We artists have taken over-much to heart that old commandment about
seeking after the Kingdom of Heaven. Verlaine told me that he had tried
to translate '_In Memoriam_,' but could not because Tennyson was 'too
noble, too Anglais, and, when he should have been broken-hearted, had
many reminiscences.' About that time I found in some English review an
essay of his on Shakespeare. 'I had once a fine Shakespeare,' he wrote,
or some such words, 'but I have it no longer. I write from memory.' One
wondered in what vicissitude he had sold it, and for what money; and an
image of the man rose in the imagination. To be his ordinary self as
much as possible, not a scholar or even a reader, that was certainly his
pose; and in the lecture he gave at Oxford he insisted 'that the poet
should hide nothing of himself,' though he must speak it all with 'a
care of that dignity which should manifest itself, if not in the
perfection of form, at all events with an invisible, insensible, but
effectual endeavour after this lofty and severe quality, I was about to
say this virtue.' It was this feeling for his own personality, his
delight in singing his own life, even more than that life itself, which
made the generation I belong to compare him to Villon. It was not till
after his death that I understood the meaning his words should have had
for me, for while he lived I was interested in nothing but states of
mind, lyrical moments, intellectual essences. I would not then have been
as delighted as I am now by that guitar player, or as shocked as I am
now by that girl whose movements have grown abrupt, and whose voice has
grown harsh by the neglect of all but external activities. I had not
learned what sweetness, what rhythmic movement, there is in those who
have become the joy that is themselves. Without knowing it, I had come
to care for nothing but impersonal beauty. I had set out on life with
the thought of putting my very self into poetry, and had understood
this as a representation of my own visions and an attempt to cut away
the non-essential, but as I imagined the visions outside myself my
imagination became full of decorative landscape and of still life. I
thought of myself as something unmoving and silent living in the middle
of my own mind and body, a grain of sand in Bloomsbury or in Connacht
that Satan's watch fiends cannot find. Then one day I understood quite
suddenly, as the way is, that I was seeking something unchanging and
unmixed and always outside myself, a Stone or an Elixir that was always
out of reach, and that I myself was the fleeting thing that held out its
hand. The more I tried to make my art deliberately beautiful, the more
did I follow the opposite of myself, for deliberate beauty is like a
woman always desiring man's desire. Presently I found that I entered
into myself and pictured myself and not some essence when I was not
seeking beauty at all, but merely to lighten the mind of some burden of
love or bitterness thrown upon it by the events of life. We are only
permitted to desire life, and all the rest should be our complaints or
our praise of that exacting mistress who can awake our lips into song
with her kisses. But we must not give her all, we must deceive her a
little at times, for, as Le Sage says in _Diable Boiteux_ the false
lovers who do not become melancholy or jealous with honest passion have
the happiest mistresses and are rewarded the soonest and by the most
beautiful. Our deceit will give us style, mastery, that dignity, that
lofty and severe quality Verlaine spoke of. To put it otherwise, we
should ascend out of common interests, the thoughts of the newspapers,
of the marketplace, of men of science, but only so far as we can carry
the normal, passionate, reasoning self, the personality as a whole. We
must find some place upon the Tree of Life for the Phoenix nest, for
the passion that is exaltation and the negation of the will, for the
wings that are always upon fire, set high that the forked branches may
keep it safe, yet low enough to be out of the little wind-tossed boughs,
the quivering of the twigs.