No More Learning

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. There were fine passages in all, but these
were often embedded in thoughts which have evidently a special value
to his mind, but are to other men the counters of an unknown coinage.
To them they seem merely so much brass or copper or tarnished silver
at the best. At other times the beauty of the thought was obscured by
careless writing as though he had suddenly doubted if writing was not a
foolish labour. He had frequently illustrated his verses with drawings,
in which an imperfect anatomy did not altogether hide extreme beauty of
feeling. The faeries in whom he believes have given him many subjects,
notably Thomas of Ercildoune sitting motionless in the twilight while
a young and beautiful creature leans softly out of the shadow and
whispers in his ear. He had delighted above all in strong effects of
colour: spirits who have upon their heads instead of hair the feathers
of peacocks; a phantom reaching from a swirl of flame towards a star;
a spirit passing with a globe of iridescent crystal--symbol of the
soul--half shut within his hand.
But always under this largess of
colour lay some tender homily addressed to man's fragile hopes. This
spiritual eagerness draws to him all those who, like himself, seek
for illumination or else mourn for a joy that has gone. One of these
especially comes to mind. A winter or two ago he spent much of the
night walking up and down upon the mountain talking to an old peasant
who, dumb to most men, poured out his cares for him. Both were unhappy:
X---- because he had then first decided that art and poetry were not
for him, and the old peasant because his life was ebbing out with no
achievement remaining and no hope left him. Both how Celtic! how full
of striving after a something never to be completely expressed in word
or deed. The peasant was wandering in his mind with prolonged sorrow.
Once he burst out with 'God possesses the heavens--God possesses the
heavens--but He covets the world'; and once he lamented that his old
neighbours were gone, and that all had forgotten him: they used to draw
a chair to the fire for him in every cabin, and now they said, 'Who is
that old fellow there? ' 'The fret' [Irish for doom] 'is over me,' he
repeated, and then went on to talk once more of God and heaven. More
than once also he said, waving his arm towards the mountain, 'Only
myself knows what happened under the thorn-tree forty years ago'; and
as he said it the tears upon his face glistened in the moonlight.

This old man always rises before me when I think of X----. Both seek--one
in wandering sentences, the other in symbolic pictures and subtle
allegoric poetry--to express a something that lies beyond the range of
expression; and both, if X---- will forgive me, have within them the vast
and vague extravagance that lies at the bottom of the Celtic heart. The
peasant visionaries that are, the landlord duellists that were, and the
whole hurly-burly of legends--Cuchulain fighting the sea for two days
until the waves pass over him and he dies, Caolte storming the palace
of the gods, Oisin seeking in vain for three hundred years to appease
his insatiable heart with all the pleasures of faeryland, these two
mystics walking up and down upon the mountains uttering the central
dreams of their souls in no less dream-laden sentences, and this mind
that finds them so interesting--all are a portion of that great Celtic
phantasmagoria whose meaning no man has discovered, nor any angel
revealed.

FOOTNOTE:

[A] I wrote this sentence long ago. This sadness now seems to me a part
of all peoples who preserve the moods of the ancient peoples of the
world.