symbolic, that is, for the soul can only
achieve a distinct separated life where many related objects at once
distinguish and arouse its energies in their fullness. All visionaries
have entered into such a world in trances, and all ideal art has trance
for warranty. Shelley seemed to Matthew Arnold to beat his ineffectual
wings in the void, and I only made my pleasure in him contented pleasure
by massing in my imagination his recurring images of towers and rivers,
and caves with fountains in them, and that one star of his, till his
world had grown solid underfoot and consistent enough for the soul's
habitation.

But even then I lacked something to compensate my imagination for
geographical and historical reality, for the testimony of our ordinary
senses, and found myself wishing for and trying to imagine, as I had
also when reading Keats' Endymion, a crowd of believers who could put
into all those strange sights the strength of their belief and the rare
testimony of their visions. A little crowd had been sufficient, and I
would have had Shelley a sectary that his revelation might have found
the only sufficient evidence of religion, miracle. All symbolic art
should arise out of a real belief, and that it cannot do so in this age
proves that this age is a road and not a resting place for the
imaginative arts. I can only understand others by myself, and I am
certain that there are many who are not moved as they desire to be by
that solitary light burning in the tower of Prince Athanais, because it
has not entered into men's prayers nor lighted any through the sacred
dark of religious contemplation.

Lyrical poems even when they but speak of emotions common to all need,
if not a religious belief like the spiritual arts, a life that has
leisure for itself, and a society that is quickly stirred that our
emotion may be strengthened by the emotion of others. All circumstance
that makes emotion at once dignified and visible, increases the poet's
power, and I think that is why I have always longed for some stringed
instrument, and a listening audience not drawn out of the hurried
streets but from a life where it would be natural to murmur over again
the singer's thought. When I heard Ivette Guilbert the other day, who
has the lyre or as good, I was not content, for she sang among people
whose life had nothing it could share with an exquisite art that should
rise out of life as the blade out of the spearshaft, a song out of the