No More Learning

It is only by ancient symbols, by
symbols that have numberless meanings beside the one or two the writer
lays an emphasis upon, or the half-score he knows of, that any highly
subjective art can escape from the barrenness and shallowness of a too
conscious arrangement, into the abundance and depth of nature. The poet
of essences and pure ideas must seek in the half-lights that glimmer
from symbol to symbol as if to the ends of the earth, all that the
epic and dramatic poet finds of mystery and shadow in the accidental
circumstance of life.

The most important, the most precise of all Shelley's symbols, the one
he uses with the fullest knowledge of its meaning, is the Morning and
Evening Star. It rises and sets for ever over the towers and rivers,
and is the throne of his genius. Personified as a woman it leads
Rousseau, the typical poet of _The Triumph of Life_, under the power
of the destroying hunger of life, under the power of the sun that
we shall find presently as a symbol of life, and it is the Morning
Star that wars against the principle of evil in _Laon and Cythna_,
at first as a star with a red comet, here a symbol of all evil as
it is of disorder in _Epipsychidion_, and then as a serpent with an
eagle--symbols in Blake too and in the Alchemists; and it is the Morning
Star that appears as a winged youth to a woman, who typifies humanity
amid its sorrows, in the first canto of _Laon and Cythna_; and it is
invoked by the wailing women of _Hellas_, who call it 'lamp of the
free' and 'beacon of love' and would go where it hides flying from the
deepening night among those 'kingless continents sinless as Eden,' and
'mountains and islands' 'prankt on the sapphire sea' that are but the
opposing hemispheres to the senses but, as I think, the ideal world,
the world of the dead, to the imagination; and in the _Ode to Liberty_,
Liberty is bid lead wisdom out of the inmost cave of man's mind as
the Morning Star leads the sun out of the waves. We know too that had
_Prince Athanase_ been finished it would have described the finding of
Pandemus, the stars' lower genius, and the growing weary of her, and
the coming to its true genius Urania at the coming of death, as the
day finds the Star at evening. There is hardly indeed a poem of any
length in which one does not find it as a symbol of love, or liberty,
or wisdom, or beauty, or of some other expression of that Intellectual
Beauty, which was to Shelley's mind the central power of the world; and
to its faint and fleeting light he offers up all desires, that are as

'The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow. '

When its genius comes to Rousseau, shedding dew with one hand, and
treading out the stars with her feet, for she is also the genius of the
dawn, she brings him a cup full of oblivion and love. He drinks and his
mind becomes like sand 'on desert Labrador' marked by the feet of deer
and a wolf. And then the new vision, life, the cold light of day moves
before him, and the first vision becomes an invisible presence. 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.