f I look at the
moon herself and remember any of her ancient names and meanings, I move
among divine people, and things that have shaken off our mortality, the
tower of ivory, the queen of waters, the shining stag among enchanted
woods, the white hare sitting upon the hilltop, the fool of faery with
his shining cup full of dreams, and it may be 'make a friend of one of
these images of wonder,' and 'meet the Lord in the air.' So, too, if one
is moved by Shakespeare, who is content with emotional symbols that he may
come the nearer to our sympathy, one is mixed with the whole spectacle of
the world; while if one is moved by Dante, or by the myth of Demeter, one
is mixed into the shadow of God or of a goddess. So too one is furthest
from symbols when one is busy doing this or that, but the soul moves among
symbols and unfolds in symbols when trance, or madness, or deep meditation
has withdrawn it from every impulse but its own. 'I then saw,' wrote
Gerard de Nerval of his madness, 'vaguely drifting into form, plastic
images of antiquity, which outlined themselves, became definite, and
seemed to represent symbols of which I only seized the idea with
difficulty.' In an earlier time he would have been of that multitude,
whose souls austerity withdrew, even more perfectly than madness could
withdraw his soul, from hope and memory, from desire and regret, that they
might reveal those processions of symbols that men bow to before altars,
and woo with incense and offerings. But being of our time, he has been
like Maeterlinck, like Villiers de l'Isle Adam in _Axel_, like all who are
preoccupied with intellectual symbols in our time, a foreshadower of the
new sacred book, of which all the arts, as somebody has said, are begging
to dream, and because, as I think, they cannot overcome the slow dying of
men's hearts that we call the progress of the world, and lay their hands
upon men's heart-strings again, without becoming the garment of religion
as in old times.

V

If people were to accept the theory that poetry moves us because of its
symbolism, what change should one look for in the manner of our poetry? A
return to the way of our fathers, a casting out of descriptions of nature
for the sake of nature, of the moral law for the sake of the moral law, a
casting out of all anecdotes and of that brooding over scientific opinion
that so often extinguished the central flame in Tennyson, and of that
vehemence that would make us do or n