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 the emotions and in the intellect, move
visibly through my mind, and move invisibly beyond 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 come
the nearer to our sympathy, one is mixed with the whole spectacle of
the world; while if one is moved by Dante, or by the myth of 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 Gérard 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 _Axël_, 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,
they cannot overcome the slow dying of men’s hearts that we call the
progress of the world, and lay their hands upon men’s heart-strings
again, without becoming the garment of religion as in old times.
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 man running, which are the invention of
the will with its eyes always on something to be done or undone; and
we would seek out those 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.