When all art was struck out of personality, whether as in our daily
business or in the adventure of religion, there was little separation
between holy and common things, and just as the arts themselves passed
quickly from passion to divine contemplation, from the conversation of
peasants to that of princes, the one song remembering the drunken miller
and but half forgetting Cambuscan bold; so did a man feel himself near
sacred presences when he turned his plough from the slope of Cruachmaa
or of Olympus. The occupations and the places known to Homer or to
Hesiod, those pure first artists, might, as it were, if but the
fashioners' hands had loosened, have changed before the poem's end to
symbols and vanished, winged and unweary, into the unchanging worlds
where religion alone can discover life as well as peace. A man of that
unbroken day could have all the subtlety of Shelley, and yet use no
image unknown among the common people, and speak no thought that was
not a deduction from the common thought. Unless the discovery of
legendary knowledge and the returning belief in miracle, or what we must
needs call so, can bring once more a new belief in the sanctity of
common ploughland, and new wonders that reward no difficult
ecclesiastical routine but the common, wayward, spirited man, we may
never see again a Shelley and a Dickens in the one body, but be broken
to the end. We have grown jealous of the body, and we dress it in dull
unshapely clothes, that we may cherish aspiration alone. Moliere being
but the master of common sense lived ever in the common daylight, but
Shakespeare could not, and Shakespeare seems to bring us to the very
marketplace, when we remember Shelley's dizzy and Landor's calm disdain
of usual daily things. And at last we have Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
crying in the ecstasy of a supreme culture, of a supreme refusal, 'as
for living, our servants will do that for us.' One of the means of
loftiness, of marmorean stillness has been the choice of strange and
far-away places, for the scenery of art, but this choice has grown
bitter to me, and there are moments when I cannot believe in the reality
of imaginations that are not inset with the minute life of long familiar
things and symbols and places. I have come to think of even
Shakespeare's journeys to Rome or to Verona as the outflowing of an
unrest, a dissatisfaction with natural interests, an unstable
equilibrium of the whole European mind that would not have come had John
Palaeologus cherished, despite that high and heady look, copied by Burne
Jones for his Cophetua, a hearty disposition to fight the Turk. I am
orthodox and pray for a resurrection of the body, and am certain that a
man should find his Holy Land where he first crept upon the floor, and
that familiar woods and rivers should fade into symbol with so gradual a
change that he never discover, no, not even in ecstasy itself, that he
is beyond space, and that time alone keeps him from Primum Mobile, the
Supernal Eden, and the White Rose over all.
1906.