The Autumn of

see and hear are alone real,' for he saw them without illusion at last, and found the Body. them but air and dust and moisture. And now he must be philosophical above everything, even about the arts, for he can only return the way he came, and so escape from weariness, by philosophy.) The arts are, I believe, about to take upon their shoulders the burdens that C have fallen from the shoulders of priests, and to lead us back upon our journey by filling our thoughts with the essences of things, and not with things. We are

about to substitute once more the distillation of alchemy for the analyses of chemistry and for some other sciences; and certain of us are looking everywhere for the perfect alembic that no silver or golden drop may escape.) Mr. Symons has written lately on M. Mallarmé's method, and has quoted him as saying that we should abolish the pretension, æsthetically an error, despite its dominion over almost all the masterpieces, to enclose

within the subtle pages other than-for example-the horror of the forest or the silent thunder in the leaves, not the intense dense wood of the trees,' and as desiring to substitute for 'the old lyric afflatus or the enthusiastic personal direction of the phrase words 'that take light from mutual reflection, like an actual trail of fire over precious stones,' and 'to make an entire word hitherto unknown to the language' 'out of many vocables.' Mr. Symons understands these and other sentences to mean that poetry will henceforth be a poetry of essences, separated one from another in little and intense poems. I think there will be much poetry of this kind, because of an ever more arduous search for an almost disembodied ecstasy, but I think we will not cease to write long poems, but rather that we will write them more and more as our new belief makes the world plastic under our hands again. I think that we will learn again how to describe at great

The
Autumn of

length an old man wandering among
enchanted islands, his return home at last, the Body.
his slow-gathering vengeance, a flitting
shape of a goddess, and a flight of arrows,
and yet to make all of these so different
things take light by mutual reflection,
like an actual trail of fire over precious
stones,' and become an entire word,' the
signature or symbol of a mood of the
divine imagination as imponderable as
'the horror of the forest or the silent
thunder in the leaves.'

1898.

Ideas of Good and Evil.

THE MOODS

LITERATURE differs from explanatory and scientific writing in being wrought about a mood, or a community of moods, as the body is wrought about an invisible soul; and if it uses argument, theory, erudition, observation, and seems to grow hot in assertion or denial, it does so merely to make us partakers at the banquet of the moods. It seems to me that these moods are the labourers and messengers of the Ruler of All, the gods of ancient days still dwelling on their secret Olympus, the angels of more modern days ascending and descending upon their shining ladder; and that argument, theory, erudition, observation, are merely what Blake called 'little devils who fight for themselves,' illusions of our visible passing life, who must be made serve the moods, or we have no part in eternity. Everything that can be seen, touched, measured, explained, understood, argued over, is to the imagina

tive artist nothing more than a means, for he belongs to the invisible life, and delivers its ever new and ever ancient revelation. We hear much of his need for the restraints of reason, but the only restraint he can obey is the mysterious instinct that has made him an artist, and that teaches him to discover immortal moods in mortal desires, an undecaying hope in our trivial ambitions, a divine love in sexual passion.

1895.

The Moods.

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