No More Learning

These are 'gleams of a remoter
world which visit us in sleep,' spiritual essences whose shadows are
the delights of all the senses, sounds 'folded in cells of crystal
silence,' 'visions swift and sweet and quaint,' which lie waiting their
moment 'each in his thin sheath like a chrysalis,' 'odours' among
'ever-blooming eden trees,' 'liquors' that can give 'happy sleep,' or
can make tears 'all wonder and delight'; 'the golden genii who spoke to
the poets of Greece in dreams'; 'the phantoms' which become the forms
of the arts when 'the mind, arising bright from the embrace of beauty,'
'casts on them the gathered rays which are reality'; 'the guardians'
who move in 'the atmosphere of human thought,' as 'the birds within the
wind, or the fish within the wave,' or man's thought itself through all
things; and who join the throng of the happy hours when Time is passing
away--

'As the flying fish leap
From the Indian deep,
And mix with the seabirds half asleep. '

It is these powers which lead Asia and Panthea, as they would lead all
the affections of humanity, by words written upon leaves, by faint
songs, by eddies of echoes that draw 'all spirits on that secret
way,' by the 'dying odours' of flowers and by 'the sunlight of the
sphered dew,' beyond the gates of birth and death to awake Demogorgon,
eternity, that 'the painted veil called life' may be 'torn aside. '

There are also ministers of ugliness and all evil, like those that came
to Prometheus--

'As from the rose which the pale priestess kneels
To gather for her festal crown of flowers,
The aerial crimson falls, flushing her cheek,
So from our victim's destined agony
The shade which is our form invests us round;
Else we are shapeless as our mother Night. '

Or like those whose shapes the poet sees in _The Triumph of Life_,
coming from the procession that follows the car of life, as 'hope'
changes to 'desire,' shadows 'numerous as the dead leaves blown in
autumn evening from a poplar tree'; and resembling those they come
from, until, if I understand an obscure phrase aright, they are
'wrapt' round 'all the busy phantoms that live there as the sun shapes
the clouds. ' Some to sit 'chattering like apes,' and some like 'old
anatomies' 'hatching their bare broods under the shade of daemons'
wings,' laughing 'to reassume the delegated powers' they had given to
the tyrants of the earth, and some 'like small gnats and flies' to
throng 'about the brow of lawyers, statesmen, priest and theorist,'
and some 'like discoloured shapes of snow' to fall 'on fairest bosoms
and the sunniest hair,' to be 'melted by the youthful glow which
they extinguish,' and many to 'fling shadows of shadows yet unlike
themselves,' shadows that are shaped into new forms by that 'creative
ray' in which all move like motes.

These ministers of beauty and ugliness were certainly more than
metaphors or picturesque phrases to one who believed the 'thoughts
which are called real or external objects' differed but in regularity
of recurrence from 'hallucinations, dreams, and the ideas of madness,'
and lessened this difference by telling how he had dreamed 'three
several times, between intervals of two or more years, the same precise
dream,' and who had seen images with the mind's eye that left his
nerves shaken for days together. Shadows that were as when there

'hovers
A flock of vampire bats before the glare
Of the tropic sun, bringing, ere evening,
Strange night upon some Indian isle,'

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

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


II. HIS RULING SYMBOLS

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

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

He may have seen some cave that was the bed of a rivulet by some river
side, or have followed some mountain stream to its source in a cave,
for from his return to England rivers and streams and wells, flowing
through caves or rising in them, came into every poem of his that
was of any length, and always with the precision of symbols. Alastor
passed in his boat along a river in a cave; and when for the last time
he felt the presence of the spirit he loved and followed, it was when
he watched his image in a silent well; and when he died it was where
a river fell into 'an abysmal chasm'; and the Witch of Atlas in her
gladness, as he in his sadness, passed in her boat along a river in a
cave, and it was where it bubbled out of a cave that she was born; and
when Rousseau, the typical poet of _The Triumph of Life_, awoke to the
vision that was life, it was where a rivulet bubbled out of a cave; and
the poet of _Epipsychidion_ met the evil beauty 'by a well under blue
nightshade bowers'; and Cythna bore her child imprisoned in a great
cave beside 'a fountain round and vast, in which the wave imprisoned
leaped and boiled perpetually'; and her lover Laon was brought to
his prison in a high column through a cave where there was 'a putrid
pool,' and when he went to see the conquered city he dismounted beside
a polluted fountain in the market-place, foreshadowing thereby that
spirit who at the end of _Prometheus Unbound_ gazes at a regenerated
city from 'within a fountain in the public square'; and when Laon and
Cythna are dead they awake beside a fountain and drift into Paradise
along a river; and at the end of things Prometheus and Asia are to live
amid a happy world in a cave where a fountain 'leaps with an awakening
sound'; and it was by a fountain, the meeting-place of certain unhappy
lovers, that Rosalind and Helen told their unhappiness to one another;
and it was under a willow by a fountain that the enchantress and her
lover began their unhappy love; while his lesser poems and his prose
fragments use caves and rivers and wells and fountains continually
as metaphors. It may be that his subconscious life seized upon some
passing scene, and moulded it into an ancient symbol without help from
anything but that great memory; but so good a Platonist as Shelley
could hardly have thought of any cave as a symbol, without thinking
of Plato's cave that was the world; and so good a scholar may well
have had Porphyry on 'the Cave of the Nymphs' in his mind.