Good and Evil. Ideas of should see the poetic genius not in a woman star but in the Sun, and should rejoice throughout his poetry in 'the Sun in his strength.' Shelley, however, except when he uses it to describe the peculiar beauty of Emelia Viviani, who was like an incarnation of the Sun when light is changed to love,' saw it with less friendly eyes. He seems to have seen it with perfect happiness only when veiled in mist, or glimmering upon water, or when faint enough to do no more than veil the brightness of his own Star; and in The Triumph of Life, the one poem in which it is part of the avowed symbolism, its power is the being and the source of all tyrannies. When the woman personifying the Morning Star has faded from before his eyes, Rousseau sees a new vision' in 'a cold bright car' with a rainbow hovering over her, and as she comes the shadow passes from 'leaf and stone,' and the souls she has enslaved seem in 'that light like atomies The Philosophy Poetry. to dance within a sunbeam,' or they dance among the flowers that grow up of Shelley's newly 'in the grassy verdure of the desert,' unmindful of the misery that is to come upon them. 'These are the great, the unforgotten,' all who have worn 'mitres and helms and crowns or wreaths of light,' and yet have not known themselves. Even 'great Plato' is there because he knew joy and sorrow, because life that could not subdue him by gold or pain, by age or sloth or slavery,' subdued him by love. All who i have ever lived are there except Christ and Socrates and the sacred few' who put away all life could give, being doubtless followers throughout their lives of the forms borne by the flying ideal, or who, as soon as they had touched the world with living flame, flew back like eagles to their native noon.' In ancient times, it seems to me that Blake, who for all his protest was glad to be alive, and ever spoke of his glad Ideas of Good and ness, would have worshipped in some chapel of the Sun, and that Keats, who accepted life gladly though with a delicious diligent indolence,' would have worshipped in some chapel of the Moon, but that Shelley, who hated life because he sought 'more in life than any understood,' would have wandered, lost in a ceaseless reverie, in some chapel of the Star of infinite desire. I think too that as he knelt before an altar, where a thin flame burnt in a lamp made of green agate, a single vision would have come to him again and again, a vision of a boat drifting down a broad river between high hills where there were caves and towers, and following the light of one Star; and that voices. would have told him how there is for every man some one scene, some one adventure, some one picture that is the image of his secret life, for wisdom first speaks in images, and that this one image, if he would but brood over it his life long, would lead his soul, disentangled The Philosophy from unmeaning circumstance and the of Shelley's ebb and flow of the world, into that far Poetry. household, where the undying gods await all whose souls have become simple as flame, whose bodies have become quiet as an agate lamp. But he was born in a day when the old wisdom had vanished and was content merely to write verses, and often with little thought of more than verses. 1900. Ideas of Good and Evil. AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON I I HAVE been hearing Shakespeare, as the traveller in News from Nowhere might have heard him, had he not been hurried back into our noisy time. One passes through quiet streets, where gabled and red-tiled houses remember the Middle Age, to a theatre that has been made not to make money, but for the pleasure of making it, like the market houses that set the traveller chuckling; nor does one find it among hurrying cabs and ringing pavements, but in a green garden by a river side. Inside I have to be content for a while with a chair, for I am unexpected, and there is not an empty seat but this; and yet there is no one who has come merely because one must go somewhere after dinner. All day, too, one does not hear or see an incongruous or noisy thing, but spends the hours reading the plays, and the wise and foolish things men have said of them, in the library |