The followers of the Father Christian Rosencrux, says the old tradition,
wrapped his imperishable body in noble raiment and laid it under the house
of their order, in a tomb containing the symbols of all things in heaven
and earth, and in the waters under the earth, and set about him
inextinguishable magical lamps, which burnt on generation after
generation, until other students of the order came upon the tomb by
chance. It seems to me that the imagination has had no very different
history during the last two hundred years, but has been laid in a great
tomb of criticism, and had set over it inextinguishable magical lamps of
wisdom and romance, and has been altogether so nobly housed and apparelled
that we have forgotten that its wizard lips are closed, or but opened for
the complaining of some melancholy and ghostly voice. The ancients and
the Elizabethans abandoned themselves to imagination as a woman abandons
herself to love, and created great beings who made the people of this
world seem but shadows, and great passions which made our loves and
hatreds appear but ephemeral and trivial phantasies; but now it is not the
great persons, or the great passions we imagine, which absorb us, for the
persons and passions in our poems are mainly reflections our mirror has
caught from older poems or from the life about us, but the wise comments
we make upon them, the criticism of life we wring from their fortunes.
Arthur and his Court are nothing, but the many-coloured lights that play
about them are as beautiful as the lights from cathedral windows; Pompilia
and Guido are but little, while the ever-recurring meditations and
expositions which climax in the mouth of the Pope are among the wisest of
the Christian age. I cannot get it out of my mind that this age of
criticism is about to pass, and an age of imagination, of emotion, of
moods, of revelation, about to come in its place; for certainly belief in
a supersensual world is at hand again; and when the notion that we are
'phantoms of the earth and water' has gone down the wind, we will trust
our own being and all it desires to invent; and when the external world is
no more the standard of reality, we will learn again that the great
Passions are angels of God, and that to embody them 'uncurbed in their
eternal glory,' even in their labour for the ending of man's peace and
prosperity, is more than to comment, however wisely, upon the tendencies
of our time, or to express the socialistic, or humanitarian, or other
forces of our time, or even 'to sum up' our time, as the phrase is; for
Art is a revelation, and not a criticism, and the life of the artist is in
the old saying, 'The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the
sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth;
so is every one that is born of the spirit.'
1895.