No More Learning

Ordinary speech is formless, and its variety is
like the variety which separates bad prose from the regulated speech
of Milton, or anything that is formless and void from anything that has
form and beauty. The orator, the speaker who has some little of the
great tradition of his craft, differs from the debater very largely
because he understands how to assume that subtle monotony of voice
which runs through the nerves like fire.

Even when one is speaking to a single note sounded faintly on the
Psaltery, if one is sufficiently practised to speak on it without
thinking about it one can get an endless variety of expression. All
art is, indeed, a monotony in external things for the sake of an
interior variety, a sacrifice of gross effects to subtle effects, an
asceticism of the imagination. But this new art, new in modern life
I mean, will have to train its hearers as well as its speakers, for
it takes time to surrender gladly the gross effects one is accustomed
to, and one may well find mere monotony at first where one soon learns
to find a variety as incalculable as in the outline of faces or in
the expression of eyes. Modern acting and recitation have taught us
to fix our attention on the gross effects till we have come to think
gesture and the intonation that copies the accidental surface of life
more important than the rhythm; and yet we understand theoretically
that it is precisely this rhythm that separates good writing from
bad, that it is the glimmer, the fragrance, the spirit of all intense
literature. I do not say that we should speak our plays to musical
notes, for dramatic verse will need its own method, and I have hitherto
experimented with short lyric poems alone; but I am certain that, if
people would listen for a while to lyrical verse spoken to notes, they
would soon find it impossible to listen without indignation to verse
as it is spoken in our leading theatres. They would get a subtlety of
hearing that would demand new effects from actors and even from public
speakers, and they might, it may be, begin even to notice one another's
voices till poetry and rhythm had come nearer to common life.

I cannot tell what changes this new art is to go through, or to what
greatness or littleness of fortune; but I can imagine little stories in
prose with their dialogues in metre going pleasantly to the strings.
I am not certain that I shall not see some Order naming itself from
the Golden Violet of the Troubadours or the like, and having among its
members none but well-taught and well-mannered speakers who will keep
the new art from disrepute. They will know how to keep from singing
notes and from prosaic lifeless intonations, and they will always
understand, however far they push their experiments, that poetry and
not music is their object; and they will have by heart, like the Irish
_File_, so many poems and notations that they will never have to bend
their heads over the book to the ruin of dramatic expression and of
that wild air the bard had always about him in my boyish imagination.
They will go here and there speaking their verses and their little
stories wherever they can find a score or two of poetical-minded people
in a big room, or a couple of poetical-minded friends sitting by the
hearth, and poets will write them poems and little stories to the
confounding of print and paper. I, at any rate, from this out mean to
write all my longer poems for the stage, and all my shorter ones for
the Psaltery, if only some strong angel keep me to my good resolutions.

1902.




MAGIC.
I

I BELIEVE in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call
magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not
know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the
visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed;
and I believe in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been handed
down from early times, and been the foundations of nearly all magical
practices. These doctrines are--

(1) That the borders of our minds are ever shifting, and that many
minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a
single mind, a single energy.

(2) That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our
memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.

(3) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.

I often think I would put this belief in magic from me if I could,
for I have come to see or to imagine, in men and women, in houses, in
handicrafts, in nearly all sights and sounds, a certain evil, a certain
ugliness, that comes from the slow perishing through the centuries of a
quality of mind that made this belief and its evidences common over the
world.


II

Some ten or twelve years ago, a man with whom I have since quarrelled
for sound reasons, a very singular man who had given his life to
studies other men despised, asked me and an acquaintance, who is now
dead, to witness a magical work. He lived a little way from London,
and on the way my acquaintance told me that he did not believe in
magic, but that a novel of Bulwer Lytton's had taken such a hold upon
his imagination that he was going to give much of his time and all his
thought to magic. He longed to believe in it, and had studied though
not learnedly, geomancy, astrology, chiromancy, and much cabalistic
symbolism, and yet doubted if the soul outlived the body. He awaited
the magical work full of scepticism. He expected nothing more than an
air of romance, an illusion as of the stage, that might capture the
consenting imagination for an hour. The evoker of spirits and his
beautiful wife received us in a little house, on the edge of some kind
of garden or park belonging to an eccentric rich man, whose curiosities
he arranged and dusted, and he made his evocation in a long room that
had a raised place on the floor at one end, a kind of dais, but was
furnished meagrely and cheaply. I sat with my acquaintance in the
middle of the room, and the evoker of spirits on the dais, and his wife
between us and him. He held a wooden mace in his hand, and turning to a
tablet of many-coloured squares, with a number on each of the squares,
that stood near him on a chair, he repeated a form of words. Almost
at once my imagination began to move of itself and to bring before me
vivid images that, though never too vivid to be imagination, as I had
always understood it, had yet a motion of their own, a life I could
not change or shape. I remember seeing a number of white figures, and
wondering whether their mitred heads had been suggested by the mitred
head of the mace, and then, of a sudden, the image of my acquaintance
in the midst of them. I told what I had seen, and the evoker of spirits
cried in a deep voice, 'Let him be blotted out,' and as he said it the
image of my acquaintance vanished, and the evoker of spirits or his
wife saw a man dressed in black with a curious square cap standing
among the white figures.