escape. Mr. Symons has
written lately on M. Mallarme's method, and has quoted him as saying that
we should 'abolish the pretension, aesthetically 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 length an old man wandering among enchanted islands,
his return home at last, 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.

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