No More Learning

' 'Die, if thou wouldst be with that which
thou wouldst seek;' and he sees his own soon-coming death in a rapture
of prophecy, for 'the fire for which all thirst' beams upon him,
'consuming the last clouds of cold mortality. ' When he is dead he will
still influence the living, for though Adonais has fled 'to the burning
fountains whence he came,' and 'is a portion of the eternal which must
glow through time and change unquenchably the same,' and has 'awaked
from the dream of life,' he has not gone from 'the young dawn,' or the
'caverns in the forests,' or 'the faint flowers and the fountains. ' He
has been 'made one with nature,' and his voice is 'heard in all her
music,' and his presence is felt wherever 'that power may move which
has withdrawn his being to its own,' and he bears 'his part' when it is
compelling mortal things to their appointed forms, and he overshadows
men's minds at their supreme moments, for

'when lofty thought
Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair,
And love and life contend in it for what
Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there,
And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air. '

'Of his speculations as to what will befall this inestimable spirit
when we appear to die,' Mrs. Shelley has written, 'a mystic ideality
tinged these speculations in Shelley's mind; certain stanzas in the
poem of _The Sensitive Plant_ express, in some degree, the almost
inexpressible idea, not that we die into another state, when this
state is no longer, from some reason, unapparent as well as apparent,
accordant with our being--but that those who rise above the ordinary
nature of man, fade from before our imperfect organs; they remain in
their "love, beauty, and delight," in a world congenial to them, and
we, clogged by "error, ignorance, and strife," see them not till we
are fitted by purification and improvement to their higher state. ' Not
merely happy souls, but all beautiful places and movements and gestures
and events, when we think they have ceased to be, have become portions
of the eternal.

'In this life
Of error, ignorance, and strife,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
And we the shadow of the dream,

It is a modest creed, and yet
Pleasant, if one considers it,
To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.

That garden sweet, that lady fair,
And all sweet shapes and odours there,
In truth have never passed away;
'Tis we, 'tis ours are changed, not they.

For love and beauty and delight
There is no death, nor change; their might
Exceeds our organs, which endure
No light, being themselves obscure. '

He seems in his speculations to have lit on that memory of nature the
visionaries claim for the foundation of their knowledge; but I do not
know whether he thought, as they do, that all things good and evil
remain for ever, 'thinking the thought and doing the deed,' though
not, it may be, self-conscious; or only thought that 'love and beauty
and delight' remain for ever. The passage where Queen Mab awakes 'all
knowledge of the past,' and the good and evil 'events of old and
wondrous times,' was no more doubtless than a part of the machinery
of the poem, but all the machineries of poetry are parts of the
convictions of antiquity, and readily become again convictions in minds
that dwell upon them in a spirit of intense idealism.

Intellectual Beauty has not only the happy dead to do her will, but
ministering spirits who correspond to the Devas of the East, and the
Elemental Spirits of mediaeval Europe, and the Sidhe of ancient Ireland,
and whose too constant presence, and perhaps Shelley's ignorance
of their more traditional forms, give some of his poetry an air of
rootless phantasy. They change continually in his poetry, as they do
in the visions of the mystics everywhere and of the common people in
Ireland, and the forms of these changes display, in an especial sense,
the glowing forms of his mind when freed from all impulse not out of
itself or out of supersensual power. These are 'gleams of a remoter
world which visit us in sleep,' spiritual essences whose shadows are
the delights of all the senses, sounds 'folded in cells of crystal
silence,' 'visions swift and sweet and quaint,' which lie waiting their
moment 'each in his thin sheath like a chrysalis,' 'odours' among
'ever-blooming eden trees,' 'liquors' that can give 'happy sleep,' or
can make tears 'all wonder and delight'; 'the golden genii who spoke to
the poets of Greece in dreams'; 'the phantoms' which become the forms
of the arts when 'the mind, arising bright from the embrace of beauty,'
'casts on them the gathered rays which are reality'; 'the guardians'
who move in 'the atmosphere of human thought,' as 'the birds within the
wind, or the fish within the wave,' or man's thought itself through all
things; and who join the throng of the happy hours when Time is passing
away--

'As the flying fish leap
From the Indian deep,
And mix with the seabirds half asleep. '

It is these powers which lead Asia and Panthea, as they would lead all
the affections of humanity, by words written upon leaves, by faint
songs, by eddies of echoes that draw 'all spirits on that secret
way,' by the 'dying odours' of flowers and by 'the sunlight of the
sphered dew,' beyond the gates of birth and death to awake Demogorgon,
eternity, that 'the painted veil called life' may be 'torn aside.
'

There are also ministers of ugliness and all evil, like those that came
to Prometheus--

'As from the rose which the pale priestess kneels
To gather for her festal crown of flowers,
The aerial crimson falls, flushing her cheek,
So from our victim's destined agony
The shade which is our form invests us round;
Else we are shapeless as our mother Night. '

Or like those whose shapes the poet sees in _The Triumph of Life_,
coming from the procession that follows the car of life, as 'hope'
changes to 'desire,' shadows 'numerous as the dead leaves blown in
autumn evening from a poplar tree'; and resembling those they come
from, until, if I understand an obscure phrase aright, they are
'wrapt' round 'all the busy phantoms that live there as the sun shapes
the clouds. ' Some to sit 'chattering like apes,' and some like 'old
anatomies' 'hatching their bare broods under the shade of daemons'
wings,' laughing 'to reassume the delegated powers' they had given to
the tyrants of the earth, and some 'like small gnats and flies' to
throng 'about the brow of lawyers, statesmen, priest and theorist,'
and some 'like discoloured shapes of snow' to fall 'on fairest bosoms
and the sunniest hair,' to be 'melted by the youthful glow which
they extinguish,' and many to 'fling shadows of shadows yet unlike
themselves,' shadows that are shaped into new forms by that 'creative
ray' in which all move like motes.

These ministers of beauty and ugliness were certainly more than
metaphors or picturesque phrases to one who believed the 'thoughts
which are called real or external objects' differed but in regularity
of recurrence from 'hallucinations, dreams, and the ideas of madness,'
and lessened this difference by telling how he had dreamed 'three
several times, between intervals of two or more years, the same precise
dream,' and who had seen images with the mind's eye that left his
nerves shaken for days together. Shadows that were as when there

'hovers
A flock of vampire bats before the glare
Of the tropic sun, bringing, ere evening,
Strange night upon some Indian isle,'

could not but have had more than a metaphorical and picturesque being
to one who had spoken in terror with an image of himself, and who had
fainted at the apparition of a woman with eyes in her breasts, and who
had tried to burn down a wood, if we can trust Mrs. Williams' account,
because he believed a devil, who had first tried to kill him, had
sought refuge there.

It seems to me, indeed, that Shelley had reawakened in himself the age
of faith, though there were times when he would doubt, as even the
saints have doubted, and that he was a revolutionist, because he had
heard the commandment, 'If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye
do them. ' I have re-read his _Prometheus Unbound_ for the first time
for many years, in the woods of Drim-da-rod, among the Echte hills,
and sometimes I have looked towards Slieve-nan-Orr, where the country
people say the last battle of the world shall be fought till the third
day, when a priest shall lift a chalice, and the thousand years of
peace begin. And I think this mysterious song utters a faith as simple
and as ancient as the faith of those country people, in a form suited
to a new age, that will understand with Blake that the holy spirit is
'an intellectual fountain,' and that the kinds and degrees of beauty
are the images of its authority.


II. HIS RULING SYMBOLS

At a comparatively early time Shelley made his imprisoned Cythna become
wise in all human wisdom through the contemplation of her own mind,
and write out this wisdom upon the sands in 'signs' that were 'clear
elemental shapes whose smallest change' made 'a subtler language
within language,' and were 'the key of truths, which once were dimly
taught in old Crotona. ' His early romances and much throughout his
poetry show how strong a fascination the traditions of magic and of
the magical philosophy had cast over his mind, and one can hardly
suppose that he had not brooded over their doctrine of symbols or
signatures, though I do not find anything to show that he gave it any
deep study. One finds in his poetry, besides innumerable images that
have not the definiteness of symbols, many images that are certainly
symbols, and as the years went by he began to use these with a more
and more deliberately symbolic purpose. I imagine that, when he wrote
his earlier poems he allowed the subconscious life to lay its hands so
firmly upon the rudder of his imagination, that he was little conscious
of the abstract meaning of the images that rose in what seemed the
idleness of his mind. Any one who has any experience of any mystical
state of the soul knows how there float up in the mind profound
symbols,[A] whose meaning, if indeed they do not delude one into the
dream that they are meaningless, one does not perhaps understand for
years. Nor I think has anyone, who has known that experience with any
constancy, failed to find some day in some old book or on some old
monument, a strange or intricate image, that had floated up before
him, and grow perhaps dizzy with the sudden conviction that our little
memories are but a part of some great memory that renews the world and
men's thoughts age after age, and that our thoughts are not, as we
suppose, the deep but a little foam upon the deep.