HODOS CAMELIONIS
_HODOS CAMELIONIS_
I
When staying with Hyde in Roscommon, I had driven over to Lough Kay,
hoping to find some local memory of the old story of Tumaus Costello,
which I was turning into a story now called _Proud Costello, Macdermot's
Daughter, and the Bitter Tongue_. I was rowed up the lake that I might
find the island where he died; I had to find it from Hyde's account in
_The Love-Songs of Connaught_, for when I asked the boatman, he told the
story of Hero and Leander, putting Hero's house on one island, and
Leander's on another. Presently we stopped to eat our sandwiches at the
"Castle Rock," an island all castle. It was not an old castle, being but
the invention of some romantic man, seventy or eighty years ago. The last
man who had lived there had been Dr. Hyde's father, and he had but stayed
a fortnight. The Gaelic-speaking men in the district were accustomed,
instead of calling some specially useless thing a "white elephant," to
call it "The Castle on the Rock." The roof was, however, still sound, and
the windows unbroken. The situation in the centre of the lake, that has
little wood-grown islands, and is surrounded by wood-grown hills, is
romantic, and at one end, and perhaps at the other too, there is a stone
platform where meditative persons might pace to and fro. I planned a
mystical Order which should buy or hire the castle, and keep it as a place
where its members could retire for a while for contemplation, and where
we might establish mysteries like those of Eleusis and Samothrace; and for
ten years to come my most impassioned thought was a vain attempt to find
philosophy and to create ritual for that Order. I had an unshakeable
conviction, arising how or whence I cannot tell, that invisible gates
would open as they opened for Blake, as they opened for Swedenborg, as
they opened for Boehme, and that this philosophy would find its manuals of
devotion in all imaginative literature, and set before Irishmen for
special manual an Irish literature which, though made by many minds, would
seem the work of a single mind, and turn our places of beauty or legendary
association into holy symbols. I did not think this philosophy would be
altogether pagan, for it was plain that its symbols must be selected from
all those things that had moved men most during many, mainly Christian,
centuries.
I thought that for a time I could rhyme of love, calling it _The Rose_,
because of the Rose's double meaning; of a fisherman who had "never a
crack" in his heart; of an old woman complaining of the idleness of the
young, or of some cheerful fiddler, all those things that "popular poets"
write of, but that I must some day, on that day when the gates began to
open, become difficult or obscure. With a rhythm that still echoed Morris
I prayed to the Red Rose, to Intellectual Beauty:
"Come near, come near, come near--ah, leave me still
A little space for the Rose-breath to fill,
Lest I no more hear common things....
But seek alone to hear the strange things said
By God to the bright hearts of those long dead,
And learn to chant a tongue men do not know."
I do not remember what I meant by "the bright hearts," but a little later
I wrote of Spirits "with mirrors in their hearts."
My rituals were not to be made deliberately, like a poem, but all got by
that method Mathers had explained to me, and with this hope I plunged
without a clue into a labyrinth of images, into that labyrinth that we are
warned against in those _Oracles_ which antiquity has attributed to
Zoroaster, but modern scholarship to some Alexandrian poet. "Stoop not
down to the darkly splendid world wherein lieth continually a faithless
depth and Hades wrapped in cloud, delighting in unintelligible images."
II
I found a supporter at Sligo in my elderly uncle, a man of fifty-three or
fifty-four, with the habits of a much older man. He had never left the
West of Ireland, except for a few days to London every year, and a single
fortnight's voyage to Spain on board a trading schooner, in his boyhood.
He was in politics a Unionist and Tory of the most obstinate kind, and
knew nothing of Irish literature or history. He was, however, strangely
beset by the romance of Ireland, as he discovered it among the people who
served him, sailing upon his ships or attending to his horses, and, though
narrow and obstinate of opinion, and puritanical in his judgment of life,
was perhaps the most tolerant man I have ever known. He never expected
anybody to agree with him, and if you did not upset his habits by cheating
him over a horse, or by offending his taste, he would think as well of you
as he did of other men, and that was not very well; and help you out of
any scrape whatever. I was accustomed to people much better read than he,
much more liberal-minded, but they had no life but the intellectual life,
and if they and I differed, they could not take it lightly, and were often
angry, and so for years now I had gone to Sligo, sometimes because I could
not afford my Dublin lodging, but most often for freedom and peace. He
would receive me with "I have learned that your friend So and So has been
seen at the Gresham Hotel talking to Mr William Redmond. What will not
people do for notoriety?" He considered all Irish Nationalist Members of
Parliament as outside the social pale, but after dinner, when conversation
grew intimate, would talk sympathetically of the Fenians in Ballina, where
he spent his early manhood, or of the Fenian privateer that landed the
wounded man at Sligo in the 'sixties. When Parnell was contesting an
election at Sligo a little before his death, other Unionist magistrates
refused or made difficulties when asked for some assistance, what I do not
remember, made necessary under election law; and so my uncle gave that
assistance. He walked up and down some Town Hall assembly-room or some
courtroom with Parnell, but would tell me nothing of that conversation,
except that Parnell spoke of Gladstone with extravagant hatred. He would
not repeat words spoken by a great man in his bitterness, yet Parnell at
the moment was too angry to care who listened. I knew one other man who
kept as firm a silence; he had attended Parnell's last public meeting, and
after it sat alone beside him, and heard him speak of the followers that
had fallen away, or were showing their faint hearts; but Parnell was the
chief devotion of his life.
When I first began my visits, he had lived in the town itself, and close
to a disreputable neighbourhood called the Burrough, till one evening,
while he sat over his dinner, he heard a man and woman quarrelling under
his window. "I mind the time," shouted the man, "when I slept with you and
your daughter in the one bed." My uncle was horrified, and moved to a
little house about a quarter of a mile into the country, where he lived
with an old second-sighted servant, and a man-servant to look after the
racehorse that was browsing in the neighbouring field, with a donkey to
keep it company. His furniture had not been changed since he set up house
for himself as a very young man, and in a room opposite his dining-room
were the saddles of his youth, and though he would soon give up riding,
they would be oiled and the stirrups kept clean and bright till the day of
his death. Some love-affair had gone wrong when he was a very young man;
he had now no interest in women; certainly never sought favour of a woman,
and yet he took great care of his appearance. He did not let his beard
grow, though he had, or believed that he had, for he was hypochondriacal,
a sensitiveness of the skin that forced him to spend an hour in shaving,
and he would take to club and dumb-bell if his waist thickened by a hair's
breadth, and twenty years after, when a very old man, he had the erect
shapely figure of his youth. I often wondered why he went through so much
labour, for it was not pride, which had seemed histrionic in his eyes--and
certainly he had no vanity; and now, looking back, I am convinced that it
was from habit, mere habit, a habit formed when he was a young man, and
the best rider of his district.
Probably through long association with Mary Battle, the second-sighted
servant, he had come to believe much in the supernatural world, and would
tell how several times, arriving home with an unexpected guest, he had
found the table set for three, and that he himself had dreamed of his
brother's illness in Liverpool before he had other news of it. He saw me
using images learned from Mathers to start reverie, and, though I held out
for a long time, thinking him too old and habit-bound, he persuaded me to
tell him their use, and from that on we experimented continually, and
after a time I began to keep careful record. In summer he always had the
same little house at Rosses Point, and it was there that he first became
sensitive to the cabalistic symbols. There are some high sandhills and low
cliffs, and I adopted the practice of walking by the seashore while he
walked on cliff or sandhill; I, without speaking, would imagine the
symbol, and he would notice what passed before his mind's eye, and in a
short time he would practically never fail of the appropriate vision. In
the symbols which are used certain colours are classified as "actives,"
while certain other colours are "passives," and I had soon discovered that
if I used "actives" George Pollexfen would see nothing. I therefore gave
him exercises to make him sensitive to those colours, and gradually we
found ourselves well fitted for this work, and he began to take as lively
an interest, as was possible to a nature given over to habit, in my plans
for the Castle on the Rock.
I worked with others, sworn to the scheme for the most part, and I made
many curious observations. It was the symbol itself, or, at any rate, not
my conscious intention that produced the effect, for if I made an error
and told someone, let us say, to gaze at the wrong symbol--they were
painted upon cards--the vision would be suggested by the symbol, not by
my thought, or two visions would appear side by side, one from the symbol
and one from my thought. When two people, between whose minds there was
even a casual sympathy, worked together under the same symbolic influence,
the dream or reverie would divide itself between them, each half being the
complement of the other; and now and again these complementary dreams, or
reveries, would arise spontaneously. I find, for instance, in an old
notebook, "I saw quite suddenly a tent with a wooden badly-carved idol,
painted dull red; a man looking like a Red Indian was prostrate before it.
The idol was seated to the left. I asked G. what he saw. He saw a most
august immense being, glowing with a ruddy opalescent colour, sitting on a
throne to the left", or, to summarise from a later notebook,... I am
meditating in one room and my fellow-student in another, when I see a boat
full of tumult and movement on a still sea, and my friend sees a boat with
motionless sails upon a tumultuous sea. There was nothing in the
originating symbol to suggest a boat.
We never began our work until George's old servant was in her bed; and
yet, when we went upstairs to our beds, we constantly heard her crying out
with nightmare, and in the morning we would find that her dream echoed our
vision. One night, started by what symbol I forget, we had seen an
allegorical marriage of Heaven and Earth. When Mary Battle brought in the
breakfast next morning, I said, "Well, Mary, did you dream anything last
night?" and she replied (I am quoting from an old notebook) "indeed she
had," and that it was "a dream she would not have liked to have had twice
in one night." She had dreamed that her bishop, the Catholic bishop of
Sligo, had gone away "without telling anybody," and had married "a very
high-up lady," "and she not too young, either." She had thought in her
dream, "Now all the clergy will get married, and it will be no use going
to confession." There were "layers upon layers of flowers, many roses, all
round the church."
Another time, when George Pollexfen had seen in answer to some evocation
of mine a man with his head cut in two, she woke to find that she "must
have cut her face with a pin, as it was all over blood." When three or
four saw together, the dream or vision would divide itself into three or
four parts, each seeming complete in itself, and all fitting together, so
that each part was an adaptation of a single meaning to a particular
personality. A visionary being would give, let us say, a lighted torch to
one, an unlighted candle to another, an unripe fruit to a third, and to
the fourth a ripe fruit. At times coherent stories were built up, as if a
company of actors were to improvise, and play, not only without previous
consultation, but without foreseeing at any moment what would be said or
done the moment after. Who made the story? Was it the mind of one of the
visionaries? Perhaps, for I have endless proof that, where two worked
together, the symbolic influence commonly took upon itself, though no word
was spoken, the quality of the mind that had first fixed a symbol in the
mind's eye. But, if so, what part of the mind? One friend, in whom the
symbolic impulse produced actual trance, described an elaborate and very
strange story while the trance was upon him, but upon waking told a story
that after a certain point was quite different. "They gave me a cup of
wine, and after that I remembered nothing." While speaking out of trance
he had said nothing of the cup of wine, which must have been offered to a
portion of his mind quite early in the dream. Then, too, from whence come
the images of the dream? Not always, I was soon persuaded, from the
memory, perhaps never in trance or sleep. One man, who certainly thought
that Eve's apple was the sort that you got from the greengrocer, and as
certainly never doubted its story's literal truth, said, when I used some
symbol to send him to Eden, that he saw a walled garden on the top of a
high mountain, and in the middle of it a tree with great birds in the
branches, and fruit out of which, if you held a fruit to your ear, came
the sound of fighting. I had not at the time read Dante's _Purgatorio_,
and it caused me some trouble to verify the mountain garden, and, from
some passage in the Zohar, the great birds among the boughs; while a young
girl, on being sent to the same garden, heard "the music of heaven" from a
tree, and on listening with her ear against the trunk, found that it was
made by the "continual clashing of swords." Whence came that fine thought
of music-making swords, that image of the garden, and many like images and
thoughts? I had as yet no clear answer, but knew myself face to face with
the Anima Mundi described by Platonic philosophers, and more especially in
modern times by Henry More, which has a memory independent of individual
memories, though they constantly enrich it with their images and their
thoughts.
III
At Sligo we walked twice every day, once after lunch and once after
dinner, to the same gate on the road to Knocknarea; and at Rosses Point,
to the same rock upon the shore; and as we walked we exchanged those
thoughts that never rise before me now without bringing some sight of
mountain or of shore. Considering that Mary Battle received our thoughts
in sleep, though coarsened or turned to caricature, do not the thoughts of
the scholar or the hermit, though they speak no word, or something of
their shape and impulse, pass into the general mind? Does not the emotion
of some woman of fashion, caught in the subtle torture of self-analysing
passion, pass down, although she speak no word, to Joan with her Pot, Jill
with her Pail and, it may be, with one knows not what nightmare melancholy
to Tom the Fool?
Seeing that a vision could divide itself in divers complementary portions,
might not the thought of philosopher or poet or mathematician depend at
every moment of its progress upon some complementary thought in minds
perhaps at a great distance? Is there nation-wide multiform reverie, every
mind passing through a stream of suggestion, and all streams acting and
reacting upon one another, no matter how distant the minds, how dumb the
lips? A man walked, as it were, casting a shadow, and yet one could never
say which was man and which was shadow, or how many the shadows that he
cast. Was not a nation, as distinguished from a crowd of chance comers,
bound together by these parallel streams or shadows; that Unity of Image,
which I sought in national literature, being but an originating symbol?
From the moment when these speculations grew vivid, I had created for
myself an intellectual solitude, most arguments that could influence
action had lost something of their meaning. How could I judge any scheme
of education, or of social reform, when I could not measure what the
different classes and occupations contributed to that invisible commerce
of reverie and of sleep; and what is luxury and what necessity when a
fragment of gold braid, or a flower in the wallpaper may be an originating
impulse to revolution or to philosophy? I began to feel myself not only
solitary but helpless.
IV
I had not taken up these subjects wilfully, nor through love of
strangeness, nor love of excitement, nor because I found myself in some
experimental circle, but because unaccountable things had happened even in
my childhood, and because of an ungovernable craving. When supernatural
events begin, a man first doubts his own testimony, but when they repeat
themselves again and again, he doubts all human testimony. At least he
knows his own bias, and may perhaps allow for it, but how trust historian
and psychologist that have for two hundred years ignored in writing of the
history of the world, or of the human mind, so momentous a part of human
experience? What else had they ignored and distorted? When Mesmerists
first travelled about as public entertainers, a favourite trick was to
tell a mesmerised man that some letter of the alphabet had ceased to
exist, and after that to make him write his name upon the blackboard.
Brown, or Jones, or Robinson would become upon the instant, and without
any surprise or hesitation, Rown, or Ones, or Obinson.
Was modern civilisation a conspiracy of the sub-conscious? Did we turn
away from certain thoughts and things because the Middle Ages lived in
terror of the dark, or had some seminal illusion been imposed upon us by
beings greater than ourselves for an unknown purpose? Even when no facts
of experience were denied, might not what had seemed logical proof be but
a mechanism of change, an automatic impulse? Once in London, at a dinner
party, where all the guests were intimate friends, I had written upon a
piece of paper, "In five minutes York Powell will talk of a burning
house," thrust the paper under my neighbour's plate, and imagined my fire
symbol, and waited in silence. Powell shifted conversation from topic to
topic and within the five minutes was describing a fire he had seen as a
young man. When Locke's French translator Coste asked him how, if there
were no "innate ideas," he could explain the skill shown by a bird in
making its nest, Locke replied, "I did not write to explain the actions of
dumb creatures," and his translator thought the answer "very good, seeing
that he had named his book _A Philosophical Essay upon Human
Understanding_." Henry More, upon the other hand, considered that the
bird's instinct proved the existence of the Anima Mundi, with its ideas
and memories. Did modern enlightenment think with Coste that Locke had the
better logic, because it was not free to think otherwise?
V
I ceased to read modern books that were not books of belief older than any
European Church, and founded that interested me, I tried to trace it back
to its earliest use, believing that there must be a tradition of belief
older than any European Church, and founded upon the experience of the
world before the modern bias. It was this search for a tradition that
urged George Pollexfen and myself to study the visions and thoughts of the
country people, and some country conversation repeated by one or the other
often gave us a day's discussion. These visions, we soon discovered, were
very like those we called up by symbol. Mary Battle, looking out of the
window at Rosses Point, saw coming from Knocknarea, where Queen Maeve,
according to local folklore, is buried under a great heap of stones, "the
finest woman you ever saw travelling right across from the mountains and
straight to here."--I quote a record written at the time. "She looked very
strong, but not wicked" (that is to say, not cruel). "I have seen the
Irish Giant" (some big man shown at a fair). "And though he was a fine man
he was nothing to her, for he was round and could not have stepped out so
soldierly ... she had no stomach on her but was slight and broad in the
shoulders, and was handsomer than any one you ever saw; she looked about
thirty." And when I asked if she had seen others like her, she said, "Some
of them have their hair down, but they look quite different, more like the
sleepy-looking ladies one sees in the papers. Those with their hair up are
like this one. The others have long white dresses, but those with their
hair up have short dresses, so that you can see their legs right up to
the calf." And when I questioned her, I found that they wore what might
well be some kind of buskin. "They are fine and dashing-looking, like the
men one sees riding their horses in twos and threes on the slopes of the
mountains with their swords swinging. There is no such race living now,
none so finely proportioned ... When I think of her and the ladies now
they are like little children running about not knowing how to put their
clothes on right ... why, I would not call them women at all."
Not at this time, but some three or four years later, when the visions
came without any conscious use of symbol for a short time, and with much
greater vividness, I saw two or three forms of this incredible beauty, one
especially that must always haunt my memory. Then, too, the Master Pilot
told us of meeting at night close to the Pilot House a procession of women
in what seemed the costume of another age. Were they really people of the
past, revisiting, perhaps, the places where they lived, or must I explain
them, as I explained that vision of Eden as a mountain garden, by some
memory of the race, as distinct from individual memory? Certainly these
Spirits, as the country people called them, seemed full of personality;
were they not capricious, generous, spiteful, anxious, angry, and yet did
that prove them more than images and symbols? When I used a combined earth
and fire and lunar symbol, my seer, a girl of twenty-five, saw an obvious
Diana and her dogs, about a fire in a cavern. Presently, judging from her
closed eyes, and from the tone of her voice, that she was in trance, not
in reverie, I wished to lighten the trance a little, and made through
carelessness or hasty thinking a symbol of dismissal; and at once she
started and cried out, "She says you are driving her away too quickly. You
have made her angry." Then, too, if my visions had a subjective element,
so had Mary Battle's, for her fairies had but one tune, _The Distant
Waterfall_, and she never heard anything described in a sermon at the
Cathedral that she did not "see it after," and spoke of seeing in this way
the gates of Purgatory.
Furthermore, if my images could affect her dreams, the folk-images could
affect mine in turn, for one night I saw between sleeping and waking a
strange long bodied pair of dogs, one black and one white, that I found
presently in some country tale. How, too, could one separate the dogs of
the country tale from those my uncle heard bay in his pillow? In order to
keep myself from nightmare, I had formed the habit of imagining four
watch-dogs, one at each corner of my room, and, though I had not told him
or anybody, he said, "Here is a very curious thing; most nights now, when
I lay my head upon the pillow, I hear a sound of dogs baying--the sound
seems to come up out of the pillow." A friend of Strindberg's, in
_delirium tremens_, was haunted by mice, and a friend in the next room
heard the squealing of the mice.
VI
To that multiplicity of interest and opinion, of arts and sciences, which
had driven me to conceive a Unity of Culture defined and evoked by Unity
of Image, I had but added a multiplicity of images, and I was the more
troubled because, the first excitement over, I had done nothing to rouse
George Pollexfen from the gloom and hypochondria always thickening about
him. I asked no help of books, for I believed that the truth I sought
would come to me like the subject of a poem, from some moment of
passionate experience, and that if I filled my exposition with other men's
thought, other men's investigation, I would sink into all that
multiplicity of interest and opinion. That passionate experience could
never come--of that I was certain--until I had found the right image or
right images. From what but the image of Apollo, fixed always in memory
and passion, did his priesthood get that occasional power, a classical
historian has described, of lifting great stones and snapping great
branches; and did not Gemma Galgani, like many others that had gone
before, in 1889 cause deep wounds to appear in her body by contemplating
her crucifix? In the essay that Wilde read to me one Christmas Day,
occurred these words--"What does not the world owe to the imitation of
Christ, what to the imitation of Caesar?" and I had seen Macgregor Mathers
paint little pictures combining the forms of men, animals, and birds,
according to a rule which provided a form for every possible mental
condition, and I had heard him describing, upon what authority I do not
remember, how citizens of ancient Egypt assumed, when in contemplation,
the images of their gods.
But now image called up image in an endless procession, and I could not
always choose among them with any confidence; and when I did choose, the
image lost its intensity, or changed into some other image. I had but
exchanged the Temptation of Flaubert's _Bouvard et Pecuchet_ for that of
his _St. Anthony_, and I was lost in that region a cabalistic manuscript,
shown me by Macgregor Mathers, had warned me of; astray upon the Path of
the Cameleon, upon _Hodos Camelionis_.
VII
Now that I am a settled man and have many birds--the canaries have just
hatched out four nestlings--I have before me the problem that Locke waved
aside. As I gave them an artificial nest, a hollow vessel like a saucer,
they had no need of that skill the wild bird shows, each species having
its own preference among the lichen, or moss; but they could sort out wool
and hair and a certain soft white down that I found under a big tree. They
would twist a stem of grass till it was limber, and would wind it all
about the centre of the nest, and when the four grey eggs were laid, the
mother bird knew how to turn them over from time to time, that they might
be warmed evenly; and how long she must leave them uncovered, that the
white might not be dried up, and when to return that the growing bird
might not take cold. Then the young birds, even when they had all their
feathers, were very still as compared with the older birds, as though any
habit of movement would disturb the nest or make them tumble out. One of
them would now and again pass on the food that he had received from his
mother's beak to some other nestling. The father had often pecked the
mother bird before the eggs were laid, but now, until the last nestling
was decently feathered, he took his share in the feeding, and was very
peaceable, and it was only when the young could be left to feed themselves
that he grew jealous and had to be put into another cage.
When I watch my child, who is not yet three years old, I can see so many
signs of knowledge from beyond her own mind; why else should she be so
excited when a little boy passes outside the window, and take so little
interest in a girl; why should she put a cloak about her, and look over
her shoulder to see it trailing upon the stairs, as she will some day
trail a dress; and why, above all, as she lay against her mother's side,
and felt the unborn child moving within, did she murmur, "Baby, baby?"
When a man writes any work of genius, or invents some creative action, is
it not because some knowledge or power has come into his mind from beyond
his mind? It is called up by an image, as I think; all my birds'
adventures started when I hung a little saucer at one side of the cage,
and at the other a bundle of hair and grass; but our images must be given
to us, we cannot choose them deliberately.
VIII
I know now that revelation is from the self, but from that age-long
memoried self, that shapes the elaborate shell of the mollusc and the
child in the womb, that teaches the birds to make their nest; and that
genius is a crisis that joins that buried self for certain moments to our
trivial daily mind. There are, indeed, personifying spirits that we had
best call but Gates and Gate-keepers, because through their dramatic power
they bring our souls to crisis, to Mask and Image, caring not a straw
whether we be Juliet going to her wedding, or Cleopatra to her death; for
in their eyes nothing has weight but passion. We have dreamed a foolish
dream these many centuries in thinking that they value a life of
contemplation, for they scorn that more than any possible life, unless it
be but a name for the worst crisis of all. They have but one purpose, to
bring their chosen man to the greatest obstacle he may confront without
despair. They contrived Dante's banishment, and snatched away his
Beatrice, and thrust Villon into the arms of harlots, and sent him to
gather cronies at the foot of the gallows, that Dante and Villon might
through passion become conjoint to their buried selves, turn all to Mask
and Image, and so be phantoms in their own eyes. In great lesser writers
like Landor and like Keats we are shown that Image and that Mask as
something set apart; Andromeda and her Perseus--though not the
sea-dragon--but in a few in whom we recognise supreme masters of tragedy,
the whole contest is brought into the circle of their beauty. Such
masters, Villon and Dante, let us say, would not, when they speak through
their art, change their luck; yet they are mirrored in all the suffering
of desire. The two halves of their nature are so completely joined that
they seem to labour for their objects, and yet to desire whatever happens,
being at the same instant predestinate and free, creation's very self. We
gaze at such men in awe, because we gaze not at a work of art, but at the
re-creation of the man through that art, the birth of a new species of
man, and, it may even seem that the hairs of our heads stand up, because
that birth, that re-creation, is from terror. Had not Dante and Villon
understood that their fate wrecked what life could not rebuild, had they
lacked their Vision of Evil, had they cherished any species of optimism,
they could but have found a false beauty, or some momentary instinctive
beauty, and suffered no change at all, or but changed as do the wild
creatures, or from devil well to devil sick, and so round the clock.
They and their sort alone earn contemplation, for it is only when the
intellect has wrought the whole of life to drama, to crisis, that we may
live for contemplation, and yet keep our intensity.
And these things are true also of nations, but the Gate-keepers who drive
the nation to war or anarchy that it may find its Image are different from
those who drive individual men, though I think at times they work
together. And as I look backward upon my own writing, I take pleasure
alone in those verses where it seems to me I have found something hard,
cold, some articulation of the Image, which is the opposite of all that I
am in my daily life, and all that my country is; yet man or nation can no
more make Mask or Image than the seed can be made by the soil into which
it is cast.
Ille.
"What portion in the world can the artist have,
Who has awakened from the common dream,
But dissipation and despair?
Hic.
And yet
No one denies to Keats, love of the world.
Remember his deliberate happiness.
Ille.
His art is happy, but who knows his mind?
I see a schoolboy, when I think of him,
With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window.
For certainly he sank into his grave
His senses and his heart unsatisfied,
And made, being poor, ailing, and ignorant....
Shut out from all the luxury of the world,
Luxuriant song."