No More Learning

' He made everybody work
so hard that nobody saw what happened to the faeries.

1902.




A VISIONARY


A YOUNG man came to see me at my lodgings the other night, and began
to talk of the making of the earth and the heavens and much else. I
questioned him about his life and his doings. He had written many poems
and painted many mystical designs since we met last, but latterly
had neither written nor painted, for his whole heart was set upon
making his mind strong, vigorous, and calm, and the emotional life of
the artist was bad for him, he feared. He recited his poems readily,
however. He had them all in his memory. Some indeed had never been
written down. They, with their wild music as of winds blowing in the
reeds,[A] seemed to me the very inmost voice of Celtic sadness, and of
Celtic longing for infinite things the world has never seen. Suddenly
it seemed to me that he was peering about him a little eagerly. 'Do you
see anything, X----? ' I said. 'A shining, winged woman, covered by her
long hair, is standing near the doorway,' he answered, or some such
words. 'Is it the influence of some living person who thinks of us,
and whose thoughts appear to us in that symbolic form? ' I said; for I
am well instructed in the ways of the visionaries and in the fashion
of their speech.
'No,' he replied; 'for if it were the thoughts of a
person who is alive I should feel the living influence in my living
body, and my heart would beat and my breath would fail. It is a spirit.
It is some one who is dead or who has never lived. '

I asked what he was doing, and found he was clerk in a large shop.
His pleasure, however, was to wander about upon the hills, talking
to half-mad and visionary peasants, or to persuade queer and
conscience-stricken persons to deliver up the keeping of their troubles
into his care. Another night, when I was with him in his own lodging,
more than one turned up to talk over their beliefs and disbeliefs, and
sun them as it were in the subtle light of his mind. Sometimes visions
come to him as he talks with them, and he is rumoured to have told
divers people true matters of their past days and distant friends, and
left them hushed with dread of their strange teacher, who seems scarce
more than a boy, and is so much more subtle than the oldest among them.

The poetry he recited me was full of his nature and his visions.
Sometimes it told of other lives he believes himself to have lived in
other centuries, sometimes of people he had talked to, revealing them
to their own minds. I told him I would write an article upon him and
it, and was told in turn that I might do so if I did not mention his
name, for he wished to be always 'unknown, obscure, impersonal. ' Next
day a bundle of his poems arrived, and with them a note in these words:
'Here are copies of verses you said you liked. I do not think I could
ever write or paint any more. I prepare myself for a cycle of other
activities in some other life. I will make rigid my roots and branches.
It is not now my turn to burst into leaves and flowers. '

The poems were all endeavours to capture some high, impalpable mood in
a net of obscure images.