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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6833f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +* text=auto +*.txt text +*.md text diff --git a/33338-8.txt b/33338-8.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f436853 --- /dev/null +++ b/33338-8.txt @@ -0,0 +1,1944 @@ +Project Gutenberg's Per Amica Silentia Lunae, by William Butler Yeats + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Per Amica Silentia Lunae + +Author: William Butler Yeats + +Release Date: August 3, 2010 [EBook #33338] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PER AMICA SILENTIA LUNAE *** + + + + +Produced by Brian Foley and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was +produced from images generously made available by The +Internet Archive/American Libraries.) + + + + + + + + + +PER AMICA SILENTIA LUNAE + + + + + OTHER WORKS OF WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS + + POEMS AND PLAYS, 2 volumes: + + I--Lyrics. $2.00. + II--DRAMATIC POEMS. $2.00. + + THE CELTIC TWILIGHT. $1.50. + + IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL. $1.50. + + STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN. $1.25. + + REVERIES OVER CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. Illustrated. $2.00. + + RESPONSIBILITIES AND OTHER POEMS. $1.25. + + THE TABLES OF THE LAW. $1.25. + + THE HOUR GLASS AND OTHER PLAYS. $1.25. + + THE GREEN HELMET AND OTHER POEMS. $1.25. + + THE CUTTING OF AN AGATE. $1.50. + + THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. + + + + +PER AMICA SILENTIA LUNAE + + + + +_SPECIAL LIMITED EDITION_ + + + + + PER AMICA SILENTIA LUNAE + + + BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS + + + New York + THE MACMILLAN COMPANY + 1918 + _All rights reserved_ + + + + + COPYRIGHT, 1918, + BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. + + Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1918. + + + Norwood Press + J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co. + Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. + + + + +PROLOGUE + + +MY DEAR "MAURICE"--You will remember that afternoon in Calvados last +summer when your black Persian "Minoulooshe," who had walked behind us for +a good mile, heard a wing flutter in a bramble-bush? For a long time we +called her endearing names in vain. She seemed resolute to spend her night +among the brambles. She had interrupted a conversation, often interrupted +before, upon certain thoughts so long habitual that I may be permitted to +call them my convictions. When I came back to London my mind ran again and +again to those conversations and I could not rest till I had written out +in this little book all that I had said or would have said. Read it some +day when "Minoulooshe" is asleep. + +W. B. YEATS. + +_May_ 11, 1917. + + + + +EGO DOMINUS TUUS + + +HIC + + On the grey sand beside the shallow stream, + Under your old wind-beaten tower, where still + A lamp burns on above the open book + That Michael Robartes left, you walk in the moon, + And, though you have passed the best of life, still trace, + Enthralled by the unconquerable delusion, + Magical shapes. + +ILLE + + By the help of an image + I call to my own opposite, summon all + That I have handled least, least looked upon. + +HIC + + And I would find myself and not an image. + +ILLE + + That is our modern hope, and by its light + We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind + And lost the old nonchalance of the hand; + Whether we have chosen chisel, pen, or brush, + We are but critics, or but half create, + Timid, entangled, empty, and abashed, + Lacking the countenance of our friends. + +HIC + + And yet, + The chief imagination of Christendom, + Dante Alighieri, so utterly found himself, + That he has made that hollow face of his + More plain to the mind's eye than any face + But that of Christ. + +ILLE + + And did he find himself, + Or was the hunger that had made it hollow + A hunger for the apple on the bough + Most out of reach? And is that spectral image + The man that Lapo and that Guido knew? + I think he fashioned from his opposite + An image that might have been a stony face, + Staring upon a Beduin's horse-hair roof, + From doored and windowed cliff, or half upturned + Among the coarse grass and the camel dung. + He set his chisel to the hardest stone; + Being mocked by Guido for his lecherous life, + Derided and deriding, driven out + To climb that stair and eat that bitter bread, + He found the unpersuadable justice, he found + The most exalted lady loved by a man. + +HIC + + Yet surely there are men who have made their art + Out of no tragic war; lovers of life, + Impulsive men, that look for happiness, + And sing when they have found it. + +ILLE + + No, not sing, + For those that love the world serve it in action, + Grow rich, popular, and full of influence; + And should they paint or write still is it action, + The struggle of the fly in marmalade. + The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours, + The sentimentalist himself; while art + Is but a vision of reality. + 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 sweetshop 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, + The ill-bred son of a livery stable keeper-- + Luxuriant song. + +HIC + + Why should you leave the lamp + Burning alone beside an open book, + And trace these characters upon the sand? + A style is found by sedentary toil, + And by the imitation of great masters. + +ILLE + + Because I seek an image, not a book; + Those men that in their writings are most wise + Own nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts. + I call to the mysterious one who yet + Shall walk the wet sand by the water's edge, + And look most like me, being indeed my double, + And prove of all imaginable things + The most unlike, being my anti-self, + And, standing by these characters, disclose + All that I seek; and whisper it as though + He were afraid the birds, who cry aloud + Their momentary cries before it is dawn, + Would carry it away to blasphemous men. + +_December_ 1915. + + + + +PER AMICA SILENTIA LUNAE + + + + +ANIMA HOMINIS + + +I + +When I come home after meeting men who are strange to me, and sometimes +even after talking to women, I go over all I have said in gloom and +disappointment. Perhaps I have overstated everything from a desire to vex +or startle, from hostility that is but fear; or all my natural thoughts +have been drowned by an undisciplined sympathy. My fellow-diners have +hardly seemed of mixed humanity, and how should I keep my head among +images of good and evil, crude allegories. + +But when I shut my door and light the candle, I invite a Marmorean Muse, +an art, where no thought or emotion has come to mind because another man +has thought or felt something different, for now there must be no +reaction, action only, and the world must move my heart but to the heart's +discovery of itself, and I begin to dream of eyelids that do not quiver +before the bayonet: all my thoughts have ease and joy, I am all virtue and +confidence. When I come to put in rhyme what I have found it will be a +hard toil, but for a moment I believe I have found myself and not my +anti-self. It is only the shrinking from toil perhaps that convinces me +that I have been no more myself than is the cat the medicinal grass it is +eating in the garden. + +How could I have mistaken for myself an heroic condition that from early +boyhood has made me superstitious? That which comes as complete, as +minutely organised, as are those elaborate, brightly lighted buildings and +sceneries appearing in a moment, as I lie between sleeping and waking, +must come from above me and beyond me. At times I remember that place in +Dante where he sees in his chamber the "Lord of Terrible Aspect," and how, +seeming "to rejoice inwardly that it was a marvel to see, speaking, he +said, many things among the which I could understand but few, and of these +this: ego dominus tuus"; or should the conditions come, not as it were in +a gesture--as the image of a man--but in some fine landscape, it is of +Boehme, maybe, that I think, and of that country where we "eternally +solace ourselves in the excellent beautiful flourishing of all manner of +flowers and forms, both trees and plants, and all kinds of fruit." + + +II + +When I consider the minds of my friends, among artists and emotional +writers, I discover a like contrast. I have sometimes told one close +friend that her only fault is a habit of harsh judgment with those who +have not her sympathy, and she has written comedies where the wickedest +people seem but bold children. She does not know why she has created that +world where no one is ever judged, a high celebration of indulgence, but +to me it seems that her ideal of beauty is the compensating dream of a +nature wearied out by over-much judgment. I know a famous actress who in +private life is like the captain of some buccaneer ship holding his crew +to good behaviour at the mouth of a blunderbuss, and upon the stage she +excels in the representation of women who stir to pity and to desire +because they need our protection, and is most adorable as one of those +young queens imagined by Maeterlinck who have so little will, so little +self, that they are like shadows sighing at the edge of the world. When I +last saw her in her own house she lived in a torrent of words and +movements, she could not listen, and all about her upon the walls were +women drawn by Burne-Jones in his latest period. She had invited me in the +hope that I would defend those women, who were always listening, and are +as necessary to her as a contemplative Buddha to a Japanese Samurai, +against a French critic who would persuade her to take into her heart in +their stead a Post-Impressionist picture of a fat, ruddy, nude woman lying +upon a Turkey carpet. + +There are indeed certain men whose art is less an opposing virtue than a +compensation for some accident of health or circumstance. During the riots +over the first production of the _Playboy of the Western World_ Synge was +confused, without clear thought, and was soon ill--indeed the strain of +that week may perhaps have hastened his death--and he was, as is usual +with gentle and silent men, scrupulously accurate in all his statements. +In his art he made, to delight his ear and his mind's eye, voluble +daredevils who "go romancing through a romping lifetime ... to the dawning +of the Judgment Day." At other moments this man, condemned to the life of +a monk by bad health, takes an amused pleasure in "great queens ... making +themselves matches from the start to the end." Indeed, in all his +imagination he delights in fine physical life, in life where the moon +pulls up the tide. The last act of _Deirdre of the Sorrows_, where his art +is at its noblest, was written upon his death-bed. He was not sure of any +world to come, he was leaving his betrothed and his unwritten play--"Oh, +what a waste of time," he said to me; he hated to die, and in the last +speeches of Deirdre and in the middle act he accepted death and dismissed +life with a gracious gesture. He gave to Deirdre the emotion that seemed +to him most desirable, most difficult, most fitting, and maybe saw in +those delighted seven years, now dwindling from her, the fulfilment of his +own life. + + +III + +When I think of any great poetical writer of the past (a realist is an +historian and obscures the cleavage by the record of his eyes) I +comprehend, if I know the lineaments of his life, that the work is the +man's flight from his entire horoscope, his blind struggle in the network +of the stars. William Morris, a happy, busy, most irascible man, described +dim colour and pensive emotion, following, beyond any man of his time, an +indolent muse; while Savage Landor topped us all in calm nobility when the +pen was in his hand, as in the daily violence of his passion when he had +laid it down. He had in his _Imaginary Conversations_ reminded us, as it +were, that the Venus de Milo is a stone, and yet he wrote when the copies +did not come from the printer as soon as he expected: "I have ... had the +resolution to tear in pieces all my sketches and projects and to forswear +all future undertakings. I have tried to sleep away my time and pass +two-thirds of the twenty-four hours in bed. I may speak of myself as a +dead man." I imagine Keats to have been born with that thirst for luxury +common to many at the outsetting of the Romantic Movement, and not able, +like wealthy Beckford, to slake it with beautiful and strange objects. It +drove him to imaginary delights; ignorant, poor, and in poor health, and +not perfectly well-bred, he knew himself driven from tangible luxury; +meeting Shelley, he was resentful and suspicious because he, as Leigh Hunt +recalls, "being a little too sensitive on the score of his origin, felt +inclined to see in every man of birth his natural enemy." + + +IV + +Some thirty years ago I read a prose allegory by Simeon Solomon, long out +of print and unprocurable, and remember or seem to remember a sentence, "a +hollow image of fulfilled desire." All happy art seems to me that hollow +image, but when its lineaments express also the poverty or the +exasperation that set its maker to the work, we call it tragic art. Keats +but gave us his dream of luxury; but while reading Dante we never long +escape the conflict, partly because the verses are at moments a mirror of +his history, and yet more because that history is so clear and simple that +it has the quality of art. I am no Dante scholar, and I but read him in +Shadwell or in Dante Rossetti, but I am always persuaded that he +celebrated the most pure lady poet ever sung and the Divine Justice, not +merely because death took that lady and Florence banished her singer, but +because he had to struggle in his own heart with his unjust anger and his +lust; while unlike those of the great poets, who are at peace with the +world and at war with themselves, he fought a double war. "Always," says +Boccaccio, "both in youth and maturity he found room among his virtues for +lechery"; or as Matthew Arnold preferred to change the phrase, "his +conduct was exceeding irregular." Guido Cavalcanti, as Rossetti translates +him, finds "too much baseness" in his friend: + + "And still thy speech of me, heartfelt and kind, + Hath made me treasure up thy poetry; + But now I dare not, for thy abject life, + Make manifest that I approve thy rhymes." + +And when Dante meets Beatrice in Eden, does she not reproach him because, +when she had taken her presence away, he followed in spite of warning +dreams, false images, and now, to save him in his own despite, she has +"visited ... the Portals of the Dead," and chosen Virgil for his courier? +While Gino da Pistoia complains that in his _Commedia_ his "lovely +heresies ... beat the right down and let the wrong go free": + + "Therefore his vain decrees, wherein he lied, + Must be like empty nutshells flung aside; + Yet through the rash false witness set to grow, + French and Italian vengeance on such pride + May fall like Anthony on Cicero." + +Dante himself sings to Giovanni Guirino "at the approach of death"; + + "The King, by whose rich grave his servants be + With plenty beyond measure set to dwell, + Ordains that I my bitter wrath dispel, + And lift mine eyes to the great Consistory." + + +V + +We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with +ourselves, poetry. Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from +remembering the crowd they have won or may win, we sing amid our +uncertainty; and, smitten even in the presence of the most high beauty by +the knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm shudders. I think, too, that no +fine poet, no matter how disordered his life, has ever, even in his mere +life, had pleasure for his end. Johnson and Dowson, friends of my youth, +were dissipated men, the one a drunkard, the other a drunkard and mad +about women, and yet they had the gravity of men who had found life out +and were awakening from the dream; and both, one in life and art and one +in art and less in life, had a continual preoccupation with religion. Nor +has any poet I have read of or heard of or met with been a sentimentalist. +The other self, the anti-self or the antithetical self, as one may choose +to name it, comes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion +is reality. The sentimentalists are practical men who believe in money, in +position, in a marriage bell, and whose understanding of happiness is to +be so busy whether at work or at play, that all is forgotten but the +momentary aim. They find their pleasure in a cup that is filled from +Lethe's wharf, and for the awakening, for the vision, for the revelation +of reality, tradition offers us a different word--ecstasy. An old artist +wrote to me of his wanderings by the quays of New York, and how he found +there a woman nursing a sick child, and drew her story from her. She +spoke, too, of other children who had died: a long tragic story. "I +wanted to paint her," he wrote, "if I denied myself any of the pain I +could not believe in my own ecstasy." We must not make a false faith by +hiding from our thoughts the causes of doubt, for faith is the highest +achievement of the human intellect, the only gift man can make to God, and +therefore it must be offered in sincerity. Neither must we create, by +hiding ugliness, a false beauty as our offering to the world. He only can +create the greatest imaginable beauty who has endured all imaginable +pangs, for only when we have seen and foreseen what we dread shall we be +rewarded by that dazzling unforeseen wing-footed wanderer. We could not +find him if he were not in some sense of our being and yet of our being +but as water with fire, a noise with silence. He is of all things not +impossible the most difficult, for that only which comes easily can never +be a portion of our being, "Soon got, soon gone," as the proverb says. I +shall find the dark grow luminous, the void fruitful when I understand I +have nothing, that the ringers in the tower have appointed for the hymen +of the soul a passing bell. + +The last knowledge has often come most quickly to turbulent men, and for a +season brought new turbulence. When life puts away her conjuring tricks +one by one, those that deceive us longest may well be the wine-cup and the +sensual kiss, for our Chambers of Commerce and of Commons have not the +divine architecture of the body, nor has their frenzy been ripened by the +sun. The poet, because he may not stand within the sacred house but lives +amid the whirlwinds that beset its threshold, may find his pardon. + + +VI + +I think the Christian saint and hero, instead of being merely +dissatisfied, make deliberate sacrifice. I remember reading once an +autobiography of a man who had made a daring journey in disguise to +Russian exiles in Siberia, and his telling how, very timid as a child, he +schooled himself by wandering at night through dangerous streets. Saint +and hero cannot be content to pass at moments to that hollow image and +after become their heterogeneous selves, but would always, if they could, +resemble the antithetical self. There is a shadow of type on type, for in +all great poetical styles there is saint or hero, but when it is all over +Dante can return to his chambering and Shakespeare to his "pottle pot." +They sought no impossible perfection but when they handled paper or +parchment. So too will saint or hero, because he works in his own flesh +and blood and not in paper or parchment, have more deliberate +understanding of that other flesh and blood. + +Some years ago I began to believe that our culture, with its doctrine of +sincerity and self-realisation, made us gentle and passive, and that the +Middle Ages and the Renaissance were right to found theirs upon the +imitation of Christ or of some classic hero. St. Francis and Caesar Borgia +made themselves over-mastering, creative persons by turning from the +mirror to meditation upon a mask. When I had this thought I could see +nothing else in life. I could not write the play I had planned, for all +became allegorical, and though I tore up hundreds of pages in my endeavour +to escape from allegory, my imagination became sterile for nearly five +years and I only escaped at last when I had mocked in a comedy my own +thought. I was always thinking of the element of imitation in style and in +life, and of the life beyond heroic imitation. I find in an old diary: "I +think all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other +life, on a re-birth as something not one's self, something created in a +moment and perpetually renewed; in playing a game like that of a child +where one loses the infinite pain of self-realisation, in a grotesque or +solemn painted face put on that one may hide from the terror of +judgment.... Perhaps all the sins and energies of the world are but the +world's flight from an infinite blinding beam"; and again at an earlier +date: "If we cannot imagine ourselves as different from what we are, and +try to assume that second self, we cannot impose a discipline upon +ourselves though we may accept one from others. Active virtue, as +distinguished from the passive acceptance of a code, is therefore +theatrical, consciously dramatic, the wearing of a mask.... Wordsworth, +great poet though he be, is so often flat and heavy partly because his +moral sense, being a discipline he had not created, a mere obedience, has +no theatrical element. This increases his popularity with the better kind +of journalists and politicians who have written books." + + +VII + +I thought the hero found hanging upon some oak of Dodona an ancient mask, +where perhaps there lingered something of Egypt, and that he changed it to +his fancy, touching it a little here and there, gilding the eyebrows or +putting a gilt line where the cheekbone comes; that when at last he +looked out of its eyes he knew another's breath came and went within his +breath upon the carven lips, and that his eyes were upon the instant fixed +upon a visionary world: how else could the god have come to us in the +forest? The good, unlearned books say that He who keeps the distant stars +within His fold comes without intermediary, but Plutarch's precepts and +the experience of old women in Soho, ministering their witchcraft to +servant girls at a shilling apiece, will have it that a strange living man +may win for Daemon an illustrious dead man; but now I add another thought: +the Daemon comes not as like to like but seeking its own opposite, for man +and Daemon feed the hunger in one another's hearts. Because the ghost is +simple, the man heterogeneous and confused, they are but knit together +when the man has found a mask whose lineaments permit the expression of +all the man most lacks, and it may be dreads, and of that only. + +The more insatiable in all desire, the more resolute to refuse deception +or an easy victory, the more close will be the bond, the more violent and +definite the antipathy. + + +VIII + +I think that all religious men have believed that there is a hand not ours +in the events of life, and that, as somebody says in _Wilhelm Meister_, +accident is destiny; and I think it was Heraclitus who said: the Daemon is +our destiny. When I think of life as a struggle with the Daemon who would +ever set us to the hardest work among those not impossible, I understand +why there is a deep enmity between a man and his destiny, and why a man +loves nothing but his destiny. In an Anglo-Saxon poem a certain man is +called, as though to call him something that summed up all heroism, "Doom +eager." I am persuaded that the Daemon delivers and deceives us, and that +he wove that netting from the stars and threw the net from his shoulder. +Then my imagination runs from Daemon to sweetheart, and I divine an +analogy that evades the intellect. I remember that Greek antiquity has bid +us look for the principal stars, that govern enemy and sweetheart alike, +among those that are about to set, in the Seventh House as the astrologers +say; and that it may be "sexual love," which is "founded upon spiritual +hate," is an image of the warfare of man and Daemon; and I even wonder if +there may not be some secret communion, some whispering in the dark +between Daemon and sweetheart. I remember how often women, when in love, +grow superstitious, and believe that they can bring their lovers good +luck; and I remember an old Irish story of three young men who went +seeking for help in battle into the house of the gods at Slieve-na-mon. +"You must first be married," some god told them, "because a man's good or +evil luck comes to him through a woman." + +I sometimes fence for half-an-hour at the day's end, and when I close my +eyes upon the pillow I see a foil playing before me, the button to my +face. We meet always in the deep of the mind, whatever our work, wherever +our reverie carries us, that other Will. + + +IX + +The poet finds and makes his mask in disappointment, the hero in defeat. +The desire that is satisfied is not a great desire, nor has the shoulder +used all its might that an unbreakable gate has never strained. The saint +alone is not deceived, neither thrusting with his shoulder nor holding out +unsatisfied hands. He would climb without wandering to the antithetical +self of the world, the Indian narrowing his thought in meditation or +driving it away in contemplation, the Christian copying Christ, the +antithetical self of the classic world. For a hero loves the world till it +breaks him, and the poet till it has broken faith; but while the world was +yet debonair, the saint has turned away, and because he renounced +Experience itself, he will wear his mask as he finds it. The poet or the +hero, no matter upon what bark they found their mask, so teeming their +fancy, somewhat change its lineaments, but the saint, whose life is but a +round of customary duty, needs nothing the whole world does not need, and +day by day he scourges in his body the Roman and Christian conquerors: +Alexander and Caesar are famished in his cell. His nativity is neither in +disappointment nor in defeat, but in a temptation like that of Christ in +the Wilderness, a contemplation in a single instant perpetually renewed of +the Kingdom of the World; all, because all renounced, continually present +showing their empty thrones. Edwin Ellis, remembering that Christ also +measured the sacrifice, imagined himself in a fine poem as meeting at +Golgotha the phantom of "Christ the Less," the Christ who might have lived +a prosperous life without the knowledge of sin, and who now wanders +"companionless a weary spectre day and night." + + "I saw him go and cried to him + 'Eli, thou hast forsaken me.' + The nails were burning through each limb, + He fled to find felicity." + +And yet is the saint spared, despite his martyr's crown and his vigil of +desire, defeat, disappointed love, and the sorrow of parting. + + "O Night, that did'st lead thus, + O Night, more lovely than the dawn of light, + O Night, that broughtest us + Lover to lover's sight, + Lover with loved in marriage of delight! + + Upon my flowery breast, + Wholly for him, and save himself for none, + There did I give sweet rest + To my beloved one; + The fanning of the cedars breathed thereon. + + When the first morning air + Blew from the tower, and waved his locks aside, + His hand, with gentle care, + Did wound me in the side, + And in my body all my senses died. + + All things I then forgot, + My cheek on him who for my coming came; + All ceased and I was not, + Leaving my cares and shame + Among the lilies, and forgetting them."[1] + + +X + +It is not permitted to a man, who takes up pen or chisel, to seek +originality, for passion is his only business, and he cannot but mould or +sing after a new fashion because no disaster is like another. He is like +those phantom lovers in the Japanese play who, compelled to wander side by +side and never mingle, cry: "We neither wake nor sleep and passing our +nights in a sorrow which is in the end a vision, what are these scenes of +spring to us?" If when we have found a mask we fancy that it will not +match our mood till we have touched with gold the cheek, we do it +furtively, and only where the oaks of Dodona cast their deepest shadow, +for could he see our handiwork the Daemon would fling himself out, being +our enemy. + + +XI + +Many years ago I saw, between sleeping and waking, a woman of incredible +beauty shooting an arrow into the sky, and from the moment when I made my +first guess at her meaning I have thought much of the difference between +the winding movement of nature and the straight line, which is called in +Balzac's _Seraphita_ the "Mark of Man," but comes closer to my meaning as +the mark of saint or sage. I think that we who are poets and artists, not +being permitted to shoot beyond the tangible, must go from desire to +weariness and so to desire again, and live but for the moment when vision +comes to our weariness like terrible lightning, in the humility of the +brutes. I do not doubt those heaving circles, those winding arcs, whether +in one man's life or in that of an age, are mathematical, and that some in +the world, or beyond the world, have foreknown the event and pricked upon +the calendar the life-span of a Christ, a Buddha, a Napoleon: that every +movement, in feeling or in thought, prepares in the dark by its own +increasing clarity and confidence its own executioner. We seek reality +with the slow toil of our weakness and are smitten from the boundless and +the unforeseen. Only when we are saint or sage, and renounce Experience +itself, can we, in the language of the Christian Caballa, leave the sudden +lightning and the path of the serpent and become the bowman who aims his +arrow at the centre of the sun. + + +XII + +The doctors of medicine have discovered that certain dreams of the night, +for I do not grant them all, are the day's unfulfilled desire, and that +our terror of desires condemned by the conscience has distorted and +disturbed our dreams. They have only studied the breaking into dream of +elements that have remained unsatisfied without purifying discouragement. +We can satisfy in life a few of our passions and each passion but a +little, and our characters indeed but differ because no two men bargain +alike. The bargain, the compromise, is always threatened, and when it is +broken we become mad or hysterical or are in some way deluded; and so when +a starved or banished passion shows in a dream we, before awaking, break +the logic that had given it the capacity of action and throw it into chaos +again. But the passions, when we know that they cannot find fulfilment, +become vision; and a vision, whether we wake or sleep, prolongs its power +by rhythm and pattern, the wheel where the world is butterfly. We need no +protection, but it does, for if we become interested in ourselves, in our +own lives, we pass out of the vision. Whether it is we or the vision that +create the pattern, who set the wheel turning, it is hard to say, but +certainly we have a hundred ways of keeping it near us: we select our +images from past times, we turn from our own age and try to feel Chaucer +nearer than the daily paper. It compels us to cover all it cannot +incorporate, and would carry us when it comes in sleep to that moment when +even sleep closes her eyes and dreams begin to dream; and we are taken up +into a clear light and are forgetful even of our own names and actions and +yet in perfect possession of ourselves murmur like Faust, "Stay, moment," +and murmur in vain. + + +XIII + +A poet, when he is growing old, will ask himself if he cannot keep his +mask and his vision without new bitterness, new disappointment. Could he +if he would, knowing how frail his vigour from youth up, copy Landor who +lived loving and hating, ridiculous and unconquered, into extreme old age, +all lost but the favour of his muses. + + The mother of the muses we are taught + Is memory; she has left me; they remain + And shake my shoulder urging me to sing. + +Surely, he may think, now that I have found vision and mask I need not +suffer any longer. He will buy perhaps some small old house where like +Ariosto he can dig his garden, and think that in the return of birds and +leaves, or moon and sun, and in the evening flight of the rooks he may +discover rhythm and pattern like those in sleep and so never awake out of +vision. Then he will remember Wordsworth withering into eighty years, +honoured and empty-witted, and climb to some waste room and find, +forgotten there by youth, some bitter crust. + +_February_ 25, 1917. + + + + +ANIMA MUNDI + + +I + +I have always sought to bring my mind close to the mind of Indian and +Japanese poets, old women in Connaught, mediums in Soho, lay brothers whom +I imagine dreaming in some mediaeval monastery the dreams of their +village, learned authors who refer all to antiquity; to immerse it in the +general mind where that mind is scarce separable from what we have begun +to call "the subconscious"; to liberate it from all that comes of councils +and committees, from the world as it is seen from universities or from +populous towns; and that I might so believe I have murmured evocations and +frequented mediums, delighted in all that displayed great problems +through sensuous images, or exciting phrases, accepting from abstract +schools but a few technical words that are so old they seem but broken +architraves fallen amid bramble and grass, and have put myself to school +where all things are seen: _A Tenedo Tacitae per Amica Silentia Lunae_. At +one time I thought to prove my conclusions by quoting from diaries where I +have recorded certain strange events the moment they happened, but now I +have changed my mind--I will but say like the Arab boy that became Vizier: +"O brother, I have taken stock in the desert sand and of the sayings of +antiquity." + + +II + +There is a letter of Goethe's, though I cannot remember where, that +explains evocation, though he was but thinking of literature. He described +some friend who had complained of literary sterility as too intelligent. +One must allow the images to form with all their associations before one +criticises. "If one is critical too soon," he wrote, "they will not form +at all." If you suspend the critical faculty, I have discovered, either as +the result of training, or, if you have the gift, by passing into a slight +trance, images pass rapidly before you. If you can suspend also desire, +and let them form at their own will, your absorption becomes more complete +and they are more clear in colour, more precise in articulation, and you +and they begin to move in the midst of what seems a powerful light. But +the images pass before you linked by certain associations, and indeed in +the first instance you have called them up by their association with +traditional forms and sounds. You have discovered how, if you can but +suspend will and intellect, to bring up from the "subconscious" anything +you already possess a fragment of. Those who follow the old rule keep +their bodies still and their minds awake and clear, dreading especially +any confusion between the images of the mind and the objects of sense; +they seek to become, as it were, polished mirrors. + +I had no natural gift for this clear quiet, as I soon discovered, for my +mind is abnormally restless; and I was seldom delighted by that sudden +luminous definition of form which makes one understand almost in spite of +oneself that one is not merely imagining. I therefore invented a new +process. I had found that after evocation my sleep became at moments full +of light and form, all that I had failed to find while awake; and I +elaborated a symbolism of natural objects that I might give myself dreams +during sleep, or rather visions, for they had none of the confusion of +dreams, by laying upon my pillow or beside my bed certain flowers or +leaves. Even to-day, after twenty years, the exaltations and the messages +that came to me from bits of hawthorn or some other plant seem of all +moments of my life the happiest and the wisest. After a time, perhaps +because the novelty wearing off the symbol lost its power, or because my +work at the Irish Theatre became too exciting, my sleep lost its +responsiveness. I had fellow-scholars, and now it was I and now they who +made some discovery. Before the mind's eye, whether in sleep or waking, +came images that one was to discover presently in some book one had never +read, and after looking in vain for explanation to the current theory of +forgotten personal memory, I came to believe in a great memory passing on +from generation to generation. But that was not enough, for these images +showed intention and choice. They had a relation to what one knew and yet +were an extension of one's knowledge. If no mind was there, why should I +suddenly come upon salt and antimony, upon the liquefaction of the gold, +as they were understood by the alchemists, or upon some detail of +cabalistic symbolism verified at last by a learned scholar from his +never-published manuscripts, and who can have put together so ingeniously, +working by some law of association and yet with clear intention and +personal application, certain mythological images. They had shown +themselves to several minds, a fragment at a time, and had only shown +their meaning when the puzzle picture had been put together. The thought +was again and again before me that this study had created a contact or +mingling with minds who had followed a like study in some other age, and +that these minds still saw and thought and chose. Our daily thought was +certainly but the line of foam at the shallow edge of a vast luminous sea: +Henry More's _Anima Mundi_, Wordsworth's "immortal sea which brought us +hither ... and near whose edge the children sport," and in that sea there +were some who swam or sailed, explorers who perhaps knew all its shores. + + +III + +I had always to compel myself to fix the imagination upon the minds behind +the personifications, and yet the personifications were themselves living +and vivid. The minds that swayed these seemingly fluid images had +doubtless form, and those images themselves seemed, as it were, mirrored +in a living substance whose form is but change of form. From tradition and +perception, one thought of one's own life as symbolised by earth, the +place of heterogeneous things, the images as mirrored in water and the +images themselves one could divine but as air; and beyond it all there +was, I felt confident, certain aims and governing loves, the fire that +makes all simple. Yet the images themselves were fourfold, and one judged +their meaning in part from the predominance of one out of the four +elements, or that of the fifth element, the veil hiding another four, a +bird born out of the fire. + + +IV + +I longed to know something even if it were but the family and Christian +names of those minds that I could divine, and that yet remained always as +it seemed impersonal. The sense of contact came perhaps but two or three +times with clearness and certainty, but it left among all to whom it came +some trace, a sudden silence, as it were, in the midst of thought or +perhaps at moments of crisis a faint voice. Were our masters right when +they declared so solidly that we should be content to know these presences +that seemed friendly and near but as "the phantom" in Coleridge's poem, +and to think of them perhaps, as having, as St. Thomas says, entered upon +the eternal possession of themselves in one single moment? + + "All look and likeness caught from earth, + All accident of kin and birth, + Had passed away. There was no trace + Of ought on that illumined face, + Upraised beneath the rifted stone, + But of one spirit all her own; + She, she herself and only she, + Shone through her body visibly." + + +V + +One night I heard a voice that said: "The love of God for every human soul +is infinite, for every human soul is unique; no other can satisfy the same +need in God." Our masters had not denied that personality outlives the +body or even that its rougher shape may cling to us a while after death, +but only that we should seek it in those who are dead. Yet when I went +among the country people, I found that they sought and found the old +fragilities, infirmities, physiognomies that living stirred affection. The +Spiddal knowledgeable man, who had his knowledge from his sister's ghost, +noticed every hallowe'en, when he met her at the end of the garden, that +her hair was greyer. Had she perhaps to exhaust her allotted years in the +neighbourhood of her home, having died before her time? Because no +authority seemed greater than that of this knowledge running backward to +the beginning of the world, I began that study of spiritism so despised by +Stanislas de Gaeta, the one eloquent learned scholar who has written of +magic in our generation. + + +VI + +I know much that I could never have known had I not learnt to consider in +the after life what, there as here, is rough and disjointed; nor have I +found that the mediums in Connaught and Soho have anything I cannot find +some light on in Henry More, who was called during his life the holiest +man now walking upon the earth. + +All souls have a vehicle or body, and when one has said that, with More +and the Platonists one has escaped from the abstract schools who seek +always the power of some church or institution, and found oneself with +great poetry, and superstition which is but popular poetry, in a pleasant +dangerous world. Beauty is indeed but bodily life in some ideal condition. +The vehicle of the human soul is what used to be called the animal +spirits, and Henry More quotes from Hippocrates this sentence: "The mind +of man is ... not nourished from meats and drinks from the belly, but by a +clear luminous substance that redounds by separation from the blood." +These animal spirits fill up all parts of the body and make up the body of +air, as certain writers of the seventeenth century have called it. The +soul has a plastic power, and can after death, or during life, should the +vehicle leave the body for a while, mould it to any shape it will by an +act of imagination, though the more unlike to the habitual that shape is, +the greater the effort. To living and dead alike, the purity and +abundance of the animal spirits are a chief power. The soul can mould from +these an apparition clothed as if in life, and make it visible by showing +it to our mind's eye, or by building into its substance certain particles +drawn from the body of a medium till it is as visible and tangible as any +other object. To help that building the ancients offered fragrant gum, the +odour of flowers, and it may be pieces of virgin wax. The half +materialised vehicle slowly exudes from the skin in dull luminous drops or +condenses from a luminous cloud, the light fading as weight and density +increase. The witch, going beyond the medium, offered to the slowly +animating phantom certain drops of her blood. The vehicle once separate +from the living man or woman may be moulded by the souls of others as +readily as by its own soul, and even it seems by the souls of the living. +It becomes a part for a while of that stream of images which I have +compared to reflections upon water. But how does it follow that souls who +never have handled the modelling tool or the brush, make perfect images? +Those materialisations who imprint their powerful faces upon paraffin wax, +leave there sculpture that would have taken a good artist, making and +imagining, many hours. How did it follow that an ignorant woman could, as +Henry More believed, project her vehicle in so good a likeness of a hare, +that horse and hound and huntsman followed with the bugle blowing? Is not +the problem the same as of those finely articulated scenes and patterns +that come out of the dark, seemingly completed in the winking of an eye, +as we are lying half asleep, and of all those elaborate images that drift +in moments of inspiration or evocation before the mind's eye? Our animal +spirits or vehicles are but as it were a condensation of the vehicle of +_Anima Mundi_, and give substance to its images in the faint +materialisation of our common thought, or more grossly when a ghost is our +visitor. It should be no great feat, once those images have dipped into +our vehicle, to take their portraits in the photographic camera. Henry +More will have it that a hen scared by a hawk when the cock is treading, +hatches out a hawkheaded chicken (I am no stickler for the fact), because +before the soul of the unborn bird could give the shape "the deeply +impassioned fancy of the mother" called from the general cistern of form a +competing image. "The soul of the world," he runs on, "interposes and +insinuates into all generations of things while the matter is fluid and +yielding, which would induce a man to believe that she may not stand idle +in the transformation of the vehicle of the daemons, but assist the +fancies and desires, and so help to clothe them and to utter them +according to their own pleasures; or it may be sometimes against their +wills as the unwieldiness of the mother's fancy forces upon her a +monstrous birth." Though images appear to flow and drift, it may be that +we but change in our relation to them, now losing, now finding with the +shifting of our minds; and certainly Henry More speaks by the book, +claiming that those images may be hard to the right touch as "pillars of +crystal" and as solidly coloured as our own to the right eyes. Shelley, a +good Platonist, seems in his earliest work to set this general soul in the +place of God, an opinion, one may find from More's friend Cudworth now +affirmed, now combated, by classic authority; but More would steady us +with a definition. The general soul as apart from its vehicle is "a +substance incorporeal but without sense and animadversion pervading the +whole matter of the universe and exercising a plastic power therein, +according to the sundry predispositions and occasions, in the parts it +works upon, raising such phenomena in the world, by directing the parts of +the matter and their motion as cannot be resolved into mere mechanical +powers." I must assume that "sense and animadversion," perception and +direction, are always faculties of individual soul, and that, as Blake +said, "God only acts or is in existing beings or men." + + +VII + +The old theological conception of the individual soul as bodiless or +abstract led to what Henry More calls "contradictory debate" as to how +many angels "could dance booted and spurred upon the point of a needle," +and made it possible for rationalist physiology to persuade us that our +thought has no corporeal existence but in the molecules of the brain. +Shelley was of opinion that the "thoughts which are called real or +external objects" differed but in regularity of occurrence from +"hallucinations, dreams and ideas of madmen," and noticed that he had +dreamed, therefore lessening the difference, "three several times between +intervals of two or more years the same precise dream." If all our mental +images no less than apparitions (and I see no reason to distinguish) are +forms existing in the general vehicle of _Anima Mundi_, and mirrored in +our particular vehicle, many crooked things are made straight. I am +persuaded that a logical process, or a series of related images, has body +and period, and I think of _Anima Mundi_ as a great pool or garden where +it spreads through allotted growth like a great water plant or branches +more fragrantly in the air. Indeed as Spenser's Garden of Adonis: + + "There is the first seminary + Of all things that are born to live and die + According to their kynds." + +The soul by changes of "vital congruity," More says, draws to it a certain +thought, and this thought draws by its association the sequence of many +thoughts, endowing them with a life in the vehicle meted out according to +the intensity of the first perception. A seed is set growing, and this +growth may go on apart from the power, apart even from the knowledge of +the soul. If I wish to "transfer" a thought I may think, let us say, of +Cinderella's slipper, and my subject may see an old woman coming out of a +chimney; or going to sleep I may wish to wake at seven o'clock and, though +I never think of it again, I shall wake upon the instant. The thought has +completed itself, certain acts of logic, turns, and knots in the stem have +been accomplished out of sight and out of reach as it were. We are always +starting these parasitic vegetables and letting them coil beyond our +knowledge, and may become, like that lady in Balzac who, after a life of +sanctity, plans upon her deathbed to fly with her renounced lover. After +death a dream, a desire she had perhaps ceased to believe in, perhaps +ceased almost to remember, must have recurred again and again with its +anguish and its happiness. We can only refuse to start the wandering +sequence or, if start it does, hold it in the intellectual light where +time gallops, and so keep it from slipping down into the sluggish +vehicle. The toil of the living is to free themselves from an endless +sequence of objects, and that of the dead to free themselves from an +endless sequence of thoughts. One sequence begets another, and these have +power because of all those things we do, not for their own sake but for an +imagined good. + + +VIII + +Spiritism, whether of folk-lore or of the séance room, the visions of +Swedenborg, and the speculation of the Platonists and Japanese plays, will +have it that we may see at certain roads and in certain houses old murders +acted over again, and in certain fields dead huntsmen riding with horse +and hound, or ancient armies fighting above bones or ashes. We carry to +_Anima Mundi_ our memory, and that memory is for a time our external +world; and all passionate moments recur again and again, for passion +desires its own recurrence more than any event, and whatever there is of +corresponding complacency or remorse is our beginning of judgment; nor do +we remember only the events of life, for thoughts bred of longing and of +fear, all those parasitic vegetables that have slipped through our +fingers, come again like a rope's end to smite us upon the face; and as +Cornelius Agrippa writes: "We may dream ourselves to be consumed in flame +and persecuted by daemons," and certain spirits have complained that they +would be hard put to it to arouse those who died, believing they could not +awake till a trumpet shrilled. A ghost in a Japanese play is set afire by +a fantastic scruple, and though a Buddhist priest explains that the fire +would go out of itself if the ghost but ceased to believe in it, it cannot +cease to believe. Cornelius Agrippa called such dreaming souls +hobgoblins, and when Hamlet refused the bare bodkin because of what dreams +may come, it was from no mere literary fancy. The soul can indeed, it +appears, change these objects built about us by the memory, as it may +change its shape; but the greater the change, the greater the effort and +the sooner the return to the habitual images. Doubtless in either case the +effort is often beyond its power. Years ago I was present when a woman +consulted Madame Blavatsky for a friend who saw her newly-dead husband +nightly as a decaying corpse and smelt the odour of the grave. When he was +dying, said Madame Blavatsky, he thought the grave the end, and now that +he is dead cannot throw off that imagination. A Brahmin once told an +actress friend of mine that he disliked acting, because if a man died +playing Hamlet, he would be Hamlet in eternity. Yet after a time the soul +partly frees itself and becomes "the shape changer" of the legends, and +can cast, like the mediaeval magician, what illusions it would. There is +an Irish countryman in one of Lady Gregory's books who had eaten with a +stranger on the road, and some while later vomited, to discover he had but +eaten chopped up grass. One thinks, too, of the spirits that show +themselves in the images of wild creatures. + + +IX + +The dead, as the passionate necessity wears out, come into a measure of +freedom and may turn the impulse of events, started while living, in some +new direction, but they cannot originate except through the living. Then +gradually they perceive, although they are still but living in their +memories, harmonies, symbols, and patterns, as though all were being +refashioned by an artist, and they are moved by emotions, sweet for no +imagined good but in themselves, like those of children dancing in a ring; +and I do not doubt that they make love in that union which Swedenborg has +said is of the whole body and seems from far off an incandescence. +Hitherto shade has communicated with shade in moments of common memory +that recur like the figures of a dance in terror or in joy, but now they +run together like to like, and their Covens and Fleets have rhythm and +pattern. This running together and running of all to a centre and yet +without loss of identity, has been prepared for by their exploration of +their moral life, of its beneficiaries and its victims, and even of all +its untrodden paths, and all their thoughts have moulded the vehicle and +become event and circumstance. + + +X + +There are two realities, the terrestrial and the condition of fire. All +power is from the terrestrial condition, for there all opposites meet and +there only is the extreme of choice possible, full freedom. And there the +heterogeneous is, and evil, for evil is the strain one upon another of +opposites; but in the condition of fire is all music and all rest. Between +is the condition of air where images have but a borrowed life, that of +memory or that reflected upon them when they symbolise colours and +intensities of fire, the place of shades who are "in the whirl of those +who are fading," and who cry like those amorous shades in the Japanese +play: + + "That we may acquire power + Even in our faint substance, + We will show forth even now, + And though it be but in a dream, + Our form of repentance." + +After so many rhythmic beats the soul must cease to desire its images, and +can, as it were, close its eyes. + +When all sequence comes to an end, time comes to an end, and the soul puts +on the rhythmic or spiritual body or luminous body and contemplates all +the events of its memory and every possible impulse in an eternal +possession of itself in one single moment. That condition is alone +animate, all the rest is phantasy, and from thence come all the passions, +and some have held, the very heat of the body. + + Time drops in decay, + Like a candle burnt out, + And the mountains and the woods + Have their day, have their day. + What one, in the rout + Of the fire-born moods, + Has fallen away? + + +XI + +The soul cannot have much knowledge till it has shaken off the habit of +time and of place, but till that hour it must fix its attention upon what +is near, thinking of objects one after another as we run the eye or the +finger over them. Its intellectual power cannot but increase and alter as +its perceptions grow simultaneous. Yet even now we seem at moments to +escape from time in what we call prevision, and from place when we see +distant things in a dream and in concurrent dreams. A couple of years ago, +while in meditation, my head seemed surrounded by a conventional sun's +rays, and when I went to bed I had a long dream of a woman with her hair +on fire. I awoke and lit a candle, and discovered presently from the odour +that in doing so I had set my own hair on fire. I dreamed very lately that +I was writing a story, and at the same time I dreamed that I was one of +the characters in that story and seeking to touch the heart of some girl +in defiance of the author's intention; and concurrently with all that, I +was as another self trying to strike with the button of a foil a great +china jar. The obscurity of the prophetic books of William Blake, which +were composed in a state of vision, comes almost wholly from these +concurrent dreams. Everybody has some story or some experience of the +sudden knowledge in sleep or waking of some event, a misfortune for the +most part happening to some friend far off. + + +XII + +The dead living in their memories, are, I am persuaded, the source of all +that we call instinct, and it is their love and their desire, all +unknowing, that make us drive beyond our reason, or in defiance of our +interest it may be; and it is the dream martens that, all unknowing, are +master-masons to the living martens building about church windows their +elaborate nests; and in their turn, the phantoms are stung to a keener +delight from a concord between their luminous pure vehicle and our strong +senses. It were to reproach the power or the beneficence of God, to +believe those children of Alexander who died wretchedly could not throw an +urnful to the heap, nor that Caesarea[2] murdered in childhood, whom +Cleopatra bore to Caesar, nor that so brief-lived younger Pericles +Aspasia bore being so nobly born. + + +XIII + +Because even the most wise dead can but arrange their memories as we +arrange pieces upon a chess-board and obey remembered words alone, he who +would turn magician is forbidden by the Zoroastrian oracle to change +"barbarous words" of invocation. Communication with _Anima Mundi_ is +through the association of thoughts or images or objects; and the famous +dead and those of whom but a faint memory lingers, can still--and it is +for no other end that, all unknowing, we value posthumous fame--tread the +corridor and take the empty chair. A glove or a name can call their +bearer; the shadows come to our elbow amid their old undisturbed +habitations, and "materialisation" itself is easier, it may be, among +walls, or by rocks and trees, that carry upon them particles the vehicles +cast off in some extremity while they had still animate bodies. + +Certainly the mother returns from the grave, and with arms that may be +visible and solid, for a hurried moment, can comfort a neglected child or +set the cradle rocking; and in all ages men have known and affirmed that +when the soul is troubled, those that are a shade and a song: + + "live there, + And live like winds of light on dark or stormy air." + + +XIV + +Awhile they live again those passionate moments, not knowing they are +dead, and then they know and may awake or half awake to be our visitors. +How is their dream changed as Time drops away and their senses multiply? +Does their stature alter, do their eyes grow more brilliant? Certainly the +dreams stay the longer, the greater their passion when alive: Helen may +still open her chamber door to Paris or watch him from the wall, and know +she is dreaming but because nights and days are poignant or the stars +unreckonably bright. Surely of the passionate dead we can but cry in words +Ben Jonson meant for none but Shakespeare: "So rammed" are they "with life +they can but grow in life with being." + + +XV + +The inflowing from their mirrored life, who themselves receive it from the +Condition of Fire, falls upon the Winding Path called the Path of the +Serpent, and that inflowing coming alike to men and to animals is called +natural. There is another inflow which is not natural but intellectual, +and is from the fire; and it descends through souls who pass for a lengthy +or a brief period out of the mirror life, as we in sleep out of the bodily +life, and though it may fall upon a sleeping serpent, it falls principally +upon straight paths. In so far as a man is like all other men, the inflow +finds him upon the winding path, and in so far as he is a saint or sage, +upon the straight path. + + +XVI + +Daemon and man are opposites; man passes from heterogeneous objects to the +simplicity of fire, and the Daemon is drawn to objects because through +them he obtains power, the extremity of choice. For only in men's minds +can he meet even those in the Condition of Fire who are not of his own +kin. He, by using his mediatorial shades, brings man again and again to +the place of choice, heightening temptation that the choice may be as +final as possible, imposing his own lucidity upon events, leading his +victim to whatever among works not impossible is the most difficult. He +suffers with man as some firm-souled man suffers with the woman he but +loves the better because she is extravagant and fickle. His descending +power is neither the winding nor the straight line but zigzag, +illuminating the passive and active properties, the tree's two sorts of +fruit: it is the sudden lightning, for all his acts of power are +instantaneous. We perceive in a pulsation of the artery, and after slowly +decline. + + +XVII + +Each Daemon is drawn to whatever man or, if its nature is more general, to +whatever nation it most differs from, and it shapes into its own image +the antithetical dream of man or nation. The Jews had already shown by the +precious metals, by the ostentatious wealth of Solomon's temple, the +passion that has made them the money-lenders of the modern world. If they +had not been rapacious, lustful, narrow and persecuting beyond the people +of their time, the incarnation had been impossible; but it was an +intellectual impulse from the Condition of Fire that shaped their +antithetical self into that of the classic world. So always it is an +impulse from some Daemon that gives to our vague, unsatisfied desire, +beauty, a meaning and a form all can accept. + + +XVIII + +Only in rapid and subtle thought, or in faint accents heard in the quiet +of the mind, can the thought of the spirit come to us but little changed; +for a mind, that grasps objects simultaneously according to the degree of +its liberation, does not think the same thought with the mind that sees +objects one after another. The purpose of most religious teaching, of the +insistence upon the submission to God's will above all, is to make certain +of the passivity of the vehicle where it is most pure and most tenuous. +When we are passive where the vehicle is coarse, we become mediumistic, +and the spirits who mould themselves in that coarse vehicle can only +rarely and with great difficulty speak their own thoughts and keep their +own memory. They are subject to a kind of drunkenness and are stupefied, +old writers said, as if with honey, and readily mistake our memory for +their own, and believe themselves whom and what we please. We bewilder and +overmaster them, for once they are among the perceptions of successive +objects, our reason, being but an instrument created and sharpened by +those objects, is stronger than their intellect, and they can but repeat +with brief glimpses from another state, our knowledge and our words. + + +XIX + +A friend once dreamed that she saw many dragons climbing upon the steep +side of a cliff and continually falling. Henry More thought that those +who, after centuries of life, failed to find the rhythmic body and to pass +into the Condition of Fire, were born again. Edmund Spenser, who was among +More's masters, affirmed that nativity without giving it a cause: + + "After that they againe retourned beene, + They in that garden planted be agayne, + And grow afresh, as they had never seene + Fleshy corruption, nor mortal payne. + Some thousand years so doen they ther remayne, + And then of him are clad with other hew, + Or sent into the chaungeful world agayne, + Till thither they retourn where first they grew: + So like a wheele, around they roam from old to new." + +The dead who speak to us deny metempsychosis, perhaps because they but +know a little better what they knew alive; while the dead in Asia, for +perhaps no better reason, affirm it, and so we are left amid +plausibilities and uncertainties. + + +XX + +But certainly it is always to the Condition of Fire, where emotion is not +brought to any sudden stop, where there is neither wall nor gate, that we +would rise; and the mask plucked from the oak-tree is but my imagination +of rhythmic body. We may pray to that last condition by any name so long +as we do not pray to it as a thing or a thought, and most prayers call it +man or woman or child: + + "For mercy has a human heart, + Pity a human face." + +Within ourselves Reason and Will, who are the man and woman, hold out +towards a hidden altar, a laughing or crying child. + + +XXI + +When I remember that Shelley calls our minds "mirrors of the fire for +which all thirst," I cannot but ask the question all have asked, "What or +who has cracked the mirror?" I begin to study the only self that I can +know, myself, and to wind the thread upon the perne again. + +At certain moments, always unforeseen, I become happy, most commonly when +at hazard I have opened some book of verse. Sometimes it is my own verse +when, instead of discovering new technical flaws, I read with all the +excitement of the first writing. Perhaps I am sitting in some crowded +restaurant, the open book beside me, or closed, my excitement having +over-brimmed the page. I look at the strangers near as if I had known them +all my life, and it seems strange that I cannot speak to them: everything +fills me with affection, I have no longer any fears or any needs; I do not +even remember that this happy mood must come to an end. It seems as if the +vehicle had suddenly grown pure and far extended and so luminous that one +half imagines that the images from _Anima Mundi_, embodied there and drunk +with that sweetness, would, as some country drunkard who had thrown a +wisp into his own thatch, burn up time. + +It may be an hour before the mood passes, but latterly I seem to +understand that I enter upon it the moment I cease to hate. I think the +common condition of our life is hatred--I know that this is so with +me--irritation with public or private events or persons. There is no great +matter in forgetfulness of servants, or the delays of tradesmen, but how +forgive the ill-breeding of Carlyle, or the rhetoric of Swinburne, or that +woman who murmurs over the dinner-table the opinion of her daily paper? +And only a week ago last Sunday, I hated the spaniel who disturbed a +partridge on her nest, a trout who took my bait and yet broke away +unhooked. The books say that our happiness comes from the opposite of +hate, but I am not certain, for we may love unhappily. And plainly, when +I have closed a book too stirred to go on reading, and in those brief +intense visions of sleep, I have something about me that, though it makes +me love, is more like innocence. I am in the place where the daemon is, +but I do not think he is with me until I begin to make a new personality, +selecting among those images, seeking always to satisfy a hunger grown out +of conceit with daily diet; and yet as I write the words, "I select," I am +full of uncertainty, not knowing when I am the finger, when the clay. +Once, twenty years ago, I seemed to awake from sleep to find my body +rigid, and to hear a strange voice speaking these words through my lips as +through lips of stone: "We make an image of him who sleeps, and it is not +him who sleeps, and we call it Emmanuel." + + +XXII + +As I go up and down my stair and pass the gilded Moorish wedding-chest +where I keep my "barbarous words," I wonder will I take to them once more, +for I am baffled by those voices that still speak as to Odysseus but as +the bats; or now that I shall in a little be growing old, to some kind of +simple piety like that of an old woman. + +_May_ 9, 1917. + + + + +EPILOGUE + + +MY DEAR "MAURICE"--I was often in France before you were born or when you +were but a little child. When I went for the first or second time Mallarmé +had just written: "All our age is full of the trembling of the veil of the +temple." One met everywhere young men of letters who talked of magic. A +distinguished English man of letters asked me to call with him on +Stanislas de Gaeta because he did not dare go alone to that mysterious +house. I met from time to time with the German poet Doukenday, a grave +Swede whom I only discovered after years to have been Strindberg, then +looking for the philosopher's stone in a lodging near the Luxembourg; and +one day in the chambers of Stuart Merrill the poet, I spoke with a young +Arabic scholar who displayed a large, roughly-made gold ring which had +grown to the shape of his finger. Its gold had no hardening alloy, he +said, because it was made by his master, a Jewish Rabbi, of alchemical +gold. My critical mind--was it friend or enemy?--mocked, and yet I was +delighted. Paris was as legendary as Connaught. This new pride, that of +the adept, was added to the pride of the artist. Villiers de L'Isle Adam, +the haughtiest of men, had but lately died. I had read his _Axel_ slowly +and laboriously as one reads a sacred book--my French was very bad--and +had applauded it upon the stage. As I could not follow the spoken words, I +was not bored even where Axel and the Commander discussed philosophy for a +half-hour instead of beginning their duel. If I felt impatient it was only +that they delayed the coming of the adept Janus, for I hoped to recognise +the moment when Axel cries: "I know that lamp, it was burning before +Solomon"; or that other when he cries: "As for living, our servants will +do that for us." + +The movement of letters had been haughty even before Magic had touched it. +Rimbaud had sung: "Am I an old maid that I should fear the embrace of +death?" And everywhere in Paris and in London young men boasted of the +garret, and claimed to have no need of what the crowd values. + +Last summer you, who were at the age I was when first I heard of Mallarmé +and of Verlaine, spoke much of the French poets young men and women read +to-day. Claudel I already somewhat knew, but you read to me for the first +time from Jammes a dialogue between a poet and a bird, that made us cry, +and a whole volume of Peguy's _Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d'Arc_. +Nothing remained the same but the preoccupation with religion, for these +poets submitted everything to the Pope, and all, even Claudel, a proud +oratorical man, affirmed that they saw the world with the eyes of +vine-dressers and charcoal-burners. It was no longer the soul, self-moving +and self-teaching--the magical soul--but Mother France and Mother Church. + +Have not my thoughts run through a like round, though I have not found my +tradition in the Catholic Church, which was not the church of my +childhood, but where the tradition is, as I believe, more universal and +more ancient? + +W. B. Y. + +_May_ 11, 1917. + + +Printed in the United States of America. + + + + +The following pages contain advertisements of books by the same author or +on kindred subjects. + + +Responsibilities + +BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS + +_Cloth, $1.25_ + + "William Butler Yeats is by far the biggest poetic personality living + among us at present. He is great both as a lyric and dramatist poet." + + --_John Masefield._ + + "This poetry has the rhythm that is incantation and sorcery, that is + not of the senses nor of the spirit, but of a mingling which is + exaltation." + + --_Chicago Evening Post._ + +Under the title of "Responsibilities" William Butler Yeats brings together +some of his recent poems. Notable still for his freshness of thought, his +keen originality, and his purely poetic conception of thoughts and facts, +Mr. Yeats sometimes makes us wonder how he has so long been able to hold +his style above the ever rising level of modern poetry. No man stands so +apart in his own perfection as does this Irish poet and playwright, in his +art of discovering truths remote and beautiful. Serious, vital thoughts he +veils, as the genuine poet, in a cloak of fine rhythmical expression. + +It is, after all, as a poet that the majority of people like to think of +Mr. Yeats, and this splendid collection, the first in a number of years, +is assured of a warm welcome. + + + + +BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS + +The Cutting of an Agate + +_12mo, $1.50_ + + "Mr. Yeats is probably the most important as well as the most widely + known of the men concerned directly in the so-called Celtic + renaissance. More than this, he stands among the few men to be + reckoned with in modern poetry."--_New York Herald._ + + +The Green Helmet and Other Poems + +_Decorated cloth, 12mo, $1.25_ + + The initial piece in this volume is a deliciously conceived heroic + farce, quaint in humor and sprightly in action. It tells of the + difficulty in which two simple Irish folk find themselves when they + enter into an agreement with an apparition of the sea, who demands + that they knock off his head and who maintains that after they have + done that he will knock off theirs. There is a real meaning in the + play which it will not take the thoughtful reader long to discover. + Besides this there are a number of shorter poems, notably one in + which Mr. Yeats answers the critics of "The Playboy of the Western + World." + + +Lyrical and Dramatic Poems + + In Two Volumes + _Vol. I. Lyrical Poems, $2.00 Leather, $2.25_ + _Vol. II. Plays (Revised), $2.00 Leather, $2.25_ + + The two-volume edition of the Irish poet's works included everything + he has done in verse up to the present time. The first volume + contains his lyrics; the second includes all of his five dramas in + verse: "The Countess Cathleen," "The Land of Heart's Desire," "The + King's Threshold," "On Baile's Strand," and "The Shadowy Waters." + + +Reveries Over Childhood and Youth + +_$2.00_ + + In this book the celebrated Irish author gives us his reminiscences + of his childhood and youth. The memories are written, as is to be + expected, in charming prose. They have the appeal invariably attached + to the account of a sensitive childhood. + + +The Hour Glass and Other Plays _$1.25_ + + "The Hour Glass" is one of Mr. Yeats' noble and effective plays, and + with the other plays in the volume, make a small, but none the less + representative collection. + + +Stories of Red Hanrahan + +_$1.25_ + + These tales belong to the realm of pure lyrical expression. They are + mysterious and shadowy, full of infinite subtleties and old wisdom of + folklore, and sad with the gray wistful Celtic sadness. + + "Lovers of Mr. Yeats's suggestive and delicate writing will find him + at his best in this volume."--_Springfield Republican._ + + +Ideas of Good and Evil _$1.50_ + + Essays on art and life, wherein are set forth much of Yeats' + philosophy, his love of beauty, his hope for Ireland and for Irish + artistic achievement. + + +The Celtic Twilight _$1.50_ + + A collection of tales from Irish life and of Irish fancy, retold from + peasants' stories with no additions except an occasional comment. + + + +THE WORKS OF RABINDRANATH TAGORE + +BOLPUR EDITION + + HUNGRY STONES AND OTHER STORIES. + FRUIT GATHERING. + CHITRA: A Play in one act. + THE CRESCENT MOON: Child Poems. + THE GARDENER: Love Poems. + GITANJALI: Religious Poems. + THE KING OF THE DARK CHAMBER: A Play. + THE SONGS OF KABIR. + SADHANA: The Realization of Life. + THE POST OFFICE: A Play. + +Each volume decorated cloth, $1.50; leather, $2.00. + +This new edition of the works of Rabindranath Tagore will recommend itself +to those who desire to possess the various poems and plays of the great +Hindu writer in the best possible printings and bindings. Great care has +been taken with the physical appearance of the books. In addition to the +special design that has been made for the cover, there are special end +papers and decorated title pages in each book. Altogether this edition +promises to become the standard one of this distinguished poet and seer. + + THE MACMILLAN COMPANY + Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York + + + + +Footnotes: + +[1] Translated by Arthur Symons from _San Juan de la Cruz_. + +[2] I have no better authority for Caesarea than Landor's play. + + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's Per Amica Silentia Lunae, by William Butler Yeats + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PER AMICA SILENTIA LUNAE *** + +***** This file should be named 33338-8.txt or 33338-8.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/3/3/3/3/33338/ + +Produced by Brian Foley and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was +produced from images generously made available by The +Internet Archive/American Libraries.) + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Per Amica Silentia Lunae + +Author: William Butler Yeats + +Release Date: August 3, 2010 [EBook #33338] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PER AMICA SILENTIA LUNAE *** + + + + +Produced by Brian Foley and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was +produced from images generously made available by The +Internet Archive/American Libraries.) + + + + + + +</pre> + + + + +<h1>PER AMICA SILENTIA LUNAE</h1> + +<p> </p><p> </p> + +<div class="border"> +<p class="center"><big>OTHER WORKS OF<br />WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS</big></p> + +<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table"> +<tr><td><span class="smcap">Poems and Plays</span>, 2 volumes:<br /> +<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">I—Lyrics. $2.00.</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 1em;">II—DRAMATIC POEMS. $2.00.</span></td></tr> +<tr><td><span class="smcap">The Celtic Twilight.</span> $1.50.</td></tr> +<tr><td><span class="smcap">Ideas of Good and Evil.</span> $1.50.</td></tr> +<tr><td><span class="smcap">Stories of Red Hanrahan.</span> $1.25.</td></tr> +<tr><td><span class="smcap">Reveries over Childhood and Youth.</span> Illustrated. $2.00.</td></tr> +<tr><td><span class="smcap">Responsibilities and Other Poems.</span> $1.25.</td></tr> +<tr><td><span class="smcap">The Tables of the Law.</span> $1.25.</td></tr> +<tr><td><span class="smcap">The Hour Glass and Other Plays.</span> $1.25.</td></tr> +<tr><td><span class="smcap">The Green Helmet and Other Poems.</span> $1.25.</td></tr> +<tr><td><span class="smcap">The Cutting of an Agate.</span> $1.50.</td></tr></table> + +<p class="center">THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.</p></div> + + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<hr style="width: 50%;" /> +<h2>PER AMICA SILENTIA LUNAE</h2> +<p> </p> +<p class="center"><strong><i>SPECIAL LIMITED EDITION</i></strong></p> +<p> </p><p> </p><p> </p> + +<h2>PER AMICA<br />SILENTIA LUNAE</h2> +<p> </p> +<p class="center"><small>BY</small><br /><strong>WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS</strong></p> +<p> </p> +<p class="center">New York<br />THE MACMILLAN COMPANY<br />1918<br /><i>All rights reserved</i></p> +<p> </p><p> </p> + +<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Copyright, 1918,<br /> +By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.</span></p> +<p class="center">Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1918.</p> +<p> </p> +<p class="center">Norwood Press<br />J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.<br />Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.</p> + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<hr style="width: 50%;" /> +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span></p> +<h2>PROLOGUE</h2> + +<p><span class="smcap">My Dear “Maurice”</span>—You will remember that afternoon in Calvados last +summer when your black Persian “Minoulooshe,” who had walked behind us for +a good mile, heard a wing flutter in a bramble-bush? For a long time we +called her endearing names in vain. She seemed resolute to spend her night +among the brambles. She had interrupted a conversation, often interrupted +before, upon certain thoughts so long habitual that I may be permitted to +call them my convictions. When I came back to London my mind ran again and +again to those conversations and I could not rest till I had written out +in this little book all that I had said or would have said. Read it some +day when “Minoulooshe” is asleep.</p> + +<p class="right">W. B. YEATS.</p> + +<p><i>May</i> 11, 1917.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span></p> + + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<hr style="width: 50%;" /> +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span></p> +<h2>EGO DOMINUS TUUS</h2> + +<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="dominus"> +<tr><td class="center"><span class="smcap">Hic</span></td></tr> +<tr><td>On the grey sand beside the shallow stream,<br /> +Under your old wind-beaten tower, where still<br /> +A lamp burns on above the open book<br /> +That Michael Robartes left, you walk in the moon,<br /> +And, though you have passed the best of life, still trace,<br /> +Enthralled by the unconquerable delusion,<br /> +Magical shapes.</td></tr> +<tr><td> </td></tr> +<tr><td class="center"><span class="smcap">Ille</span></td></tr> +<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 7em;">By the help of an image</span><br /> +I call to my own opposite, summon all<br /> +That I have handled least, least looked upon.</td></tr> +<tr><td> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span></td></tr> +<tr><td class="center"><span class="smcap">Hic</span></td></tr> +<tr><td>And I would find myself and not an image.</td></tr> +<tr><td> </td></tr> +<tr><td class="center"><span class="smcap">Ille</span></td></tr> +<tr><td>That is our modern hope, and by its light<br /> +We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind<br /> +And lost the old nonchalance of the hand;<br /> +Whether we have chosen chisel, pen, or brush,<br /> +We are but critics, or but half create,<br /> +Timid, entangled, empty, and abashed,<br /> +Lacking the countenance of our friends.</td></tr> +<tr><td> </td></tr> +<tr><td class="center"><span class="smcap">Hic</span></td></tr> +<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 13em;">And yet,</span><br /> +The chief imagination of Christendom,<br /> +Dante Alighieri, so utterly found himself,<br /> +That he has made that hollow face of his<br /> +More plain to the mind’s eye than any face<br /> +But that of Christ.</td></tr> +<tr><td> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span></td></tr> +<tr><td class="center"><span class="smcap">Ille</span></td></tr> +<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 7em;">And did he find himself,</span><br /> +Or was the hunger that had made it hollow<br /> +A hunger for the apple on the bough<br /> +Most out of reach? And is that spectral image<br /> +The man that Lapo and that Guido knew?<br /> +I think he fashioned from his opposite<br /> +An image that might have been a stony face,<br /> +Staring upon a Beduin’s horse-hair roof,<br /> +From doored and windowed cliff, or half upturned<br /> +Among the coarse grass and the camel dung.<br /> +He set his chisel to the hardest stone;<br /> +Being mocked by Guido for his lecherous life,<br /> +Derided and deriding, driven out<br /> +<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span>To climb that stair and eat that bitter bread,<br /> +He found the unpersuadable justice, he found<br /> +The most exalted lady loved by a man.</td></tr> +<tr><td> </td></tr> +<tr><td class="center"><span class="smcap">Hic</span></td></tr> +<tr><td>Yet surely there are men who have made their art<br /> +Out of no tragic war; lovers of life,<br /> +Impulsive men, that look for happiness,<br /> +And sing when they have found it.</td></tr> +<tr><td> </td></tr> +<tr><td class="center"><span class="smcap">Ille</span></td></tr> +<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 13em;">No, not sing,</span><br /> +For those that love the world serve it in action,<br /> +Grow rich, popular, and full of influence;<br /> +And should they paint or write still is it action,<br /> +The struggle of the fly in marmalade.<br /> +The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours,<br /> +<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>The sentimentalist himself; while art<br /> +Is but a vision of reality.<br /> +What portion in the world can the artist have,<br /> +Who has awakened from the common dream,<br /> +But dissipation and despair?</td></tr> +<tr><td> </td></tr> +<tr><td class="center"><span class="smcap">Hic</span></td></tr> +<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 14em;">And yet,</span><br /> +No one denies to Keats love of the world,<br /> +Remember his deliberate happiness.</td></tr> +<tr><td> </td></tr> +<tr><td class="center"><span class="smcap">Ille</span></td></tr> +<tr><td>His art is happy, but who knows his mind?<br /> +I see a schoolboy, when I think of him,<br /> +With face and nose pressed to a sweetshop window,<br /> +For certainly he sank into his grave,<br /> +His senses and his heart unsatisfied;<br /> +<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span>And made—being poor, ailing and ignorant,<br /> +Shut out from all the luxury of the world,<br /> +The ill-bred son of a livery stable keeper—<br /> +Luxuriant song.</td></tr> +<tr><td> </td></tr> +<tr><td class="center"><span class="smcap">Hic</span></td></tr> +<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 6em;">Why should you leave the lamp</span><br /> +Burning alone beside an open book,<br /> +And trace these characters upon the sand?<br /> +A style is found by sedentary toil,<br /> +And by the imitation of great masters.</td></tr> +<tr><td> </td></tr> +<tr><td class="center"><span class="smcap">Ille</span></td></tr> +<tr><td>Because I seek an image, not a book;<br /> +Those men that in their writings are most wise<br /> +Own nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts.<br /> +I call to the mysterious one who yet<br /> +Shall walk the wet sand by the water’s edge,<br /> +<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>And look most like me, being indeed my double,<br /> +And prove of all imaginable things<br /> +The most unlike, being my anti-self,<br /> +And, standing by these characters, disclose<br /> +All that I seek; and whisper it as though<br /> +He were afraid the birds, who cry aloud<br /> +Their momentary cries before it is dawn,<br /> +Would carry it away to blasphemous men.</td></tr> +<tr><td> </td></tr> +<tr><td><i>December</i> 1915.</td></tr></table> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span></p> + + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<hr style="width: 50%;" /> +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span></p> +<h2>PER AMICA SILENTIA LUNAE</h2> +<p> </p> +<h2>ANIMA HOMINIS</h2> +<h3>I</h3> + +<p>When I come home after meeting men who are strange to me, and sometimes +even after talking to women, I go over all I have said in gloom and +disappointment. Perhaps I have overstated everything from a desire to vex +or startle, from hostility that is but fear; or all my natural thoughts +have been drowned by an undisciplined sympathy. My fellow-diners have +hardly seemed of mixed humanity, and how should I keep my head among +images of good and evil, crude allegories.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span>But when I shut my door and light the candle, I invite a Marmorean Muse, +an art, where no thought or emotion has come to mind because another man +has thought or felt something different, for now there must be no +reaction, action only, and the world must move my heart but to the heart’s +discovery of itself, and I begin to dream of eyelids that do not quiver +before the bayonet: all my thoughts have ease and joy, I am all virtue and +confidence. When I come to put in rhyme what I have found it will be a +hard toil, but for a moment I believe I have found myself and not my +anti-self. It is only the shrinking from toil perhaps that convinces me +that I have been no more myself than is the cat the medicinal grass it is +eating in the garden.</p> + +<p>How could I have mistaken for myself<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> an heroic condition that from early +boyhood has made me superstitious? That which comes as complete, as +minutely organised, as are those elaborate, brightly lighted buildings and +sceneries appearing in a moment, as I lie between sleeping and waking, +must come from above me and beyond me. At times I remember that place in +Dante where he sees in his chamber the “Lord of Terrible Aspect,” and how, +seeming “to rejoice inwardly that it was a marvel to see, speaking, he +said, many things among the which I could understand but few, and of these +this: ego dominus tuus”; or should the conditions come, not as it were in +a gesture—as the image of a man—but in some fine landscape, it is of +Boehme, maybe, that I think, and of that country where we “eternally +solace ourselves in the excellent beautiful flourishing of all manner<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> of +flowers and forms, both trees and plants, and all kinds of fruit.”</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>II</h3> + +<p>When I consider the minds of my friends, among artists and emotional +writers, I discover a like contrast. I have sometimes told one close +friend that her only fault is a habit of harsh judgment with those who +have not her sympathy, and she has written comedies where the wickedest +people seem but bold children. She does not know why she has created that +world where no one is ever judged, a high celebration of indulgence, but +to me it seems that her ideal of beauty is the compensating dream of a +nature wearied out by over-much judgment. I know a famous actress who in +private life is like the captain of some buccaneer ship holding his crew +to good behaviour at the mouth of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> blunderbuss, and upon the stage she +excels in the representation of women who stir to pity and to desire +because they need our protection, and is most adorable as one of those +young queens imagined by Maeterlinck who have so little will, so little +self, that they are like shadows sighing at the edge of the world. When I +last saw her in her own house she lived in a torrent of words and +movements, she could not listen, and all about her upon the walls were +women drawn by Burne-Jones in his latest period. She had invited me in the +hope that I would defend those women, who were always listening, and are +as necessary to her as a contemplative Buddha to a Japanese Samurai, +against a French critic who would persuade her to take into her heart in +their stead a Post-Impressionist picture of a fat, ruddy, nude woman lying +upon a Turkey carpet.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>There are indeed certain men whose art is less an opposing virtue than a +compensation for some accident of health or circumstance. During the riots +over the first production of the <i>Playboy of the Western World</i> Synge was +confused, without clear thought, and was soon ill—indeed the strain of +that week may perhaps have hastened his death—and he was, as is usual +with gentle and silent men, scrupulously accurate in all his statements. +In his art he made, to delight his ear and his mind’s eye, voluble +daredevils who “go romancing through a romping lifetime ... to the dawning +of the Judgment Day.” At other moments this man, condemned to the life of +a monk by bad health, takes an amused pleasure in “great queens ... making +themselves matches from the start to the end.” Indeed, in all his +imagination he delights in fine physical life,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> in life where the moon +pulls up the tide. The last act of <i>Deirdre of the Sorrows</i>, where his art +is at its noblest, was written upon his death-bed. He was not sure of any +world to come, he was leaving his betrothed and his unwritten play—“Oh, +what a waste of time,” he said to me; he hated to die, and in the last +speeches of Deirdre and in the middle act he accepted death and dismissed +life with a gracious gesture. He gave to Deirdre the emotion that seemed +to him most desirable, most difficult, most fitting, and maybe saw in +those delighted seven years, now dwindling from her, the fulfilment of his +own life.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>III</h3> + +<p>When I think of any great poetical writer of the past (a realist is an +historian and obscures the cleavage by the record of his eyes)<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> I +comprehend, if I know the lineaments of his life, that the work is the +man’s flight from his entire horoscope, his blind struggle in the network +of the stars. William Morris, a happy, busy, most irascible man, described +dim colour and pensive emotion, following, beyond any man of his time, an +indolent muse; while Savage Landor topped us all in calm nobility when the +pen was in his hand, as in the daily violence of his passion when he had +laid it down. He had in his <i>Imaginary Conversations</i> reminded us, as it +were, that the Venus de Milo is a stone, and yet he wrote when the copies +did not come from the printer as soon as he expected: “I have ... had the +resolution to tear in pieces all my sketches and projects and to forswear +all future undertakings. I have tried to sleep away my time and pass +two-thirds of the twenty-four hours in bed. I may speak<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> of myself as a +dead man.” I imagine Keats to have been born with that thirst for luxury +common to many at the outsetting of the Romantic Movement, and not able, +like wealthy Beckford, to slake it with beautiful and strange objects. It +drove him to imaginary delights; ignorant, poor, and in poor health, and +not perfectly well-bred, he knew himself driven from tangible luxury; +meeting Shelley, he was resentful and suspicious because he, as Leigh Hunt +recalls, “being a little too sensitive on the score of his origin, felt +inclined to see in every man of birth his natural enemy.”</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>IV</h3> + +<p>Some thirty years ago I read a prose allegory by Simeon Solomon, long out +of print and unprocurable, and remember or seem to remember a sentence, “a +hollow image of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> fulfilled desire.” All happy art seems to me that hollow +image, but when its lineaments express also the poverty or the +exasperation that set its maker to the work, we call it tragic art. Keats +but gave us his dream of luxury; but while reading Dante we never long +escape the conflict, partly because the verses are at moments a mirror of +his history, and yet more because that history is so clear and simple that +it has the quality of art. I am no Dante scholar, and I but read him in +Shadwell or in Dante Rossetti, but I am always persuaded that he +celebrated the most pure lady poet ever sung and the Divine Justice, not +merely because death took that lady and Florence banished her singer, but +because he had to struggle in his own heart with his unjust anger and his +lust; while unlike those of the great poets, who are at peace with the +world and at war with <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>themselves, he fought a double war. “Always,” says +Boccaccio, “both in youth and maturity he found room among his virtues for +lechery”; or as Matthew Arnold preferred to change the phrase, “his +conduct was exceeding irregular.” Guido Cavalcanti, as Rossetti translates +him, finds “too much baseness” in his friend:</p> + +<p class="poem">“And still thy speech of me, heartfelt and kind,<br /> +Hath made me treasure up thy poetry;<br /> +But now I dare not, for thy abject life,<br /> +Make manifest that I approve thy rhymes.”</p> + +<p>And when Dante meets Beatrice in Eden, does she not reproach him because, +when she had taken her presence away, he followed in spite of warning +dreams, false images, and now, to save him in his own despite, she has +“visited ... the Portals of the Dead,” and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> chosen Virgil for his courier? +While Gino da Pistoia complains that in his <i>Commedia</i> his “lovely +heresies ... beat the right down and let the wrong go free”:</p> + +<p class="poem">“Therefore his vain decrees, wherein he lied,<br /> +Must be like empty nutshells flung aside;<br /> +Yet through the rash false witness set to grow,<br /> +French and Italian vengeance on such pride<br /> +May fall like Anthony on Cicero.”</p> + +<p>Dante himself sings to Giovanni Guirino “at the approach of death”;</p> + +<p class="poem">“The King, by whose rich grave his servants be<br /> +With plenty beyond measure set to dwell,<br /> +Ordains that I my bitter wrath dispel,<br /> +And lift mine eyes to the great Consistory.”</p> + +<p> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span></p> +<h3>V</h3> + +<p>We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with +ourselves, poetry. Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from +remembering the crowd they have won or may win, we sing amid our +uncertainty; and, smitten even in the presence of the most high beauty by +the knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm shudders. I think, too, that no +fine poet, no matter how disordered his life, has ever, even in his mere +life, had pleasure for his end. Johnson and Dowson, friends of my youth, +were dissipated men, the one a drunkard, the other a drunkard and mad +about women, and yet they had the gravity of men who had found life out +and were awakening from the dream; and both, one in life and art and one +in art and less in life, had a continual<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> preoccupation with religion. Nor +has any poet I have read of or heard of or met with been a sentimentalist. +The other self, the anti-self or the antithetical self, as one may choose +to name it, comes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion +is reality. The sentimentalists are practical men who believe in money, in +position, in a marriage bell, and whose understanding of happiness is to +be so busy whether at work or at play, that all is forgotten but the +momentary aim. They find their pleasure in a cup that is filled from +Lethe’s wharf, and for the awakening, for the vision, for the revelation +of reality, tradition offers us a different word—ecstasy. An old artist +wrote to me of his wanderings by the quays of New York, and how he found +there a woman nursing a sick child, and drew her story from her. She +spoke, too, of other children who had died: a long tragic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> story. “I +wanted to paint her,” he wrote, “if I denied myself any of the pain I +could not believe in my own ecstasy.” We must not make a false faith by +hiding from our thoughts the causes of doubt, for faith is the highest +achievement of the human intellect, the only gift man can make to God, and +therefore it must be offered in sincerity. Neither must we create, by +hiding ugliness, a false beauty as our offering to the world. He only can +create the greatest imaginable beauty who has endured all imaginable +pangs, for only when we have seen and foreseen what we dread shall we be +rewarded by that dazzling unforeseen wing-footed wanderer. We could not +find him if he were not in some sense of our being and yet of our being +but as water with fire, a noise with silence. He is of all things not +impossible the most difficult, for that only which comes easily can<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> never +be a portion of our being, “Soon got, soon gone,” as the proverb says. I +shall find the dark grow luminous, the void fruitful when I understand I +have nothing, that the ringers in the tower have appointed for the hymen +of the soul a passing bell.</p> + +<p>The last knowledge has often come most quickly to turbulent men, and for a +season brought new turbulence. When life puts away her conjuring tricks +one by one, those that deceive us longest may well be the wine-cup and the +sensual kiss, for our Chambers of Commerce and of Commons have not the +divine architecture of the body, nor has their frenzy been ripened by the +sun. The poet, because he may not stand within the sacred house but lives +amid the whirlwinds that beset its threshold, may find his pardon.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span></p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>VI</h3> + +<p>I think the Christian saint and hero, instead of being merely +dissatisfied, make deliberate sacrifice. I remember reading once an +autobiography of a man who had made a daring journey in disguise to +Russian exiles in Siberia, and his telling how, very timid as a child, he +schooled himself by wandering at night through dangerous streets. Saint +and hero cannot be content to pass at moments to that hollow image and +after become their heterogeneous selves, but would always, if they could, +resemble the antithetical self. There is a shadow of type on type, for in +all great poetical styles there is saint or hero, but when it is all over +Dante can return to his chambering and Shakespeare to his “pottle pot.” +They sought no impossible perfection but when they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> handled paper or +parchment. So too will saint or hero, because he works in his own flesh +and blood and not in paper or parchment, have more deliberate +understanding of that other flesh and blood.</p> + +<p>Some years ago I began to believe that our culture, with its doctrine of +sincerity and self-realisation, made us gentle and passive, and that the +Middle Ages and the Renaissance were right to found theirs upon the +imitation of Christ or of some classic hero. St. Francis and Caesar Borgia +made themselves over-mastering, creative persons by turning from the +mirror to meditation upon a mask. When I had this thought I could see +nothing else in life. I could not write the play I had planned, for all +became allegorical, and though I tore up hundreds of pages in my endeavour +to escape from allegory, my imagination became sterile for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> nearly five +years and I only escaped at last when I had mocked in a comedy my own +thought. I was always thinking of the element of imitation in style and in +life, and of the life beyond heroic imitation. I find in an old diary: “I +think all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other +life, on a re-birth as something not one’s self, something created in a +moment and perpetually renewed; in playing a game like that of a child +where one loses the infinite pain of self-realisation, in a grotesque or +solemn painted face put on that one may hide from the terror of +judgment.... Perhaps all the sins and energies of the world are but the +world’s flight from an infinite blinding beam”; and again at an earlier +date: “If we cannot imagine ourselves as different from what we are, and +try to assume that second self, we cannot impose a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> discipline upon +ourselves though we may accept one from others. Active virtue, as +distinguished from the passive acceptance of a code, is therefore +theatrical, consciously dramatic, the wearing of a mask.... Wordsworth, +great poet though he be, is so often flat and heavy partly because his +moral sense, being a discipline he had not created, a mere obedience, has +no theatrical element. This increases his popularity with the better kind +of journalists and politicians who have written books.”</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>VII</h3> + +<p>I thought the hero found hanging upon some oak of Dodona an ancient mask, +where perhaps there lingered something of Egypt, and that he changed it to +his fancy, touching it a little here and there, gilding the eyebrows or +putting a gilt line where the cheekbone<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> comes; that when at last he +looked out of its eyes he knew another’s breath came and went within his +breath upon the carven lips, and that his eyes were upon the instant fixed +upon a visionary world: how else could the god have come to us in the +forest? The good, unlearned books say that He who keeps the distant stars +within His fold comes without intermediary, but Plutarch’s precepts and +the experience of old women in Soho, ministering their witchcraft to +servant girls at a shilling apiece, will have it that a strange living man +may win for Daemon an illustrious dead man; but now I add another thought: +the Daemon comes not as like to like but seeking its own opposite, for man +and Daemon feed the hunger in one another’s hearts. Because the ghost is +simple, the man heterogeneous and confused, they are but knit together +when the man has found a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> mask whose lineaments permit the expression of +all the man most lacks, and it may be dreads, and of that only.</p> + +<p>The more insatiable in all desire, the more resolute to refuse deception +or an easy victory, the more close will be the bond, the more violent and +definite the antipathy.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>VIII</h3> + +<p>I think that all religious men have believed that there is a hand not ours +in the events of life, and that, as somebody says in <i>Wilhelm Meister</i>, +accident is destiny; and I think it was Heraclitus who said: the Daemon is +our destiny. When I think of life as a struggle with the Daemon who would +ever set us to the hardest work among those not impossible, I understand +why there is a deep enmity between a man and his destiny, and why a man +loves nothing but his destiny.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> In an Anglo-Saxon poem a certain man is +called, as though to call him something that summed up all heroism, “Doom +eager.” I am persuaded that the Daemon delivers and deceives us, and that +he wove that netting from the stars and threw the net from his shoulder. +Then my imagination runs from Daemon to sweetheart, and I divine an +analogy that evades the intellect. I remember that Greek antiquity has bid +us look for the principal stars, that govern enemy and sweetheart alike, +among those that are about to set, in the Seventh House as the astrologers +say; and that it may be “sexual love,” which is “founded upon spiritual +hate,” is an image of the warfare of man and Daemon; and I even wonder if +there may not be some secret communion, some whispering in the dark +between Daemon and sweetheart. I remember how often<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> women, when in love, +grow superstitious, and believe that they can bring their lovers good +luck; and I remember an old Irish story of three young men who went +seeking for help in battle into the house of the gods at Slieve-na-mon. +“You must first be married,” some god told them, “because a man’s good or +evil luck comes to him through a woman.”</p> + +<p>I sometimes fence for half-an-hour at the day’s end, and when I close my +eyes upon the pillow I see a foil playing before me, the button to my +face. We meet always in the deep of the mind, whatever our work, wherever +our reverie carries us, that other Will.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>IX</h3> + +<p>The poet finds and makes his mask in disappointment, the hero in defeat. +The desire that is satisfied is not a great desire, nor has the shoulder +used all its might that an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> unbreakable gate has never strained. The saint +alone is not deceived, neither thrusting with his shoulder nor holding out +unsatisfied hands. He would climb without wandering to the antithetical +self of the world, the Indian narrowing his thought in meditation or +driving it away in contemplation, the Christian copying Christ, the +antithetical self of the classic world. For a hero loves the world till it +breaks him, and the poet till it has broken faith; but while the world was +yet debonair, the saint has turned away, and because he renounced +Experience itself, he will wear his mask as he finds it. The poet or the +hero, no matter upon what bark they found their mask, so teeming their +fancy, somewhat change its lineaments, but the saint, whose life is but a +round of customary duty, needs nothing the whole world does not need, and +day by day<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> he scourges in his body the Roman and Christian conquerors: +Alexander and Caesar are famished in his cell. His nativity is neither in +disappointment nor in defeat, but in a temptation like that of Christ in +the Wilderness, a contemplation in a single instant perpetually renewed of +the Kingdom of the World; all, because all renounced, continually present +showing their empty thrones. Edwin Ellis, remembering that Christ also +measured the sacrifice, imagined himself in a fine poem as meeting at +Golgotha the phantom of “Christ the Less,” the Christ who might have lived +a prosperous life without the knowledge of sin, and who now wanders +“companionless a weary spectre day and night.”</p> + +<p class="poem">“I saw him go and cried to him<br /> +<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>‘Eli, thou hast forsaken me.’<br /> +The nails were burning through each limb,<br /> +He fled to find felicity.”</p> + +<p>And yet is the saint spared, despite his martyr’s crown and his vigil of +desire, defeat, disappointed love, and the sorrow of parting.</p> + +<p class="poem">“O Night, that did’st lead thus,<br /> +O Night, more lovely than the dawn of light,<br /> +O Night, that broughtest us<br /> +Lover to lover’s sight,<br /> +Lover with loved in marriage of delight!<br /> +<br /> +Upon my flowery breast,<br /> +Wholly for him, and save himself for none,<br /> +There did I give sweet rest<br /> +To my beloved one;<br /> +The fanning of the cedars breathed thereon.<br /> +<br /> +When the first morning air<br /> +Blew from the tower, and waved his locks aside,<br /> +<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>His hand, with gentle care,<br /> +Did wound me in the side,<br /> +And in my body all my senses died.<br /> +<br /> +All things I then forgot,<br /> +My cheek on him who for my coming came;<br /> +All ceased and I was not,<br /> +Leaving my cares and shame<br /> +Among the lilies, and forgetting them.”<small><a name="f1.1" id="f1.1" href="#f1">[1]</a></small></p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>X</h3> + +<p>It is not permitted to a man, who takes up pen or chisel, to seek +originality, for passion is his only business, and he cannot but mould or +sing after a new fashion because no disaster is like another. He is like +those phantom lovers in the Japanese play who, compelled to wander side by +side and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> never mingle, cry: “We neither wake nor sleep and passing our +nights in a sorrow which is in the end a vision, what are these scenes of +spring to us?” If when we have found a mask we fancy that it will not +match our mood till we have touched with gold the cheek, we do it +furtively, and only where the oaks of Dodona cast their deepest shadow, +for could he see our handiwork the Daemon would fling himself out, being +our enemy.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XI</h3> + +<p>Many years ago I saw, between sleeping and waking, a woman of incredible +beauty shooting an arrow into the sky, and from the moment when I made my +first guess at her meaning I have thought much of the difference between +the winding movement of nature and the straight line, which is called in +Balzac’s <i>Seraphita</i> the “Mark of Man,”<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> but comes closer to my meaning as +the mark of saint or sage. I think that we who are poets and artists, not +being permitted to shoot beyond the tangible, must go from desire to +weariness and so to desire again, and live but for the moment when vision +comes to our weariness like terrible lightning, in the humility of the +brutes. I do not doubt those heaving circles, those winding arcs, whether +in one man’s life or in that of an age, are mathematical, and that some in +the world, or beyond the world, have foreknown the event and pricked upon +the calendar the life-span of a Christ, a Buddha, a Napoleon: that every +movement, in feeling or in thought, prepares in the dark by its own +increasing clarity and confidence its own executioner. We seek reality +with the slow toil of our weakness and are smitten from the boundless and +the unforeseen. Only when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> we are saint or sage, and renounce Experience +itself, can we, in the language of the Christian Caballa, leave the sudden +lightning and the path of the serpent and become the bowman who aims his +arrow at the centre of the sun.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XII</h3> + +<p>The doctors of medicine have discovered that certain dreams of the night, +for I do not grant them all, are the day’s unfulfilled desire, and that +our terror of desires condemned by the conscience has distorted and +disturbed our dreams. They have only studied the breaking into dream of +elements that have remained unsatisfied without purifying discouragement. +We can satisfy in life a few of our passions and each passion but a +little, and our characters indeed but differ because no two men bargain +alike. The bargain, the compromise, is always <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>threatened, and when it is +broken we become mad or hysterical or are in some way deluded; and so when +a starved or banished passion shows in a dream we, before awaking, break +the logic that had given it the capacity of action and throw it into chaos +again. But the passions, when we know that they cannot find fulfilment, +become vision; and a vision, whether we wake or sleep, prolongs its power +by rhythm and pattern, the wheel where the world is butterfly. We need no +protection, but it does, for if we become interested in ourselves, in our +own lives, we pass out of the vision. Whether it is we or the vision that +create the pattern, who set the wheel turning, it is hard to say, but +certainly we have a hundred ways of keeping it near us: we select our +images from past times, we turn from our own age and try to feel Chaucer +nearer than the daily<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> paper. It compels us to cover all it cannot +incorporate, and would carry us when it comes in sleep to that moment when +even sleep closes her eyes and dreams begin to dream; and we are taken up +into a clear light and are forgetful even of our own names and actions and +yet in perfect possession of ourselves murmur like Faust, “Stay, moment,” +and murmur in vain.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XIII</h3> + +<p>A poet, when he is growing old, will ask himself if he cannot keep his +mask and his vision without new bitterness, new disappointment. Could he +if he would, knowing how frail his vigour from youth up, copy Landor who +lived loving and hating, ridiculous and unconquered, into extreme old age, +all lost but the favour of his muses.</p> + +<p class="poem"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> +The mother of the muses we are taught<br /> +Is memory; she has left me; they remain<br /> +And shake my shoulder urging me to sing.</p> + +<p>Surely, he may think, now that I have found vision and mask I need not +suffer any longer. He will buy perhaps some small old house where like +Ariosto he can dig his garden, and think that in the return of birds and +leaves, or moon and sun, and in the evening flight of the rooks he may +discover rhythm and pattern like those in sleep and so never awake out of +vision. Then he will remember Wordsworth withering into eighty years, +honoured and empty-witted, and climb to some waste room and find, +forgotten there by youth, some bitter crust.</p> + +<p><i>February</i> 25, 1917.</p> + + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<hr style="width: 50%;" /> +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span></p> +<h2>ANIMA MUNDI</h2> +<h3>I</h3> + +<p>I have always sought to bring my mind close to the mind of Indian and +Japanese poets, old women in Connaught, mediums in Soho, lay brothers whom +I imagine dreaming in some mediaeval monastery the dreams of their +village, learned authors who refer all to antiquity; to immerse it in the +general mind where that mind is scarce separable from what we have begun +to call “the subconscious”; to liberate it from all that comes of councils +and committees, from the world as it is seen from universities or from +populous towns; and that I might so believe I have murmured evocations and +frequented mediums, delighted in all that displayed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> great problems +through sensuous images, or exciting phrases, accepting from abstract +schools but a few technical words that are so old they seem but broken +architraves fallen amid bramble and grass, and have put myself to school +where all things are seen: <i>A Tenedo Tacitae per Amica Silentia Lunae</i>. At +one time I thought to prove my conclusions by quoting from diaries where I +have recorded certain strange events the moment they happened, but now I +have changed my mind—I will but say like the Arab boy that became Vizier: +“O brother, I have taken stock in the desert sand and of the sayings of +antiquity.”</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>II</h3> + +<p>There is a letter of Goethe’s, though I cannot remember where, that +explains evocation, though he was but thinking of literature. He described +some friend who had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> complained of literary sterility as too intelligent. +One must allow the images to form with all their associations before one +criticises. “If one is critical too soon,” he wrote, “they will not form +at all.” If you suspend the critical faculty, I have discovered, either as +the result of training, or, if you have the gift, by passing into a slight +trance, images pass rapidly before you. If you can suspend also desire, +and let them form at their own will, your absorption becomes more complete +and they are more clear in colour, more precise in articulation, and you +and they begin to move in the midst of what seems a powerful light. But +the images pass before you linked by certain associations, and indeed in +the first instance you have called them up by their association with +traditional forms and sounds. You have discovered how, if you can but +suspend will and intellect, to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> bring up from the “subconscious” anything +you already possess a fragment of. Those who follow the old rule keep +their bodies still and their minds awake and clear, dreading especially +any confusion between the images of the mind and the objects of sense; +they seek to become, as it were, polished mirrors.</p> + +<p>I had no natural gift for this clear quiet, as I soon discovered, for my +mind is abnormally restless; and I was seldom delighted by that sudden +luminous definition of form which makes one understand almost in spite of +oneself that one is not merely imagining. I therefore invented a new +process. I had found that after evocation my sleep became at moments full +of light and form, all that I had failed to find while awake; and I +elaborated a symbolism of natural objects that I might give myself dreams +during sleep, or rather visions, for they had none of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> the confusion of +dreams, by laying upon my pillow or beside my bed certain flowers or +leaves. Even to-day, after twenty years, the exaltations and the messages +that came to me from bits of hawthorn or some other plant seem of all +moments of my life the happiest and the wisest. After a time, perhaps +because the novelty wearing off the symbol lost its power, or because my +work at the Irish Theatre became too exciting, my sleep lost its +responsiveness. I had fellow-scholars, and now it was I and now they who +made some discovery. Before the mind’s eye, whether in sleep or waking, +came images that one was to discover presently in some book one had never +read, and after looking in vain for explanation to the current theory of +forgotten personal memory, I came to believe in a great memory passing on +from generation to generation. But that was not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> enough, for these images +showed intention and choice. They had a relation to what one knew and yet +were an extension of one’s knowledge. If no mind was there, why should I +suddenly come upon salt and antimony, upon the liquefaction of the gold, +as they were understood by the alchemists, or upon some detail of +cabalistic symbolism verified at last by a learned scholar from his +never-published manuscripts, and who can have put together so ingeniously, +working by some law of association and yet with clear intention and +personal application, certain mythological images. They had shown +themselves to several minds, a fragment at a time, and had only shown +their meaning when the puzzle picture had been put together. The thought +was again and again before me that this study had created a contact or +mingling with minds who had followed a like study in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> some other age, and +that these minds still saw and thought and chose. Our daily thought was +certainly but the line of foam at the shallow edge of a vast luminous sea: +Henry More’s <i>Anima Mundi</i>, Wordsworth’s “immortal sea which brought us +hither ... and near whose edge the children sport,” and in that sea there +were some who swam or sailed, explorers who perhaps knew all its shores.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>III</h3> + +<p>I had always to compel myself to fix the imagination upon the minds behind +the personifications, and yet the personifications were themselves living +and vivid. The minds that swayed these seemingly fluid images had +doubtless form, and those images themselves seemed, as it were, mirrored +in a living substance whose form is but change of form. From tradition and +perception,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> one thought of one’s own life as symbolised by earth, the +place of heterogeneous things, the images as mirrored in water and the +images themselves one could divine but as air; and beyond it all there +was, I felt confident, certain aims and governing loves, the fire that +makes all simple. Yet the images themselves were fourfold, and one judged +their meaning in part from the predominance of one out of the four +elements, or that of the fifth element, the veil hiding another four, a +bird born out of the fire.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>IV</h3> + +<p>I longed to know something even if it were but the family and Christian +names of those minds that I could divine, and that yet remained always as +it seemed impersonal. The sense of contact came perhaps but two or three +times with clearness and certainty, but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> it left among all to whom it came +some trace, a sudden silence, as it were, in the midst of thought or +perhaps at moments of crisis a faint voice. Were our masters right when +they declared so solidly that we should be content to know these presences +that seemed friendly and near but as “the phantom” in Coleridge’s poem, +and to think of them perhaps, as having, as St. Thomas says, entered upon +the eternal possession of themselves in one single moment?</p> + +<p class="poem">“All look and likeness caught from earth,<br /> +All accident of kin and birth,<br /> +Had passed away. There was no trace<br /> +Of ought on that illumined face,<br /> +Upraised beneath the rifted stone,<br /> +But of one spirit all her own;<br /> +She, she herself and only she,<br /> +Shone through her body visibly.”</p> + +<p> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span></p> +<h3>V</h3> + +<p>One night I heard a voice that said: “The love of God for every human soul +is infinite, for every human soul is unique; no other can satisfy the same +need in God.” Our masters had not denied that personality outlives the +body or even that its rougher shape may cling to us a while after death, +but only that we should seek it in those who are dead. Yet when I went +among the country people, I found that they sought and found the old +fragilities, infirmities, physiognomies that living stirred affection. The +Spiddal knowledgeable man, who had his knowledge from his sister’s ghost, +noticed every hallowe’en, when he met her at the end of the garden, that +her hair was greyer. Had she perhaps to exhaust her allotted years in the +neighbourhood of her home, having died <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>before her time? Because no +authority seemed greater than that of this knowledge running backward to +the beginning of the world, I began that study of spiritism so despised by +Stanislas de Gaeta, the one eloquent learned scholar who has written of +magic in our generation.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>VI</h3> + +<p>I know much that I could never have known had I not learnt to consider in +the after life what, there as here, is rough and disjointed; nor have I +found that the mediums in Connaught and Soho have anything I cannot find +some light on in Henry More, who was called during his life the holiest +man now walking upon the earth.</p> + +<p>All souls have a vehicle or body, and when one has said that, with More +and the Platonists one has escaped from the abstract schools who seek +always the power of some<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> church or institution, and found oneself with +great poetry, and superstition which is but popular poetry, in a pleasant +dangerous world. Beauty is indeed but bodily life in some ideal condition. +The vehicle of the human soul is what used to be called the animal +spirits, and Henry More quotes from Hippocrates this sentence: “The mind +of man is ... not nourished from meats and drinks from the belly, but by a +clear luminous substance that redounds by separation from the blood.” +These animal spirits fill up all parts of the body and make up the body of +air, as certain writers of the seventeenth century have called it. The +soul has a plastic power, and can after death, or during life, should the +vehicle leave the body for a while, mould it to any shape it will by an +act of imagination, though the more unlike to the habitual that shape is, +the greater the effort.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> To living and dead alike, the purity and +abundance of the animal spirits are a chief power. The soul can mould from +these an apparition clothed as if in life, and make it visible by showing +it to our mind’s eye, or by building into its substance certain particles +drawn from the body of a medium till it is as visible and tangible as any +other object. To help that building the ancients offered fragrant gum, the +odour of flowers, and it may be pieces of virgin wax. The half +materialised vehicle slowly exudes from the skin in dull luminous drops or +condenses from a luminous cloud, the light fading as weight and density +increase. The witch, going beyond the medium, offered to the slowly +animating phantom certain drops of her blood. The vehicle once separate +from the living man or woman may be moulded by the souls of others as +readily as by its own soul, and even it seems by the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> souls of the living. +It becomes a part for a while of that stream of images which I have +compared to reflections upon water. But how does it follow that souls who +never have handled the modelling tool or the brush, make perfect images? +Those materialisations who imprint their powerful faces upon paraffin wax, +leave there sculpture that would have taken a good artist, making and +imagining, many hours. How did it follow that an ignorant woman could, as +Henry More believed, project her vehicle in so good a likeness of a hare, +that horse and hound and huntsman followed with the bugle blowing? Is not +the problem the same as of those finely articulated scenes and patterns +that come out of the dark, seemingly completed in the winking of an eye, +as we are lying half asleep, and of all those elaborate images that drift +in moments of inspiration<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> or evocation before the mind’s eye? Our animal +spirits or vehicles are but as it were a condensation of the vehicle of +<i>Anima Mundi</i>, and give substance to its images in the faint +materialisation of our common thought, or more grossly when a ghost is our +visitor. It should be no great feat, once those images have dipped into +our vehicle, to take their portraits in the photographic camera. Henry +More will have it that a hen scared by a hawk when the cock is treading, +hatches out a hawkheaded chicken (I am no stickler for the fact), because +before the soul of the unborn bird could give the shape “the deeply +impassioned fancy of the mother” called from the general cistern of form a +competing image. “The soul of the world,” he runs on, “interposes and +insinuates into all generations of things while the matter is fluid and +yielding, which would<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> induce a man to believe that she may not stand idle +in the transformation of the vehicle of the daemons, but assist the +fancies and desires, and so help to clothe them and to utter them +according to their own pleasures; or it may be sometimes against their +wills as the unwieldiness of the mother’s fancy forces upon her a +monstrous birth.” Though images appear to flow and drift, it may be that +we but change in our relation to them, now losing, now finding with the +shifting of our minds; and certainly Henry More speaks by the book, +claiming that those images may be hard to the right touch as “pillars of +crystal” and as solidly coloured as our own to the right eyes. Shelley, a +good Platonist, seems in his earliest work to set this general soul in the +place of God, an opinion, one may find from More’s friend Cudworth now +affirmed, now combated, by classic authority;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> but More would steady us +with a definition. The general soul as apart from its vehicle is “a +substance incorporeal but without sense and animadversion pervading the +whole matter of the universe and exercising a plastic power therein, +according to the sundry predispositions and occasions, in the parts it +works upon, raising such phenomena in the world, by directing the parts of +the matter and their motion as cannot be resolved into mere mechanical +powers.” I must assume that “sense and animadversion,” perception and +direction, are always faculties of individual soul, and that, as Blake +said, “God only acts or is in existing beings or men.”</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>VII</h3> + +<p>The old theological conception of the individual soul as bodiless or +abstract led to what Henry More calls “contradictory <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>debate” as to how +many angels “could dance booted and spurred upon the point of a needle,” +and made it possible for rationalist physiology to persuade us that our +thought has no corporeal existence but in the molecules of the brain. +Shelley was of opinion that the “thoughts which are called real or +external objects” differed but in regularity of occurrence from +“hallucinations, dreams and ideas of madmen,” and noticed that he had +dreamed, therefore lessening the difference, “three several times between +intervals of two or more years the same precise dream.” If all our mental +images no less than apparitions (and I see no reason to distinguish) are +forms existing in the general vehicle of <i>Anima Mundi</i>, and mirrored in +our particular vehicle, many crooked things are made straight. I am +persuaded that a logical process, or a series of related images, has body +and period,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> and I think of <i>Anima Mundi</i> as a great pool or garden where +it spreads through allotted growth like a great water plant or branches +more fragrantly in the air. Indeed as Spenser’s Garden of Adonis:</p> + +<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">“There is the first seminary</span><br /> +Of all things that are born to live and die<br /> +According to their kynds.”</p> + +<p>The soul by changes of “vital congruity,” More says, draws to it a certain +thought, and this thought draws by its association the sequence of many +thoughts, endowing them with a life in the vehicle meted out according to +the intensity of the first perception. A seed is set growing, and this +growth may go on apart from the power, apart even from the knowledge of +the soul. If I wish to “transfer” a thought I may think, let us say, of +Cinderella’s slipper, and my subject may see<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> an old woman coming out of a +chimney; or going to sleep I may wish to wake at seven o’clock and, though +I never think of it again, I shall wake upon the instant. The thought has +completed itself, certain acts of logic, turns, and knots in the stem have +been accomplished out of sight and out of reach as it were. We are always +starting these parasitic vegetables and letting them coil beyond our +knowledge, and may become, like that lady in Balzac who, after a life of +sanctity, plans upon her deathbed to fly with her renounced lover. After +death a dream, a desire she had perhaps ceased to believe in, perhaps +ceased almost to remember, must have recurred again and again with its +anguish and its happiness. We can only refuse to start the wandering +sequence or, if start it does, hold it in the intellectual light where +time gallops, and so keep it from slipping<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> down into the sluggish +vehicle. The toil of the living is to free themselves from an endless +sequence of objects, and that of the dead to free themselves from an +endless sequence of thoughts. One sequence begets another, and these have +power because of all those things we do, not for their own sake but for an +imagined good.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>VIII</h3> + +<p>Spiritism, whether of folk-lore or of the séance room, the visions of +Swedenborg, and the speculation of the Platonists and Japanese plays, will +have it that we may see at certain roads and in certain houses old murders +acted over again, and in certain fields dead huntsmen riding with horse +and hound, or ancient armies fighting above bones or ashes. We carry to +<i>Anima Mundi</i> our memory, and that memory is for a time our external +world; and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> all passionate moments recur again and again, for passion +desires its own recurrence more than any event, and whatever there is of +corresponding complacency or remorse is our beginning of judgment; nor do +we remember only the events of life, for thoughts bred of longing and of +fear, all those parasitic vegetables that have slipped through our +fingers, come again like a rope’s end to smite us upon the face; and as +Cornelius Agrippa writes: “We may dream ourselves to be consumed in flame +and persecuted by daemons,” and certain spirits have complained that they +would be hard put to it to arouse those who died, believing they could not +awake till a trumpet shrilled. A ghost in a Japanese play is set afire by +a fantastic scruple, and though a Buddhist priest explains that the fire +would go out of itself if the ghost but ceased to believe in it, it cannot +cease to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>believe. Cornelius Agrippa called such dreaming souls +hobgoblins, and when Hamlet refused the bare bodkin because of what dreams +may come, it was from no mere literary fancy. The soul can indeed, it +appears, change these objects built about us by the memory, as it may +change its shape; but the greater the change, the greater the effort and +the sooner the return to the habitual images. Doubtless in either case the +effort is often beyond its power. Years ago I was present when a woman +consulted Madame Blavatsky for a friend who saw her newly-dead husband +nightly as a decaying corpse and smelt the odour of the grave. When he was +dying, said Madame Blavatsky, he thought the grave the end, and now that +he is dead cannot throw off that imagination. A Brahmin once told an +actress friend of mine that he disliked acting, because if a man died +playing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> Hamlet, he would be Hamlet in eternity. Yet after a time the soul +partly frees itself and becomes “the shape changer” of the legends, and +can cast, like the mediaeval magician, what illusions it would. There is +an Irish countryman in one of Lady Gregory’s books who had eaten with a +stranger on the road, and some while later vomited, to discover he had but +eaten chopped up grass. One thinks, too, of the spirits that show +themselves in the images of wild creatures.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>IX</h3> + +<p>The dead, as the passionate necessity wears out, come into a measure of +freedom and may turn the impulse of events, started while living, in some +new direction, but they cannot originate except through the living. Then +gradually they perceive, although they are still but living in their +memories, harmonies,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> symbols, and patterns, as though all were being +refashioned by an artist, and they are moved by emotions, sweet for no +imagined good but in themselves, like those of children dancing in a ring; +and I do not doubt that they make love in that union which Swedenborg has +said is of the whole body and seems from far off an incandescence. +Hitherto shade has communicated with shade in moments of common memory +that recur like the figures of a dance in terror or in joy, but now they +run together like to like, and their Covens and Fleets have rhythm and +pattern. This running together and running of all to a centre and yet +without loss of identity, has been prepared for by their exploration of +their moral life, of its beneficiaries and its victims, and even of all +its untrodden paths, and all their thoughts have moulded the vehicle and +become event and circumstance.</p> + + +<p> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span></p> +<h3>X</h3> + +<p>There are two realities, the terrestrial and the condition of fire. All +power is from the terrestrial condition, for there all opposites meet and +there only is the extreme of choice possible, full freedom. And there the +heterogeneous is, and evil, for evil is the strain one upon another of +opposites; but in the condition of fire is all music and all rest. Between +is the condition of air where images have but a borrowed life, that of +memory or that reflected upon them when they symbolise colours and +intensities of fire, the place of shades who are “in the whirl of those +who are fading,” and who cry like those amorous shades in the Japanese +play:</p> + +<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 1em;">“That we may acquire power</span><br /> +Even in our faint substance,<br /> +We will show forth even now,<br /> +<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>And though it be but in a dream,<br /> +Our form of repentance.”</p> + +<p>After so many rhythmic beats the soul must cease to desire its images, and +can, as it were, close its eyes.</p> + +<p>When all sequence comes to an end, time comes to an end, and the soul puts +on the rhythmic or spiritual body or luminous body and contemplates all +the events of its memory and every possible impulse in an eternal +possession of itself in one single moment. That condition is alone +animate, all the rest is phantasy, and from thence come all the passions, +and some have held, the very heat of the body.</p> + +<p class="poem">Time drops in decay,<br /> +Like a candle burnt out,<br /> +And the mountains and the woods<br /> +<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span>Have their day, have their day.<br /> +What one, in the rout<br /> +Of the fire-born moods,<br /> +Has fallen away?</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XI</h3> + +<p>The soul cannot have much knowledge till it has shaken off the habit of +time and of place, but till that hour it must fix its attention upon what +is near, thinking of objects one after another as we run the eye or the +finger over them. Its intellectual power cannot but increase and alter as +its perceptions grow simultaneous. Yet even now we seem at moments to +escape from time in what we call prevision, and from place when we see +distant things in a dream and in concurrent dreams. A couple of years ago, +while in meditation, my head seemed surrounded by a conventional sun’s +rays, and when I went to bed I had a long dream of a woman with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> her hair +on fire. I awoke and lit a candle, and discovered presently from the odour +that in doing so I had set my own hair on fire. I dreamed very lately that +I was writing a story, and at the same time I dreamed that I was one of +the characters in that story and seeking to touch the heart of some girl +in defiance of the author’s intention; and concurrently with all that, I +was as another self trying to strike with the button of a foil a great +china jar. The obscurity of the prophetic books of William Blake, which +were composed in a state of vision, comes almost wholly from these +concurrent dreams. Everybody has some story or some experience of the +sudden knowledge in sleep or waking of some event, a misfortune for the +most part happening to some friend far off.</p> + + +<p> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span></p> +<h3>XII</h3> + +<p>The dead living in their memories, are, I am persuaded, the source of all +that we call instinct, and it is their love and their desire, all +unknowing, that make us drive beyond our reason, or in defiance of our +interest it may be; and it is the dream martens that, all unknowing, are +master-masons to the living martens building about church windows their +elaborate nests; and in their turn, the phantoms are stung to a keener +delight from a concord between their luminous pure vehicle and our strong +senses. It were to reproach the power or the beneficence of God, to +believe those children of Alexander who died wretchedly could not throw an +urnful to the heap, nor that Caesarea<small><a name="f2.1" id="f2.1" href="#f2">[2]</a></small> murdered in childhood, whom +Cleopatra bore to Caesar, nor<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> that so brief-lived younger Pericles +Aspasia bore being so nobly born.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XIII</h3> + +<p>Because even the most wise dead can but arrange their memories as we +arrange pieces upon a chess-board and obey remembered words alone, he who +would turn magician is forbidden by the Zoroastrian oracle to change +“barbarous words” of invocation. Communication with <i>Anima Mundi</i> is +through the association of thoughts or images or objects; and the famous +dead and those of whom but a faint memory lingers, can still—and it is +for no other end that, all unknowing, we value posthumous fame—tread the +corridor and take the empty chair. A glove or a name can call their +bearer; the shadows come to our elbow amid their old undisturbed +habitations, and “materialisation”<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> itself is easier, it may be, among +walls, or by rocks and trees, that carry upon them particles the vehicles +cast off in some extremity while they had still animate bodies.</p> + +<p>Certainly the mother returns from the grave, and with arms that may be +visible and solid, for a hurried moment, can comfort a neglected child or +set the cradle rocking; and in all ages men have known and affirmed that +when the soul is troubled, those that are a shade and a song:</p> + +<p class="poem"><span style="margin-left: 11.5em;">“live there,</span><br /> +And live like winds of light on dark or stormy air.”</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XIV</h3> + +<p>Awhile they live again those passionate moments, not knowing they are +dead, and then they know and may awake or half awake to be our visitors. +How is their dream changed as Time drops away and their senses<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> multiply? +Does their stature alter, do their eyes grow more brilliant? Certainly the +dreams stay the longer, the greater their passion when alive: Helen may +still open her chamber door to Paris or watch him from the wall, and know +she is dreaming but because nights and days are poignant or the stars +unreckonably bright. Surely of the passionate dead we can but cry in words +Ben Jonson meant for none but Shakespeare: “So rammed” are they “with life +they can but grow in life with being.”</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XV</h3> + +<p>The inflowing from their mirrored life, who themselves receive it from the +Condition of Fire, falls upon the Winding Path called the Path of the +Serpent, and that inflowing coming alike to men and to animals is called +natural. There is another inflow<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> which is not natural but intellectual, +and is from the fire; and it descends through souls who pass for a lengthy +or a brief period out of the mirror life, as we in sleep out of the bodily +life, and though it may fall upon a sleeping serpent, it falls principally +upon straight paths. In so far as a man is like all other men, the inflow +finds him upon the winding path, and in so far as he is a saint or sage, +upon the straight path.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XVI</h3> + +<p>Daemon and man are opposites; man passes from heterogeneous objects to the +simplicity of fire, and the Daemon is drawn to objects because through +them he obtains power, the extremity of choice. For only in men’s minds +can he meet even those in the Condition of Fire who are not of his own +kin. He, by using his mediatorial shades,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> brings man again and again to +the place of choice, heightening temptation that the choice may be as +final as possible, imposing his own lucidity upon events, leading his +victim to whatever among works not impossible is the most difficult. He +suffers with man as some firm-souled man suffers with the woman he but +loves the better because she is extravagant and fickle. His descending +power is neither the winding nor the straight line but zigzag, +illuminating the passive and active properties, the tree’s two sorts of +fruit: it is the sudden lightning, for all his acts of power are +instantaneous. We perceive in a pulsation of the artery, and after slowly +decline.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XVII</h3> + +<p>Each Daemon is drawn to whatever man or, if its nature is more general, to +whatever nation it most differs from, and it shapes into<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> its own image +the antithetical dream of man or nation. The Jews had already shown by the +precious metals, by the ostentatious wealth of Solomon’s temple, the +passion that has made them the money-lenders of the modern world. If they +had not been rapacious, lustful, narrow and persecuting beyond the people +of their time, the incarnation had been impossible; but it was an +intellectual impulse from the Condition of Fire that shaped their +antithetical self into that of the classic world. So always it is an +impulse from some Daemon that gives to our vague, unsatisfied desire, +beauty, a meaning and a form all can accept.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XVIII</h3> + +<p>Only in rapid and subtle thought, or in faint accents heard in the quiet +of the mind, can the thought of the spirit come to us but little changed; +for a mind, that grasps <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span>objects simultaneously according to the degree of +its liberation, does not think the same thought with the mind that sees +objects one after another. The purpose of most religious teaching, of the +insistence upon the submission to God’s will above all, is to make certain +of the passivity of the vehicle where it is most pure and most tenuous. +When we are passive where the vehicle is coarse, we become mediumistic, +and the spirits who mould themselves in that coarse vehicle can only +rarely and with great difficulty speak their own thoughts and keep their +own memory. They are subject to a kind of drunkenness and are stupefied, +old writers said, as if with honey, and readily mistake our memory for +their own, and believe themselves whom and what we please. We bewilder and +overmaster them, for once they are among the perceptions of successive +<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span>objects, our reason, being but an instrument created and sharpened by +those objects, is stronger than their intellect, and they can but repeat +with brief glimpses from another state, our knowledge and our words.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XIX</h3> + +<p>A friend once dreamed that she saw many dragons climbing upon the steep +side of a cliff and continually falling. Henry More thought that those +who, after centuries of life, failed to find the rhythmic body and to pass +into the Condition of Fire, were born again. Edmund Spenser, who was among +More’s masters, affirmed that nativity without giving it a cause:</p> + +<p class="poem">“After that they againe retourned beene,<br /> +They in that garden planted be agayne,<br /> +And grow afresh, as they had never seene<br /> +<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span>Fleshy corruption, nor mortal payne.<br /> +Some thousand years so doen they ther remayne,<br /> +And then of him are clad with other hew,<br /> +Or sent into the chaungeful world agayne,<br /> +Till thither they retourn where first they grew:<br /> +So like a wheele, around they roam from old to new.”</p> + +<p>The dead who speak to us deny metempsychosis, perhaps because they but +know a little better what they knew alive; while the dead in Asia, for +perhaps no better reason, affirm it, and so we are left amid +plausibilities and uncertainties.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XX</h3> + +<p>But certainly it is always to the Condition of Fire, where emotion is not +brought to any sudden stop, where there is neither wall nor gate, that we +would rise; and the mask<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> plucked from the oak-tree is but my imagination +of rhythmic body. We may pray to that last condition by any name so long +as we do not pray to it as a thing or a thought, and most prayers call it +man or woman or child:</p> + +<p class="poem">“For mercy has a human heart,<br /> +Pity a human face.”</p> + +<p>Within ourselves Reason and Will, who are the man and woman, hold out +towards a hidden altar, a laughing or crying child.</p> + +<p> </p> +<h3>XXI</h3> + +<p>When I remember that Shelley calls our minds “mirrors of the fire for +which all thirst,” I cannot but ask the question all have asked, “What or +who has cracked the mirror?” I begin to study the only self that I can +know, myself, and to wind the thread upon the perne again.</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span>At certain moments, always unforeseen, I become happy, most commonly when +at hazard I have opened some book of verse. Sometimes it is my own verse +when, instead of discovering new technical flaws, I read with all the +excitement of the first writing. Perhaps I am sitting in some crowded +restaurant, the open book beside me, or closed, my excitement having +over-brimmed the page. I look at the strangers near as if I had known them +all my life, and it seems strange that I cannot speak to them: everything +fills me with affection, I have no longer any fears or any needs; I do not +even remember that this happy mood must come to an end. It seems as if the +vehicle had suddenly grown pure and far extended and so luminous that one +half imagines that the images from <i>Anima Mundi</i>, embodied there and drunk +with that sweetness, would, as some country drunkard<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> who had thrown a +wisp into his own thatch, burn up time.</p> + +<p>It may be an hour before the mood passes, but latterly I seem to +understand that I enter upon it the moment I cease to hate. I think the +common condition of our life is hatred—I know that this is so with +me—irritation with public or private events or persons. There is no great +matter in forgetfulness of servants, or the delays of tradesmen, but how +forgive the ill-breeding of Carlyle, or the rhetoric of Swinburne, or that +woman who murmurs over the dinner-table the opinion of her daily paper? +And only a week ago last Sunday, I hated the spaniel who disturbed a +partridge on her nest, a trout who took my bait and yet broke away +unhooked. The books say that our happiness comes from the opposite of +hate, but I am not certain, for we may love <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>unhappily. And plainly, when +I have closed a book too stirred to go on reading, and in those brief +intense visions of sleep, I have something about me that, though it makes +me love, is more like innocence. I am in the place where the daemon is, +but I do not think he is with me until I begin to make a new personality, +selecting among those images, seeking always to satisfy a hunger grown out +of conceit with daily diet; and yet as I write the words, “I select,” I am +full of uncertainty, not knowing when I am the finger, when the clay. +Once, twenty years ago, I seemed to awake from sleep to find my body +rigid, and to hear a strange voice speaking these words through my lips as +through lips of stone: “We make an image of him who sleeps, and it is not +him who sleeps, and we call it Emmanuel.”</p> + +<p> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span></p> +<h3>XXII</h3> + +<p>As I go up and down my stair and pass the gilded Moorish wedding-chest +where I keep my “barbarous words,” I wonder will I take to them once more, +for I am baffled by those voices that still speak as to Odysseus but as +the bats; or now that I shall in a little be growing old, to some kind of +simple piety like that of an old woman.</p> + +<p><i>May</i> 9, 1917.</p> + + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<hr style="width: 50%;" /> +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span></p> +<h2>EPILOGUE</h2> + +<p><span class="smcap">My Dear “Maurice”</span>—I was often in France before you were born or when you +were but a little child. When I went for the first or second time Mallarmé +had just written: “All our age is full of the trembling of the veil of the +temple.” One met everywhere young men of letters who talked of magic. A +distinguished English man of letters asked me to call with him on +Stanislas de Gaeta because he did not dare go alone to that mysterious +house. I met from time to time with the German poet Doukenday, a grave +Swede whom I only discovered after years to have been Strindberg, then +looking for the philosopher’s stone in a lodging near the Luxembourg; and +one day in the chambers of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> Stuart Merrill the poet, I spoke with a young +Arabic scholar who displayed a large, roughly-made gold ring which had +grown to the shape of his finger. Its gold had no hardening alloy, he +said, because it was made by his master, a Jewish Rabbi, of alchemical +gold. My critical mind—was it friend or enemy?—mocked, and yet I was +delighted. Paris was as legendary as Connaught. This new pride, that of +the adept, was added to the pride of the artist. Villiers de L’Isle Adam, +the haughtiest of men, had but lately died. I had read his <i>Axel</i> slowly +and laboriously as one reads a sacred book—my French was very bad—and +had applauded it upon the stage. As I could not follow the spoken words, I +was not bored even where Axel and the Commander discussed philosophy for a +half-hour instead of beginning their duel. If I felt impatient it was only +that they delayed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> the coming of the adept Janus, for I hoped to recognise +the moment when Axel cries: “I know that lamp, it was burning before +Solomon”; or that other when he cries: “As for living, our servants will +do that for us.”</p> + +<p>The movement of letters had been haughty even before Magic had touched it. +Rimbaud had sung: “Am I an old maid that I should fear the embrace of +death?” And everywhere in Paris and in London young men boasted of the +garret, and claimed to have no need of what the crowd values.</p> + +<p>Last summer you, who were at the age I was when first I heard of Mallarmé +and of Verlaine, spoke much of the French poets young men and women read +to-day. Claudel I already somewhat knew, but you read to me for the first +time from Jammes a dialogue between a poet and a bird, that made us cry, +and a whole volume of Peguy’s <i>Mystère de<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> la Charité de Jeanne d’Arc</i>. +Nothing remained the same but the preoccupation with religion, for these +poets submitted everything to the Pope, and all, even Claudel, a proud +oratorical man, affirmed that they saw the world with the eyes of +vine-dressers and charcoal-burners. It was no longer the soul, self-moving +and self-teaching—the magical soul—but Mother France and Mother Church.</p> + +<p>Have not my thoughts run through a like round, though I have not found my +tradition in the Catholic Church, which was not the church of my +childhood, but where the tradition is, as I believe, more universal and +more ancient?</p> + +<p class="right">W. B. Y.</p> + +<p><i>May</i> 11, 1917.</p> + +<p> </p> +<p class="center">Printed in the United States of America.</p> + + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<hr style="width: 50%;" /> +<div class="adverts"> +<p class="center">The following pages contain advertisements of books by the same author or on kindred subjects.</p> + +<p> </p> +<p><big><strong>Responsibilities</strong></big></p> +<p class="center"><span class="smcap">By</span> WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS</p> +<p class="right"><i>Cloth, $1.25</i></p> +<p>“William Butler Yeats is by far the biggest poetic personality living +among us at present. He is great both as a lyric and dramatist poet.”</p> +<p class="right">—<i>John Masefield.</i></p> + +<p>“This poetry has the rhythm that is incantation and sorcery, that is +not of the senses nor of the spirit, but of a mingling which is +exaltation.”</p> +<p class="right">—<i>Chicago Evening Post.</i></p> + +<p>Under the title of “Responsibilities” William Butler Yeats brings together +some of his recent poems. Notable still for his freshness of thought, his +keen originality, and his purely poetic conception of thoughts and facts, +Mr. Yeats sometimes makes us wonder how he has so long been able to hold +his style above the ever rising level of modern poetry. No man stands so +apart in his own perfection as does this Irish poet and playwright, in his +art of discovering truths remote and beautiful. Serious, vital thoughts he +veils, as the genuine poet, in a cloak of fine rhythmical expression.</p> + +<p>It is, after all, as a poet that the majority of people like to think of +Mr. Yeats, and this splendid collection, the first in a number of years, +is assured of a warm welcome.</p> + + +<p> </p> +<p class="center"><strong>BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS</strong></p> +<p><big><strong>The Cutting of an Agate</strong></big></p> +<p class="right"><i>12mo, $1.50</i></p> +<p>“Mr. Yeats is probably the most important as well as the most widely +known of the men concerned directly in the so-called Celtic +renaissance. More than this, he stands among the few men to be +reckoned with in modern poetry.”—<i>New York Herald.</i></p> + +<p> </p> +<p><big><strong>The Green Helmet and Other Poems</strong></big></p> +<p class="right"><i>Decorated cloth, 12mo, $1.25</i></p> +<p>The initial piece in this volume is a deliciously conceived heroic +farce, quaint in humor and sprightly in action. It tells of the +difficulty in which two simple Irish folk find themselves when they +enter into an agreement with an apparition of the sea, who demands +that they knock off his head and who maintains that after they have +done that he will knock off theirs. There is a real meaning in the +play which it will not take the thoughtful reader long to discover. +Besides this there are a number of shorter poems, notably one in +which Mr. Yeats answers the critics of “The Playboy of the Western +World.”</p> + +<p> </p> +<p><big><strong>Lyrical and Dramatic Poems</strong></big></p> +<p class="center">In Two Volumes</p> +<p class="right"><i>Vol. I. Lyrical Poems, $2.00 Leather, $2.25</i><br /> +<i>Vol. II. Plays (Revised), $2.00 Leather, $2.25</i></p> +<p>The two-volume edition of the Irish poet’s works included everything +he has done in verse up to the present time. The first volume +contains his lyrics; the second includes all of his five dramas in +verse: “The Countess Cathleen,” “The Land of Heart’s Desire,” “The +King’s Threshold,” “On Baile’s Strand,” and “The Shadowy Waters.”</p> + +<p> </p> +<p><big><strong>Reveries Over Childhood and Youth</strong></big></p> +<p class="right"><i>$2.00</i></p> +<p>In this book the celebrated Irish author gives us his reminiscences +of his childhood and youth. The memories are written, as is to be +expected, in charming prose. They have the appeal invariably attached +to the account of a sensitive childhood.</p> + +<p> </p> +<p><big><strong>The Hour Glass and Other Plays</strong></big></p> +<p class="right"><i>$1.25</i></p> +<p>“The Hour Glass” is one of Mr. Yeats’ noble and effective plays, and +with the other plays in the volume, make a small, but none the less +representative collection.</p> + +<p> </p> +<p><big><strong>Stories of Red Hanrahan</strong></big></p> +<p class="right"><i>$1.25</i></p> +<p>These tales belong to the realm of pure lyrical expression. They are +mysterious and shadowy, full of infinite subtleties and old wisdom of +folklore, and sad with the gray wistful Celtic sadness.</p> + +<p>“Lovers of Mr. Yeats’s suggestive and delicate writing will find him +at his best in this volume.”—<i>Springfield Republican.</i></p> + +<p> </p> +<p><big><strong>Ideas of Good and Evil</strong></big></p> +<p class="right"><i>$1.50</i></p> +<p>Essays on art and life, wherein are set forth much of Yeats’ +philosophy, his love of beauty, his hope for Ireland and for Irish +artistic achievement.</p> + +<p> </p> +<p><big><strong>The Celtic Twilight</strong></big></p> +<p class="right"><i>$1.50</i></p> +<p>A collection of tales from Irish life and of Irish fancy, retold from +peasants’ stories with no additions except an occasional comment.</p> + + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<p class="center"><strong>THE WORKS OF RABINDRANATH TAGORE</strong></p> +<p class="center">BOLPUR EDITION</p> + +<p><br />HUNGRY STONES AND OTHER STORIES.<br /> +FRUIT GATHERING.<br /> +CHITRA: A Play in one act.<br /> +THE CRESCENT MOON: Child Poems.<br /> +THE GARDENER: Love Poems.<br /> +GITANJALI: Religious Poems.<br /> +THE KING OF THE DARK CHAMBER: A Play.<br /> +THE SONGS OF KABIR.<br /> +SADHANA: The Realization of Life.<br /> +THE POST OFFICE: A Play.</p> + +<p class="center"><br />Each volume decorated cloth, $1.50; leather, $2.00.</p> + +<p>This new edition of the works of Rabindranath Tagore will recommend itself +to those who desire to possess the various poems and plays of the great +Hindu writer in the best possible printings and bindings. Great care has +been taken with the physical appearance of the books. In addition to the +special design that has been made for the cover, there are special end +papers and decorated title pages in each book. Altogether this edition +promises to become the standard one of this distinguished poet and seer.</p> + +<p> </p> +<p class="center"><big><strong>THE MACMILLAN COMPANY</strong></big><br /> +<b>Publishers<span class="spacer"> </span>64-66 Fifth Avenue<span class="spacer"> </span>New York</b></p></div> + + +<p> </p><p> </p> +<hr style="width: 50%;" /> +<p><b>Footnotes:</b></p> + +<p><a name="f1" id="f1" href="#f1.1">[1]</a> Translated by Arthur Symons from <i>San Juan de la Cruz</i>.</p> + +<p><a name="f2" id="f2" href="#f2.1">[2]</a> I have no better authority for Caesarea than Landor’s play.</p> + + + + + + + + + +<pre> + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's Per Amica Silentia Lunae, by William Butler Yeats + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PER AMICA SILENTIA LUNAE *** + +***** This file should be named 33338-h.htm or 33338-h.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/3/3/3/3/33338/ + +Produced by Brian Foley and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was +produced from images generously made available by The +Internet Archive/American Libraries.) + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Per Amica Silentia Lunae + +Author: William Butler Yeats + +Release Date: August 3, 2010 [EBook #33338] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PER AMICA SILENTIA LUNAE *** + + + + +Produced by Brian Foley and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was +produced from images generously made available by The +Internet Archive/American Libraries.) + + + + + + + + + +PER AMICA SILENTIA LUNAE + + + + + OTHER WORKS OF WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS + + POEMS AND PLAYS, 2 volumes: + + I--Lyrics. $2.00. + II--DRAMATIC POEMS. $2.00. + + THE CELTIC TWILIGHT. $1.50. + + IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL. $1.50. + + STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN. $1.25. + + REVERIES OVER CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. Illustrated. $2.00. + + RESPONSIBILITIES AND OTHER POEMS. $1.25. + + THE TABLES OF THE LAW. $1.25. + + THE HOUR GLASS AND OTHER PLAYS. $1.25. + + THE GREEN HELMET AND OTHER POEMS. $1.25. + + THE CUTTING OF AN AGATE. $1.50. + + THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. + + + + +PER AMICA SILENTIA LUNAE + + + + +_SPECIAL LIMITED EDITION_ + + + + + PER AMICA SILENTIA LUNAE + + + BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS + + + New York + THE MACMILLAN COMPANY + 1918 + _All rights reserved_ + + + + + COPYRIGHT, 1918, + BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. + + Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1918. + + + Norwood Press + J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co. + Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. + + + + +PROLOGUE + + +MY DEAR "MAURICE"--You will remember that afternoon in Calvados last +summer when your black Persian "Minoulooshe," who had walked behind us for +a good mile, heard a wing flutter in a bramble-bush? For a long time we +called her endearing names in vain. She seemed resolute to spend her night +among the brambles. She had interrupted a conversation, often interrupted +before, upon certain thoughts so long habitual that I may be permitted to +call them my convictions. When I came back to London my mind ran again and +again to those conversations and I could not rest till I had written out +in this little book all that I had said or would have said. Read it some +day when "Minoulooshe" is asleep. + +W. B. YEATS. + +_May_ 11, 1917. + + + + +EGO DOMINUS TUUS + + +HIC + + On the grey sand beside the shallow stream, + Under your old wind-beaten tower, where still + A lamp burns on above the open book + That Michael Robartes left, you walk in the moon, + And, though you have passed the best of life, still trace, + Enthralled by the unconquerable delusion, + Magical shapes. + +ILLE + + By the help of an image + I call to my own opposite, summon all + That I have handled least, least looked upon. + +HIC + + And I would find myself and not an image. + +ILLE + + That is our modern hope, and by its light + We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind + And lost the old nonchalance of the hand; + Whether we have chosen chisel, pen, or brush, + We are but critics, or but half create, + Timid, entangled, empty, and abashed, + Lacking the countenance of our friends. + +HIC + + And yet, + The chief imagination of Christendom, + Dante Alighieri, so utterly found himself, + That he has made that hollow face of his + More plain to the mind's eye than any face + But that of Christ. + +ILLE + + And did he find himself, + Or was the hunger that had made it hollow + A hunger for the apple on the bough + Most out of reach? And is that spectral image + The man that Lapo and that Guido knew? + I think he fashioned from his opposite + An image that might have been a stony face, + Staring upon a Beduin's horse-hair roof, + From doored and windowed cliff, or half upturned + Among the coarse grass and the camel dung. + He set his chisel to the hardest stone; + Being mocked by Guido for his lecherous life, + Derided and deriding, driven out + To climb that stair and eat that bitter bread, + He found the unpersuadable justice, he found + The most exalted lady loved by a man. + +HIC + + Yet surely there are men who have made their art + Out of no tragic war; lovers of life, + Impulsive men, that look for happiness, + And sing when they have found it. + +ILLE + + No, not sing, + For those that love the world serve it in action, + Grow rich, popular, and full of influence; + And should they paint or write still is it action, + The struggle of the fly in marmalade. + The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours, + The sentimentalist himself; while art + Is but a vision of reality. + 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 sweetshop 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, + The ill-bred son of a livery stable keeper-- + Luxuriant song. + +HIC + + Why should you leave the lamp + Burning alone beside an open book, + And trace these characters upon the sand? + A style is found by sedentary toil, + And by the imitation of great masters. + +ILLE + + Because I seek an image, not a book; + Those men that in their writings are most wise + Own nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts. + I call to the mysterious one who yet + Shall walk the wet sand by the water's edge, + And look most like me, being indeed my double, + And prove of all imaginable things + The most unlike, being my anti-self, + And, standing by these characters, disclose + All that I seek; and whisper it as though + He were afraid the birds, who cry aloud + Their momentary cries before it is dawn, + Would carry it away to blasphemous men. + +_December_ 1915. + + + + +PER AMICA SILENTIA LUNAE + + + + +ANIMA HOMINIS + + +I + +When I come home after meeting men who are strange to me, and sometimes +even after talking to women, I go over all I have said in gloom and +disappointment. Perhaps I have overstated everything from a desire to vex +or startle, from hostility that is but fear; or all my natural thoughts +have been drowned by an undisciplined sympathy. My fellow-diners have +hardly seemed of mixed humanity, and how should I keep my head among +images of good and evil, crude allegories. + +But when I shut my door and light the candle, I invite a Marmorean Muse, +an art, where no thought or emotion has come to mind because another man +has thought or felt something different, for now there must be no +reaction, action only, and the world must move my heart but to the heart's +discovery of itself, and I begin to dream of eyelids that do not quiver +before the bayonet: all my thoughts have ease and joy, I am all virtue and +confidence. When I come to put in rhyme what I have found it will be a +hard toil, but for a moment I believe I have found myself and not my +anti-self. It is only the shrinking from toil perhaps that convinces me +that I have been no more myself than is the cat the medicinal grass it is +eating in the garden. + +How could I have mistaken for myself an heroic condition that from early +boyhood has made me superstitious? That which comes as complete, as +minutely organised, as are those elaborate, brightly lighted buildings and +sceneries appearing in a moment, as I lie between sleeping and waking, +must come from above me and beyond me. At times I remember that place in +Dante where he sees in his chamber the "Lord of Terrible Aspect," and how, +seeming "to rejoice inwardly that it was a marvel to see, speaking, he +said, many things among the which I could understand but few, and of these +this: ego dominus tuus"; or should the conditions come, not as it were in +a gesture--as the image of a man--but in some fine landscape, it is of +Boehme, maybe, that I think, and of that country where we "eternally +solace ourselves in the excellent beautiful flourishing of all manner of +flowers and forms, both trees and plants, and all kinds of fruit." + + +II + +When I consider the minds of my friends, among artists and emotional +writers, I discover a like contrast. I have sometimes told one close +friend that her only fault is a habit of harsh judgment with those who +have not her sympathy, and she has written comedies where the wickedest +people seem but bold children. She does not know why she has created that +world where no one is ever judged, a high celebration of indulgence, but +to me it seems that her ideal of beauty is the compensating dream of a +nature wearied out by over-much judgment. I know a famous actress who in +private life is like the captain of some buccaneer ship holding his crew +to good behaviour at the mouth of a blunderbuss, and upon the stage she +excels in the representation of women who stir to pity and to desire +because they need our protection, and is most adorable as one of those +young queens imagined by Maeterlinck who have so little will, so little +self, that they are like shadows sighing at the edge of the world. When I +last saw her in her own house she lived in a torrent of words and +movements, she could not listen, and all about her upon the walls were +women drawn by Burne-Jones in his latest period. She had invited me in the +hope that I would defend those women, who were always listening, and are +as necessary to her as a contemplative Buddha to a Japanese Samurai, +against a French critic who would persuade her to take into her heart in +their stead a Post-Impressionist picture of a fat, ruddy, nude woman lying +upon a Turkey carpet. + +There are indeed certain men whose art is less an opposing virtue than a +compensation for some accident of health or circumstance. During the riots +over the first production of the _Playboy of the Western World_ Synge was +confused, without clear thought, and was soon ill--indeed the strain of +that week may perhaps have hastened his death--and he was, as is usual +with gentle and silent men, scrupulously accurate in all his statements. +In his art he made, to delight his ear and his mind's eye, voluble +daredevils who "go romancing through a romping lifetime ... to the dawning +of the Judgment Day." At other moments this man, condemned to the life of +a monk by bad health, takes an amused pleasure in "great queens ... making +themselves matches from the start to the end." Indeed, in all his +imagination he delights in fine physical life, in life where the moon +pulls up the tide. The last act of _Deirdre of the Sorrows_, where his art +is at its noblest, was written upon his death-bed. He was not sure of any +world to come, he was leaving his betrothed and his unwritten play--"Oh, +what a waste of time," he said to me; he hated to die, and in the last +speeches of Deirdre and in the middle act he accepted death and dismissed +life with a gracious gesture. He gave to Deirdre the emotion that seemed +to him most desirable, most difficult, most fitting, and maybe saw in +those delighted seven years, now dwindling from her, the fulfilment of his +own life. + + +III + +When I think of any great poetical writer of the past (a realist is an +historian and obscures the cleavage by the record of his eyes) I +comprehend, if I know the lineaments of his life, that the work is the +man's flight from his entire horoscope, his blind struggle in the network +of the stars. William Morris, a happy, busy, most irascible man, described +dim colour and pensive emotion, following, beyond any man of his time, an +indolent muse; while Savage Landor topped us all in calm nobility when the +pen was in his hand, as in the daily violence of his passion when he had +laid it down. He had in his _Imaginary Conversations_ reminded us, as it +were, that the Venus de Milo is a stone, and yet he wrote when the copies +did not come from the printer as soon as he expected: "I have ... had the +resolution to tear in pieces all my sketches and projects and to forswear +all future undertakings. I have tried to sleep away my time and pass +two-thirds of the twenty-four hours in bed. I may speak of myself as a +dead man." I imagine Keats to have been born with that thirst for luxury +common to many at the outsetting of the Romantic Movement, and not able, +like wealthy Beckford, to slake it with beautiful and strange objects. It +drove him to imaginary delights; ignorant, poor, and in poor health, and +not perfectly well-bred, he knew himself driven from tangible luxury; +meeting Shelley, he was resentful and suspicious because he, as Leigh Hunt +recalls, "being a little too sensitive on the score of his origin, felt +inclined to see in every man of birth his natural enemy." + + +IV + +Some thirty years ago I read a prose allegory by Simeon Solomon, long out +of print and unprocurable, and remember or seem to remember a sentence, "a +hollow image of fulfilled desire." All happy art seems to me that hollow +image, but when its lineaments express also the poverty or the +exasperation that set its maker to the work, we call it tragic art. Keats +but gave us his dream of luxury; but while reading Dante we never long +escape the conflict, partly because the verses are at moments a mirror of +his history, and yet more because that history is so clear and simple that +it has the quality of art. I am no Dante scholar, and I but read him in +Shadwell or in Dante Rossetti, but I am always persuaded that he +celebrated the most pure lady poet ever sung and the Divine Justice, not +merely because death took that lady and Florence banished her singer, but +because he had to struggle in his own heart with his unjust anger and his +lust; while unlike those of the great poets, who are at peace with the +world and at war with themselves, he fought a double war. "Always," says +Boccaccio, "both in youth and maturity he found room among his virtues for +lechery"; or as Matthew Arnold preferred to change the phrase, "his +conduct was exceeding irregular." Guido Cavalcanti, as Rossetti translates +him, finds "too much baseness" in his friend: + + "And still thy speech of me, heartfelt and kind, + Hath made me treasure up thy poetry; + But now I dare not, for thy abject life, + Make manifest that I approve thy rhymes." + +And when Dante meets Beatrice in Eden, does she not reproach him because, +when she had taken her presence away, he followed in spite of warning +dreams, false images, and now, to save him in his own despite, she has +"visited ... the Portals of the Dead," and chosen Virgil for his courier? +While Gino da Pistoia complains that in his _Commedia_ his "lovely +heresies ... beat the right down and let the wrong go free": + + "Therefore his vain decrees, wherein he lied, + Must be like empty nutshells flung aside; + Yet through the rash false witness set to grow, + French and Italian vengeance on such pride + May fall like Anthony on Cicero." + +Dante himself sings to Giovanni Guirino "at the approach of death"; + + "The King, by whose rich grave his servants be + With plenty beyond measure set to dwell, + Ordains that I my bitter wrath dispel, + And lift mine eyes to the great Consistory." + + +V + +We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with +ourselves, poetry. Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from +remembering the crowd they have won or may win, we sing amid our +uncertainty; and, smitten even in the presence of the most high beauty by +the knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm shudders. I think, too, that no +fine poet, no matter how disordered his life, has ever, even in his mere +life, had pleasure for his end. Johnson and Dowson, friends of my youth, +were dissipated men, the one a drunkard, the other a drunkard and mad +about women, and yet they had the gravity of men who had found life out +and were awakening from the dream; and both, one in life and art and one +in art and less in life, had a continual preoccupation with religion. Nor +has any poet I have read of or heard of or met with been a sentimentalist. +The other self, the anti-self or the antithetical self, as one may choose +to name it, comes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion +is reality. The sentimentalists are practical men who believe in money, in +position, in a marriage bell, and whose understanding of happiness is to +be so busy whether at work or at play, that all is forgotten but the +momentary aim. They find their pleasure in a cup that is filled from +Lethe's wharf, and for the awakening, for the vision, for the revelation +of reality, tradition offers us a different word--ecstasy. An old artist +wrote to me of his wanderings by the quays of New York, and how he found +there a woman nursing a sick child, and drew her story from her. She +spoke, too, of other children who had died: a long tragic story. "I +wanted to paint her," he wrote, "if I denied myself any of the pain I +could not believe in my own ecstasy." We must not make a false faith by +hiding from our thoughts the causes of doubt, for faith is the highest +achievement of the human intellect, the only gift man can make to God, and +therefore it must be offered in sincerity. Neither must we create, by +hiding ugliness, a false beauty as our offering to the world. He only can +create the greatest imaginable beauty who has endured all imaginable +pangs, for only when we have seen and foreseen what we dread shall we be +rewarded by that dazzling unforeseen wing-footed wanderer. We could not +find him if he were not in some sense of our being and yet of our being +but as water with fire, a noise with silence. He is of all things not +impossible the most difficult, for that only which comes easily can never +be a portion of our being, "Soon got, soon gone," as the proverb says. I +shall find the dark grow luminous, the void fruitful when I understand I +have nothing, that the ringers in the tower have appointed for the hymen +of the soul a passing bell. + +The last knowledge has often come most quickly to turbulent men, and for a +season brought new turbulence. When life puts away her conjuring tricks +one by one, those that deceive us longest may well be the wine-cup and the +sensual kiss, for our Chambers of Commerce and of Commons have not the +divine architecture of the body, nor has their frenzy been ripened by the +sun. The poet, because he may not stand within the sacred house but lives +amid the whirlwinds that beset its threshold, may find his pardon. + + +VI + +I think the Christian saint and hero, instead of being merely +dissatisfied, make deliberate sacrifice. I remember reading once an +autobiography of a man who had made a daring journey in disguise to +Russian exiles in Siberia, and his telling how, very timid as a child, he +schooled himself by wandering at night through dangerous streets. Saint +and hero cannot be content to pass at moments to that hollow image and +after become their heterogeneous selves, but would always, if they could, +resemble the antithetical self. There is a shadow of type on type, for in +all great poetical styles there is saint or hero, but when it is all over +Dante can return to his chambering and Shakespeare to his "pottle pot." +They sought no impossible perfection but when they handled paper or +parchment. So too will saint or hero, because he works in his own flesh +and blood and not in paper or parchment, have more deliberate +understanding of that other flesh and blood. + +Some years ago I began to believe that our culture, with its doctrine of +sincerity and self-realisation, made us gentle and passive, and that the +Middle Ages and the Renaissance were right to found theirs upon the +imitation of Christ or of some classic hero. St. Francis and Caesar Borgia +made themselves over-mastering, creative persons by turning from the +mirror to meditation upon a mask. When I had this thought I could see +nothing else in life. I could not write the play I had planned, for all +became allegorical, and though I tore up hundreds of pages in my endeavour +to escape from allegory, my imagination became sterile for nearly five +years and I only escaped at last when I had mocked in a comedy my own +thought. I was always thinking of the element of imitation in style and in +life, and of the life beyond heroic imitation. I find in an old diary: "I +think all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other +life, on a re-birth as something not one's self, something created in a +moment and perpetually renewed; in playing a game like that of a child +where one loses the infinite pain of self-realisation, in a grotesque or +solemn painted face put on that one may hide from the terror of +judgment.... Perhaps all the sins and energies of the world are but the +world's flight from an infinite blinding beam"; and again at an earlier +date: "If we cannot imagine ourselves as different from what we are, and +try to assume that second self, we cannot impose a discipline upon +ourselves though we may accept one from others. Active virtue, as +distinguished from the passive acceptance of a code, is therefore +theatrical, consciously dramatic, the wearing of a mask.... Wordsworth, +great poet though he be, is so often flat and heavy partly because his +moral sense, being a discipline he had not created, a mere obedience, has +no theatrical element. This increases his popularity with the better kind +of journalists and politicians who have written books." + + +VII + +I thought the hero found hanging upon some oak of Dodona an ancient mask, +where perhaps there lingered something of Egypt, and that he changed it to +his fancy, touching it a little here and there, gilding the eyebrows or +putting a gilt line where the cheekbone comes; that when at last he +looked out of its eyes he knew another's breath came and went within his +breath upon the carven lips, and that his eyes were upon the instant fixed +upon a visionary world: how else could the god have come to us in the +forest? The good, unlearned books say that He who keeps the distant stars +within His fold comes without intermediary, but Plutarch's precepts and +the experience of old women in Soho, ministering their witchcraft to +servant girls at a shilling apiece, will have it that a strange living man +may win for Daemon an illustrious dead man; but now I add another thought: +the Daemon comes not as like to like but seeking its own opposite, for man +and Daemon feed the hunger in one another's hearts. Because the ghost is +simple, the man heterogeneous and confused, they are but knit together +when the man has found a mask whose lineaments permit the expression of +all the man most lacks, and it may be dreads, and of that only. + +The more insatiable in all desire, the more resolute to refuse deception +or an easy victory, the more close will be the bond, the more violent and +definite the antipathy. + + +VIII + +I think that all religious men have believed that there is a hand not ours +in the events of life, and that, as somebody says in _Wilhelm Meister_, +accident is destiny; and I think it was Heraclitus who said: the Daemon is +our destiny. When I think of life as a struggle with the Daemon who would +ever set us to the hardest work among those not impossible, I understand +why there is a deep enmity between a man and his destiny, and why a man +loves nothing but his destiny. In an Anglo-Saxon poem a certain man is +called, as though to call him something that summed up all heroism, "Doom +eager." I am persuaded that the Daemon delivers and deceives us, and that +he wove that netting from the stars and threw the net from his shoulder. +Then my imagination runs from Daemon to sweetheart, and I divine an +analogy that evades the intellect. I remember that Greek antiquity has bid +us look for the principal stars, that govern enemy and sweetheart alike, +among those that are about to set, in the Seventh House as the astrologers +say; and that it may be "sexual love," which is "founded upon spiritual +hate," is an image of the warfare of man and Daemon; and I even wonder if +there may not be some secret communion, some whispering in the dark +between Daemon and sweetheart. I remember how often women, when in love, +grow superstitious, and believe that they can bring their lovers good +luck; and I remember an old Irish story of three young men who went +seeking for help in battle into the house of the gods at Slieve-na-mon. +"You must first be married," some god told them, "because a man's good or +evil luck comes to him through a woman." + +I sometimes fence for half-an-hour at the day's end, and when I close my +eyes upon the pillow I see a foil playing before me, the button to my +face. We meet always in the deep of the mind, whatever our work, wherever +our reverie carries us, that other Will. + + +IX + +The poet finds and makes his mask in disappointment, the hero in defeat. +The desire that is satisfied is not a great desire, nor has the shoulder +used all its might that an unbreakable gate has never strained. The saint +alone is not deceived, neither thrusting with his shoulder nor holding out +unsatisfied hands. He would climb without wandering to the antithetical +self of the world, the Indian narrowing his thought in meditation or +driving it away in contemplation, the Christian copying Christ, the +antithetical self of the classic world. For a hero loves the world till it +breaks him, and the poet till it has broken faith; but while the world was +yet debonair, the saint has turned away, and because he renounced +Experience itself, he will wear his mask as he finds it. The poet or the +hero, no matter upon what bark they found their mask, so teeming their +fancy, somewhat change its lineaments, but the saint, whose life is but a +round of customary duty, needs nothing the whole world does not need, and +day by day he scourges in his body the Roman and Christian conquerors: +Alexander and Caesar are famished in his cell. His nativity is neither in +disappointment nor in defeat, but in a temptation like that of Christ in +the Wilderness, a contemplation in a single instant perpetually renewed of +the Kingdom of the World; all, because all renounced, continually present +showing their empty thrones. Edwin Ellis, remembering that Christ also +measured the sacrifice, imagined himself in a fine poem as meeting at +Golgotha the phantom of "Christ the Less," the Christ who might have lived +a prosperous life without the knowledge of sin, and who now wanders +"companionless a weary spectre day and night." + + "I saw him go and cried to him + 'Eli, thou hast forsaken me.' + The nails were burning through each limb, + He fled to find felicity." + +And yet is the saint spared, despite his martyr's crown and his vigil of +desire, defeat, disappointed love, and the sorrow of parting. + + "O Night, that did'st lead thus, + O Night, more lovely than the dawn of light, + O Night, that broughtest us + Lover to lover's sight, + Lover with loved in marriage of delight! + + Upon my flowery breast, + Wholly for him, and save himself for none, + There did I give sweet rest + To my beloved one; + The fanning of the cedars breathed thereon. + + When the first morning air + Blew from the tower, and waved his locks aside, + His hand, with gentle care, + Did wound me in the side, + And in my body all my senses died. + + All things I then forgot, + My cheek on him who for my coming came; + All ceased and I was not, + Leaving my cares and shame + Among the lilies, and forgetting them."[1] + + +X + +It is not permitted to a man, who takes up pen or chisel, to seek +originality, for passion is his only business, and he cannot but mould or +sing after a new fashion because no disaster is like another. He is like +those phantom lovers in the Japanese play who, compelled to wander side by +side and never mingle, cry: "We neither wake nor sleep and passing our +nights in a sorrow which is in the end a vision, what are these scenes of +spring to us?" If when we have found a mask we fancy that it will not +match our mood till we have touched with gold the cheek, we do it +furtively, and only where the oaks of Dodona cast their deepest shadow, +for could he see our handiwork the Daemon would fling himself out, being +our enemy. + + +XI + +Many years ago I saw, between sleeping and waking, a woman of incredible +beauty shooting an arrow into the sky, and from the moment when I made my +first guess at her meaning I have thought much of the difference between +the winding movement of nature and the straight line, which is called in +Balzac's _Seraphita_ the "Mark of Man," but comes closer to my meaning as +the mark of saint or sage. I think that we who are poets and artists, not +being permitted to shoot beyond the tangible, must go from desire to +weariness and so to desire again, and live but for the moment when vision +comes to our weariness like terrible lightning, in the humility of the +brutes. I do not doubt those heaving circles, those winding arcs, whether +in one man's life or in that of an age, are mathematical, and that some in +the world, or beyond the world, have foreknown the event and pricked upon +the calendar the life-span of a Christ, a Buddha, a Napoleon: that every +movement, in feeling or in thought, prepares in the dark by its own +increasing clarity and confidence its own executioner. We seek reality +with the slow toil of our weakness and are smitten from the boundless and +the unforeseen. Only when we are saint or sage, and renounce Experience +itself, can we, in the language of the Christian Caballa, leave the sudden +lightning and the path of the serpent and become the bowman who aims his +arrow at the centre of the sun. + + +XII + +The doctors of medicine have discovered that certain dreams of the night, +for I do not grant them all, are the day's unfulfilled desire, and that +our terror of desires condemned by the conscience has distorted and +disturbed our dreams. They have only studied the breaking into dream of +elements that have remained unsatisfied without purifying discouragement. +We can satisfy in life a few of our passions and each passion but a +little, and our characters indeed but differ because no two men bargain +alike. The bargain, the compromise, is always threatened, and when it is +broken we become mad or hysterical or are in some way deluded; and so when +a starved or banished passion shows in a dream we, before awaking, break +the logic that had given it the capacity of action and throw it into chaos +again. But the passions, when we know that they cannot find fulfilment, +become vision; and a vision, whether we wake or sleep, prolongs its power +by rhythm and pattern, the wheel where the world is butterfly. We need no +protection, but it does, for if we become interested in ourselves, in our +own lives, we pass out of the vision. Whether it is we or the vision that +create the pattern, who set the wheel turning, it is hard to say, but +certainly we have a hundred ways of keeping it near us: we select our +images from past times, we turn from our own age and try to feel Chaucer +nearer than the daily paper. It compels us to cover all it cannot +incorporate, and would carry us when it comes in sleep to that moment when +even sleep closes her eyes and dreams begin to dream; and we are taken up +into a clear light and are forgetful even of our own names and actions and +yet in perfect possession of ourselves murmur like Faust, "Stay, moment," +and murmur in vain. + + +XIII + +A poet, when he is growing old, will ask himself if he cannot keep his +mask and his vision without new bitterness, new disappointment. Could he +if he would, knowing how frail his vigour from youth up, copy Landor who +lived loving and hating, ridiculous and unconquered, into extreme old age, +all lost but the favour of his muses. + + The mother of the muses we are taught + Is memory; she has left me; they remain + And shake my shoulder urging me to sing. + +Surely, he may think, now that I have found vision and mask I need not +suffer any longer. He will buy perhaps some small old house where like +Ariosto he can dig his garden, and think that in the return of birds and +leaves, or moon and sun, and in the evening flight of the rooks he may +discover rhythm and pattern like those in sleep and so never awake out of +vision. Then he will remember Wordsworth withering into eighty years, +honoured and empty-witted, and climb to some waste room and find, +forgotten there by youth, some bitter crust. + +_February_ 25, 1917. + + + + +ANIMA MUNDI + + +I + +I have always sought to bring my mind close to the mind of Indian and +Japanese poets, old women in Connaught, mediums in Soho, lay brothers whom +I imagine dreaming in some mediaeval monastery the dreams of their +village, learned authors who refer all to antiquity; to immerse it in the +general mind where that mind is scarce separable from what we have begun +to call "the subconscious"; to liberate it from all that comes of councils +and committees, from the world as it is seen from universities or from +populous towns; and that I might so believe I have murmured evocations and +frequented mediums, delighted in all that displayed great problems +through sensuous images, or exciting phrases, accepting from abstract +schools but a few technical words that are so old they seem but broken +architraves fallen amid bramble and grass, and have put myself to school +where all things are seen: _A Tenedo Tacitae per Amica Silentia Lunae_. At +one time I thought to prove my conclusions by quoting from diaries where I +have recorded certain strange events the moment they happened, but now I +have changed my mind--I will but say like the Arab boy that became Vizier: +"O brother, I have taken stock in the desert sand and of the sayings of +antiquity." + + +II + +There is a letter of Goethe's, though I cannot remember where, that +explains evocation, though he was but thinking of literature. He described +some friend who had complained of literary sterility as too intelligent. +One must allow the images to form with all their associations before one +criticises. "If one is critical too soon," he wrote, "they will not form +at all." If you suspend the critical faculty, I have discovered, either as +the result of training, or, if you have the gift, by passing into a slight +trance, images pass rapidly before you. If you can suspend also desire, +and let them form at their own will, your absorption becomes more complete +and they are more clear in colour, more precise in articulation, and you +and they begin to move in the midst of what seems a powerful light. But +the images pass before you linked by certain associations, and indeed in +the first instance you have called them up by their association with +traditional forms and sounds. You have discovered how, if you can but +suspend will and intellect, to bring up from the "subconscious" anything +you already possess a fragment of. Those who follow the old rule keep +their bodies still and their minds awake and clear, dreading especially +any confusion between the images of the mind and the objects of sense; +they seek to become, as it were, polished mirrors. + +I had no natural gift for this clear quiet, as I soon discovered, for my +mind is abnormally restless; and I was seldom delighted by that sudden +luminous definition of form which makes one understand almost in spite of +oneself that one is not merely imagining. I therefore invented a new +process. I had found that after evocation my sleep became at moments full +of light and form, all that I had failed to find while awake; and I +elaborated a symbolism of natural objects that I might give myself dreams +during sleep, or rather visions, for they had none of the confusion of +dreams, by laying upon my pillow or beside my bed certain flowers or +leaves. Even to-day, after twenty years, the exaltations and the messages +that came to me from bits of hawthorn or some other plant seem of all +moments of my life the happiest and the wisest. After a time, perhaps +because the novelty wearing off the symbol lost its power, or because my +work at the Irish Theatre became too exciting, my sleep lost its +responsiveness. I had fellow-scholars, and now it was I and now they who +made some discovery. Before the mind's eye, whether in sleep or waking, +came images that one was to discover presently in some book one had never +read, and after looking in vain for explanation to the current theory of +forgotten personal memory, I came to believe in a great memory passing on +from generation to generation. But that was not enough, for these images +showed intention and choice. They had a relation to what one knew and yet +were an extension of one's knowledge. If no mind was there, why should I +suddenly come upon salt and antimony, upon the liquefaction of the gold, +as they were understood by the alchemists, or upon some detail of +cabalistic symbolism verified at last by a learned scholar from his +never-published manuscripts, and who can have put together so ingeniously, +working by some law of association and yet with clear intention and +personal application, certain mythological images. They had shown +themselves to several minds, a fragment at a time, and had only shown +their meaning when the puzzle picture had been put together. The thought +was again and again before me that this study had created a contact or +mingling with minds who had followed a like study in some other age, and +that these minds still saw and thought and chose. Our daily thought was +certainly but the line of foam at the shallow edge of a vast luminous sea: +Henry More's _Anima Mundi_, Wordsworth's "immortal sea which brought us +hither ... and near whose edge the children sport," and in that sea there +were some who swam or sailed, explorers who perhaps knew all its shores. + + +III + +I had always to compel myself to fix the imagination upon the minds behind +the personifications, and yet the personifications were themselves living +and vivid. The minds that swayed these seemingly fluid images had +doubtless form, and those images themselves seemed, as it were, mirrored +in a living substance whose form is but change of form. From tradition and +perception, one thought of one's own life as symbolised by earth, the +place of heterogeneous things, the images as mirrored in water and the +images themselves one could divine but as air; and beyond it all there +was, I felt confident, certain aims and governing loves, the fire that +makes all simple. Yet the images themselves were fourfold, and one judged +their meaning in part from the predominance of one out of the four +elements, or that of the fifth element, the veil hiding another four, a +bird born out of the fire. + + +IV + +I longed to know something even if it were but the family and Christian +names of those minds that I could divine, and that yet remained always as +it seemed impersonal. The sense of contact came perhaps but two or three +times with clearness and certainty, but it left among all to whom it came +some trace, a sudden silence, as it were, in the midst of thought or +perhaps at moments of crisis a faint voice. Were our masters right when +they declared so solidly that we should be content to know these presences +that seemed friendly and near but as "the phantom" in Coleridge's poem, +and to think of them perhaps, as having, as St. Thomas says, entered upon +the eternal possession of themselves in one single moment? + + "All look and likeness caught from earth, + All accident of kin and birth, + Had passed away. There was no trace + Of ought on that illumined face, + Upraised beneath the rifted stone, + But of one spirit all her own; + She, she herself and only she, + Shone through her body visibly." + + +V + +One night I heard a voice that said: "The love of God for every human soul +is infinite, for every human soul is unique; no other can satisfy the same +need in God." Our masters had not denied that personality outlives the +body or even that its rougher shape may cling to us a while after death, +but only that we should seek it in those who are dead. Yet when I went +among the country people, I found that they sought and found the old +fragilities, infirmities, physiognomies that living stirred affection. The +Spiddal knowledgeable man, who had his knowledge from his sister's ghost, +noticed every hallowe'en, when he met her at the end of the garden, that +her hair was greyer. Had she perhaps to exhaust her allotted years in the +neighbourhood of her home, having died before her time? Because no +authority seemed greater than that of this knowledge running backward to +the beginning of the world, I began that study of spiritism so despised by +Stanislas de Gaeta, the one eloquent learned scholar who has written of +magic in our generation. + + +VI + +I know much that I could never have known had I not learnt to consider in +the after life what, there as here, is rough and disjointed; nor have I +found that the mediums in Connaught and Soho have anything I cannot find +some light on in Henry More, who was called during his life the holiest +man now walking upon the earth. + +All souls have a vehicle or body, and when one has said that, with More +and the Platonists one has escaped from the abstract schools who seek +always the power of some church or institution, and found oneself with +great poetry, and superstition which is but popular poetry, in a pleasant +dangerous world. Beauty is indeed but bodily life in some ideal condition. +The vehicle of the human soul is what used to be called the animal +spirits, and Henry More quotes from Hippocrates this sentence: "The mind +of man is ... not nourished from meats and drinks from the belly, but by a +clear luminous substance that redounds by separation from the blood." +These animal spirits fill up all parts of the body and make up the body of +air, as certain writers of the seventeenth century have called it. The +soul has a plastic power, and can after death, or during life, should the +vehicle leave the body for a while, mould it to any shape it will by an +act of imagination, though the more unlike to the habitual that shape is, +the greater the effort. To living and dead alike, the purity and +abundance of the animal spirits are a chief power. The soul can mould from +these an apparition clothed as if in life, and make it visible by showing +it to our mind's eye, or by building into its substance certain particles +drawn from the body of a medium till it is as visible and tangible as any +other object. To help that building the ancients offered fragrant gum, the +odour of flowers, and it may be pieces of virgin wax. The half +materialised vehicle slowly exudes from the skin in dull luminous drops or +condenses from a luminous cloud, the light fading as weight and density +increase. The witch, going beyond the medium, offered to the slowly +animating phantom certain drops of her blood. The vehicle once separate +from the living man or woman may be moulded by the souls of others as +readily as by its own soul, and even it seems by the souls of the living. +It becomes a part for a while of that stream of images which I have +compared to reflections upon water. But how does it follow that souls who +never have handled the modelling tool or the brush, make perfect images? +Those materialisations who imprint their powerful faces upon paraffin wax, +leave there sculpture that would have taken a good artist, making and +imagining, many hours. How did it follow that an ignorant woman could, as +Henry More believed, project her vehicle in so good a likeness of a hare, +that horse and hound and huntsman followed with the bugle blowing? Is not +the problem the same as of those finely articulated scenes and patterns +that come out of the dark, seemingly completed in the winking of an eye, +as we are lying half asleep, and of all those elaborate images that drift +in moments of inspiration or evocation before the mind's eye? Our animal +spirits or vehicles are but as it were a condensation of the vehicle of +_Anima Mundi_, and give substance to its images in the faint +materialisation of our common thought, or more grossly when a ghost is our +visitor. It should be no great feat, once those images have dipped into +our vehicle, to take their portraits in the photographic camera. Henry +More will have it that a hen scared by a hawk when the cock is treading, +hatches out a hawkheaded chicken (I am no stickler for the fact), because +before the soul of the unborn bird could give the shape "the deeply +impassioned fancy of the mother" called from the general cistern of form a +competing image. "The soul of the world," he runs on, "interposes and +insinuates into all generations of things while the matter is fluid and +yielding, which would induce a man to believe that she may not stand idle +in the transformation of the vehicle of the daemons, but assist the +fancies and desires, and so help to clothe them and to utter them +according to their own pleasures; or it may be sometimes against their +wills as the unwieldiness of the mother's fancy forces upon her a +monstrous birth." Though images appear to flow and drift, it may be that +we but change in our relation to them, now losing, now finding with the +shifting of our minds; and certainly Henry More speaks by the book, +claiming that those images may be hard to the right touch as "pillars of +crystal" and as solidly coloured as our own to the right eyes. Shelley, a +good Platonist, seems in his earliest work to set this general soul in the +place of God, an opinion, one may find from More's friend Cudworth now +affirmed, now combated, by classic authority; but More would steady us +with a definition. The general soul as apart from its vehicle is "a +substance incorporeal but without sense and animadversion pervading the +whole matter of the universe and exercising a plastic power therein, +according to the sundry predispositions and occasions, in the parts it +works upon, raising such phenomena in the world, by directing the parts of +the matter and their motion as cannot be resolved into mere mechanical +powers." I must assume that "sense and animadversion," perception and +direction, are always faculties of individual soul, and that, as Blake +said, "God only acts or is in existing beings or men." + + +VII + +The old theological conception of the individual soul as bodiless or +abstract led to what Henry More calls "contradictory debate" as to how +many angels "could dance booted and spurred upon the point of a needle," +and made it possible for rationalist physiology to persuade us that our +thought has no corporeal existence but in the molecules of the brain. +Shelley was of opinion that the "thoughts which are called real or +external objects" differed but in regularity of occurrence from +"hallucinations, dreams and ideas of madmen," and noticed that he had +dreamed, therefore lessening the difference, "three several times between +intervals of two or more years the same precise dream." If all our mental +images no less than apparitions (and I see no reason to distinguish) are +forms existing in the general vehicle of _Anima Mundi_, and mirrored in +our particular vehicle, many crooked things are made straight. I am +persuaded that a logical process, or a series of related images, has body +and period, and I think of _Anima Mundi_ as a great pool or garden where +it spreads through allotted growth like a great water plant or branches +more fragrantly in the air. Indeed as Spenser's Garden of Adonis: + + "There is the first seminary + Of all things that are born to live and die + According to their kynds." + +The soul by changes of "vital congruity," More says, draws to it a certain +thought, and this thought draws by its association the sequence of many +thoughts, endowing them with a life in the vehicle meted out according to +the intensity of the first perception. A seed is set growing, and this +growth may go on apart from the power, apart even from the knowledge of +the soul. If I wish to "transfer" a thought I may think, let us say, of +Cinderella's slipper, and my subject may see an old woman coming out of a +chimney; or going to sleep I may wish to wake at seven o'clock and, though +I never think of it again, I shall wake upon the instant. The thought has +completed itself, certain acts of logic, turns, and knots in the stem have +been accomplished out of sight and out of reach as it were. We are always +starting these parasitic vegetables and letting them coil beyond our +knowledge, and may become, like that lady in Balzac who, after a life of +sanctity, plans upon her deathbed to fly with her renounced lover. After +death a dream, a desire she had perhaps ceased to believe in, perhaps +ceased almost to remember, must have recurred again and again with its +anguish and its happiness. We can only refuse to start the wandering +sequence or, if start it does, hold it in the intellectual light where +time gallops, and so keep it from slipping down into the sluggish +vehicle. The toil of the living is to free themselves from an endless +sequence of objects, and that of the dead to free themselves from an +endless sequence of thoughts. One sequence begets another, and these have +power because of all those things we do, not for their own sake but for an +imagined good. + + +VIII + +Spiritism, whether of folk-lore or of the seance room, the visions of +Swedenborg, and the speculation of the Platonists and Japanese plays, will +have it that we may see at certain roads and in certain houses old murders +acted over again, and in certain fields dead huntsmen riding with horse +and hound, or ancient armies fighting above bones or ashes. We carry to +_Anima Mundi_ our memory, and that memory is for a time our external +world; and all passionate moments recur again and again, for passion +desires its own recurrence more than any event, and whatever there is of +corresponding complacency or remorse is our beginning of judgment; nor do +we remember only the events of life, for thoughts bred of longing and of +fear, all those parasitic vegetables that have slipped through our +fingers, come again like a rope's end to smite us upon the face; and as +Cornelius Agrippa writes: "We may dream ourselves to be consumed in flame +and persecuted by daemons," and certain spirits have complained that they +would be hard put to it to arouse those who died, believing they could not +awake till a trumpet shrilled. A ghost in a Japanese play is set afire by +a fantastic scruple, and though a Buddhist priest explains that the fire +would go out of itself if the ghost but ceased to believe in it, it cannot +cease to believe. Cornelius Agrippa called such dreaming souls +hobgoblins, and when Hamlet refused the bare bodkin because of what dreams +may come, it was from no mere literary fancy. The soul can indeed, it +appears, change these objects built about us by the memory, as it may +change its shape; but the greater the change, the greater the effort and +the sooner the return to the habitual images. Doubtless in either case the +effort is often beyond its power. Years ago I was present when a woman +consulted Madame Blavatsky for a friend who saw her newly-dead husband +nightly as a decaying corpse and smelt the odour of the grave. When he was +dying, said Madame Blavatsky, he thought the grave the end, and now that +he is dead cannot throw off that imagination. A Brahmin once told an +actress friend of mine that he disliked acting, because if a man died +playing Hamlet, he would be Hamlet in eternity. Yet after a time the soul +partly frees itself and becomes "the shape changer" of the legends, and +can cast, like the mediaeval magician, what illusions it would. There is +an Irish countryman in one of Lady Gregory's books who had eaten with a +stranger on the road, and some while later vomited, to discover he had but +eaten chopped up grass. One thinks, too, of the spirits that show +themselves in the images of wild creatures. + + +IX + +The dead, as the passionate necessity wears out, come into a measure of +freedom and may turn the impulse of events, started while living, in some +new direction, but they cannot originate except through the living. Then +gradually they perceive, although they are still but living in their +memories, harmonies, symbols, and patterns, as though all were being +refashioned by an artist, and they are moved by emotions, sweet for no +imagined good but in themselves, like those of children dancing in a ring; +and I do not doubt that they make love in that union which Swedenborg has +said is of the whole body and seems from far off an incandescence. +Hitherto shade has communicated with shade in moments of common memory +that recur like the figures of a dance in terror or in joy, but now they +run together like to like, and their Covens and Fleets have rhythm and +pattern. This running together and running of all to a centre and yet +without loss of identity, has been prepared for by their exploration of +their moral life, of its beneficiaries and its victims, and even of all +its untrodden paths, and all their thoughts have moulded the vehicle and +become event and circumstance. + + +X + +There are two realities, the terrestrial and the condition of fire. All +power is from the terrestrial condition, for there all opposites meet and +there only is the extreme of choice possible, full freedom. And there the +heterogeneous is, and evil, for evil is the strain one upon another of +opposites; but in the condition of fire is all music and all rest. Between +is the condition of air where images have but a borrowed life, that of +memory or that reflected upon them when they symbolise colours and +intensities of fire, the place of shades who are "in the whirl of those +who are fading," and who cry like those amorous shades in the Japanese +play: + + "That we may acquire power + Even in our faint substance, + We will show forth even now, + And though it be but in a dream, + Our form of repentance." + +After so many rhythmic beats the soul must cease to desire its images, and +can, as it were, close its eyes. + +When all sequence comes to an end, time comes to an end, and the soul puts +on the rhythmic or spiritual body or luminous body and contemplates all +the events of its memory and every possible impulse in an eternal +possession of itself in one single moment. That condition is alone +animate, all the rest is phantasy, and from thence come all the passions, +and some have held, the very heat of the body. + + Time drops in decay, + Like a candle burnt out, + And the mountains and the woods + Have their day, have their day. + What one, in the rout + Of the fire-born moods, + Has fallen away? + + +XI + +The soul cannot have much knowledge till it has shaken off the habit of +time and of place, but till that hour it must fix its attention upon what +is near, thinking of objects one after another as we run the eye or the +finger over them. Its intellectual power cannot but increase and alter as +its perceptions grow simultaneous. Yet even now we seem at moments to +escape from time in what we call prevision, and from place when we see +distant things in a dream and in concurrent dreams. A couple of years ago, +while in meditation, my head seemed surrounded by a conventional sun's +rays, and when I went to bed I had a long dream of a woman with her hair +on fire. I awoke and lit a candle, and discovered presently from the odour +that in doing so I had set my own hair on fire. I dreamed very lately that +I was writing a story, and at the same time I dreamed that I was one of +the characters in that story and seeking to touch the heart of some girl +in defiance of the author's intention; and concurrently with all that, I +was as another self trying to strike with the button of a foil a great +china jar. The obscurity of the prophetic books of William Blake, which +were composed in a state of vision, comes almost wholly from these +concurrent dreams. Everybody has some story or some experience of the +sudden knowledge in sleep or waking of some event, a misfortune for the +most part happening to some friend far off. + + +XII + +The dead living in their memories, are, I am persuaded, the source of all +that we call instinct, and it is their love and their desire, all +unknowing, that make us drive beyond our reason, or in defiance of our +interest it may be; and it is the dream martens that, all unknowing, are +master-masons to the living martens building about church windows their +elaborate nests; and in their turn, the phantoms are stung to a keener +delight from a concord between their luminous pure vehicle and our strong +senses. It were to reproach the power or the beneficence of God, to +believe those children of Alexander who died wretchedly could not throw an +urnful to the heap, nor that Caesarea[2] murdered in childhood, whom +Cleopatra bore to Caesar, nor that so brief-lived younger Pericles +Aspasia bore being so nobly born. + + +XIII + +Because even the most wise dead can but arrange their memories as we +arrange pieces upon a chess-board and obey remembered words alone, he who +would turn magician is forbidden by the Zoroastrian oracle to change +"barbarous words" of invocation. Communication with _Anima Mundi_ is +through the association of thoughts or images or objects; and the famous +dead and those of whom but a faint memory lingers, can still--and it is +for no other end that, all unknowing, we value posthumous fame--tread the +corridor and take the empty chair. A glove or a name can call their +bearer; the shadows come to our elbow amid their old undisturbed +habitations, and "materialisation" itself is easier, it may be, among +walls, or by rocks and trees, that carry upon them particles the vehicles +cast off in some extremity while they had still animate bodies. + +Certainly the mother returns from the grave, and with arms that may be +visible and solid, for a hurried moment, can comfort a neglected child or +set the cradle rocking; and in all ages men have known and affirmed that +when the soul is troubled, those that are a shade and a song: + + "live there, + And live like winds of light on dark or stormy air." + + +XIV + +Awhile they live again those passionate moments, not knowing they are +dead, and then they know and may awake or half awake to be our visitors. +How is their dream changed as Time drops away and their senses multiply? +Does their stature alter, do their eyes grow more brilliant? Certainly the +dreams stay the longer, the greater their passion when alive: Helen may +still open her chamber door to Paris or watch him from the wall, and know +she is dreaming but because nights and days are poignant or the stars +unreckonably bright. Surely of the passionate dead we can but cry in words +Ben Jonson meant for none but Shakespeare: "So rammed" are they "with life +they can but grow in life with being." + + +XV + +The inflowing from their mirrored life, who themselves receive it from the +Condition of Fire, falls upon the Winding Path called the Path of the +Serpent, and that inflowing coming alike to men and to animals is called +natural. There is another inflow which is not natural but intellectual, +and is from the fire; and it descends through souls who pass for a lengthy +or a brief period out of the mirror life, as we in sleep out of the bodily +life, and though it may fall upon a sleeping serpent, it falls principally +upon straight paths. In so far as a man is like all other men, the inflow +finds him upon the winding path, and in so far as he is a saint or sage, +upon the straight path. + + +XVI + +Daemon and man are opposites; man passes from heterogeneous objects to the +simplicity of fire, and the Daemon is drawn to objects because through +them he obtains power, the extremity of choice. For only in men's minds +can he meet even those in the Condition of Fire who are not of his own +kin. He, by using his mediatorial shades, brings man again and again to +the place of choice, heightening temptation that the choice may be as +final as possible, imposing his own lucidity upon events, leading his +victim to whatever among works not impossible is the most difficult. He +suffers with man as some firm-souled man suffers with the woman he but +loves the better because she is extravagant and fickle. His descending +power is neither the winding nor the straight line but zigzag, +illuminating the passive and active properties, the tree's two sorts of +fruit: it is the sudden lightning, for all his acts of power are +instantaneous. We perceive in a pulsation of the artery, and after slowly +decline. + + +XVII + +Each Daemon is drawn to whatever man or, if its nature is more general, to +whatever nation it most differs from, and it shapes into its own image +the antithetical dream of man or nation. The Jews had already shown by the +precious metals, by the ostentatious wealth of Solomon's temple, the +passion that has made them the money-lenders of the modern world. If they +had not been rapacious, lustful, narrow and persecuting beyond the people +of their time, the incarnation had been impossible; but it was an +intellectual impulse from the Condition of Fire that shaped their +antithetical self into that of the classic world. So always it is an +impulse from some Daemon that gives to our vague, unsatisfied desire, +beauty, a meaning and a form all can accept. + + +XVIII + +Only in rapid and subtle thought, or in faint accents heard in the quiet +of the mind, can the thought of the spirit come to us but little changed; +for a mind, that grasps objects simultaneously according to the degree of +its liberation, does not think the same thought with the mind that sees +objects one after another. The purpose of most religious teaching, of the +insistence upon the submission to God's will above all, is to make certain +of the passivity of the vehicle where it is most pure and most tenuous. +When we are passive where the vehicle is coarse, we become mediumistic, +and the spirits who mould themselves in that coarse vehicle can only +rarely and with great difficulty speak their own thoughts and keep their +own memory. They are subject to a kind of drunkenness and are stupefied, +old writers said, as if with honey, and readily mistake our memory for +their own, and believe themselves whom and what we please. We bewilder and +overmaster them, for once they are among the perceptions of successive +objects, our reason, being but an instrument created and sharpened by +those objects, is stronger than their intellect, and they can but repeat +with brief glimpses from another state, our knowledge and our words. + + +XIX + +A friend once dreamed that she saw many dragons climbing upon the steep +side of a cliff and continually falling. Henry More thought that those +who, after centuries of life, failed to find the rhythmic body and to pass +into the Condition of Fire, were born again. Edmund Spenser, who was among +More's masters, affirmed that nativity without giving it a cause: + + "After that they againe retourned beene, + They in that garden planted be agayne, + And grow afresh, as they had never seene + Fleshy corruption, nor mortal payne. + Some thousand years so doen they ther remayne, + And then of him are clad with other hew, + Or sent into the chaungeful world agayne, + Till thither they retourn where first they grew: + So like a wheele, around they roam from old to new." + +The dead who speak to us deny metempsychosis, perhaps because they but +know a little better what they knew alive; while the dead in Asia, for +perhaps no better reason, affirm it, and so we are left amid +plausibilities and uncertainties. + + +XX + +But certainly it is always to the Condition of Fire, where emotion is not +brought to any sudden stop, where there is neither wall nor gate, that we +would rise; and the mask plucked from the oak-tree is but my imagination +of rhythmic body. We may pray to that last condition by any name so long +as we do not pray to it as a thing or a thought, and most prayers call it +man or woman or child: + + "For mercy has a human heart, + Pity a human face." + +Within ourselves Reason and Will, who are the man and woman, hold out +towards a hidden altar, a laughing or crying child. + + +XXI + +When I remember that Shelley calls our minds "mirrors of the fire for +which all thirst," I cannot but ask the question all have asked, "What or +who has cracked the mirror?" I begin to study the only self that I can +know, myself, and to wind the thread upon the perne again. + +At certain moments, always unforeseen, I become happy, most commonly when +at hazard I have opened some book of verse. Sometimes it is my own verse +when, instead of discovering new technical flaws, I read with all the +excitement of the first writing. Perhaps I am sitting in some crowded +restaurant, the open book beside me, or closed, my excitement having +over-brimmed the page. I look at the strangers near as if I had known them +all my life, and it seems strange that I cannot speak to them: everything +fills me with affection, I have no longer any fears or any needs; I do not +even remember that this happy mood must come to an end. It seems as if the +vehicle had suddenly grown pure and far extended and so luminous that one +half imagines that the images from _Anima Mundi_, embodied there and drunk +with that sweetness, would, as some country drunkard who had thrown a +wisp into his own thatch, burn up time. + +It may be an hour before the mood passes, but latterly I seem to +understand that I enter upon it the moment I cease to hate. I think the +common condition of our life is hatred--I know that this is so with +me--irritation with public or private events or persons. There is no great +matter in forgetfulness of servants, or the delays of tradesmen, but how +forgive the ill-breeding of Carlyle, or the rhetoric of Swinburne, or that +woman who murmurs over the dinner-table the opinion of her daily paper? +And only a week ago last Sunday, I hated the spaniel who disturbed a +partridge on her nest, a trout who took my bait and yet broke away +unhooked. The books say that our happiness comes from the opposite of +hate, but I am not certain, for we may love unhappily. And plainly, when +I have closed a book too stirred to go on reading, and in those brief +intense visions of sleep, I have something about me that, though it makes +me love, is more like innocence. I am in the place where the daemon is, +but I do not think he is with me until I begin to make a new personality, +selecting among those images, seeking always to satisfy a hunger grown out +of conceit with daily diet; and yet as I write the words, "I select," I am +full of uncertainty, not knowing when I am the finger, when the clay. +Once, twenty years ago, I seemed to awake from sleep to find my body +rigid, and to hear a strange voice speaking these words through my lips as +through lips of stone: "We make an image of him who sleeps, and it is not +him who sleeps, and we call it Emmanuel." + + +XXII + +As I go up and down my stair and pass the gilded Moorish wedding-chest +where I keep my "barbarous words," I wonder will I take to them once more, +for I am baffled by those voices that still speak as to Odysseus but as +the bats; or now that I shall in a little be growing old, to some kind of +simple piety like that of an old woman. + +_May_ 9, 1917. + + + + +EPILOGUE + + +MY DEAR "MAURICE"--I was often in France before you were born or when you +were but a little child. When I went for the first or second time Mallarme +had just written: "All our age is full of the trembling of the veil of the +temple." One met everywhere young men of letters who talked of magic. A +distinguished English man of letters asked me to call with him on +Stanislas de Gaeta because he did not dare go alone to that mysterious +house. I met from time to time with the German poet Doukenday, a grave +Swede whom I only discovered after years to have been Strindberg, then +looking for the philosopher's stone in a lodging near the Luxembourg; and +one day in the chambers of Stuart Merrill the poet, I spoke with a young +Arabic scholar who displayed a large, roughly-made gold ring which had +grown to the shape of his finger. Its gold had no hardening alloy, he +said, because it was made by his master, a Jewish Rabbi, of alchemical +gold. My critical mind--was it friend or enemy?--mocked, and yet I was +delighted. Paris was as legendary as Connaught. This new pride, that of +the adept, was added to the pride of the artist. Villiers de L'Isle Adam, +the haughtiest of men, had but lately died. I had read his _Axel_ slowly +and laboriously as one reads a sacred book--my French was very bad--and +had applauded it upon the stage. As I could not follow the spoken words, I +was not bored even where Axel and the Commander discussed philosophy for a +half-hour instead of beginning their duel. If I felt impatient it was only +that they delayed the coming of the adept Janus, for I hoped to recognise +the moment when Axel cries: "I know that lamp, it was burning before +Solomon"; or that other when he cries: "As for living, our servants will +do that for us." + +The movement of letters had been haughty even before Magic had touched it. +Rimbaud had sung: "Am I an old maid that I should fear the embrace of +death?" And everywhere in Paris and in London young men boasted of the +garret, and claimed to have no need of what the crowd values. + +Last summer you, who were at the age I was when first I heard of Mallarme +and of Verlaine, spoke much of the French poets young men and women read +to-day. Claudel I already somewhat knew, but you read to me for the first +time from Jammes a dialogue between a poet and a bird, that made us cry, +and a whole volume of Peguy's _Mystere de la Charite de Jeanne d'Arc_. +Nothing remained the same but the preoccupation with religion, for these +poets submitted everything to the Pope, and all, even Claudel, a proud +oratorical man, affirmed that they saw the world with the eyes of +vine-dressers and charcoal-burners. It was no longer the soul, self-moving +and self-teaching--the magical soul--but Mother France and Mother Church. + +Have not my thoughts run through a like round, though I have not found my +tradition in the Catholic Church, which was not the church of my +childhood, but where the tradition is, as I believe, more universal and +more ancient? + +W. B. Y. + +_May_ 11, 1917. + + +Printed in the United States of America. + + + + +The following pages contain advertisements of books by the same author or +on kindred subjects. + + +Responsibilities + +BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS + +_Cloth, $1.25_ + + "William Butler Yeats is by far the biggest poetic personality living + among us at present. He is great both as a lyric and dramatist poet." + + --_John Masefield._ + + "This poetry has the rhythm that is incantation and sorcery, that is + not of the senses nor of the spirit, but of a mingling which is + exaltation." + + --_Chicago Evening Post._ + +Under the title of "Responsibilities" William Butler Yeats brings together +some of his recent poems. Notable still for his freshness of thought, his +keen originality, and his purely poetic conception of thoughts and facts, +Mr. Yeats sometimes makes us wonder how he has so long been able to hold +his style above the ever rising level of modern poetry. No man stands so +apart in his own perfection as does this Irish poet and playwright, in his +art of discovering truths remote and beautiful. Serious, vital thoughts he +veils, as the genuine poet, in a cloak of fine rhythmical expression. + +It is, after all, as a poet that the majority of people like to think of +Mr. Yeats, and this splendid collection, the first in a number of years, +is assured of a warm welcome. + + + + +BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS + +The Cutting of an Agate + +_12mo, $1.50_ + + "Mr. Yeats is probably the most important as well as the most widely + known of the men concerned directly in the so-called Celtic + renaissance. More than this, he stands among the few men to be + reckoned with in modern poetry."--_New York Herald._ + + +The Green Helmet and Other Poems + +_Decorated cloth, 12mo, $1.25_ + + The initial piece in this volume is a deliciously conceived heroic + farce, quaint in humor and sprightly in action. It tells of the + difficulty in which two simple Irish folk find themselves when they + enter into an agreement with an apparition of the sea, who demands + that they knock off his head and who maintains that after they have + done that he will knock off theirs. There is a real meaning in the + play which it will not take the thoughtful reader long to discover. + Besides this there are a number of shorter poems, notably one in + which Mr. Yeats answers the critics of "The Playboy of the Western + World." + + +Lyrical and Dramatic Poems + + In Two Volumes + _Vol. I. Lyrical Poems, $2.00 Leather, $2.25_ + _Vol. II. Plays (Revised), $2.00 Leather, $2.25_ + + The two-volume edition of the Irish poet's works included everything + he has done in verse up to the present time. The first volume + contains his lyrics; the second includes all of his five dramas in + verse: "The Countess Cathleen," "The Land of Heart's Desire," "The + King's Threshold," "On Baile's Strand," and "The Shadowy Waters." + + +Reveries Over Childhood and Youth + +_$2.00_ + + In this book the celebrated Irish author gives us his reminiscences + of his childhood and youth. The memories are written, as is to be + expected, in charming prose. They have the appeal invariably attached + to the account of a sensitive childhood. + + +The Hour Glass and Other Plays _$1.25_ + + "The Hour Glass" is one of Mr. Yeats' noble and effective plays, and + with the other plays in the volume, make a small, but none the less + representative collection. + + +Stories of Red Hanrahan + +_$1.25_ + + These tales belong to the realm of pure lyrical expression. They are + mysterious and shadowy, full of infinite subtleties and old wisdom of + folklore, and sad with the gray wistful Celtic sadness. + + "Lovers of Mr. Yeats's suggestive and delicate writing will find him + at his best in this volume."--_Springfield Republican._ + + +Ideas of Good and Evil _$1.50_ + + Essays on art and life, wherein are set forth much of Yeats' + philosophy, his love of beauty, his hope for Ireland and for Irish + artistic achievement. + + +The Celtic Twilight _$1.50_ + + A collection of tales from Irish life and of Irish fancy, retold from + peasants' stories with no additions except an occasional comment. + + + +THE WORKS OF RABINDRANATH TAGORE + +BOLPUR EDITION + + HUNGRY STONES AND OTHER STORIES. + FRUIT GATHERING. + CHITRA: A Play in one act. + THE CRESCENT MOON: Child Poems. + THE GARDENER: Love Poems. + GITANJALI: Religious Poems. + THE KING OF THE DARK CHAMBER: A Play. + THE SONGS OF KABIR. + SADHANA: The Realization of Life. + THE POST OFFICE: A Play. + +Each volume decorated cloth, $1.50; leather, $2.00. + +This new edition of the works of Rabindranath Tagore will recommend itself +to those who desire to possess the various poems and plays of the great +Hindu writer in the best possible printings and bindings. Great care has +been taken with the physical appearance of the books. In addition to the +special design that has been made for the cover, there are special end +papers and decorated title pages in each book. Altogether this edition +promises to become the standard one of this distinguished poet and seer. + + THE MACMILLAN COMPANY + Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York + + + + +Footnotes: + +[1] Translated by Arthur Symons from _San Juan de la Cruz_. + +[2] I have no better authority for Caesarea than Landor's play. + + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's Per Amica Silentia Lunae, by William Butler Yeats + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PER AMICA SILENTIA LUNAE *** + +***** This file should be named 33338.txt or 33338.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/3/3/3/3/33338/ + +Produced by Brian Foley and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was +produced from images generously made available by The +Internet Archive/American Libraries.) + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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