No More Learning

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'?