No More Learning

Bridges, a more
considerable poet, elaborated a rhythm too delicate for any but an
almost bodiless emotion, and repeated over and over the most ancient
notes of poetry, and none but these. The poets who followed have
either, like Mr. Kipling, turned from serious poetry altogether, and
so passed out of the processional order, or speak out of some personal
or spiritual passion in words and types and metaphors that draw one's
imagination as far as possible from the complexities of modern life and
thought. The change has been more marked in English painting, which,
when intense enough to belong to the procession order, began to cast
out things, as they are seen by minds plunged in the labour of life, so
much before French painting that ideal art is sometimes called English
art upon the Continent.

I see, indeed, in the arts of every country those faint lights and
faint colours and faint outlines and faint energies which many call
'the decadence,' and which I, because I believe that the arts lie
dreaming of things to come, prefer to call the autumn of the body.
An Irish poet whose rhythms are like the cry of a sea-bird in autumn
twilight has told its meaning in the line, 'The very sunlight's weary,
and it's time to quit the plough. ' Its importance is the greater
because it comes to us at the moment when we are beginning to be
interested in many things which positive science, the interpreter
of exterior law, has always denied: communion of mind with mind in
thought and without words, foreknowledge in dreams and in visions, and
the coming among us of the dead, and of much else. We are, it may be,
at a crowning crisis of the world, at the moment when man is about
to ascend, with the wealth, he has been so long gathering, upon his
shoulders, the stairway he has been descending from the first days.
The first poets, if one may find their images in the _Kalevala_, had
not Homer's preoccupation with things, and he was not so full of their
excitement as Virgil. Dante added to poetry a dialectic which, although
he made it serve his laborious ecstasy, was the invention of minds
trained by the labour of life, by a traffic among many things, and
not a spontaneous expression of an interior life; while Shakespeare
shattered the symmetry of verse and of drama that he might fill them
with things and their accidental relations to one another.

Each of these writers had come further down the stairway than those
who had lived before him, but it was only with the modern poets, with
Goethe and Wordsworth and Browning, that poetry gave up the right to
consider all things in the world as a dictionary of types and symbols
and began to call itself a critic of life and an interpreter of things
as they are. Painting, music, science, politics, and even religion,
because they have felt a growing belief that we know nothing but the
fading and flowering of the world, have changed in numberless elaborate
ways. Man has wooed and won the world, and has fallen weary, and not,
I think, for a time, but with a weariness that will not end until the
last autumn, when the stars shall be blown away like withered leaves.
He grew weary when he said, 'These things that I touch and see and hear
are alone real,' for he saw them without illusion at last, and found
them but air and dust and moisture. And now he must be philosophical
above everything, even about the arts, for he can only return the way
he came, and so escape from weariness, by philosophy.
The arts are,
I believe, about to take upon their shoulders the burdens that have
fallen from the shoulders of priests, and to lead us back upon our
journey by filling our thoughts with the essences of things, and not
with things. We are about to substitute once more the distillation of
alchemy for the analyses of chemistry and for some other sciences; and
certain of us are looking everywhere for the perfect alembic that no
silver or golden drop may escape. Mr. Symons has written lately on M.
Mallarme's method, and has quoted him as saying that we should 'abolish
the pretension, aesthetically an error, despite its dominion over
almost all the masterpieces, to enclose within the subtle pages other
than--for example--the horror of the forest or the silent thunder in the
leaves, not the intense dense wood of the trees,' and as desiring to
substitute for 'the old lyric afflatus or the enthusiastic personal
direction of the phrase' words 'that take light from mutual reflection,
like an actual trail of fire over precious stones,' and 'to make an
entire word hitherto unknown to the language' 'out of many vocables. '
Mr. Symons understands these and other sentences to mean that poetry
will henceforth be a poetry of essences, separated one from another in
little and intense poems. I think there will be much poetry of this
kind, because of an ever more arduous search for an almost disembodied
ecstasy, but I think we will not cease to write long poems, but rather
that we will write them more and more as our new belief makes the world
plastic under our hands again. I think that we will learn again how to
describe at great length an old man wandering among enchanted islands,
his return home at last, his slow-gathering vengeance, a flitting shape
of a goddess, and a flight of arrows, and yet to make all of these
so different things 'take light by mutual reflection, like an actual
trail of fire over precious stones,' and become 'an entire word,' the
signature or symbol of a mood of the divine imagination as imponderable
as 'the horror of the forest or the silent thunder in the leaves. '

1898.




THE MOODS


LITERATURE differs from explanatory and scientific writing in being
wrought about a mood, or a community of moods, as the body is wrought
about an invisible soul; and if it uses argument, theory, erudition,
observation, and seems to grow hot in assertion or denial, it does so
merely to make us partakers at the banquet of the moods. It seems to me
that these moods are the labourers and messengers of the Ruler of All,
the gods of ancient days still dwelling on their secret Olympus, the
angels of more modern days ascending and descending upon their shining
ladder; and that argument, theory, erudition, observation, are merely
what Blake called 'little devils who fight for themselves,' illusions
of our visible passing life, who must be made serve the moods, or
we have no part in eternity. Everything that can be seen, touched,
measured, explained, understood, argued over, is to the imaginative
artist nothing more than a means, for he belongs to the invisible
life, and delivers its ever new and ever ancient revelation. We hear
much of his need for the restraints of reason, but the only restraint
he can obey is the mysterious instinct that has made him an artist,
and that teaches him to discover immortal moods in mortal desires,
an undecaying hope in our trivial ambitions, a divine love in sexual
passion.

1895.




THE BODY OF THE FATHER CHRISTIAN ROSENCRUX


THE followers of the Father Christian Rosencrux, says the old
tradition, wrapped his imperishable body in noble raiment and laid it
under the house of their order, in a tomb containing the symbols of all
things in heaven and earth, and in the waters under the earth, and set
about him inextinguishable magical lamps, which burnt on generation
after generation, until other students of the order came upon the
tomb by chance.