No More Learning

"' He
goes on to argue that the cave was a temple before Homer wrote, and
that 'the ancients did not establish temples without fabulous symbols,'
and then begins to interpret Homer's description in all its detail.
The ancients, he says, 'consecrated a cave to the world' and held 'the
flowing waters' and the 'obscurity of the cavern' 'apt symbols of what
the world contains,' and he calls to witness Zoroaster's cave with
fountains; and often caves are, he says, symbols of 'all invisible
power; because as caves are obscure and dark, so the essence of all
these powers is occult,' and quotes a lost hymn to Apollo to prove
that nymphs living in caves fed men 'from intellectual fountains';
and he contends that fountains and rivers symbolize generation, and
that the word nymph 'is commonly applied to all souls descending into
generation,' and that the two gates of Homer's cave are the gate of
generation and the gate of ascent through death to the gods, the gate
of cold and moisture, and the gate of heat and fire. Cold, he says,
causes life in the world, and heat causes life among the gods, and the
constellation of the Cup is set in the heavens near the sign Cancer,
because it is there that the souls descending from the Milky Way
receive their draught of the intoxicating cold drink of generation.
'The mixing bowls and jars of stone' are consecrated to the Naiads,
and are also, as it seems, symbolical of Bacchus, and are of stone
because of the rocky beds of the rivers. And 'the looms of stone' are
the symbols of the 'souls that descend into generation. ' 'For the
formation of the flesh is on or about the bones, which in the bodies
of animals resemble stones,' and also because 'the body is a garment'
not only about the soul, but about all essences that become visible,
for 'the heavens are called by the ancients a veil, in consequence of
being as it were the vestments of the celestial gods. ' The bees hive
in the mixing bowls and jars of stone, for so Porphyry understands
the passage, because honey was the symbol adopted by the ancients for
'pleasure arising from generation. ' The ancients, he says, called souls
not only Naiads but bees, 'as the efficient cause of sweetness'; but
not all souls 'proceeding into generation' are called bees, 'but those
who will live in it justly and who after having performed such things
as are acceptable to the gods will again return (to their kindred
stars). For this insect loves to return to the place from whence it
came and is eminently just and sober. ' I find all these details in the
cave of the Witch of Atlas, the most elaborately described of Shelley's
caves, except the two gates, and these have a far-off echo in her
summer journeys on her cavern river and in her winter sleep in 'an
inextinguishable well of crimson fire. ' We have for the mixing bowls,
and jars of stone full of honey, those delights of the senses, 'sounds
of air' 'folded in cells of crystal silences,' 'liquors clear and
sweet' 'in crystal vials,' and for the bees, visions 'each in his thin
sheath like a chrysalis,' and for 'the looms of stone' and 'raiment
of purple stain' the Witch's spinning and embroidering; and the Witch
herself is a Naiad, and was born from one of the Atlantides, who lay
in 'a chamber of grey rock' until she was changed by the sun's embrace
into a cloud.

When one turns to Shelley for an explanation of the cave and fountain
one finds how close his thought was to Porphyry's. He looked upon
thought as a condition of life in generation and believed that the
reality beyond was something other than thought. He wrote in his
fragment 'On Life,' 'That the basis of all things cannot be, as the
popular philosophy alleges, mind, is sufficiently evident. Mind, as
far as we have any experience of its properties, and beyond that
experience how vain is argument, cannot create, it can only perceive;'
and in another passage he defines mind as existence.
Water is his great
symbol of existence, and he continually meditates over its mysterious
source. In his prose he tells how 'thought can with difficulty visit
the intricate and winding chambers which it inhabits. It is like a
river, whose rapid and perpetual stream flows outward. . . . The caverns
of the mind are obscure and shadowy; or pervaded with a lustre,
beautiful and bright indeed, but shining not beyond their portals. '
When the Witch has passed in her boat from the caverned river, that is
doubtless her own destiny, she passes along the Nile 'by Moeris and
the Mareotid lakes,' and sees all human life shadowed upon its waters
in shadows that 'never are erased but tremble ever'; and in many a
dark and subterranean street under the Nile--new caverns--and along the
bank of the Nile; and as she bends over the unhappy, she compares
unhappiness to the 'strife that stirs the liquid surface of man's
life'; and because she can see the reality of things she is described
as journeying 'in the calm depths' of 'the wide lake' we journey over
unpiloted. Alastor calls the river that he follows an image of his
mind, and thinks that it will be as hard to say where his thought will
be when he is dead as where its waters will be in ocean or cloud in a
little while. In _Mont Blanc_, a poem so overladen with descriptions
in parentheses that one loses sight of its logic, Shelley compares
the flowing through our mind of 'the universe of things,' which are,
he has explained elsewhere, but thoughts, to the flowing of the Arne
through the ravine, and compares the unknown sources of our thoughts
in some 'remoter world' whose 'gleams' 'visit the soul in sleep,' to
Arne's sources among the glaciers on the mountain heights. Cythna in
the passage where she speaks of making signs 'a subtle language within
language' on the sand by the 'fountain' of sea water in the cave where
she is imprisoned, speaks of the 'cave' of her mind which gave its
secrets to her, and of 'one mind the type of all' which is a 'moveless
wave' reflecting 'all moveless things that are;' and then passing more
completely under the power of the symbol, she speaks of growing wise
through contemplation of the images that rise out of the fountain at
the call of her will. Again and again one finds some passing allusion
to the cave of man's mind, or to the caves of his youth, or to the
cave of mysteries we enter at death, for to Shelley as to Porphyry it
is more than an image of life in the world. It may mean any enclosed
life, as when it is the dwelling-place of Asia and Prometheus, or when
it is 'the still cave of poetry,' and it may have all meanings at once,
or it may have as little meaning as some ancient religious symbol
enwoven from the habit of centuries with the patterns of a carpet or a
tapestry.

As Shelley sailed along those great rivers and saw or imagined the cave
that associated itself with rivers in his mind, he saw half-ruined
towers upon the hilltops, and once at any rate a tower is used to
symbolize a meaning that is the contrary to the meaning symbolized by
caves. Cythna's lover is brought through the cave where there is a
polluted fountain to a high tower, for being man's far-seeing mind,
when the world has cast him out he must to the 'towers of thought's
crowned powers'; nor is it possible for Shelley to have forgotten
this first imprisonment when he made men imprison Lionel in a tower
for a like offence; and because I know how hard it is to forget a
symbolical meaning, once one has found it, I believe Shelley had more
than a romantic scene in his mind when he made Prince Athanase follow
his mysterious studies in a lighted tower above the sea, and when he
made the old hermit watch over Laon in his sickness in a half-ruined
tower, wherein the sea, here doubtless as to Cythna, 'the one mind,'
threw 'spangled sands' and 'rarest sea shells. ' The tower, important
in Maeterlinck, as in Shelley, is, like the sea, and rivers, and caves
with fountains, a very ancient symbol, and would perhaps, as years went
by, have grown more important in his poetry.