Now I am not saying - Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, or any such quibble. I am saying that without the Maker's imagination nothing can live for us - whether alive or dead, or once alive and now dead, or waiting to be brought to life -
Oh, I have tried to tell you my truth - and have written only dreary quibbles about poetry. But you know-I do believe you know -
Tell me you know - and that it is not simple - or simply to berejected - there is a truth of Imagination.
Dear Mr Ash,
MacBeth was a Sorcerer - had he not born of woman not put an end to him - with his sharp sword - think you not thatgood King James - with his pious Daemonologie - would not have desiderated his Burning?
Yet in our time you may sit quietly there andplead - oh but I am a mere poet - if I urge that we receive Truth only through the Life - or Liveliness - of Lies - there's no harm in that- since we all take in both withour mother-milk - Indissoluble - it is the human case -
He said -I am the Truth and the Life - what of that, Sir? Was that an approximate statement? Or a Poetic adumbration? Well - was it? It rings - through eternity -I AM -
Not that I will not grant you - now I climb down from my preaching-place, my unattainable pulpit - that there are Truths of your sort. Who that judges does not know - that Lear's agony - and the Duke of Gloucester's pain - are true - tho ' those men never lived - or never lived so - you will tell me that they lived indeed in some sort - and that he - W.S. - sage sorcerer prophet - brought them again to huge Life - so much so that no Actor - could do his part therein, but must leave it to the studium of you and me to flesh it out.
But what a Poet might be in those daysof Giants, which were also the days of the aforesaid King James and his Daemonologie - and not only of his Daemonologie - but of his commissioning of the Word of God in English - so writ then to aftertime that every word of it rings with faith and truth - and has accruedmore, of faith at least - through the centuries - until our own faithlessness -
What a poet was then- seer, daemon, force of nature,the Word - isnot what he is now in our time of material thickening-
It may be that your diligent - reconstitution - like the restorationof old Frescoes with new colours - is our way to the Truth - a discreet patching. Would you acknowledge my simile?
We went to hear another lecture on the recent Spiritual Manifestations, given by a most respectable Quaker - who began with a predisposition to believe in the life of the Spirit - but with no vulgar desire to be shocked or startled. Himself an Englishman, he characterised the English in a manner not wholly alien to the style of the poet Ash. We have undergone - this good man said - adouble process of Induration. Trade - andProtestantabjuration of spiritual relations - have been mutually doing the work of internal pétrificationand ossification upon us. We aregrossly materialist - and nothing will satisfy us but material proofs- as we call them - of spiritual facts - and so the spirits have deigned to speak to us in these crude ways - of rapping- and rustling- and musical hummings- such as once were not needed - when our Faith was alight and alive in us -
He said too the English are particularly indurate by reasonof our denser atmosphere, less electrical and magnetic in its characterthan that of the Americans - who are conspicuously more nervous and excitable than we are - with more genius for socialschemes - more belief in the betterment of Human Nature - whose Minds, like their Institutions - have shot up with a rapidity ofgrowth resembling that of tropicaljungles - and have in consequence greater openness and receptivity. They had the Fox Sisters and the first rapping messages - they the Revelations of Andrew Jackson Davis and his Univercoelum, they fostered the genius of D. D. Home.
Whereas our "telluric conditions" (do you savour the phrase as I do?) are less favourable to the transmission of spiritual impressions. I know not what is your opinion of these matters - with which Society is now so universally busy - that it has stirred the quiet backwaters of our Richmond river-front -?
This letter is not a worthy answer to your inspiring remarks on Keats and poetic truth, or your self-exposition as a prophet-sorcerer. It is not written at White Heat - as others have been - but I must plead that I am not well - that we are not well- both my dear friend and I have been somewhat afflictedwith a slight fever and consequent lowness of spirits. I have spent today in a darkened Room - and feel the benefit of that - but am still weak.
In such a situation fancies easily abuse the mind. I had half made up my mind to plead - no more such letters - leave me quiet with my simple faith - leave me asidefrom the Rush of your intellectandpower of writing - or I am a Lost Soul - Sir -I am threatened in that Autonomy for which have so struggled. Now I have indeed, in a Winding and Roundabout Way - made such a plea - by presenting the thing itself as a hypothetical designation of whatI might say. So whether I might - or Do - so plead -/ leave to your generous judgment.
Dear Miss LaMotte,
You do not forbid me to write again. Thank you. You do not even reproach me strongly with equivocation and dabblingwith arcane powers. Thankyou also for that. And enough - -for the time being - of these harsh subjects.
I was most distressed to hear that you were ill. I cannot think thatthis mild Spring weather - or my letters, so full of goodwill, however else intrusive - could affect you so uncomfortably - and so am reduced to suspecting the oratory of your inspired Quaker - whose telluric conditions of magnetic inertia, whose observation of Induration -I enjoy quite as much as you could have hoped. May he invoke aforce that will, indeed "strike flat the thick rotunditieso'th'earth." There is a masterly lack of logic in accusing an Age of Materialism and then invoking a wholly material spirituality - is there not?
I did not know you walked out so readily or so frequently. I had quite envisaged you barricaded behind your pretty front door - which I imagine, because I am never content without using my imagination, quite embowered in roses and clematis. What should you say if I were to evince a strong desire to hear your reasonableQuaker for myself? You may forbid me cucumber sandwiches, but not spiritual sustenance.
No - do not be anxious -I would do no such thing -I would not risk our friendsh ip -
As for the rappings and tappings - I have not, so far, been much interested in them. I am not, as some are, whetherfor religiousorfor sceptical reasons, convinced that they are nothing- the kind of nothing that emanates from human weakness and gullibility and the strong desire to believe in the loving presence of those lost and much missed, which we must all have felt at times. I like to credit Paracelsus, who tells us that there are minor spirits doomed to inhabit the regions of the air who wander the earth perpetually and whom we might, from time to time, exceptionally, hear or see, when the wind,or the trick of the light, is right. (I believe too that Fraud is a possible and probable explanation for much. I am more ready to believe in D. D. Home's prestigious skills than in any pre-eminent spiritual opening to him.)
It occurs to me - speaking of Paracelsus - that your Fairy Melusine was just such a Spirit in his books - do you know the passage? You must - but I transcribe it because it is of such interest - and to ask if this is the shape of your interest in the Fairy - or is it her more beneficent castle-building propensities that have interestedyou - as I remember you said?
The Melusinas are daughters of kings, desperate through their sins. Satan bore them away and transformed them into spectres, into evil spirits, into horrible revenants andfrightful monsters. It is thought they live without rational souls in fantastic bodies, that they are nourished by the mere elements, and at the final fudgment will pass away with these, unless they may be married to a man. In this case, by virtue of this union, they may die a natural death, as they may have lived a natural life, in their marriage. Of these spectres it is believed thatthey abound in deserts, inforests, in ruins and tombs, in empty vaults, and by the shores of the sea…