
seen on Patmos?

To cover the imperishable lineaments of beauty with shadows and
reflected lights was to fall into the power of his 'Vala,' the
indolent fascination of nature, the woman divinity who is so often
described in 'the prophetic books' as 'sweet pestilence,' and whose
children weave webs to take the souls of men; but there was yet a
more lamentable chance, for nature has also a 'masculine portion' or
'spectre' which kills instead of merely hiding, and is continually at
war with inspiration. To 'generalize' forms and shadows, to 'smooth
out' spaces and lines in obedience to 'laws of composition,' and of
painting; founded, not upon imagination, which always thirsts for
variety and delights in freedom, but upon reasoning from sensation
which is always seeking to reduce everything to a lifeless and slavish
uniformity; as the popular art of Blake's day had done, and as he
understood Sir Joshua Reynolds to advise, was to fall into 'Entuthon
Benithon,' or 'the Lake of Udan Adan,' or some other of those regions
where the imagination and the flesh are alike dead, that he names by
so many resonant phantastical names. 'General knowledge is remote
knowledge,' he wrote; 'it is in particulars that wisdom consists, and
happiness too. Both in art and life general masses are as much art as a
pasteboard man is human. Every man has eyes, nose and mouth; this every
idiot knows. But he who enters into and discriminates most minutely
the manners and intentions, the characters in all their branches, is
the alone wise or sensible man, and on this discrimination all art is
founded. . . . As poetry admits not a letter that is insignificant, so
painting admits not a grain of sand or a blade of grass insignificant,
much less an insignificant blot or blur. '

Against another desire of his time, derivative also from what he has
called 'corporeal reason,' the desire for 'a tepid moderation,' for a
lifeless 'sanity in both art and life,' he had protested years before
with a paradoxical violence. 'The roadway of excess leads to the palace
of wisdom,' and we must only 'bring out weight and measure in time of
dearth. ' This protest, carried, in the notes on Sir Joshua Reynolds,
to the point of dwelling with pleasure on the thought that 'The _Lives
of the Painters_ say that Raphael died of dissipation,' because
dissipation is better than emotional penury, seemed as important to his
old age as to his youth. He taught it to his disciples, and one finds
it in its purely artistic shape in a diary written by Samuel Palmer, in
1824: 'Excess is the essential vivifying spirit, vital spark, embalming
spice of the finest art. There are many mediums in the _means_--none,
oh, not a jot, not a shadow of a jot, in the _end_ of great art. In a
picture whose merit is to be excessively brilliant, it can't be too
brilliant, but individual tints may be too brilliant. . . . We must not
begin with medium, but think always on excess and only use medium to
make excess more abundantly excessive. '

These three primary commands, to seek a determinate outline, to avoid a
generalized treatment, and to desire always abundance and exuberance,
were insisted upon with vehement anger, and their opponents called
again and again 'demons' and 'villains,' 'hired' by the wealthy and
the idle; but in private, Palmer has told us, he could find 'sources
of delight throughout the whole range of art,' and was ever ready to
praise excellence in any school, finding, doubtless, among friends, no
need for the emphasis of exaggeration. There is a beautiful passage in
'Jerusalem' in which the merely mortal part of the mind, 'the spectre,'
creates 'pyramids of pride,' and 'pillars in the deepest hell to reach
the heavenly arches,' and seeks to discover wisdom in 'the spaces
between the stars,' not 'in the stars,' where it is, but the immortal
part makes all his labours vain, and turns his pyramids to 'grains of
sand,' his 'pillars' to 'dust on the fly's wing,' and makes of 'his
starry heavens a moth of gold and silver mocking his anxious grasp. '
So when man's desire to rest from spiritual labour, and his thirst
to fill his art with mere sensation and memory, seem upon the point
of triumph, some miracle transforms them to a new inspiration; and
here and there among the pictures born of sensation and memory is the
murmuring of a new ritual, the glimmering of new talismans and symbols.

It was during and after the writing of these opinions that Blake did
the various series of pictures which have brought him the bulk of his
fame. He had already completed the illustrations to Young's _Night
Thoughts_--in which the great sprawling figures, a little wearisome even
with the luminous colours of the original water-colour, became nearly
intolerable in plain black and white--and almost all the illustrations
to 'the prophetic books,' which have an energy like that of the
elements, but are rather rapid sketches taken while some phantasmic
procession swept over him, than elaborate compositions, and in whose
shadowy adventures one finds not merely, as did Dr. Garth Wilkinson,
'the hells of the ancient people, the Anakim, the Nephalim, and the
Rephaim . . . gigantic petrifactions from which the fires of lust and
intense selfish passion have long dissipated what was animal and
vital'; not merely the shadows cast by the powers who had closed the
light from him as 'with a door and window shutters,' but the shadows
of those who gave them battle. He did now, however, the many designs
to Milton, of which I have only seen those to _Paradise Regained_; the
reproductions of those to _Comus_, published, I think, by Mr. Quaritch;
and the three or four to _Paradise Lost_, engraved by Bell Scott--a
series of designs which one good judge considers his greatest work; the
illustrations to Blair's _Grave_, whose gravity and passion struggle
with the mechanical softness and trivial smoothness of Schiavonetti's
engraving; the illustrations to Thornton's _Virgil_, whose influence
is manifest in the work of the little group of landscape-painters who
gathered about him in his old age and delighted to call him master. The
member of the group, whom I have already so often quoted, has alone
praised worthily these illustrations to the first _eclogue_: 'There is
in all such a misty and dreamy glimmer as penetrates and kindles the
inmost soul and gives complete and unreserved delight, unlike the gaudy
daylight of this world. They are like all this wonderful artist's work,
the drawing aside of the fleshly curtain, and the glimpse which all the
most holy, studious saints and sages have enjoyed, of the rest which
remains to the people of God. ' Now, too, he did the great series, the
crowning work of his life, the illustrations to _The Book of Job_ and
the illustrations to _The Divine Comedy_. Hitherto he had protested
against the mechanical 'dots and lozenges' and 'blots and blurs' of
Woollett and Strange, but had himself used both 'dot and lozenge,'
'blot and blur,' though always in subordination 'to a firm and
determinate outline'; but in Marc Antonio, certain of whose engravings
he was shown by Linnell, he found a style full of delicate lines, a
style where all was living and energetic, strong and subtle. And almost
his last words, a letter written upon his death-bed, attack the 'dots
and lozenges' with even more than usually quaint symbolism, and praise
expressive lines. 'I know that the majority of Englishmen are bound
by the indefinite . . . a line is a line in its minutest particulars,
straight or crooked. It is itself not intermeasurable by anything else
. . . but since the French Revolution'--since the reign of reason began,
that is--'Englishmen are all intermeasurable with one another, certainly
a happy state of agreement in which I do not agree. ' The Dante series
occupied the last years of his life; even when too weak to get out of
bed he worked on, propped up with the great drawing-book before him.
He sketched a hundred designs, but left all incomplete, some very
greatly so, and partly engraved seven plates, of which the 'Francesca
and Paolo' is the most finished. It is not, I think, inferior to
any but the finest in the Job, if indeed to them, and shows in its
perfection Blake's mastery over elemental things, the swirl in which
the lost spirits are hurried, 'a watery flame' he would have called it,
the haunted waters and the huddling shapes. In the illustrations of
Purgatory there is a serene beauty, and one finds his Dante and Virgil
climbing among the rough rocks under a cloudy sun, and in their sleep
upon the smooth steps towards the summit, a placid, marmoreal, tender,
starry rapture.

All in this great series are in some measure powerful and moving, and
not, as it is customary to say of the work of Blake, because a flaming
imagination pierces through a cloudy and indecisive technique, but
because they have the only excellence possible in any art, a mastery
over artistic expression. The technique of Blake was imperfect,
incomplete, as is the technique of well-nigh all artists who have
striven to bring fires from remote summits; but where his imagination
is perfect and complete, his technique has a like perfection, a like
completeness. He strove to embody more subtle raptures, more elaborate
intuitions than any before him; his imagination and technique are
more broken and strained under a great burden than the imagination
and technique of any other master. 'I am,' wrote Blake, 'like others,
just equal in invention and execution. ' And again, 'No man can improve
an original invention; nor can an original invention exist without
execution, organized, delineated and articulated either by God or
man . . . I have heard people say, "Give me the ideas; it is no matter
what words you put them into"; and others say, "Give me the designs;
it is no matter for the execution. ". . . Ideas cannot be given but in
their minutely appropriate words, nor can a design be made without
its minutely appropriate execution. ' Living in a time when technique
and imagination are continually perfect and complete, because they no
longer strive to bring fire from heaven, we forget how imperfect and
incomplete they were in even the greatest masters, in Botticelli, in
Orcagna, and in Giotto.

The errors in the handiwork of exalted spirits are as the more
phantastical errors in their lives; as Coleridge's opium cloud; as
Villiers De L'Isle Adam's candidature for the throne of Greece; as
Blake's anger against causes and purposes he but half understood;
as the flickering madness an Eastern scripture would allow in august
dreamers; for he who half lives in eternity endures a rending of the
structures of the mind, a crucifixion of the intellectual body.


II. HIS OPINIONS ON DANTE.

As Blake sat bent over the great drawing-book, in which he made his
designs to _The Divine Comedy_, he was very certain that he and Dante
represented spiritual states which face one another in an eternal
enmity. Dante, because a great poet, was 'inspired by the Holy Ghost';
but his inspiration was mingled with a certain philosophy, blown up
out of his age, which Blake held for mortal and the enemy of immortal
things, and which from the earliest times has sat in high places and
ruled the world. This philosophy was the philosophy of soldiers, of
men of the world, of priests busy with government, of all who, because
of the absorption in active life, have been persuaded to judge and to
punish, and partly also, he admitted, the philosophy of Christ, who
in descending into the world had to take on the world; who, in being
born of Mary, a symbol of the law in Blake's symbolic language, had
to 'take after his mother,' and drive the money-changers out of the
Temple. Opposed to this was another philosophy, not made by men of
action, drudges of time and space, but by Christ when wrapped in the
divine essence, and by artists and poets, who are taught by the nature
of their craft to sympathize with all living things, and who, the more
pure and fragrant is their lamp, pass the further from all limitations,
to come at last to forget good and evil in an absorbing vision of the
happy and the unhappy. The one philosophy was worldly, and established
for the ordering of the body and the fallen will, and so long as it did
not call its 'laws of prudence' 'the laws of God,' was a necessity,
because 'you cannot have liberty in this world without what you call
moral virtue'; the other was divine, and established for the peace of
the imagination and the unfallen will, and, even when obeyed with a too
little reverence, could make men sin against no higher principality
than prudence. He called the followers of the first philosophy pagans,
no matter by what name they knew themselves, because the pagans, as he
understood the word pagan, believed more in the outward life, and in
what he called 'war, princedom, and victory,' than in the secret life
of the spirit; and the followers of the second philosophy Christians,
because only those whose sympathies had been enlarged and instructed
by art and poetry could obey the Christian command of unlimited
forgiveness. Blake had already found this 'pagan' philosophy in
Swedenborg, in Milton, in Wordsworth, in Sir Joshua Reynolds, in many
persons, and it had roused him so constantly and to such angry paradox
that its overthrow became the signal passion of his life, and filled
all he did and thought with the excitement of a supreme issue. Its
kingdom was bound to grow weaker so soon as life began to lose a little
in crude passion and naive tumult, but Blake was the first to announce
its successor, and he did this, as must needs be with revolutionists
who have 'the law' for 'mother,' with a firm conviction that the
things his opponents held white were indeed black, and that the things
they held black, white; with a strong persuasion that all busy with
government are men of darkness and 'something other than human life';
one is reminded of Shelley, who was the next to take up the cry, though
with a less abundant philosophic faculty, but still more of Nietzsche,
whose thought flows always, though with an even more violent current,
in the bed Blake's thought has worn.

The kingdom that was passing was, he held, the kingdom of the Tree of
Knowledge; the kingdom that was coming was the kingdom of the Tree of
Life: men who ate from the Tree of Knowledge wasted their days in anger
against one another, and in taking one another captive in great nets;
men who sought their food among the green leaves of the Tree of Life
condemned none but the unimaginative and the idle, and those who forget
that even love and death and old age are an imaginative art.

In these opposing kingdoms is the explanation of the petulant sayings
he wrote on the margins of the great sketch-book, and of those others,
still more petulant, which Crabb Robinson has recorded in his diary.
The sayings about the forgiveness of sins have no need for further
explanation, and are in contrast with the attitude of that excellent
commentator, Herr Hettinger, who, though Dante swooned from pity at
the tale of Francesca, will only 'sympathize' with her 'to a certain
extent,' being taken in a theological net. 'It seems as if Dante,'
Blake wrote, 'supposes God was something superior to the Father of
Jesus; for if He gives rain to the evil and the good, and His sun to
the just and the unjust, He can never have builded Dante's Hell, nor
the Hell of the Bible, as our parsons explain it. It must have been
framed by the dark spirit itself, and so I understand it. ' And again,
'Whatever task is of vengeance and whatever is against forgiveness
of sin is not of the Father but of Satan, the accuser, the father of
Hell. ' And again, and this time to Crabb Robinson, 'Dante saw devils
where I saw none. I see good only. ' 'I have never known a very bad man
who had not something very good about him. ' This forgiveness was not
the forgiveness of the theologian who has received a commandment from
afar off, but of the poet and artist, who believes he has been taught,
in a mystical vision, 'that the imagination is the man himself,' and
believes he has discovered in the practice of his art that without a
perfect sympathy there is no perfect imagination, and therefore no
perfect life. At another moment he called Dante 'an atheist, a mere
politician busied about this world, as Milton was, till, in his old
age, returned to God whom he had had in his childhood. ' 'Everything is
atheism,' he has already explained, 'which assumed the reality of the
natural and unspiritual world. ' Dante, he held, assumed its reality
when he made obedience to its laws a condition of man's happiness
hereafter, and he set Swedenborg beside Dante in misbelief for
calling Nature 'the ultimate of Heaven,' a lowest rung, as it were,
of Jacob's ladder, instead of a net woven by Satan to entangle our
wandering joys and bring our hearts into captivity. There are certain
curious unfinished diagrams scattered here and there among the now
separated pages of the sketch-book, and of these there is one which,
had it had all its concentric rings filled with names, would have
been a systematic exposition of his animosities and of their various
intensity. It represents Paradise, and in the midst, where Dante
emerges from the earthly Paradise, is written 'Homer,' and in the next
circle 'Swedenborg,' and on the margin these words: 'Everything in
Dante's Paradise shows that he has made the earth the foundation of
all, and its goddess Nature, memory,' memory of sensations, 'not the
Holy Ghost. . . . Round Purgatory is Paradise, and round Paradise vacuum.
Homer is the centre of all, I mean the poetry of the heathen. ' The
statement that round Paradise is vacuum is a proof of the persistence
of his ideas, and of his curiously literal understanding of his own
symbols; for it is but another form of the charge made against Milton
many years before in _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_. 'In Milton
the Father is destiny, the Son a ratio of the five senses,' Blake's
definition of the reason which is the enemy of the imagination, 'and
the Holy Ghost vacuum. ' Dante, like other mediaeval mystics, symbolized
the highest order of created beings by the fixed stars, and God by the
darkness beyond them, the _Primum Mobile_. Blake, absorbed in his very
different vision, in which God took always a human shape, believed
that to think of God under a symbol drawn from the outer world was in
itself idolatry, but that to imagine Him as an unpeopled immensity
was to think of Him under the one symbol furthest from His essence--it
being a creation of the ruining reason, 'generalizing' away 'the minute
particulars of life. ' Instead of seeking God in the deserts of time
and space, in exterior immensities, in what he called 'the abstract
void,' he believed that the further he dropped behind him memory of
time and space, reason builded upon sensation, morality founded for the
ordering of the world; and the more he was absorbed in emotion; and,
above all, in emotion escaped from the impulse of bodily longing and
the restraints of bodily reason, in artistic emotion; the nearer did
he come to Eden's 'breathing garden,' to use his beautiful phrase, and
to the unveiled face of God. No worthy symbol of God existed but the
inner world, the true humanity, to whose various aspects he gave many
names, 'Jerusalem,' 'Liberty,' 'Eden,' 'The Divine Vision,' 'The Body
of God,' 'The Human Form Divine,' 'The Divine Members,' and whose most
intimate expression was art and poetry.