At a comparatively early time Shelley made his imprisoned Cythna become
wise in all human wisdom through the contemplation of her own mind, and
write out this wisdom upon the sand in 'signs' that were 'clear elemental
shapes whose smallest change' made 'a subtler language within language'
and were 'the key of truths, which once were dimly taught in old
Crotona.' His early romances and much throughout his poetry show how
strong a fascination the traditions of magic and of the magical philosophy
had cast over his mind, and one can hardly suppose that he had not brooded
over their doctrine of symbols or signatures, though I do not find
anything to show that he gave it any deep study. One finds in his poetry,
besides innumerable images that have not the definiteness of symbols, many
images that are certainly symbols, and as the years went by he began to
use these with a more and more deliberately symbolic purpose. I imagine
that, when he wrote his earlier poems, he allowed the subconscious life to
lay its hands so firmly upon the rudder of his imagination, that he was
little conscious of the abstract meaning of the images that rose in what
seemed the idleness of his mind. Any one who has any experience of any
mystical state of the soul knows how there float up in the mind profound
symbols,[1] whose meaning, if indeed they do not delude one into the dream
that they are meaningless, one does not perhaps understand for years. Nor
I think has any one, who has known that experience with any constancy,
failed to find some day in some old book or on some old monument, a
strange or intricate image, that had floated up before him, and grow
perhaps dizzy with the sudden conviction that our little memories are but
a part of some great memory that renews the world and men's thoughts age
after age, and that our thoughts are not, as we suppose, the deep but a
little foam upon the deep. Shelley understood this, as is proved by what
he says of the eternity of beautiful things and of the influence of the
dead, but whether he understood that the great memory is also a
dwelling-house of symbols, of images that are living souls, I cannot
tell. He had certainly experience of all but the most profound of the
mystical states, of that union with created things which assuredly must
precede the soul's union with the uncreated spirit. He says in his
fragment of an essay upon life, mistaking a unique experience for the
common experience of all: 'Let us recollect our sensations as children ...
we less habitually distinguished all that we saw and felt from ourselves.
They seemed as it were to constitute one mass. There are some persons who
in this respect are always children. Those who are subject to the state
called reverie, feel as if their nature were resolved into the surrounding
universe, or as if the surrounding universe were resolved into their
being,' and he must have expected to receive thoughts and images from
beyond his own mind, just in so far as that mind transcended its
preoccupation with particular time and place, for he believed inspiration
a kind of death; and he could hardly have helped perceiving that an image
that has transcended particular time and place becomes a symbol, passes
beyond death, as it were, and becomes a living soul.
When Shelley went to the Continent with Godwin's daughter in 1812 they
sailed down certain great rivers in an open boat, and when he summed up in
his preface to _Laon and Cythna_ the things that helped to make him a
poet, he spoke of these voyages: 'I have sailed down mighty rivers and
seen the sun rise and set and the stars come forth whilst I sailed night
and day down a rapid stream among mountains.'
He may have seen some cave that was the bed of a rivulet by some river
side, or have followed some mountain stream to its source in a cave, for
from his return to England rivers and streams and wells, flowing through
caves or rising in them, came into every poem of his that was of any
length, and always with the precision of symbols. Alastor passed in his
boat along a river in a cave; and when for the last time he felt the
presence of the spirit he loved and followed, it was when he watched his
image in a silent well; and when he died it was where a river fell into
'an abysmal chasm'; and the Witch of Atlas in her gladness, as he in his
sadness, passed in her boat along a river in a cave, and it was where it
bubbled out of a cave that she was born; and when Rousseau, the typical
poet of _The Triumph of Life_, awoke to the vision that was life, it was
where a rivulet bubbled out of a cave; and the poet of _Epipsychidion_ met
the evil beauty 'by a well under blue nightshade bowers'; and Cythna bore
her child imprisoned in a great cave beside 'a fountain round and vast and
in which the wave imprisoned leaped and boiled perpetually'; and her lover
Laon was brought to his prison in a high column through a cave where there
was 'a putrid pool,' and when he went to see the conquered city he
dismounted beside a polluted fountain in the market-place, foreshadowing
thereby that spirit who at the end of _Prometheus Unbound_ gazes at a
regenerated city from 'within a fountain in the public square'; and when
Laon and Cythna are dead they awake beside a fountain and drift into
Paradise along a river; and at the end of things Prometheus and Asia are
to live amid a happy world in a cave where a fountain 'leaps with an
awakening sound'; and it was by a fountain, the meeting-place of certain
unhappy lovers, that Rosalind and Helen told their unhappiness to one
another; and it was under a willow by a fountain that the enchantress and
her lover began their unhappy love; while his lesser poems and his prose
fragments use caves and rivers and wells and fountains continually as
metaphors. It may be that his subconscious life seized upon some passing
scene, and moulded it into an ancient symbol without help from anything
but that great memory; but so good a Platonist as Shelley could hardly
have thought of any cave as a symbol, without thinking of Plato's cave
that was the world; and so good a scholar may well have had Porphyry on
'the Cave of the Nymphs' in his mind. When I compare Porphyry's
description of the cave where the Phæacian boat left Odysseus, with
Shelley's description of the cave of the Witch of Atlas, to name but one
of many, I find it hard to think otherwise. I quote Taylor's translation,
only putting Mr. Lang's prose for Taylor's bad verse. 'What does Homer
obscurely signify by the cave in Ithaca which he describes in the
following verses? "Now at the harbour's head is a long-leaved olive tree,
and hard by is a pleasant cave and shadowy, sacred to the nymphs, that are
called Naiads. And therein are mixing bowls and jars of stone, and there
moreover do bees hive. And there are great looms of stone, whereon the
nymphs weave raiment of purple stain, a marvel to behold; and there are
waters welling ever more. Two gates there are to the cave, the one set
towards the North wind, whereby men may go down, but the portals toward
the South pertain rather to the gods, whereby men may not enter: it is the
way of the immortals."' He goes on to argue that the cave was a temple
before Homer wrote, and that 'the ancients did not establish temples
without fabulous symbols,' and then begins to interpret Homer's
description in all its detail. The ancients, he says, 'consecrated a cave
to the world' and held 'the flowing waters' and the 'obscurity of the
cavern' 'apt symbols of what the world contains,' and he calls to witness
Zoroaster's cave with fountains; and often caves are, he says, symbols of
'all invisible power; because as caves are obscure and dark, so the
essence of all these powers is occult,' and quotes a lost hymn to Apollo
to prove that nymphs living in caves fed men 'from intellectual
fountains'; and he contends that fountains and rivers symbolize
generation, and that the word nymph 'is commonly applied to all souls
descending into generation,' and that the two gates of Homer's cave are
the gate of generation and the gate of ascent through death to the gods,
the gate of cold and moisture, and the gate of heat and fire. Cold, he
says, causes life in the world, and heat causes life among the gods, and
the constellation of the cup is set in the heavens near the sign Cancer,
because it is there that the souls descending from the Milky Way receive
their draught of the intoxicating cold drink of generation. 'The mixing
bowls and jars of stone' are consecrated to the Naiads, and are also, as
it seems, symbolical of Bacchus, and are of stone because of the rocky
beds of the rivers. And 'the looms of stone' are the symbols of the 'souls
that descend into generation.' 'For the formation of the flesh is on or
about the bones, which in the bodies of animals resemble stones,' and also
because 'the body is a garment' not only about the soul, but about all
essences that become visible, for 'the heavens are called by the ancients
a veil, in consequence of being as it were the vestments of the celestial
gods.' The bees hive in the mixing bowls and jars of stone, for so
Porphyry understands the passage, because honey was the symbol adopted by
the ancients for 'pleasure arising from generation.' The ancients, he
says, called souls not only Naiads but bees, 'as the efficient cause of
sweetness'; but not all souls 'proceeding into generation' are called
bees, 'but those who will live in it justly and who after having performed
such things as are acceptable to the gods will again return (to their
kindred stars). For this insect loves to return to the place from whence
it came and is eminently just and sober.' I find all these details in the
cave of the Witch of Atlas, the most elaborately described of Shelley's
caves, except the two gates, and these have a far-off echo in her summer
journeys on her cavern river and in her winter sleep in 'an
inextinguishable well of crimson fire.' We have for the mixing bowls, and
jars of stone full of honey, those delights of the senses, 'sounds of air'
'folded in cells of crystal silences,' 'liquors clear and sweet' 'in
crystal vials,' and for the bees, visions 'each in his thin sheath like a
chrysalis,' and for 'the looms of stone' and 'raiment of purple stain' the
Witch's spinning and embroidering; and the Witch herself is a Naiad, and
was born from one of the Atlantides, who lay in 'a chamber of grey rock'
until she was changed by the sun's embrace into a cloud.
When one turns to Shelley for an explanation of the cave and fountain one
finds how close his thought was to Porphyry's. He looked upon thought as a
condition of life in generation and believed that the reality beyond was
something other than thought. He wrote in his fragment 'On Life,' 'That
the basis of all things cannot be, as the popular philosophy alleges,
mind, is sufficiently evident. Mind, as far as we have any experience of
its properties, and beyond that experience how vain is argument, cannot
create, it can only perceive;' and in another passage he defines mind as
existence. Water is his great symbol of existence, and he continually
meditates over its mysterious source. In his prose he tells how 'thought
can with difficulty visit the intricate and winding chambers which it
inhabits. It is like a river, whose rapid and perpetual stream flows
outward.... The caverns of the mind are obscure and shadowy; or pervaded
with a lustre, beautiful and bright indeed, but shining not beyond their
portals.' When the Witch has passed in her boat from the caverned river,
that is doubtless her own destiny, she passes along the Nile 'by Moeris
and the Mareotid lakes,' and sees all human life shadowed upon its waters
in shadows that 'never are erased but tremble ever'; and in many a dark
and subterranean street under the Nile--new caverns--and along the bank of
the Nile; and as she bends over the unhappy, she compares unhappiness to
'the strife that stirs the liquid surface of man's life'; and because she
can see the reality of things she is described as journeying 'in the calm
depths' of 'the wide lake' we journey over unpiloted. Alastor calls the
river that he follows an image of his mind, and thinks that it will be as
hard to say where his thought will be when he is dead as where its waters
will be in ocean or cloud in a little while. In _Mont Blanc_, a poem so
overladen with descriptions in parentheses that one loses sight of its
logic, Shelley compares the flowing through our mind of 'the universe of
things,' which are, he has explained elsewhere, but thoughts, to the
flowing of the Arne through the ravine, and compares the unknown sources
of our thoughts in some 'remoter world' whose 'gleams' 'visit the soul in
sleep,' to Arne's sources among the glaciers on the mountain heights.
Cythna in the passage where she speaks of making signs 'a subtle language
within language' on the sand by the 'fountain' of sea water in the cave
where she is imprisoned, speaks of the 'cave' of her mind which gave its
secrets to her, and of 'one mind the type of all' which is a 'moveless
wave' reflecting 'all moveless things that are'; and then passing more
completely under the power of the symbol, she speaks of growing wise
through contemplation of the images that rise out of the fountain at the
call of her will. Again and again one finds some passing allusion to the
cave of man's mind, or to the caves of his youth, or to the cave of
mysteries we enter at death, for to Shelley as to Porphyry it is more than
an image of life in the world. It may mean any enclosed life, as when it
is the dwelling-place of Asia and Prometheus, or when it is 'the still
cave of poetry,' and it may have all meanings at once, or it may have as
little meaning as some ancient religious symbol enwoven from the habit of
centuries with the patterns of a carpet or a tapestry.
As Shelley sailed along those great rivers and saw or imagined the cave
that associated itself with rivers in his mind, he saw half-ruined towers
upon the hilltops, and once at any rate a tower is used to symbolize a
meaning that is the contrary to the meaning symbolized by caves. Cythna's
lover is brought through the cave where there is a polluted fountain to a
high tower, for being man's far-seeing mind, when the world has cast him
out he must to the 'towers of thought's crowned powers'; nor is it
possible for Shelley to have forgotten this first imprisonment when he
made men imprison Lionel in a tower for a like offence; and because I know
how hard it is to forget a symbolical meaning, once one has found it, I
believe Shelley had more than a romantic scene in his mind when he made
Prince Athanase follow his mysterious studies in a lighted tower above the
sea, and when he made the old hermit watch over Laon in his sickness in a
half-ruined tower, wherein the sea, here doubtless as to Cythna, 'the one
mind,' threw 'spangled sands' and 'rarest sea shells.' The tower,
important in Maeterlinck, as in Shelley, is, like the sea, and rivers, and
caves with fountains, a very ancient symbol, and would perhaps, as years
went by, have grown more important in his poetry. The contrast between it
and the cave in _Laon and Cythna_ suggests a contrast between the mind
looking outward upon men and things and the mind looking inward upon
itself, which may or may not have been in Shelley's mind, but certainly
helps, with one knows not how many other dim meanings, to give the poem
mystery and shadow. It is only by ancient symbols, by symbols that have
numberless meanings beside the one or two the writer lays an emphasis
upon, or the half-score he knows of, that any highly subjective art can
escape from the barrenness and shallowness of a too conscious
arrangement, into the abundance and depth of nature. The poet of essences
and pure ideas must seek in the half-lights that glimmer from symbol to
symbol as if to the ends of the earth, all that the epic and dramatic poet
finds of mystery and shadow in the accidental circumstance of life.
The most important, the most precise of all Shelley's symbols, the one he
uses with the fullest knowledge of its meaning, is the Morning and Evening
Star. It rises and sets for ever over the towers and rivers, and is the
throne of his genius. Personified as a woman it leads Rousseau, the
typical poet of _The Triumph of Life_, under the power of the destroying
hunger of life, under the power of the sun that we shall find presently as
a symbol of life, and it is the Morning Star that wars against the
principle of evil in _Laon and Cythna_, at first as a star with a red
comet, here a symbol of all evil as it is of disorder in _Epipsychidion_,
and then as a serpent with an eagle--symbols in Blake too and in the
Alchemists; and it is the Morning Star that appears as a winged youth to a
woman, who typifies humanity amid its sorrows, in the first canto of _Laon
and Cythna_; and it is evoked by the wailing women of _Hellas_, who call
it 'lamp of the free' and 'beacon of love' and would go where it hides
flying from the deepening night among those 'kingless continents sinless
as Eden,' and 'mountains and islands' 'prankt on the sapphire sea' that
are but the opposing hemispheres to the senses but, as I think, the ideal
world, the world of the dead, to the imagination; and in the _Ode to
Liberty_, Liberty is bid lead wisdom out of the inmost cave of man's mind
as the Morning Star leads the sun out of the waves. We know too that had
_Prince Athanase_ been finished it would have described the finding of
Pandemus, the stars' lower genius, and the growing weary of her, and the
coming to its true genius Urania at the coming of death, as the day finds
the Star at evening. There is hardly indeed a poem of any length in which
one does not find it as a symbol of love, or liberty, or wisdom, or
beauty, or of some other expression of that Intellectual Beauty, which was
to Shelley's mind the central power of the world; and to its faint and
fleeting light he offers up all desires, that are as
'The desire of the Moth for the star,
The desire for something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow.'
When its genius comes to Rousseau, shedding dew with one hand, and
treading out the stars with her feet, for she is also the genius of the
dawn, she brings him a cup full of oblivion and love. He drinks and his
mind becomes like sand 'on desert Labrador' marked by the feet of deer and
a wolf. And then the new vision, life, the cold light of day moves before
him, and the first vision becomes an invisible presence. The same image
was in his mind too when he wrote
'Hesperus flies from awakening night
And pants in its beauty with speed and light,
Fast fleeting, soft and bright.'
Though I do not think that Shelley needed to go to Porphyry's account of
the cold intoxicating cup, given to the souls in the constellation of the
Cup near the constellation Cancer, for so obvious a symbol as the cup, or
that he could not have found the wolf and the deer and the continual
flight of his Star in his own mind, his poetry becomes the richer, the
more emotional, and loses something of its appearance of idle phantasy
when I remember that these are ancient symbols, and still come to
visionaries in their dreams. Because the wolf is but a more violent symbol
of longing and desire than the hound, his wolf and deer remind me of the
hound and deer that Usheen saw in the Gaelic poem chasing one another on
the water before he saw the young man following the woman with the golden
apple; and of a Galway tale that tells how Niam, whose name means
brightness or beauty, came to Usheen as a deer; and of a vision that a
friend of mine saw when gazing at a dark-blue curtain. I was with a number
of Hermetists, and one of them said to another, 'Do you see something in
the curtain?' The other gazed at the curtain for a while and saw presently
a man led through a wood by a black hound, and then the hound lay dead at
a place the seer knew was called, without knowing why, 'the Meeting of the
Suns,' and the man followed a red hound, and then the red hound was
pierced by a spear. A white fawn watched the man out of the wood, but he
did not look at it, for a white hound came and he followed it trembling,
but the seer knew that he would follow the fawn at last, and that it would
lead him among the gods. The most learned of the Hermetists said, 'I
cannot tell the meaning of the hounds or where the Meeting of the Suns is,
but I think the fawn is the Morning and Evening Star.' I have little
doubt that when the man saw the white fawn he was coming out of the
darkness and passion of the world into some day of partial regeneration,
and that it was the Morning Star and would be the Evening Star at its
second coming. I have little doubt that it was but the story of Prince
Athanase and what may have been the story of Rousseau in _The Triumph of
Life_, thrown outward once again from that great memory, which is still
the mother of the Muses, though men no longer believe in it.
It may have been this memory, or it may have been some impulse of his
nature too subtle for his mind to follow, that made Keats, with his love
of embodied things, of precision of form and colouring, of emotions made
sleepy by the flesh, see Intellectual Beauty in the Moon; and Blake, who
lived in that energy he called eternal delight, see it in the Sun, where
his personification of poetic genius labours at a furnace. I think there
was certainly some reason why these men took so deep a pleasure in lights,
that Shelley thought of with weariness and trouble. The Moon is the most
changeable of symbols, and not merely because it is the symbol of change.
As mistress of the waters she governs the life of instinct and the
generation of things, for as Porphyry says, even 'the apparition of
images' in the 'imagination' is through 'an excess of moisture'; and, as a
cold and changeable fire set in the bare heavens, she governs alike
chastity and the joyless idle drifting hither and thither of generated
things. She may give God a body and have Gabriel to bear her messages, or
she may come to men in their happy moments as she came to Endymion, or she
may deny life and shoot her arrows; but because she only becomes beautiful
in giving herself, and is no flying ideal, she is not loved by the
children of desire.
Shelley could not help but see her with unfriendly eyes. He is believed to
have described Mary Shelley at a time when she had come to seem cold in
his eyes, in that passage of _Epipsychidion_ which tells how a woman like
the Moon led him to her cave and made 'frost' creep over the sea of his
mind, and so bewitched life and death with 'her silver voice' that they
ran from him crying, 'Away, he is not of our crew.' When he describes the
Moon as part of some beautiful scene he can call her beautiful, but when
he personifies, when his words come under the influence of that great
memory or of some mysterious tide in the depth of our being, he grows
unfriendly or not truly friendly or at the most pitiful. The Moon's lips
'are pale and waning,' it is 'the cold Moon,' or 'the frozen and
inconstant Moon,' or it is 'forgotten' and 'waning,' or it 'wanders' and
is 'weary,' or it is 'pale and grey,' or it is 'pale for weariness,' and
'wandering companionless' and 'ever changing,' and finding 'no object
worth' its 'constancy,' or it is like a 'dying lady' who 'totters' 'out of
her chamber led by the insane and feeble wanderings of her fading brain,'
and even when it is no more than a star, it casts an evil influence that
makes the lips of lovers 'lurid' or pale. It only becomes a thing of
delight when Time is being borne to his tomb in eternity, for then the
spirit of the Earth, man's procreant mind, fills it with his own
joyousness. He describes the spirit of the Earth and of the Moon, moving
above the rivulet of their lives in a passage which reads like a
half-understood vision. Man has become 'one harmonious soul of many a
soul' and 'all things flow to all' and 'familiar acts are beautiful
through love,' and an 'animation of delight' at this change flows from
spirit to spirit till the snow 'is loosened from the Moon's lifeless
mountains.'
Some old magical writer, I forget who, says if you wish to be melancholy
hold in your left hand an image of the Moon made out of silver, and if you
wish to be happy hold in your right hand an image of the Sun made out of
gold. The Sun is the symbol of sensitive life, and of belief and joy and
pride and energy, of indeed the whole life of the will, and of that beauty
which neither lures from far off, nor becomes beautiful in giving itself,
but makes all glad because it is beauty. Taylor quotes Proclus as calling
it 'the Demiurgos of everything sensible.' It was therefore natural that
Blake, who was always praising energy, and all exalted overflowing of
oneself, and who thought art an impassioned labour to keep men from doubt
and despondency, and woman's love an evil, when it would trammel the man's
will, should see the poetic genius not in a woman star but in the Sun,
and should rejoice throughout his poetry in 'the Sun in his strength.'
Shelley, however, except when he uses it to describe the peculiar beauty
of Emilia Viviani, who was 'like an incarnation of the Sun when light is
changed to love,' saw it with less friendly eyes. He seems to have seen it
with perfect happiness only when veiled in mist, or glimmering upon water,
or when faint enough to do no more than veil the brightness of his own
Star; and in _The Triumph of Life_, the one poem in which it is part of
the avowed symbolism, its power is the being and the source of all
tyrannies. When the woman personifying the Morning Star has faded from
before his eyes, Rousseau sees a 'new vision' in 'a cold bright car' with
a rainbow hovering over her, and as she comes the shadow passes from 'leaf
and stone,' and the souls she has enslaved seem in 'that light like
atomies to dance within a sunbeam,' or they dance among the flowers that
grow up newly 'in the grassy verdure of the desert,' unmindful of the
misery that is to come upon them. 'These are the great, the unforgotten,'
all who have worn 'mitres and helms and crowns or wreaths of light,' and
yet have not known themselves. Even 'great Plato' is there because he knew
joy and sorrow, because life that could not subdue him by gold or pain, by
'age or sloth or slavery,' subdued him by love. All who have ever lived
are there except Christ and Socrates and 'the sacred few' who put away all
life could give, being doubtless followers throughout their lives of the
forms borne by the flying ideal, or who, 'as soon as they had touched the
world with living flame, flew back like eagles to their native noon.'
In ancient times, it seems to me that Blake, who for all his protest was
glad to be alive, and ever spoke of his gladness, would have worshipped
in some chapel of the Sun, and that Keats, who accepted life gladly though
'with a delicious diligent indolence,' would have worshipped in some
chapel of the Moon, but that Shelley, who hated life because he sought
'more in life than any understood,' would have wandered, lost in a
ceaseless reverie, in some chapel of the Star of infinite desire.
I think too that as he knelt before an altar, where a thin flame burnt in
a lamp made of green agate, a single vision would have come to him again
and again, a vision of a boat drifting down a broad river between high
hills where there were caves and towers, and following the light of one
Star; and that voices would have told him how there is for every man some
one scene, some one adventure, some one picture that is the image of his
secret life, for wisdom first speaks in images, and that this one image,
if he would but brood over it his life long, would lead his soul,
disentangled from unmeaning circumstance and the ebb and flow of the
world, into that far household, where the undying gods await all whose
souls have become simple as flame, whose bodies have become quiet as an
agate lamp.
But he was born in a day when the old wisdom had vanished and was content
merely to write verses, and often with little thought of more than verses.
1900.