Phase Fourteen

Yeats’s description of the phase from A Vision

As we approach Phase 15 personal beauty increases and at Phase 14 and Phase 16 the greatest human beauty becomes possible. The aim of the being should be to disengage those objects which are images of desire from the excitement and disorder of the Body of Fate, and under certain circumstances to impress upon these the full character of the Mask which, being from Phase 28, is a folding up, or fading into themselves. It is this act of the intellect, begun at conception, which has given the body its beauty. The Body of Fate, derived from the phase of the utmost possible physical energy, but of an energy without aim, like that of a child, works against this folding up, yet offers little more of objects than their excitement, their essential honey. The images of desire, disengaged and subject to the Mask, are separate and still (Creative Mind from a phase of violent scattering). The images of Phase 13 and even of Phase 12 have in a lesser degree this character. When we compare these images with those of any subsequent phase, each seems studied for its own sake; they float as in serene air, or lie hidden in some valley, and if they move it is to music that returns always to the same note, or in a dance that so returns into itself that they seem immortal.

When the being is out of phase, when it is allured by primary curiosity, it is aware of its primary feebleness and its intellect becomes but a passion of apprehension, or a shrinking from solitude; it may even become mad; or it may use its conscious feebleness and its consequent terror as a magnet for the sympathy of others, as a means of domination. At Phase 16 will be discovered a desire to accept every possible responsibility; but now responsibility is renounced and this renunciation becomes an instrument of power, dropped burdens being taken up by others. Here are born those women who are most touching in their beauty. Helen was of the phase; and she comes before the mind's eye elaborating a delicate personal discipline, as though she would make her whole life an image of a unified antithetical energy. While seeming an image of softness and of quiet, she draws perpetually upon glass with a diamond. Yet she will not number among her sins anything that does not break that personal discipline, no matter what it may seem according to others' discipline; but if she fail in her own discipline she will not deceive herself, and for all the languor of her movements, and her indifference to the acts of others, her mind is never at peace. She will wander much alone as though she consciously meditated her masterpiece that shall be at the full moon, yet unseen by human eyes, and when she returns to her house she will look upon her household with timid eyes, as though she knew that all powers of self-protection had been taken away, that of her once violent primary tincture nothing remained but a strange irresponsible innocence. Her early life has perhaps been perilous because of that nobility, that excess of antithetical energies, which may have so constrained the fading primary that, instead of its becoming the expression of those energies, it is but a vague beating of the wings, or their folding up into a melancholy stillness. The greater the peril the nearer has she approached to the final union of primary and antithetical, where she will desire nothing; already perhaps, through weakness of desire, she understands nothing yet seems to understand everything; already serves nothing, while alone seeming of service. Is it not because she desires so little, gives so little that men will die and murder in her service? One thinks of the 'Eternal Idol' of Rodin: that kneeling man with hands clasped behind his back in humble adoration, kissing a young girl a little below the breast, while she gazes down, without comprehending, under her half-closed eyelids. Perhaps, could we see her a little later, with flushed cheeks casting her money upon some gaming-table, we would wonder that action and form could so belie each other, not understanding that the Fool's Mask is her chosen motley, not her terror before death and stillness. One thinks too of the women of Burne-Jones, but not of Botticelli's women, who have too much curiosity, nor Rossetti's women, who have too much passion; and as we see before the mind's eye those pure faces gathered about the 'Sleep of Arthur,' or crowded upon the 'Golden Stair,' we wonder if they too would not have filled us with surprise, or dismay, because of some craze, some passion for mere excitement, or slavery to a drug.

In the poets too, who are of the phase, one finds the impression of the Body of Fate as intoxication or narcotic. Wordsworth, shuddering at his solitude, has filled his art in all but a few pages with common opinion, common sentiment; while in the poetry of Keats there is, though little sexual passion, an exaggerated sensuousness that compels us to remember the pepper on the tongue as though that were his symbol. Thought is disappearing into image; and in Keats, in some ways a perfect type, intellectual curiosity is at its weakest; there is scarcely an image, where his poetry is at its best, whose subjectivity has not been heightened by its use in many great poets, painters, sculptors, artificers. The being has almost reached the end of that elaboration of itself which has for its climax an absorption in time, where space can be but symbols or images in the mind. There is little observation even in detail of expression, all is reverie, while in Wordsworth the soul's deepening solitude has reduced mankind, when seen objectively, to a few slight figures outlined for a moment amid mountain and lake. The corresponding genius in painting is that of Monticelli, after 1870, and perhaps that of Conder, though in Conder there are elements suggesting the preceding phase.

All born at antithetical phases before Phase 15 are subject to violence, because of the indeterminate energy of the Body of Fate; this violence seems accidental, unforeseen and cruel – and here are women carried off by robbers and ravished by clowns.

(AV B 131-34)