No More Learning

I would not
consent in Paris, when I was full of unsatisfied desire, and now that I
have at last fashioned my life according to my desire, am I likely to
consent? '

'You have changed greatly since then,' he answered. 'I have read your
books, and now I see you among all these images, and I understand
you better than you do yourself, for I have been with many and many
dreamers at the same cross-ways. You have shut away the world and
gathered the gods about you, and if you do not throw yourself at their
feet, you will be always full of lassitude, and of wavering purpose,
for a man must forget he is miserable in the bustle and noise of the
multitude in this world and in time; or seek a mystical union with
the multitude who govern this world and time. ' And then he murmured
something I could not hear, and as though to someone I could not see.

For a moment the room appeared to darken, as it used to do when he was
about to perform some singular experiment, and in the darkness the
peacocks upon the doors seemed to glow with a more intense colour. I
cast off the illusion, which was, I believe, merely caused by memory,
and by the twilight of incense, for I would not acknowledge that he
could overcome my now mature intellect; and I said: 'Even if I grant
that I need a spiritual belief and some form of worship, why should I
go to Eleusis and not to Calvary? ' He leaned forward and began speaking
with a slightly rhythmical intonation, and as he spoke I had to
struggle again with the shadow, as of some older night than the night
of the sun, which began to dim the light of the candles and to blot out
the little gleams upon the corner of picture-frames and on the bronze
divinities, and to turn the blue of the incense to a heavy purple;
while it left the peacocks to glimmer and glow as though each separate
colour were a living spirit. I had fallen into a profound dream-like
reverie in which I heard him speaking as at a distance. 'And yet there
is no one who communes with only one god,' he was saying, 'and the
more a man lives in imagination and in a refined understanding, the
more gods does he meet with and talk with, and the more does he come
under the power of Roland, who sounded in the Valley of Roncesvalles
the last trumpet of the body's will and pleasure; and of Hamlet, who
saw them perishing away, and sighed; and of Faust, who looked for
them up and down the world and could not find them; and under the
power of all those countless divinities who have taken upon themselves
spiritual bodies in the minds of the modern poets and romance writers,
and under the power of the old divinities, who since the Renaissance
have won everything of their ancient worship except the sacrifice of
birds and fishes, the fragrance of garlands and the smoke of incense.
The many think humanity made these divinities, and that it can unmake
them again; but we who have seen them pass in rattling harness, and
in soft robes, and heard them speak with articulate voices while we
lay in deathlike trance, know that they are always making and unmaking
humanity, which is indeed but the trembling of their lips. '

He had stood up and begun to walk to and fro, and had become in my
waking dream a shuttle weaving an immense purple web whose folds had
begun to fill the room. The room seemed to have become inexplicably
silent, as though all but the web and the weaving were at an end in
the world. 'They have come to us; they have come to us,' the voice
began again; 'all that have ever been in your reverie, all that you
have met with in books. There is Lear, his head still wet with the
thunder-storm, and he laughs because you thought yourself an existence
who are but a shadow, and him a shadow who is an eternal god; and
there is Beatrice, with her lips half parted in a smile, as though all
the stars were about to pass away in a sigh of love; and there is the
mother of the God of humility who cast so great a spell over men that
they have tried to unpeople their hearts that he might reign alone, but
she holds in her hand the rose whose every petal is a god; and there,
O swiftly she comes!
is Aphrodite under a twilight falling from the
wings of numberless sparrows, and about her feet are the grey and white
doves. ' In the midst of my dream I saw him hold out his left arm and
pass his right hand over it as though he stroked the wings of doves. I
made a violent effort which seemed almost to tear me in two, and said
with forced determination: 'You would sweep me away into an indefinite
world which fills me with terror; and yet a man is a great man just in
so far as he can make his mind reflect everything with indifferent
precision like a mirror. ' I seemed to be perfectly master of myself,
and went on, but more rapidly: 'I command you to leave me at once,
for your ideas and phantasies are but the illusions that creep like
maggots into civilizations when they begin to decline, and into minds
when they begin to decay. ' I had grown suddenly angry, and seizing the
_alembic_ from the table, was about to rise and strike him with it,
when the peacocks on the door behind him appeared to grow immense; and
then the _alembic_ fell from my fingers and I was drowned in a tide
of green and blue and bronze feathers, and as I struggled hopelessly
I heard a distant voice saying: 'Our master Avicenna has written that
all life proceeds out of corruption. ' The glittering feathers had now
covered me completely, and I knew that I had struggled for hundreds of
years, and was conquered at last. I was sinking into the depth when
the green and blue and bronze that seemed to fill the world became a
sea of flame and swept me away, and as I was swirled along I heard
a voice over my head cry, 'The mirror is broken in two pieces,' and
another voice answer, 'The mirror is broken in four pieces,' and a more
distant voice cry with an exultant cry, 'The mirror is broken into
numberless pieces'; and then a multitude of pale hands were reaching
towards me, and strange gentle faces bending above me, and half wailing
and half caressing voices uttering words that were forgotten the moment
they were spoken. I was being lifted out of the tide of flame, and
felt my memories, my hopes, my thoughts, my will, everything I held
to be myself, melting away; then I seemed to rise through numberless
companies of beings who were, I understood, in some way more certain
than thought, each wrapped in his eternal moment, in the perfect
lifting of an arm, in a little circlet of rhythmical words, in dreaming
with dim eyes and half-closed eyelids. And then I passed beyond these
forms, which were so beautiful they had almost ceased to be, and,
having endured strange moods, melancholy, as it seemed, with the weight
of many worlds, I passed into that Death which is Beauty herself, and
into that Loneliness which all the multitudes desire without ceasing.
All things that had ever lived seemed to come and dwell in my heart,
and I in theirs; and I had never again known mortality or tears, had I
not suddenly fallen from the certainty of vision into the uncertainty
of dream, and become a drop of molten gold falling with immense
rapidity, through a night elaborate with stars, and all about me a
melancholy exultant wailing. I fell and fell and fell, and then the
wailing was but the wailing of the wind in the chimney, and I awoke
to find myself leaning upon the table and supporting my head with my
hands. I saw the _alembic_ swaying from side to side in the distant
corner it had rolled to, and Michael Robartes watching me and waiting.
'I will go wherever you will,' I said, 'and do whatever you bid me, for
I have been with eternal things. ' 'I knew,' he replied, 'you must need
answer as you have answered, when I heard the storm begin. You must
come to a great distance, for we were commanded to build our temple
between the pure multitude by the waves and the impure multitude of
men. '


III

I did not speak as we drove through the deserted streets, for my mind
was curiously empty of familiar thoughts and experiences; it seemed
to have been plucked out of the definite world and cast naked upon
a shoreless sea.