No More Learning

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. He always sang of God under
this symbol:

'For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is God our Father dear;
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is man, His child and care.

For Mercy has a human heart;
Pity a human face;
And Love the human form divine;
And Peace, the human dress.

Then every man of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine--
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace. '

Whenever he gave this symbol a habitation in space he set it in the
sun, the father of light and life; and set in the darkness beyond the
stars, where light and life die away, Og and Anak and the giants that
were of old, and the iron throne of Satan.

By thus contrasting Blake and Dante by the light of Blake's
paradoxical wisdom, and as though there was no important truth
hung from Dante's beam of the balance, I but seek to interpret a
little-understood philosophy rather than one incorporate in the thought
and habits of Christendom. Every philosophy has half its truth from
times and generations; and to us one-half of the philosophy of Dante
is less living than his poetry, while the truth Blake preached and
sang and painted is the root of the cultivated life, of the fragile
perfect blossom of the world born in ages of leisure and peace, and
never yet to last more than a little season; the life those Phaeacians,
who told Odysseus that they had set their hearts in nothing but in
'the dance and changes of raiment, and love and sleep,' lived before
Poseidon heaped a mountain above them; the lives of all who, having
eaten of the Tree of Life, love, more than did the barbarous ages when
none had time to live, 'the minute particulars of life,' the little
fragments of space and time, which are wholly flooded by beautiful
emotion because they are so little they are hardly of time and space
at all. 'Every space smaller than a globule of man's blood,' he wrote,
'opens into eternity of which this vegetable earth is but a shadow. '
And again, 'Every time less than a pulsation of the artery is equal'
in its tenor and value 'to six thousand years, for in this period the
poet's work is done, and all the great events of time start forth,
and are conceived: in such a period, within a moment, a pulsation of
the artery. ' Dante, indeed, taught, in the 'Purgatorio,' that sin and
virtue are alike from love, and that love is from God; but this love
he would restrain by a complex eternal law, a complex external Church.
Blake upon the other hand cried scorn upon the whole spectacle of
external things, a vision to pass away in a moment, and preached the
cultivated life, the internal Church which has no laws but beauty,
rapture and labour. 'I know of no other Christianity, and of no other
gospel, than the liberty, both of body and mind, to exercise the
divine arts of imagination, the real and eternal world of which this
vegetable universe is but a faint shadow, and in which we shall live in
our eternal or imaginative bodies when these vegetable mortal bodies
are no more. The Apostles knew of no other gospel. What are all their
spiritual gifts? What is the divine spirit?
Is the Holy Ghost any other
than an intellectual fountain? What is the harvest of the gospel and
its labours? What is the talent which it is a curse to hide? What are
the treasures of heaven which we are to lay up for ourselves? Are
they any other than mental studies and performances? What are all the
gifts of the gospel, are they not all mental gifts? Is God a spirit
who must be worshipped in spirit and truth? Are not the gifts of the
spirit everything to man? O ye religious! discountenance every one
among you who shall pretend to despise art and science. I call upon you
in the name of Jesus! What is the life of man but art and science? Is
it meat and drink? Is not the body more than raiment? What is mortality
but the things relating to the body which dies? What is immortality
but the things relating to the spirit which lives immortally? What is
the joy of Heaven but improvement in the things of the spirit? What
are the pains of Hell but ignorance, idleness, bodily lust, and the
devastation of the things of the spirit? Answer this for yourselves,
and expel from amongst you those who pretend to despise the labours
of art and science, which alone are the labours of the gospel. Is not
this plain and manifest to the thought? Can you think at all, and not
pronounce heartily that to labour in knowledge is to build Jerusalem,
and to despise knowledge is to despise Jerusalem and her builders? And
remember, he who despises and mocks a mental gift in another, calling
it pride, and selfishness, and sin, mocks Jesus, the giver of every
mental gift, which always appear to the ignorance-loving hypocrites
as sins. But that which is sin in the sight of cruel man is not sin
in the sight of our kind God. Let every Christian as much as in him
lies engage himself openly and publicly before all the world in some
mental pursuit for the building of Jerusalem. ' I have given the whole
of this long passage because, though the very keystone of his thought,
it is little known, being sunk, like nearly all of his most profound
thoughts, in the mysterious prophetic books. Obscure about much else,
they are always lucid on this one point, and return to it again and
again. 'I care not whether a man is good or bad,' are the words they
put into the mouth of God, 'all I care is whether he is a wise man or
a fool. Go put off holiness and put on intellect. ' This cultivated
life, which seems to us so artificial a thing, is really, according to
them, the laborious re-discovery of the golden age, of the primeval
simplicity, of the simple world in which Christ taught and lived, and
its lawlessness is the lawlessness of Him 'who being all virtue, acted
from impulse and not from rules,'

And his seventy disciples sent
Against religion and government.

The historical Christ was indeed no more than the supreme symbol of
the artistic imagination, in which, with every passion wrought to
perfect beauty by art and poetry, we shall live, when the body has
passed away for the last time; but before that hour man must labour
through many lives and many deaths. 'Men are admitted into heaven not
because they have curbed and governed their passions, but because
they have cultivated their understandings. The treasures of heaven
are not negations of passion but realities of intellect from which
the passions emanate uncurbed in their eternal glory. The fool shall
not enter into heaven, let him be ever so holy. Holiness is not the
price of entering into heaven. Those who are cast out are all those
who, having no passions of their own, because no intellect, have
spent their lives in curbing and governing other people's lives by
the various arts of poverty and cruelty of all kinds. The modern
Church crucifies Christ with the head downwards. Woe, woe, woe to you
hypocrites. ' After a time man has 'to return to the dark valley whence
he came and begin his labours anew,' but before that return he dwells
in the freedom of imagination, in the peace of the 'divine image,'
'the divine vision,' in the peace that passes understanding and is
the peace of art. 'I have been very near the gates of death,' Blake
wrote in his last letter, 'and have returned very weak and an old man,
feeble and tottering but not in spirit and life, not in the real man,
the imagination which liveth for ever. In that I grow stronger and
stronger as this foolish body decays. . . . Flaxman is gone, and we must
all soon follow, every one to his eternal home, leaving the delusions
of goddess Nature and her laws, to get into freedom from all the laws
of the numbers,' the multiplicity of nature, 'into the mind in which
every one is king and priest in his own house. ' The phrase about the
king and priest is a memory of the crown and mitre set upon Dante's
head before he entered Paradise. Our imaginations are but fragments of
the universal imagination, portions of the universal body of God, and
as we enlarge our imagination by imaginative sympathy, and transform
with the beauty and peace of art, the sorrows and joys of the world, we
put off the limited mortal man more and more and put on the unlimited
'immortal man. ' 'As the seed waits eagerly watching for its flower
and fruit, anxious its little soul looks out into the clear expanse
to see if hungry winds are abroad with their invisible array, so man
looks out in tree, and herb, and fish, and bird, and beast, collecting
up the fragments of his immortal body into the elemental forms of
everything that grows. . . . In pain he sighs, in pain he labours in his
universe, sorrowing in birds over the deep, or howling in the wolf
over the slain, and moaning in the cattle, and in the winds. ' Mere
sympathy for living things is not enough, because we must learn to
separate their 'infected' from their eternal, their satanic from their
divine part; and this can only be done by desiring always beauty, the
one mask through which can be seen the unveiled eyes of eternity. We
must then be artists in all things, and understand that love and old
age and death are first among the arts. In this sense he insists that
'Christ's apostles were artists,' that 'Christianity is Art,' and
that 'the whole business of man is the arts. ' Dante, who deified law,
selected its antagonist, passion, as the most important of sins, and
made the regions where it was punished the largest. Blake, who deified
imaginative freedom, held 'corporeal reason' for the most accursed of
things, because it makes the imagination revolt from the sovereignty
of beauty and pass under the sovereignty of corporeal law, and this
is 'the captivity in Egypt. ' True art is expressive and symbolic,
and makes every form, every sound, every colour, every gesture, a
signature of some unanalyzable imaginative essence. False art is not
expressive, but mimetic, not from experience but from observation, and
is the mother of all evil, persuading us to save our bodies alive at no
matter what cost of rapine and fraud. True art is the flame of the last
day, which begins for every man, when he is first moved by beauty, and
which seeks to burn all things until they become 'infinite and holy. '


III. THE ILLUSTRATIONS OF DANTE.

The late Mr. John Addington Symonds wrote--in a preface to certain
Dante illustrations by Stradanus, a sixteenth-century artist of no
great excellence, published in phototype by Mr. Unwin in 1892--that
the illustrations of Gustave Dore, 'in spite of glaring artistic
defects, must, I think, be reckoned first among numerous attempts to
translate Dante's conceptions into terms of plastic art. ' One can only
account for this praise of a noisy and demagogic art by supposing
that a temperament, strong enough to explore with unfailing alertness
the countless schools and influences of the Renaissance in Italy, is
of necessity a little lacking in delicacy of judgment and in the
finer substances of emotion. It is more difficult to account for so
admirable a scholar not only preferring these illustrations to the work
of what he called 'the graceful and affected Botticelli,'--although
'Dore was fitted for his task, not by dramatic vigour, by feeling for
beauty, or by anything sterling in sympathy with the supreme poet's
soul, but by a very effective sense of luminosity and gloom'--but
preferring them because 'he created a fanciful world, which makes the
movement of Dante's _dramatis personae_ conceivable, introducing the
ordinary intelligence into those vast regions thronged with destinies
of souls and creeds and empires. ' When the ordinary student finds
this intelligence in an illustrator, he thinks, because it is his
own intelligence, that it is an accurate interpretation of the text,
while work of the extraordinary intelligences is merely an expression
of their own ideas and feelings. Dore and Stradanus, he will tell
you, have given us something of the world of Dante, but Blake and
Botticelli have builded worlds of their own and called them Dante's--as
if Dante's world were more than a mass of symbols of colour and form
and sound which put on humanity, when they arouse some mind to an
intense and romantic life that is not theirs; as if it was not one's
own sorrows and angers and regrets and terrors and hopes that awaken to
condemnation or repentance while Dante treads his eternal pilgrimage;
as if any poet or painter or musician could be other than an enchanter
calling with a persuasive or compelling ritual, creatures, noble or
ignoble, divine or daemonic, covered with scales or in shining raiment,
that he never imagined, out of the bottomless deeps of imaginations he
never foresaw; as if the noblest achievement of art was not when the
artist enfolds himself in darkness, while he casts over his readers a
light as of a wild and terrible dawn.

Let us therefore put away the designs to _The Divine Comedy_, in which
there is 'an ordinary intelligence,' and consider only the designs
in which the magical ritual has called up extraordinary shapes, the
magical light glimmered upon a world, different from the Dantesque
world of our own intelligence in its ordinary and daily moods, upon
a difficult and distinguished world. Most of the series of designs
to Dante, and there are a good number, need not busy any one for a
moment. Genelli has done a copious series, which is very able in
the 'formal' 'generalized' way which Blake hated, and which is
spiritually ridiculous. Penelli has transformed the 'Inferno' into a
vulgar Walpurgis night, and a certain Schuler, whom I do not find in
the biographical dictionaries, but who was apparently a German, has
prefaced certain flaccid designs with some excellent charts, while
Stradanus has made a series for the 'Inferno,' which has so many of
the more material and unessential powers of art, and is so extremely
undistinguished in conception, that one supposes him to have touched
in the sixteenth century the same public Dore has touched in the
nineteenth.

Though with many doubts, I am tempted to value Flaxman's designs to the
'Inferno,' the 'Purgatorio,' and the 'Paradiso,' only a little above
the best of these, because he does not seem to have ever been really
moved by Dante, and so to have sunk into a formal manner, which is a
reflection of the vital manner of his Homer and Hesiod. His designs to
_The Divine Comedy_ will be laid, one imagines, with some ceremony in
that immortal wastepaper-basket in which Time carries with many sighs
the failures of great men. I am perhaps wrong, however, because Flaxman
even at his best has not yet touched me very deeply, and I hardly ever
hope to escape this limitation of my ruling stars. That Signorelli
does not seem greatly more interesting except here and there, as in the
drawing of 'The Angel,' full of innocence and energy, coming from the
boat which has carried so many souls to the foot of the mountain of
purgation, can only be because one knows him through poor reproductions
from frescoes half mouldered away with damp. A little-known series,
drawn by Adolph Sturler, an artist of German extraction, who was
settled in Florence in the first half of this century, are very
poor in drawing, very pathetic and powerful in invention, and full
of most interesting pre-Raphaelitic detail. There are admirable and
moving figures, who, having set love above reason, listen in the
last abandonment of despair to the judgment of Minos, or walk with a
poignant melancholy to the foot of his throne through a land where owls
and strange beasts move hither and thither with the sterile content of
the evil that neither loves nor hates, and a Cerberus full of patient
cruelty. All Sturler's designs have, however, the languor of a mind
that does its work by a succession of delicate critical perceptions
rather than the decision and energy of true creation, and are more a
curious contribution to artistic methods than an imaginative force.

The only designs that compete with Blake's are those of Botticelli and
Giulio Clovio, and these contrast rather than compete; for Blake did
not live to carry his 'Paradiso' beyond the first faint pencillings,
the first thin washes of colour, while Botticelli only, as I think,
became supremely imaginative in his 'Paradiso,' and Clovio never
attempted the 'Inferno' and 'Purgatorio' at all. The imaginations of
Botticelli and Clovio were overshadowed by the cloister, and it was
only when they passed beyond the world or into some noble peace, which
is not the world's peace, that they won a perfect freedom. Blake had
not such mastery over figure and drapery as had Botticelli, but he
could sympathize with the persons and delight in the scenery of the
'Inferno' and the 'Purgatorio' as Botticelli could not, and could
fill them with a mysterious and spiritual significance born perhaps
of mystical pantheism. The flames of Botticelli give one no emotion,
and his car of Beatrice is no symbolic chariot of the Church led by
the gryphon, half eagle, half lion, of Christ's dual nature, but is
a fragment of some mediaeval pageant pictured with a merely technical
inspiration. Clovio, the illuminator of missals, has tried to create
with that too easy hand of his a Paradise of serene air reflected in a
little mirror, a heaven of sociability and humility and prettiness,
a heaven of women and of monks; but one cannot imagine him deeply
moved, as the modern world is moved, by the symbolism of bird and
beast, of tree and mountain, of flame and darkness. It was a profound
understanding of all creatures and things, a profound sympathy with
passionate and lost souls, made possible in their extreme intensity
by his revolt against corporeal law, and corporeal reason, which made
Blake the one perfectly fit illustrator for the 'Inferno' and the
'Purgatorio'; in the serene and rapturous emptiness of Dante's Paradise
he would find no symbols but a few abstract emblems, and he had no love
for the abstract, while with the drapery and the gestures of Beatrice
and Virgil, he would have prospered less than Botticelli or even Clovio.

1897.




SYMBOLISM IN PAINTING


IN England, which has made great Symbolic Art, most people dislike
an art if they are told it is symbolic, for they confuse symbol and
allegory. Even Johnson's Dictionary sees no great difference, for it
calls a Symbol 'That which comprehends in its figure a representation
of something else'; and an Allegory, 'A figurative discourse, in which
something other is intended than is contained in the words literally
taken. ' It is only a very modern Dictionary that calls a Symbol 'the
sign or representation of any moral thing by the images or properties
of natural things,' which, though an imperfect definition, is not
unlike 'The things below are as the things above' of the Emerald Tablet
of Hermes! _The Faerie Queene_ and _The Pilgrim's Progress_ have been
so important in England that Allegory has overtopped Symbolism, and
for a time has overwhelmed it in its own downfall. William Blake was
perhaps the first modern to insist on a difference; and the other
day, when I sat for my portrait to a German Symbolist in Paris, whose
talk was all of his love for Symbolism and his hatred for Allegory,
his definitions were the same as William Blake's, of whom he knew
nothing. William Blake has written, 'Vision or imagination'--meaning
symbolism by these words--'is a representation of what actually exists,
really or unchangeably. Fable or Allegory is formed by the daughters
of Memory. ' The German insisted with many determined gestures, that
Symbolism said things which could not be said so perfectly in any other
way, and needed but a right instinct for its understanding; while
Allegory said things which could be said as well, or better, in another
way, and needed a right knowledge for its understanding. The one gave
dumb things voices, and bodiless things bodies; while the other read
a meaning--which had never lacked its voice or its body--into something
heard or seen, and loved less for the meaning than for its own sake.
The only symbols he cared for were the shapes and motions of the body;
ears hidden by the hair, to make one think of a mind busy with inner
voices; and a head so bent that back and neck made the one curve, as in
Blake's 'Vision of Bloodthirstiness,' to call up an emotion of bodily
strength; and he would not put even a lily, or a rose, or a poppy into
a picture to express purity, or love, or sleep, because he thought
such emblems were allegorical, and had their meaning by a traditional
and not by a natural right. I said that the rose, and the lily, and
the poppy were so married, by their colour and their odour, and their
use, to love and purity and sleep, or to other symbols of love and
purity and sleep, and had been so long a part of the imagination of the
world, that a symbolist might use them to help out his meaning without
becoming an allegorist. I think I quoted the lily in the hand of the
angel in Rossetti's 'Annunciation,' and the lily in the jar in his
'Childhood of Mary Virgin,' and thought they made the more important
symbols, the women's bodies, and the angels' bodies, and the clear
morning light, take that place, in the great procession of Christian
symbols, where they can alone have all their meaning and all their
beauty.

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

All Art that is not mere story-telling, or mere portraiture, is
symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which
mediaeval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade
their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it
entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.
A person or a landscape that is a part of a story or a portrait, evokes
but so much emotion as the story or the portrait can permit without
loosening the bonds that make it a story or a portrait; but if you
liberate a person or a landscape from the bonds of motives and their
actions, causes and their effects, and from all bonds but the bonds
of your love, it will change under your eyes, and become a symbol
of an infinite emotion, a perfected emotion, a part of the Divine
Essence; for we love nothing but the perfect, and our dreams make all
things perfect, that we may love them. Religious and visionary people,
monks and nuns, and medicine-men and opium-eaters, see symbols in
their trances; for religious and visionary thought is thought about
perfection and the way to perfection; and symbols are the only things
free enough from all bonds to speak of perfection.

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

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

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

1898.




THE SYMBOLISM OF POETRY


I

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

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


II

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

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

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

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

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

or these lines by Nash--

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

or these lines by Shakespeare--

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

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

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

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


III

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


IV

Besides emotional symbols, symbols that evoke emotions alone,--and in
this sense all alluring or hateful things are symbols, although their
relations with one another are too subtle to delight us fully, away
from rhythm and pattern,--there are intellectual symbols, symbols that
evoke ideas alone, or ideas mingled with emotions; and outside the
very definite traditions of mysticism and the less definite criticism
of certain modern poets, these alone are called symbols. Most things
belong to one or another kind, according to the way we speak of them
and the companions we give them, for symbols, associated with ideas
that are more than fragments of the shadows thrown upon the intellect
by the emotions they evoke, are the playthings of the allegorist or
the pedant, and soon pass away. If I say 'white' or 'purple' in an
ordinary line of poetry, they evoke emotions so exclusively that I
cannot say why they move me; but if I say them in the same mood, in
the same breath with such obvious intellectual symbols as a cross or a
crown of thorns, I think of purity and sovereignty; while innumerable
other meanings, which are held to one another by the bondage of subtle
suggestion, and alike in the emotions and in the intellect, move
visibly through my mind, and move invisibly beyond the threshold of
sleep, casting lights and shadows of an indefinable wisdom on what
had seemed before, it may be, but sterility and noisy violence. It
is the intellect that decides where the reader shall ponder over the
procession of the symbols, and if the symbols are merely emotional,
he gazes from amid the accidents and destinies of the world; but if
the symbols are intellectual too, he becomes himself a part of pure
intellect, and he is himself mingled with the procession. If I watch
a rushy pool in the moonlight, my emotion at its beauty is mixed with
memories of the man that I have seen ploughing by its margin, or of the
lovers I saw there a night ago; but if I look at the moon herself and
remember any of her ancient names and meanings, I move among divine
people, and things that have shaken off our mortality, the tower of
ivory, the queen of waters, the shining stag among enchanted woods, the
white hare sitting upon the hilltop, the fool of faery with his shining
cup full of dreams, and it may be 'make a friend of one of these images
of wonder,' and 'meet the Lord in the air. ' So, too, if one is moved by
Shakespeare, who is content with emotional symbols that he may come
the nearer to our sympathy, one is mixed with the whole spectacle of
the world; while if one is moved by Dante, or by the myth of Demeter,
one is mixed into the shadow of God or of a goddess. So too one is
furthest from symbols when one is busy doing this or that, but the soul
moves among symbols and unfolds in symbols when trance, or madness, or
deep meditation has withdrawn it from every impulse but its own. 'I
then saw,' wrote Gerard de Nerval of his madness, 'vaguely drifting
into form, plastic images of antiquity, which outlined themselves,
became definite, and seemed to represent symbols of which I only seized
the idea with difficulty. ' In an earlier time he would have been of
that multitude, whose souls austerity withdrew, even more perfectly
than madness could withdraw his soul, from hope and memory, from desire
and regret, that they might reveal those processions of symbols that
men bow to before altars, and woo with incense and offerings. But being
of our time, he has been like Maeterlinck, like Villiers de L'Isle Adam
in _Axel_, like all who are preoccupied with intellectual symbols in
our time, a foreshadower of the new sacred book, of which all the arts,
as somebody has said, are begging to dream, and because, as I think,
they cannot overcome the slow dying of men's hearts that we call the
progress of the world, and lay their hands upon men's heart-strings
again, without becoming the garment of religion as in old times.


V

If people were to accept the theory that poetry moves us because of its
symbolism, what change should one look for in the manner of our poetry?
A return to the way of our fathers, a casting out of descriptions of
nature for the sake of nature, of the moral law for the sake of the
moral law, a casting out of all anecdotes and of that brooding over
scientific opinion that so often extinguished the central flame in
Tennyson, and of that vehemence that would make us do or not do certain
things; or, in other words, we should come to understand that the beryl
stone was enchanted by our fathers that it might unfold the pictures
in its heart, and not to mirror our own excited faces, or the boughs
waving outside the window. With this change of substance, this return
to imagination, this understanding that the laws of art, which are
the hidden laws of the world, can alone bind the imagination, would
come a change of style, and we would cast out of serious poetry those
energetic rhythms, as of a man running, which are the invention of
the will with its eyes always on something to be done or undone; and
we would seek out those wavering, meditative, organic rhythms, which
are the embodiment of the imagination, that neither desires nor hates,
because it has done with time, and only wishes to gaze upon some
reality, some beauty; nor would it be any longer possible for anybody
to deny the importance of form, in all its kinds, for although you can
expound an opinion, or describe a thing when your words are not quite
well chosen, you cannot give a body to something that moves beyond
the senses, unless your words are as subtle, as complex, as full of
mysterious life, as the body of a flower or of a woman. The form of
sincere poetry, unlike the form of the popular poetry, may indeed be
sometimes obscure, or ungrammatical as in some of the best of the Songs
of Innocence and Experience, but it must have the perfections that
escape analysis, the subtleties that have a new meaning every day, and
it must have all this whether it be but a little song made out of a
moment of dreamy indolence, or some great epic made out of the dreams
of one poet and of a hundred generations whose hands were never weary
of the sword.

1900.




THE THEATRE


I

I REMEMBER, some years ago, advising a distinguished, though too little
recognised, writer of poetical plays to write a play as unlike ordinary
plays as possible, that it might be judged with a fresh mind, and to
put it on the stage in some small suburban theatre, where a small
audience would pay its expenses. I said that he should follow it the
year after, at the same time of the year, with another play, and so
on from year to year; and that the people who read books, and do not
go to the theatre, would gradually find out about him. I suggested
that he should begin with a pastoral play, because nobody would expect
from a pastoral play the succession of nervous tremours which the
plays of commerce, like the novels of commerce, have substituted for
the purification that comes with pity and terror to the imagination
and intellect. He followed my advice in part, and had a small but
perfect success, filling his small theatre for twice the number of
performances he had announced; but instead of being content with the
praise of his equals, and waiting to win their praise another year,
he hired immediately a big London theatre, and put his pastoral play
and a new play before a meagre and unintelligent audience. I still
remember his pastoral play with delight, because, if not always of a
high excellence, it was always poetical; but I remember it at the small
theatre, where my pleasure was magnified by the pleasure of those about
me, and not at the big theatre, where it made me uncomfortable, as an
unwelcome guest always makes one uncomfortable.

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

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

Blake has said that all Art is a labour to bring again the Golden Age,
and all culture is certainly a labour to bring again the simplicity
of the first ages, with knowledge of good and evil added to it. The
drama has need of cities that it may find men in sufficient numbers,
and cities destroy the emotions to which it appeals, and therefore
the days of the drama are brief and come but seldom. It has one day
when the emotions of cities still remember the emotions of sailors and
husbandmen and shepherds and users of the spear and the bow; as the
houses and furniture and earthern vessels of cities, before the coming
of machinery, remember the rocks and the woods and the hillside;
and it has another day, now beginning, when thought and scholarship
discover their desire.