No More Learning

The servants appeared to be out, for though the
sound poured through every corner and crevice of the house there was
no stir in the lower rooms. I remembered that because my needs were so
few, my part in life so little, they had begun to come and go as they
would, often leaving me alone for hours. The emptiness and silence
of a world from which I had driven everything but dreams suddenly
overwhelmed me, and I shuddered as I drew the bolt. I found before me
Michael Robartes, whom I had not seen for years, and whose wild red
hair, fierce eyes, sensitive, tremulous lips and rough clothes made
him look now, just as they used to do fifteen years before, something
between a debauchee, a saint, and a peasant. He had recently come to
Ireland, he said, and wished to see me on a matter of importance;
indeed, the only matter of importance for him and for me. His voice
brought up before me our student years in Paris, and remembering the
magnetic power he had once possessed over me, a little fear mingled
with much annoyance at this irrelevant intrusion, as I led the way up
the wide staircase, where Swift had passed joking and railing, and
Curran telling stories and quoting Greek, in simpler days, before
men's minds, subtilized and complicated by the romantic movement in
art and literature, began to tremble on the verge of some unimagined
revelation. I felt that my hand shook, and saw that the light of the
candle wavered and quivered more than it need have upon the Maenads on
the old French panels, making them look like the first beings slowly
shaping in the formless and void darkness. When the door had closed,
and the peacock curtain, glimmering like many-coloured flame, fell
between us and the world, I felt, in a way I could not understand,
that some singular and unexpected thing was about to happen. I went
over to the mantlepiece, and finding that a little chainless bronze
censer, set, upon the outside, with pieces of painted china by Orazio
Fontana, which I had filled with antique amulets, had fallen upon its
side and poured out its contents, I began to gather the amulets into
the bowl, partly to collect my thoughts and partly with that habitual
reverence which seemed to me the due of things so long connected with
secret hopes and fears. 'I see,' said Michael Robartes, 'that you are
still fond of incense, and I can show you an incense more precious than
any you have ever seen,' and as he spoke he took the censer out of my
hand and put the amulets in a little heap between the _athanor_ and the
_alembic_. I sat down, and he sat down at the side of the fire, and sat
there for awhile looking into the fire, and holding the censer in his
hand. 'I have come to ask you something,' he said, 'and the incense
will fill the room, and our thoughts, with its sweet odour while we
are talking. I got it from an old man in Syria, who said it was made
from flowers, of one kind with the flowers that laid their heavy purple
petals upon the hands and upon the hair and upon the feet of Christ in
the Garden of Gethsemane, and folded Him in their heavy breath, until
He cried against the cross and his destiny. ' He shook some dust into
the censer out of a small silk bag, and set the censer upon the floor
and lit the dust which sent up a blue stream of smoke, that spread
out over the ceiling, and flowed downwards again until it was like
Milton's banyan tree. It filled me, as incense often does, with a faint
sleepiness, so that I started when he said, 'I have come to ask you
that question which I asked you in Paris, and which you left Paris
rather than answer.
'

He had turned his eyes towards me, and I saw them glitter in the
firelight, and through the incense, as I replied: 'You mean, will I
become an initiate of your Order of the Alchemical Rose? 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!