Besides emotional symbols, symbols that evoke emotions alone,--and in this
sense all alluring or hateful things are symbols, although their relations
with one another are too subtle to delight us fully, away from rhythm and
pattern,--there are intellectual symbols, symbols that evoke ideas alone,
or ideas mingled with emotions; and outside the very definite traditions
of mysticism and the less definite criticism of certain modern poets,
these alone are called symbols. Most things belong to one or another kind,
according to the way we speak of them and the companions we give them, for
symbols, associated with ideas that are more than fragments of the shadows
thrown upon the intellect by the emotions they evoke, are the playthings
of the allegorist or the pedant, and soon pass away. If I say 'white' or
'purple' in an ordinary line of poetry, they evoke emotions so exclusively
that I cannot say why they move me; but if I say them in the same mood, in
the same breath with such obvious intellectual symbols as a cross or a
crown of thorns, I think of purity and sovereignty; while innumerable
other meanings, which are held to one another by the bondage of subtle
suggestion, and alike in the emotions and in the intellect, move visibly
through my mind, and move invisibly beyond the threshold of sleep, casting
lights and shadows of an indefinable wisdom on what had seemed before, it
may be, but sterility and noisy violence. It is the intellect that decides
where the reader shall ponder over the procession of the symbols, and if
the symbols are merely emotional, he gazes from amid the accidents and
destinies of the world; but if the symbols are intellectual too, he
becomes himself a part of pure intellect, and he is himself mingled with
the procession. If I watch a rushy pool in the moonlight, my emotion at
its beauty is mixed with memories of the man that I have seen ploughing by
its margin, or of the lovers I saw there a night ago; but if I look at the
moon herself and remember any of her ancient names and meanings, I move
among divine people, and things that have shaken off our mortality, the
tower of ivory, the queen of waters, the shining stag among enchanted
woods, the white hare sitting upon the hilltop, the fool of faery with
his shining cup full of dreams, and it may be 'make a friend of one of
these images of wonder,' and 'meet the Lord in the air.' So, too, if one
is moved by Shakespeare, who is content with emotional symbols that he may
come the nearer to our sympathy, one is mixed with the whole spectacle of
the world; while if one is moved by Dante, or by the myth of Demeter, one
is mixed into the shadow of God or of a goddess. So too one is furthest
from symbols when one is busy doing this or that, but the soul moves among
symbols and unfolds in symbols when trance, or madness, or deep meditation
has withdrawn it from every impulse but its own. 'I then saw,' wrote
Gérard de Nerval of his madness, 'vaguely drifting into form, plastic
images of antiquity, which outlined themselves, became definite, and
seemed to represent symbols of which I only seized the idea with
difficulty.' In an earlier time he would have been of that multitude,
whose souls austerity withdrew, even more perfectly than madness could
withdraw his soul, from hope and memory, from desire and regret, that they
might reveal those processions of symbols that men bow to before altars,
and woo with incense and offerings. But being of our time, he has been
like Maeterlinck, like Villiers de l'Isle Adam in _Axël_, like all who are
preoccupied with intellectual symbols in our time, a foreshadower of the
new sacred book, of which all the arts, as somebody has said, are begging
to dream, and because, as I think, they cannot overcome the slow dying of
men's hearts that we call the progress of the world, and lay their hands
upon men's heart-strings again, without becoming the garment of religion
as in old times.
V
If people were to accept the theory that poetry moves us because of its
symbolism, what change should one look for in the manner of our poetry? A
return to the way of our fathers, a casting out of descriptions of nature
for the sake of nature, of the moral law for the sake of the moral law, a
casting out of all anecdotes and of that brooding over scientific opinion
that so often extinguished the central flame in Tennyson, and of that
vehemence that would make us do or not do certain things; or, in other
words, we should come to understand that the beryl stone was enchanted by
our fathers that it might unfold the pictures in its heart, and not to
mirror our own excited faces, or the boughs waving outside the window.
With this change of substance, this return to imagination, this
understanding that the laws of art, which are the hidden laws of the
world, can alone bind the imagination, would come a change of style, and
we would cast out of serious poetry those energetic rhythms, as of a man
running, which are the invention of the will with its eyes always on
something to be done or undone; and we would seek out those wavering,
meditative, organic rhythms, which are the embodiment of the imagination,
that neither desires nor hates, because it has done with time, and only
wishes to gaze upon some reality, some beauty; nor would it be any longer
possible for anybody to deny the importance of form, in all its kinds, for
although you can expound an opinion, or describe a thing when your words
are not quite well chosen, you cannot give a body to something that moves
beyond the senses, unless your words are as subtle, as complex, as full of
mysterious life, as the body of a flower or of a woman. The form of
sincere poetry, unlike the form of the popular poetry, may indeed be
sometimes obscure, or ungrammatical as in some of the best of the Songs of
Innocence and Experience, but it must have the perfections that escape
analysis, the subtleties that have a new meaning every day, and it must
have all this whether it be but a little song made out of a moment of
dreamy indolence, or some great epic made out of the dreams of one poet
and of a hundred generations whose hands were never weary of the sword.
1900.