University of Virginia Library

Trying to fancy how he thought of “Avalon” let us find a little the grace of his soul by reminding ourselves of the speech of Uriel to Percival in “Taliesin,”—Percival, the good knight, the practical man, when in contrast with Taliesin, the man of prayer, vision, and song.

Uriel.
Percival. ... Percival! ... Approach no nearer thy desire, thou of the Choice.
The time is not yet. Still the air thy spirit breathes too thickened is with noise
Of earth-blown rumors for the thin pulsations of the interstellar voice
To stir its sluggard atoms to the unbroken theme the deeps hear and rejoice.
Thy heart is yet too full of anger, and the hate of evil clots thy soul;
Too far from hell to hate it must he be whom God shall breathe on as a coal
Until the pure light of perfection burns about him like an aureole.
Pray to the tranquil night to let the calm of stars beneath the silent pole
Fall like a mighty hand upon thy spirit, even like the hand of Death.
And in that hour when thou art clothed upon with the tranquillity of Death,
When Love has cast out even the hate of hate,—Love whom the gods name Death,—
Come, and the gates shall open; come, and thou shalt enter in the holy place,
See the mask melt into the features of the Living Soul it covers, face
The Eyes that all love looks through, feel intense about thee like a burning breath
The swift invasion of his heart-beats, the reverberation of his grace. ...

With such moral height in the masque of æsthetics what would not have been the mystic whiteness of the peaks of song whence he would have had us worship in his masque of ethics.

His nature was most deeply religious. He forgot dogmas in insights, and life in the pure visions born of the impulses of a high and illumined heart.

So “Avalon” would not have been merely religious in the conventional sense, but might have soared to those mystic heights where love alone is motive, and act, and reward.

As was well said by one of his earliest reviewers:

“While the development of the succeeding dramas is dimly outlined and darkly foreshadowed in the enigmatic replies of the awe-inspiring Norns to Merlin's questionings, there is still a deeper intent, revealing in part the poet's philosophy of being; indicating, by means of ideal characters, who, in turn, personify the classical, medieval, and Christian myths, the growth of the religious instinct in man, through varied phases of terror or of beauty, to culminate, at last, in the Christian ideal.”

Let it, however, be remembered that “Merlin” was but a partial view of the subject which was to have been supplemented by “Taliesin” and “Morgana”; and finally to reach some state of solution of the whole tangle in a complexity of interaction without tangle, which in the case of the masque “Avalon,” he named Harmonody.

The scene of the “Quest of Merlin” being chiefly laid in Avalon, where Merlin and allegorical folk of all degree, from the dryads to the angels, are assembled, indicates that his Avalon is the place of eternity, the place of the beginning and the end. Merlin deals with very primitive seekings for this land and the experience of its infinities. Prophecy is an easy thing in a place where past, present and future are visible; and what matter if they are called

Urd, Verdandi, Skuld! Merlin's questioning was a very simple one; whether two mortals should marry. But the Avalon of the masque of that name, although the same, was to be another Avalon. Even as those equal infinities, past and future, which seem so different relatively to us, are one and relatively to themselves the same.

For the Harmonody “Avalon,” which was to end the “Poem in Dramas,” we have in the notes but few characters named: Arthur, Guenevere, Launcelot and Galahad. But the evolution of mythologies running through the masques makes it seem likely that all the people of his earth-world and his unreal world as well should have assembled, each making some essential part of the completed harmony.

An evolution of societies, governments, religions, an evolution of material conditions, mental conditions, spiritual conditions, was the great groundwork of the “Poem in Dramas.” That work itself was suggested as evolving from simple to complex, from discord to harmony. The masque of Merlin begins with the Norns and ends with the angels and final star prophesies. Taliesin again begins with the magic of the wood, of physical nature and our own nature, and ends with Taliesin's human song going on even terms with the angelic choirs. As Carman said: “Richard never for a moment doubted the ultimate benignity of nature.”

Whether this progression from primitive chaos to the holiest flights of human inspiration was to be repeated in “Morgana,” we do not find indicated in the

notebooks; but there is no doubt that in its own variation this was what it was to be, and that a like progression was to pass through the masques themselves, each rising to a different height, so that in the end the last, “Avalon,” should be supreme.

A harmony is greater as its components are the more unlike, if they still are in each part helpful to every part. Even so the study in ethics, called a “Masque of Evil,” was needed, so that the basic contrast should produce a greater harmony as the discords were resolved in “Avalon.”

Somewhere in eternity, not regarding place, all stages of the human race must coexist, regardless of their place in time, and their relation or absence of relation or their experiences. This condition he uses as a place, and calls Avalon.