At a comparatively early time Shelley made his imprisoned Cythna become
wise in all human wisdom through the contemplation of her own mind,
and write out this wisdom upon the sands in ‘signs’ that were ‘clear
elemental shapes whose smallest change’ made ‘a subtler language
within language,’ and were ‘the key of truths, which once were dimly
taught in old Crotona.’ His early romances and much throughout his
poetry show how strong a fascination the traditions of magic and of
the magical philosophy had cast over his mind, and one can hardly
suppose that he had not brooded over their doctrine of symbols or
signatures, though I do not find anything to show that he gave it any
deep study. One finds in his poetry, besides innumerable images that
have not the definiteness of symbols, many images that are certainly
symbols, and as the years went by he began to use these with a more
and more deliberately symbolic purpose. I imagine that, when he wrote
his earlier poems he allowed the subconscious life to lay its hands so
firmly upon the rudder of his imagination, that he was little conscious
of the abstract meaning of the images that rose in what seemed the
idleness of his mind. Any one who has any experience of any mystical
state of the soul knows how there float up in the mind profound
symbols,[A] whose meaning, if indeed they do not delude one into the
dream that they are meaningless, one does not perhaps understand for
years. Nor I think has anyone, who has known that experience with any
constancy, failed to find some day in some old book or on some old
monument, a strange or intricate image, that had floated up before
him, and grow perhaps dizzy with the sudden conviction that our little
memories are but a part of some great memory that renews the world and
men’s thoughts age after age, and that our thoughts are not, as we
suppose, the deep but a little foam upon the deep. 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 with created
things which assuredly must precede the soul’s union with the uncreated
spirit. 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 mighty rivers
and seen the sun rise and set and the stars come forth whilst I sailed
night and day down a rapid stream among mountains.’
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 her lover Laon was brought to
his prison in a high column through a cave where there was ‘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 Unbound_ gazes 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 may well
have had Porphyry on ‘the Cave of the Nymphs’ in his mind. When I
compare Porphyry’s description of the cave where the Phæacian 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.
The ancients, he says, ‘consecrated a cave to the world’ and held ‘the
flowing waters’ and 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 symbols of the ‘souls that descend into generation.’ ‘For the
formation of the flesh is on or about the bones, which in the bodies
of animals 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 arising from 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 honey, those delights of the senses, ‘sounds
of air’ ‘folded in cells of crystal silences,’ ‘liquors 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 chambers which it inhabits. It is like a
river, whose rapid and perpetual stream flows outward.... The caverns
of the mind are obscure and 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, but thoughts, to the flowing of the Arne
through the ravine, and compares the unknown sources 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.
As Shelley sailed along those great rivers and saw or imagined the cave
that associated itself with rivers in his mind, he saw half-ruined
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 contrast between
it and the cave in _Laon and Cythna_ suggests a contrast between the
mind 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 and 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 Life_, under the power
of the destroying hunger of life, under the power of the sun that
we shall find presently as a symbol of life, and it is the Morning
Star that wars against the principle of evil in _Laon and Cythna_,
at first as 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 of any
length in which one does not find it as a symbol of love, or liberty,
or wisdom, or 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 the Cup near the constellation Cancer, for so obvious a symbol as
the cup, or that he could not have found the wolf and the deer and
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 white fawn watched the man out of the wood, but he did not look at
it, for a white hound 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 his personification of poetic genius labours at a
furnace. I think there was certainly some reason why these men took so
deep a pleasure 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 Life and Death with ‘her silver
voice’ that they ran from him crying, ‘Away, he is not of our 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 of many a soul’ and ‘all things flow to
all’ and ‘familiar acts are beautiful through love,’ and an ‘animation
of delight’ at this change flows 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 over-flowing 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 ‘like an incarnation of the Sun when light is changed
to love,’ saw it with less friendly eyes. 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 Triumph 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 all life could give,
being doubtless followers throughout their lives of the forms borne by
the flying ideal, or who, ‘as soon as they had 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, would
lead his soul, disentangled from unmeaning circumstance and the ebb
and flow of the 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.
1900.