Our thoughts and emotions are often but spray flung up from hidden tides
that follow a moon no eye can see. I remember that when I first began to
write I desired to describe outward things as vividly as possible, and
took pleasure, in which there was, perhaps, a little discontent, in
picturesque and declamatory books. And then quite suddenly I lost the
desire of describing outward things, and found that I took little pleasure
in a book unless it was spiritual and unemphatic. I did not then
understand that the change was from beyond my own mind, but I understand
now that writers are struggling all over Europe, though not often with a
philosophic understanding of their struggle, against that picturesque and
declamatory way of writing, against that 'externality' which a time of
scientific and political thought has brought into literature. This
struggle has been going on for some years, but it has only just become
strong enough to draw within itself the little inner world which alone
seeks more than amusement in the arts. In France, where movements are more
marked, because the people are pre-eminently logical, _The Temptation of
S. Anthony_, the last great dramatic invention of the old romanticism,
contrasts very plainly with _Axël_, the first great dramatic invention of
the new; and Maeterlinck has followed Count Villiers de l'Isle Adam.
Flaubert wrote unforgettable descriptions of grotesque, bizarre, and
beautiful scenes and persons, as they show to the ear and to the eye, and
crowded them with historic and ethnographical details; but Count Villiers
de l'Isle Adam swept together, by what seemed a sudden energy, words
behind which glimmered a spiritual and passionate mood, as the flame
glimmers behind the dusky blue and red glass in an Eastern lamp; and
created persons from whom has fallen all even of personal characteristic
except a thirst for that hour when all things shall pass away like a
cloud, and a pride like that of the Magi following their star over many
mountains; while Maeterlinck has plucked away even this thirst and this
pride and set before us faint souls, naked and pathetic shadows already
half vapour and sighing to one another upon the border of the last abyss.
There has been, as I think, a like change in French painting, for one sees
everywhere, instead of the dramatic stories and picturesque moments of an
older school, frail and tremulous bodies unfitted for the labour of life,
and landscape where subtle rhythms of colour and of form have overcome the
clear outline of things as we see them in the labour of life.
There has been a like change in England, but it has come more gradually
and is more mixed with lesser changes than in France. The poetry which
found its expression in the poems of writers like Browning and of
Tennyson, and even of writers, who are seldom classed with them, like
Swinburne, and like Shelley in his earlier years, pushed its limits as far
as possible, and tried to absorb into itself the science and politics, the
philosophy and morality of its time; but a new poetry, which is always
contracting its limits, has grown up under the shadow of the old. Rossetti
began it, but was too much of a painter in his poetry to follow it with a
perfect devotion; and it became a movement when Mr. Lang and Mr. Gosse and
Mr. Dobson devoted themselves to the most condensed of lyric poems, and
when Mr. Bridges, a more considerable poet, elaborated a rhythm too
delicate for any but an almost bodiless emotion, and repeated over and
over the most ancient notes of poetry, and none but these. The poets who
followed have either, like Mr. Kipling, turned from serious poetry
altogether, and so passed out of the processional order, or speak out of
some personal or spiritual passion in words and types and metaphors that
draw one's imagination as far as possible from the complexities of modern
life and thought. The change has been more marked in English painting,
which, when intense enough to belong to the procession order, began to
cast out things, as they are seen by minds plunged in the labour of life,
so much before French painting that ideal art is sometimes called English
art upon the Continent.
I see, indeed, in the arts of every country those faint lights and faint
colours and faint outlines and faint energies which many call 'the
decadence,' and which I, because I believe that the arts lie dreaming of
things to come, prefer to call the autumn of the body. An Irish poet whose
rhythms are like the cry of a sea-bird in autumn twilight has told its
meaning in the line, 'The very sunlight's weary, and it's time to quit the
plough.' Its importance is the greater because it comes to us at the
moment when we are beginning to be interested in many things which
positive science, the interpreter of exterior law, has always denied:
communion of mind with mind in thought and without words, foreknowledge in
dreams and in visions, and the coming among us of the dead, and of much
else. We are, it may be, at a crowning crisis of the world, at the moment
when man is about to ascend, with the wealth, he has been so long
gathering, upon his shoulders, the stairway he has been descending from
the first days. The first poets, if one may find their images in the
_Kalevala_, had not Homer's preoccupation with things, and he was not so
full of their excitement as Virgil. Dante added to poetry a dialectic
which, although he made it serve his laborious ecstasy, was the invention
of minds trained by the labour of life, by a traffic among many things,
and not a spontaneous expression of an interior life; while Shakespeare
shattered the symmetry of verse and of drama that he might fill them with
things and their accidental relations to one another.
Each of these writers had come further down the stairway than those who
had lived before him, but it was only with the modern poets, with Goethe
and Wordsworth and Browning, that poetry gave up the right to consider all
things in the world as a dictionary of types and symbols and began to call
itself a critic of life and an interpreter of things as they are.
Painting, music, science, politics, and even religion, because they have
felt a growing belief that we know nothing but the fading and flowering of
the world, have changed in numberless elaborate ways. Man has wooed and
won the world, and has fallen weary, and not, I think, for a time, but
with a weariness that will not end until the last autumn, when the stars
shall be blown away like withered leaves. He grew weary when he said,
'These things that I touch and see and hear are alone real,' for he saw
them without illusion at last, and found them but air and dust and
moisture. And now he must be philosophical above everything, even about
the arts, for he can only return the way he came, and so escape from
weariness, by philosophy. The arts are, I believe, about to take upon
their shoulders the burdens that have fallen from the shoulders of
priests, and to lead us back upon our journey by filling our thoughts with
the essences of things, and not with things. We are about to substitute
once more the distillation of alchemy for the analyses of chemistry and
for some other sciences; and certain of us are looking everywhere for the
perfect alembic that no silver or golden drop may escape. Mr. Symons has
written lately on M. Mallarmé's method, and has quoted him as saying that
we should 'abolish the pretension, æsthetically an error, despite its
dominion over almost all the masterpieces, to enclose within the subtle
pages other than--for example--the horror of the forest or the silent
thunder in the leaves, not the intense dense wood of the trees,' and as
desiring to substitute for the old lyric afflatus or the enthusiastic
personal direction of the phrase' words 'that take light from mutual
reflection, like an actual trail of fire over precious stones,' and 'to
make an entire word hitherto unknown to the language' 'out of many
vocables.' Mr. Symons understands these and other sentences to mean that
poetry will henceforth be a poetry of essences, separated one from another
in little and intense poems. I think there will be much poetry of this
kind, because of an ever more arduous search for an almost disembodied
ecstasy, but I think we will not cease to write long poems, but rather
that we will write them more and more as our new belief makes the world
plastic under our hands again. I think that we will learn again how to
describe at great length an old man wandering among enchanted islands,
his return home at last, his slow-gathering vengeance, a flitting shape of
a goddess, and a flight of arrows, and yet to make all of these so
different things 'take light by mutual reflection, like an actual trail of
fire over precious stones,' and become 'an entire word,' the signature or
symbol of a mood of the divine imagination as imponderable as 'the horror
of the forest or the silent thunder in the leaves.'
1898.