No More Learning

The
same image was in his mind too when he wrote

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

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

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

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

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