No More Learning

--_Euripides. _




ROSA ALCHEMICA


I

IT is now more than ten years since I met, for the last time, Michael
Robartes, and for the first time and the last time his friends
and fellow students; and witnessed his and their tragic end, and
endured those strange experiences, which have changed me so that my
writings have grown less popular and less intelligible, and driven
me almost to the verge of taking the habit of St. Dominic. I had
just published _Rosa Alchemica_, a little work on the Alchemists,
somewhat in the manner of Sir Thomas Browne, and had received many
letters from believers in the arcane sciences, upbraiding what they
called my timidity, for they could not believe so evident sympathy
but the sympathy of the artist, which is half pity, for everything
which has moved men's hearts in any age. I had discovered, early in
my researches, that their doctrine was no merely chemical phantasy,
but a philosophy they applied to the world, to the elements and to
man himself; and that they sought to fashion gold out of common metals
merely as part of an universal transmutation of all things into some
divine and imperishable substance; and this enabled me to make my
little book a fanciful reverie over the transmutation of life into art,
and a cry of measureless desire for a world made wholly of essences.

I was sitting dreaming of what I had written, in my house in one of
the old parts of Dublin; a house my ancestors had made almost famous
through their part in the politics of the city and their friendships
with the famous men of their generations; and was feeling an unwonted
happiness at having at last accomplished a long-cherished design, and
made my rooms an expression of this favourite doctrine. The portraits,
of more historical than artistic interest, had gone; and tapestry, full
of the blue and bronze of peacocks, fell over the doors, and shut out
all history and activity untouched with beauty and peace; and now when
I looked at my Crevelli and pondered on the rose in the hand of the
Virgin, wherein the form was so delicate and precise that it seemed
more like a thought than a flower, or at the grey dawn and rapturous
faces of my Francesca, I knew all a Christian's ecstasy without his
slavery to rule and custom; when I pondered over the antique bronze
gods and goddesses, which I had mortgaged my house to buy, I had all a
pagan's delight in various beauty and without his terror at sleepless
destiny and his labour with many sacrifices; and I had only to go to
my bookshelf, where every book was bound in leather, stamped with
intricate ornament, and of a carefully chosen colour: Shakespeare
in the orange of the glory of the world, Dante in the dull red of
his anger, Milton in the blue grey of his formal calm; and I could
experience what I would of human passions without their bitterness and
without satiety. I had gathered about me all gods because I believed
in none, and experienced every pleasure because I gave myself to none,
but held myself apart, individual, indissoluble, a mirror of polished
steel: I looked in the triumph of this imagination at the birds of
Hera, glowing in the firelight as though they were wrought of jewels;
and to my mind, for which symbolism was a necessity, they seemed the
doorkeepers of my world, shutting out all that was not of as affluent
a beauty as their own; and for a moment I thought as I had thought
in so many other moments, that it was possible to rob life of every
bitterness except the bitterness of death; and then a thought which had
followed this thought, time after time, filled me with a passionate
sorrow. All those forms: that Madonna with her brooding purity, those
rapturous faces singing in the morning light, those bronze divinities
with their passionless dignity, those wild shapes rushing from despair
to despair, belonged to a divine world wherein I had no part; and every
experience, however profound, every perception, however exquisite,
would bring me the bitter dream of a limitless energy I could never
know, and even in my most perfect moment I would be two selves, the
one watching with heavy eyes the other's moment of content. I had
heaped about me the gold born in the crucibles of others; but the
supreme dream of the alchemist, the transmutation of the weary heart
into a weariless spirit, was as far from me as, I doubted not, it had
been from him also. I turned to my last purchase, a set of alchemical
apparatus which, the dealer in the Rue le Peletier had assured me,
once belonged to Raymond Lully, and as I joined the _alembic_ to the
_athanor_ and laid the _lavacrum maris_ at their side, I understood the
alchemical doctrine, that all beings, divided from the great deep where
spirits wander, one and yet a multitude, are weary; and sympathized,
in the pride of my connoisseurship, with the consuming thirst for
destruction which made the alchemist veil under his symbols of lions
and dragons, of eagles and ravens, of dew and of nitre, a search for an
essence which would dissolve all mortal things. I repeated to myself
the ninth key of Basilius Valentinus, in which he compares the fire
of the last day to the fire of the alchemist, and the world to the
alchemist's furnace, and would have us know that all must be dissolved
before the divine substance, material gold or immaterial ecstasy,
awake. I had dissolved indeed the mortal world and lived amid immortal
essences, but had obtained no miraculous ecstasy. As I thought of these
things, I drew aside the curtains and looked out into the darkness, and
it seemed to my troubled fancy that all those little points of light
filling the sky were the furnaces of innumerable divine alchemists, who
labour continually, turning lead into gold, weariness into ecstasy,
bodies into souls, the darkness into God; and at their perfect labour
my mortality grew heavy, and I cried out, as so many dreamers and men
of letters in our age have cried, for the birth of that elaborate
spiritual beauty which could alone uplift souls weighted with so many
dreams.


II

My reverie was broken by a loud knocking at the door, and I wondered
the more at this because I had no visitors, and had bid my servants
do all things silently, lest they broke the dream of my inner life.
Feeling a little curious, I resolved to go to the door myself, and,
taking one of the silver candlesticks from the mantlepiece, began to
descend the stairs. The servants appeared to be out, for though the
sound poured through every corner and crevice of the house there was
no stir in the lower rooms. I remembered that because my needs were so
few, my part in life so little, they had begun to come and go as they
would, often leaving me alone for hours. The emptiness and silence
of a world from which I had driven everything but dreams suddenly
overwhelmed me, and I shuddered as I drew the bolt. I found before me
Michael Robartes, whom I had not seen for years, and whose wild red
hair, fierce eyes, sensitive, tremulous lips and rough clothes made
him look now, just as they used to do fifteen years before, something
between a debauchee, a saint, and a peasant. He had recently come to
Ireland, he said, and wished to see me on a matter of importance;
indeed, the only matter of importance for him and for me. His voice
brought up before me our student years in Paris, and remembering the
magnetic power he had once possessed over me, a little fear mingled
with much annoyance at this irrelevant intrusion, as I led the way up
the wide staircase, where Swift had passed joking and railing, and
Curran telling stories and quoting Greek, in simpler days, before
men's minds, subtilized and complicated by the romantic movement in
art and literature, began to tremble on the verge of some unimagined
revelation. I felt that my hand shook, and saw that the light of the
candle wavered and quivered more than it need have upon the Maenads on
the old French panels, making them look like the first beings slowly
shaping in the formless and void darkness. When the door had closed,
and the peacock curtain, glimmering like many-coloured flame, fell
between us and the world, I felt, in a way I could not understand,
that some singular and unexpected thing was about to happen. I went
over to the mantlepiece, and finding that a little chainless bronze
censer, set, upon the outside, with pieces of painted china by Orazio
Fontana, which I had filled with antique amulets, had fallen upon its
side and poured out its contents, I began to gather the amulets into
the bowl, partly to collect my thoughts and partly with that habitual
reverence which seemed to me the due of things so long connected with
secret hopes and fears. 'I see,' said Michael Robartes, 'that you are
still fond of incense, and I can show you an incense more precious than
any you have ever seen,' and as he spoke he took the censer out of my
hand and put the amulets in a little heap between the _athanor_ and the
_alembic_. I sat down, and he sat down at the side of the fire, and sat
there for awhile looking into the fire, and holding the censer in his
hand. 'I have come to ask you something,' he said, 'and the incense
will fill the room, and our thoughts, with its sweet odour while we
are talking. I got it from an old man in Syria, who said it was made
from flowers, of one kind with the flowers that laid their heavy purple
petals upon the hands and upon the hair and upon the feet of Christ in
the Garden of Gethsemane, and folded Him in their heavy breath, until
He cried against the cross and his destiny. ' He shook some dust into
the censer out of a small silk bag, and set the censer upon the floor
and lit the dust which sent up a blue stream of smoke, that spread
out over the ceiling, and flowed downwards again until it was like
Milton's banyan tree. It filled me, as incense often does, with a faint
sleepiness, so that I started when he said, 'I have come to ask you
that question which I asked you in Paris, and which you left Paris
rather than answer.