No More Learning

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. There were moments when the vision appeared on the
point of returning, and I would half-remember, with an ecstasy of joy
or sorrow, crimes and heroisms, fortunes and misfortunes; or begin to
contemplate, with a sudden leaping of the heart, hopes and terrors,
desires and ambitions, alien to my orderly and careful life; and then
I would awake shuddering at the thought that some great imponderable
being had swept through my mind. It was indeed days before this feeling
passed perfectly away, and even now, when I have sought refuge in the
only definite faith, I feel a great tolerance for those people with
incoherent personalities, who gather in the chapels and meeting-places
of certain obscure sects, because I also have felt fixed habits and
principles dissolving before a power, which was _hysterica passio_
or sheer madness, if you will, but was so powerful in its melancholy
exultation that I tremble lest it wake again and drive me from my
new-found peace.

When we came in the grey light to the great half-empty terminus, it
seemed to me I was so changed that I was no more, as man is, a moment
shuddering at eternity, but eternity weeping and laughing over a
moment; and when we had started and Michael Robartes had fallen asleep,
as he soon did, his sleeping face, in which there was no sign of all
that had so shaken me and that now kept me wakeful, was to my excited
mind more like a mask than a face. The fancy possessed me that the man
behind it had dissolved away like salt in water, and that it laughed
and sighed, appealed and denounced at the bidding of beings greater or
less than man. 'This is not Michael Robartes at all: Michael Robartes
is dead; dead for ten, for twenty years perhaps,' I kept repeating to
myself. I fell at last into a feverish sleep, waking up from time to
time when we rushed past some little town, its slated roofs shining
with wet, or still lake gleaming in the cold morning light. I had been
too preoccupied to ask where we were going, or to notice what tickets
Michael Robartes had taken, but I knew now from the direction of the
sun that we were going westward; and presently I knew also, by the way
in which the trees had grown into the semblance of tattered beggars
flying with bent heads towards the east, that we were approaching the
western coast. Then immediately I saw the sea between the low hills
upon the left, its dull grey broken into white patches and lines.

When we left the train we had still, I found, some way to go, and
set out, buttoning our coats about us, for the wind was bitter and
violent. Michael Robartes was silent, seeming anxious to leave me to
my thoughts; and as we walked between the sea and the rocky side of a
great promontory, I realized with a new perfection what a shock had
been given to all my habits of thought and of feelings, if indeed some
mysterious change had not taken place in the substance of my mind, for
the grey waves, plumed with scudding foam, had grown part of a teeming,
fantastic inner life; and when Michael Robartes pointed to a square
ancient-looking house, with a much smaller and newer building under its
lee, set out on the very end of a dilapidated and almost deserted pier,
and said it was the Temple of the Alchemical Rose, I was possessed with
the phantasy that the sea, which kept covering it with showers of white
foam, was claiming it as part of some indefinite and passionate life,
which had begun to war upon our orderly and careful days, and was about
to plunge the world into a night as obscure as that which followed
the downfall of the classical world. One part of my mind mocked this
phantastic terror, but the other, the part that still lay half plunged
in vision, listened to the clash of unknown armies, and shuddered at
unimaginable fanaticisms, that hung in those grey leaping waves.

We had gone but a few paces along the pier when we came upon an old
man, who was evidently a watchman, for he sat in an overset barrel,
close to a place where masons had been lately working upon a break in
the pier, and had in front of him a fire such as one sees slung under
tinkers' carts. I saw that he was also a voteen, as the peasants say,
for there was a rosary hanging from a nail on the rim of the barrel,
and as I saw I shuddered, and I did not know why I shuddered. We had
passed him a few yards when I heard him cry in Gaelic, 'Idolaters,
idolaters, go down to Hell with your witches and your devils; go down
to Hell that the herrings may come again into the bay'; and for some
moments I could hear him half screaming and half muttering behind us.