All art is sensuous, but when a man puts only his contemplative nature
and his more vague desires into his art, the sensuous images through
which it speaks become broken, fleeting, uncertain, or are chosen for
their distance from general experience, and all grows unsubstantial and
fantastic. When imagination moves in a dim world like the country of
sleep in _Love's Nocturne_ and 'Siren there winds her dizzy hair and
sings,' we go to it for delight indeed but in our weariness. If we are
to sojourn there that world must grow consistent with itself, emotion
must be related to emotion by a system of ordered images, as in the
_Divine Comedy_. It must grow to be symbolic, that is, for the soul can
only achieve a distinct separated life where many related objects at
once distinguish and arouse its energies in their fulness. All
visionaries have entered into such a world in trances, and all ideal
art has trance for warranty. Shelley seemed to Matthew Arnold to beat
his ineffectual wings in the void, and I only made my pleasure in him
contented pleasure by massing in my imagination his recurring images of
towers and rivers, and caves with fountains in them, and that one star
of his, till his world had grown solid underfoot and consistent enough
for the soul's habitation.
But even then I lacked something to compensate my imagination for
geographical and historical reality, for the testimony of our ordinary
senses, and found myself wishing for and trying to imagine, as I had
also when reading Keats' _Endymion_, a crowd of believers who could put
into all those strange sights the strength of their belief and the rare
testimony of their visions. A little crowd had been sufficient, and I
would have had Shelley a sectary that his revelation might have found
the only sufficient evidence of religion, miracle. All symbolic art
should arise out of a real belief, and that it cannot do so in this age
proves that this age is a road and not a resting-place for the
imaginative arts. I can only understand others by myself, and I am
certain that there are many who are not moved as they desire to be by
that solitary light burning in the tower of Prince Athanais, because it
has not entered into men's prayers nor lighted any through the sacred
dark of religious contemplation.
Lyrical poems, when they but speak of emotions common to all, require
not indeed a religious belief like the spiritual arts, but a life that
has leisure for itself, and a society that is quickly stirred that our
emotion may be strengthened by the emotion of others. All circumstance
that makes emotion at once dignified and visible, increases the poet's
power, and I think that is why I have always longed for some stringed
instrument, and a listening audience, not drawn out of the hurried
streets, but from a life where it would be natural to murmur over again
the singer's thought. When I heard Yvette Guilbert the other day, who
has the lyre or as good, I was not content, for she sang among people
whose life had nothing it could share with an exquisite art, that should
rise out of life as the blade out of the spearshaft, a song out of the
mood, the fountain from its pool, all art out of the body, laughter from
a happy company. I longed to make all things over again, that she might
sing in some great hall, where there was no one that did not love life
and speak of it continually.