1


i






















THE COLLECTED WORKS OF
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS








IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
BEING THE SIXTH VOLUME OF
r 1HE COILLECTED) WORKS IN
VERSE & PROSE OF WILLIAM
BUTLER YEATS IMPRINTED
AT THE SHAKESPEARE HEAD
PRESS STRATFORD -ON-AVON
MCMVIII
LONDON:
CHAPMAN & HALL
LIMITED








CONTENTS
PAGE
WHAT IS POPULAR POETRY'..    I
SPEAKING TO THE PSALTERY..13
MAGIC......            23
THE HAPPIEST OF THE POETS                   55
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SHELLEY S POETRY..
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON..            III
WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE IMAGINATION.. 131
WILLIAM BLAKE AND HIS ILLUSTRATIONS TO
THE cDIVINE COMEDY.... 138
SYMBOLISM IN PAINTING. 176
THE SYMBOLISM OF POETRY. I85
THE THEATRE.... 200
THE CELTIC ELEMENT IN LITERATURE.. 210
THE AUTUMN OF THE BODY..230
THE MOODS.... 238
THE BODY OF THE FATHER CHRISTIAN ROSENCRUX....... 240
THE RETURN OF ULYSSES.. 243
IRELAND AND THE ARTS... 249
THE GALWAY PLAINS...            259
EMOTION OF MULTITUDE. 264
272032








WHAT IS 'POPULAR POETRY'?
I THINK it was a Young Ireland Society that
set my mind running on ' popular poetry.' We
used to discuss everything that was known to
us about Ireland, and especially Irish literature
and Irish history. We had no Gaelic, but paid
great honour to the Irish poets who wrote in
English, and quoted them in our speeches. I
could have told you at that time the dates of
the birth and death, and quoted the chief poems,
of men whose names you have not heard, and
perhaps of some whose names I have forgotten.
I knew in my heart that the most of them
wrote badly, and yet such romance clung about
them, such a desire for Irish poetry was in all
our minds, that I kept on saying, not only to
others but to myself, that most of them wrote
well, or all but well. I had read Shelley and
Spenser and had tried to mix their styles together in a pastoral play which I have not come
to dislike much, and yet I do not think Shelley
or Spenser ever moved me as did these poets.
I thought one day-I can remember the very
B




2   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


What is  day when I thought it-' If somebody could
'Popular make a style which would not be an English
Poetry'?
"style and yet would be musical and full of colour,
many others would catch fire from him, and
we would have a really great school of ballad
poetry in Ireland. If these poets, who have
never ceased to fill the newspapers and the
ballad-books with their verses, had a good tradition they would write beautifully and move
everybody as they move me.' Then a little
later on I thought,' If they had something else
to write about besides political opinions, if more
of them would write about the beliefs of the
people like Allingham, or about old legends like
Ferguson, they would find it easier to get a
style.' Then, with a deliberateness that still
surprises me, for in my heart of hearts I have
never been quite certain that one should be more
than an artist, that even patriotism is more than
an impure desire in an artist, I set to work to
find a style and things to write about that the
ballad writers might be the better.
They are no better, I think, and my desire
to make them so was, it may be, one of the
illusions Nature holds before one, because she
knows that the gifts she has to give are not
worth troubling about. It is for her sake that
we must stir ourselves, but we would not trouble




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


3


to get out of bed in the morning, or to leave  What is
our chairs once we are in them, if she had not  'Popular
Poetry'?
her conjuring bag. She wanted a few verses
from me, and because it would not have seemed
worth while taking so much trouble to see my
books lie on a few drawing-room tables, she
filled my head with thoughts of making a whole
literature, and plucked me out of the Dublin
art schools where I should have stayed drawing
from the round, and sent me into a library to
read bad translations from the Irish, and at last
down into Connaught to sit by turf fires. I
wanted to write 'popular poetry' like those
Irish poets, for I believed that all good literatures were popular, and even cherished the fancy
that the Adelphi melodrama, which I had never
seen, might be good literature, and I hated what
I called the coteries. I thought that one must
write without care, for that was of the coteries,
but with a gusty energy that would put all
straight if it came out of the right heart.  I
had a conviction, which indeed I have still,
that one's verses should hold, as in a mirror,
the colours of one's own climate and scenery in
their right proportion; and, when I found my
verses too full of the reds and yellows Shelley
gathered in Italy, I thought for two days of
setting things right, not as I should now by




4     IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
What is  making rhythms faint and nervous and filling
"Popular my images with a certain coldness, a certain
Poetry'?
wintry wildness, but by eating little and sleeping
upon a board. I felt indignant with Matthew
Arnold because he complained that somebody,
who had translated Homer into a ballad measure,
had tried to write epic to the tune of Yankee
Doodle. It seemed to me that it did not matter
what tune one wrote to, so long as that gusty
energy came often enough and strongly enough.
And I delighted in Victor Hugo's book upon
Shakespeare, because he abused critics and
coteries and thought that Shakespeare wrote
without care or premeditation and to please
everybody. I would indeed have had every
illusion had I believed in that straightforward
logic, as of newspaper articles, which so tickles
the ears of the shopkeepers; but I always knew
that the line of Nature is crooked, that, though
we dig the canal beds as straight as we can, the
rivers run hither and thither in their wildness.
From that day to this I have been busy among
the verses and stories that the people make for
themselves, but I had been busy a very little
while before I knew that what we call popular
poetry never came from the people at all. Longfellow, and Campbell, and Mrs. Hemans, and
Macaulay in his Lays, and Scott in his longer
a




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


5


poems are the poets of the middle class, of people  What is
who have unlearned the unwritten tradition  'Popular
Poetry'?
which binds the unlettered, so long as they are
masters of themselves, to the beginning of time
and to the foundation of the world, and who
have not learned the written tradition which
has been established upon the unwritten. I
became certain that Burns, whose greatness has
been used to justify the littleness of others, was
in part a poet of the middle class, because though
the farmers he sprang from and lived among
had been able to create a little tradition of their
own, less a tradition of ideas than of speech,
they had been divided by religious and political
changes from the images and emotions which
had once carried their memories backward
thousands of years. Despite his expressive
speech which sets him above all other popular
poets, he has the triviality of emotion, the
poverty of ideas, the imperfect sense of beauty
of a poetry whose most typical expression is
in Longfellow. Longfellow has his popularity,
in the main, because he tells his story or his
idea so that one needs nothing but his verses to
understand it. No words of his borrow their
beauty from those that used them before, and
one can get all that there is in story and idea
without seeing them as if moving before a




6     IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
What is  half-faded curtain embroidered with kings and
'Popular queens, their loves and battles and their days
Poetry '  e
out hunting, or else with holy letters and images
of so great antiquity that nobody can tell the
god or goddess they would commend to an
unfading memory. Poetry that is not popular
poetry presupposes, indeed, more than it says,
though we, who cannot know what it is to be
disinherited, only understand how much more,
when we read it in its most typical expressions,
in the Epipsychidion of Shelley, or in Spenser's
description of the gardens of Adonis, or when
we meet the misunderstandings of others. Go
down into the street and read to your baker or
your candlestick-maker any poem which is not
popular poetry. I have heard a baker, who
was clever enough with his oven, deny that
Tennyson could have known what he was
writing when he wrote 'Warming his five wits,
the white owl in the belfry sits,' and once
when I read out Omar Khayyam to one of the
best of candlestick-makers, he said, ' What is
the meaning of "we come like water and like
wind we go"?' Or go down into the street
with some thought whose bare meaning must
be plain to everybody; take with you Ben
Jonson's 'Beauty like sorrow dwelleth everywhere,' and find out how utterly its enchantment




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


7


depends on an association of beauty with sorrow  What is
which written tradition has from the unwritten, 'Popular
Poetry '?
which had it in its turn from ancient religion;
or take with you these lines in whose bare
meaning also there is nothing to stumble over,
and find out what men lose who are not in love
with Helen.
'Brightness falls from the air,
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust hath closed Helen's eye.'
I pick my examples at random, for I am
writing where I have no books to turn the
pages of, but one need not go east of the sun
or west of the moon in so simple a matter.
On the other hand, when Walt Whitman
writes in seeming defiance of tradition, he needs
tradition for his protection, for the butcher and
the baker and the candlestick-maker grow merry
over him when they meet his work by chance.
Nature, which cannot endure emptiness, has
made them gather conventions which cannot
disguise their low birth though they copy, as
from far off, the dress and manners of the wellbred and the well-born. The gatherers mock
all expression that is wholly unlike their own,
just as little boys in the street mock at strangelydressed people and at old men who talk to
themselves.




8   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


What is    There is only one kind of good poetry, for
Popular the poetry of the coteries, which presupposes
" the written tradition, does not differ in kind
from the true poetry of the people, which
presupposes the unwritten tradition. Both are
alike strange and obscure, and unreal to all who
have not understanding, and both, instead of
that manifest logic, that clear rhetoric of the
'popular poetry,' glimmer with thoughts and
images whose 'ancestors were stout and wise,'
'anigh to Paradise' 'ere yet men knew the
gift of corn.'  It may be that we know as
little of their descent as men knew of 'the man
born to be a king' when they found him in that
cradle marked with the red lion crest, and yet
we know somewhere in the heart that they have
been sung in temples, in ladies' chambers, and
our nerves quiver with a recognition they were
shaped to by a thousand emotions. If men did
not remember or half remember impossible
things, and, it may be, if the worship of sun
and moon had not left a faint reverence behind
it, what Aran fisher-girl would sing'It is late last night the dog was speaking of
you; the snipe was speaking of you in her deep
marsh. It is you are the lonely bird throughout the woods; and that you may be without
a mate until you find me.


I




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


9


'You promised me and you said a lie to me, What is
that you would be before me where the sheep  'Popular
P  Poetry'?
are flocked. I gave a whistle and three hundred
cries to you; and I found nothing there but a
bleating lamb.
'You promised me a thing that was hard for
you, a ship of gold under a silver mast; twelve
towns and a market in all of them, and a fine
white court by the side of the sea.
' You promised me a thing that is not possible;
that you would give me gloves of the skin of
a fish; that you would give me shoes of the
skin of a bird, and a suit of the dearest silk in
Ireland.
"My mother said to me not to be talking
with you, to-day or to-morrow or on Sunday.
It was a bad time she took for telling me that,
it was shutting the door after the house was
robbed....
"You have taken the east from me, you have
taken the west from me, you have taken what
is before me and what is behind me; you have
taken the moon, you have taken the sun from
me, and my fear is great you have taken God
from me.'
The Gael of the Scottish islands could not
sing his beautiful song over a bride, had he not
a memory of the belief that Christ was the




io    IDEAS OF GOOD AND           EVIL
What is  only man who measured six feet and not a little
'Popular  more or less, and was perfectly shaped in all
Poetry'
"Ptry'  other ways, and if he did not remember old
symbolical observancesI bathe thy palms
In showers of wine,
In the cleansing fire,
In the juice of raspberries,
In the milk of honey.
"Thou art the joy of all joyous things,
Thou art the light of the beam of the sun,
Thou art the door of the chief of hospitality,
Thou art the surpassing pilot star,
Thou art the step of the deer of the hill,
Thou art the step of the horse of the plain,
Thou art the grace of the sun rising,
Thou art the loveliness of all lovely desires.
The lovely likeness of the Lord
Is in thy pure face,
The loveliest likeness that was upon earth.
I soon learned to cast away one other illusion
of 'popular poetry.' I learned from the people
themselves, before I learned it from any book,
that they cannot separate the idea of an art or
a craft from the idea of a cult with ancient
technicalities and mysteries. They can hardly
separate mere learning from witchcraft, and are
fond of the words and verses that keep half their
secret to themselves. Indeed, it is certain that


1
1
*i




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


II


before the counting-house had created a new  What is
class and a new art without breeding and with-  'Popular
out ancestry, and set this art and this classPoetry
between the hut and the castle, and between
the hut and the cloister, the art of the people
was as closely mingled with the art of the coteries
as was the speech of the people that delighted
in rhythmical animation, in idiom, in images,
in words full of far-off suggestion, with the
unchanging speech of the poets.
Now I see a new generation in Ireland which
discusses Irish literature and history in Young
Ireland societies, and societies with newer names,
and there are far more than when I was a boy
who would make verses for the people. They
have the help, too, of a vigorous journalism,
and this journalism sometimes urges them to
desire the direct logic, the clear rhetoric, of
'popular poetry.' It sees that Ireland has no
cultivated minority, and it does not see, though
it would cast out all English things, that its
literary ideal belongs more to England than to
other countries. I have hope that the new
writers will not fall into its illusion, for they
write in Irish, and for a people the countinghouse has not made forgetful. Among the seven
or eight hundred thousand who have had Irish
from the cradle, there is, perhaps, nobody who




12    IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
What is  has not enough of the unwritten tradition to
'Popular know good verses from bad ones, if he have
Poetry'?
enough mother-wit.   Among all that speak
English in Australia, in America, in Great
Britain, are there many more than the ten
thousand the prophet saw, who have enough of
the written tradition education has set in room
of the unwritten to know good verses from bad
ones, even though their mother-wit has made
them Ministers of the Crown or what you will?
Nor can things be better till that ten thousand
have gone hither and thither to preach their
faith that 'the imagination is the man himself,'
and that the world as imagination sees it is the
durable world, and have won men as did the
disciples of Him who
His seventy disciples sent
Against religion and government.


I901.




SPEAKING TO THE PSALTERY.


I
I HAVE always known that there was something I disliked about singing, and I naturally
dislike print and paper, but now at last I
understand why, for I have found something
better. I have just heard a poem spoken with
so delicate a sense of its rhythm, with so perfect
a respect for its meaning, that if I were a wise
man and could persuade a few people to learn
the art I would never open a book of verses
again. A friend, who was here a few minutes
ago, has sat with a beautiful stringed instrument
upon her knee, her fingers passing over the
strings, and has spoken to me some verses
from Shelley's Skylark and Sir Ector's lamentation over the dead Launcelot out of the Morte
d'Arthur and some of my own poems. Wherever
the rhythm was most delicate, wherever the
emotion was most ecstatic, her art was the most
beautiful, and yet, although she sometimes
spoke to a little tune, it was never singing, as
we sing to-day, never anything but speech. A




14


IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


Speaking  singing note, a word chanted as they chant in
to the  churches, would have spoiled everything; nor
Psaltery was it reciting, for she spoke to a notation as
definite as that of song, using the instrument
which murmured sweetly and faintly, under the
spoken sounds, to give her the changing notes.
Another speaker could have repeated all her
effects, except those which came from her own
beautiful voice that would have given her fame
if the only art that gives the speaking voice its
perfect opportunity were as well known among
us as it was known in the ancient world.
II
Since I was a boy I have always longed to
hear poems spoken to a harp, as I imagined
Homer to have spoken his, for it is not natural
to enjoy an art only when one is by oneself.
Whenever one finds a fine verse one wants to
read it to somebody, and it would be much less
trouble and much pleasanter ifwe could all listen,
friend by friend, lover by beloved. Images used
to rise up before me, as I am sure they have
arisen before nearly everybody else who cares
for poetry, of wild-eyed men speaking harmoniously to murmuring wires while audiences
in many-coloured robes listened, hushed and
excited. Whenever I spoke of my desire to




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


I5


anybody they said I should write for music, but Speaking
when I heard anything sung I did not hear the  to the
words, or if I did their natural pronunciation Psaltery.
was altered and their natural music was altered,
or it was drowned in another music which I
did not understand. What was the good of
writing a love-song if the singer pronounced
love, 'lo-o-o-o-o-ve,' or even if he said 'love,'
but did not give it its exact place and weight
in the rhythm? Like every other poet, I spoke
verses in a kind of chant when I was making
them, and sometimes, when I was alone on a
country road, I would speak them in a loud
chanting voice, and feel that if I dared I would
speak them in that way to other people. One
day I was walking through a Dublin street with
the Visionary I have written about in The Celtic
Twilight, and he began speaking his verses out
aloud with the confidence of those who have
the inner light. He did not mind that people
stopped and looked after him even on the far
side of the road, but went on through poem
after poem. Like myself, he knew nothing of
music, but was certain that he had written them
to a manner of music, and he had once asked
somebody who played on a wind instrument of
some kind, and then a violinist, to write out the
music and play it. The violinist had played




16 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


Speaking  it, or something like it, but had not written it
to the  down; but the man with the wind instrument
Psaltery.said it could not be played because it contained
quarter-tones and would be out of tune. We
were not at all convinced by this, and one day,
when we were staying with a Galway friend
who is a learned musician, I asked him to listen
to our verses, and to the way we spoke them.
The Visionary found to his surprise that he did
not make every poem to a different tune, and
to the surprise of the musician that he did make
them all to two quite definite tunes, which are,
it seems, like very simple Arabic music. It
was, perhaps, to some such music, I thought,
that Blake sang his Songs of Innocence in Mrs.
Williams' drawing-room, and perhaps he, too,
spoke rather than sang. I, on the other hand,
did not often compose to a tune, though I
sometimes did, yet always to notes that could
be written down and played on my friend's
organ, or turned into something like a Gregorian hymn if one sang them in the ordinary
way. I varied more than the Visionary, who
never forgot his two tunes, one for long and
one for short lines, and could not always speak
a poem in the same way, but always felt that
certain ways were right, and that I would know
one of them if I remembered the way I first




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


17


spoke the poem. When I got to London I    Speaking
gave the notation, as it had been played on the  to the
organ, to the friend who has just gone out, and Psaltery.
she spoke it to me, giving my words a new
quality by the beauty of her voice.
Then we began to wander through the wood
of error; we tried speaking through music in
the ordinary way under I know not whose evil
influence, until we got to hate the two competing tunes and rhythms that were so often at
discord with one another, the tune and rhythm
of the verse and the tune and rhythm of the
music. Then we tried, persuaded by somebody
who thought quarter-tones and less intervals
the especial mark of speech as distinct from
singing, to write out what we did in wavy lines.
On finding something like these lines in Tibetan
music, we became so confident that we covered
a large piece of pasteboard, which now blows
up my fire in the morning, with a notation in
wavy lines as a demonstration for a lecture;
but at last Mr. Dolmetsch put us back to our
first thought. He made us a beautiful instrument half psaltery half lyre which contains, I
understand, all the chromatic intervals within
the range of the speaking voice; and he taught
c




18    IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
Speaking  us to regulate our speech by the ordinary musical
to the
notes.
Psaltery. notes
Some of the notations he taught us-those
in which there is no lilt, no recurring pattern
of sounds-are like this notation for a song out
of the first Act of The Countess Cathleen.
It is written in the old C clef, which is, I am
told, the most reasonable way to write it, for it
would be below the stave on the treble clef or
above it on the bass clef. The central line of
the stave corresponds to the middle C of the
piano; the first note of the poem is therefore
D. The marks of long and short over the
syllables are not marks of scansion, but show
the syllables one makes the voice hurry or linger
over.
One needs, of course, a far less complicated
notation than a singer, and one is even permitted
slight modifications of the fixed note when
dramatic expression demands it and the instrument is not sounding. The notation which
regulates the general form of the sound leaves
it free to add a complexity of dramatic expression
from its own incommunicable genius which
compensates the lover of speech for the lack of
complex musical expression. Ordinary speech
is formless, and its variety is like the variety
which separates bad prose from the regulated




-U'F
p ft.t4.   t4
fliT     daol4             oal                   ns~
P4.
doI~~




20 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


Speaking speech of Milton, or anything that is formless
to the  and void from  anything that has form   and
Psaltery 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




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


21


rhythm that separates good writing from bad,  Speaking
that it is the glimmer, the fragrance, the spirit  to the
Psaltery.
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




22 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


Speaking  they will always understand, however far they
to the  push their experiments, that poetry and not
Psaltery.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(I) 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




24    IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
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




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


25


spirits and his beautiful wife received us in a Magic.
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




26. IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


Magic. black with a curious square cap standing among
the white figures. It was my acquaintance, the
seeress said, as he had been in a past life, the
life that had moulded his present, and that life
would now unfold before us. I too seemed to
see the man with a strange vividness. The
story unfolded itself chiefly before the mind's
eye of the seeress, but sometimes I saw what
she described before I heard her description.
She thought the man in black was perhaps a
Fleming of the sixteenth century, and I could
see him pass along narrow streets till he came
to a narrow door with some rusty ironwork
above it. He went in, and wishing to find out
how far we had one vision among us, I kept
silent when I saw a dead body lying upon the
table within the door. The seeress described
him going down a long hall and up into what
she called a pulpit, and beginning to speak.
She said, 'He is a clergyman, I can hear his
words. They sound like Low Dutch.' Then
after a little silence, 'No, I am wrong. I can
see the listeners; he is a doctor lecturing among
his pupils.' I said, 'Do you see anything near
the door?' and she said, 'Yes, I see a subject for
dissection.' Then we saw him go out again into
the narrow streets, I following the story of the
seeress, sometimes merely following her words,




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


27


but sometimes seeing for myself. My acquaint- Magic.
ance saw nothing; I think he was forbidden to
see, it being his own life, and I think could not
in any case. His imagination had no will of its
own. Presently the man in black went into a
house with two gables facing the road, and up
some stairs into a room where a hump-backed
woman gave him a key; and then along a corridor, and down some stairs into a large cellar
full of retorts and strange vessels of all kinds.
Here he seemed to stay a long while, and one
saw him eating bread that he took down from
a shelf. The evoker of spirits and the seeress
began to speculate about the man's character
and habits, and decided, from a visionary impression, that his mind was absorbed in naturalism,
but that his imagination had been excited by
stories of the marvels wrought by magic in past
times, and that he was trying to copy them by
naturalistic means. Presently one of them saw
him go to a vessel that stood over a slow fire,
and take out of the vessel a thing wrapped up in
numberless cloths, which he partly unwrapped,
showing at length what looked like the image
of a man made by somebody who could not
model. The evoker of spirits said that the man
in black was trying to make flesh by chemical
means, and though he had not succeeded, his




28  IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


Magic. brooding had drawn so many evil spirits about
him, that the image was partly alive. He could
see it moving a little where it lay upon a table.
At that moment I heard something like little
squeals, but kept silent, as when I saw the dead
body. In a moment more the seeress said, 'I
hear little squeals.' Then the evoker of spirits
heard them, but said, 'They are not squeals; he
is pouring a red liquid out of a retort through
a slit in the cloth; the slit is over the mouth of
the image and the liquid is gurgling in rather
a curious way.' Weeks seemed to pass by
hurriedly, and somebody saw the man still busy
in his cellar. Then more weeks seemed to pass,
and now we saw him lying sick in a room upstairs, and a man in a conical cap standing beside
him. We could see the image too. It was in
the cellar, but now it could move feebly about
the floor. I saw fainter images of the image
passing continually from where it crawled to
the man in his bed, and I asked the evoker of
spirits what they were. He said, 'They are
the images of his terror.' Presently the man in
the conical cap began to speak, but who heard
him I cannot remember. He made the sick
man get out of bed and walk, leaning upon him,
and in much terror till they came to the cellar.
There the man in the conical cap made some




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


29


symbol over the image, which fell back as if Magic.
asleep, and putting a knife into the other's hand
he said, 'I have taken from it the magical life,
but you must take from it the life you gave.'
Somebody saw the sick man stoop and sever
the head of the image from its body, and then
fall as if he had given himself a mortal wound,
for he had filled it with his own life. And then
the vision changed and fluttered, and he was
lying sick again in the room up-stairs. He
seemed to lie there a long time with the man
in the conical cap watching beside him, and
then, I cannot remember how, the evoker of
spirits discovered that though he would in part
recover, he would never be well, and that the
story had got abroad in the town and shattered
his good name. His pupils had left him and
men avoided him. He was accursed. He was
a magician.
The story was finished, and I looked at my
acquaintance. He was white and awestruck.
He said, as nearly as I can remember, 'All my
life I have seen myself in dreams making a man
by some means like that. When I was a child
I was always thinking out contrivances for
galvanizing a corpse into life.' Presently he
said, 'Perhaps my bad health in this life comes
from that experiment.' I asked if he had read




30


IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


Magic. Frankenstein, and he answered that he had. He
was the only one of us who had, and he had
taken no part in the vision.
III
Then I asked to have some past life of mine
revealed, and a new evocation was made before
the tablet full of little squares. I cannot remember so well who saw this or that detail, for
now I was interested in little but the vision
itself. I had come to a conclusion about the
method. I knew that the vision may be in
part common to several people.
A man in chain armour passed through a
castle door, and the seeress noticed with surprise
the bareness and rudeness of castle rooms.
There was nothing of the magnificence or the
pageantry she had expected. The man came
to a large hall and to a little chapel opening out
of it, where a ceremony was taking place. There
were six girls dressed in white, who took from
the altar some yellow object-I thought it was
gold, for though, like my acquaintance, I was
told not to see, I could not help seeing. Somebody else thought that it was yellow flowers,
and I think the girls, though I cannot remember
clearly, laid it between the man's hands. He
went out after a time, and as he passed through




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


31


the great hall one of us, I forget whom, noticed Magic.
that he passed over two gravestones. Then the
vision became broken, but presently he stood
in a monk's habit among men-at-arms in the
middle of a village reading from a parchment.
He was calling villagers about him, and presently
he and they and the men-at-arms took ship for
some long voyage. The vision became broken
again, and when we could see clearly they had
come to what seemed the Holy Land. They
had begun some kind of sacred labour among
palm-trees. The common men among them
stood idle, but the gentlemen carried large
stones, bringing them from certain directions,
from the cardinal points I think, with a ceremonious formality. The evoker of spirits said
they must be making some kind of masonic
house. His mind, like the minds of so many
students of these hidden things, was always
running on masonry and discovering it in strange
places.
We broke the vision that we might have
supper, breaking it with some form of words
which I forget. When supper had ended the
seeress cried out that while we had been eating
they had been building, and they had built not
a masonic house but a great stone cross. And
now they had all gone away but the man who




32    IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
Magic. had been in chain armour and two monks we
had not noticed before. He was standing against
the cross, his feet upon two stone rests a little
above the ground, and his arms spread out. He
seemed to stand there all day, but when night
came he went to a little cell, that was beside
two other cells. I think they were like the
cells I have seen in the Aran Islands, but I cannot be certain. Many days seemed to pass, and
all day every day he stood upon the cross, and
we never saw anybody there but him and the
two monks. Many years seemed to pass, making the vision flutter like a drift of leaves before
our eyes, and he grew old and white-haired,
and we saw the two monks, old and whitehaired, holding him upon the cross. I asked
the evoker of spirits why the man stood there,
and before he had time to answer I saw two
people, a man and a woman, rising like a dream
within a dream, before the eyes of the man
upon the cross. The evoker of spirits saw them
too, and said that one of them held up his arms
and they were without hands. I thought of
the two grave-stones the man in chain mail
had passed over in the great hall when he came
out of the chapel, and asked the evoker of
spirits if the knight was undergoing a penance
for violence, and while I was asking him, and




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


33


he was saying that it might be so but he did Magic.
not know, the vision, having completed its
circle, vanished.
It had not, so far as I could see, the personal
significance of the other vision, but it was certainly strange and beautiful, though I alone
seemed to see its beauty. Who was it that
made the story, if it were but a story?  I did
not, and the seeress did not, and the evoker of
spirit did not and could not. It arose in three
minds, for I cannot remember my acquaintance
taking any part, and it rose without confusion,
and without labour, except the labour of keeping the mind's eye awake, and more swiftly
than any pen could have written it out. It
may be, as Blake said of one of his poems, that
the author was in eternity. In coming years
I was to see and hear of many such visions, and
though I was not to be convinced, though half
convinced once or twice, that they were old
lives, in an ordinary sense of the word life, I
was to learn that they have almost always some
quite definite relation to dominant moods and
moulding events in this life. They are, perhaps,
in most cases, though the vision I have but just
described was not, it seems, among the cases,
symbolical histories of these moods and events,
or rather symbolical shadows of the impulses
D




34    IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
Magic. that have made them, messages as it were out
of the ancestral being of the questioner.
At the time these two visions meant little
more to me, if I can remember my feeling at
the time, than a proof of the supremacy of
imagination, of the power of many minds to
become one, overpowering one another by
spoken words and by unspoken thought till
they have become a single intense, unhesitating
energy. One mind was doubtless the master,
I thought, but all the minds gave a little,
creating or revealing for a moment what I must
call a supernatural artist.
IV
Some years afterwards I was staying with some
friends in Paris. I had got up before breakfast and gone out to buy a newspaper. I had
noticed the servant, a girl who had come from
the country some years before, laying the table
for breakfast. As I had passed her I had been
telling myself one of those long foolish tales
which one tells only to oneself. If something had happened that had not happened, I
would have hurt my arm, I thought. I saw
myself with my arm in a sling in the middle
of some childish adventures. I returned with
the newspaper and met my host and hostess in




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


35


the door. The moment they saw me they cried Magic.
out, 'Why, the bonne has just told us you had
your arm in a sling. We thought something
must have happened to you last night, that you
had been run over maybe'-or some such words.
I had been dining out at the other end of Paris,
and had come in after everybody had gone to
bed. I had cast my imagination so strongly
upon the servant that she had seen it, and with
what had appeared to be more than the mind's
eye.
One afternoon, about the same time, I was
thinking very intently of a certain fellow-student
for whom I had a message, which I hesitated
about writing. In a couple of days I got a
letter from a place some hundreds of miles away
where that student was. On the afternoon
when I had been thinking so intently I had
suddenly appeared there amid a crowd of people
in a hotel and as seeming solid as if in the flesh.
My fellow-student had seen me, but no one
else, and had asked me to come again when the
people had gone. I had vanished, but had come
again in the middle of the night and given the
message. I myself had no knowledge of casting an imagination upon one so far away.
I could tell of stranger images, of stranger
enchantments, of stranger imaginations, cast




36    IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
Magic. consciously or unconsciously over as great distances by friends or by myself, were it not that
the greater energies of the mind seldom break
forth but when the deeps are loosened. They
break forth amid events too private or too sacred
for public speech, or seem themselves, I know
not why, to belong to hidden things. I have
written of these breakings forth, these loosenings of the deep, with some care and some detail,
but I shall keep my record shut. After all, one
can but bear witness less to convince him who
won't believe than to protect him who does, as
Blake puts it, enduring unbelief and misbelief
and ridicule as best one may. I shall be content to show that past times have believed as I
do, by quoting Joseph Glanvil's description of
the Scholar Gipsy. Joseph Glanvil is dead,
and will not mind unbelief and misbelief and
ridicule.
The Scholar Gipsy, too, is dead, unless indeed
perfectly wise magicians can live till it please
them to die, and he is wandering somewhere,
even if one cannot see him, as Arnold imagined,
'at some lone ale-house in the Berkshire moors,
on the warm ingle-bench,' or 'crossing the stripling Thames at Bablock Hithe,' 'trailing his
fingers in the cool stream,' or 'giving store of
flowers-the frail-leafd white anemone, dark




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


37


bluebells drenched with dews of summer eves,' Magic.
to the girls 'who from the distant hamlets come
to dance around the Fyfield elm in May,' or
'sitting upon the river bank o'ergrown,' living
on through time 'with a free onward impulse.'
This is Joseph Glanvil's storyThere was very lately a lad in the University of
Oxford, who being of very pregnant and ready parts
and yet wanting the encouragement of preferment,
was by his poverty forced to leave his studies there,
and to cast himself upon the wide world for a livelihood. Now his necessities growing daily on him, and
wanting the help of friends to relieve him, he was at
last forced to join himself to a company of vagabond
gipsies, whom occasionally he met with, and to
follow their trade for a maintenance.... After he
had been a pretty while well exercised in the trade,
there chanced to ride by a couple of scholars, who
had formerly been of his acquaintance. The scholar
had quickly spied out these old friends among the
gipsies, and their amazement to see him among such
society had well-nigh discovered him; but by a sign
he prevented them owning him before that crew,
and taking one of them aside privately desired him
with his friend to go to an inn, not far distant, promising there to come to them. They accordingly went
thither and he follows: after their first salutation his
friends inquire how he came to lead so odd a life as
that was, and so joined himself into such a beggarly
company. The scholar gipsy having given them an
account of the necessity which drove him to that kind




38     IDEAS OF GOOD AND          EVIL
Magic. of life, told them that the people he went with were
not such impostors as they were taken for, but that
they had a traditional kind of learning among them
and could do wonders by the power of imagination,
and that himself had learned much of their art and
improved it further than themselves could. And to
evince the truth of what he told them, he said he'd
remove into another room, leaving them to discourse
together; and upon his return tell them the sense of
what they had talked of; which accordingly he performed, giving them a full account of what had passed
between them in his absence. The scholars being
amazed at so unexpected a discovery, earnestly desired
him to unriddle the mystery. In which he gave them
satisfaction by telling them that what he did was by
the power of imagination, his phantasy leading theirs;
and that himself had dictated to them the discourse
they had held together while he was from them; that
there were warrantable ways of heightening the imagination to that pitch as to bend another's, and that
when he had compassed the whole secret, some parts
of which he was yet ignorant of, he intended to leave
their company and give the world an account of what
he had learned.
If all who have described events like this
have not dreamed, we should rewrite our histories, for all men, certainly all imaginative men,
must be for ever casting forth enchantments,
glamours, illusions; and all men, especially
tranquil men who have no powerful egotistic
life, must be continually passing under their




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


39


power. Our most elaborate thoughts, elaborate Magic.
purposes, precise emotions, are often, as I think,
not really ours, but have on a sudden come up,
as it were, out of hell or down out of heaven.
The historian should remember, should he not?
angels and devils not less than kings and soldiers,
and plotters and thinkers. What matter if the
angel or devil, as indeed certain old writers
believed, first wrapped itself with an organized
shape in some man's imagination? what matter
"if God himself only acts or is in existing beings
or men,' as Blake believed? we must none the
less admit that invisible beings, far wandering
influences, shapes that may have floated from
a hermit of the wilderness, brood over councilchambers and studies and battle-fielde. We
should never be certain that it was not some
woman treading in the wine-press who began
that subtle change in men's minds, that powerful movement of thought and imagination about
which so many Germans have written; or that
the passion, because of which so many countries
were given to the sword, did not begin in the
mind of some shepherd boy, lighting up his
eyes for a moment before it ran upon its way.




40    IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
Magic.
V
We cannot doubt that barbaric people receive
such influences more visibly and obviously, and
in all likelihood more easily and fully than we
do, for our life in cities, which deafens or kills
the passive meditative life, and our education
that enlarges the separated, self-moving mind,
have made our souls less sensitive. Our souls
that were once naked to the winds of heaven
are now thickly clad, and have learned to build
a house and light a fire upon its hearth, and
shut to the doors and windows. The winds
can, indeed, make us draw near to the fire, or
can even lift the carpet and whistle under the
door, but they could do worse out on the plains
long ago. A certain learned man, quoted by
Mr. Lang in his Making of Religion, contends
that the memories of primitive man and his
thoughts of distant places must have had the
intensity of hallucination, because there was
nothing in his mind to draw his attention away
from them-an explanation that does not seem
to me complete-and Mr. Lang goes on to
quote certain travellers to prove that savages
live always on the edges of vision. One Laplander who wished to become a Christian, and




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


41


thought visions but heathenish, confessed to a Magic.
traveller, to whom he had given a minute account of many distant events, read doubtless in
that traveller's mind, 'that he knew not how
to make use of his eyes, since things altogether
distant were present to them.' I myself could
find in one district in Galway but one man who
had not seen what I can but call spirits, and
he was in his dotage. 'There is no man mowing a meadow but sees them at one time or
another,' said a man in a different district.
If I can unintentionally cast a glamour, an
enchantment, over persons of our own time
who have lived for years in great cities, there
is no reason to doubt that men could cast intentionally a far stronger enchantment, a far
stronger glamour, over the more sensitive people
of ancient times, or that men can still do so
where the old order of life remains unbroken.
Why should not the Scholar Gipsy cast his
spell over his friends?  Why should not St.
Patrick, or he of whom the story was first
told, pass his enemies, he and all his clerics, as a
herd of deer? Why should not enchanters like
him in the Morte d'Arthur make troops of horse
seem but grey stones?  Why should not the
Roman soldiers, though they came of a civilization which was ceasing to be sensitive to




42    IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
Magic. these things, have trembled for a moment before
the enchantments of the Druids of Mona? Why
should not the Jesuit father, or the Count Saint
Germain, or whoever the tale was first told of,
have really seemed to leave the city in a coach
and four by all the Twelve Gates at once? Why
should not Moses and the enchanters of Pharaoh
have made their staffs as the medicine men of
many primitive peoples make their pieces of
old rope seem like devouring serpents? Why
should not that mediaeval enchanter have made
summer and all its blossoms seem to break forth
in middle winter?
May we not learn some day to rewrite our
histories, when they touch upon these things
too?
Men who are imaginative writers to-day
may well have preferred to influence the imagination of others more directly in past times.
Instead of learning their craft with paper and
a pen they may have sat for hours imagining
themselves to be stocks and stones and beasts
of the wood, till the images were so vivid that
the passers-by became but a part of the imagination of the dreamer, and wept or laughed or
ran away as he would have them. Have not
poetry and music arisen, as it seems, out of
the sounds the enchanters made to help their




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


43


imagination to enchant, to charm, to bind with Magic.
a spell themselves and the passers-by? These
very words, a chief part of all praises of music
or poetry, still cry to us their origin. And just
as the musician or the poet enchants and charms
and binds with a spell his own mind when he
would enchant the minds of others, so did the
enchanter create or reveal for himself as well
as for others the supernatural artist or genius,
the seeming transitory mind made out of many
minds, whose work I saw, or thought I saw,
in that suburban house. He kept the doors
too, as it seems, of those less transitory minds,
the genius of the family, the genius of the tribe,
or it may be, when he was mighty-souled
enough, the genius of the world. Our history
speaks of opinions and discoveries, but in ancient
times when, as I think, men had their eyes
ever upon those doors, history spoke of commandments and revelations. They looked as
carefully and as patiently towards Sinai and its
thunders as we look towards parliaments and
laboratories. We are always praising men in
whom the individual life has come to perfection,
but they were always praising the one mind,
their foundation of all perfection.




44     IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
Magic.
VI
I once saw a young Irish woman, fresh from
a convent school, cast into a profound trance,
though not by a method known to any hypnotist. In her waking state she thought the apple
of Eve was the kind of apple you can buy at
the greengrocer's, but in her trance she saw the
Tree of Life with ever-sighing souls moving in
its branches instead of sap, and among its leaves
all the fowls of the air, and on its highest bough
one white fowl bearing a crown. When I went
home I took from the shelf a translation of The
Book of Concealed Mystery, an old Jewish book,
and cutting the pages came upon this passage,
which I cannot think I had ever read: 'The
Tree,... is the Tree of the Knowledge of
Good and of Evil... in its branches the
birds lodge and build their nests, the souls and
the angels have their place.'
I once saw a young Church of Ireland man,
a bank clerk in the west of Ireland, thrown in
a like trance. I have no doubt that he, too,
was quite certain that the apple of Eve was a
greengrocer's apple, and yet he saw the tree
and heard the souls sighing through its branches,
and saw apples with human faces, and laying




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


45


his ear to an apple heard a sound as of fighting Magic.
hosts within. Presently he strayed from the
tree and came to the edge of Eden, and there
he found himself not by the wilderness he had
learned of at the Sunday-school, but upon the
summit of a great mountain, of a mountain
'two miles high.' The whole summit, in contradiction to all that would have seemed probable to his waking mind, was a great walled
garden. Some years afterwards I found a
medieval diagram, which pictured Eden as a
walled garden upon a high mountain.
Where did these intricate symbols come
from? Neither I nor the one or two people
present or the seers had ever seen, I am convinced, the description in The Book of Concealed
Mystery, or the medieval diagram. Remember
that the images appeared in a moment perfect
in all their complexity. If one can imagine
that the seers or that I myself or another had
read of these images and forgotten it, that the
supernatural artist's knowledge of what was in
our buried memories accounted for these visions,
there are numberless other visions to account
for. One cannot go on believing in improbable
knowledge for ever. For instance, I find in my
diary that on December 27, 1897, a seer, to
whom I had given a certain old Irish symbol,




46     IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
Magic. saw Brigit, the goddess, holding out 'a glittering and wriggling serpent,'and yet I feel certain
that neither I nor he knew anything of her
association with the serpent until Carmina
Gadelica was published a few months ago.
And an old Irish woman who can neither read
nor write has described to me a woman dressed
like Dian, with helmet, and short skirt and
sandals, and what seemed to be buskins. Why,
too, among all the countless stories of visions
that I have gathered in Ireland, or that a friend
has gathered for me, are there none that mix
the dress of different periods? The seers when
they are but speaking from tradition will mix
everything together, and speak of Finn mac
Cool going to the Assizes at Cork. Almost
every one who has ever busied himself with
such matters has come, in trance or dream,
upon some new and strange symbol or event,
which he has afterwards found in some work
he had never read or heard of. Examples like
this are as yet too little classified, too little
analyzed, to convince the stranger, but some
of them are proof enough for those they have
happened to, proof that there is a memory of
nature that reveals events and symbols of distant centuries. Mystics of many countries and
many centuries have spoken of this memory;




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


47


and the honest men and charlatans, who keep  Magic.
the magical traditions which will some day be
studied as a part of folk-lore, base most that is
of importance in their claims upon this memory.
I have read of it in Paracelsus and in some
Indian book that describes the people of past
days as still living within it, 'Thinking the
thought and doing the deed.' And I have
found it in the prophetic books of William
Blake, who calls its images 'the bright sculptures of Los's Halls'; and says that all events,
'all love stories,' renew themselves from those
images. It is perhaps well that so few believe
in it, for if many did many would go out of
parliaments and universities and libraries and
run into the wilderness to so waste the body,
and to so hush the unquiet mind that, still living, they might pass the doors the dead pass
daily; for who among the wise would trouble
himself with making laws or in writing history
or in weighing the earth if the things of eternity
seemed ready to hand?
VII
I find in my diary of magical events for 1899
that I awoke at 3 A.M. out of a nightmare, and
imagined one symbol to prevent its recurrence,




48    IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
Magic. and imagined another, a simple geometrical
form, which calls up dreams of luxuriant vegetable life, that I might have pleasant dreams.
I imagined it faintly, being very sleepy, and
went to sleep. I had confused dreams which
seemed to have no relation with the symbol.
I awoke about eight, having for the time forgotten both nightmare and symbol. Presently
I dozed off again and began half to dream and
half to see, as one does between sleep and waking,
enormous flowers and grapes. I awoke and
recognized that what I had dreamed or seen
was the kind of thing appropriate to the symbol
before I remembered having used it. I find
another record, though made some time after
the event, of having imagined over the head of
a person, who was a little of a seer, a combined
symbol of elemental air and elemental water.
This person, who did not know what symbol I
was using, saw a pigeon flying with a lobster
in his bill. I find that on December 13, 1898,
I used a certain star-shaped symbol with a
seeress, getting her to look at it intently before
she began seeing. She saw a rough stone house,
and in the middle of the house the skull of a
horse. I find that I had used the same symbol
a few days before with a seer, and that he had
seen a rough stone house, and in the middle of




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


49


the house something under a cloth marked with Magic.
the Hammer of Thor. He had lifted the cloth
and discovered a skeleton of gold with teeth of
diamonds, and eyes of some unknown dim precious stones. I had made a note to this last
vision, pointing out that we had been using a
Solar symbol a little earlier. Solar symbols often
call up visions of gold and precious stones. I
do not give these examples to prove my arguments, but to illustrate them. I know that my
examples will awaken in all who have not met
the like, or who are not on other grounds inclined towards my arguments, a most natural
incredulity. It was long before I myself would
admit an inherent power in symbols, for it long
seemed to me that one could account for everything by the power of one imagination over
another, telepathy as it is called with that
separation of knowledge and life, of word and
emotion, which is the sterility of scientific
speech.  The symbol seemed    powerful, I
thought, merely because we thought it powerful, and we would do just as well without it.
In those days I used symbols made with some
ingenuity instead of merely imagining them.
I used to give them to the person I was experimenting with, and tell him to hold them
to his forehead without looking at them; and
E




50 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


Magic. sometimes I made a mistake. I learned from
these mistakes that if I did not myself imagine
the symbol, in which case he would have a
mixed vision, it was the symbol I gave by mistake that produced the vision. Then I met
with a seer who could say to me, 'I have a
vision of a square pond, but I can see your
thought, and you expect me to see an oblong
pond,' or 'The symbol you are imagining has
made me see a woman holding a crystal, but it
was a moonlight sea I should have seen.' I
discovered that the symbol hardly ever failed
to call up its typical scene, its typical event,
its typical person, but that I could practically
never call up, no matter how vividly I imagined
it, the particular scene, the particular event,
the particular person I had in my own mind,
and that when I could, the two visions rose
side by side.
I cannot now think symbols less than the
greatest of all powers whether they are used
consciously by the masters of magic, or half
unconsciously by their successors, the poet, the
musician and the artist. At first I tried to
distinguish between symbols and symbols, between what I called inherent symbols and
arbitrary symbols, but the distinction has come
to mean little or nothing.  Whether their




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


51


power has arisen out of themselves, or whether Magic.
it has an arbitrary origin, matters little, for
they act, as I believe, because the great memory
associates them with certain events and moods
and persons. Whatever the passions of man
have gathered about, becomes a symbol in the
great memory, and in the hands of him who
has the secret, it is a worker of wonders, a
caller-up of angels or of devils. The symbols
are of all kinds, for everything in heaven or
earth has its association, momentous or trivial,
in the great memory, and one never knows
what forgotten events may have plunged it,
like the toadstool and the ragweed, into the
great passions. Knowledgeable men and women
in Ireland sometimes distinguish between the
simples that work cures by some medical property in the herb, and those that do their work
by magic. Such magical simples as the husk
of the flax, water out of the fork of an elmtree, do their work, as I think, by awaking in
the depths of the mind where it mingles with
the great mind, and is enlarged by the great
memory, some curative energy, some hypnotic
command. They are not what we call faith
cures, for they have been much used and successfully, the traditions of all lands affirm, over
children and over animals, and to me they




52    IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
Magic. seem the only medicine that could have been
committed safely to ancient hands. To pluck
the wrong leaf would have been to go uncured,
but, if one had eaten it, one might have been
poisoned.
VIII
I have now described that belief in magic
which has'set me all but unwilling among those
lean and fierce minds who are at war with their
time, who cannot accept the days as they pass,
simply and gladly; and I look at what I have
written with some alarm, for I have told more
of the ancient secret than many among my
fellow-students think it right to tell. I have
come to believe so many strange things because
of experience, that I see little reason to doubt
the truth of many things that are beyond my
experience; and it may be that there are beings
who watch over that ancient secret, as all tradition affirms, and resent, and perhaps avenge,
too fluent speech. They say in the Aran Islands
that if you speak overmuch of the things of
Faery your tongue becomes like a stone, and
it seems to me, though doubtless naturalistic
reason would call it Auto-suggestion or the
like, that I have often felt my tongue become
just so heavy and clumsy. More than once,




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


53


too, as I wrote this very essay I have become Magic.
uneasy, and have torn up some paragraph, not
for any literary reason, but because some incident or some symbol that would perhaps have
meant nothing to the reader, seemed, I know
not why, to belong to hidden things. Yet I
must write or be of no account to any cause,
good or evil; I must commit what merchandise
of wisdom I have to this ship of written speech,
and after all, I have many a time watched it
put out to sea with not less alarm when all the
speech was rhyme. We who write, we who
bear witness, must often hear our hearts cry
out against us, complaining because of their
hidden things, and I know not but he who
speaks of wisdom may not sometimes in the
change that is coming upon the world, have to
fear the anger of the people of Faery, whose
country is the heart of the world--'The Land
of the Living Heart.' Who can keep always to
the little pathway between speech and silence,
where one meets none but discreet revelations?
And surely, at whatever risk, we must cry out
that imagination is always seeking to remake
the world according to the impulses and the
patterns in that great Mind, and that great
Memory? Can there be anything so important as to cry out that what we call romance,




54    IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
Magic. poetry, intellectual beauty, is the only signal
that the supreme Enchanter, or some one in
His councils, is speaking of what has been,
and shall be again, in the consummation of
time?
1901.




THE HAPPIEST OF THE POETS.
I
ROSSETTI in one of his letters numbers his
favourite colours in the order of his favour,
and throughout his work one feels that he loved
form and colour for themselves and apart from
what they represent. One feels sometimes that
he desired a world of essences, of unmixed
powers, of impossible purities. It is as though
the last judgment had already begun in his
mind and that the essences and powers, which
the divine hand had mixed into one another to
make the loam of life, fell asunder at his touch.
If he painted a flame or a blue distance, he
painted as though he had seen the flame out of
whose heart all flames had been taken, or the
blue of the abyss that was before all life; and
if he painted a woman's face he painted it in
some moment of intensity when the ecstasy of
the lover and of the saint are alike, and desire
becomes wisdom without ceasing to be desire.
He listens to the cry of the flesh till it becomes
proud and passes beyond the world where some




56    IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
The   immense desire that the intellect cannot underHappiest stand mixes with the desire of a body's warmth
of the
Poets. and softness. His genius like Shelley's can
hardly stir but to the rejection of nature, whose
delight is profusion, but never intensity, and
like Shelley's it follows the Star of the Magi,
the Morning and Evening Star, the mother of
impossible hope, although it follows through
deep woods, where the star glimmers among
dew-drenched boughs and not through 'a windswept valley of the Apennine.' Men like him
cannot be happy as we understand happiness,
for to be happy one must delight like nature
in mere profusion, in mere abundance, in making and doing things, and if one sets an image
of the perfect before one it must be the image
that draws her perpetually, the image of a
perfect fulness of natural life, of an Earthly
Paradise. One's emotion must never break the
bonds of life, one's hands must never labour to
loosen the silver cord, one's ears must never
strain to catch the sound of Michael's trumpet.
That is to say, one must not be among those
that would have prayed in old times in some
chapel of the Star, but among those who would
have prayed under the shadow of the Green
Tree, and on the wet stones of the Well, among
the worshippers of natural abundance.




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


57


The
II                     Happiest
of the
I do not think it was accident, so subtle are  Poets.
the threads that lead the soul, that made William
Morris, who seems to me to be the one perfectly happy and fortunate poet of modern
times, celebrate the Green Tree and the goddess
Habundia, and wells and enchanted waters in
so many books. In The Well at the World's End
green trees and enchanted waters are shown to
us, as they were understood by old writers,
who thought that the generation of all things
was through water; for when the water that
gives a long and fortunate life and that can be
found by none but such a one as all women
love is found at last, the Dry Tree, the image
of the ruined land, becomes green. To him
indeed as to older writers Well and Tree are
all but images of the one thing, of an 'energy'
that is not the less 'eternal delight' because it
is half of the body. He never wrote, and could
not have written, of a man or woman who
was not of the kin of Well or Tree. Long
before he had named either he had made his
"Wanderers' follow a dream indeed, but a
dream of natural happiness, and all the people
of all his poems and stories from the confused
beginning of his art in The Hollow Land to its




58    IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
The   end in The Sundering Flood, are full of the heavy
Happiest sweetness of this dream. He wrote indeed of
ofthe
Poets. nothing but of the quest of the Grail, but it
was the Heathen Grail that gave every man
his chosen food, and not the Grail of Malory
or Wagner; and he came at last to praise, as
other men have praised the martyrs of religion
or of passion, men with lucky eyes and men
whom all women love.
We know so little of man and of the world
that we cannot be certain that the same invisible hands, that gave him an imagination
preoccupied with good fortune, gave him also
health and wealth, and the power to create
beautiful things without labour, that he might
honour the Green Tree. It pleases me to
imagine the copper mine which brought, as
Mr. Mackail has told, so much unforeseen
wealth and in so astonishing a way, as no less
miraculous than the three arrows in YThe Sundering Flood. No mighty poet in his misery dead
could have delighted enough to make us delight
in men 'who knew no vain desire of foolish
fame,' but who thought the dance upon 'the
stubble field' and 'the battle with the earth'
better than 'the bitter war' 'where right and
wrong are mixed together.' 'Oh the trees, the
trees!' he wrote in one of his early letters, and




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


59


it was his work to make us, who had been   The
taught to sympathize with the unhappy till we Happiest
of the
had grown morbid, to sympathize with men   Poets.
and women who turned everything into happiness because they had in them something of
the abundance of the beechen boughs or of the
bursting wheat-ear. He alone, I think, has
told the story of Alcestis with perfect sympathy
for Admetus, with so perfect a sympathy that
he cannot persuade himself that one so happy
died at all; and he, unlike all other poets, has
delighted to tell us that the men after his own
heart, the men of his News from Nowhere, sorrowed but a little while over unhappy love.
He cannot even think of nobility and happiness
apart, for all his people are like his men of
Burg Dale who lived 'in much plenty and ease
of life, though not delicately or desiring things
out of measure. They wrought with their
hands and wearied themselves; and they rested
from their toil and feasted and were merry; tomorrow was not a burden to them, nor yesterday a thing which they would fain forget; life
shamed them not nor did death make them
afraid. As for the Dale wherein they dwelt,
it was indeed most fair and lovely and they
deemed it the Blessing of the earth, and they
trod the flowery grass beside its rippled stream




60 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


The   amidst the green tree-boughs proudly and joyHappiest fully with goodly bodies and merry hearts.'
Poets.
III
I think of his men as with broad brows and
golden beards and mild eyes and tranquil speech,
and of his good women as like 'The Bride' in
whose face Rossetti saw and painted for once
the abundance of earth and not the half-hidden
light of his star. They are not in love with
love for its own sake, with a love that is apart
from the world or at enmity with it, as Swinburne imagines Mary Stuart and as all men
have imagined Helen. They do not seek in
love that ecstasy, which Shelley's nightingale
called death, that extremity of life in which
life seems to pass away like the Phcenix in
flame of its own lighting, but rather a gentle
self-surrender that would lose more than half
its sweetness if it lost the savour of coming days.
They are good house-wives; they sit often at
the embroidery frame, and they have wisdom
in flocks and herds and they are before all fruitful mothers. It seems at times as if their love
was less a passion for one man out of the world
than submission to the hazard of destiny, and
the hope of motherhood and the innocent desire of the body. They accept changes and




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


6i


chances of life as gladly as they accept spring  The
and summer and autumn and winter, and be- Happiest
of the
cause they have sat under the shadow of the  Poets.
Green Tree and drunk the Waters of Abundance
out of their hollow hands, the barren blossoms
do not seem to them the most beautiful. When
Habundia takes the shape of Birdalone she
comes first as a young naked girl standing
among great trees, and then as an old carline,
Birdalone in stately old age. And when she
praises Birdalone's naked body, and speaks of
the desire it shall awaken, praise and desire are
innocent because they would not break the
links that chain the days to one another. The
desire seems not other than the desire of the
bird for its mate in the heart of the wood, and
we listen to that joyous praise as though a bird
watching its plumage in still water had begun
to sing in its joy, or as if we heard hawk praising hawk in the middle air, and because it is
the praise of one made for all noble life and not
for pleasure only, it seems, though it is the
praise of the body, that it is the noblest praise.
Birdalone has never seen her image but in
'a broad latten dish,' so the wood woman must
tell her of her body and praise it.
"Thus it is with thee; thou standest before
me a tall and slim maiden, somewhat thin as




62 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


The   befitteth thy seventeen summers; where thy
Happiest flesh is bare of wont, as thy throat and thine
Poets  arms and thy legs from  the middle down, it
is tanned a beauteous colour, but otherwhere
it is even as fair a vihite, wholesome and clean
as if the golden sunlight which fulfilleth the
promise of the earth were playing therein...
Delicate and clean-made is the little trench
that goeth from thy mouth to thy lips, and
sweet it is, and there is more might in it than
sweet words spoken. Thy lips they are of the
finest fashion, yet rather thin than full; and
some would not have it so; but I would,
whereas I see therein a sign of thy valiancy
and friendliness. Surely he who did thy carven
chin had a mind to a master work and did no
less. Great was the deftness of thine imaginer,
and he would have all folk who see thee wonder
at thy deep thinking and thy carefulness and
thy kindness. Ah, maiden! is it so that thy
thoughts are ever deep and solemn? Yet at
least I know it of thee that they be hale and
true and sweet.
"My friend, when thou hast a mirror, some
of all this thou shalt see, but not all; and when
thou hast a lover some deal wilt thou hear, but
not all. But now thy she-friend may tell it
thee all, if she have eyes to see it, as have I;




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


63


whereas no man could say so much of thee    The
before the mere love should overtake him, and Happiest
of the
turn his speech into the folly of love and the  Poets.
madness of desire.'
All his good women, whether it is Danae in
her tower, or that woman in rThe Wood beyond
the World who can make the withered flowers
in her girdle grow young again by the touch
of her hand, are of the kin of the wood woman.
All his bad women too and his half-bad women
are of her kin. The evils their enchantments
make are a disordered abundance like that of
weedy places and they are as cruel as wild
creatures are cruel and they have unbridled
desires. One finds these evils in their typical
shape in that isle of the Wondrous Isles, where
the wicked witch has her pleasure-house and
her prison, and in that 'isle of the old and the
young,' where until her enchantment is broken
second childhood watches over children who
never grow old and who seem to the bystander
who knows their story 'like images' or like
"the rabbits on the grass.' It is as though
Nature spoke through him at all times in the
mood that is upon her when she is opening
the apple-blossom or reddening the apple or
thickening the shadow of the boughs, and that




64    IDEAS OF GOOD AND         EVIL
The   the men and women of his verse and of his
Happiest stories are all the ministers of her mood.
of the
Poets.
IV
When I was a child I often heard my elders
talking of an old turreted house where an old
great-uncle of mine lived, and of its gardens
and its long pond where there was an island
with tame eagles; and one day somebody read
me some verses and said they made him think
of that old house where he had been very
happy. The verses ran in my head for years
and became to me the best description of happiness in the world, and I am not certain that I
know a better even now. They were those first
dozen verses of Golden Wings that begin'Midways of a walled garden
In the happy poplar land
Did an ancient castle stand,
With an old knight for a warden.
Many scarlet bricks there were
In its walls, and old grey stone;
Over which red apples shone
At the right time of the year.
On the bricks the green moss grew,
Yellow lichen on the stone,
Over which red apples shone;
Little war that castle knew.'




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


When William Morris describes a house of  The
any kind, and makes his description poetical, Happiest
it is always, I think, some house that he would  Poets.
have liked to have lived in, and I remember him
saying about the time when he was writing of
that great house of the Wolfings, 'I decorate
modern houses for people, but the house that
would please me would be some great room
where one talked to one's friends in one corner
and eat in another and slept in another and
worked in another.' Indeed all he writes seems
to me like the make-believe of a child who is
remaking the world, not always in the same
way, but always after his own heart; and so
unlike all other modern writers he makes his
poetry out of unending pictures of a happiness
that is often what a child might imagine, and
always a happiness that sets mind and body at
ease. Now it is a picture of some great room
full of merriment, now of the wine-press, now
of the golden threshing-floor, now of an old
mill among apple-trees, now of cool water after
the heat of the sun, now of some well-sheltered,
well-tilled place among woods or mountains,
where men and women live happily, knowing
of nothing that is too far off or too great for
the affections. He has but one story to tell us,
how some man or woman lost and found again
F




66  IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


The   the happiness that is always half of the body;
"Happiest and even when they are wandering from it,
Poets. leaves must fall over them, and flowers make
fragrances about them, and warm winds fan
them, and birds sing to them, for being of
Habundia's kin they must not forget the shadow
of her Green Tree even for a moment, and the
waters of her Well must be always wet upon
their sandals. His poetry often wearies us as
the unbroken green of July wearies us, for there
is something in us, some bitterness because of
the Fall it may be, that takes a little from the
sweetness of Eve's apple after the first mouthful; but he who did all things gladly and easily,
who never knew the curse of labour, found it
always as sweet as it was in Eve's mouth. All
kinds of associations have gathered about the
pleasant things of the world and half taken the
pleasure out of them for the greater number of
men, but he saw them as when they came from
the Divine Hand. I often see him in my mind
as I saw him once at Hammersmith holding
up a glass of claret towards the light and saying, 'Why do people say it is prosaic to get
inspiration out of wine? Is it not the sunlight
and the sap in the leaves? Are not grapes made
by the sunlight and the sap?'




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


67


The
v                     Happiest
of the
In one of his little socialistic pamphlets he  Poets.
tells us how he sat under an elm-tree and
watched the starlings and thought of an old
horse and an old labourer that had passed him
by, and of the men and women he had seen in
towns; and he wondered how all these had
come to be as they were. He saw that the
starlings were beautiful and merry and that
men and the old horse they had subdued to
their service were ugly and miserable, and yet
the starlings, he thought, were of one kind
whether there or in the south of England, and
the ugly men and women were of one kind
with those whose nobility and beauty had
moved the ancient sculptors and poets to
imagine the gods and the heroes after the
images of men. Then he began, he tells us, to
meditate how this great difference might be
ended and a new life, which would permit men
to have beauty in common among them as the
starlings have, be built on the wrecks of the
old life. In other words, his mind was illuminated from within and lifted into prophecy
in the full right sense of the word, and he saw
the natural things he was alone gifted to see in
their perfect form; and having that faith which




68  IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


The   is alone worth having, for it includes all others,
Happiest a sure knowledge established in the constitution
of the
Poets. of his mind that perfect things are final things,
he announced that all he had seen would come
to pass. I do not think he troubled to understand books of economics, and Mr. Mackail
says, I think, that they vexed him and wearied
him. He found it enough to hold up, as it
were, life as it is to-day beside his visions, and
to show how faded its colours were and how
sapless it was. And if we had not enough
artistic feeling, enough feeling for the perfect
that is, to admit the authority of the vision;
or enough faith to understand that all that is
imperfect passes away, he would not, as I think,
have argued with us in a serious spirit. Though
I think that he never used the kinds of words
I use in writing of him, though I think he
would even have disliked a word like faith
with its theological associations, I am certain
that he understood thoroughly, as all artists
understand a little, that the important things,
the things we must believe in or perish, are
beyond argument. We can no more reason
about them than can the pigeon, come but
lately from the egg, about the hawk whose
shadow makes it cower among the grass. His
vision is true because it is poetical, because we




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


69


are a little happier when we are looking at it;  The
and he knew as Shelley knew by an act of faith Happiest
of the
that the economists should take their measure-  Poets.
ments not from life as it is, but from the vision
of the world made perfect that is buried under
all minds. The early Christians were of the kin
of the Wilderness and of the Dry Tree, and
they saw an unearthly Paradise, but he was of
the kin of the Well and of the Green Tree and
he saw an Earthly Paradise.
He obeyed his vision when he tried to make
first his own house, for he was in this matter
also like a child playing with the world, and
then houses of other people, places where one
could live happily; and he obeyed it when he
wrote essays about the nature of happy work,
and when he spoke at street corners about the
coming changes.
He knew clearly what he was doing towards
the end, for he lived at a time when poets and
artists have begun again to carry the burdens
that priests and theologians took from them
angrily some few hundred years ago. His art
was not more essentially religious than Rossetti's art, but it was different, for Rossetti,
drunken with natural beauty, saw the supernatural beauty, the impossible beauty, in his
frenzy, while he being less intense and more




70    IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
The   tranquil would show us a beauty that would
Happiest wither if it did not set us at peace with natural
of the
Poets. things, and if we did not believe that it existed
always a little, and would some day exist in its
fulness. He may not have been, indeed he was
not, among the very greatest of the poets, but
he was among the greatest of those who prepare the last reconciliation when the Cross shall
blossom with roses.
1902.




THE PHILOSOPHY OF SHELLEY'S
POETRY
I. HIS RULING IDEAS
WHEN I was a boy in Dublin I was one of a
group who rented a room in a mean street to discuss philosophy. My fellow-students got more
and more interested in certain modern schools of
mystical belief, and I never found anybody to
share my one unshakable belief. I thought that
whatever of philosophy has been made poetry
is alone permanent, and that one should begin
to arrange it in some regular order, rejecting
nothing as the make-believe of the poets. I
thought, so far as I can recollect my thoughts
after so many years, that if a powerful and
benevolent spirit has shaped the destiny of this
world, we can better discover that destiny from
the words that have gathered up the heart's
desire of the world, than from historical records,
or from speculation, wherein the heart withers.
Since then I have observed dreams and visions
very carefully, and am now certain that the




72


IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


The   imagination has some way of lighting on the
Philosophy truth that the reason has not, and that its comofShelley's
Poetry. mandments, delivered when the body is still and
the reason silent, are the most binding we can
ever know. I have re-read Prometheus Unbound,
which I had hoped my fellow-students would
have studied as a sacred book, and it seems to
me to have an even more certain place than
I had thought, among the sacred books of the
world.  I remember going to a learned scholar
to ask about its deep meanings, which I felt
more than understood, and his telling me that
it was Godwin's Political Justice put into rhyme,
and that Shelley was a crude revolutionist, and
believed that the overturning of kings and
priests would regenerate mankind. I quoted
the lines which tell how the halcyons ceased to
prey on fish, and how poisonous leaves became
good for food, to show that he foresaw more
than any political regeneration, but was too
timid to push the argument. I still believe
that one cannot help believing him, as this
scholar I know believes him, a vague thinker,
who mixed occasional great poetry with a
phantastic rhetoric, unless one compares such
passages, and above all such passages as describe
the liberty he praised, till one has discovered
the system of belief that lay behind them.  It




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


73


should seem natural to find his thought full of  The
subtlety, for Mrs. Shelley has told how he hesi- Philosophy
1     1of Shelley's
tated whether he should be a metaphysician or Poetry.
a poet, and has spoken of his ' huntings after
the obscure' with regret, and said of that Prometheus Unbound, which so many for three
generations have thought Political Justice put
into rhyme, 'It requires a mind as subtle and
penetrating as his own to understand the mystic
meanings scattered throughout the poem. They
elude the ordinary reader by their abstraction
and delicacy of distinction, but they are far
from vague.   It was his design to write prose
metaphysical essays on the Nature of Man,
which would have served to explain much of
what is obscure in his poetry; a few scattered
fragments of observation and remarks alone
remain.   He considered these philosophical
views of mind and nature to be instinct with
the intensest spirit of poetry.' From  these
scattered fragments and observations, and from
many passages read in their light, one soon
comes to understand that his liberty was so
much more than the liberty of Political Justice
that it was one with Intellectual Beauty, and
that the regeneration he foresaw was so much
more than the regeneration many political
dreamers have foreseen, that it could not come




74     IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
The   in its perfection till the hours bore 'Time to
Philosophy his grave in eternity.' In A Defence of Poetry,
of Shelley's                                     Y
Poetry. the profoundest essay on the foundation of
poetry in English, he shows that the poet and
the lawgiver hold their station by the right of
the same faculty, the one uttering in words and
the other in the forms of society, his vision of
the divine order, the Intellectual Beauty.
"Poets, according to the circumstances of the
age and nation in which they appeared, were
called in the earliest epoch of the world legislators or prophets, and a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For
he not only beholds intensely the present as it
is, and discovers those laws according to which
present things are to be ordained, but he
beholds the future in the present, and his
thoughts are the germs of the flowers and the
fruit of latest time.' ' Language, colour, form,
and religious and civil habits of action are all
the instruments and   materials of poetry.'
Poetry is 'the creation of actions according to
the unchangeable process of human nature as
existing in the mind of the creator, which is
itself the image of all other minds.' 'Poets
have been challenged to resign the civic crown
to reasoners and merchants.... It is admitted that the exercise of the imagination is




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


75


the most delightful, but it is alleged that that  The
of reason is the more useful.... Whilst the Philosophy
of Shelley's
mechanist abridges and the political economist  Poetry.
combines labour, let them be sure that their
speculations, for want of correspondence with
those first principles which belong to the imagination, do not tend, as they have in modern
England, to exasperate at once the extremes of
luxury and want.... The rich have become
richer, the poor have become poorer,...
such are the effects which must ever flow from
an unmitigated exercise of the calculating
faculty.' The speaker of these things might
almost be Blake, who held that the Reason not
only created Ugliness, but all other evils. The
books of all wisdom are hidden in the cave of
the Witch of Atlas, who is one of his personifications of beauty, and when she moves over
the enchanted river that is an image of all life,
the priests cast aside their deceits, and the king
crowns an ape to mock his own sovereignty,
and the soldiers gather about the anvils to beat
their swords to ploughshares, and lovers cast
away their timidity, and friends are united;
while the power which in Laon and Cythna
awakens the mind of the reformer to contend,
and itself contends, against the tyrannies of the
world, is first seen as the star of love or beauty.




76


IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


The   And at the end of The Ode to Naples, he cries
Philosophy out to 'the spirit of beauty' to overturn the
of Shelley's
Poetry. tyrannies of the world, or to fill them with its
"harmonizing ardours.' He calls the spirit of
beauty liberty, because despotism, and perhaps,
as 'the man of virtuous soul commands not
nor obeys,' all authority, pluck virtue from her
path towards beauty, and because it leads us by
that love whose service is perfect freedom. It
leads all things by love, for he cries again and
again that love is the perception of beauty in
thought and things, and it orders all things by
love, for it is love that impels the soul to its
expressions in thought and in action, by making us 'seek to awaken in all things that are, a
community with what we experience within
ourselves.' 'We are born into the world, and
there is something within us which, from the
instant that we live, more and more thirsts after
its likeness.' We have 'a soul within our soul
that describes a circle around its proper paradise which pain and sorrow and evil dare not
overleap,' and we labour to see this soul in many
mirrors, that we may possess it the more abundantly. He would hardly seek the progress of
the world by any less gentle labour, and would
hardly have us resist evil itself. He bids the
reformers in The Philosophical Review of Reform




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


77


receive 'the onset of the cavalry,' if it be sent  The
to disperse their meetings, 'with folded arms,' hilosophy
and 'not because active resistance is not justifi-  Poetry.
able, but because temperance and courage would
produce greater advantages than the most decisive victory;' and he gives them like advice in
The Masque of Anarchy, for liberty, the poem
cries, 'is love,' and can make the rich man kiss
its feet, and, like those who followed Christ,
give away his goods and follow it throughout
the world.
He does not believe that the reformation of
society can bring this beauty, this divine order,
among men without the regeneration of the
hearts of men. Even in Queen Mab, which was
written before he had found his deepest thought,
or rather perhaps before he had found words to
utter it, for I do not think men change much
in their deepest thought, he is less anxious to
change men's beliefs, as I think, than to cry out
against that serpent more subtle than any beast
of the field, 'the cause and the effect of tyranny.'
He affirms again and again that the virtuous,
those who have 'pure desire and universal love,'
are happy in the midst of tyranny, and he foresees a day when 'the spirit of nature,' the spirit
of beauty of his later poems, who has her'throne
of power unappealable in every human heart,'




78    IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
The   shall have made men so virtuous that 'kingly
hilosophy glare will lose its power to dazzle and silently
of Shelley's
Poetry. pass by,' and as it seems commerce, 'the venal
interchange of all that human art or nature
yields, which wealth should purchase not,' come
as silently to an end.
He was always, indeed in chief, a witness for
that 'power unappealable.' Maddalo, in Julian
andMaddalo, says that the soul is powerless, and
can only, like a 'dreary bell hung in a heavenillumined tower, toll our thoughts and our desires to meet round the rent heart and pray;'
but Julian, who is Shelley himself, replies, as
the makers of all religions have replied'Where is the love, beauty and truth we seek
But in our mind? And if we were not weak,
Should we be less in deed than in desire?'
while Mont Blanc is an intricate analogy to
affirm that the soul has its sources in ' the secret
strength of things,'' which governs thought
and to the infinite heavens is a law.' He even
thought that men might be immortal were they
sinless, and his Cythna bids the sailors be without remorse, for all that live are stained as they
are. It is thus, she says, that time marks men
and their thoughts for the tomb.    And the
"Red Comet,' the image of evil in Laon and




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


79


Cythna, when it began its war with the star of  The
beauty, brought not only 'Fear, Hatred, Fraud Philosophy
and Tyranny,' but ' Death, Decay, Earthquake, of Shelley's
and Blight and Madness pale.'
When the Red Comet is conquered, when
Jupiter is overthrown by Demogorgon, when
the prophecy of Queen Mab is fulfilled, visible
nature will put on perfection again. He declares, in one of the notes to Queen Mab, that
"there is no great extravagance in presuming.... that there should be a perfect identity
between the moral and physical improvement of
the human species,' and thinks it 'certain that
wisdom is not compatible with disease, and that,
in the present state of the climates of the earth,
health in the true and comprehensive sense of
the word is out of the reach of civilized man.'
In Prometheus Unbound he sees, as in the ecstasy
of a saint, the ships moving among the seas of
the world without fear of danger
'by the light
Of wave-reflected flowers, and floating odours,
And music soft,'
and poison dying out of the green things, and
cruelty out of all living things, and even the
toads and efts becoming beautiful, and at last
Time being borne 'to his tomb in eternity.'




80 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


The      This beauty, this divine order, whereof all
Philosophy things shall become a part in a kind of resurof Shelley's
Poetry. rection of the body, is already visible to the
dead and to souls in ecstasy, for ecstasy is a
kind of death. The dying Lionel hears the
song of the nightingale, and cries' Heardst thou not sweet words among
That heaven-resounding minstrelsy?
Heardst thou not, that those who die
Awake in a world of ecstasy?
That love, when limbs are interwoven,
And sleep, when the night of life is cloven,
And thought, to the world's dim boundaries
clinging,
And music, when one beloved is singing,
Is death? Let us drain right joyously
The cup which the sweet bird fills for me.'
And in the most famous passage in all his poetry
he sings of Death as of a mistress. 'Life, like a
dome of many-coloured glass, stains the white
radiance of eternity.' '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




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


'is a portion of the eternal which must glow   The
through time and change unquenchably the Philosophy
0   i i  c                              of Shelley's
same, and has 'awaked from the dream of life,' of Shelley'setry.
Poetry.
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, unG




82  IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


The    apparent as well as apparent, accordant with our
Philosophy being-but that those who rise above the ordiof Shelley's
Poetry. nary 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.'




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


83


He seems in his speculations to have lit on  The
that memory of nature the visionaries claim for Philosophy
ofShelley's
the foundation of their knowledge; but I do Poetry.
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,




84    IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
The   the glowing forms of his mind when freed from
Philosophy all impulse not out of itself or out of superof Shelley's
Poetry. sensual 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 awaySAs 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,




IDEAS OF GOOD AND         EVIL      85
by eddies of echoes that draw ' all spirits on that  The
secret way,' by the 'dying odours' of flowers Philosophy
and by 'the sunlight of the sphered dew,' of Shelley's
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 ofLife, 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




w


86    IDEAS OF GOOD AND        EVIL
The   tyrants of the earth, and some 'like small gnats
Philosophy and flies' to throng 'about the brow of lawyers,
of Shelley's
Poetry. 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
Sin 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




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


87


and picturesque being to one who had spoken  The
in terror with an image of himself, and who Philosophy.  ofShelley's
had fainted at the apparition of a woman with  Poetry.
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.




88 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


The
Philosophy
ofShelley's       II. HIS RULING SYMBOLS
Poetry.
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




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


89


the images that rose in what seemed the idle-  The
ness of his mind. Any one who has any experi- Philosophy
of Shelley's
ence of any mystical state of the soul knows Poetry.
how there float up in the mind profound
symbols,* 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. Shelley understood this
as is proved by what he says of the eternity of
beautiful things and of the influence of the
dead, but whether he understood that the great
memory is also a dwelling-house of symbols, of
images that are living souls, I cannot tell. He
had certainly experience of all but the most
profound of the mystical states, of that union
* 'Marianne's Dream' was certainly copied from a
real dream of somebody's, but like images come to the
mystic in his waking state.




9~     IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
Thie  with created things which assuredly must prePhilosophy cede the soul's union with the uncreated spirit.
ofShelley's  ~
Poetry. He says, in his fragment of an essay 'On Life,'
mistaking a unique experience for the common
experience of all: 'Let us recollect our sensations as children... we less habitually distinguished all that we saw and felt from ourselves.
They seemed as it were to constitute one mass.
There are some persons who in this respect are
always children. Those who are subject to the
state called reverie, feel as if their nature were
resolved into the surrounding universe, or as if
the surrounding universe were resolved into
their being,' and he must have expected to
receive thoughts and images from beyond his
own mind,just in so far as that mind transcended
its preoccupation with particular time and place,
for he believed inspiration a kind of death; and
he could hardly have helped perceiving that an
image that has transcended particular time and
place becomes a symbol, passes beyond death,
as it were, and becomes a living soul.
When Shelley went to the Continent with
Godwin's daughter in 1812 they sailed down
certain great rivers in an open boat, and when
he summed up in his preface to Laon and Cythna
the things that helped to make him a poet, he
spoke of these voyages: ' I have sailed down




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


91


mighty rivers and seen the sun rise and set and  The
the stars come forth whilst I sailed night and Philosophy
of Shelley's
day down a rapid stream among mountains.'   Poetry.
He may have seen some cave that was the
bed of a rivulet by some river side, or have
followed some mountain stream to its source in
a cave, for from his return to England rivers
and streams and wells, flowing through caves
or rising in them, came into every poem of his
that was of any length, and always with the
precision of symbols. Alastor passed in his
boat along a river in a cave; and when for the
last time he felt the presence of the spirit he
loved and followed, it was when he watched
his image in a silent well; and when he died it
was where a river fell into 'an abysmal chasm';
and the Witch of Atlas in her gladness, as he
in his sadness, passed in her boat along a river
in a cave, and it was where it bubbled out of a
cave that she was born; and when Rousseau, the
typical poet of The Triumph of Life, awoke to
the vision that was life, it was where a rivulet
bubbled out of a cave; and the poet of Epipsychidion met the evil beauty 'by a well under
blue nightshade bowers'; and Cythna bore her
child imprisoned in a great cave beside 'a fountain round and vast, in which the wave imprisoned leaped and boiled perpetually'; and




92    IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
The   her lover Laon was brought to his prison in a
Philosophy high column through a cave where there was
ofShelley's
Poetry. 'a putrid pool,' and when he went to see the
conquered city he dismounted beside a polluted
fountain in the market-place, foreshadowing
thereby that spirit who at the end of Prometheus
Unboundgazes at a regenerated city from 'within
a fountain in the public square'; and when
Laon and Cythna are dead they awake beside a
fountain and drift into Paradise along a river;
and at the end of things Prometheus and Asia
are to live amid a happy world in a cave where
a fountain 'leaps with an awakening sound';
and it was by a fountain, the meeting-place of
certain unhappy lovers, that Rosalind and Helen
told their unhappiness to one another; and it
was under a willow by a fountain that the enchantress and her lover began their unhappy
love; while his lesser poems and his prose
fragments use caves and rivers and wells and
fountains continually as metaphors. It may be
that his subconscious life seized upon some
passing scene, and moulded it into an ancient
symbol without help from anything but that
great memory; but so good a Platonist as
Shelley could hardly have thought of any cave
as a symbol, without thinking of Plato's cave
that was the world; and so good a scholar


ftwo*- ppow- we " mo*ý nrs-*--~~-s




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


93


may well have had Porphyry on 'the Cave of The
the Nymphs' in his mind. When I compare Philosophy
of Shelley's
Porphyry's description of the cave where the Poetry.
Phaacian boat left Odysseus, with Shelley's
description of the cave of the Witch of Atlas,
to name but one of many, I find it hard to think
otherwise. I quote Taylor's translation, only
putting Mr. Lang's prose for Taylor's bad verse.
" What does Homer obscurely signify by the
cave in Ithaca which he describes in the following verses? "Now at the harbour's head is
a long-leaved olive tree, and hard by is a pleasant
cave and shadowy, sacred to the nymphs, that
are called Naiads. And therein are mixing bowls
and jars of stone, and there moreover do bees
hive. And there are great looms of stone,
whereon the nymphs weave raiment of purple
stain, a marvel to behold; and there are waters
welling evermore. Two gates there are to the
cave, the one set towards the North wind,
whereby men may go down, but the portals
towards the South pertain rather to the gods,
whereby men may not enter: it is the way
of the immortals."' He goes on to argue that
the cave was a temple before Homer wrote,
and that 'the ancients did not establish temples
without fabulous symbols,' and then begins to
interpret Homer's description in all its detail.




94


IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


The   The ancients, he says, ' consecrated a cave to
Philosophy the world' and held 'the flowing waters' and
of Shelley's
Poetry. the 'obscurity of the cavern' 'apt symbols of
what the world contains,' and he calls to witness Zoroaster's cave with fountains; and often
caves are, he says, symbols of 'all invisible
power; because as caves are obscure and dark,
so the essence of all these powers is occult,' and
quotes a lost hymn to Apollo to prove that
nymphs living in caves fed men 'from intellectual fountains'; and he contends that fountains
and rivers symbolize generation, and that the
word nymph 'is commonly applied to all souls
descending into generation,' and that the two
gates of Homer's cave are the gate of generation and the gate of ascent through death to
the gods, the gate of cold and moisture, and
the gate of heat and fire. Cold, he says, causes
life in the world, and heat causes life among
the gods, and the constellation of the Cup is set
in the heavens near the sign Cancer, because it is
there that the souls descending from the Milky
Way receive their draught of the intoxicating
cold drink of generation. 'The mixing bowls
and jars of stone' are consecrated to the Naiads,
and are also, as it seems, symbolical of Bacchus,
and are of stone because of the rocky beds of
the rivers.  And 'the looms of stone' are the




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


95


symbols of the 'souls that descend into genera-  The
tion.' 'For the formation of the flesh is on or Philosophy
about the bones, which in the bodies of animals Poetry.
resemble stones,' and also because 'the body is
a garment' not only about the soul, but about
all essences that become visible, for 'the heavens
are called by the ancients a veil, in consequence
of being as it were the vestments of the celestial
gods.' The bees hive in the mixing bowls and
jars of stone, for so Porphyry understands the
passage, because honey was the symbol adopted
by the ancients for ' pleasure arisingfrom generation.' The ancients, he says, called souls not
only Naiads but bees, 'as the efficient cause of
sweetness'; but not all souls 'proceeding into
generation' are called bees, ' but those who
will live in it justly and who after having performed such things as are acceptable to the
gods will again return (to their kindred stars).
For this insect loves to return to the place from
whence it came and is eminently just and sober.'
I find all these details in the cave of the Witch
of Atlas, the most elaborately described of
Shelley's caves, except the two gates, and these
have a far-off echo in her summer journeys on
her cavern river and in her winter sleep in 'an
inextinguishable well of crimson fire.' We have
for the mixing bowls, and jars of stone full of




96    IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
The   honey, those delights of the senses, 'sounds of
Philosophy air' 'folded in cells of crystal silences,' 'liquors
ofShelley's..
Poetry. clear and sweet' 'in crystal vials,' and for the
bees, visions 'each in his thin sheath like a
chrysalis,' and for 'the looms of stone' and
'raiment of purple stain' the Witch's spinning
and embroidering; and the Witch herself is a
Naiad, and was born from one of the Atlantides,
who lay in 'a chamber of grey rock' until
she was changed by the sun's embrace into a
cloud.
When one turns to Shelley for an explanation
of the cave and fountain one finds how close
his thought was to Porphyry's. He looked
upon thought as a condition of life in generation and believed that the reality beyond was
something other than thought.  He wrote in
his fragment 'On Life,' 'That the basis of all
things cannot be, as the popular philosophy
alleges, mind, is sufficiently evident. Mind, as
far as we have any experience of its properties,
and beyond that experience how vain is argument, cannot create, it can only perceive;' and
in another passage he defines mind as existence.
Water is his great symbol of existence, and he
continually meditates over its mysterious source.
In his prose he tells how 'thought can with
difficulty visit the intricate and winding cham



IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


97


bers which it inhabits. It is like a river, whose  The
rapid and perpetual stream flows outward.. hilosophy
The caverns of the mind are obscure and of Shelley's
shadowy; or pervaded with a lustre, beautiful
and bright indeed, but shining not beyond their
portals.' When the Witch has passed in her
boat from the caverned river, that is doubtless
her own destiny, she passes along the Nile
'by Moeris and the Mareotid lakes,' and sees
all human life shadowed upon its waters in
shadows that 'never are erased but tremble
ever'; and in many a dark and subterranean
street under the Nile-new caverns-and along
the bank of the Nile; and as she bends over
the unhappy, she compares unhappiness to the
strife that stirs the liquid surface of man's life';
and because she can see the reality of things she
is described as journeying 'in the calm depths'
of 'the wide lake' we journey over unpiloted.
Alastor calls the river that he follows an image
of his mind, and thinks that it will be as hard
to say where his thought will be when he is dead
as where its waters will be in ocean or cloud in
a little while. In Mont Blanc, a poem so overladen with descriptions in parentheses that one
loses sight of its logic, Shelley compares the
flowing through our mind of' the universe of
things,' which are, he has explained elsewhere,


H




98    IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
The   but thoughts, to the flowing of the Arne through
Philosophy the ravine, and compares the unknown sources
ofShelley's.
Poetry. of our thoughts in some 'remoter world' whose
'gleams' 'visit the soul in sleep,' to Arne's
sources among the glaciers on the mountain
heights. Cythna in the passage where she
speaks of making signs 'a subtle language within language' on the sand by the 'fountain' of
sea water in the cave where she is imprisoned,
speaks of the 'cave' of her mind which gave its
secrets to her, and of 'one mind the type of all'
which is a 'moveless wave' reflecting 'all moveless things that are;' and then passing more
completely under the power of the symbol, she
speaks of growing wise through contemplation
of the images that rise out of the fountain at
the call of her will. Again and again one finds
some passing allusion to the cave of man's mind,
or to the caves of his youth, or to the cave of
mysteries we enter at death, for to Shelley as
to Porphyry it is more than an image of life in
the world. It may mean any enclosed life, as
when it is the dwelling-place of Asia and Prometheus, or when it is ' the still cave of poetry,'
and it may have all meanings at once, or it may
have as little meaning as some ancient religious
symbol enwoven from the habit of centuries
with the patterns of a carpet or a tapestry.




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


99


As Shelley sailed along those great rivers and  The
saw or imagined the cave that associated itself Philosophy
ofShelley's
with rivers in his mind, he saw half-ruined  Poetry.
towers upon the hilltops, and once at any rate
a tower is used to symbolize a meaning that is
the contrary to the meaning symbolized by
caves. Cythna's lover is brought through the
cave where there is a polluted fountain to a
high tower, for being man's far-seeing mind,
when the world has cast him out he must to
the 'towers of thought's crowned powers'; nor
is it possible for Shelley to have forgotten this
first imprisonment when he made men imprison Lionel in a tower for a like offence; and
because I know how hard it is to forget a symbolical meaning, once one has found it, I believe
Shelley had more than a romantic scene in his
mind when he made Prince Athanase follow his
mysterious studies in a lighted tower above the
sea, and when he made the old hermit watch
over Laon in his sickness in a half-ruined tower,
wherein the sea, here doubtless as to Cythna,
"the one mind,' threw  'spangled sands' and
'rarest sea shells.' The tower, important in
Maeterlinck, as in Shelley, is, like the sea, and
rivers, and caves with fountains, a very ancient
symbol, and would perhaps, as years went by,
have grown more important in his poetry. The




100oo IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


The   contrast between it and the cave in Laon and
Philosophy Cythna suggests a contrast between the mind
of Shelley's
Poetry. looking outward upon men and things and the
mind looking inward upon itself, which may
or may not have been in Shelley's mind, but
certainly helps, with one knows not how many
other dim meanings, to give the poem mystery
and shadow. It is only by ancient symbols, by
symbols that have numberless meanings beside
the one or two the writer lays an emphasis upon,
or the half-score he knows of, that any highly
subjective art can escape from the barrenness
Sand shallowness of a too conscious arrangement,
into the abundance and depth of nature. The
poet of essences and pure ideas must seek in the
half-lights that glimmer from symbol to symbol
as if to the ends of the earth, all that the epic
and dramatic poet finds of mystery and shadow
in the accidental circumstance of life.
The most important, the most precise of all
Shelley's symbols, the one he uses with the
fullest knowledge of its meaning, is the Morning and Evening Star. It rises and sets for ever
over the towers and rivers, and is the throne
of his genius. Personified as a woman it leads
Rousseau, the typical poet of The Triumph of
Ltfe, under the power of the destroying hunger
of life, under the power of the sun that we




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


101


shall find presently as a symbol of life, and  The
it is the Morning Star that wars against thePhilosophy
*                     of Shelley's
principle of evil in Laon and Cythna, at first as Poetry.
a star with a red comet, here a symbol of all evil
as it is of disorder in Epipsychidion, and then
as a serpent with an eagle-symbols in Blake
too and in the Alchemists; and it is the Morning Star that appears as a winged youth to a
woman, who typifies humanity amid its sorrows,
in the first canto of Laon and Cythna; and it is
invoked by the wailing women of Hellas, who
call it 'lamp of the free' and 'beacon of love'
and would go where it hides flying from the
deepening night among those 'kingless continents sinless as Eden,' and 'mountains and
islands' 'prankt on the sapphire sea' that are
but the opposing hemispheres to the senses but,
as I think, the ideal world, the world of the
dead, to the imagination; and in the Ode to
Liberty, Liberty is bid lead wisdom out of the
inmost cave of man's mind as the Morning
Star leads the sun out of the waves. We know
too that had Prince Athanase been finished it
would have described the finding of Pandemus,
the stars' lower genius, and the growing weary
of her, and the coming to its true genius Urania
at the coming of death, as the day finds the
Star at evening. There is hardly indeed a poem




102   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
The   of any length in which one does not find it as
Philosophy a symbol of love, or liberty, or wisdom, or
of Shelley's  J
Poetry. beauty, or of some other expression of that Intellectual Beauty, which was to Shelley's mind
the central power of the world; and to its faint
and fleeting light he offers up all desires, that
are as
'The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow.
When its genius comes to Rousseau, shedding
dew with one hand, and treading out the stars
with her feet, for she is also the genius of the
dawn, she brings him a cup full of oblivion and
love. He drinks and his mind becomes like sand
'on desert Labrador'marked by the feet of deer
and a wolf. And then the new vision, life, the
cold light of day moves before him, and the first
vision becomes an invisible presence. The same
image was in his mind too when he wrote
'Hesperus flies from awakening night
And pants in its beauty and speed with light,
Fast fleeting, soft and bright.'
Though I do not think that Shelley needed to go
to Porphyry's account of the cold intoxicating
cup, given to the souls in the constellation of




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


1o3


the Cup near the constellation Cancer, for so  The
obvious a symbol as the cup, or that he could Philosophy
not have found the wolf and the deer and Poetry.
the continual flight of his Star in his own
mind, his poetry becomes the richer, the more
emotional, and loses something of its appearance of idle phantasy when I remember that
these are ancient symbols, and still come to
visionaries in their dreams. Because the wolf
is but a more violent symbol of longing and
desire than the hound, his wolf and deer remind
me of the hound and deer that Usheen saw in
the Gaelic poem chasing one another on the
water before he saw the young man following
the woman with the golden apple; and of a
Galway tale that tells how Niam, whose name
means brightness or beauty, came to Usheen as
a deer; and of a vision that a friend of mine
saw when gazing at a dark-blue curtain. I was
with a number of Hermetists, and one of them
said to another,' Do you see something in the
curtain?' The other gazed at the curtain for
a while and saw presently a man led through a
wood by a black hound, and then the hound
lay dead at a place the seer knew was called,
without knowing why, 'the Meeting of the
Suns,' and the man followed a red hound, and
then the red hound was pierced by a spear. A




104


IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


The   white fawn watched the man out of the wood,
Philosophy but he did not look at it, for a white hound
of Shelley's
Poetry. came and he followed it trembling, but the seer
knew that he would follow the fawn at last, and
that it would lead him among the gods. The
most learned of the Hermetists said,' I cannot
tell the meaning of the hounds or where the
Meeting of the Suns is, but I think the fawn
is the Morning and Evening Star.' I have little
doubt that when the man saw the white fawn
he was coming out of the darkness and passion
of the world into some day of partial regeneration, and that it was the Morning Star and
would be the Evening Star at its second coming. I have little doubt that it was but the
story of Prince Athanase and what may have
been the story of Rousseau in The Triumph of
Life, thrown outward once again from that
great memory, which is still the mother of the
Muses, though men no longer believe in it.
It may have been this memory, or it may
have been some impulse of his nature too subtle
for his mind to follow, that made Keats, with
his love of embodied things, of precision of
form and colouring, of emotions made sleepy
by the flesh, see Intellectual Beauty in the
Moon; and Blake, who lived in that energy he
called eternal delight, see it in the Sun, where




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL          105
his personification of poetic genius labours at  The
a furnace. I think there was certainly some Philosophy
S   ofShelley's
reason why these men took so deep a pleasure Poetry.
in lights that Shelley thought of with weariness
and trouble. The Moon is the most changeable of symbols, and not merely because it is
the symbol of change. As mistress of the waters
she governs the life of instinct and the generation of things, for, as Porphyry says, even 'the
apparition of images' in the 'imagination' is
through 'an excess of moisture'; and, as a cold
and changeable fire set in the bare heavens, she
governs alike chastity and the joyless idle drifting hither and thither of generated things. She
may give God a body and have Gabriel to bear
her messages, or she may come to men in their
happy moments as she came to Endymion, or she
may deny life and shoot her arrows; but because
she only becomes beautiful in giving herself,
and is no flying ideal, she is not loved by the
children of desire.
Shelley could not help but see her with unfriendly eyes. He is believed to have described
Mary Shelley at a time when she had come to
seem cold in his eyes, in that passage of Epipsychidion which tells how a woman like the
Moon led him to her cave and made 'frost'
creep over the sea of his mind, and so bewitched




io6 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


The   Life and Death with 'her silver voice' that they
Philosophy ran from him crying, 'Away, he is not of our
Poetry. crew.' When he describes the Moon as part
of some beautiful scene he can call her beautiful, but when he personifies, when his words
come under the influence of that great memory
or of some mysterious tide in the depth of our
being, he grows unfriendly or not truly friendly
or at the most pitiful. The Moon's lips 'are
pale and waning,' it is 'the cold Moon,' or 'the
frozen and inconstant Moon,' or it is 'forgotten'
and 'waning,' or it 'wanders' and is 'weary,'
or it is 'pale and grey,' or it is 'pale for weariness,' and 'wandering companionless' and 'ever
changing,' and finding 'no object worth' its
'constancy,' or it is like a 'dying lady' who
'totters' 'out of her chamber led by the insane
and feeble wanderings of her fading brain,' and
even when it is no more than a star, it casts
an evil influence that makes the lips of lovers
"lurid' or pale. It only becomes a thing of delight
when Time is being borne to his tomb in
eternity, for then the spirit of the Earth, man's
procreant mind, fills it with his own joyousness.
He describes the spirit of the Earth and of the
Moon, moving above the rivulet of their lives
in a passage which reads like a half-understood
vision. Man has become 'one harmonious soul




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


10o7


of many a soul' and 'all things flow to all' and  The
'familiar acts are beautiful through love,' and Philosophy
of Shelley's
an 'animation of delight' at this change flows Poetry.
from spirit to spirit till the snow 'is loosened
from the Moon's lifeless mountains.'
Some old magical writer, I forget who, says
if you wish to be melancholy hold in your left
hand an image of the Moon made out of silver,
and if you wish to be happy hold in your right
hand an image of the Sun made out of gold.
The Sun is the symbol of sensitive life, and of
belief and joy and pride and energy, of indeed
the whole life of the will, and of that beauty
which neither lures from far off, nor becomes
beautiful in giving itself, but makes all glad
because it is beauty. Taylor quotes Proclus as
calling it 'the Demiurgos of everything sensible.' It was therefore natural that Blake, who
was always praising energy, and all exalted overflowing of oneself, and who thought art an
impassioned labour to keep men from doubt
and despondency, and woman's love an evil,
when it would trammel the man's will, should
see the poetic genius not in a woman star but
in the Sun, and should rejoice throughout his
poetry in 'the Sun in his strength.' Shelley,
however, except when he uses it to describe
the peculiar beauty of Emilia Viviani, who was




io8 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


The   'like an incarnation of the Sun when light is
Philosophy changed to love,' saw it with less friendly eyes.
of Shelley's
Poetry. He seems to have seen it with perfect happiness only when veiled in mist, or glimmering
upon water, or when faint enough to do no
more than veil the brightness of his own Star;
and in The 7Triumph of Life, the one poem in
which it is part of the avowed symbolism, its
power is the being and the source of all tyrannies.
When the woman personifying the Morning
Star has faded from before his eyes, Rousseau
sees a 'new vision' in 'a cold bright car' with
a rainbow hovering over her, and as she comes
the shadow passes from 'leaf and stone' and
the souls she has enslaved seem in 'that light
like atomies to dance within a sunbeam,'or they
dance among the flowers that grow up newly
'in the grassy verdure of the desert,' unmindful of the misery that is to come upon them.
'These are the great, the unforgotten,' all who
have worn 'mitres and helms and crowns or
wreaths of light,' and yet have not known themselves. Even 'great Plato' is there because he
knew joy and sorrow, because life that could
not subdue him by gold or pain, by 'age or
sloth or slavery,' subdued him by love. All
who have ever lived are there except Christ
and Socrates and the 'sacred few' who put away




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


o109


all life could give, being doubtless followers  The
throughout their lives of the forms borne by Philosophy
S1of Shelley's
the flying ideal, or who, 'as soon as they had  Poetry.
touched the world with living flame, flew back
like eagles to their native noon.'
In ancient times, it seems to me that Blake,
who for all his protest was glad to be alive, and
ever spoke of his gladness, would have worshipped in some chapel of the Sun, and that
Keats, who accepted life gladly though with
'a delicious diligent indolence,' would have
worshipped in some chapel of the Moon, but
that Shelley, who hated life because he sought
"more in life than any understood,' would have
wandered, lost in a ceaseless reverie, in some
chapel of the Star of infinite desire.
I think too that as he knelt before an altar,
where a thin flame burnt in a lamp made of
green agate, a single vision would have come
to him again and again, a vision of a boat drifting down a broad river between high hills where
there were caves and towers, and following the
light of one Star; and that voices would have
told him how there is for every man some one
scene, some one adventure, some one picture
that is the image of his secret life, for wisdom
first speaks in images, and that this one image,
if he would but brood over it his life long,




I o   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
The   would lead his soul, disentangled from unmeanPhilosophy ing circumstance and the ebb and flow of the
ofShelley's
Poetry. world, into that far household, where the undying gods await all whose souls have become
simple as flame, whose bodies have become quiet
as an agate lamp.
But he was born in a day when the old
wisdom had vanished and was content merely
to write verses, and often with little thought
of more than verses.
I900.




AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON


I
I HAVE been hearing Shakespeare, as the
traveller in News from Nowhere might have
heard him, had he not been hurried back into
our noisy time. One passes through quiet streets,
where gabled and red-tiled houses remember
the Middle Age, to a theatre that has been
made not to make money, but for the pleasure
of making it, like the market houses that set
the traveller chuckling; nor does one find it
among hurrying cabs and ringing pavements,
but in a green garden by a river side. Inside
I have to be content for a while with a chair,
for I am unexpected, and there is not an empty
seat but this; and yet there is no one who has
come merely because one must go somewhere
after dinner. All day, too, one does not hear or
see an incongruous or noisy thing, but spends the
hours reading the plays, and the wise and foolish things men have said of them, in the library
of the theatre, with its oak-panelled walls and
leaded windows of tinted glass; or one rows by




112   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
At   reedy banks and by old farm-houses, and by old
Stratford- churches among great trees. It is certainly one's
on-Avonfault if one opens a newspaper, for Mr. Benson
gives one a new play every night, and one need
talk of nothing but the play in the inn-parlour,
under the oak beams blackened by time and
showing the mark of the adze that shaped them.
I have seen this week King John, Richard IL.,
the second part of Henry IV., Henry V., the
second part of Henry VI., and Richard III.
played in their right order, with all the links
that bind play to play unbroken; and partly
because of a spirit in the place, and partly because of the way play supports play, the theatre
has moved me as it has never done before.
That strange procession of kings and queens,
of warring nobles, of insurgent crowds, of courtiers, and of people of the gutter has been to
me almost too visible, too audible, too full of
an unearthly energy. I have felt as I have sometimes felt on grey days on the Galway shore,
when a faint mist has hung over the grey sea
and the grey stones, as if the world might
suddenly vanish and leave nothing behind, not
even a little dust under one's feet. The people
my mind's eye has seen have too much of the
extravagance of dreams, like all the inventions of art before our crowded life had brought




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


"II3


moderation and compromise, to seem   more    At
than a dream, and yet all else has grown dim Stratfordbefore them.on-Avon.
In London the first man one meets puts any
high dream out of one's head, for he will talk
to one of something at once vapid and exciting,
some one of those many subjects of thought
that build up our social unity. But here he
gives back one's dream like a mirror. If we do
not talk of the plays, we talk of the theatre, and
how more people may be got to come, and our
isolation from common things makes the future
become grandiose and important. One man
tells how the theatre and the library were at
their foundation but part of a scheme the future
is to fulfil. To them will be added a school
where speech, and gesture, and fencing, and all
else that an actor needs will be taught, and the
council, which will have enlarged its Festivals
to some six weeks, will engage all the chief
players of Shakespeare, and perhaps of other
great dramatists in this and other countries.
These chief players will need to bring but few
of their supporters, for the school will be able
to fill all the lesser parts with players who are
slowly recovering the lost tradition of musical
speech. Another man is certain that the Festival, even without the school, which would
I




T 14 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
At   require a new endowment, will grow in imStratford- portance year by year, and that it may become
on-Avon..
with favouring chance the supreme dramatic
event of the world; and when I suggest that
it may help to break the evil prestige of London
he becomes enthusiastic.
Surely a bitter hatred of London is becoming
a mark of those that love the arts, and all that
have this hatred should help anything that looks
like a beginning of a centre of art elsewhere.
The easiness of travel, which is always growing, began by emptying the country, but it may
end by filling it; for adventures like this of
Stratford-on-Avon show that people are ready
to journey from all parts of England and Scotland and Ireland, and even from America, to
live with their favourite art as shut away from
the world as though they were 'in retreat,' as
Catholics say. Nobody but an impressionist
painter, who hides it in light and mist, even
pretends to love a street for its own sake; and
could we meet our friends and hear music and
poetry in the country, none of us that are not
captive would ever leave the thrushes. In
London, we hear something that we like some
twice or thrice in a winter, and among people
who are thinking the while of a music-hall
singer or of a member of parliament, but there




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


II5


we would hear it and see it among people who  At
liked it well enough to have travelled some few  Stratfordhours to find it; and because those who care for Avon
the arts have few near friendships among those
that do not, we would hear and see it among
near friends. We would escape, too, from those
artificial tastes and interests we cultivate, that
we may have something to talk about among
people we meet for a few minutes and not again,
and the arts would grow serious as the Ten
Commandments.
II
I do not think there is anything I disliked in
Stratford, beside certain new houses, but the
shape of the theatre; and as a larger theatre
must be built sooner or later, that would be no
great matter if one could put a wiser shape into
somebody's head. I cannot think there is any
excuse for a half-round theatre, where land is not
expensive, or no very great audience to be seated
within earshot of the stage; or that it was
adopted for a better reason than because it has
come down to us, though from a time when the
art of the stage was a different art. The Elizabethan theatre was a half-round, because the
players were content to speak their lines on a
platform, as if they were speakers at a public




116 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


At    meeting, and we go on building in the same
Stratford- shape, although our art of the stage is the art
on-Avon.
of making a succession of pictures. Were our
theatres of the shape of a half-closed fan, like
Wagner's theatre, where the audience sit on
seats that rise towards the broad end while the
play is played at the narrow end, their pictures
could be composed for eyes at a small number
of points of view, instead of for eyes at many
points of view, above and below and at the sides,
and what is no better than a trade might become an art. With the eyes watching from the
sides of a half-round, on the floor and in the
boxes and galleries, would go the solid-built
houses and the flat trees that shake with every
breath of air; and we could make our pictures
with robes that contrasted with great masses
of colour in the back cloth and such severe or
decorative forms of hills and trees and houses
as would not overwhelm, as our naturalistic
scenery does, the idealistic art of the poet, and
all at a little price. Naturalistic scene-painting
is not an art, but a trade, because it is, at best,
an attempt to copy the more obvious effects of
nature by the methods of the ordinary landscapepainter, and by his methods made coarse and
summary. It is but flashy landscape-painting
and lowers the taste it appeals to, for the taste




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


"117


it appeals to has been formed by a more deli-  At
cate art. Decorative scene-painting would be, Stratfordon the other hand, as inseparable from theon-Avon
movements as from the robes of the players and
from the falling of the light; and being in itself
a grave and quiet thing it would mingle with
the tones of the voices and with the sentiment
of the play, without overwhelming them under
an alien interest. It would be a new and legitimate art appealing to a taste formed by itself
and copying nothing but itself. Mr. Gordon
Craig used scenery of this kind at the Purcell
Society performance the other day, and despite
some marring of his effects by the half-round
shape of the theatre, it was the first beautiful
scenery our stage has seen. He created an ideal
country where everything was possible, even
speaking in verse, or speaking in music, or the
expression of the whole of life in a dance, and
I would like to see Stratford-on-Avon decorate
its Shakespeare with like scenery. As we
cannot, it seems, go back to the platform and
the curtain, and the argument for doing so is
not without weight, we can only get rid of the
sense of unreality, which most of us feel when
we listen to the conventional speech of Shakespeare, by making scenery as conventional. Time
after time his people use at some moment of deep




118 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


At   emotion an elaborate or deliberate metaphor,
Stratford- or do some improbable thing which breaks an
on-Avon.    0
emotion of reality we have imposed upon him
by an art that is not his, nor in the spirit of his.
It also is an essential part of his method to give
slight or obscure motives of many actions that
our attention may dwell on what is of chief importance, and we set these cloudy actions among
solid-looking houses, and what we hope are
solid-looking trees, and illusion comes to an end,
slain by our desire to increase it. In his art, as
in all the older art of the world, there was much
make-believe, and our scenery, too, should remember the time when, as my nurse used to
tell me, herons built their nests in old men's
beards! Mr. Benson did not venture to play the
scene in Richard III. where the ghosts walk,
as Shakespeare wrote it, but had his scenery
been as simple as Mr. Gordon Craig's purple
back cloth that made Dido and IEneas seem
wandering on the edge of eternity, he would
have found nothing absurd in pitching the tents
of Richard and Richmond side by side. Goethe
has said, 'Art is art, because it is not nature!'
It brings us near to the archetypal ideas themselves, and away from nature, which is but their
looking-glass.




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


II9


At
III                    Stratfordon-Avon.
In La Peau de Chagrin Balzac spends many
pages in describing a coquette, who seems the
image of heartlessness, and then invents an improbable incident that her chief victim may
discover how beautifully she can sing. Nobody
had ever heard her sing, and yet in her singing,
and in her chatter with her maid, Balzac tells
us, was her true self. He would have us understand that behind the momentary self, which
acts and lives in the world, and is subject to the
judgment of the world, there is that which
cannot be called before any mortal Judgment
seat, even though a great poet, or novelist, or
philosopher be sitting upon it. Great literature
has always been written in a like spirit, and is,
indeed, the Forgiveness of Sin, and when we find
it becoming the Accusation of Sin, as in George
Eliot, who plucks her Tito in pieces with as
much assurance as if he had been clockwork,
literature has begun to change into something
else. George Eliot had a fierceness one hardly
finds but in a woman turned argumentative, but
the habit of mind her fierceness gave its life to
was characteristic of her century, and is the
habit of mind of the Shakespearian critics.
They and she grew up in a century of utilita



120 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


At   rianism, when nothing about a man seemed
Stratford- important except his utility to the State, and noon-Avon.
thing so useful to the State as the actions whose
effect can be weighed by the reason. The deeds
of Coriolanus, Hamlet, Timon, Richard II.
had no obvious use, were, indeed, no more than
the expression of their personalities, and so it
was thought Shakespeare was accusing them,
and telling us to be careful lest we deserve
the like accusations.  It did not occur to the
critics that you cannot know a man from his
actions because you cannot watch him in every
kind of circumstance, and that men are made
useless to the State as often by abundance as by
emptiness, and that a man's business may at
times be revelation, and not reformation. Fortinbras was, it is likely enough, a better King
than Hamlet would have been, Aufidius was a
more reasonable man than Coriolanus, Henry V.
was a better man-at-arms than Richard II., but
after all, were not those others who changed
nothing for the better and many things for the
worse greater in the Divine Hierarchies? Blake
has said that 'the roaring of lions, the howling
of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the
destructive sword are portions of Eternity, too
great for the eye of man,' but Blake belonged
by right to the ages of Faith, and thought the




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL 121


State of less moment than the Divine Hierar-  At
chies. Because reason can only discover com- Stratford-..      on-Avon.
pletely the use of those obvious actions which
everybody admires, and because every character
was to be judged by efficiency in action, Shakespearian criticism became a vulgar worshipper
of Success. I have turned over many books in
the library at Stratford-on-Avon, and I have
found in nearly all an antithesis, which grew in
clearness and violence as the century grew older,
between two types, whose representatives were
Richard II.,' sentimental,' 'weak,' 'selfish,' 'insincere,' and Henry V., 'Shakespeare's only
hero.' These books took the same delight in
abasing Richard II. that school-boys do in persecuting some boy of fine temperament, who
has weak muscles and a distaste for school games.
And they had the admiration for Henry V.
that school-boys have for the sailor or soldier
hero of a romance in some boys' paper. I cannot
claim any minute knowledge of these books,
but I think that these emotions began among
the German critics, who perhaps saw something French and Latin in Richard II., and I
know that Professor Dowden, whose book I
once read carefully, first made these emotions
eloquent and plausible. He lived in Ireland,
where everything has failed,and he meditated fre



122 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


At   quently upon the perfection of character which
Stratford- had, he thought, made England successful, for,
on-Avon.
as we say, 'cows beyond the water have long
horns.' He forgot that England, as Gordon
has said, was made by her adventurers, by her
people of wildness and imagination and eccentricity; and thought that Henry V., who only
seemed to be these things because he had some
commonplace vices, was not only the typical
Anglo-Saxon, but the model Shakespeare held
up before England; and he even thought it
worth while pointing out that Shakespeare
himself was making a large fortune while he
was writing about Henry's victories. In Professor Dowden's successors this apotheosis went
further; and it reached its height at a moment
of imperialistic enthusiasm, of ever-deepening
conviction that the commonplace shall inherit
the earth, when somebody of reputation, whose
name I cannot remember, wrote that Shakespeare admired this one character alone out of
all his characters. The Accusation of Sin produced its necessary fruit, hatred of all that was
abundant, extravagant, exuberant, of all that
sets a sail for shipwreck, and flattery of the
commonplace emotions and conventional ideals
of the mob, the chief Paymaster of accusation.




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


123


At
IV                    StratfordSIon-Avon.
I cannot believe that Shakespeare looked on
his Richard II. with any but sympathetic eyes,
understanding indeed how ill-fitted he was to
be King, at a certain moment of history, but
understanding that he was lovable and full of
capricious fancy, 'a wild creature' as Pater has
called him. The man on whom Shakespeare
modelled him had been full of French elegancies, as he knew from Holinshed, and had
given life a new luxury, a new splendour, and
been 'too friendly' to his friends, 'too favourable' to his enemies. And certainly Shakespeare
had these things in his head when he made
his King fail, a little because he lacked some
qualities that were doubtless common among
his scullions, but more because he had certain
qualities that are uncommon in all ages. To
suppose that Shakespeare preferred the men
who deposed his King is to suppose that Shakespeare judged men with the eyes of a Municipal
Councillor weighing the merits of a Town Clerk;
and that had he been by when Verlaine cried
out from his bed, 'Sir, you have been made by
the stroke of a pen, but I have been made by
the breath of God,' he would have thought the
Hospital Superintendent the better man. He




124   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
At   saw indeed, as I think, in Richard II. the defeat
Stratford- that awaits all, whether they be Artist or Saint,
who find themselves where men ask of them a
rough energy and have nothing to give but some
contemplative virtue, whether lyrical phantasy,
or sweetness of temper, or dreamy dignity, or
love of God, or love of His creatures. He saw
that such a man through sheer bewilderment
and impatience can become as unjust or as
violent as any common man, any Bolingbroke
or Prince John, and yet remain 'that sweet
lovely rose.' The courtly and saintly ideals
of the Middle Ages were fading, and the practical ideals of the modern age had begun to
threaten the unuseful dome of the sky; Merry
England was fading, and yet it was not so faded
that the Poets could not watch the procession
of the world with that untroubled sympathy
for men as they are, as apart from all they do
and seem, which is the substance of tragic irony.
Shakespeare cared little for the State, the
source of all our judgments, apart from its
shows and splendours, its turmoils and battles, its
flamings out of the uncivilized heart. He did
indeed think it wrong to overturn a King, and
thereby to swamp peace in civil war, and the
historical plays from Henry IV. to Richard III.,
that monstrous birth and last sign of the wrath




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


125


of Heaven, are a fulfilment of the prophecy       At
of the Bishop of Carlisle, who was 'raised up Stratfordon-Avon.
by God' to make it; but he had no nice sense
of utilities, no ready balance to measure deeds,
like that fine instrument, with all the latest
improvements, Gervinus and Professor Dowden
handle so skilfully. He meditated as Solomon,
not as Bentham meditated, upon blind ambitions,
untoward accidents, and capricious passions,
and the world was almost as empty in his eyes
as it must be in the eyes of God.
'Tired with all these, for restful death I cry;As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And Art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.'
v
The Greeks, a certain scholar has told me,
considered that myths are the activities of the




126 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


At   Daemons, and that the Daemons shape our charStratford- acters and our lives. I have often had the fancy
on-Avon.
that there is some one Myth for every man,
which, if we but knew it, would make us
understand all he did and thought. Shakespeare's Myth, it may be, describes a wise man
who was blind from very wisdom, and an empty
man who thrust him from his place, and saw
all that could be seen from very emptiness. It
is in the story of Hamlet, who saw too great
issues everywhere to play the trivial game of
life, and of Fortinbras, who came from fighting
battles about 'a little patch of ground' so poor
that one of his captains would not give 'six
ducats' to 'farm it,' and who was yet acclaimed
by Hamlet and by all as the only befitting
King. And it is in the story of Richard II.,
that unripened Hamlet, and of Henry V., that
ripened Fortinbras. To poise character against
character was an element in Shakespeare's art,
and scarcely a play is lacking in characters that
are the complement of one another, and so,
having madethe vessel of porcelain Richard II.,
he had to make the vessel of clay Henry V.
He makes him the reverse of all that Richard
was.   He has the gross vices, the coarse
nerves, of one who is to rule among violent
people, and he is so little 'too friendly' to his




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


127


friends that he bundles them out of doors when  At
their time is over. He is as remorseless and Stratfordundistinguished as some natural force, and the
finest thing in his play is the way his old companions fall out of it broken-hearted or on their
way to the gallows; and instead of that lyricism
which rose out of Richard's mind like the jet
of a fountain to fall again where it had risen,
instead of that phantasy too enfolded in its own
sincerity to make any thought the hour had
need of, Shakespeare has given him a resounding rhetoric that moves men, as a leading article
does to-day. His purposes are so intelligible
to everybody that everybody talks of him as if
he succeeded, although he fails in the end, as
all men great and little fail in Shakespeare, and
yet his conquests abroad are made nothing by
a woman turned warrior, and that boy he and
Katherine were to 'compound,' 'half French,
half English,' ' that' was to 'go to Constantinople
and take the Turk by the beard,' turns out a
Saint and loses all his father had built up at
home and his own life.
Shakespeare watched Henry V. not indeed
as he watched the greater souls in the visionary
procession, but cheerfully, as one watches some
handsome spirited horse, and he spoke his tale,
as he spoke all tales, with tragic irony.




128 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


At
Stratford-                 vi
on-Avon.
The five plays, that are but one play, have,
when played one after another, something extravagant and superhuman, something almost
mythological. Those nobles with their indifference to death and their immense energy
seem at times no nearer the common stature
of men than do the Gods and the heroes of
Greek plays. Had there been no Renaissance
and no Italian influence to bring in the stories
of other lands English history would, it may
be, have become as important to the English
imagination as the Greek Myths to the Greek
imagination; and many plays by many poets
would have woven it into a single story whose
contours, vast as those of Greek myth, would
have made living men and women seem like
swallows building their nests under the architrave of some Temple of the Giants. English
literature, because it would have grown out of
itself, might have had the simplicity and unity
of Greek literature, for I can never get out of
my head that no man, even though he be
Shakespeare, can write perfectly when his web
is woven of threads that have been spun in
many lands. And yet, could those foreign tales
have come in if the great famine, the sinking




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


129


down of popular imagination, the dying out of  At
traditional phantasy, the ebbing out of the Stratfordon-Avon.
energy of race, had not made them necessary?
The metaphors and language of Euphuism,
compounded of the natural history and mythology of the classics, were doubtless a necessity
also that something might be poured into the
emptiness. Yet how they injured the simplicity
and unity of the speech! Shakespeare wrote
at a time when solitary great men were gathering to themselves the fire that had once flowed
hither and thither among all men, when individualism in work and thought and emotion
was breaking up the old rhythms of life, when
the common people, no longer uplifted by the
myths of Christianity and of still older faiths,
were sinking into the earth.
The people of Stratford-on-Avon have remembered little about him, and invented no
legend to his glory. They have remembered
a drinking-bout of his, and invented some bad
verses for him, and that is about all. Had he
been some hard-drinking, hard-living, hardriding, loud-blaspheming Squire they would
have enlarged his fame by a legend of his dealings with the devil; but in his day the glory of a
Poet, like that of all other imaginative powers,
had ceased, or almost ceased, outside a narrow
K




130   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
At   class. The poor Gaelic rhymer leaves a nobler
Stratford- memory among his neighbours, who will talk
on-Avon..
of Angels standing like flames about his deathbed, and of voices speaking out of bramblebushes that he may have the wisdom of the
world. The Puritanism that drove the theatres
into Surrey was but part of an inexplicable
movement that was trampling out the minds of
all but some few thousands born to cultivated
ease.
May, 1901.




WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE


IMAGINATION.
THERE have been men who loved the future
like a mistress, and the future mixed her breath
into their breath and shook her hair about them,
and hid them from the understanding of their
times. William Blake was one of these men,
and if he spoke confusedly and obscurely it was
because he spoke of things for whose speaking
he could find no models in the world about him.
He announced the religion of art, of which no
man dreamed in the world about him; and he
understood it more perfectly than the thousands
of subtle spirits who have received its baptism
in the world about us, because, in the beginning of important things-in the beginning of
love, in the beginning of the day, in the beginning of any work, there is a moment when
we understand more perfectly than we understand again until all is finished. In his time




132


IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


William  educated people believed that they amused
Blake and themselves with books of imagination, but that
the Imagination,  they'made their souls' by listening to sermons
and by doing or by not doing certain things.
When they had to explain why serious people
like themselves honoured the great poets greatly
they were hard put to it for lack of good reasons.
In our time we are agreed that we 'make our
souls' out of some one of the great poets of
ancient times, or out of Shelley or Wordsworth,
or Goethe or Balzac, or Flaubert, or Count Tolstoy, in the books he wrote before he became
a prophet and fell into a lesser order, or out of
Mr. Whistler's pictures, while we amuse ourselves, or, at best, make a poorer sort of soul,
by listening to sermons or by doing or by not
doing certain things. We write of great writers,
even of writers whose beauty would once have
seemed an unholy beauty, with rapt sentences
like those our fathers kept for the beatitudes
and mysteries of the Church; and no matter
what we believe with our lips, we believe with
our hearts that beautiful things, as Browning
said in his one prose essay that was not in
verse, have 'lain burningly on the Divine hand,'
and that when time has begun to wither, the
Divine hand will fall heavily on bad taste and
vulgarity. When no man believed these things




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


I33


William Blake believed them, and began that William
preaching against the Philistine, which is as Blake and
1                               the Imaginthe preaching of the Middle Ages against the  ation.
Saracen.
He had learned from Jacob Boehme and from
old alchemist writers that imagination was the
first emanation of divinity, 'the body of God,'
'the Divine members,' and he drew the deduction, which they did not draw, that the imaginative arts were therefore the greatest of Divine
revelations, and that the sympathy with all
living things, sinful and righteous alike, which
the imaginative arts awaken, is that forgiveness
of sins commanded by Christ. The reason, and
by the reason he meant deductions from the
observations of the senses, binds us to mortality
because it binds us to the senses, and divides us
from each other by showing us our clashing
interests; but imagination divides us from mortality by the immortality of beauty, and binds
us to each other by opening the secret doors of
all hearts. He cried again and again that every
thing that lives is holy, and that nothing is unholy except things that do not live-lethargies,
and cruelties, and timidities, and that denial of
imagination which is the root they grew from
in old times. Passions, because most living, are
most holy-and this was a scandalous paradox




134   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
William in his time-and man shall enter eternity borne
Blake and
theImagin- upon their wings.
ation.   And he understood this so literally that certain
drawings to Vala, had he carried them beyond
the first faint pencillings, the first faint washes
of colour, would have been a pretty scandal
to his time and to our time. The sensations of
this 'foolish body,' this 'phantom of the earth
and water,' were in themselves but half-living
things, 'vegetative' things, but passion that
'eternal glory' made them a part of the body
of God.
This philosophy kept him more simply a
poet than any poet of his time, for it made him
content to express every beautiful feeling that
came into his head without troubling about its
utility or chaining it to any utility. Sometimes
one feels, even when one is reading poets of a
better time-Tennyson or Wordsworth, let us
say-that they have troubled the energy and
simplicity of their imaginative passions by asking
whether they were for the helping or for the
hindrance of the world, instead of believing
that all beautiful things have 'lain burningly
on the Divine hand.' But when one reads
Blake, it is as though the spray of an inexhaustible fountain of beauty was blown into our
faces, and not merely when one reads the Songs




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


I35


of Innocence, or the lyrics he wished to call William
'The Ideas of Good and Evil,' but when one Blake and
reads those 'Prophetic Works' in which he the Iagin.spoke confusedly and obscurely because he spoke
of things for whose speaking he could find no
models in the world about him. He was a
symbolist who had to invent his symbols; and
his counties of England, with their correspondence to tribes of Israel, and his mountains and
rivers, with their correspondence to parts of a
man's body, are arbitrary as some of the symbolism in the Axel of the symbolist Villiers De
L'Isle Adam is arbitrary, while they mix incongruous things as Axel does not. He was a
man crying out for a mythology, and trying to
make one because he could not find one to his
hand. Had he been a Catholic of Dante's time
he would have been well content with Mary
and the angels; or had he been a scholar of our
time he would have taken his symbols where
Wagner took his, from Norse mythology; or
have followed, with the help of Professor Rhys,
that pathway into Welsh mythology which he
found in 'Jerusalem'; or have gone to Irelandand he was probably an Irishman-and chosen
for his symbols the sacred mountains, along
whose sides the peasant still sees enchanted fires,
and the divinities which have not faded from




136   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
William  the belief, if they have faded from the prayers
Blake and of simple hearts; and have spoken without
the Imagination.  mixing incongruous things because he spoke
of things that had been long steeped in emotion;
and have been less obscure because a traditional
mythology stood on the threshold of his meaning and on the margin of his sacred darkness.
If 'Enitharmon' had been named Freia, or
Gwydeon, or Danu, and made live in Ancient
Norway, or Ancient Wales, or Ancient Ireland,
we would have forgotten that her maker was a
mystic; and the hymn of her harping, that is
in Vala, would but have reminded us of many
ancient hymns.
'The joy of woman in the death of her most beloved,
Who dies for love of her,
In torments of fierce jealousy and pangs of
adoration.
The lover's night bears on my song,
And the nine spheres rejoice beneath my powerful
control.
They sing unwearied to the notes of my immortal
hand.
The solemn, silent moon
Reverberates the long harmony sounding upon
my limbs.
The birds and beasts rejoice and play,
And every one seeks for his mate to prove his
inmost joy.




IDEAS OF GOOD        AND   EVIL     137
Furious and terrible they sport and rend the nether William
deep.                                   Blake and
The deep lifts up his rugged head,          the ImaginAnd lost in infinite hovering wings vanishes with  ation.
a cry.
The fading cry is ever dying,
The living voice is ever living in its inmost joy.'
I897.




WILLIAM     BLAKE AND HIS
ILLUSTRATIONS TO THE DIVINE
COMEDY.
I. HIS OPINIONS UPON ART.
WILLIAM BLAKE was the first writer of modern times to preach the indissoluble marriage
of all great art with symbol. There had been
allegorists and teachers of allegory in plenty,
but the symbolic imagination, or, as Blake preferred to call it, 'vision,' is not allegory, being
'a representation of what actually exists really
and unchangeably.' A symbol is indeed the
only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame;
while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar
principle, and belongs to fancy and not to
imagination: the one is a revelation, the other
an amusement. It is happily no part of my
purpose to expound in detail the relations he
believed to exist between symbol and mind, for




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


i39


in doing so I should come upon not a few William
doctrines which, though they have not been dif- Blake and
'.                        his Illuscult to many simple persons, ascetics wrapped trations.
in skins, women who had cast away all common
knowledge, peasants dreaming by their sheepfolds upon the hills, are full of obscurity to the
man of modern culture; but it is necessary to
just touch upon these relations, because in them
was the fountain of much of the practice and
of all the precept of his artistic life.
If a man would enter into 'Noah's rainbow,'
he has written, and 'make a friend' of one of
"the images of wonder' which dwell there, and
which always entreat him 'to leave mortal things,'
"then would he arise from the grave and meet
the Lord in the air'; and by this rainbow, this
sign of a covenant granted to him who is with
Shem and Japhet, 'painting, poetry and music,'
" the three powers in man of conversing with
Paradise which the flood "of time and space"
did not sweep away,' Blake represented the
shapes of beauty haunting our moments of inspiration: shapes held by most for the frailest
of ephemera, but by him for a people older than
the world, citizens of eternity, appearing and
reappearing in the minds of artists and of poets,
creating all we touch and see by casting distorted
images of themselves upon 'the vegetable glass




140   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
William of nature'; and because beings, none the less
Blake and symbols, blossoms, as it were, growing from
histratons. invisible immortal roots, hands, as it were, pointtrations.
ing the way into some divine labyrinth. If' the
world of imagination' was' the world of eternity,'
as this doctrine implied, it was of less importance
to know men and nature than to distinguish the
beings and substances of imagination from those
of a more perishable kind, created by the phantasy, in uninspired moments, out of memory and
whim; and this could best be done by purifying
one's mind, as with a flame, in study of the works
of the great masters, who were great because
they had been granted by divine favour a vision
of the unfallen world from which others are kept
apart by the flaming sword that turns every way;
and by flying from the painters who studied 'the
vegetable glass' for its own sake, and not to discover there the shadows of imperishable beings
and substances, and who entered into their own
minds, not to make the unfallen world a test of
all they heard and saw and felt with the senses,
but to cover the naked spirit with 'the rotten
rags of memory' of older sensations. The
struggle of the first part of his life had been to
distinguish between these two schools, and to
cleave always to the Florentine, and so to escape
the fascination of those who seemed to him to






IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


141


offer the sleep of nature to a spirit weary with William
the labours of inspiration; but it was only after Blake and
his Illushis return to London from Felpham in 1804 trations.
that he finally escaped from 'temptations and
perturbations' which sought to destroy 'the
imaginative power'at 'the hands of Venetian
and Flemish Demons.' 'The spirit of Titian'
-and one must always remember that he had
only seen poor engravings, and what his disciple, Palmer, has called 'picture-dealers'Titians'
-'was particularly active in raising doubts
concerning the possibility of executing without
a model; and when once he had raised the doubt
it became easy for him to snatch away the vision
time after time'; and Blake's imagination 'weakened' and 'darkened' until a 'memory of nature
and of the pictures of various schools possessed
his mind, instead of appropriate execution'
flowing from the vision itself. But now he
wrote,' O glory, and O delight! I have entirely
reduced that spectrous fiend to his station'he had overcome the merely reasoning and sensual portion of the mind-' whose annoyance
has been the ruin of my labours for the last
twenty years of my life.... I speak with
perfect confidence and certainty of the fact which
has passed upon me. Nebuchadnezzar had seven
times passed over him, I have had twenty;




142 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
William  thank God I was not altogether a beast as he
Blake and was..... Suddenly, on the day after visiting
his Illustrations, the Truchsessian Gallery of pictures'-this was
a gallery containing pictures by Albert Diirer
and by the great Florentines--'I was again
enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my
youth, and which had for exactly twenty years
been closed from me, as by a door and window
shutters.... Excuse my enthusiasm, or
rather madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or
graver in my hand, as I used to be in my youth.'
This letter may have been the expression of
a moment's enthusiasm, but was more probably
rooted in one of those intuitions of coming technical power which every creator feels, and learns
to rely upon; for all his greatest work was done,
and the principles of his art were formulated,
after this date. Except a word here and there,
his writings hitherto had not dealt with the
principles of art except remotely and by implication; but now he wrote much upon them, and
not in obscure symbolic verse, but in emphatic
prose, and explicit if not very poetical rhyme.
In his Descriptive Catalogue, in The Address to
the Public, in the notes on Sir Joshua Reynolds,
in The Book of Moonlight-of which some not
very dignified rhymes alone remain-in beautiful




I


IDEAS OF GOOD AND        EVIL     143
detached passages in The MS. Book, he explained William
spiritual art, and praised the painters of Florence Blake and
his Illusand their influence, and cursed all that has come trations.
of Venice and Holland. The limitation of his
view was from the very intensity of his vision;
he was a too literal realist of imagination, as
others are of nature; and because he believed that
the figures seen by the mind's eye, when exalted
by inspiration, were 'eternal existences,' symbols
of divine essences, he hated every grace of style
that might obscure their lineaments. To wrap
them about in reflected lights was to do this,
and to dwell over-fondly upon any softness of
hair or flesh was to dwell upon that which was
least permanent and least characteristic, for 'The
great and golden rule of art, as of life, is this:
that the more distinct, sharp and wiry the
boundary-line, the more perfect the work of
art; and the less keen and sharp, the greater is
the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism and
bungling.' Inspiration was to see the permanent
and characteristic in all forms, and if you had
it not, you must needs imitate with a languid
mind the things you saw or remembered, and
so sink into the sleep of nature where all is soft
and melting. 'Great inventors in all ages knew
this. Protogenes and Apelles knew each other
by their line. Raphael and Michael Angelo and




144   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
William Albert Diirer are known by this and this alone.
Blake and How do we distinguish the owl from the beast,
his Illustrations, the horse from the ox, but by the bounding outline? How do we distinguish one face or
countenance from another but by the boundingline and its infinite inflections and movements?
What is it that builds a house and plants a
garden but the definite and determinate? What
is it that distinguished honesty from knavery
but the hard and wiry line of rectitude and
certainty in the actions and intentions? Leave
out this line and you leave out life itself; and
all is chaos again, and the line of the Almighty
must be drawn out upon it before man or beast
can exist.' He even insisted that 'colouring
does not depend upon where the colours are
put, but upon where the light and dark are put,
and all depends upon the form or outline'meaning, I suppose, that a colour gets its brilliance or its depth from being in light or in
shadow. He does not mean by outline the
bounding-line dividing a form from its background, as one of his commentators has thought,
but the line that divides it from surrounding
space, and unless you have an overmastering
sense of this you cannot draw true beauty at
all, but only 'the beauty that is appended to
folly,' a beauty of mere voluptuous softness, 'a






IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


145


lamentable accident of the mortal and perishing William
life,' for 'the beauty proper for sublime art is Blake and
his Illuslineaments, or forms and features capable of trations.
being the receptacles of intellect,' and 'the face
or limbs that alter least from youth to old age
are the face and limbs of the greatest beauty and
perfection.' His praise of a severe art had been
beyond price had his age rested a moment to
listen, in the midst of its enthusiasm for Correggio and the later Renaissance, for Bartolozzi
and for Stothard; and yet in his visionary realism,
and in his enthusiasm for what, after all, is
perhaps the greatest art, and a necessary part
of every picture that is art at all, he forgot how
he who wraps the vision in lights and shadows,
in iridescent or glowing colour, having in the
midst of his labour many little visions of these
secondary essences, until form be half lost in
pattern, may compel the canvas or paper to
become itself a symbol of some not indefinite
because unsearchable essence; for is not the
Bacchus and Ariadne of Titian a talisman as
powerfully charged with intellectual virtue as
though it were a jewel-studded door of the city
seen on Patmos?
To cover the imperishable lineaments of
beauty with shadows and reflected lights was
to fall into the power of his' Vala,' the indolent
L




146   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
William fascination of nature, the woman divinity who
Blake and is so often described in 'the prophetic books'
his Illustrations. as 'sweet pestilence,' and whose children weave
webs to take the souls of men; but there was
yet a more lamentable chance, for nature has
also a 'masculine portion' or 'spectre' which
kills instead of merely hiding, and is continually
at war with inspiration. To 'generalize' forms
and shadows, to 'smooth out' spaces and lines
in obedience to 'laws of composition,' and of
painting; founded, not upon imagination, which
always thirsts for variety and delights in freedom, but upon reasoning from sensation which
is always seeking to reduce everything to a
lifeless and slavish uniformity; as the popular
art of Blake's day had done, and as he understood Sir Joshua Reynolds to advise, was to fall
into 'Entuthon Benithon,' or 'the Lake of
Udan Adan,' or some other of those regions
where the imagination and the flesh are alike
dead, that he names by so many resonant phantastical names. 'General knowledge is remote
knowledge,' he wrote; 'it is in particulars that
wisdom consists, and happiness too. Both in
art and life general masses are as much art as
a pasteboard man is human. Every man has
eyes, nose and mouth; this every idiot knows.
But he who enters into and discriminates most




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


147


minutely the manners and intentions, the char- William
acters in all their branches, is the alone wise or Blake and
his Illussensible man, and on this discrimination all art trations.
is founded.... As poetry admits not a letter
that is insignificant, so painting admits not a
grain of sand or a blade of grass insignificant,
much less an insignificant blot or blur.'
Against another desire of his time, derivative
also from what he has called 'corporeal reason,'
the desire for 'a tepid moderation,' for a lifeless 'sanity in both art and life,' he had protested
years before with a paradoxical violence. 'The
roadway of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,'
and we must only 'bring out weight and measure
in time of dearth.' This protest, carried, in the
notes on Sir Joshua Reynolds, to the point of
dwelling with pleasure on the thought that
'The Lives of the Painters say that Raphael
died of dissipation,' because dissipation is better
than emotional penury, seemed as important to
his old age as to his youth. He taught it to his
disciples, and one finds it in its purely artistic
shape in a diary written by Samuel Palmer, in
18 24: 'Excess is the essential vivifying spirit,
vital spark, embalming spice of the finest art.
There are many mediums in the means-none,
oh, not a jot, not a shadow of a jot, in the end
of great art. In a picture whose merit is to be




148   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
William  excessively brilliant, it can't be too brilliant,
Blake and but individual tints may be too brilliant...
his Illustrations. We must not begin with medium, but think
always on excess and only use medium to make
excess more abundantly excessive.'
These three primary commands, to seek a
determinate outline, to avoid a generalized
treatment, and to desire always abundance and
exuberance, were insisted upon with vehement
anger, and their opponents called again and again
"demons' and 'villains, 'hired' by the wealthy
and the idle; but in private, Palmer has told
us, he could find 'sources of delight throughout
the whole range of art,' and was ever ready to
praise excellence in any school, finding, doubtless, among friends, no need for the emphasis
of exaggeration. There is a beautiful passage
in 'Jerusalem' in which the merely mortal part
of the mind, 'the spectre,' creates 'pyramids of
pride,' and 'pillars in the deepest hell to reach
the heavenly arches,' and seeks to discover
wisdom in 'the spaces between the stars,' not
"in the stars,' where it is, but the immortal part
makes all his labours vain, and turns his pyramids to 'grains of sand,' his 'pillars' to 'dust
on the fly's wing,' and makes of 'his starry
heavens a moth of gold and silver mocking his
anxious grasp.' So when man's desire to rest




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


149


from spiritual labour, and his thirst to fill his William
art with mere sensation and memory, seem upon Blake and
a r                                 his Illusthe point of triumph, some miracle transforms trations.
them to a new inspiration; and here and there
among the pictures born of sensation and
memory is the murmuring of a new ritual, the
glimmering of new talismans and symbols.
It was during and after the writing of these
opinions that Blake did the various series of
pictures which have brought him the bulk of
his fame. He had already completed the illustrations to Young's Night Thoughts-in which
the great sprawling figures, a little wearisome
even with the luminous colours of the original
water-colour, became nearly intolerable in plain
black and white-and almost all the illustrations to 'the prophetic books,' which have an
energy like that of the elements, but are rather
rapid sketches taken while some phantasmic
procession swept over him, than elaborate compositions, and in whose shadowy adventures one
finds not merely, as did Dr. Garth Wilkinson,
"the hells of the ancient people, the Anakim,
the Nephalim, and the Rephaim... gigantic
petrifactions from which the fires of lust and
intense selfish passion have long dissipated what
was animal and vital'; not merely the shadows
cast by the powers who had closed the light




150


IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


William  from him as 'with a door and window shutters,'
Blake and but the shadows of those who gave them battle.
his Illustrations. He did now, however, the many designs to
Milton, of which I have only seen those to
Paradise Regained; the reproductions of those
to Comus, published, I think, by Mr. Quaritch;
and the three or four to Paradise Lost, engraved
by Bell Scott-a series of designs which one good
judge considers his greatest work; the illustrations to Blair's Grave, whose gravity and passion
struggle with the mechanical softness and trivial
smoothness of Schiavonetti's engraving; the
illustrations to Thornton's Virgil, whose influence is manifest in the work of the little
group of landscape-painters who gathered about
him in his old age and delighted to call him
master. The member of the group, whom I
have already so often quoted, has alone praised
worthily these illustrations to the first eclogue:
"There is in all such a misty and dreamy
glimmer as penetrates and kindles the inmost
soul and gives complete and unreserved delight,
unlike the gaudy daylight of this world. They
are like all this wonderful artist's work, the
drawing aside of the fleshly curtain, and the
glimpse which all the most holy, studious saints
and sageshave enjoyed, of the rest which remains
to the people of God.' Now, too, he did the




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL           151
great series, the crowning work of his life, William
the illustrations to The Book of Job and the Blake and
illustrations to The Divine Comedy.  Hitherto his Illushe had protested against the mechanical 'dots
and lozenges' and 'blots and blurs' of Woollett
and Strange, but had himself used both 'dot
and lozenge,' 'blot and blur,' though always in
subordination 'to a firm and determinate outline'; but in Marc Antonio, certain of whose
engravings he was shown by Linnell, he found
a style full of delicate lines, a style where all
was living and energetic, strong and subtle.
And almost his last words, a letter written upon
his death-bed, attack the 'dots and lozenges'
with even more than usually quaint symbolism,
and praise expressive lines. 'I know that the
majority of Englishmen are bound by the indefinite... a line is a line in its minutest
particulars, straight or crooked. It is itself not
intermeasurable by anything else... but since
the French Revolution'-since the reign of
reason began, that is-'Englishmen are all intermeasurable with one another, certainly a
happy state of agreement in which I do not
agree.' The Dante series occupied the last
years of his life; even when too weak to get
out of bed he worked on, propped up with the
great drawing-book before him. He sketched




152   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
William  a hundred designs, but left all incomplete, some
Blake and very greatly so,and partly engraved seven plates,
trations. of which the 'Francesca and Paolo' is the most
finished. It is not, I think, inferior to any but
the finest in the Job, if indeed to them, and
shows in its perfection Blake's mastery over
elemental things, the swirl in which the lost
spirits are hurried, 'a watery flame' he would
have called it, the haunted waters and the
huddling shapes.  In the illustrations of Purgatory there is a serene beauty, and one finds
his Dante and Virgil climbing among the rough
rocks under a cloudy sun, and in their sleep
upon the smooth steps towards the summit, a
placid, marmoreal, tender, starry rapture.
All in this great series are in some measure
powerful and moving, and not, as it is customary to say of the work of Blake, because a
flaming imagination pierces through a cloudy
and indecisive technique, but because they
have the only excellence possible in any art,
a mastery   over artistic  expression.  The
technique of Blake was imperfect, incomplete,
as is the technique of well-nigh all artists
who have striven to bring fires from remote
summits; but where his imagination is perfect
and complete, his technique has a like perfection, a like completeness. He strove to embody




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL           I53
more subtle raptures, more elaborate intuitions William
than any before him; his imagination and tech- Blake and
7                           his Illusnique are more broken and strained under a great trations.
burden than the imagination and technique of
any other master. 'I am,' wrote Blake,' 'like
others, just equal in invention and execution.'
And again, 'No man can improve an original
invention; nor can an original invention exist
without execution, organized, delineated and
articulated either by God or man... I have
heard people say, "Give me the ideas; it is no
matter what words you put them into"; and
others say, "Give me the designs; it is no matter
for the execution."... Ideas cannot be given
but in their minutely appropriate words, nor
can a design be made without its minutely appropriate execution.' Living in a time when
technique and imagination are continually
perfect and complete, because they no longer
strive to bring fire from heaven, we forget how
imperfect and incomplete they were in even
the greatest masters, in Botticelli, in Orcagna,
and in Giotto.
The errors in the handiwork of exalted spirits
are as the more phantastical errors in their lives;
as Coleridge's opium cloud; as Villiers De
L'Isle Adam's candidature for the throne of
Greece; as Blake's anger against causes and




154   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
William  purposes he but half understood; as the flickerBlake and in  madness an Eastern scripture would allow
his Illus-.                               al
trations. in august dreamers; for he who half lives in
eternity endures a rending of the structures of
the mind, a crucifixion of the intellectual body.
II. HIS OPINIONS ON DANTE.
As Blake sat bent over the great drawingbook, in which he made his designs to The
Divine Comedy, he was very certain that he and
Dante represented spiritual states which face
one another in an eternal enmity. Dante, because a great poet, was 'inspired by the Holy
Ghost'; but his inspiration was mingled with a
certain philosophy, blown up out of his age,
which Blake held for mortal and the enemy of
immortal things, and which from the earliest
times has sat in high places and ruled the world.
This philosophy was the philosophy of soldiers,
of men of the world, of priests busy with government, of all who, because of the absorption
in active life, have been persuaded to judge and
to punish, and partly also, he admitted, the
philosophy of Christ, who in descending into
the world had to take on the world; who, in
being born of Mary, a symbol of the law in
Blake's symbolic language, had to 'take after




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


i55


his mother,' and drive the money-changers out William
of the Temple. Opposed to this was another Blake and
his Illusphilosophy, not made by men of action, drudges trations.
of time and space, but by Christ when wrapped
in the divine essence, and by artists and poets,
who are taught by the nature of their craft to
sympathize with all living things, and who, the
more pure and fragrant is their lamp, pass the
further from all limitations, to come at last to
forget good and evil in an absorbing vision of the
happy and the unhappy. The one philosophy
was worldly, and established for the ordering
of the body and the fallen will, and so long as
it did not call its 'laws of prudence' 'the laws
of God,' was a necessity, because 'you cannot
have liberty in this world without what you
call moral virtue'; the other was divine, and
established for the peace of the imagination and
the unfallen will, and, even when obeyed with
a too little reverence, could make men sin
against no higher principality than prudence.
He called the followers of the first philosophy
pagans, no matter by what name they knew
themselves, because the pagans, as he understood the word pagan, believed more in the
outward life, and in what he called 'war,
princedom, and victory,' than in the secret life
of the spirit; and the followers of the second




156   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
William philosophy Christians, because only those whose
Blake and sympathies had been enlarged and instructed
his Illus- s  p   h   b     e       a instrcte
trations. by art and poetry could obey the Christian
command of unlimited forgiveness. Blake had
already found this 'pagan' philosophy in Swedenborg, in Milton, in Wordsworth, in Sir Joshua
Reynolds, in many persons, and it had roused
him so constantly and to such angry paradox
that its overthrow became the signal passion of
his life, and filled all he did and thought with
the excitement of a supreme issue. Its kingdom was bound to grow weaker so soon as life
began to lose a little in crude passion and naive
tumult, but Blake was the first to announce its
successor, and he did this, as must needs be
with revolutionists who have 'the law' for
'mother,' with a firm conviction that the things
his opponents held white were indeed black,
and that the things they held black, white;
with a strong persuasion that all busy with
government are men of darkness and 'something other than human life'; one is reminded
of Shelley, who was the next to take up the
cry, though with a less abundant philosophic
faculty, but still more of Nietzsche, whose
thought flows always, though with an even more
violent current, in the bed Blake's thought has
worn.




_ ____ __1__1_ _______:/


IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


157


The kingdom that was passing was, he held, William
the kingdom of the Tree of Knowledge; the Blake and
his Illuskingdom that was coming was the kingdom   trations.
of the Tree of Life: men who ate from the
Tree of Knowledge wasted their days in anger
against one another, and in taking one another
captive in great nets; men who sought their
food among the green leaves of the Tree of
Life condemned none but the unimaginative
and the idle, and those who forget that 'even
love and death and old age are an imaginative
art.
In these opposing kingdoms is the explanation of the petulant sayings he wrote on the
margins of the great sketch-book, and of those
others, still more petulant, which Crabb Robinson has recorded in his diary. The sayings
about the forgiveness of sins have no need for
further explanation, and are in contrast with
the attitude of that excellent commentator,
Herr Hettinger, who, though Dante swooned
from pity at the tale of Francesca, will only
'sympathize' with her 'to a certain extent,'
being taken in a theological net. 'It seems as
if Dante,' Blake wrote, 'supposes God was
something superior to the Father of Jesus; for
if He gives rain to the evil and the good, and
His sun to the just and the unjust, He can




158   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
William  never have builded Dante's Hell, nor the Hell
Blake and of the Bible, as our parsons explain it. It must
his Illustrations. have been framed by the dark spirit itself, and
so I understand it.' And again,' Whatever task
is of vengeance and whatever is against forgiveness of sin is not of the Father but of Satan,
the accuser, the father of Hell.' And again,
and this time to Crabb Robinson, 'Dante saw
devils where I saw none. I see good only.' 'I
have never known a very bad man who had not
something very good about him.' This forgiveness was not the forgiveness of the theologian
who has received a commandment from afar
off, but of the poet and artist, who believes he
has been taught, in a mystical vision, 'that the
imagination is the man himself,' and believes
he has discovered in the practice of his art that
without a perfect sympathy there is no perfect
imagination, and therefore no perfect life. At
another moment he called Dante 'an atheist, a
mere politician busied about this world, as
Milton was, till, in his old age, returned to God
whom he had had in his childhood.' 'Everything is atheism,' he has already explained,
'which assumed the reality of the natural and
unspiritual world.' Dante, he held, assumed
its reality when he made obedience to its laws
a condition of man's happiness hereafter, and




_ __ __ __;______ _ __ ____ ___ I_ ___ _


IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


I59


he set Swedenborg beside Dante in misbelief William
for calling Nature 'the ultimate of Heaven,' a Blake and
his Illuslowest rung, as it were, of Jacob's ladder, instead trations.
of a net woven by Satan to entangle our wandering joys and bring our hearts into captivity.
There are certain curious unfinished diagrams
scattered here and there among the now separated pages of the sketch-book, and of these
there is one which, had it had all its concentric
rings filled with names, would have been a systematic exposition of his animosities and of
their various intensity. It represents Paradise,
and in the midst, where Dante emerges from
the earthly Paradise, is written 'Homer,' and
in the next circle 'Swedenborg,' and on the
margin these words: 'Everything in Dante's
Paradise shows that he has made the earth
the foundation of all, and its goddess Nature,
memory,' memory of sensations, 'not the Holy
Ghost.... Round Purgatory is Paradise, and
round Paradise vacuum. Homer is the centre
of all, I mean the poetry of the heathen.' The
statement that round Paradise is vacuum is a
proof of the persistence of his ideas, and of his
curiously literal understanding of his own symbols; for it is but another form of the charge
made against Milton many years before in The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell. 'In Milton the




i6o IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


William  Father is destiny, the Son a ratio of the five
Blake and senses,' Blake's definition of the reason which
trations Illus- is the enemy of the imagination, 'and the Holy
Ghost vacuum.' Dante, like other mediaeval
mystics, symbolized the highest order of created
beings by the fixed stars, and God by the darkness beyond them, the Primum Mobile. Blake,
absorbed in his very different vision, in which
God took always a human shape, believed that
to think of God under a symbol drawn from
the outer world was in itself idolatry, but that
to imagine Him as an unpeopled immensity was
to think of Him under the one symbol furthest
from His essence-it being a creation of the
ruining reason, 'generalizing' away 'the minute
particulars of life.' Instead of seeking God in
the deserts of time and space, in exterior immensities, in what he called 'the abstract void,'
he believed that the further he dropped behind
him memory of time and space, reason builded
upon sensation, morality founded for the ordering of the world; and the more he was absorbed
in emotion; and, above all, in emotion escaped
from the impulse of bodily longing and the restraints of bodily reason, in artistic emotion;
the nearer did he come to Eden's 'breathing
garden,' to use his beautiful phrase, and to the
unveiled face of God. No worthy symbol of




______ __I_ __ __ __ ~ __I____ I


IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


I6I


God existed but the inner world, the true hu- William
manity, to whose various aspects he gave many Ble and
names,'Jerusalem,''Liberty," Eden, 'The Di- trations.
vine Vision,' 'The Body of God,' 'The Human
Form Divine,' 'The Divine Members,' and
whose most intimate expression was art and
poetry. He always sang of God under this
symbol:
"For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is God our Father dear;
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is man, His child and care.
For Mercy has a human heart;
Pity a human face;
And Love the human form divine;
And Peace, the human dress.
Then every man of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divineLove, Mercy, Pity, Peace.'
Whenever he gave this symbol a habitation in
space he set it in the sun, the father of light
and life; and set in the darkness beyond the
stars, where light and life die away, Og and
Anak and the giants that were of old, and the
iron throne of Satan.
By thus contrasting Blake and Dante by the
M




162 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


William light of Blake's paradoxical wisdom, and as
Blake and though there was no important truth hung
trations. from Dante's beam of the balance, I but seek
to interpret a little-understood philosophy rather
than one incorporate in the thought and habits
of Christendom. Every philosophy has half its
truth from times and generations; and to us onehalf of the philosophy of Dante is less living
than his poetry, while the truth Blake preached
and sang and painted is the root of the cultivated life, of the fragile perfect blossom of the
world born in ages of leisure and peace, and
never yet to last more than a little season; the
life those Pha;acians, who told Odysseus that
they had set their hearts in nothing but in 'the
dance and changes of raiment, and love and
sleep,' lived before Poseidon heaped a mountain
above them; the lives of all who, having eaten
of the Tree of Life, love, more than did the
barbarous ages when none had time to live,
"the minute particulars of life,' the little fragments of space and time, which are wholly
flooded by beautiful emotion because they are
so little they are hardly of time and space at all.
"Every space smaller than a globule of man's
blood,' he wrote, 'opens into eternity of which
this vegetable earth is but a shadow.' And again,
"Every time less than a pulsation of the artery




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


I63


is equal' in its tenor and value 'to six thousand William
years, for in this period the poet's work is done, Blake and
his Illusand all the great events of time start forth, and trations.
are conceived: in such a period, within a moment, a pulsation of the artery.' Dante, indeed,
taught, in the ' Purgatorio,' that sin and virtue
are alike from love, and that love is from God;
but this love he would restrain by a complex
eternal law, a complex external Church. Blake
upon the other hand cried scorn upon the whole
spectacle of external things, a vision to pass
away in a moment, and preached the cultivated
life, the internal Church which has no laws but
beauty, rapture and labour. 'I know of no other
Christianity, and of no other gospel, than the
liberty, both of body and mind, to exercise the
divine arts of imagination, the real and eternal
world of which this vegetable universe is but
a faint shadow, and in which we shall live in
our eternal or imaginative bodies when these
vegetable mortal bodies are no more. The
Apostles knew of no other gospel. What are all
their spiritual gifts? What is the divine spirit?
Is the Holy Ghost any other than an intellectual fountain? What is the harvest of the
gospel and its labours? What is the talent which
it is a curse to hide? What are the treasures of
heaven which we are to lay up for ourselves?




164   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
William  Are they any other than mental studies and
Blake and performances? What are all the gifts of the
his Illustrations. gospel, are they not all mental gifts? Is God a
spirit who must be worshipped in spirit and
truth? Are not the gifts of the spirit everything to man? O ye religious! discountenance
every one among you who shall pretend to
despise art and science. I call upon you in the
name of Jesus! What is the life of man but
art and science? Is it meat and drink? Is not
the body more than raiment? What is mortality but the things relating to the body which
dies? What is immortality but the things relating to the spirit which lives immortally?
What is the joy of Heaven but improvement
in the things of the spirit? What are the pains
of Hell but ignorance, idleness, bodily lust, and
the devastation of the things of the spirit?
Answer this for yourselves, and expel from
amongst you those who pretend to despise the
labours of art and science, which alone are the
labours of the gospel. Is not this plain and
manifest to the thought? Can you think at
all, and not pronounce heartily that to labour
in knowledge is to build Jerusalem, and to
despise knowledge is to despise Jerusalem and
her builders? And remember, he who despises
and mocks a mental gift in another, calling it




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


I65


pride, and selfishness, and sin, mocks Jesus, the William
giver of every mental gift, which always appear Blake and
to the ignorance-loving hypocrites as sins. But trations.
that which is sin in the sight of cruel man is
not sin in the sight of our kind God. Let every
Christian as much as in him lies engage himself
openly and publicly before all the world in some
mental pursuit for the building of Jerusalem.'
I have given the whole of this long passage because, though the very keystone of his thought,
it is little known, being sunk, like nearly all of
his most profound thoughts, in the mysterious
prophetic books. Obscure about much else,
they are always lucid on this one point, and
return to it again and again. 'I care not whether
a man is good or bad,' are the words they put
into the mouth of God, 'all I care is whether
he is a wise man or a fool. Go put off holiness
and put on intellect.' This cultivated life, which
seems to us so artificial a thing, is really, according to them, the laborious re-discovery of
the golden age, of the primeval simplicity, of
the simple world in which Christ taught and
lived, and its lawlessness is the lawlessness of
Him' who being all virtue, acted from impulse
and not from rules,'
And his seventy disciples sent
Against religion and government.




166   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
William   The historical Christ was indeed no more than
Blake and the supreme symbol of the artistic imagination,
trations. in which, with every passion wrought to perfect
beauty by art and poetry, we shall live, when
the body has passed away for the last time;
but before that hour man must labour through
many lives and many deaths. 'Men are admitted into heaven not because they have curbed
and governed their passions, but because they
have cultivated their understandings. The treasures of heaven are not negations of passion but
realities of intellect from which the passions
emanate uncurbed in their eternal glory. The
fool shall not enter into heaven, let him be ever
so holy. Holiness is not the price of entering
into heaven. Those who are cast out are all
those who, having no passions of their own,
because no intellect, have spent their lives in
curbing and governing other people's lives by
the various arts of poverty and cruelty of all
kinds. The modern Church crucifies Christ
with the head downwards. Woe, woe, woe
to you hypocrites.' After a time man has
"to return to the dark valley whence he came
and begin his labours anew,' but before that
return he dwells in the freedom of imagination,
in the peace of the 'divine image,' 'the divine
vision,' in the peace that passes understanding




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


167


and is the peace of art. ' I have been very near William
the gates of death,' Blake wrote in his last letter, Blake and
his Illus'and have returned very weak and an old man, trations.
feeble and tottering but not in spirit and life,
not in the real man, the imagination which
liveth for ever. In that I grow stronger and
stronger as this foolish body decays.... Flaxman is gone, and we must all soon follow, every
one to his eternal home, leaving the delusions of
goddess Nature and her laws, to get into freedom from all the laws of the numbers,' the
multiplicity of nature, 'into the mind in which
every one is king and priest in his own house.'
The phrase about the king and priest is a
memory of the crown and mitre set upon Dante's
head before he entered Paradise. Our imaginations are but fragments of the universal
imagination, portions of the universal body of
God, and as we enlarge our imagination by
imaginative sympathy, and transform with
the beauty and peace of art, the sorrows and
joys of the world, we put off the limited
mortal man more and more and put on the
unlimited 'immortal man.' 'As the seed waits
eagerly watching for its flower and fruit,
anxious its little soul looks out into the clear
expanse to see if hungry winds are abroad
with their invisible array, so man looks out in






168    IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
William  tree, and herb, and fish, and bird, and beast,
Blake and collecting up the fragments of his immortal
trations. body into the elemental forms of everything
that grows.... In pain he sighs, in pain he
labours in his universe, sorrowing in birds over
the deep, or howling in the wolf over the slain,
and moaning in the cattle, and in the winds.'
Mere sympathy for living things is not enough,
because we must learn to separate their 'infected' from their eternal, their satanic from
their divine part; and this can only be done by
desiring always beauty, the one mask through
which can be seen the unveiled eyes of eternity.
We must then be artists in all things, and understand that love and old age and death are
first among the arts. In this sense he insists
that ' Christ's apostles were artists,' that 'Christianity is Art,' and that ' the whole business of
man is the arts.' Dante, who deified law,
selected its antagonist, passion, as the most
important of sins, and made the regions where
it was punished the largest. Blake, who deified
imaginative freedom, held 'corporeal reason'
for the most accursed of things, because it makes
the imagination revolt from the sovereignty of
beauty and pass under the sovereignty of corporeal law, and this is 'the captivity in Egypt.'
True art is expressive and symbolic, and makes




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL           169
every form, every sound, every colour, every William
gesture, a signature of some unanalyzable ima- Blake and
his Illusginative essence. False art is not expressive, but trations.
mimetic, not from experience but from observation, and is the mother of all evil, persuading
us to save our bodies alive at no matter what
cost of rapine and fraud. True art is the flame
of the last day, which begins for every man,
when he is first moved by beauty, and which
seeks to burn all things until they become
"infinite and holy.'
III. THE ILLUSTRATIONS OF DANTE.
The late Mr.John Addington Symonds wrote
-in a preface to certain Dante illustrations by
Stradanus, a sixteenth-century artist of no great
excellence, published in phototype by Mr.
Unwin in 1892-that the illustrations of Gustave Dore, 'in spite of glaring artistic defects,
must, I think, be reckoned first among numerous attempts to translate Dante's conceptions
into terms of plastic art.' One can only account
for this praise of a noisy and demagogic art by
supposing that a temperament, strong enough
to explore with unfailing alertness the countless
schools and influences of the Renaissance in
Italy, is of necessity a little lacking in delicacy






170 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
William  of judgment and in the finer substances of
Blake and emotion.  It is more difficult to account for
his Illustrations. so admirable a scholar not only preferring
these illustrations to the work of what he
called 'the graceful and affected Botticelli,'although 'Dore was fitted for his task, not by
dramatic vigour, by feeling for beauty, or by
anything sterling in sympathy with the supreme
poet's soul, but by a very effective sense of
luminosity and gloom'-but preferring them because 'he created a fanciful world, which makes
the movement of Dante's dramatis personce conceivable, introducing the ordinary intelligence
into those vast regions thronged with destinies
of souls and creeds and empires.' When the
ordinary student finds this intelligence in an
illustrator, he thinks, because it is his own intelligence, that it is an accurate interpretation
of the text, while work of the extraordinary
intelligences is merely an expression of their
own ideas and feelings.  Dore and Stradanus,
he will tell you, have given us something of
the world of Dante, but Blake and Botticelli
have builded worlds of their own and called
them Dante's-as if Dante's world were more
than a mass of symbols of colour and form and
sound which put on humanity, when they arouse
some mind to an intense and romantic life that




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


171


is not theirs; as if it was not one's own sorrows William
and angers and regrets and terrors and hopes Blake and
his Illusthat awaken to condemnation or repentance trations.
while Dante treads his eternal pilgrimage; as
if any poet or painter or musician could be
other than an enchanter calling with a persuasive or compelling ritual, creatures, noble
or ignoble, divine or daemonic, covered with
scales or in shining raiment, that he never
imagined, out of the bottomless deeps of imaginations he never foresaw; as if the noblest
achievement of art was not when the artist
enfolds himself in darkness, while he casts
over his readers a light as of a wild and terrible
dawn.
Let us therefore put away the designs to The
Divine Comedy, in which there is 'an ordinary
intelligence,' and consider only the designs in
which the magical ritual has called up extraordinary shapes, the magical light glimmered
upon a world, different from the Dantesque
world of our own intelligence in its ordinary
and daily moods, upon a difficult and distinguished world. Most of the series of designs
to Dante, and there are a good number, need
not busy any one for a moment. Genelli has
done a copious series, which is very able in the
"formal' 'generalized' way which Blake hated,




NNW


172   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
William and which is spiritually ridiculous. Penelli has
Blake and transformed the 'Inferno' into a vulgar Walhis Illustrations. purgis night, and a certain Schuler, whom I do
not find in the biographical dictionaries, but
who was apparently a German, has prefaced
certain flaccid designs with some excellent
charts, while Stradanus has made a series for
the 'Inferno,' which has so many of the more
material and unessential powers of art, and is so
extremely undistinguished in conception, that
one supposes him to have touched in the sixteenth century the same public Dore has
touched in the nineteenth.
Though with many doubts, I am tempted to
value Flaxman's designs to the 'Inferno,' the
'Purgatorio,' and the 'Paradiso,' only a little
above the best of these, because he does not
seem to have ever been really moved by Dante,
and so to have sunk into a formal manner, which
is a reflection of the vital manner of his Homer
and Hesiod. His designs to The Divine Comedy
will be laid, one imagines, with some ceremony
in that immortal wastepaper-basket in which
Time carries with many sighs the failures of
great men. I am perhaps wrong, however, because Flaxman even at his best has not yet touched
me very deeply, and I hardly ever hope to escape
this limitation of my ruling stars. That Signorelli




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


I73


does not seem greatly more interesting except William
here and there, as in the drawing of'The Angel,' Blake and
full of innocence and energy, coming from the trations.
boat which has carried so many souls to the
foot of the mountain of purgation, can only be
because one knows him through poor reproductions from frescoes half mouldered away with
damp. A little-known series, drawn by Adolph
Stiirler, an artist of German extraction, who was
settled in Florence in the first half of this century, are very poor in drawing, very pathetic
and powerful in invention, and full of most
interesting pre-Raphaelitic detail. There are
admirable and moving figures, who, having set
love above reason, listen in the last abandonment of despair to the judgment of Minos, or
walk with a poignant melancholy to the foot of
his throne through a land where owls and strange
beasts move hither and thither with the sterile
content of the evil that neither loves nor hates,
and a Cerberus full of patient cruelty. All
Stiirler's designs have, however, the languor of
a mind that does its work by a succession of
delicate critical perceptions rather than the
decision and energy of true creation, and are
more a curious contribution to artistic methods
than an imaginative force.
The only designs that compete with Blake's




OWN


174   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
William  are those of Botticelli and Giulio Clovio, and
Blake and these contrast rather than compete; for Blake
his Illustraions. did not live to carry his 'Paradiso' beyond the
first faint pencillings, the first thin washes of
colour, while Botticelli only, as I think, became supremely imaginative in his 'Paradiso,'
and Clovio never attempted the 'Inferno' and
"Purgatorio' at all. The imaginations of Botticelli and Clovio were overshadowed by the
cloister, and it was only when they passed
beyond the world or into some noble peace,
which is not the world's peace, that they won
a perfect freedom. Blake had not such mastery over figure and drapery as had Botticelli,
but he could sympathize with the persons
and delight in the scenery of the 'Inferno' and
the 'Purgatorio' as Botticelli could not, and
could fill them with a mysterious and spiritual
significance born perhaps of mystical pantheism.
The flames of Botticelli give one no emotion,
and his car of Beatrice is no symbolic chariot
of the Church led by the gryphon, half eagle,
half lion, of Christ's dual nature, but is a fragment of some medieval pageant pictured with
a merely technical inspiration.  Clovio, the
illuminator of missals, has tried to create with
that too easy hand of his a Paradise of serene
air reflected in a little mirror, a heaven ofsocia



IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


175


bility and humility and prettiness, a heaven of William
women and of monks; but one cannot imagine Blake and
his Illushim deeply moved, as the modern world is trations.
moved, by the symbolism of bird and beast, of
tree and mountain, of flame and darkness. It
was a profound understanding of all creatures
and things, a profound sympathy with passionate and lost souls, made possible in their extreme intensity by his revolt against corporeal
law, and corporeal reason, which made Blake
the one perfectly fit illustrator for the' Inferno'
and the 'Purgatorio'; in the serene and rapturous emptiness of Dante's Paradise he would
find no symbols but a few abstract emblems,
and he had no love for the abstract, while with
the drapery and the gestures of Beatrice and
Virgil, he would have prospered less than
Botticelli or even Clovio.
1897.




I


SYMBOLISM IN PAINTING


IN England, which has made great Symbolic
Art, most people dislike an art if they are told
it is symbolic, for they confuse symbol and
allegory. Even Johnson's Dictionary sees no
great difference, for it calls a Symbol 'That
which comprehends in its figure a representation of something else'; and an Allegory, 'A
figurative discourse, in which something other
is intended than is contained in the words
literally taken.' It is only a very modern Dictionary that calls a Symbol 'the sign or representation of any moral thing by the images or
properties of natural things,' which, though an
imperfect definition, is not unlike 'The things
below are as the things above' of the Emerald
Tablet of Hermes! The Faerie Queene and The
Pilgrim's Progress have been so important in
England that Allegory has overtopped Symbolism, and for a time has overwhelmed it in its
own downfall. William Blake was perhaps the
first modern to insist on a difference; and the




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


177


other day, when I sat for my portrait to a Symbolism
German Symbolist in Paris, whose talk was all in Painting
of his love for Symbolism and his hatred for
Allegory, his definitions were the same as
William Blake's, of whom he knew nothing.
William Blake has written,' Vision or imagination'-meaning symbolism by these words"is a representation of what actually exists,
really or unchangeably. Fable or Allegory is
formed by the daughters of Memory.' The
German insisted with many determined gestures, that Symbolism said things which could
not be said so perfectly in any other way, and
needed but a right instinct for its understanding; while Allegory said things which could
be said as well, or better, in another way, and
needed a right knowledge for its understanding.
The one gave dumb things voices, and bodiless
things bodies; while the other read a meaning
-which had never lacked its voice or its body
-into something heard or seen, and loved less
for the meaning than for its own sake. The
only symbols he cared for were the shapes
and motions of the body; ears hidden by the
hair, to make one think of a mind busy with
inner voices; and a head so bent that back and
neck made the one curve, as in Blake's 'Vision
of Bloodthirstiness,' to call up an emotion of
N




I


178   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
Symbolism bodily strength; and he would not put even a
in Painting lily, or a rose, or a poppy into a picture to
express purity, or love, or sleep, because he
thought such emblems were allegorical, and
had their meaning by a traditional and not
by a natural right. I said that the rose, and
the lily, and the poppy were so married, by
their colour and their odour, and their use, to
love and purity and sleep, or to other symbols
of love and purity and sleep, and had been so
long a part of the imagination of the world,
that a symbolist might use them to help out
his meaning without becoming an allegorist. I
think I quoted the lily in the hand of the angel
in Rossetti's 'Annunciation,' and the lily in the
jar in his 'Childhood of Mary Virgin,' and
thought they made the more important symbols, the women's bodies, and the angels' bodies,
and the clear morning light, take that place,
in the great procession of Christian symbols,
where they can alone have all their meaning
and all their beauty.
It is hard to say where Allegory and Symbolism melt into one another, but it is not hard
to say where either comes to its perfection;
and though one may doubt whether Allegory
or Symbolism is the greater in the horns of
Michael Angelo's 'Moses,' one need not doubt




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


179


that its symbolism has helped to awaken the Symbolism
modern imagination; while Tintoretto's ' Origin in Painting
of the Milky Way,' which is Allegory without
any Symbolism, is, apart from its fine painting,
but a moment's amusement for our fancy. A
hundred generations might write out what
seemed the meaning of the one, and they would
write different meanings, for no symbol tells
all its meaning to any generation; but when
you have said, 'That woman there is Juno, and
the milk out of her breast is making the Milky
Way,' you have told the meaning of the other,
and the fine painting, which has added so much
irrelevant beauty, has not told it better.
All Art that is not mere story-telling, or
mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which mediaeval
magicians made with complex colours and forms,
and bade their patients ponder over daily, and
guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in
complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine
Essence. A person or a landscape that is a part
of a story or a portrait, evokes but so much
emotion as the story or the portrait can permit
without loosening the bonds that make it a
story or a portrait; but if you liberate a person or a landscape from the bonds of motives
and their actions, causes and their effects, and






i80 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


Symbolism from all bonds but the bonds of your love, it
in Painting will change under your eyes, and become a
symbol of an infinite emotion, a perfected emotion, a part of the Divine Essence; for we love
nothing but the perfect, and our dreams make
all things perfect, that we may love them.
Religious and visionary people, monks and
nuns, and medicine-men and opium-eaters, see
symbols in their trances; for religious and
visionary thought is thought about perfection
and the way to perfection; and symbols are
the only things free enough from all bonds to
speak of perfection.
Wagner's dramas, Keats' odes, Blake's pictures and poems, Calvert's pictures, Rossetti's
pictures, Villiers De L'Isle Adam's plays, and
the black-and-white art of Mr. Beardsley and
Mr. Ricketts, and the lithographs of Mr.
Shannon, and the pictures of Mr. Whistler,
and the plays of M. Maeterlinck, and the
poetry of Verlaine, in our own day, but differ
from the religious art of Giotto and his disciples in having accepted all symbolisms, the
symbolism of the ancient shepherds and stargazers, that symbolism of bodily beauty which
seemed a wicked thing to Fra Angelico, the
symbolism in day and night, and winter and
summer, spring and autumn, once so great




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


ISI


a part of an older religion than Christianity; Symbolism
and in having accepted all the Divine Intellect, in Painting
its anger and its pity, its waking and its sleep,
its love and its lust, for the substance of their
art. A Keats or a Calvert is as much a symbolist as a Blake or a Wagner; but he is a
fragmentary symbolist, for while he evokes in
his persons and his landscapes an infinite emotion, a perfected emotion, a part of the Divine
Essence, he does not set his symbols in the great
procession as Blake would have him, 'in a certain order, suited' to his 'imaginative energy.'
If you paint a beautiful woman and fill her
face, as Rossetti filled so many faces, with an
infinite love, a perfected love,'one's eyes meet
no mortal thing when they meet the light of
her peaceful eyes,' as Michael Angelo said of
Vittoria Colonna; but one's thoughts stray to
mortal things, and ask, maybe,' Has her lover
gone from her, or is he coming?' or' What predestinated unhappiness has made the shadow
in her eyes?' If you paint the same face, and
set a winged rose or a rose of gold somewhere
about her, one's thoughts are of her immortal
sisters, Pity and Jealousy, and of her mother,
Ancestral Beauty, and of her high kinsmen, the
Holy Orders, whose swords make a continual
music before her face. The systematic mystic is




182 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


Symbolism not the greatest of artists, because his imaginain Painting tion is too great to be bounded by a picture or
a song, and because only imperfection in a
mirror of perfection, or perfection in a mirror
of imperfection, delight our frailty. There
is indeed a systematic mystic in every poet or
painter who, like Rossetti, delights in a traditional Symbolism, or, like Wagner, delights in
a personal Symbolism; and such men often fall
into trances, or have waking dreams. Their
thought wanders from the woman who is Love
herself, to her sisters and her forebears, and to
all the great procession; and so august a beauty
moves before the mind, that they forget the
things which move before the eyes. William
Blake, who was the chanticleer of the new
dawn, has written: 'If the spectator could
enter into one of these images of his imagination, approaching them on the fiery chariot
of his contemplative thought, if.... he
could make a friend and companion of one
of these images of wonder, which always
entreat him to leave mortal things (as he must
know), then would he arise from the grave, then
would he meet the Lord in the air, and then
he would be happy.' And again, 'The world of
imagination is the world of Eternity. It is
the Divine bosom into which we shall all go




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


183


after the death of the vegetated body. The Symbolism
world of imagination is infinite and eternal,in Painting
whereas the world of generation or vegetation
is finite and temporal. There exist in that
eternal world the eternal realities of everything
which we see reflected in the vegetable glass
of nature.'
Every visionary knows that the mind's eye
soon comes to see a capricious and variable
world, which the will cannot shape or change,
though it can call it up and banish it again. I
closed my eyes a moment ago, and a company
of people in blue robes swept by me in a
blinding light, and had gone before I had done
more than see little roses embroidered on the
hems of their robes, and confused, blossoming
apple-boughs somewhere beyond them, and
recognised one of the company by his square
black, curling beard. I have often seen him; and
one night a year ago, I asked him questions
which he answered by showing me flowers and
precious stones, of whose meaning I had no
knowledge, and he seemed too perfected a soul
for any knowledge that cannot be spoken in
symbol or metaphor.
Are he and his blue-robed companions, and
their like, 'the Eternal realities' of which we
are the reflection 'in the vegetable glass of




184   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
Symbolism nature,' or a momentary dream? To answer
in Painting is to take sides in the only controversy in which
it is greatly worth taking sides, and in the only
controversy which may never be decided.
1898.




THE SYMBOLISM        OF POETRY
I
'SYMBOLISM, as seen in the writers of our day,
would have no value if it were not seen also,
under one disguise or another, in every great
imaginative writer,' writes Mr. Arthur Symons
in The Symbolist Movement in Literature, a subtle
book which I cannot praise as I would, because
it has been dedicated to me; and he goes on to
show how many profound writers have in the
last few years sought for a philosophy of poetry
in the doctrine of symbolism, and how even in
countries where it is almost scandalous to seek
for any philosophy of poetry, new writers are
following them in their search. We do not
know what the writers of ancient times talked
of among themselves, and one bull is all that
remains of Shakespeare's talk, who was on the
edge of modern times; and the journalist is convinced, it seems, that they talked of wine and
women and politics, but never about their art,




186 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


The    or never quite seriously about their art. He is
Symbolism certain that no one, who had a philosophy of
of Poetryhis art or a theory of how he should write, has
ever made a work of art, that people have no
imagination who do not write without forethought and afterthought as he writes his own
articles. He says this with enthusiasm, because
he has heard it at so many comfortable dinnertables, where some one had mentioned through
carelessness, or foolish zeal, a book whose difficulty had offended indolence, or a man who had
not forgotten that beauty is an accusation.
Those formulas and generalizations, in which a
hidden sergeant has drilled the ideas of journalists and through them the ideas of all but all
the modern world, have created in their turn a
forgetfulness like that of soldiers in battle, so
that journalists and their readers have forgotten,
among many like events, that Wagner spent
seven years arranging and explaining his ideas
before he began his most characteristic music;
that opera, and with it modern music, arose
from certain talks at the house of one Giovanni
Bardi of Florence; and that the Pleiade laid the
foundations of modern French literature with
a pamphlet. (Goethe has said, 'a poet needs all
philosophy, but he must keep it out of his work,'
though that is not always necessary; and cer



IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


I87


tainly he cannot know too much, whether The
about his own work, or about the procreant Symbolism
waters of the soul where the breath first moved, of Poetry.
or about the waters under the earth that are the
life of passing things; and almost certainly no
great art, outside England, where journalists
are more powerful and ideas less plentiful than
elsewhere, has arisen without a great criticism,
for its herald or its interpreter and protector,
and it may be for this reason that great art, now
that vulgarity has armed itself and multiplied
itself, is perhaps dead in England.
All writers, all artists of any kind, in so far
as they have had any philosophical or critical
power, perhaps just in so far as they have been
deliberate artists at all, have had some philosophy, some criticism of their art; and it has
often been this philosophy, or this criticism,
that has evoked their most startling inspiration,
calling into outer life some portion of the divine
life, of the buried reality, which could alone
extinguish in the emotions what their philosophy or their criticism would extinguish in the
intellect. They have sought for no new thing,
it may be, but only to understand and to copy
the pure inspiration of early times, but because
the divine life wars upon our outer life, and
must needs change its weapons and its move



188 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


The    ments as we change ours, inspiration has come
Symbolism to them in beautiful startling shapes. The
scientific movement brought with it a literiature,
which was always tending to lose itself in externalities of all kinds, in opinion, in declamation, in picturesque writing, in word-painting,
or in what Mr. Symons has called an attempt
" to build in brick and mortar inside the covers
of a book'; and now writers have begun to
dwell upon the element of evocation, of suggestion, upon what we call the symbolism in
great writers.
II
In 'Symbolism in Painting,' I tried to describe the element of symbolism that is in
pictures and sculpture, and described a little the
symbolism in poetry, but did not describe at
(all the continuous indefinable symbolism which
is the substance of all style.
There are no lines with more melancholy
beauty than these by Burns'The white moon is setting behind the white wave,
And Time is setting with me, O!'
and these lines are perfectly symbolical. Take
from them the whiteness of the moon and of
the wave, whose relation to the setting of Time




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


I89


is too subtle for the intellect, and you take from  The
them their beauty. But, when all are together, Symbolism
of Poetry.
moon and wave and whiteness and setting of Poetry.
Time and the last melancholy cry, they evoke
an emotion which cannot be evoked by any
other arrangement of colours and sounds and
forms. We may call this metaphorical writing,
but it is better to call it symbolical writing,
because metaphors are not profound enough to
be moving, when they are not symbols, and
when they are symbols they are the most perfect, because the most subtle, outside of pure
sound, and through them one can the best find
out what symbols are. If one begins the reverie
with any beautiful lines that one can remember,
one finds they are like those by Burns. Begin
with this line by Blake'The gay fishes on the wave when the moon sucks
up the dew';
or these lines by Nash'Brightness falls from the air,
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust hath closed Helen's eye';
or these lines by Shakespeare'Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beached verge of the salt flood;
Who once a day with his embossed froth
The turbulent surge shall cover';




190


IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


The    or take some line that is quite simple, that gets
Symbolism its beau'ty from its place in a story, and see how
of Poetry. it flickers with the light of the many symbols
that have given the story its beauty, as a swordblade may flicker with the light of burning
towers.
All sounds, all colours, all forms, either because of their pre-ordained energies or because
of long association, evoke indefinable and yet
precise emotions, or, as I prefer to think, call
down among us certain disembodied powers,
whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions;
and when sound, and colour, and form are in
a musical relation, a beautiful relation to one
another, they become as it were one sound,
one colour, one form, and evoke an emotion
that is made out of their distinct evocations
and yet is one emotion. The same relation
exists between all portions of every work of
art, whether it be an epic or a song, and the
more perfect it is, and the more various and
numerous the elements that have flowed into
its perfection, the more powerful will be the
emotion, the power, the god it calls among us.
Because an emotion does not exist, or does not
become perceptible and active among us, till it
has found its expression, in colour or in sound
or in form, or in all of these, and because no
two modulations or arrangements of these




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


191


evoke the same emotion, poets and painters and The
musicians, and in a less degree because their Symbolism
effects are momentary, day and night and cloud
and shadow, are continually making and unmaking mankind.    It is indeed only those
things which seem useless or very feeble that
have any power, and all those things that seem
useful or strong, armies, moving wheels, modes
of architecture, modes of government, speculations of the reason, would have been a little
different if some mind long ago had not given
itself to some emotion, as a woman gives herself to her lover, and shaped sounds or colours
or forms, or all of these, into a musical relation,
that their emotion might live in other minds.
A little lyric evokes an emotion, and this
emotion gathers others about it and melts into
their being in the making of some great epic;
and at last, needing an always less delicate body,
or symbol, as it grows more powerful, it flows
out, with all it has gathered, among the blind
instincts of daily life, where it moves a power
within powers, as one sees ring within ring in
the stem of an old tree. This is maybe what
Arthur O'Shaughnessy meant when he made
his poets say they had built Nineveh with their
sighing; and I am certainly never certain, when
I hear of some war, or of some religious excitement, or of some new manufacture, or of any



192   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
The    thing else that fills the ear of the world, that
Symbolism it has not all happened because of something
that a boy piped in Thessaly. I remember once
asking a seer to ask one among the gods who,
as she believed, were standing about her in their
symbolic bodies, what would come of a charming but seeming trivial labour of a friend, and
the form answering,' the devastation of peoples
and the overwhelming of cities.' I doubt indeed if the crude circumstance of the world,
which seems to create all our emotions, does
more than reflect, as in multiplying mirrors,
the emotions that have come to solitary men
in moments of poetical contemplation; or that
love itself would be more than an animal
hunger but for the poet and his shadow the
priest, for unless we believe that outer things
are the reality, we must believe that the gross
is the shadow of the subtle, that things are wise
before they become foolish, and secret before
they cry out in the market-place. Solitary men
in moments of contemplation receive, as I
think, the creative impulse from the lowest of
the Nine Hierarchies, and so make and unmake
mankind, and even the world itself, for does
not' the eye altering alter all'?
'Our towns are copied fragments from our breast;
And all man's Babylons strive but to impart
The grandeurs of his Babylonian heart.')




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


I93


The
III                   Symbolism
The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed of Poetry.
to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and
awake, which is the one moment of creation,
by hushing us with an alluring monotony,
while it holds us waking by variety, to keep
us in that state of perhaps real trance, in which
the mind liberated from the pressure of the
will is unfolded in symbols. If certain sensitive
persons listen persistently to the ticking of a
watch, or gaze persistently on the monotonous
flashing of a light, they fall into the hypnotic
trance; and rhythm is but the ticking of a
watch made softer, that one must needs listen,
and various, that one may not be swept beyond
memory or grow weary of listening; while the
patterns of the artist are but the monotonous
flash woven to take the eyes in a subtler enchantment. I have heard in meditation voices
that were forgotten the moment they had
spoken; and I have been swept, when in more
profound meditation, beyond all memory but
of those things that came from beyond the
threshold of waking life. I was writing once
at a very symbolical and abstract poem, when
my pen fell on the ground; and as I stooped
o




194   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
The   to pick it up, I remembered some phantastic
Symbolism adventure that yet did not seem phantastic,
of Poetry. and then another like adventure, and when I
asked myself when these things had happened,
I found that I was remembering my dreams
for many nights. I tried to remember what
I had done the day before, and then what I
had done that morning; but all my waking life
had perished from me, and it was only after a
struggle that I came to remember it again, and
as I did so that more powerful and startling
life perished in its turn. Had my pen not
fallen on the ground and so made me turn from
the images that I was weaving into verse, I
would never have known that meditation had
become trance, for I would have been like one
who does not know that he is passing through
a wood because his eyes are on the pathway.
So I think that in the making and in the
understanding of a work of art, and the more
easily if it is full of patterns and symbols and
music, we are lured to the threshold of sleep,
and it may be far beyond it, without knowing
that we have ever set our feet upon the steps
of horn or of ivory.




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL          I95
The
IV                    Symbolism
of Poetry.
Besides emotional symbols, symbols that evoke
emotions alone,-and in this sense all alluring
or hateful things are symbols, although their
relations with one another are too subtle to
delight us fully, away from rhythm and pattern,
--'there are intellectual symbols, symbols that
evoke ideas alone, or ideas mingled with emotions; and outside the very definite traditions
of mysticism and the less definite criticism of
certain modern poets, these alone are called
symbols. Most things belong to one or another
kind, according to the way we speak of them
and the companions we give them, for symbols,
associated with ideas that are more than fragments of the shadows thrown upon the intellect
by the emotions they evoke, are the playthings
of the allegorist or the pedant, and soon pass
away. If I say 'white' or 'purple' in an
ordinary line of poetry, they evoke emotions
so exclusively that I cannot say why they move
me; but if I say them in the same mood, in
the same breath with such obvious intellectual
symbols as a cross or a crown of thorns, I think
of purity and sovereignty; while innumerable
other meanings, which are held to one another
by the bondage of subtle suggestion, and alike in




196   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
The   the emotions and in the intellect, move visibly
Symbolism through my mind, and move invisibly beyond
of Poetry. the threshold of sleep,casting lights and shadows
of an indefinable wisdom on what had seemed
before, it may be, but sterility and noisy violence.
It is the intellect that decides where the reader
shall ponder over the procession of the symbols,
and if the symbols are merely emotional, he
gazes from amid the accidents and destinies of
the world; but if the symbols are intellectual
too, he becomes himself a part of pure intellect,
and he is himself mingled with the procession.
If I watch a rushy pool in the moonlight, my
emotion at its.beauty is mixed with memories
of the man that I have seen ploughing by its
margin, or of the lovers I saw there a night
ago; but if I look at the moon herself and
remember any of her ancient names and meanings, I move among divine people, and things
that have shaken off our mortality, the tower
of ivory, the queen of waters, the shining stag
among enchanted woods, the white hare sitting
upon the hilltop, the fool of faery with his
shining cup full of dreams, and it may be
'make a friend of one of these images of
wonder,' and 'meet the Lord in the air.' So,
too, if one is moved by Shakespeare, who is
content with emotional symbols that he may




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


197


come the nearer to our sympathy, one is mixed  The
with the whole spectacle of the world; while Symbolism
if one is moved by Dante, or by the myth of fPoetry.
Demeter, one is mixed into the shadow of God
or of a goddess. So too one is furthest from
symbols when one is busy doing this or that,
but the soul moves among symbols and unfolds
in symbols when trance, or madness, or deep
meditation has withdrawn it from every impulse
but its own. 'I then saw,' wrote Gerard de
Nerval of his madness, 'vaguely drifting into
form, plastic images of antiquity, which outlined themselves, became definite, and seemed
to represent symbols of which I only seized
the idea with difficulty.' In an earlier time
he would have been of that multitude, whose
souls austerity withdrew, even more perfectly
than madness could withdraw his soul, from
hope and memory, from desire and regret, that
they might reveal those processions of symbols
that men bow to before altars, and woo with
incense and offerings. But being of our time,
he has been like Maeterlinck, like Villiers de
L'Isle Adam in Axel, like all who are preoccupied with intellectual symbols in our time,
a foreshadower of the new sacred book, of
which all the arts, as somebody has said, are
begging to dream, and because, as I think,




198   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
The   they cannot overcome the slow dying of men's
Symbolism hearts that we call the progress of the world,
of Poetry.,
of Poetry.and lay their hands upon men's heart-strings
again, without becoming the garment of religion as in old times.'ý
v
(If people were to accept the theory that
poetry moves us because of its symbolism,
what change should one look for in the manner
of our poetry? A return to the way of our
fathers, a casting out of descriptions of nature
for the sake of nature, of the moral law for
the sake of the moral law, a casting out of all
anecdotes and of that brooding over scientific
opinion that so often extinguished the central
flame in Tennyson, and of that vehemence that
would make us do or not do certain things; or,
in other words, we should come to understand
that the beryl stone was enchanted by our
fathers that it might unfold the pictures in its
heart, and not to mirror our own excited faces,
or the boughs waving outside the window.
With this change of substance, this return to
imagination, this understanding that the laws
of art, which are the hidden laws of the world,
can alone bind the imagination, would come a
change of style, and we would cast out of
serious poetry those energetic rhythms, as of a




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


199


man running, which are the invention of the  The
will with its eyes always on something to be Symbolism
done or undone; and we would seek out those of Poetry.
wavering, meditative, organic rhythms, which
are the embodiment of the imagination, that
neither desires nor hates, because it has done
with time, and only wishes to gaze upon some
reality, some beauty; nor would it be any longer
possible for anybody to deny the importance
of form, in all its kinds, for although you can
expound an opinion, or describe a thing when
your words are not quite well chosen, you
cannot give a body to something that moves
beyond the senses, unless your words are as
subtle, as complex, as full of mysterious life,
as the body of a flower or of a woman. The
form of sincere poetry, unlike the form of the
popular poetry, may indeed be sometimes obscure, or ungrammatical as in some of the best
of the Songs of Innocence and Experience, but
it must have the perfections that escape analysis,
the subtleties that have a new meaning every
day, and it must have all this whether it be
but a little song made out of a moment of
dreamy indolence, or some great epic made
out of the dreams of one poet and of a hundred
generations whose hands were never weary of
the sword.
1900.




THE THEATRE


I
I REMEMBER, some years ago, advising a
distinguished, though too little recognised,
writer of poetical plays to write a play as unlike
ordinary plays as possible, that it might be
judged with a fresh mind, and to put it on the
stage in some small suburban theatre, where a
small audience would pay its expenses. I said
that he should follow it the year after, at the
same time of the year, with another play, and
so on from year to year; and that the people
who read books, and do not go to the theatre,
would gradually find out about him. I suggested
that he should begin with a pastoral play,
because nobody would expect from a pastoral
play the succession of nervous tremours which
the plays of commerce, like the novels of
commerce, have substituted for the purification
that comes with pity and terror to the imagination and intellect. He followed my advice in
part, and had a small but perfect success, filling




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL 201


his small theatre for twice the number of   The
performances he had announced; but instead Theatre.
of being content with the praise of his equals,
and waiting to win their praise another year,
he hired immediately a big London theatre,
and put his pastoral play and a new play before
a meagre and unintelligent audience. I still
remember his pastoral play with   delight,
because, if not always of a high excellence, it
was always poetical; but I remember it at the
small theatre, where my pleasure was magnified
by the pleasure of those about me, and not at
the big theatre, where it made me uncomfortable, as an unwelcome guest always makes one
uncomfortable.
Why should we thrust our works, which
we have written with imaginative sincerity
and filled with spiritual desire, before those
quite excellent people who think that Rossetti's
women are 'guys,' that Rodin's women are
'ugly,' and that Ibsen is 'immoral,' and who
only want to be left at peace to enjoy the works
so many clever men have made especially to
suit them? We must make a theatre for ourselves and our friends, and for a few simple
people who understand from sheer simplicity
what we understand from scholarship and
thought. We have planned the Irish Literary




202 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


The   Theatre with this hospitable emotion, and,
Theatre. that the right people may find out about us,
we hope to act a play or two in the spring of
every year; and that the right people may
escape the stupefying memory of the theatre
of commerce which clings even to them, our
plays will be for the most part remote, spiritual,
and ideal.
A common opinion is that the poetic drama
has come to an end, because modern poets have
no dramatic power; and Mr. Binyon seems to
accept this opinion when he says: 'It has been
too often assumed that it is the manager who
bars the way to poetic plays. But it is much
more probable that the poets have failed the
managers. If poets mean to serve the stage,
their dramas must he dramatic.' I find it
easier to believe that audiences, who have
learned, as I think, from the life of crowded
cities to live upon the surface of life, and actors
and managers, who study to please them, have
changed, than that imagination, which is the
voice of what is eternal in man, has changed.
The arts are but one Art; and why should all
intense painting and all intense poetry have
become not merely unintelligible but hateful
to the greater number of men and women, and
intense drama move them to pleasure? The




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL           203
audiences of Sophocles and of Shakespeare and  The
of Calderon were not unlike the audiences I Theatre.
have heard listening in Irish cabins to songs in
Gaelic about 'an old poet telling his sins,' and
about 'the five young men who were drowned
last year,' and about 'the lovers that were
drowned going to America,' or to some tale of
Oisin and his three hundred years in Tir nan
Oge. Mr. Bridges' Return of Ulysses, one of
the most beautiful and, as I think, dramatic of
modern plays, might have some success in the
Aran Islands, if the Gaelic League would translate it into Gaelic, but I am quite certain that
it would have no success in the Strand.
Blake has said that all Art is a labour to
bring again the Golden Age, and all culture is
certainly a labour to bring again the simplicity
of the first ages, with knowledge of good and
evil added to it. The drama has need of cities
that it may find men in sufficient numbers,
and cities destroy the emotions to which it
appeals, and therefore the days of the drama
are brief and come but seldom. It has one
day when the emotions of cities still remember
the emotions of sailors and husbandmen and
shepherds and users of the spear and the bow;
as the houses and furniture and earthern vessels
of cities, before the coming of machinery,




204   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
The   remember the rocks and the woods and the
Theatre. hillside; and it has another day, now beginning,
when thought and scholarship discover their
desire. In the first day, it is the Art of the
people; and in the second day, like the dramas
acted of old times in the hidden places of
temples, it is the preparation of a Priesthood.
It may be, though the world is not old enough
to show us any example, that this Priesthood
will spread their Religion everywhere, and
make their Art the Art of the people.
When the first day of the drama had passed
by, actors found that an always larger number
of people were more easily moved through the
eyes than through the ears. The emotion that
comes with the music of words is exhausting,
like all intellectual emotions, and few people
like exhausting emotions; and therefore actors
began to speak as if they were reading something out of the newspapers. They forgot
the noble art of oratory, and gave all their
thought to the poor art of acting, that is content
with the sympathy of our nerves; until at last
those who love poetry found it better to read
alone in their rooms what they had once delighted to hear sitting friend by friend, lover
by beloved. I once asked Mr. William Morris
if he had thought of writing a play, and he




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


205


answered that he had, but would not write   The
one, because actors did not know how to speak Theatre.
poetry with the half-chant men spoke it with
in old times. Mr. Swinburne's Locrine was
acted a month ago, and it was not badly acted,
but nobody could tell whether it was fit for the
stage or not, for not one rhythm, not one cry
of passion, was spoken with a musical emphasis,
and verse spoken without a musical emphasis
seems but an artificial and cumbersome way of
saying what might be said naturally and simply
in prose.
As audiences and actors changed, managers
learned to substitute meretricious landscapes,
painted upon wood and canvas, for the descriptions of poetry, until the painted scenery, which
had in Greece been a charming explanation of
what was least important in the story, became
as important as the story. It needed some
imagination, some gift for day-dreams, to see
the horses and the fields and flowers of Colonus
as one listened to the elders gathered about
CEdipus, or to see 'the pendent bed and procreant cradle' of the 'martlet' as one listened
to Duncan before the castle of Macbeth; but
it needs no imagination to admire a painting
of one of the more obvious effects of nature
painted by somebody who understands how to




206   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
The   show everything to the most hurried glance.
Theatre. At the same time the managers made the
costumes of the actors more and more magnificent, that the mind might sleep in peace, while
the eye took pleasure in the magnificence of
velvet and silk and in the physical beauty of
women. These changes gradually perfected
the theatre of commerce, the masterpiece of
that movement towards externality in life and
thought and Art, against which the criticism
of our day is learning to protest.
Even if poetry were spoken as poetry, it
would still seem out of place in many of its
highest moments upon a stage, where the
superficial appearances of nature are so closely
copied; for poetry is founded upon convention,
and becomes incredible the moment painting
or gesture remind us that people do not speak
verse when they meet upon the highway. The
theatre of Art, when it comes to exist, must
therefore discover grave and decorative gestures,
such as delighted Rossetti and Madox Brown,
and grave and decorative scenery, that will be
forgotten the moment an actor has said 'It is
dawn,' or 'It is raining,' or 'The wind is
shaking the trees'; and dresses of so little
irrelevant magnificence that the mortal actors
and actresses may change without much labour




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


207


into the immortal people of romance. The     The
theatre began in ritual, and it cannot come to Theatre.
its greatness again without recalling words to
their ancient sovereignty.
It will take a generation, and perhaps generations, to restore the theatre of Art; for one
must get one's actors, and perhaps one's scenery,
from the theatre of commerce, until new actors
and new painters have come to help one; and
until many failures and imperfect successes
have made a new tradition, and perfected in
detail the ideal that is beginning to float before
our eyes. If one could call one's painters and
one's actors from where one would, how easy
it would be! I know some painters, who have
never painted scenery, who could paint the
scenery I want, but they have their own work
to do; and in Ireland I have heard a red-haired
orator repeat some bad political verses with a
voice that went through one like flame, and
made them seem the most beautiful verses in
the world; but he has no practical knowledge
of the stage, and probably despises it.


May, 1899.




208   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
The
Theatre.                    II
Dionysius, the Areopagite, wrote that 'He
has set the borders of the nations according to
His angels.'  It is these angels, each one the
genius of some race about to be unfolded, that
are the founders of intellectual traditions; and
as lovers understand in their first glance all that
is to befall them, and as poets and musicians
see the whole work in its first impulse, so races
prophesy at their awakening whatever the
generations that are to prolong their traditions
shall accomplish in detail. It is only at the
awakening-as in ancient Greece, or in Elizabethan England, or in contemporary Scandinavia
-that great numbers of men understand that
a right understanding of life and of destiny is
more important than amusement. In London,
where all the intellectual traditions gather to
die, men hate a play if they are told it is
literature, for they will not endure a spiritual
superiority; but in Athens, where so many
intellectual traditions were born, Euripides
once changed hostility to enthusiasm by asking
his playgoers whether it was his business to
teach them, or their business to teach him.
New races understand instinctively, because
the future cries in their ears, that the old




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL           209
revelations are insufficient, and that all life is  The
revelation beginning in miracle and enthusiasm, Theatre.
and dying out as it unfolds itself in what we
have mistaken for progress. It is one of our
illusions, as I think, that education, the softening of manners, the perfecting of law-countless
images of a fading light-can create nobleness
and beauty, and that life moves slowly and
evenly towards some perfection.  Progress is
miracle, and it is sudden, because miracles are
the work of an all-powerful energy, and nature
in herself has no power except to die and to
forget. If one studies one's own mind, one
comes to think with Blake, that 'every time
less than a pulsation of the artery is equal to
six thousand years, for in this period the poet's
work is done; and all the great events of time
start forth and are conceived in such a period,
within a pulsation of the artery.'
February, I900.


P




THE CELTIC ELEMENT IN
LITERATURE
I
ERNEST RENAN described what he held to
be Celtic characteristics in The Poetry of the
Celtic Races. I must repeat the well-known
sentences: 'No race communed so intimately
as the Celtic race with the lower creation, or
believed it to have so big a share of moral life.'
The Celtic race had 'a realistic naturalism,'
'a love of nature for herself, a vivid feeling for
her magic, commingled with the melancholy
a man knows when he is face to face with her,
and thinks he hears her communing with him
about his origin and his destiny.' 'It has worn
itself out in mistaking dreams for realities,' and
"compared with the classical imagination the
Celtic imagination is indeed the infinite contrasted with the finite.' 'Its history is one long
lament, it still recalls its exiles, its flights across
the seas.' 'If at times it seems to be cheerful,






IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL 211


its tear is not slow to glisten behind the smile. The Celtic
Its songs of joy end as elegies; there is nothing Element in
I               Literature.
to equal the delightful sadness of its national
melodies.' Matthew Arnold, in The Study of
Celtic Literature, has accepted this passion for
nature, this imaginativeness, this melancholy,
as Celtic characteristics, but has described them
more elaborately. The Celtic passion for nature
comes almost more from a sense of her 'mystery' than of her 'beauty,' and it adds 'charm
and magic' to nature, and the Celtic imaginativeness and melancholy are alike 'a passionate,
turbulent, indomitable reaction against the
despotism of fact.' The Celt is not melancholy,
as Faust or Werther are melancholy, from 'a
perfectly definite motive,' but because of something about him 'unaccountable, defiant and
titanic.' How well one knows these sentences,
better even than Renan's, and how well one
knows the passages of prose and verse which
he uses to prove that wherever English literature has the qualities these sentences describe,
it has them from a Celtic source. Though I
do not think any of us who write about Ireland
have built any argument upon them, it is well
to consider them a little, and see where they
are helpful and where they are hurtful. If we
do not, we may go mad some day, and the




212 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


The Celtic enemy root up our rose-garden and plant a
Element in cabbage-garden instead. Perhaps we must reLiterature.
state a little, Renan's and Arnold's argument.
II
Once every people in the world believed
that trees were divine, and could take a human
or grotesque shape and dance among the
shadows; and that deer, and ravens and foxes,
and wolves and bears, and clouds and pools,
almost all things under the sun and moon, and
the sun and moon, were not less divine and
changeable. They saw in the rainbow the still
bent bow of a god thrown down in his negligence; they heard in the thunder the sound of
his beaten water-jar, or the tumult of his
chariot wheels; and when a sudden flight of
wild duck, or of crows, passed over their heads,
they thought they were gazing at the dead
hastening to their rest; while they dreamed of
so great a mystery in little things that they
believed the waving of a hand, or of a sacred
bough, enough to trouble far-off hearts, or
hood the moon with darkness. All old literatures
are full of these or of like imaginations, and all
the poets of races, who have not lost this way
of looking at things, could have said of them



IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL          213
selves, as the poet of the Kalevala said of The Celtic
himself, 'I have learned my songs from the Element in
music of many birds, and from the music ofLiterature.
many waters.' When a mother in the Kalevala
weeps for a daughter, who was drowned flying
from an old suitor, she weeps so greatly that
her tears become three rivers, and cast up three
rocks, on which grow three birch-trees, where
three cuckoos sit and sing, the one 'love, love,'
the one 'suitor, suitor,' the one 'consolation,
consolation.' And the makers of the Sagas
made the squirrel run up and down the sacred
ash-tree carrying words of hatred from the
eagle to the worm, and from the worm to the
eagle; although they had less of the old way
than the makers of the Kalevala, for they
lived in a more crowded and complicated
world, and were learning the abstract meditation which lures men from visible beauty, and
were unlearning, it may be, the impassioned
meditation which brings men beyond the edge
of trance and makes trees, and beasts, and dead
things talk with human voices.
The old Irish and the old Welsh, though
they had less of the old way than the makers
of the Kalevala, had more of it than the makers
of the Sagas, and it is this that distinguishes
the examples Matthew Arnold quotes of their




214   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
The Celtic 'natural magic,' of their sense of 'the mystery'
Element in more than of 'the beauty' of nature. When
Literature.,
Matthew Arnold wrote it was not easy to
know as much as we know now of folk song
and folk belief, and I do not think he understood that our 'natural magic' is but the ancient
religion of the world, the ancient worship of
nature and that troubled ecstasy before her,
that certainty of all beautiful places being
haunted, which it brought into men's minds.
The ancient religion is in that passage of the
Mabinogion about the making of 'Flower Aspect.' Gwydion and Math made her 'by
charms and illusions' 'out of flowers.' 'They
took the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms
of the broom, and the blossoms of the meadowsweet, and produced from them a maiden the
fairest and most graceful that man ever saw;
and they baptized her, and called her Flower
Aspect'; and one finds it in the not less beautiful passage about the burning Tree, that has
half its beauty from calling up a fancy of
leaves so living and beautiful, they can be of
no less living and beautiful a thing than flame:
"They saw a tall tree by the side of the river,
one half of which was in flames from the root
to the top, and the other half was green and in
full leaf.' And one finds it very certainly in the




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


215


quotations he makes from English poets to TheCeltic
prove a Celtic influence in English poetry; inElement in
Literature.
Keats's 'magic casements opening on the foam
of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn'; in his
'moving waters at their priest-like task of pure
ablution round earth's human shore'; in Shakespeare's 'floor of heaven,' 'inlaid with patens
of bright gold'; and in his Dido standing 'on
the wild sea banks,' 'a willow in her hand,'
and waving it in the ritual of the old worship
of nature and the spirits of nature, to wave
"her love to come again to Carthage.' And
his other examples have the delight and wonder
of devout worshippers among the haunts of
their divinities. Is there not such delight and
wonder in the description of Olwen in the
Mabinogion: 'More yellow was her hair than
the flower of the broom, and her skin was
whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer
were her hands and her fingers than the
blossoms of the wood-anemone amidst the
spray of the meadow fountains.' And is there
not such delight and wonder in'Meet we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,
By paved fountain or by rushy brook,
Or on the beached margent of the sea'?


If men had never dreamed that fair women




216 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


The Celtic could be made out of flowers, or rise up out of
Element in meadow fountains and paved fountains, neither
Literature.
passage could have been written. Certainly the
descriptions of nature made in what Matthew
Arnold calls 'the faithful way,' or in what he
calls 'the Greek way,' would have lost nothing
if all the meadow fountains or paved fountains
were meadow fountains and paved fountains
and nothing more. When Keats wrote, in the
Greek way, which adds lightness and brightness to nature'What little town by river or sea-shore
Or mountain built with quiet citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn';
when Shakespeare wrote in the Greek way'I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows';
when Virgil wrote in the Greek way'Muscosi fontes et somno mollior herba,'
and
'Pallentes violas et summa papavera carpens
Narcissum et florem jungit bene olentis anethi';
they looked at nature without ecstasy, but with
the affection a man feels for the garden where
he has walked daily and thought pleasant
thoughts. They looked at nature in the modern




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


217


way, the way of people who are poetical, but The Celtic
are more interested in one another than in a Element in
nature which has faded to be but friendly andLiterature.
pleasant, the way of people who have forgotten
the ancient religion.
III
Men who lived in a world where anything
might flow and change, and become any other
thing; and among great gods whose passions
were in the flaming sunset, and in the thunder
and the thunder-shower, had not our thoughts
of weight and measure. They worshipped
nature and the abundance of nature, and had
always, as it seems, for a supreme ritual that
tumultuous dance among the hills or in the
depths of the woods, where unearthly ecstasy
fell upon the dancers, until they seemed the
gods or the godlike beasts, and felt their souls
overtopping the moon; and, as some think,
imagined for the first time in the world the
blessed country of the gods and of the happy
dead. They had imaginative passions because
they did not live within our own strait
limits, and were nearer to ancient chaos, every
man's desire, and had immortal models about
them. The hare that ran by among the dew
might have sat upon his haunches when the




218   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
The Celtic first man was made, and the poor bunch of
Element in rushes under their feet might have been a
Literature.                                1
goddess laughing among the stars; and with
but a little magic, a little waving of the hands,
a little murmuring of the lips, they too could
become a hare or a bunch of rushes, and know
immortal love and immortal hatred.
All folk literature, and all literature that
keeps the folk tradition, delights in unbounded
and immortal things. The Kalevala delights
in the seven hundred years that Luonaton
wanders in the depths of the sea with Wiiinimoinen in her womb, and the Mahomedan
king in the Song of Roland, pondering upon
the greatness of Charlemagne, repeats over and
over, 'He is three hundred years old, when
will he weary of war?' Cuchulain in the
Irish folk tale had the passion of victory, and
he overcame all men, and died warring upon
the waves, because they alone had the strength
to overcome him. The lover in the Irish folk
song bids his beloved come with him into the
woods, and see the salmon leap in the rivers,
and hear the cuckoo sing, because death will
never find them in the heart of the woods.
Oisin, new come from his three hundred years
of faeryland, and of the love that is in faeryland, bids Saint Patrick cease his prayers a




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


219


while and listen to the blackbird, because it is The Celtic
the blackbird of Darrycarn that Finn brought Element in
Literature.
from Norway, three hundred years before, and
set its nest upon the oak-tree with his own
hands. Surely if one goes far enough into the
woods, one will find there all that one is seeking? Who knows how many centuries the
birds of the woods have been singing?
All folk literature has indeed a passion whose
like is not in modern literature and music and
art, except where it has come by some straight
or crooked way out of ancient times. Love was
held to be a fatal sickness in ancient Ireland,
and there is a love-poem in The Songs of Connacht
that is like a death cry: ' My love, 0 she is my
love, the woman who is most for destroying me,
dearer is she for making me ill than the woman
who would be for making me well. She is my
treasure, 0 she is my treasure, the woman of the
grey eyes... a woman who would not lay a hand
under my head.... She is my love, 0 she is my
love, the woman who left no strength in me; a
woman who would not breathe a sigh after me, a
woman who would not raise a stone at my tomb.... She is my secret love, 0 she is my secret love.
A woman who tells me nothing,... a woman
who does not remember me to be out....
She is my choice, 0 she is my choice, the woman




220 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


The Celtic who would not look back at me, the woman
Element in who would not make peace with me.... She
Literature..                               "  "
is my desire, 0 she is my desire: a woman
dearest to me under the sun, a woman who
would not pay me heed, if I were to sit by her
side. It is she ruined my heart and left a sigh
for ever in me.' There is another song that
ends, 'The Erne shall be in strong flood, the
hills shall be torn down, and the sea shall have
red waves, and blood shall be spilled, and every
mountain valley and every moor shall be on
high, before you shall perish, my little black
rose.' Nor do the old Irish weigh and measure
their hatred. The nurse of O'Sullivan Bere in
the folk song prays that the bed of his betrayer
may be the red hearth-stone of hell for ever.
And an Elizabethan Irish poet cries: 'Three
things are waiting for my death. The devil,
who is waiting for my soul and cares nothing
for my body or my wealth; the worms, who
are waiting for my body but care nothing for
my soul or my wealth; my children, who are
waiting for my wealth and care nothing for my
body or my soul. 0 Christ, hang all three in the
one noose.' Such love and hatred seek no mortal
thing but their own infinity, and such love and
hatred soon become love and hatred of the idea.
The lover who loves so passionately can soon




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL 221


sing to his beloved like the lover in the poem The Celtic
by 'A.E., 'A vast desire awakes and grows into Element in
'                                   Literature.
forgetfulness of thee.'
When an early Irish poet calls the Irishman
famous for much loving, and a proverb, a friend
has heard in the Highlands of Scotland, talks
of the lovelessness of the Irishman, they may
say but the same thing, for if your passion is
but great enough it leads you to a country where
there are many cloisters. The hater who hates
with too good a heart soon comes also to hate
the idea only; and from this idealism in love
and hatred comes, as I think, a certain power
of saying and forgetting things, especially a
power of saying and forgetting things in politics,
which others do not say and forget. The
ancient farmers and herdsmen were full of
love and hatred, and made their friends gods,
and their enemies the enemies of gods, and those
who keep their tradition are not less mythological. From this 'mistaking dreams,' which
are perhaps essences, for 'realities' which are
perhaps accidents, from this 'passionate, turbulent reaction against the despotism of fact,'
comes, it may be, that melancholy which made
all ancient peoples delight in tales that end in
death and parting, as modern peoples delight in
tales that end in marriage bells; and made all




222 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


The Celtic ancient peoples, who like the old Irish had a
Element in nature more lyrical than dramatic, delight in
Literature..
wild and beautiful lamentations. Life was so
weighed down by the emptiness of the great
forests and by the mystery of all things, and by
the greatness of its own desires, and, as I think,
by the loneliness of much beauty; and seemed
so little and so fragile and so brief, that nothing
could be more sweet in the memory than a tale
that ended in death and parting, and than a wild
and beautiful lamentation. Men did not mourn
merely because their beloved was married to
another, or because learning was bitter in the
mouth, for such mourning believes that life
might be happy were it different, and is therefore the less mourning; but because they had
been born and must die with their great thirst
unslaked. And so it is that all the august sorrowful persons of literature, Cassandra and Helen
and Deirdre, and Lear and Tristan, have come
out of legends and are indeed but the images
of the primitive imagination mirrored in the
little looking-glass of the modern and classic
imagination. This is that 'melancholy a man
knows when he is face to face' with nature,
and thinks 'he hears her communing with him
about' the mournfulness of being born and of
dying; and how can it do otherwise than call




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


223


into his mind 'its exiles, its flights across the The Celtic
seas,' that it may stir the ever-smouldering ashes? Element in.  ^. r       Literature.
No Gaelic poetry is so popular in Gaelic-speaking places as the lamentations of Oisin, old and
miserable, remembering the companions and the
loves of his youth, and his three hundred years
in faeryland, and his faery love: all dreams
withering in the winds of time lament in his
lamentations: 'The clouds are long above me
this night; last night was a long night to me;
although I find this day long, yesterday was still
longer. Every day that comes to me is long.... No one in this great world is like mea poor old man dragging stones. The clouds
are long above me this night. I am the last
man of the Fianna, the great Oisin, the son of
Finn, listening to the sound of bells. The clouds
are long above me this night.' Matthew Arnold
quotes the lamentation of Leyrach Hen as a
type of the Celtic melancholy, but I prefer to
quote it as a type of the primitive melancholy;
"O my crutch, is it not autumn when the fern
is red and the water flag yellow? Have I not
hated that which I love?... Behold, old
age, which makes sport of me, from the hair
of my head and my teeth, to my eyes which
women loved. The four things I have all my life
most hated fall upon me together-coughing




224   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
The Celtic and old age, sickness and sorrow. I am old, I
Element in am alone, shapeliness and warmth are gone from
Literature.
me, the couch of honour shall be no more mine;
I am miserable, I am bent on my crutch. How
evil was the lot allotted to Leyrach, the night
he was brought forth! Sorrows without end
and no deliverance from his burden.' An Elizabethan writer describes extravagant sorrow by
calling it 'to weep Irish'; and Oisin and Leyrach
Hen are, I think, a little nearer even to us modern
Irish than they are to most people. That is why
our poetry and much of our thought is melancholy. 'The same man,' writes Dr. Hyde in
the beautiful prose which he first writes in
Gaelic, 'who will to-day be dancing, sporting,
drinking, and shouting, will be soliloquizing by
himself to-morrow, heavy and sick and sad in
his own lonely little hut, making a croon over
departed hopes, lost life, the vanity of this world,
and the coming of death.'
IV
Matthew Arnold asks how much of the Celt
must one imagine in the ideal man of genius.
I prefer to say, how much of the ancient hunters
and fishers and of the ecstatic dancers among
hills and woods must one imagine in the ideal




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL           225
man of genius. Certainly a thirst for unbounded The Celtic
emotion and a wild melancholy are troublesome Element in
Literature.
things in the world, and do not make its life
more easy or orderly, but it may be the arts
are founded on the life beyond the world, and
that they must cry in the ears of our penury
until the world has been consumed and become
a vision. Certainly, as Samuel Palmer wrote,
"Excess is the vivifying spirit of the finest art,
and we must always seek to make excess more
abundantly excessive.' Matthew Arnold has
said that if he were asked 'where English got
its turn for melancholy and its turn for natural
magic,' he 'would answer with little doubt
that it got much of its melancholy from a
Celtic source, with no doubt at all that from a
Celtic source is got nearly all its natural magic.'
I will put this differently and say that literature dwindles to a mere chronicle of circumstance, or passionless phantasies, and passionless
meditations, unless it is constantly flooded with
the passions and beliefs of ancient times, and
that of all the fountains of the passions and
beliefs of ancient times in Europe, the Sclavonic,
the Finnish, the Scandinavian, and the Celtic,
the Celtic alone has been for centuries close to
the main river of European literature. It has
again and again brought 'the vivifying spirit'
Q




226 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


The Celtic 'of excess' into the arts of Europe. Ernest
Element in Renan has told how the visions of purgatory
Literature.
seen by pilgrims to Lough Derg-once visions
of the pagan under-world, as the boat made out
of a hollow tree that bore the pilgrim to the
holy island were alone enough to prove-gave
European thought new symbols of a more
abundant penitence; and had so great an influence that he has written, 'It cannot be doubted
for a moment that to the number of poetical
themes Europe owes to the genius of the Celt
is to be added the framework of the divine
comedy.'
A little later the legends of Arthur and his
table, and of the Holy Grail, once it seems the
cauldron of an Irish god, changed the literature
of Europe, and it maybe changed, as it were,
the very roots of man's emotions by their
influence on the spirit of chivalry and on the
spirit of romance; and later still Shakespeare
found his Mab, and probably his Puck, and
one knows not how much else of his faery
kingdom, in Celtic legend; while at the beginning of our own day Sir Walter Scott gave
Highland legends and Highland excitability so
great a mastery over all romance that they seem
romance itself.
In our own time Scandinavian tradition,




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


227


because of the imagination of Richard Wagner The Celtic
and of William Morris and of the earlier and, Element in
ILiterature.
as I think, greater Heinrich Ibsen, has created
Sa new romance, and through the imagination
of Richard Wagner, become all but the most
passionate element in the arts of the modern
world. There is indeed but one other element
as passionate, the still unfaded legends of Arthur
and of the Holy Grail; and now a new fountain of legends, and, as I think, a more abundant
fountain than any in Europe, is being opened,
the great fountain of Gaelic legends; the tale
of Deirdre, who alone among the women who
have set men mad was at once the white flame
and the red flame, wisdom and loveliness; the
tale of the Sons of Tuireann, with its unintelligible mysteries, an old Grail Quest as I
think; the tale of the four children changed
into four swans, and lamenting over many
waters; the tale of the love of Cuchulain for
an immortal goddess, and his coming home to
a mortal woman in the end; the tale of his
many battles at the ford with that dear friend
he kissed before the battles, and over whose dead
body he wept when he had killed him; the tale
of his death and of the lamentations of Emer;
the tale of the flight of Grainne with Diarmuid,
strangest of all tales of the fickleness of woman,




228 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


The Celtic and the tale of the coming of Oisin out of faeryElement in land, and of his memories and lamentations.
Literature..
'The Celtic movement,' as I understand it, is
principally the opening of this fountain, and
none can measure of how great importance it
may be to coming times, for every new fountain of legends is a new intoxication for the
imagination of the world. It comes at a time
when the imagination of the world is as ready,
as it was at the coming of the tales of Arthur
and of the Grail, for a new intoxication. The
reaction against the rationalism of the eighteenth
century has mingled with a reaction against
the materialism of the nineteenth century, and
the symbolical movement, which has come to
perfection in Germany in Wagner, in England
in the Pre-Raphaelites, and in France in Villiers
de L'Isle Adam, and Mallarme, and Maeterlinck, and has stirred the imagination of Ibsen
and D'Annunzio, is certainly the only movement that is saying new things. The arts by
brooding upon their own intensity have become
religious, and are seeking, as I think Verhaeren
has said, to create a sacred book. They must,
as religious thought has always done, utter
themselves through legends; and the Sclavonic
and Finnish legends tell of strange woods and
seas, and the Scandinavian legends are held by




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


229


a great master, and tell also of strange woods The Celtic
and seas, and the Welsh legends are held by Element in
SLiterature.
almost as many great masters as the Greek
legends, while the Irish legends move among
known woods and seas, and have so much of a
new beauty, that they may well give the opening century its most memorable symbols.
1897.
I could have written this essay with much
more precision and have much better illustrated
my meaning if I had waited until Lady Gregory
had finished her book of legends, Cuchulain of
Muirthemne, a book to set beside the Morte
d'Arthur and the Mabinogion.
1902.




THE AUTUMN OF THE BODY


OUR thoughts and emotions are often but
spray flung up from hidden tides that follow a
moon no eye can see. I remember that when
I first began to write I desired to describe
outward things as vividly as possible, and took
pleasure, in which there was, perhaps, a little
discontent, in picturesque and declamatory
books. And then quite. suddenly I lost the
desire of describing outward things, and found
that I took little pleasure in a book unless it
was spiritual and unemphatic. I did not then
understand that the change was from beyond
my own mind, but I understand now that
writers are struggling all over Europe, though
not often with a philosophic understanding of
their struggle, against that picturesque and
declamatory way of writing, against that 'externality' which a time of scientific and political
thought has brought into literature. This
struggle has been going on for some years,
but it has only just become strong enough to




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


231


draw within itself the little inner world which  The
alone seeks more than amusement in the Autumnof
the Body.
arts.  In France, where movements are more
marked, because the people are pre-eminently
logical, The Temptation of S. Anthony, the last
great dramatic invention of the old romanticism,
contrasts very plainly with Axel, the first great
dramatic invention of the new; and Maeterlinck has followed Count Villiers de L'Isle
Adam. Flaubert wrote unforgettable descriptions of grotesque, bizarre, and beautiful scenes
and persons, as they show to the ear and to
the eye, and crowded them with historic and
ethnographical details; but Count Villiers de
L'Isle Adam swept together, by what seemed a
sudden energy, words behind which glimmered
a spiritual and passionate mood, as the flame
glimmers behind the dusky blue and red glass
in an Eastern lamp; and created persons from
whom has fallen all even of personal characteristic except a thirst for that hour when all
things shall pass away like a cloud, and a pride
like that of the Magi following their star over
many   mountains; while Maeterlinck    has
plucked away even this thirst and this pride
and set before us faint souls, naked and pathetic
shadows already half vapour and sighing to one
another upon the border of the last abyss.)




232   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
Theni'' There has been, as I think, a like change in
Autumn of French painting, for one sees everywhere,
instead of the dramatic stories and picturesque
moments of an older school, frail and tremulous
bodies unfitted for the labour of life, and landscape where subtle rhythms of colour and of
form have overcome the clear outline of things
as we see them in the labour of life.
There has been a like change in England,
but it has come more gradually and is more
"mixed with lesser changes than in France.
The poetry which found its expression in the
poems of writers like Browning     and  of
Tennyson, and even of writers, who are seldom
classed with them, like Swinburne, and like
Shelley in his earlier years, pushed its limits
as far as possible, and tried to absorb into itself
the science and politics, the philosophy and
morality of its time; but a new poetry, which
is always contracting its limits, has grown up
under the shadow of the old. Rossetti began
it, but was too much of a painter in his poetry
to follow it with a perfect devotion; and it
became a movement when Mr. Lang and Mr.
Gosse and Mr. Dobson devoted themselves to
the most condensed of lyric poems, and when
Mr. Bridges, a more considerable poet, elaborated a rhythm too delicate for any but an




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL           233
almost bodiless emotion, and repeated over  The
and over the most ancient notes of poetry, and Autumn of
i  i       the Body.
none but these. The poets who followed have the Body.
either, like Mr. Kipling, turned from serious
poetry altogether, and so passed out of the
processional order, or speak out of some personal or spiritual passion in words and types
and metaphors that draw one's imagination as
far as possible from the complexities of modern
life and thought. The change has been more
marked in English painting, which, when
intense enough to belong to the procession
order, began to cast out things, as they are
seen by minds plunged in the labour of life, so
much before French painting that ideal art is
sometimes called English art upon the Continent.
I see, indeed, in the arts of every country
those faint lights and faint colours and faint
outlines and faint energies which many call
'the decadence,' and which I, because I believe
that the arts lie dreaming of things to come,
prefer to call the autumn of the body. An
Irish poet whose rhythms are like the cry of a
sea-bird in autumn twilight has told its meaning in the line, 'The very sunlight's weary,
and it's time to quit the plough.' Its importance is the greater because it comes to us at




234   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
The   the moment when we are beginning to be
Autumn of interested in many things which positive
the Body.
science, the interpreter of exterior law, has
always denied (communion of mind with mind
in thought and without words, foreknowledge
in dreams and in visions, and the coming
among us of the dead, and of much else. We
are, it may be, at a crowning crisis of the
world, at the moment when man is about to
ascend, with the wealth, he has been so long
gathering, upon his shoulders, the stairway he
has been descending from the first days. The
first poets, if one may find their images in the
Kalevala, had not Homer's preoccupation with
things, and he was not so full of their excitement as Virgil. ( Dante added to poetry a
dialectic which, although he made it serve his
laborious ecstasy, was the invention of minds
trained by the labour of life, by a traffic among
many things, and not a spontaneous expression
of an interior life; while Shakespeare shattered
the symmetry of verse and of drama that he
might fill them with things and their accidental relations to one another.
Each of these writers had come further
down the stairway than those who had lived
before him, but it was only with the modern
poets, with Goethe and Wordsworth    and




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL          235
Browning, that poetry gave up the right to  The
consider all things in the world as a dictionary Autumn of
of types and symbols and began to call itself a the Body.
critic of life and an interpreter of things as
they are. Painting, music, science, politics,
and even religion, because they have felt a
growing belief that we know nothing but the
fading and flowering of the world, have changed
in numberless elaborate ways. Man has wooed
and won the world, and has fallen weary, and
not, I think, for a time, but with a weariness
that will not end until the last autumn, when
the stars shall be blown away like withered
leaves. He grew weary when he said, 'These
things that I touch and see and hear are alone
real,' for he saw them without illusion at last,
and found them but air and dust and moisture.
And now he must be philosophical above
everything, even about the arts, for he can
only return the way he came, and so escape
from weariness, by philosophy. The arts are,
I believe, about to take upon their shoulders
the burdens that have fallen from the shoulders
of priests, and to lead us back upon our journey
by filling our thoughts with the essences of
things, and not with things. We are about to
substitute once more the distillation of alchemy
for the analyses of chemistry and for some




236   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
The   other sciences; and certain of us are looking
Autumn ofeverywhere for the perfect alembic that no
the Body.   J
silver or golden drop may escape. Mr. Symons
has written lately on M. Mallarme's method,
and has quoted him as saying that we should
'abolish the pretension, aesthetically an error,
despite its dominion over almost all the masterpieces, to enclose within the subtle pages other
than-for example-the horror of the forest or
the silent thunder in the leaves, not the intense
dense wood of the trees,' and as desiring to
substitute for 'the old lyric afflatus or the enthusiastic personal direction of the phrase'
words 'that take light from mutual reflection,
like an actual trail of fire over precious stones,'
and 'to make an entire word hitherto unknown
to the language' 'out of many vocables.' Mr.
Symons understands these and other sentences
to mean that poetry will henceforth be a
poetry of essences, separated one from another
in little and intense poems. I think there will
be much poetry of this kind, because of an
ever more arduous search for an almost disembodied ecstasy, but I think we will not
cease to write long poems, but rather that we
will write them more and more as our new
belief makes the world plastic under our hands
again. I think that we will learn again how




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL           237
to describe at great length an old man wander-  The
ing among enchanted islands, his return home Autumnof
at last, his slow-gathering vengeance, a flitting
shape of a goddess, and a flight of arrows, and
yet to make all of these so different things
"take light by mutual reflection, like an actual
trail of fire over precious stones,' and become
'an entire word,' the signature or symbol of a
mood of the divine imagination as imponderable as 'the horror of the forest or the silent
thunder in the leaves.'
1898.




THE MOODS


LITERATURE differs from explanatory and
scientific writing in being wrought about a
mood, or a community of moods, as the body
is wrought about an invisible soul; and if it
uses argument, theory, erudition, observation,
and seems to grow hot in assertion or denial,
it does so merely to make us partakers at the
banquet of the moods. It seems to me that
these moods are the labourers and messengers
of the Ruler of All, the gods of ancient days
still dwelling on their secret Olympus, the
angels of more modern days ascending and
descending upon their shining ladder; and that
argument, theory, erudition, observation, are
merely what Blake called 'little devils who fight
for themselves,' illusions of our visible passing
life, who must be made serve the moods, or
we have no part in eternity. Everything that
can be seen, touched, measured, explained,
understood, argued over, is to the imaginative
artist nothing more than a means, for he belongs




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL          239
to the invisible life, and delivers its ever new  The
and ever ancient revelation. We hear much   Moods.
of his need for the restraints of reason, but the
only restraint he can obey is the mysterious
instinct that has made him an artist, and that
teaches him to discover immortal moods in
mortal desires, an undecaying hope in our trivial
ambitions, a divine love in sexual passion.
1895.




THE BODY OF THE FATHER
CHRISTIAN ROSENCRUX
THE followers of the Father Christian
Rosencrux, says the old tradition, wrapped his
imperishable body in noble raiment and laid it
under the house of their order, in a tomb
containing the symbols of all things in heaven
and earth, and in the waters under the earth,
and set about him inextinguishable magical
lamps, which burnt on generation after generation, until other students of the order came
upon the tomb by chance. It seems to me that
the imagination has had no very different history
during the last two hundred years, but has been
laid in a great tomb of criticism, and had set over
it inextinguishable magical lamps of wisdom
and romance, and has been altogether so nobly
housed and apparelled that we have forgotten
that its wizard lips are closed, or but opened
for the complaining of some melancholy and
ghostly voice. The ancients and the Eliza



IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


241


bethans abandoned themselves to imagination The Body
as a woman abandons herself to love, and of the
Father
created great beings who made the people of Christian
this world seem but shadows, and great passions Rosencrux.
which made our loves and hatreds appear but
ephemeral and trivial phantasies; but now it is
not the great persons, or the great passions we
imagine, which absorb us, for the persons and
passions in our poems are mainly reflections our
mirror has caught from older poems or from
the life about us, but the wise comments we
make upon them, the criticism of life we wring
from their fortunes. Arthur and his Court are
nothing, but the many-coloured lights that
play about them are as beautiful as the lights
from cathedral windows; Pompilia and Guido
are but little, while the ever-recurring meditations and expositions which climax in the
mouth of the Pope are among the wisest of
the Christian age. I cannot get it out of my
mind that this age of criticism is about to pass,
and an age of imagination, of emotion, of
moods, of revelation, about to come in its
place; for certainly belief in a supersensual
world is at hand again; and when the notion
that we are 'phantoms of the earth and water'
has gone down the wind, we will trust our own
being and all it desires to invent; and when the
R




242   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
The Body external world is no more the standard of reality,
of the  we will learn again that the great Passions are
Father
Christian angels of God, and that to embody them
Rosencrux. 'uncurbed in their eternal glory,' even in their
labour for the ending of man's peace and prosperity, is more than to comment, however
wisely, upon the tendencies of our time, or to
express the socialistic, or humanitarian, or
other forces of our time, or even 'to sum up'
our time, as the phrase is; for Art is a revelation, and not a criticism, and the life of the
artist is in the old saying, 'The wind bloweth
where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound
thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh
and whither it goeth; so is every one that is
born of the spirit.'
1895.




THE RETURN OF ULYSSES


I
M. MAETERLINCK, in his beautiful Treasure
of the Humble, compares the dramas of our
stage to the paintings of an obsolete taste; and
the dramas of the stage for which he hopes, to
the paintings of a taste that cannot become
obsolete. 'The true artist,' he says, 'no longer
chooses Marius triumphing over the Cimbrians,
or the assassination of the Duke of Guise, as
fit subjects for his art; for he is well aware that
the psychology of victory or murder is but
elementary and exceptional, and that the solemn
voice of men and things, the voice that issues
forth so timidly and hesitatingly, cannot be
heard amidst the idle uproar of acts of violence.
And therefore will he place on his canvas a
house lost in the heart of the country, a door
open at the end of a passage, a face or hands at
rest.' I do not understand him to mean that
our dramas should have no victories or murders,




244   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
The Return for he quotes for our example plays that have
of Ulysses. both, but only that their victories and murders
shall not be to excite our nerves, but to illustrate the reveries of a wisdom which shall be
as much a part of the daily life of the wise as
a face or hands at rest. And certainly the
greater plays of the past ages have been built
after such a fashion. If this fashion is about to
become our fashion also, and there are signs
that it is, plays like some of Mr. Robert
Bridges will come out of that obscurity into
which all poetry, that is not lyrical poetry, has
fallen, and even popular criticism will begin to
know something about them. Some day the
few among us, who care for poetry more than
any temporal thing, and who believe that its
delights cannot be perfect when we read it
alone in our rooms and long for one to share
its delights, but that they might be perfect in
the theatre, when we share them friend with
friend, lover with beloved, will persuade a few
idealists to seek out the lost art of speaking,
and seek out ourselves the lost art, that is perhaps nearest of all arts to eternity, the subtle
art of listening. When that day comes we will
talk much of Mr. Bridges; for did he not
write scrupulous, passionate poetry to be sung
and to be spoken, when there were few to sing




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


245


and as yet none to speak?   There is one play The Return
especially, The Return of Ulysses, which we of Ulysses.
will praise for perfect after its kind, the kind
of our new drama of wisdom, for it moulds
into dramatic shape, and with as much as possible of literal translation, those closing books
of the Odyssey which are perhaps the most
perfect poetry of the world, and compels that
great tide of song to flow through delicate
dramatic verse, with little abatement of its own
leaping and clamorous speed.    As I read, the
gathering passion overwhelms me, as it did
when Homer himself was the singer, and when
I read at last the lines in which the maid describes to Penelope the battle with the suitors,
at which she looks through the open door, I
tremble with excitement.
'Penelope: Alas! what cries! Say, is the prince still
safe?
The Maid: He shieldeth himself well, and striketh
surely;
His foes fall down before him. Ah! now what can
I see?
Who cometh? Lo! a dazzling helm, a spear
Of silver or electron; sharp and swift
The piercings. How they fall! Ha! shields are raised
In vain. I am blinded, or the beggar-man
Hath waxed in strength. He is changed, he is young.
O strange!




246    IDEAS OF GOOD       AND   EVIL
The Return He is all in golden armour. These are gods
of Ulysses. That slay the suitors. (Runs to Penelope.) O lady,
forgive me.
'Tis Ares' self. I saw his crisped beard;
I saw beneath his helm his curled locks.'
The coming of Athene helmed 'in silver or
electron' and her transformation of Ulysses
are not, as the way is with the only modern
dramas that popular criticism holds to be
dramatic, the climax of an excitement of the
nerves, but of that unearthly excitement which
has wisdom for fruit, and is of like kind with
the ecstasy of the seers, an altar flame, unshaken
by the winds of the world, and burning every
moment with whiter and purer brilliance.
Mr. Bridges has written it in what is practically the classical manner, as he has done in
Achilles in Scyros-a placid and charming setting
for many placid and charming lyrics'And ever we keep a feast of delight
The betrothal of hearts, when spirits unite,
Creating an offspring of joy, a treasure
Unknown to the bad, for whom
The gods foredoom
The glitter of pleasure
And a dark tomb.'
The poet who writes best in the Shakepearian manner is a poet with a circumstantial




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL           247
and instinctive mind, who delights to speak The Return
with strange voices and to see his mind in the of Ulysses.
mirror of Nature; while Mr. Bridges, like
most of us to-day, has a lyrical and meditative
mind, and delights to speak with his own voice
and to see Nature in the mirror of his mind.
In reading his plays in a Shakespearian manner,
I find that he is constantly arranging his story
in such and such a way because he has read
that the persons he is writing of did such and
such things, and not because his soul has passed
into the soul of their world and understood its
unchangeable destinies. His Return of Ulysses
is admirable in beauty, because its classical
gravity of speech, which does not, like Shakespeare's verse, desire the vivacity of common
life, purifies and subdues all passion into lyrical
and meditative ecstasies, and because the unity
of place and time in the late acts compels a
logical rather than instinctive procession of
incidents; and if the Shakespearian Nero:
Second Part approaches it in beauty and in
dramatic power, it is because it eddies about
Nero and Seneca, who had both, to a great
extent, lyrical and meditative minds. Had
Mr. Bridges been a true Shakespearian, the
pomp and glory of the world would have
drowned that subtle voice that speaks amid




248   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
The Return our heterogeneous lives of a life lived in obediof Ulysses. ence to a lonely and distinguished ideal.
II
The more a poet rids his verses of heterogeneous knowledge and irrelevant analysis, and
purifies his mind with elaborate art, the more
does the little ritual of his verse resemble the
great ritual of Nature, and become mysterious
and inscrutable. He becomes, as all the great
mystics have believed, a vessel of the creative
power of God; and whether he be a great poet
or a small poet, we can praise the poems, which
but seem to be his, with the extremity of praise
that we give this great ritual which is but
copied from the same eternal model. There is
poetry that is like the white light of noon, and
poetry that has the heaviness of woods, and
poetry that has the golden light of dawn or of
sunset; and I find in the poetry of Mr. Bridges
in the plays, but still more in the lyrics, the
pale colours, the delicate silence, the low
murmurs of cloudy country days, when the
plough is in the earth, and the clouds darkening towards sunset; and had I the great gift of
praising, I would praise it as I would praise
these things.
1896.




IRELAND AND THE ARTS


THE arts have failed; fewer people are interested in them every generation. The mere
business of living, of making money, of amusing
oneself, occupies people more and more, and
makes them less and less capable of the difficult art of appreciation. When they buy a
picture it generally shows a long-current idea,
or some conventional form that can be admired
in that lax mood one admires a fine carriage in
or fine horses in; and when they buy a book it
is so much in the manner of the picture that
it is forgotten, when its moment is over, as a
glass of wine is forgotten. We who care
deeply about the arts find ourselves the priesthood of an almost forgotten faith, and we must,
I think, if we would win the people again,
take upon ourselves the method and the fervour
of a priesthood. We must be half humble and
half proud. We see the perfect more than
others, it may be, but we must find the passions
among the people. We must baptize as well
as preach.




250   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
Ireland and  The makers of religions have established
the Arts. their ceremonies, their form of art, upon fear
of death, on the hope of the father in his child,
upon the love of man and woman. They have
even gathered into their ceremonies the ceremonies of more ancient faiths, for fear a grain
of the dust turned into crystal in some past
fire, a passion that had mingled with the
religious idea, might perish if the ancient
ceremony perished. They have renamed wells
and images and given new meanings to ceremonies of spring and midsummer and harvest.
In very early days the arts were so possessed
by this method that they were almost inseparable from religion, going side by side with it
into all life. But, to-day, they have grown, as
I think, too proud, too anxious to live alone
with the perfect, and so one sees them, as I
think, like charioteers standing by deserted
chariots and holding broken reins in their
hands, or seeking to go upon their way drawn
by the one passion which alone remains to
them out of the passions of the world. We
should not blame them, but rather a mysterious
tendency in things which will have its end
some day. In England, men like William
Morris, seeing about them passions so long
separated from the perfect that it seemed as if




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL          251
they could not be changed until society had Ireland and
been changed, tried to unite the arts once the Arts.
more to life by uniting them to use. They
advised painters to paint fewer pictures upon
canvas, and to burn more of them on plates;
and they tried to persuade sculptors that a
candlestick might be as beautiful as a statue.
But here in Ireland, when the arts have grown
humble, they will find two passions ready to
their hands, love of the Unseen Life and love
of country. I would have a devout writer or
painter often content himself with subjects
taken from his religious beliefs; and if his
religious beliefs are those of the majority, he
may at last move hearts in every cottage.
While even if his religious beliefs are those of
some minority, he will have a better welcome
than if he wrote of the rape of Persephone, or
painted the burning of Shelley's body. He
will have founded his work on a passion which
will bring him to many besides those who
have been trained to care for beautiful things
by a special education. If he is a painter or
a sculptor he will find churches awaiting his
hand everywhere, and if he follows the masters
of his craft our other passion will come into
his work also, for he will show his Holy
Family winding among hills like those of




252   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
Ireland and Ireland, and his Bearer of the Cross among
the Arts. faces copied from the faces of his own town.
Our art teachers should urge their pupils into
this work, for I can remember, when I was
myself a Dublin art student, how I used to
despond, when eagerness burned low, as it
always must now and then, at seeing no market
at all.
But I would rather speak to those who,
while moved in other things than the arts by
love of country, are beginning to write, as
I was some sixteen years ago, without any
decided impulse to one thing more than another,
and especially to those who are convinced, as
I was convinced, that art is tribeless, nationless, a blossom gathered in No Man's Land.
The Greeks, the only perfect artists of the
world, looked within their own borders, and
we, like them, have a history fuller than any
modern history of imaginative events; and
legends which surpass, as I think, all legends
but theirs in wild beauty, and in our land, as
in theirs, there is no river or mountain that is
not associated in the memory with some event
or legend; while political reasons have made
love of country, as I think, even greater among
us than among them. I would have our writers
and craftsmen of many kinds master this history




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


253


and these legends, and fix upon their memory Ireland and
the appearance of mountains and rivers and the Arts.
make it all visible again in their arts, so that
Irishmen, even though they had gone thousands
of miles away, would still be in their own
country.  Whether they chose for the subject
the carrying off of the Brown Bull, or the
coming of Patrick, or the political struggle of
later times, the other world comes so much
into it all that their love of it would move in
their hands also, and as much, it may be, as in
the hands of the Greek craftsmen.  In other
words, I would have Ireland recreate the
ancient arts, the arts as they were understood
in Judaea, in India, in Scandinavia, in Greece
and Rome, in every ancient land; as they were
understood when they moved a whole people
and not a few people who have grown up in a
leisured class and made this understanding
their business.
I think that my reader* will have agreed
with most that I have said up till now, for we
all hope for arts like these.  I think indeed I
first learned to hope for them myself in Young
Ireland Societies, or in reading the essays of
Davis.   An Englishman, with his belief in
progress, with his instinctive preference for
"* This essay was first published in the United Irishman.




254   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
Ireland and the cosmopolitan literature of the last century,
the Arts. may think arts like these parochial, but they
are the arts we have begun the making of.
I will not, however, have all my readers
with me when I say that no writer, no artist,
even though he choose Brian Boroihme or
Saint Patrick for his subject, should try to
make his work popular. Once he has chosen
a subject he must think of nothing but giving
it such an expression as will please himself.
As Walt Whitman has written'The oration is to the orator, the acting is to the
actor and actress, not to the audience:
And no man understands any greatness or goodness, but his own or the indication of his own.'
He must make his work a part of his own
journey towards beauty and truth. He must
picture saint or hero, or hillside, as he sees
them, not as he is expected to see them, and
he must comfort himself, when others cry
out against what he has seen, by remembering that no two men are alike, and that there
is no 'excellent beauty without strangeness.'
In this matter he must be without humility.
He may, indeed, doubt the reality of his vision
if men do not quarrel with him as they did
with the Apostles, for there is only one per



IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


255


fection and only one search for perfection, and Ireland and
it sometimes has the form of the religious life the Arts.
and sometimes of the artistic life; and I do
not think these lives differ in their wages, for
'The end of art is peace,' and out of the one
as out of the other comes the cry: Sero te
amavi, Pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova!
Sero te amavi!
The Catholic Church is not the less the
Church of the people because the Mass is
spoken in Latin, and art is not less the art of
the people because it does not always speak in
the language they are used to.  I once heard
my friend Mr. Ellis say, speaking at a celebration in honour of a writer whose fame had not
come till long after his death, 'It is not the
business of a poet to make himself understood,
but it is the business of the people to understand him. That they are at last compelled
to do so is the proof of his authority.' And
certainly if you take from art its martyrdom,
you will take from it its glory. It might still
reflect the passing modes of mankind, but it
would cease to reflect the face of God.
If our craftsmen were to choose their subjects under what we may call, if we understand
faith to mean that belief in a spiritual life
which is not confined to one Church, the




256   IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
Ireland and persuasion of their faith and their country,
the Arts. they would soon discover that although their
choice seemed arbitrary at first, it had obeyed
what was deepest in them. I could not now
write of any other country but Ireland, for my
style has been shaped by the subjects I have
worked on, but there was a time when my
imagination seemed unwilling, when I found
myself writing of some Irish event in words
that would have better fitted some Italian or
Eastern event, for my style had been shaped in
that general stream of European literature
which has come from so many watersheds, and
it was slowly, very slowly, that I made a new
style. It was years before I could rid myself
of Shelley's Italian light, but now I think my
style is myself. I might have found more of
Ireland if I had written in Irish, but I have
found a little, and I have found all myself. I
am persuaded that if the Irishmen who are
painting conventional pictures or writing conventional books on alien subjects, which have
been worn away like pebbles on the shore,
would do the same, they, too, might find
themselves. Even the landscape-painter, who
paints a place that he loves, and that no other
man has painted, soon discovers that no style
learned in the studios is wholly fitted to his




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL          257
purpose. And I cannot but believe that if Ireland and
our painters of Highland cattle and moss- the Arts.
covered barns were to care enough for their
country to care for what makes it different
from other countries, they would discover,
when struggling, it may be, to paint the exact
grey of the bare Burren Hills, and of a sudden
it may be, a new style, their very selves. And
I admit, though in this I am moved by some
touch of fanaticism, that even when I see an
old subject written of or painted in a new way,
I am yet jealous for Cuchulain, and for Baile,
and Aillinn, and for those grey mountains that
still are lacking their celebration. I sometimes reproach myself because I cannot admire
Mr. Hughes' beautiful, piteous Orpheus and
Eurydice with an unquestioning mind. I say
with my lips, 'The Spirit made it, for it is
beautiful, and the Spirit bloweth where it
listeth,' but I say in my heart, 'Aengus and
Etain would have served his turn'; but one
cannot, perhaps, love or believe at all if one
does not love or believe a little too much.
And I do not think with unbroken pleasure
of our scholars who write about German
writers or about periods of Greek history. I
always remember that they could give us a
number of little books which would tell, each
S




258


IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


Ireland and book for some one country, or some one parish,
the Arts. the verses, or the stories, or the events that
would make every lake or mountain a man can
see from his own door an excitement in his
imagination. I would have some of them
leave that work of theirs which will never
lack hands, and begin to dig in Ireland, the
garden of the future, understanding that here
in Ireland the spirit of man may be about to
wed the soil of the world.
Art and scholarship like these I have described would give Ireland more than they
received from her, for they would make love
of the unseen more unshakable, more ready to
plunge deep into the abyss, and they would
make love of country more fruitful in the
mind, more a part of daily life. One would
know an Irishman into whose life they had
come-and in a few generations they would
come into the life of all, rich and poor-by
something that set him apart among men. He
himself would understand that more was expected of him than of others because he had
greater possessions. The Irish race would
have become a chosen race, one of the pillars
that uphold the world.
1901.




THE GALWAY PLAINS


LADY GREGORY has just given me her beautiful Poets and Dreamers, and it has brought to
mind a day two or three years ago when I stood
on the side of Slieve Echtge, looking out over
Galway. The Burren Hills were to my left,
and though I forget whether I could see the
cairn over Bald Conan of the Fianna, I could
certainly see many places there that are in
poems and stories. In front of me, over many
miles of level Galway plains, I saw a low blue
hill flooded with evening light. I asked a
countryman who was with me what hill that
was, and he told me it was Cruachmaa of the
Sidhe. I had often heard of Cruachmaa of the
Sidhe even as far north as Sligo, for the country
people have told me a great many stories of the
great host of the Sidhe who live there, still
fighting and holding festivals.
I asked the old countryman about it, and he
told me of strange women who had come from
it, and who would come into a house having




260 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


The  the appearance of countrywomen, but would
Galway know all that happened in that house; and how
Plains.
they would always pay back with increase,
though not by their own hands, whatever was
given to them. And he had heard, too, of
people who had been carried away into the
hill, and how one man went to look for his
wife there, and dug into the hill and all but
got his wife again, but at the very moment
she was coming out to him, the pick he was
digging with struck her upon the head and
killed her. I asked him if he had himself seen
any of its enchantments, and he said, 'Sometimes when I look over to the hill, I see a mist
lying on the top of it, that goes away after a
while.'
A great part of the poems and stories in
Lady Gregory's book were made or gathered
between Burren and Cruachmaa. It was here
that Raftery, the wandering country poet of
ninety years ago, praised and blamed, chanting
fine verses, and playing badly on his fiddle. It
is here the ballads of meeting and parting have
been sung, and some whose lamentations for
defeat are still remembered may have passed
through this plain flying from the battle of
Aughrim.
'I will go up on the mountain alone; and I




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


26I


will come hither from it again. It is there I  The
saw the camp of the Gael, the poor troop Galway
thinned, not keeping with one another; Och
Ochone!' And here, if one can believe many
devout people whose stories are in the book,
Christ has walked upon the roads, bringing the
needy to some warm fire-side, and sending one
of His Saints to anoint the dying.
I do not think these country imaginations
have changed much for centuries, for they are
still busy with those two themes of the ancient
Irish poets, the sternness of battle and the sadness
of parting and death. The emotion that in other
countries has made many love songs has here
been given, in a long wooing, to danger, that
ghostly bride. It is not a difference in the
substance of things that the lamentations that
were sung after battles are now sung for men
who have died upon the gallows.
The emotion has become not less, but more
noble, by the change, for the man who goes to
death with the thought'It is with the people I was,
It is not with the law I was,'
has behind him generations of poetry and
poetical life.
The poets of to-day speak with the voice of




262 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


The   the unknown priest who wrote, some two
Gaway hundred years ago, that Sorrowful Lament for
Ireland, Lady Gregory has put into passionate
and rhythmical prose'I do not know of anything under the sky
That is friendly or favourable to the Gael,
But only the sea that our need brings us to,
Or the wind that blows to the harbour
The ship that is bearing us away from Ireland;
And there is reason that these are reconciled
with us,
For we increase the sea with our tears,
And the wandering wind with our sighs.'
There is still in truth upon these great level
plains a people, a community bound together
by imaginative possessions, by stories and poems
which have grown out of its own life, and by
a past of great passions which can still waken
the heart to imaginative action.  One could
still, if one had the genius, and had been born
to Irish, write for these people plays and
poems like those of Greece. Does not the
greatest poetry always require a people to listen
to it? England or any other country which
takes its tune from the great cities and gets its
taste from schools and not from old custom,
may have a mob, but it cannot have a people.
In England there are a few groups of men




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL          263
and women who have good taste, whether in   The
cookery or in books; and the great multitudes Galway
Plains.
but copy them or their copiers. The poet
must always prefer the community where the
perfected minds express the people, to a community that is vainly seeking to copy the
perfected minds. To have even perfectly the
thoughts than can be weighed, the knowledge
that can be got from books, the precision that
can be learned at school, to belong to any
aristocracy, is to be a little pool that will soon
dry up. A people alone are a great river; and
that is why I am persuaded that where a people
has died, a nation is about to die.
1903.




EMOTION OF MULTITUDE


I HAVE been thinking a good deal about
plays lately, and I have been wondering why
I dislike the clear and logical construction
which seems necessary if one is to succeed on
the Modern Stage. It came into my head
the other day that this construction, which
all the world has learnt from France, has
everything of high literature except the emotion of multitude. The Greek drama has got
the emotion of multitude from its chorus,
which called up famous sorrows, long-leaguered
Troy, much-enduring Odysseus, and all the
gods and heroes to witness, as it were, some
well-ordered fable, some action separated but
for this from all but itself. The French play
delights in the well-ordered fable, but by
leaving out the chorus it has created an art
where poetry and imagination, always the
children of far-off multitudinous things, must
of necessity grow less important than the mere
will. This is why, I said to myself, French




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


265


dramatic poetry is so often a little rhetorical, Emotion of
for rhetoric is the will trying to do the work of Multitude.
the imagination. The Shakespearian Drama
gets the emotion of multitude out of the subplot which copies the main plot, much as a
shadow upon the wall copies one's body in the
firelight. We think of King Lear less as the
history of one man and his sorrows than as the
history of a whole evil time. Lear's shadow
is in Gloster, who also has ungrateful children,
and the mind goes on imagining other shadows,
shadow beyond shadow till it has pictured the
world. In Hamlet, one hardly notices, so
subtly is the web woven, that the murder of
Hamlet's father and the sorrow of Hamlet
are shadowed in the lives of Fortinbras and
Ophelia and Laertes, whose fathers, too, have
been killed. It is so in all the plays, or in all
but all, and very commonly the sub-plot is
the main plot working itself out in more
ordinary men and women, and so doubly calling up before us the image of multitude.
Ibsen and Maeterlinck have on the other hand
created a new form, for they get multitude
from the Wild Duck in the Attic, or from the
Crown at the bottom of the Fountain, vague
symbols that set the mind wandering from
idea to idea, emotion to emotion. Indeed all
T




266 IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL


Emotion of the great Masters have understood, that there
Multitude. cannot be great art without the little limited
life of the fable, which is always the better
the simpler it is, and the rich, far-wandering,
many-imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it. There are some who understand
that the simple unmysterious things living as
in a clear noonlight are of the nature of the
sun, and that vague, many-imaged things have
in them the strength of the moon. Did not
the Egyptian carve it on emerald that all
living things have the sun for father and the
moon for mother, and has it not been said
that a man of genius takes the most after his
mother?
1903.


i


UNIV. OF MfIOH4eAN;
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Printed by A. H. BULLEN, at The Shakespeare Head Press,
Stratford-on-Avon.




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