{"collection":"myth-cosmogony","full_text_available":true,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/gutenberg_33094/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/gutenberg_33094","id":"gutenberg_33094","license":"Public Domain (US)","rights_basis":"gutenberg_metadata_copyright_false","source":"gutenberg","source_url":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33094","summary":null,"tags":["Category: Essays, Letters & Speeches","Category: Mythology, Legends & Folklore","Essays","Literature -- History and criticism","Nobel Prizes in Literature"],"text":"Produced by Brian Foley and the Online Distributed\nProofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was\nproduced from images generously made available by The\nInternet Archive/American Libraries.)\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTHE CUTTING OF AN AGATE\n\n\n\n\n  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY\n  NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO\n  DALLAS . SAN FRANCISCO\n\n  MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED\n  LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA\n  MELBOURNE\n\n  THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.\n  TORONTO\n\n\n\n\n  THE CUTTING\n  OF AN AGATE\n\n\n  BY\n  WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS\n\n  AUTHOR OF \"IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL,\" ETC.\n\n\n  New York\n  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY\n  1912\n\n  _All rights reserved_\n\n\n\n  COPYRIGHT, 1912,\n  BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.\n\n  Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1912.\n\n\n\n\nPREFACE\n\n\nWhen I wrote the essay on Edmund Spenser the company of Irish players\nwho have now their stage at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin had been\nfounded, but gave as yet few performances in a twelvemonth. I could let\nmy thought stray where it would, and even give a couple of summers to\n_The Faerie Queene_; while for some ten years now I have written little\nverse and no prose that did not arise out of some need of those players\nor some thought suggested by their work, or was written in the defence\nof some friend whose life has been a part of the movement of events\nwhich is creating a new Ireland unintelligible to an old Ireland that\nwatches with anger or indifference. The detailed defence of plays and\nplayers, published originally in _Samhain_, the occasional periodical of\nthe theatre, and now making some three hundred pages of Mr. Bullen's\ncollected edition of my writings, is not here, but for the most part an\nexposition of principles, whether suggested by my own work or by the\ndeath of friend or fellow-worker, that, intended for no great public,\nhas been printed and published from a Hand Press which my sisters manage\nat Dundrum with the help of the village girls. I have been busy with a\nsingle art, that of the theatre, of a small, unpopular theatre; and this\nart may well seem to practical men, busy with some programme of\nindustrial or political regeneration, of no more account than the\nshaping of an agate; and yet in the shaping of an agate, whether in the\ncutting or the making of the design, one discovers, if one have a\nspeculative mind, thoughts that seem important and principles that may\nbe applied to life itself, and certainly if one does not believe so, one\nis but a poor cutter of so hard a stone.\n\nW. B. YEATS.\n\nAugust, 1912.\n\n\n\n\nCONTENTS\n\n\n                                                            PAGE\n\n  THOUGHTS ON LADY GREGORY'S TRANSLATIONS\n     I. Cuchulain and his Cycle                                1\n    II. Fion and his Cycle                                    12\n\n  PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION OF THE WELL OF THE SAINTS      36\n\n  DISCOVERIES\n    Prophet, Priest and King                                  49\n    Personality and the Intellectual Essences                 56\n    The Musician and the Orator                               61\n    A Guitar Player                                           63\n    The Looking-glass                                         65\n    The Tree of Life                                          67\n    The Praise of Old Wives' Tales                            71\n    The Play of Modern Manners                                73\n    Has the Drama of Contemporary Life a Root of its Own?     76\n    Why the Blind Man in Ancient Times was made a Poet        79\n    Concerning Saints and Artists                             85\n    The Subject Matter of Drama                               89\n    The Two Kinds of Asceticism                               94\n    In the Serpent's Mouth                                    97\n    The Black and the White Arrows                            99\n    His Mistress's Eyebrows                                  100\n    The Tresses of the Hair                                  103\n    A Tower on the Apennines                                 104\n    The Thinking of the Body                                 106\n    Religious Belief Necessary to Religious Art              109\n    The Holy Places                                          113\n\n  POETRY AND TRADITION                                       116\n\n  PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION OF JOHN M. SYNGE'S POEMS\n  AND TRANSLATIONS                                           139\n\n  J. M. SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME                    146\n\n  THE TRAGIC THEATRE                                         196\n\n  JOHN SHAWE-TAYLOR                                          208\n\n  EDMUND SPENSER                                             213\n\n\n\n\nTHE CUTTING OF AN AGATE\n\n\n\n\nTHE CUTTING OF AN AGATE\n\n\n\n\nTHOUGHTS ON LADY GREGORY'S TRANSLATIONS\n\n\nI\n\nCUCHULAIN AND HIS CYCLE\n\nThe Church when it was most powerful taught learned and unlearned to\nclimb, as it were, to the great moral realities through hierarchies of\nCherubim and Seraphim, through clouds of Saints and Angels who had all\ntheir precise duties and privileges. The story-tellers of Ireland,\nperhaps of every primitive country, imagined as fine a fellowship, only\nit was to the aesthetic realities they would have had us climb. They\ncreated for learned and unlearned alike, a communion of heroes, a cloud\nof stalwart witnesses; but because they were as much excited as a monk\nover his prayers, they did not think sufficiently about the shape of\nthe poem and the story. We have to get a little weary or a little\ndistrustful of our subject, perhaps, before we can lie awake thinking\nhow to make the most of it. They were more anxious to describe energetic\ncharacters, and to invent beautiful stories, than to express themselves\nwith perfect dramatic logic or in perfectly-ordered words. They shared\ntheir characters and their stories, their very images, with one another,\nand handed them down from generation to generation; for nobody, even\nwhen he had added some new trait, or some new incident, thought of\nclaiming for himself what so obviously lived its own merry or mournful\nlife. The maker of images or worker in mosaic who first put Christ upon\na cross would have as soon claimed as his own a thought which was\nperhaps put into his mind by Christ himself. The Irish poets had also,\nit may be, what seemed a supernatural sanction, for a chief poet had to\nunderstand not only innumerable kinds of poetry, but how to keep\nhimself for nine days in a trance. Surely they believed or half believed\nin the historical reality of even their wildest imaginations. And so\nsoon as Christianity made their hearers desire a chronology that would\nrun side by side with that of the Bible, they delighted in arranging\ntheir Kings and Queens, the shadows of forgotten mythologies, in long\nlines that ascended to Adam and his Garden. Those who listened to them\nmust have felt as if the living were like rabbits digging their burrows\nunder walls that had been built by Gods and Giants, or like swallows\nbuilding their nests in the stone mouths of immense images, carved by\nnobody knows who. It is no wonder that one sometimes hears about men who\nsaw in a vision ivy-leaves that were greater than shields, and\nblackbirds whose thighs were like the thighs of oxen. The fruit of all\nthose stories, unless indeed the finest activities of the mind are but a\npastime, is the quick intelligence, the abundant imagination, the\ncourtly manners of the Irish country-people.\n\nWilliam Morris came to Dublin when I was a boy, and I had some talk with\nhim about these old stories. He had intended to lecture upon them, but\n'the ladies and gentlemen'--he put a communistic fervour of hatred into\nthe phrase--knew nothing about them. He spoke of the Irish account of\nthe battle of Clontarf and of the Norse account, and said, that one saw\nthe Norse and Irish tempers in the two accounts. The Norseman was\ninterested in the way things are done, but the Irishman turned aside,\nevidently well pleased to be out of so dull a business, to describe\nbeautiful supernatural events. He was thinking, I suppose, of the young\nman who came from Aoibhill of the Grey Rock, giving up immortal love and\nyouth, that he might fight and die by Murrough's side. He said that the\nNorseman had the dramatic temper, and the Irishman had the lyrical. I\nthink I should have said with Professor Ker, epical and romantic rather\nthan dramatic and lyrical, but his words, which have so great an\nauthority, mark the distinction very well, and not only between Irish\nand Norse, but between Irish and other un-Celtic literatures. The Irish\nstory-teller could not interest himself with an unbroken interest in the\nway men like himself burned a house, or won wives no more wonderful than\nthemselves. His mind constantly escaped out of daily circumstance, as a\nbough that has been held down by a weak hand suddenly straightens itself\nout. His imagination was always running to Tir-nan-og, to the Land of\nPromise, which is as near to the country-people of to-day as it was to\nCuchulain and his companions. His belief in its nearness, cherished in\nits turn the lyrical temper, which is always athirst for an emotion, a\nbeauty which cannot be found in its perfection upon earth, or only for a\nmoment. His imagination, which had not been able to believe in\nCuchulain's greatness, until it had brought the Great Queen, the\nred-eyebrowed goddess, to woo him upon the battlefield, could not be\nsatisfied with a friendship less romantic and lyrical than that of\nCuchulain and Ferdiad, who kissed one another after the day's fighting,\nor with a love less romantic and lyrical than that of Baile and Aillinn,\nwho died at the report of one another's deaths, and married in\nTir-nan-og. His art, too, is often at its greatest when it is most\nextravagant, for he only feels himself among solid things, among things\nwith fixed laws and satisfying purposes, when he has reshaped the world\naccording to his heart's desire. He understands as well as Blake that\nthe ruins of time build mansions in eternity, and he never allows\nanything, that we can see and handle, to remain long unchanged. The\ncharacters must remain the same, but the strength of Fergus may change\nso greatly, that he, who a moment before was merely a strong man among\nmany, becomes the master of Three Blows that would destroy an army, did\nthey not cut off the heads of three little hills instead, and his sword,\nwhich a fool had been able to steal out of its sheath, has of a sudden\nthe likeness of a rainbow. A wandering lyric moon must knead and kindle\nperpetually that moving world of cloaks made out of the fleeces of\nMananan; of armed men who change themselves into sea-birds; of\ngoddesses who become crows; of trees that bear fruit and flower at the\nsame time. The great emotions of love, terror and friendship must alone\nremain untroubled by the moon in that world which is still the world of\nthe Irish country-people, who do not open their eyes very wide at the\nmost miraculous change, at the most sudden enchantment. Its events, and\nthings, and people are wild, and are like unbroken horses, that are so\nmuch more beautiful than horses that have learned to run between shafts.\nOne thinks of actual life, when one reads those Norse stories, which had\nshadows of their decadence, so necessary were the proportions of actual\nlife to their efforts, when a dying man remembered his heroism enough to\nlook down at his wound and say, 'Those broad spears are coming into\nfashion'; but the Irish stories make us understand why some Greek writer\ncalled myths the activities of the daemons. The great virtues, the great\njoys, the great privations, come in the myths, and, as it were, take\nmankind between their naked arms, and without putting off their\ndivinity. Poets have chosen their themes more often from stories that\nare all, or half, mythological, than from history or stories that give\none the sensation of history, understanding, as I think, that the\nimagination which remembers the proportions of life is but a long\nwooing, and that it has to forget them before it becomes the torch and\nthe marriage-bed.\n\nOne finds, as one expects, in the work of men who were not troubled\nabout any probabilities or necessities but those of emotion itself, an\nimmense variety of incident and character and of ways of expressing\nemotion. Cuchulain fights man after man during the quest of the Brown\nBull, and not one of those fights is like another, and not one is\nlacking in emotion or strangeness; and when one thinks imagination can\ndo no more, the story of the Two Bulls, emblematic of all contests,\nsuddenly lifts romance into prophecy. The characters too have a\ndistinctness we do not find among the people of the _Mabinogion_,\nperhaps not even among the people of the _Morte D'Arthur_. We know we\nshall be long forgetting Cuchulain, whose life is vehement and full of\npleasure, as though he always remembered that it was to be soon over; or\nthe dreamy Fergus who betrays the sons of Usnach for a feast, without\nceasing to be noble; or Conal who is fierce and friendly and\ntrustworthy, but has not the sap of divinity that makes Cuchulain\nmysterious to men, and beloved of women. Women indeed, with their\nlamentations for lovers and husbands and sons, and for fallen rooftrees\nand lost wealth, give the stories their most beautiful sentences; and,\nafter Cuchulain, one thinks most of certain great queens--of angry,\namorous Maeve, with her long, pale face; of Findabair, her daughter, who\ndies of shame and of pity; of Deirdre, who might be some mild modern\nhousewife but for her prophetic wisdom. If one does not set Deirdre's\nlamentations among the greatest lyric poems of the world, I think one\nmay be certain that the wine-press of the poets has been trodden for one\nin vain; and yet I think it may be proud Emer, Cuchulain's fitting\nwife, who will linger longest in the memory. What a pure flame burns in\nher always, whether she is the newly-married wife fighting for\nprecedence, fierce as some beautiful bird, or the confident housewife,\nwho would awaken her husband from his magic sleep with mocking words; or\nthe great queen who would get him out of the tightening net of his doom,\nby sending him into the Valley of the Deaf, with Niamh, his mistress,\nbecause he will be more obedient to her; or the woman whom sorrow has\nset with Helen and Iseult and Brunnhilda, and Deirdre, to share their\nimmortality in the rosary of the poets.\n\n\"And oh! my love!\" she said, \"we were often in one another's company,\nand it was happy for us; for if the world had been searched from the\nrising of the sun to sunset, the like would never have been found in one\nplace, of the Black Sainglain and the Grey of Macha, and Laeg the\nchariot-driver, and myself and Cuchulain.\"\n\n'And after that Emer bade Conal to make a wide, very deep grave for\nCuchulain; and she laid herself down beside her gentle comrade, and she\nput her mouth to his mouth, and she said: \"Love of my life, my friend,\nmy sweetheart, my one choice of the men of the earth, many is the woman,\nwed or unwed, envied me until to-day; and now I will not stay living\nafter you.\"'\n\nTo us Irish, these personages should be very moving, very important, for\nthey lived in the places where we ride and go marketing, and sometimes\nthey have met one another on the hills that cast their shadows upon our\ndoors at evening. If we will but tell these stories to our children the\nLand will begin again to be a Holy Land, as it was before men gave their\nhearts to Greece and Rome and Judea. When I was a child I had only to\nclimb the hill behind the house to see long, blue, ragged hills flowing\nalong the southern horizon. What beauty was lost to me, what depth of\nemotion is still perhaps lacking in me, because nobody told me, not even\nthe merchant captains who knew everything, that Cruachan of the\nEnchantments lay behind those long, blue, ragged hills!\n\n\nII\n\nFION AND HIS CYCLE\n\nA few months ago I was on the bare Hill of Allen, 'wide Almhuin of\nLeinster,' where Finn and the Fianna are said to have had their house,\nalthough there are no earthen mounds there like those that mark the\nsites of old houses on so many hills. A hot sun beat down upon flowering\ngorse and flowerless heather; and on every side except the east, where\nthere were green trees and distant hills, one saw a level horizon and\nbrown boglands with a few green places and here and there the glitter of\nwater. One could imagine that had it been twilight and not early\nafternoon, and had there been vapours drifting and frothing where there\nwere now but shadows of clouds, it would have set stirring in one, as\nfew places even in Ireland can, a thought that is peculiar to Celtic\nromance, as I think, a thought of a mystery coming not as with Gothic\nnations out of the pressure of darkness, but out of great spaces and\nwindy light. The hill of Teamhair, or Tara, as it is now called, with\nits green mounds and its partly-wooded sides, and its more gradual slope\nset among fat grazing lands, with great trees in the hedgerows, had\nbrought before one imaginations, not of heroes who were in their youth\nfor hundreds of years, or of women who came to them in the likeness of\nhunted fawns, but of kings that lived brief and politic lives, and of\nthe five white roads that carried their armies to the lesser kingdoms of\nIreland, or brought to the great fair that had given Teamhair its\nsovereignty all that sought justice or pleasure or had goods to barter.\n\nIt is certain that we must not confuse these kings, as did the medieval\nchroniclers, with those half-divine kings of Almhuin. The chroniclers,\nperhaps because they loved tradition too well to cast out utterly much\nthat they dreaded as Christians, and perhaps because popular imagination\nhad begun the mixture, have mixed one with another ingeniously, making\nFinn the head of a kind of Militia under Cormac MacArt, who is supposed\nto have reigned at Teamhair in the second century, and making Grania,\nwho travels to enchanted houses under the cloak of AEngus, god of Love,\nand keeps her troubling beauty longer than did Helen hers, Cormac's\ndaughter, and giving the stories of the Fianna, although the impossible\nhas thrust its proud finger into them all, a curious air of precise\nhistory. It is only when we separate the stories from that medieval\npedantry, that we recognise one of the oldest worlds that man has\nimagined, an older world certainly than we find in the stories of\nCuchulain, who lived, according to the chroniclers, about the time of\nthe birth of Christ. They are far better known, and we may be certain of\nthe antiquity of incidents that are known in one form or another to\nevery Gaelic-speaking countryman in Ireland or in the Highlands of\nScotland. Sometimes a labourer digging near to a cromlech, or Bed of\nDiarmuid and Grania as it is called, will tell you a tradition that\nseems older and more barbaric than any description of their adventures\nor of themselves in written text or in story that has taken form in the\nmouths of professed story-tellers. Finn and the Fianna found welcome\namong the court poets later than did Cuchulain; and one finds memories\nof Danish invasions and standing armies mixed with the imaginations of\nhunters and solitary fighters among great woods. We never hear of\nCuchulain delighting in the hunt or in woodland things; and one imagines\nthat the story-teller would have thought it unworthy in so great a man,\nwho lived a well-ordered, elaborate life, and could delight in his\nchariot and his chariot-driver and his barley-fed horses. If he is in\nthe woods before dawn we are not told that he cannot know the leaves of\nthe hazel from the leaves of the oak; and when Emer laments him no wild\ncreature comes into her thoughts but the cuckoo that cries over\ncultivated fields. His story must have come out of a time when the wild\nwood was giving way to pasture and tillage, and men had no longer a\nreason to consider every cry of the birds or change of the night. Finn,\nwho was always in the woods, whose battles were but hours amid years of\nhunting, delighted in the 'cackling of ducks from the Lake of the Three\nNarrows; the scolding talk of the blackbird of Doire an Cairn; the\nbellowing of the ox from the Valley of the Berries; the whistle of the\neagle from the Valley of Victories or from the rough branches of the\nRidge of the Stream; the grouse of the heather of Cruachan; the call of\nthe otter of Druim re Coir.' When sorrow comes upon the queens of the\nstories, they have sympathy for the wild birds and beasts that are like\nthemselves: 'Credhe wife of Cael came with the others and went looking\nthrough the bodies for her comely comrade, and crying as she went. And\nas she was searching she saw a crane of the meadows and her two\nnestlings, and the cunning beast the fox watching the nestlings; and\nwhen the crane covered one of the birds to save it, he would make a rush\nat the other bird, the way she had to stretch herself out over the\nbirds; and she would sooner have got her own death by the fox than the\nnestlings to be killed by him. And Credhe was looking at that, and she\nsaid: \"It is no wonder I to have such love for my comely sweetheart, and\nthe bird in that distress about her nestlings.\"'\n\nOne often hears of a horse that shivers with terror, or of a dog that\nhowls at something a man's eyes cannot see, and men who live primitive\nlives where instinct does the work of reason are fully conscious of many\nthings that we cannot perceive at all. As life becomes more orderly,\nmore deliberate, the supernatural world sinks farther away. Although the\ngods come to Cuchulain, and although he is the son of one of the\ngreatest of them, their country and his are far apart, and they come to\nhim as god to mortal; but Finn is their equal. He is continually in\ntheir houses; he meets with Bodb Dearg, and AEngus, and Mananan, now as\nfriend with friend, now as with an enemy he overcomes in battle; and\nwhen he has need of their help his messenger can say: 'There is not a\nking's son or a prince, or a leader of the Fianna of Ireland, without\nhaving a wife or a mother or a foster-mother or a sweetheart of the\nTuatha de Danaan.' When the Fianna are broken up at last, after hundreds\nof years of hunting, it is doubtful that he dies at all, and certain\nthat he comes again in some other shape, and Oisin, his son, is made\nking over a divine country. The birds and beasts that cross his path in\nthe woods have been fighting-men or great enchanters or fair women, and\nin a moment can take some beautiful or terrible shape. We think of him\nand of his people as great-bodied men with large movements, that seem,\nas it were, flowing out of some deep below the shallow stream of\npersonal impulse, men that have broad brows and quiet eyes full of\nconfidence in a good luck that proves every day afresh that they are a\nportion of the strength of things. They are hardly so much individual\nmen as portions of universal nature, like the clouds that shape\nthemselves and reshape themselves momentarily, or like a bird between\ntwo boughs, or like the gods that have given the apples and the nuts;\nand yet this but brings them the nearer to us, for we can remake them in\nour image when we will, and the woods are the more beautiful for the\nthought. Do we not always fancy hunters to be something like this, and\nis not that why we think them poetical when we meet them of a sudden, as\nin these lines in _Pauline_?\n\n                    'An old hunter\n  Talking with gods; or a high-crested chief\n  Sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos.'\n\nOne must not expect in these stories the epic lineaments, the many\nincidents woven into one great event of, let us say, the story of the\nWar for the Brown Bull of Cuailgne, or that of the last gathering at\nMuirthemne. Even _Diarmuid and Grania_, which is a long story, has\nnothing of the clear outlines of _Deirdre_, and is indeed but a\nsuccession of detached episodes. The men who imagined the Fianna had the\nimagination of children, and as soon as they had invented one wonder,\nheaped another on top of it. Children--or, at any rate, it is so I\nremember my own childhood--do not understand large design, and they\ndelight in little shut-in places where they can play at houses more than\nin great expanses where a country-side takes, as it were, the impression\nof a thought. The wild creatures and the green things are more to them\nthan to us, for they creep towards our light by little holes and\ncrevices. When they imagine a country for themselves it is always a\ncountry where you can wander without aim, and where you can never know\nfrom one place what another will be like, or know from the one day's\nadventure what may meet you with to-morrow's sun.\n\nChildren play at being great and wonderful people, at the ambitions they\nwill put away for one reason or another before they grow into ordinary\nmen and women. Mankind as a whole had a like dream once; everybody and\nnobody built up the dream bit by bit, and the ancient story-tellers are\nthere to make us remember what mankind would have been like, had not\nfear and the failing will and the laws of nature tripped up its heels.\nThe Fianna and their like are themselves so full of power, and they are\nset in a world so fluctuating and dreamlike, that nothing can hold them\nfrom being all that the heart desires.\n\nI have read in a fabulous book that Adam had but to imagine a bird and\nit was born into life, and that he created all things out of himself by\nnothing more important than an unflagging fancy; and heroes who can make\na ship out of a shaving have but little less of the divine prerogatives.\nThey have no speculative thoughts to wander through eternity and waste\nheroic blood; but how could that be otherwise? for it is at all times\nthe proud angels who sit thinking upon the hill-side and not the people\nof Eden. One morning we meet them hunting a stag that is 'as joyful as\nthe leaves of a tree in summertime'; and whatever they do, whether they\nlisten to the harp or follow an enchanter over-sea, they do for the sake\nof joy, their joy in one another, or their joy in pride and movement;\nand even their battles are fought more because of their delight in a\ngood fighter than because of any gain that is in victory. They live\nalways as if they were playing a game; and so far as they have any\ndeliberate purpose at all, it is that they may become great gentlemen\nand be worthy of the songs of the poets. It has been said, and I think\nthe Japanese were the first to say it, that the four essential virtues\nare to be generous among the weak, and truthful among one's friends, and\nbrave among one's enemies, and courteous at all times; and if we\nunderstand by courtesy not merely the gentleness the story-tellers have\ncelebrated, but a delight in courtly things, in beautiful clothing and\nin beautiful verse, one understands that it was no formal succession of\ntrials that bound the Fianna to one another. Only the Table Round, that\nis indeed, as it seems, a rivulet from the same well-head, is bound in a\nlike fellowship, and there the four heroic virtues are troubled by the\nabstract virtues of the cloister. Every now and then some noble knight\nbuilds a cell upon the hill-side, or leaves kind women and joyful\nknights to seek the vision of the Grail in lonely adventures. But when\nOisin or some kingly forerunner--Bran, son of Febal, or the like--rides\nor sails in an enchanted ship to some divine country, he but looks for a\nmore delighted companionship, or to be in love with faces that will\nnever fade. No thought of any life greater than that of love, and the\ncompanionship of those that have drawn their swords upon the darkness of\nthe world, ever troubles their delight in one another as it troubles\nIseult amid her love, or Arthur amid his battles. It is an ailment of\nour speculation that thought, when it is not the planning of something,\nor the doing of something, or some memory of a plain circumstance,\nseparates us from one another because it makes us always more unlike,\nand because no thought passes through another's ear unchanged.\nCompanionship can only be perfect when it is founded on things, for\nthings are always the same under the hand, and at last one comes to hear\nwith envy the voices of boys lighting a lantern to ensnare moths, or of\nthe maids chattering in the kitchen about the fox that carried off a\nturkey before breakfast. Lady Gregory's book of tales is full of\nfellowship untroubled like theirs, and made noble by a courtesy that has\ngone perhaps out of the world. I do not know in literature better\nfriends and lovers. When one of the Fianna finds Osgar dying the proud\ndeath of a young man, and asks is it well with him, he is answered, 'I\nam as you would have me be.' The very heroism of the Fianna is indeed\nbut their pride and joy in one another, their good fellowship. Goll, old\nand savage, and letting himself die of hunger in a cave because he is\nangry and sorry, can speak lovely words to the wife whose help he\nrefuses. 'It is best as it is,' he said, 'and I never took the advice of\na woman east or west, and I never will take it. And oh, sweet-voiced\nqueen,' he said, 'what ails you to be fretting after me? And remember\nnow your silver and your gold, and your silks ... and do not be crying\ntears after me, queen with the white hands,' he said, 'but remember your\nconstant lover Aodh, son of the best woman of the world, that came from\nSpain asking for you, and that I fought on Corcar-an-Dearg; and go to\nhim now,' he said, 'for it is bad when a woman is without a good man.'\n\nThey have no asceticism, but they are more visionary than any ascetic,\nand their invisible life is but the life about them made more perfect\nand more lasting, and the invisible people are their own images in the\nwater. Their gods may have been much besides this, for we know them from\nfragments of mythology picked out with trouble from a fantastic history\nrunning backward to Adam and Eve, and many things that may have seemed\nwicked to the monks who imagined that history, may have been altered or\nleft out; but this they must have been essentially, for the old stories\nare confirmed by apparitions among the country-people to-day. The Men of\nDea fought against the mis-shapen Fomor, as Finn fights against the\nCat-Heads and the Dog-Heads; and when they are overcome at last by men,\nthey make themselves houses in the hearts of hills that are like the\nhouses of men. When they call men to their houses and to their Country\nUnder-Wave they promise them all that they have upon earth, only in\ngreater abundance. The god Midhir sings to Queen Etain in one of the\nmost beautiful of the stories: 'The young never grow old; the fields and\nthe flowers are as pleasant to be looking at as the blackbird's eggs;\nwarm streams of mead and wine flow through that country; there is no\ncare or no sorrow on any person; we see others, but we ourselves are not\nseen.' These gods are indeed more wise and beautiful than men; but men,\nwhen they are great men, are stronger than they are, for men are, as it\nwere, the foaming tide-line of their sea. One remembers the Druid who\nanswered, when someone asked him who made the world, 'The Druids made\nit.' All was indeed but one life flowing everywhere, and taking one\nquality here, another there. It sometimes seems as if there is a kind of\nday and night of religion, and that a period when the influences are\nthose that shape the world is followed by a period when the greater\npower is in influences that would lure the soul out of the world, out of\nthe body. When Oisin is speaking with St. Patrick of the friends and the\nlife he has outlived, he can but cry out constantly against a religion\nthat has no meaning for him. He laments, and the country-people have\nremembered his words for centuries: 'I will cry my fill, but not for\nGod, but because Finn and the Fianna are not living.'\n\nOld writers had an admirable symbolism that attributed certain energies\nto the influence of the sun, and certain others to the lunar influence.\nTo lunar influence belong all thoughts and emotions that were created by\nthe community, by the common people, by nobody knows who, and to the sun\nall that came from the high disciplined or individual kingly mind. I\nmyself imagine a marriage of the sun and moon in the arts I take most\npleasure in; and now bride and bridegroom but exchange, as it were, full\ncups of gold and silver, and now they are one in a mystical embrace.\nFrom the moon come the folk-songs imagined by reapers and spinners out\nof the common impulse of their labour, and made not by putting words\ntogether, but by mixing verses and phrases, and the folk-tales made by\nthe capricious mixing of incidents known to everybody in new ways, as\none deals out cards, never getting the same hand twice over. When one\nhears some fine story, one never knows whether it has not been hazard\nthat put the last touch of adventure. Such poetry, as it seems to me,\ndesires an infinity of wonder or emotion, for where there is no\nindividual mind there is no measurer-out, no marker-in of limits. The\npoor fisher has no possession of the world and no responsibility for it;\nand if he dreams of a love-gift better than the brown shawl that seems\ntoo common for poetry, why should he not dream of a glove made from the\nskin of a bird, or shoes made from the skin of a herring, or a coat made\nfrom the glittering garment of the salmon? Was it not AEschylus who said\nhe but served up fragments from the banquet of Homer?--but Homer\nhimself found the great banquet of an earthen floor and under a broken\nroof. We do not know who at the foundation of the world made the banquet\nfor the first time, or who put the pack of cards into rough hands; but\nwe do know that, unless those that have made many inventions are about\nto change the nature of poetry, we may have to go where Homer went if we\nare to sing a new song. Is it because all that is under the moon thirsts\nto escape out of bounds, to lose itself in some unbounded tidal stream,\nthat the songs of the folk are mournful, and that the story of the\nFianna, whenever the queens lament for their lovers, reminds us of songs\nthat are still sung in country-places? Their grief, even when it is to\nbe brief like Grania's, goes up into the waste places of the sky. But in\nsupreme art, or in supreme life there is the influence of the sun too,\nand the sun brings with it, as old writers tell us, not merely\ndiscipline but joy; for its discipline is not of the kind the multitudes\nimpose upon us by their weight and pressure, but the expression of the\nindividual soul, turning itself into a pure fire and imposing its own\npattern, its own music, upon the heaviness and the dumbness that is in\nothers and in itself. When we have drunk the cold cup of the moon's\nintoxication, we thirst for something beyond ourselves, and the mind\nflows outward to a natural immensity; but if we have drunk from the hot\ncup of the sun, our own fulness awakens, we desire little, for wherever\none goes one's heart goes too; and if any ask what music is the\nsweetest, we can but answer, as Finn answered, 'What happens.' And yet\nthe songs and stories that have come from either influence are a part,\nneither less than the other, of the pleasure that is the bride-bed of\npoetry.\n\nGaelic-speaking Ireland, because its art has been made, not by the\nartist choosing his material from wherever he has a mind to, but by\nadding a little to something which it has taken generations to invent,\nhas always had a popular literature. We cannot say how much that\nliterature has done for the vigour of the race, for who can count the\nhands its praise of kings and high-hearted queens made hot upon the\nsword-hilt, or the amorous eyes it made lustful for strength and beauty?\nWe remember indeed that when the farming people and the labourers of the\ntowns made their last attempt to cast out England by force of arms they\nnamed themselves after the companions of Finn. Even when Gaelic has gone\nand the poetry with it, something of the habit of mind remains in ways\nof speech and thought and 'come-all-ye's' and poetical sayings; nor is\nit only among the poor that the old thought has been for strength or\nweakness. Surely these old stories, whether of Finn or Cuchulain, helped\nto sing the old Irish and the old Norman-Irish aristocracy to their end.\nThey heard their hereditary poets and story-tellers, and they took to\nhorse and died fighting against Elizabeth or against Cromwell; and when\nan English-speaking aristocracy had their place, it listened to no\npoetry indeed, but it felt about it in the popular mind an exacting and\nancient tribunal, and began a play that had for spectators men and\nwomen that loved the high wasteful virtues. I do not think that their\nown mixed blood or the habit of their time need take all, or nearly all,\ncredit or discredit for the impulse that made those gentlemen of the\neighteenth century fight duels over pocket-handkerchiefs, and set out to\nplay ball against the gates of Jerusalem for a wager, and scatter money\nbefore the public eye; and at last, after an epoch of such eloquence the\nworld has hardly seen its like, lose their public spirit and their high\nheart, and grow querulous and selfish, as men do who have played life\nout not heartily but with noise and tumult. Had they known the people\nand the game a little better, they might have created an aristocracy in\nan age that has lost the understanding of the word. When one reads of\nthe Fianna, or of Cuchulain, or of any of their like, one remembers that\nthe fine life is always a part played finely before fine spectators.\nThere also one notices the hot cup and the cold cup of intoxication; and\nwhen the fine spectators have ended, surely the fine players grow\nweary, and aristocratic life is ended. When O'Connell covered with a\ndark glove the hand that had killed a man in the duelling-field, he\nplayed his part; and when Alexander stayed his army marching to the\nconquest of the world that he might contemplate the beauty of a\nplane-tree, he played his part. When Osgar complained as he lay dying of\nthe keening of the women and the old fighting-men, he too played his\npart; 'No man ever knew any heart in me,' he said, 'but a heart of\ntwisted horn, and it covered with iron; but the howling of the dogs\nbeside me,' he said, 'and the keening of the old fighting-men and the\ncrying of the women one after another, those are the things that are\nvexing me.' If we would create a great community--and what other game is\nso worth the labour?--we must re-create the old foundations of life, not\nas they existed in that splendid misunderstanding of the eighteenth\ncentury, but as they must always exist when the finest minds and Ned the\nbeggar and Seaghan the fool think about the same thing, although they\nmay not think the same thought about it.\n\nWhen I asked the little boy who had shown me the pathway up the Hill of\nAllen if he knew stories of Finn and Oisin, he said he did not, but that\nhe had often heard his grandfather telling them to his mother in Irish.\nHe did not know Irish, but he was learning it at school, and all the\nlittle boys he knew were learning it. In a little while he will know\nenough stories of Finn and Oisin to tell them to his children some day.\nIt is the owners of the land whose children might never have known what\nwould give them so much happiness. But now they can read Lady Gregory's\nbook to their children, and it will make Slieve-na-man, Allen, and\nBenbulben, the great mountain that showed itself before me every day\nthrough all my childhood and was yet unpeopled, and half the\ncountry-sides of south and west, as populous with memories as her\nCuchulain of Muirthemne will have made Dundealgan and Emain Macha and\nMuirthemne; and after a while somebody may even take them to some\nfamous place and say, 'This land where your fathers lived proudly and\nfinely should be dear and dear and again dear;' and perhaps when many\nnames have grown musical to their ears, a more imaginative love will\nhave taught them a better service.\n\n\nIII\n\nI praise but in brief words the noble writing of these books, for words\nthat praise a book, wherein something is done supremely well, remain, to\nsound in the ears of a later generation, like the foolish sound of\nchurch bells from the tower of a church when every pew is full.\n\n1903.\n\n\n\n\nPREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION OF THE WELL OF THE SAINTS\n\n\nSix years ago I was staying in a students' hotel in the Latin Quarter,\nand somebody, whose name I cannot recollect, introduced me to an\nIrishman, who, even poorer than myself, had taken a room at the top of\nthe house. It was J. M. Synge, and I, who thought I knew the name of\nevery Irishman who was working at literature, had never heard of him. He\nwas a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, too, and Trinity College does\nnot, as a rule, produce artistic minds. He told me that he had been\nliving in France and Germany, reading French and German Literature, and\nthat he wished to become a writer. He had, however, nothing to show but\none or two poems and impressionistic essays, full of that kind of\nmorbidity that has its root in too much brooding over methods of\nexpression, and ways of looking upon life, which come, not out of life,\nbut out of literature, images reflected from mirror to mirror. He had\nwandered among people whose life is as picturesque as the middle ages,\nplaying his fiddle to Italian sailors, and listening to stories in\nBavarian woods, but life had cast no light into his writings. He had\nlearned Irish years ago, but had begun to forget it, for the only\nlanguage that interested him was that conventional language of modern\npoetry which has begun to make us all weary. I was very weary of it, for\nI had finished _The Secret Rose_, and felt how it had separated my\nimagination from life, sending my Red Hanrahan, who should have trodden\nthe same roads with myself, into some undiscoverable country. I said,\n'Give up Paris, you will never create anything by reading Racine, and\nArthur Symons will always be a better critic of French literature. Go to\nthe Arran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people\nthemselves; express a life that has never found expression.' I had just\ncome from Arran, and my imagination was full of those grey islands\nwhere men must reap with knives because of the stones.\n\nHe went to Arran and became a part of its life, living upon salt fish\nand eggs, talking Irish for the most part, but listening also to the\nbeautiful English which has grown up in Irish-speaking districts, and\ntakes its vocabulary from the time of Malory and of the translators of\nthe Bible, but its idiom and its vivid metaphor from Irish. When Mr.\nSynge began to write in this language, Lady Gregory had already used it\nfinely in her translations of Dr. Hyde's lyrics and plays, or of old\nIrish literature, but she had listened with different ears. He made his\nown selection of word and phrase, choosing what would express his own\npersonality. Above all, he made word and phrase dance to a very strange\nrhythm, which will always, till his plays have created their own\ntradition, be difficult to actors who have not learned it from his lips.\nIt is essential, for it perfectly fits the drifting emotion, the\ndreaminess, the vague yet measureless desire, for which he would create\na dramatic form. It blurs definition, clear edges, everything that\ncomes from the will, it turns imagination from all that is of the\npresent, like a gold background in a religious picture, and it\nstrengthens in every emotion whatever comes to it from far off, from\nbrooding memory and dangerous hope. When he brought _The Shadow of the\nGlen_, his first play, to the Irish National Theatre Society, the\nplayers were puzzled by the rhythm, but gradually they became certain\nthat his woman of the glens, as melancholy as a curlew, driven to\ndistraction by her own sensitiveness, her own fineness, could not speak\nwith any other tongue, that all his people would change their life if\nthe rhythm changed. Perhaps no Irish countryman had ever that exact\nrhythm in his voice, but certainly if Mr. Synge had been born a\ncountryman, he would have spoken like that. It makes the people of his\nimagination a little disembodied; it gives them a kind of innocence even\nin their anger and their cursing. It is part of its maker's attitude\ntowards the world, for while it makes the clash of wills among his\npersons indirect and dreamy, it helps him to see the subject-matter of\nhis art with wise, clear-seeing, unreflecting eyes; to preserve the\ninnocence of good art in an age of reasons and purposes. Whether he\nwrite of old beggars by the roadside, lamenting over the misery and\nugliness of life, or of an old Arran woman mourning her drowned sons, or\nof a young wife married to an old husband, he has no wish to change\nanything, to reform anything; all these people pass by as before an open\nwindow, murmuring strange, exciting words.\n\nIf one has not fine construction, one has not drama, but if one has not\nbeautiful or powerful and individual speech, one has not literature, or,\nat any rate, one has not great literature. Rabelais, Villon,\nShakespeare, William Blake, would have known one another by their\nspeech. Some of them knew how to construct a story, but all of them had\nabundant, resonant, beautiful, laughing, living speech. It is only the\nwriters of our modern dramatic movement, our scientific dramatists, our\nnaturalists of the stage, who have thought it possible to be like the\ngreatest, and yet to cast aside even the poor persiflage of the\ncomedians, and to write in the impersonal language that has come, not\nout of individual life, nor out of life at all, but out of necessities\nof commerce, of parliament, of board schools, of hurried journeys by\nrail.\n\nIf there are such things as decaying art and decaying institutions,\ntheir decay must begin when the element they receive into their care\nfrom the life of every man in the world, begins to rot. Literature\ndecays when it no longer makes more beautiful, or more vivid, the\nlanguage which unites it to all life, and when one finds the criticism\nof the student, and the purpose of the reformer, and the logic of the\nman of science, where there should have been the reveries of the common\nheart, ennobled into some raving Lear or unabashed Don Quixote. One must\nnot forget that the death of language, the substitution of phrases as\nnearly impersonal as algebra for words and rhythms varying from man to\nman, is but a part of the tyranny of impersonal things. I have been\nreading through a bundle of German plays, and have found everywhere a\ndesire not to express hopes and alarms common to every man that ever\ncame into the world, but politics or social passion, a veiled or open\npropaganda. Now it is duelling that has need of reproof; now it is the\nideas of an actress, returning from the free life of the stage, that\nmust be contrasted with the prejudice of an old-fashioned town; now it\nis the hostility of Christianity and Paganism in our own day that is to\nfind an obscure symbol in a bell thrown from its tower by spirits of the\nwood. I compare the work of these dramatists with the greater plays of\ntheir Scandinavian master, and remember that even he, who has made so\nmany clear-drawn characters, has made us no abundant character, no man\nof genius in whom we could believe, and that in him also, even when it\nis Emperor and Galilean that are face to face, even the most momentous\nfigures are subordinate to some tendency, to some movement, to some\ninanimate energy, or to some process of thought whose very logic has\nchanged it into mechanism--always to something other than human life.\n\nWe must not measure a young talent, whether we praise or blame, with\nthat of men who are among the greatest of our time, but we may say of\nany talent, following out a definition, that it takes up the tradition\nof great drama as it came from the hands of the masters who are\nacknowledged by all time, and turns away from a dramatic movement,\nwhich, though it has been served by fine talent, has been imposed upon\nus by science, by artificial life, by a passing order.\n\nWhen the individual life no longer delights in its own energy, when the\nbody is not made strong and beautiful by the activities of daily life,\nwhen men have no delight in decorating the body, one may be certain that\none lives in a passing order, amid the inventions of a fading vitality.\nIf Homer were alive to-day, he would only resist, after a deliberate\nstruggle, the temptation to find his subject not in Helen's beauty,\nthat every man has desired, nor in the wisdom and endurance of Odysseus\nthat has been the desire of every woman that has come into the world,\nbut in what somebody would describe, perhaps, as 'the inevitable\ncontest,' arising out of economic causes, between the country-places and\nsmall towns on the one hand, and, upon the other, the great city of\nTroy, representing one knows not what 'tendency to centralisation.'\n\nMr. Synge has in common with the great theatre of the world, with that\nof Greece and that of India, with the creator of Falstaff, with Racine,\na delight in language, a preoccupation with individual life. He\nresembles them also by a preoccupation with what is lasting and noble,\nthat came to him, not as I think from books, but while he listened to\nold stories in the cottages, and contrasted what they remembered with\nreality. The only literature of the Irish country-people is their songs,\nfull often of extravagant love, and their stories of kings and of kings'\nchildren. 'I will cry my fill, but not for God, but because Finn and\nthe Fianna are not living,' says Oisin in the story. Every writer, even\nevery small writer, who has belonged to the great tradition, has had his\ndream of an impossibly noble life, and the greater he is, the more does\nit seem to plunge him into some beautiful or bitter reverie. Some, and\nof these are all the earliest poets of the world, gave it direct\nexpression; others mingle it so subtly with reality, that it is a day's\nwork to disentangle it; others bring it near by showing one whatever is\nmost its contrary. Mr. Synge, indeed, sets before us ugly, deformed or\nsinful people, but his people, moved by no practical ambition, are\ndriven by a dream of that impossible life. That we may feel how\nintensely his woman of the glen dreams of days that shall be entirely\nalive, she that is 'a hard woman to please' must spend her days between\na sour-faced old husband, a man who goes mad upon the hills, a craven\nlad and a drunken tramp; and those two blind people of _The Well of the\nSaints_ are so transformed by the dream, that they choose blindness\nrather than reality. He tells us of realities, but he knows that art has\nnever taken more than its symbols from anything that the eye can see or\nthe hand measure.\n\nIt is the preoccupation of his characters with their dream that gives\nhis plays their drifting movement, their emotional subtlety. In most of\nthe dramatic writing of our time, and this is one of the reasons why our\ndramatists do not find the need for a better speech, one finds a simple\nmotive lifted, as it were, into the full light of the stage. The\nordinary student of drama will not find anywhere in _The Well of the\nSaints_ that excitement of the will in the presence of attainable\nadvantages, which he is accustomed to think the natural stuff of drama,\nand if he see it played he will wonder why act is knitted to act so\nloosely, why it is all, as it were, flat, why there is so much leisure\nin the dialogue, even in the midst of passion. If he see the _Shadow of\nthe Glen_, he will ask, why does this woman go out of her house? Is it\nbecause she cannot help herself, or is she content to go? Why is it not\nall made clearer? And yet, like everybody when caught up into great\nevents, she does many things without being quite certain why she does\nthem. She hardly understands at moments why her action has a certain\nform, more clearly than why her body is tall or short, fair or brown.\nShe feels an emotion that she does not understand. She is driven by\ndesires that need for their expression, not 'I admire this man,' or 'I\nmust go, whether I will or no,' but words full of suggestion, rhythms of\nvoice, movements that escape analysis. In addition to all this, she has\nsomething that she shares with none but the children of one man's\nimagination. She is intoxicated by a dream which is hardly understood by\nherself, but possesses her like something half remembered on a sudden\nwakening.\n\nWhile I write, we are rehearsing _The Well of the Saints_, and are\npainting for it decorative scenery, mountains in one or two flat colours\nand without detail, ash trees and red salleys with something of\nrecurring pattern in their woven boughs. For though the people of the\nplay use no phrase they could not use in daily life, we know that we are\nseeking to express what no eye has ever seen.\n\nABBEY THEATRE, January 27, 1905.\n\n\n\n\nDISCOVERIES\n\n\nPROPHET, PRIEST AND KING\n\nThe little theatrical company I write my plays for had come to a west of\nIreland town, and was to give a performance in an old ball-room, for\nthere was no other room big enough. I went there from a neighbouring\ncountry-house, and, arriving a little before the players, tried to open\na window. My hands were black with dirt in a moment, and presently a\npane of glass and a part of the window-frame came out in my hands.\nEverything in this room was half in ruins, the rotten boards cracked\nunder my feet, and our new proscenium and the new boards of the platform\nlooked out of place, and yet the room was not really old, in spite of\nthe musicians' gallery over the stage. It had been built by some\nromantic or philanthropic landlord some three or four generations ago,\nand was a memory of we knew not what unfinished scheme.\n\nFrom there I went to look for the players, and called for information on\na young priest, who had invited them and taken upon himself the finding\nof an audience. He lived in a high house with other priests, and as I\nwent in I noticed with a whimsical pleasure a broken pane of glass in\nthe fanlight over the door, for he had once told me the story of an old\nwoman who a good many years ago quarrelled with the bishop, got drunk\nand hurled a stone through the painted glass. He was a clever man who\nread Meredith and Ibsen, but some of his books had been packed in the\nfire-grate by his housekeeper, instead of the customary view of an\nItalian lake or the coloured tissue-paper. The players, who had been\ngiving a performance in a neighbouring town, had not yet come, or were\nunpacking their costumes and properties at the hotel he had recommended\nthem. We should have time, he said, to go through the half-ruined town\nand to visit the convent schools and the cathedral, where, owing to his\ninfluence, two of our young Irish sculptors had been set to carve an\naltar and the heads of pillars. I had only heard of this work, and I\nfound its strangeness and simplicity--one of them had been Rodin's\npupil--could not make me forget the meretriciousness of the architecture\nand the commercial commonplace of the inlaid pavement. The new movement\nhad seized on the cathedral midway in its growth, and the worst of the\nold and the best of the new were side by side without any sign of\ntransition. The convent school was, as other like places have been to\nme,--a long room in a workhouse hospital at Portumna, in particular,--a\ndelight to the imagination and the eyes. A new floor had been put into\nsome ecclesiastical building and the light from a great mullioned\nwindow, cut off at the middle, fell aslant upon rows of clean and\nseemingly happy children. The nuns, who show in their own convents,\nwhere they can put what they like, a love of what is mean and pretty,\nmake beautiful rooms where the regulations compel them to do all with a\nfew colours and a few flowers. I think it was that day, but am not sure,\nthat I had lunch at a convent and told fairy stories to a couple of\nnuns, and I hope it was not mere politeness that made them seem to have\na child's interest in such things.\n\nA good many of our audience, when the curtain went up in the old\nball-room, were drunk, but all were attentive, for they had a great deal\nof respect for my friend, and there were other priests there. Presently\nthe man at the door opposite to the stage strayed off somewhere and I\ntook his place, and when boys came up offering two or three pence and\nasking to be let into the sixpenny seats, I let them join the melancholy\ncrowd. The play professed to tell of the heroic life of ancient Ireland,\nbut was really full of sedentary refinement and the spirituality of\ncities. Every emotion was made as dainty-footed and dainty-fingered as\nmight be, and a love and pathos where passion had faded into sentiment,\nemotions of pensive and harmless people, drove shadowy young men through\nthe shadows of death and battle. I watched it with growing rage. It was\nnot my own work, but I have sometimes watched my own work with a rage\nmade all the more salt in the mouth from being half despair. Why should\nwe make so much noise about ourselves and yet have nothing to say that\nwas not better said in that workhouse dormitory, where a few flowers and\na few coloured counterpanes and the coloured walls had made a severe and\ngracious beauty? Presently the play was changed and our comedian began\nto act a little farce, and when I saw him struggle to wake into laughter\nan audience out of whom the life had run as if it were water, I\nrejoiced, as I had over that broken window-pane. Here was something\nsecular, abounding, even a little vulgar, for he was gagging horribly,\ncondescending to his audience, though not without contempt.\n\nWe had supper in the priest's house, and a government official who had\ncome down from Dublin, partly out of interest in this attempt 'to\neducate the people,' and partly because it was his holiday and it was\nnecessary to go somewhere, entertained us with little jokes. Somebody,\nnot, I think, a priest, talked of the spiritual destiny of our race and\npraised the night's work, for the play was refined and the people really\nvery attentive, and he could not understand my discontent; but presently\nhe was silenced by the patter of jokes.\n\nI had my breakfast by myself the next morning, for the players had got\nup in the middle of the night and driven some ten miles to catch an\nearly train to Dublin, and were already on their way to their shops and\noffices. I had brought the visitors' book of the hotel, to turn over its\npages while waiting for my bacon and eggs, and found several pages full\nof obscenities, scrawled there some two or three weeks before, by Dublin\nvisitors, it seemed, for a notorious Dublin street was mentioned. Nobody\nhad thought it worth his while to tear out the page or blacken out the\nlines, and as I put the book away impressions that had been drifting\nthrough my mind for months rushed up into a single thought. 'If we poets\nare to move the people, we must reintegrate the human spirit in our\nimagination. The English have driven away the kings, and turned the\nprophets into demagogues, and you cannot have health among a people if\nyou have not prophet, priest and king.'\n\n\nPERSONALITY AND THE INTELLECTUAL ESSENCES\n\nMy work in Ireland has continually set this thought before me: 'How can\nI make my work mean something to vigorous and simple men whose attention\nis not given to art but to a shop, or teaching in a National School, or\ndispensing medicine?' I had not wanted to 'elevate them' or 'educate\nthem,' as these words are understood, but to make them understand my\nvision, and I had not wanted a large audience, certainly not what is\ncalled a national audience, but enough people for what is accidental and\ntemporary to lose itself in the lump. In England, where there have been\nso many changing activities and so much systematic education, one only\nescapes from crudities and temporary interests among students, but here\nthere is the right audience, could one but get its ears. I have always\ncome to this certainty: what moves natural men in the arts is what\nmoves them in life, and that is, intensity of personal life, intonations\nthat show them in a book or a play, the strength, the essential moment\nof a man who would be exciting in the market or at the dispensary door.\nThey must go out of the theatre with the strength they live by\nstrengthened with looking upon some passion that could, whatever its\nchosen way of life, strike down an enemy, fill a long stocking with\nmoney or move a girl's heart. They have not much to do with the\nspeculations of science, though they have a little, or with the\nspeculations of metaphysics, though they have a little. Their legs will\ntire on the road if there is nothing in their hearts but vague\nsentiment, and though it is charming to have an affectionate feeling\nabout flowers, that will not pull the cart out of the ditch. An exciting\nperson, whether the hero of a play or the maker of poems, will display\nthe greatest volume of personal energy, and this energy must seem to\ncome out of the body as out of the mind. We must say to ourselves\ncontinually when we imagine a character: 'Have I given him the roots,\nas it were, of all faculties necessary for life?' And only when one is\ncertain of that may one give him the one faculty that fills the\nimagination with joy. I even doubt if any play had ever a great\npopularity that did not use, or seem to use, the bodily energies of its\nprincipal actor to the full. Villon the robber could have delighted\nthese Irishmen with plays and songs, if he and they had been born to the\nsame traditions of word and symbol, but Shelley could not; and as men\ncame to live in towns and to read printed books and to have many\nspecialised activities, it has become more possible to produce Shelleys\nand less and less possible to produce Villons. The last Villon dwindled\ninto Robert Burns because the highest faculties had faded, taking the\nsense of beauty with them, into some sort of vague heaven and left the\nlower to lumber where they best could. In literature, partly from the\nlack of that spoken word which knits us to normal man, we have lost in\npersonality, in our delight in the whole man--blood, imagination,\nintellect, running together--but have found a new delight, in essences,\nin states of mind, in pure imagination, in all that comes to us most\neasily in elaborate music. There are two ways before literature--upward\ninto ever-growing subtlety, with Verhaeren, with Mallarme, with\nMaeterlinck, until at last, it may be, a new agreement among refined and\nstudious men gives birth to a new passion, and what seems literature\nbecomes religion; or downward, taking the soul with us until all is\nsimplified and solidified again. That is the choice of choices--the way\nof the bird until common eyes have lost us, or to the market carts; but\nwe must see to it that the soul goes with us, for the bird's song is\nbeautiful, and the traditions of modern imagination, growing always more\nmusical, more lyrical, more melancholy, casting up now a Shelley, now a\nSwinburne, now a Wagner, are, it may be, the frenzy of those that are\nabout to see what the magic hymn printed by the Abbe de Villars has\ncalled the Crown of Living and Melodious Diamonds. If the carts have\nhit our fancy we must have the soul tight within our bodies, for it has\ngrown so fond of a beauty accumulated by subtle generations that it will\nfor a long time be impatient with our thirst for mere force, mere\npersonality, for the tumult of the blood. If it begin to slip away we\nmust go after it, for Shelley's Chapel of the Morning Star is better\nthan Burns's beer-house--surely it was beer, not barleycorn--except at\nthe day's weary end; and it is always better than that uncomfortable\nplace where there is no beer, the machine shop of the realists.\n\n\nTHE MUSICIAN AND THE ORATOR\n\nWalter Pater says music is the type of all the Arts, but somebody else,\nI forget now who, that oratory is their type. You will side with the one\nor the other according to the nature of your energy, and I in my present\nmood am all for the man who, with an average audience before him, uses\nall means of persuasion--stories, laughter, tears, and but so much music\nas he can discover on the wings of words. I would even avoid the\nconversation of the lovers of music, who would draw us into the\nimpersonal land of sound and colour, and I would have no one write with\na sonata in his memory. We may even speak a little evil of musicians,\nhaving admitted that they will see before we do that melodious crown. We\nmay remind them that the housemaid does not respect the piano-tuner as\nshe does the plumber, and of the enmity that they have aroused among all\npoets. Music is the most impersonal of things, and words the most\npersonal, and that is why musicians do not like words. They masticate\nthem for a long time, being afraid they would not be able to digest\nthem, and when the words are so broken and softened and mixed with\nspittle that they are not words any longer, they swallow them.\n\n\nA GUITAR PLAYER\n\nA girl has been playing on the guitar. She is pretty, and if I didn't\nlisten to her I could have watched her, and if I didn't watch her I\ncould have listened. Her voice, the movements of her body, the\nexpression of her face, all said the same thing. A player of a different\ntemper and body would have made all different, and might have been\ndelightful in some other way. A movement not of music only but of life\ncame to its perfection. I was delighted and I did not know why until I\nthought, 'That is the way my people, the people I see in the mind's eye,\nplay music, and I like it because it is all personal, as personal as\nVillon's poetry.' The little instrument is quite light, and the player\ncan move freely and express a joy that is not of the fingers and the\nmind only but of the whole being; and all the while her movements call\nup into the mind, so erect and natural she is, whatever is most\nbeautiful in her daily life. Nearly all the old instruments were like\nthat, even the organ was once a little instrument, and when it grew big\nour wise forefathers gave it to God in the cathedrals, where it befits\nHim to be everything. But if you sit at the piano, it is the piano, the\nmechanism, that is the important thing, and nothing of you means\nanything but your fingers and your intellect.\n\n\nTHE LOOKING-GLASS\n\nI have just been talking to a girl with a shrill monotonous voice and an\nabrupt way of moving. She is fresh from school, where they have taught\nher history and geography 'whereby a soul can be discerned,' but what is\nthe value of an education, or even in the long run of a science, that\ndoes not begin with the personality, the habitual self, and illustrate\nall by that? Somebody should have taught her to speak for the most part\non whatever note of her voice is most musical, and soften those harsh\nnotes by speaking, not singing, to some stringed instrument, taking note\nafter note and, as it were, caressing her words a little as if she loved\nthe sound of them, and have taught her after this some beautiful\npantomimic dance, till it had grown a habit to live for eye and ear. A\nwise theatre might make a training in strong and beautiful life the\nfashion, teaching before all else the heroic discipline of the\nlooking-glass, for is not beauty, even as lasting love, one of the most\ndifficult of the arts?\n\n\nTHE TREE OF LIFE\n\nWe artists have taken over-much to heart that old commandment about\nseeking after the Kingdom of Heaven. Verlaine told me that he had tried\nto translate '_In Memoriam_,' but could not because Tennyson was 'too\nnoble, too Anglais, and, when he should have been broken-hearted, had\nmany reminiscences.' About that time I found in some English review an\nessay of his on Shakespeare. 'I had once a fine Shakespeare,' he wrote,\nor some such words, 'but I have it no longer. I write from memory.' One\nwondered in what vicissitude he had sold it, and for what money; and an\nimage of the man rose in the imagination. To be his ordinary self as\nmuch as possible, not a scholar or even a reader, that was certainly his\npose; and in the lecture he gave at Oxford he insisted 'that the poet\nshould hide nothing of himself,' though he must speak it all with 'a\ncare of that dignity which should manifest itself, if not in the\nperfection of form, at all events with an invisible, insensible, but\neffectual endeavour after this lofty and severe quality, I was about to\nsay this virtue.' It was this feeling for his own personality, his\ndelight in singing his own life, even more than that life itself, which\nmade the generation I belong to compare him to Villon. It was not till\nafter his death that I understood the meaning his words should have had\nfor me, for while he lived I was interested in nothing but states of\nmind, lyrical moments, intellectual essences. I would not then have been\nas delighted as I am now by that guitar player, or as shocked as I am\nnow by that girl whose movements have grown abrupt, and whose voice has\ngrown harsh by the neglect of all but external activities. I had not\nlearned what sweetness, what rhythmic movement, there is in those who\nhave become the joy that is themselves. Without knowing it, I had come\nto care for nothing but impersonal beauty. I had set out on life with\nthe thought of putting my very self into poetry, and had understood\nthis as a representation of my own visions and an attempt to cut away\nthe non-essential, but as I imagined the visions outside myself my\nimagination became full of decorative landscape and of still life. I\nthought of myself as something unmoving and silent living in the middle\nof my own mind and body, a grain of sand in Bloomsbury or in Connacht\nthat Satan's watch fiends cannot find. Then one day I understood quite\nsuddenly, as the way is, that I was seeking something unchanging and\nunmixed and always outside myself, a Stone or an Elixir that was always\nout of reach, and that I myself was the fleeting thing that held out its\nhand. The more I tried to make my art deliberately beautiful, the more\ndid I follow the opposite of myself, for deliberate beauty is like a\nwoman always desiring man's desire. Presently I found that I entered\ninto myself and pictured myself and not some essence when I was not\nseeking beauty at all, but merely to lighten the mind of some burden of\nlove or bitterness thrown upon it by the events of life. We are only\npermitted to desire life, and all the rest should be our complaints or\nour praise of that exacting mistress who can awake our lips into song\nwith her kisses. But we must not give her all, we must deceive her a\nlittle at times, for, as Le Sage says in _Diable Boiteux_ the false\nlovers who do not become melancholy or jealous with honest passion have\nthe happiest mistresses and are rewarded the soonest and by the most\nbeautiful. Our deceit will give us style, mastery, that dignity, that\nlofty and severe quality Verlaine spoke of. To put it otherwise, we\nshould ascend out of common interests, the thoughts of the newspapers,\nof the marketplace, of men of science, but only so far as we can carry\nthe normal, passionate, reasoning self, the personality as a whole. We\nmust find some place upon the Tree of Life for the Phoenix nest, for\nthe passion that is exaltation and the negation of the will, for the\nwings that are always upon fire, set high that the forked branches may\nkeep it safe, yet low enough to be out of the little wind-tossed boughs,\nthe quivering of the twigs.\n\n\nTHE PRAISE OF OLD WIVES' TALES\n\nAN art may become impersonal because it has too much circumstance or too\nlittle, because the world is too little or too much with it, because it\nis too near the ground or too far up among the branches. I met an old\nman out fishing a year ago, who said to me, 'Don Quixote and Odysseus\nare always near to me'; that is true for me also, for even Hamlet and\nLear and Oedipus are more cloudy.[1] No playwright ever has made or\never will make a character that will follow us out of the theatre as Don\nQuixote follows us out of the book, for no playwright can be wholly\nepisodical, and when one constructs, bringing one's characters into\ncomplicated relations with one another, something impersonal comes into\nthe story. Society, fate, 'tendency,' something not quite human, begins\nto arrange the characters and to excite into action only so much of\ntheir humanity as they find it necessary to show to one another. The\ncommon heart will always love better the tales that have something of an\nold wives' tale and that look upon their hero from every side as if he\nalone were wonderful, as a child does with a new penny. In plays of a\ncomedy too extravagant to photograph life, or written in verse, the\nconstruction is of a necessity woven out of naked motives and passions,\nbut when an atmosphere of modern reality has to be built up as well, and\nthe tendency, or fate, or society has to be shown as it is about\nourselves, the characters grow fainter, and we have to read the book\nmany times or see the play many times before we can remember them. Even\nthen they are only possible in a certain drawing-room and among such and\nsuch people, and we must carry all that lumber in our heads. I thought\nTolstoi's 'War and Peace' the greatest story I had ever read, and yet it\nhas gone from me; even Lancelot, ever a shadow, is more visible in my\nmemory than all its substance.\n\n\nTHE PLAY OF MODERN MANNERS\n\nOf all artistic forms that have had a large share of the world's\nattention, the worst is the play about modern educated people. Except\nwhere it is superficial or deliberately argumentative it fills one's\nsoul with a sense of commonness as with dust. It has one mortal ailment.\nIt cannot become impassioned, that is to say, vital, without making\nsomebody gushing and sentimental. Educated and well-bred people do not\nwear their hearts upon their sleeves, and they have no artistic and\ncharming language except light persiflage and no powerful language at\nall, and when they are deeply moved they look silently into the\nfireplace. Again and again I have watched some play of this sort with\ngrowing curiosity through the opening scene. The minor people argue,\nchaff one another, hint sometimes at some deeper stream of life just as\nwe do in our houses, and I am content. But all the time I have been\nwondering why the chief character, the man who is to bear the burden of\nfate, is gushing, sentimental and quite without ideas. Then the great\nscene comes and I understand that he cannot be well-bred or\nself-possessed or intellectual, for if he were he would draw a chair to\nthe fire and there would be no duologue at the end of the third act.\nIbsen understood the difficulty and made all his characters a little\nprovincial that they might not put each other out of countenance, and\nmade a leading article sort of poetry, phrases about vine leaves and\nharps in the air it was possible to believe them using in their moments\nof excitement, and if the play needed more than that, they could always\ndo something stupid. They could go out and hoist a flag as they do at\nthe end of _Little Eyolf_. One only understands that this manner,\ndeliberately adopted one doubts not, had gone into his soul and filled\nit with dust, when one has noticed that he could no longer create a man\nof genius. The happiest writers are those that, knowing this form of\nplay to be slight and passing, keep to the surface, never showing\nanything but the arguments and the persiflage of daily observation, or\nnow and then, instead of the expression of passion, a stage picture, a\nman holding a woman's hand or sitting with his head in his hands in dim\nlight by the red glow of a fire. It was certainly an understanding of\nthe slightness of the form, of its incapacity for the expression of the\ndeeper sorts of passion, that made the French invent the play with a\nthesis, for where there is a thesis people can grow hot in argument,\nalmost the only kind of passion that displays itself in our daily life.\nThe novel of contemporary educated life is upon the other hand a\npermanent form because having the power of psychological description it\ncan follow the thought of a man who is looking into the grate.\n\n\nHAS THE DRAMA OF CONTEMPORARY LIFE A ROOT OF ITS OWN?\n\nIn watching a play about modern educated people, with its meagre\nlanguage and its action crushed into the narrow limits of possibility, I\nhave found myself constantly saying: 'Maybe it has its power to move,\nslight as that is, from being able to suggest fundamental contrasts and\npassions which romantic and poetical literature have shown to be\nbeautiful.' A man facing his enemies alone in a quarrel over the purity\nof the water in a Norwegian Spa and using no language but that of the\nnewspapers can call up into our minds, let us say, the passion of\nCoriolanus. The lovers and fighters of old imaginative literature are\nmore vivid experiences in the soul than anything but one's own ruling\npassion that is itself riddled by their thought as by lightning, and\neven two dumb figures on the roads can call up all that glory. Put the\nman who has no knowledge of literature before a play of this kind and he\nwill say, as he has said in some form or other in every age at the first\nshock of naturalism, 'What has brought me out to hear nothing but the\nwords we use at home when we are talking of the rates?' And he will\nprefer to it any play where there is visible beauty or mirth, where life\nis exciting, at high tide as it were. It is not his fault that he will\nprefer in all likelihood a worse play although its kind may be greater,\nfor we have been following the lure of science for generations and\nforgotten him and his. I come always back to this thought. There is\nsomething of an old wives' tale in fine literature. The makers of it are\nlike an old peasant telling stories of the great famine or the hangings\nof '98 or his own memories. He has felt something in the depth of his\nmind and he wants to make it as visible and powerful to our senses as\npossible. He will use the most extravagant words or illustrations if\nthey suit his purpose. Or he will invent a wild parable, and the more\nhis mind is on fire or the more creative it is, the less will he look\nat the outer world or value it for its own sake. It gives him metaphors\nand examples, and that is all. He is even a little scornful of it, for\nit seems to him while the fit is on that the fire has gone out of it and\nleft it but white ashes. I cannot explain it, but I am certain that\nevery high thing was invented in this way, between sleeping and waking,\nas it were, and that peering and peeping persons are but hawkers of\nstolen goods. How else could their noses have grown so ravenous or their\neyes so sharp?\n\n\nWHY THE BLIND MAN IN ANCIENT TIMES WAS MADE A POET\n\nA description in the Iliad or the Odyssey, unlike one in the AEneid or in\nmost modern writers, is the swift and natural observation of a man as he\nis shaped by life. It is a refinement of the primary hungers and has the\nleast possible of what is merely scholarly or exceptional. It is, above\nall, never too observant, too professional, and when the book is closed\nwe have had our energies enriched, for we have been in the mid-current.\nWe have never seen anything Odysseus could not have seen while his\nthought was of the Cyclops, or Achilles when Briseis moved him to\ndesire. In the art of the greatest periods there is something careless\nand sudden in all habitual moods though not in their expression, because\nthese moods are a conflagration of all the energies of active life. In\nprimitive times the blind man became a poet as he became a fiddler in\nour villages, because he had to be driven out of activities all his\nnature cried for before he could be contented with the praise of life.\nAnd often it is Villon or Verlaine with impediments plain to all, who\nsings of life with the ancient simplicity. Poets of coming days, when\nonce more it will be possible to write as in the great epochs, will\nrecognise that their sacrifice shall be to refuse what blindness and\nevil name, or imprisonment at the outsetting, denied to men who missed\nthereby the sting of a deliberate refusal. The poets of the ages of\nsilver need no refusal of life, the dome of many-coloured glass is\nalready shattered while they live. They look at life deliberately and as\nif from beyond life, and the greatest of them need suffer nothing but\nthe sadness that the saints have known. This is their aim, and their\ntemptation is not a passionate activity, but the approval of their\nfellows, which comes to them in full abundance only when they delight in\nthe general thoughts that hold together a cultivated middle-class, where\nirresponsibilities of position and poverty are lacking; the things that\nare more excellent among educated men who have political preoccupations,\nAugustus Caesar's affability, all that impersonal fecundity which muddies\nthe intellectual passions. Ben Jonson says in the 'Poetaster,' that even\nthe best of men without Promethean fire is but a hollow statue, and a\nstudious man will commonly forget after some forty winters that of a\ncertainty Promethean fire will burn somebody's fingers. It may happen\nthat poets will be made more often by their sins than by their virtues,\nfor general praise is unlucky, as the villages know, and not merely as I\nimagine--for I am superstitious about these things--because the praise\nof all but an equal enslaves and adds a pound to the ball at the ankle\nwith every compliment.\n\nAll energy that comes from the whole man is as irregular as the\nlightning, for the communicable and forecastable and discoverable is a\npart only, a hungry chicken under the breast of the pelican, and the\ntest of poetry is not in reason but in a delight not different from the\ndelight that comes to a man at the first coming of love into the heart.\nI knew an old man who had spent his whole life cutting hazel and privet\nfrom the paths, and in some seventy years he had observed little but had\nmany imaginations. He had never seen like a naturalist, never seen\nthings as they are, for his habitual mood had been that of a man stirred\nin his affairs; and Shakespeare, Tintoretto, though the times were\nrunning out when Tintoretto painted, nearly all the great men of the\nRenaissance, looked at the world with eyes like his. Their minds were\nnever quiescent, never as it were in a mood for scientific observations,\nalways an exaltation, never--to use known words--founded upon an\nelimination of the personal factor; and their attention and the\nattention of those they worked for dwelt constantly with what is present\nto the mind in exaltation. I am too modern fully to enjoy Tintoretto's\n'Creation of the Milky Way,' I cannot fix my thoughts upon that glowing\nand palpitating flesh intently enough to forget, as I can the\nmake-believe of a fairy tale, that heavy drapery hanging from a cloud,\nthough I find my pleasure in _King Lear_ heightened by the make-believe\nthat comes upon it all when the fool says: 'This prophecy Merlin shall\nmake, for I live before his time';--and I always find it quite natural,\nso little does logic in the mere circumstance matter in the finest art,\nthat Richard's and Richmond's tents should be side by side. I saw with\ndelight _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_ when Mr. Carr revived it, and\nfound it none the worse because the apprentice acted a whole play upon\nthe spur of the moment and without committing a line to heart. When Ben\nJonson's _Epicoene_ rammed a century of laughter into the two hours'\ntraffic, I found with amazement that almost every journalist had put\nlogic on the seat, where our lady imagination should pronounce that\nunjust and favouring sentence her woman's heart is ever plotting, and\nhad felt bound to cherish none but reasonable sympathies and to resent\nthe baiting of that grotesque old man. I have been looking over a book\nof engravings made in the eighteenth century from those wall-pictures\nof Herculaneum and Pompeii that were, it seems, the work of journeymen\ncopying from finer paintings, for the composition is always too good for\nthe execution. I find in great numbers an indifference to obvious logic,\nto all that the eye sees at common moments. Perseus shows Andromeda the\ndeath she lived by in a pool, and though the lovers are carefully drawn\nthe reflection is upside down that we may see it the better. There is\nhardly an old master who has not made known to us in some like way how\nlittle he cares for what every fool can see and every knave can praise.\nThe men who imagined the arts were not less superstitious in religion,\nunderstanding the spiritual relations, but not the mechanical, and\nfinding nothing that need strain the throat in those gnats the floods of\nNoah and Deucalion, and in Joshua's moon at Ascalon.\n\n\nCONCERNING SAINTS AND ARTISTS\n\nI took the Indian hemp with certain followers of St. Martin on the\nground floor of a house in the Latin Quarter. I had never taken it\nbefore, and was instructed by a boisterous young poet, whose English was\nno better than my French. He gave me a little pellet, if I am not\nforgetting, an hour before dinner, and another after we had dined\ntogether at some restaurant. As we were going through the streets to the\nmeeting-place of the Martinists, I felt suddenly that a cloud I was\nlooking at floated in an immense space, and for an instant my being\nrushed out, as it seemed, into that space with ecstasy. I was myself\nagain immediately, but the poet was wholly above himself, and presently\nhe pointed to one of the street lamps now brightening in the fading\ntwilight, and cried at the top of his voice, 'Why do you look at me with\nyour great eye?' There were perhaps a dozen people already much excited\nwhen we arrived; and after I had drunk some cups of coffee and eaten a\npellet or two more, I grew very anxious to dance, but did not, as I\ncould not remember any steps. I sat down and closed my eyes; but no, I\nhad no visions, nothing but a sensation of some dark shadow which seemed\nto be telling me that some day I would go into a trance and so out of my\nbody for a while, but not yet. I opened my eyes and looked at some red\nornament on the mantelpiece, and at once the room was full of harmonies\nof red, but when a blue china figure caught my eye the harmonies became\nblue upon the instant. I was puzzled, for the reds were all there,\nnothing had changed, but they were no longer important or harmonious;\nand why had the blues so unimportant but a moment ago become exciting\nand delightful? Thereupon it struck me that I was seeing like a painter,\nand that in the course of the evening everyone there would change\nthrough every kind of artistic perception.\n\nAfter a while a Martinist ran towards me with a piece of paper on which\nhe had drawn a circle with a dot in it, and pointing at it with his\nfinger he cried out, 'God, God!' Some immeasurable mystery had been\nrevealed, and his eyes shone; and at some time or other a lean and\nshabby man, with rather a distinguished face, showed me his horoscope\nand pointed with an ecstasy of melancholy at its evil aspects. The\nboisterous poet, who was an old eater of the Indian hemp, had told me\nthat it took one three months growing used to it, three months more\nenjoying it, and three months being cured of it. These men were in their\nsecond period; but I never forgot myself, never really rose above myself\nfor more than a moment, and was even able to feel the absurdity of that\ngaiety, an Herr Nordau among the men of genius, but one that was abashed\nat his own sobriety. The sky outside was beginning to grey when there\ncame a knocking at the window shutters. Somebody opened the window, and\na woman in evening dress, who was not a little bewildered to find so\nmany people, was helped down into the room. She had been at a students'\nball unknown to her husband, who was asleep overhead, and had thought to\nhave crept home unobserved, but for a confederate at the window. All\nthose talking or dancing men laughed in a dreamy way; and she,\nunderstanding that there was no judgment in the laughter of men that had\nno thought but of the spectacle of the world, blushed, laughed and\ndarted through the room and so upstairs. Alas that the hangman's rope\nshould be own brother to that Indian happiness that keeps alone, were it\nnot for some stray cactus, mother of as many dreams, immemorial\nimpartiality.\n\n\nTHE SUBJECT MATTER OF DRAMA\n\nI read this sentence a few days ago, or one like it, in an obituary of\nIbsen: 'Let nobody again go back to the old ballad material of\nShakespeare, to murders, and ghosts, for what interests us on the stage\nis modern experience and the discussion of our interests;' and in\nanother part of the article Ibsen was blamed because he had written of\nsuicides and in other ways made use of 'the morbid terror of death.'\nDramatic literature has for a long time been left to the criticism of\njournalists, and all these, the old stupid ones and the new clever ones,\nhave tried to impress upon it their absorption in the life of the\nmoment, their delight in obvious originality and in obvious logic, their\nshrinking from the ancient and insoluble. The writer I have quoted is\nmuch more than a journalist, but he has lived their hurried life, and\ninstinctively turns to them for judgment. He is not thinking of the\ngreat poets and painters, of the cloud of witnesses, who are there that\nwe may become, through our understanding of their minds, spectators of\nthe ages, but of this age. Drama is a means of expression, not a special\nsubject matter, and the dramatist is as free to choose where he has a\nmind to, as the poet of 'Endymion,' or as the painter of Mary Magdalene\nat the door of Simon the Pharisee. So far from the discussion of our\ninterests and the immediate circumstance of our life being the most\nmoving to the imagination, it is what is old and far off that stirs us\nthe most deeply. There is a sentence in _The Marriage of Heaven and\nHell_ that is meaningless until we understand Blake's system of\ncorrespondences. 'The best wine is the oldest, the best water the\nnewest.'\n\nWater is experience, immediate sensation, and wine is emotion, and it is\nwith the intellect, as distinguished from imagination, that we enlarge\nthe bounds of experience and separate it from all but itself, from\nillusion, from memory, and create among other things science and good\njournalism. Emotion, on the other hand, grows intoxicating and\ndelightful after it has been enriched with the memory of old emotions,\nwith all the uncounted flavours of old experience; and it is necessarily\nsome antiquity of thought, emotions that have been deepened by the\nexperiences of many men of genius, that distinguishes the cultivated\nman. The subject matter of his meditation and invention is old, and he\nwill disdain a too conscious originality in the arts as in those matters\nof daily life where, is it not Balzac who says, 'we are all\nconservatives'? He is above all things well-bred, and whether he write\nor paint will not desire a technique that denies or obtrudes his long\nand noble descent. Corneille and Racine did not deny their masters, and\nwhen Dante spoke of his master Virgil there was no crowing of the cock.\nIn their day imitation was conscious or all but conscious, and while\noriginality was but so much the more a part of the man himself, so much\nthe deeper because unconscious, no quick analysis could find out their\nmiracle, that needed, it may be, generations to reveal; but it is our\nimitation that is unconscious and that waits the certainties of time.\nThe more religious the subject matter of an art, the more will it be as\nit were stationary, and the more ancient will be the emotion that it\narouses and the circumstances that it calls up before our eyes. When in\nthe Middle Ages the pilgrim to St. Patrick's Purgatory found himself on\nthe lake side, he found a boat made out of a hollow tree to ferry him to\nthe cave of vision. In religious painting and poetry, crowns and swords\nof an ancient pattern take upon themselves new meanings, and it is\nimpossible to separate our idea of what is noble from a mystic stair,\nwhere not men and women, but robes, jewels, incidents, ancient utilities\nfloat upward slowly over the all but sleeping mind, putting on emotional\nand spiritual life as they ascend until they are swallowed up by some\nfar glory that they even were too modern and momentary to endure. All\nart is dream, and what the day is done with is dreaming ripe, and what\nart has moulded religion accepts, and in the end all is in the wine cup,\nall is in the drunken phantasy, and the grapes begin to stammer.\n\n\nTHE TWO KINDS OF ASCETICISM\n\nIt is not possible to separate an emotion or a spiritual state from the\nimage that calls it up and gives it expression. Michael Angelo's Moses,\nVelasquez' Philip the Second, the colour purple, a crucifix, call into\nlife an emotion or state that vanishes with them because they are its\nonly possible expression, and that is why no mind is more valuable than\nthe images it contains. The imaginative writer differs from the saint in\nthat he identifies himself--to the neglect of his own soul, alas!--with\nthe soul of the world, and frees himself from all that is impermanent in\nthat soul, an ascetic not of women and wine, but of the newspapers. That\nwhich is permanent in the soul of the world upon the other hand, the\ngreat passions that trouble all and have but a brief recurring life of\nflower and seed in any man, is the renunciation of the saint who seeks\nnot an eternal art, but his own eternity. The artist stands between the\nsaint and the world of impermanent things, and just in so far as his\nmind dwells on what is impermanent in his sense, on all that 'modern\nexperience and the discussion of our interests,' that is to say, on what\nnever recurs, as desire and hope, terror and weariness, spring and\nautumn, recur in varying rhythms, will his mind become critical, as\ndistinguished from creative, and his emotions wither. He will think less\nof what he sees and more of his own attitude towards it, and will\nexpress this attitude by an essentially critical selection and emphasis.\nI am not quite sure of my memory, but I think that Mr. Ricketts has said\nin his book on the Prado that he feels the critic in Velasquez for the\nfirst time in painting, and we all feel the critic in Whistler and\nDegas, in Browning, even in Mr. Swinburne, in the finest art of all ages\nbut the greatest. The end for art is the ecstasy awakened by the\npresence before an ever-changing mind of what is permanent in the world,\nor by the arousing of that mind itself into the very delicate and\nfastidious mood habitual with it when it is seeking those permanent and\nrecurring things. There is a little of both ecstasies at all times, but\nat this time we have a small measure of the creative impulse itself, of\nthe divine vision, a great one of 'the lost traveller's dream under the\nhill,' perhaps because all the old simple things have been painted or\nwritten, and they will only have meaning for us again when a new race or\na new civilisation has made us look upon all with new eyesight.\n\n\nIN THE SERPENT'S MOUTH\n\nThere is an old saying that God is a circle whose centre is everywhere.\nIf that is true, the saint goes to the centre, the poet and artist to\nthe ring where everything comes round again. The poet must not seek for\nwhat is still and fixed, for that has no life for him; and if he did,\nhis style would become cold and monotonous, and his sense of beauty\nfaint and sickly, as are both style and beauty to my imagination in the\nprose and poetry of Newman, but be content to find his pleasure in all\nthat is for ever passing away that it may come again, in the beauty of\nwoman, in the fragile flowers of spring, in momentary heroic passion, in\nwhatever is most fleeting, most impassioned, as it were, for its own\nperfection, most eager to return in its glory. Yet perhaps he must\nendure the impermanent a little, for these things return, but not\nwholly, for no two faces are alike, and, it may be, had we more learned\neyes, no two flowers. Is it that all things are made by the struggle of\nthe individual and the world, of the unchanging and the returning, and\nthat the saint and the poet are over all, and that the poet has made his\nhome in the Serpent's mouth?\n\n\nTHE BLACK AND THE WHITE ARROWS\n\nInstinct creates the recurring and the beautiful, all the winding of the\nserpent; but reason, the most ugly man, as Blake called it, is a drawer\nof the straight line, the maker of the arbitrary and the impermanent,\nfor no recurring spring will ever bring again yesterday's clock.\nSanctity has its straight line also, darting from the centre, and with\nthese arrows the many-coloured serpent, theme of all our poetry, is\nmaimed and hunted. He that finds the white arrow shall have wisdom older\nthan the Serpent, but what of the black arrow? How much knowledge, how\nheavy a quiver of the crow-feathered ebony rods can the soul endure?\n\n\nHIS MISTRESS'S EYEBROWS\n\nThe preoccupation of our Art and Literature with knowledge, with the\nsurface of life, with the arbitrary, with mechanism, has arisen out of\nthe root. A careful but not necessarily very subtle man could foretell\nthe history of any religion if he knew its first principle, and that it\nwould live long enough to fulfil itself. The mind can never do the same\nthing twice over, and having exhausted simple beauty and meaning, it\npasses to the strange and hidden, and at last must find its delight,\nhaving outrun its harmonies in the emphatic and discordant. When I was a\nboy at the art school I watched an older student late returned from\nParis, with a wonder that had no understanding in it. He was very\namorous, and every new love was the occasion of a new picture, and every\nnew picture was uglier than its forerunner. He was excited about his\nmistress's eyebrows, as was fitting, but the interest of beauty had\nbeen exhausted by the logical energies of Art, which destroys where it\nhas rummaged, and can but discover, whether it will or no. We cannot\ndiscover our subject matter by deliberate intellect, for when a subject\nmatter ceases to move us we must go elsewhere, and when it moves us,\neven though it be 'that old ballad material of Shakespeare' or even 'the\nmorbid terror of death,' we can laugh at reason. We must not ask is the\nworld interested in this or that, for nothing is in question but our own\ninterest, and we can understand no other. Our place in the Hierarchy is\nsettled for us by our choice of a subject matter, and all good criticism\nis hieratic, delighting in setting things above one another, Epic and\nDrama above Lyric and so on, and not merely side by side. But it is our\ninstinct and not our intellect that chooses. We can deliberately\nrefashion our characters, but not our painting or our poetry. If our\ncharacters also were not unconsciously refashioned so completely by the\nunfolding of the logical energies of Art, that even simple things have\nin the end a new aspect in our eyes, the Arts would not be among those\nthings that return for ever. The ballads that Bishop Percy gathered\nreturned in the _Ancient Mariner_ and the delight in the world of old\nGreek sculptors sprang into a more delicate loveliness in that\narchaistic head of the young athlete down the long corridor to your left\nhand as you go into the British Museum. Civilisation too, will not that\nalso destroy where it has loved, until it shall bring the simple and\nnatural things again and a new Argo with all the gilding on her bows\nsail out to find another fleece?\n\n\nTHE TRESSES OF THE HAIR\n\nHafiz cried to his beloved, 'I made a bargain with that brown hair\nbefore the beginning of time, and it shall not be broken through\nunending time,' and it may be that Mistress Nature knows that we have\nlived many times, and that whatsoever changes and winds into itself\nbelongs to us. She covers her eyes away from us, but she lets us play\nwith the tresses of her hair.\n\n\nA TOWER ON THE APENNINES\n\nThe other day I was walking towards Urbino, where I was to spend the\nnight, having crossed the Apennines from San Sepolcro, and had come to a\nlevel place on the mountain-top near the journey's end. My friends were\nin a carriage somewhere behind, on a road which was still ascending in\ngreat loops, and I was alone amid a visionary, fantastic, impossible\nscenery. It was sunset and the stormy clouds hung upon mountain after\nmountain, and far off on one great summit a cloud darker than the rest\nglimmered with lightning. Away south upon another mountain a mediaeval\ntower, with no building near nor any sign of life, rose into the clouds.\nI saw suddenly in the mind's eye an old man, erect and a little gaunt,\nstanding in the door of the tower, while about him broke a windy light.\nHe was the poet who had at last, because he had done so much for the\nword's sake, come to share in the dignity of the saint. He had hidden\nnothing of himself, but he had taken care of 'that dignity ... the\nperfection of form ... this lofty and severe quality ... this virtue.'\nAnd though he had but sought it for the word's sake, or for a woman's\npraise, it had come at last into his body and his mind. Certainly as he\nstood there he knew how from behind that laborious mood, that pose, that\ngenius, no flower of himself but all himself, looked out as from behind\na mask that other Who alone of all men, the country-people say, is not a\nhair's breadth more nor less than six feet high. He has in his ears\nwell-instructed voices and seeming solid sights are before his eyes, and\nnot as we say of many a one, speaking in metaphor, but as this were\nDelphi or Eleusis, and the substance and the voice come to him among his\nmemories which are of women's faces; for was it Columbanus or another\nthat wrote 'There is one among the birds that is perfect, and one\nperfect among the fish'?\n\n\nTHE THINKING OF THE BODY\n\nThose learned men who are a terror to children and an ignominious sight\nin lovers' eyes, all those butts of a traditional humour where there is\nsomething of the wisdom of peasants, are mathematicians, theologians,\nlawyers, men of science of various kinds. They have followed some\nabstract reverie, which stirs the brain only and needs that only, and\nhave therefore stood before the looking-glass without pleasure and never\nknown those thoughts that shape the lines of the body for beauty or\nanimation, and wake a desire for praise or for display.\n\nThere are two pictures of Venice side by side in the house where I am\nwriting this, a Canaletto that has little but careful drawing, and a not\nvery emotional pleasure in clean bright air, and a Franz Francken, where\nthe blue water, that in the other stirs one so little, can make one long\nto plunge into the green depth where a cloud shadow falls. Neither\npainting could move us at all, if our thought did not rush out to the\nedges of our flesh, and it is so with all good art, whether the Victory\nof Samothrace which reminds the soles of our feet of swiftness, or the\nOdyssey that would send us out under the salt wind, or the young\nhorsemen on the Parthenon, that seem happier than our boyhood ever was,\nand in our boyhood's way. Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see\nthe world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every\nabstract thing, from all that is of the brain only, from all that is not\na fountain jetting from the entire hopes, memories, and sensations of\nthe body. Its morality is personal, knows little of any general law, has\nno blame for Little Musgrave, no care for Lord Barnard's house, seems\nlighter than a breath and yet is hard and heavy, for if a man is not\nready to face toil and risk, and in all gaiety of heart, his body will\ngrow unshapely and his heart lack the wild will that stirs desire. It\napproved before all men those that talked or wrestled or tilted under\nthe walls of Urbino, or sat in the wide window-seats discussing all\nthings, with love ever in their thought, when the wise Duchess ordered\nall, and the Lady Emilia gave the theme.\n\n\nRELIGIOUS BELIEF NECESSARY TO RELIGIOUS ART\n\nAll art is sensuous, but when a man puts only his contemplative nature\nand his more vague desires into his art, the sensuous images through\nwhich it speaks become broken, fleeting, uncertain, or are chosen for\ntheir distance from general experience, and all grows unsubstantial and\nfantastic. When imagination moves in a dim world like the country of\nsleep in _Love's Nocturne_ and 'Siren there winds her dizzy hair and\nsings,' we go to it for delight indeed but in our weariness. If we are\nto sojourn there that world must grow consistent with itself, emotion\nmust be related to emotion by a system of ordered images, as in the\n_Divine Comedy_. It must grow to be symbolic, that is, for the soul can\nonly achieve a distinct separated life where many related objects at\nonce distinguish and arouse its energies in their fulness. All\nvisionaries have entered into such a world in trances, and all ideal\nart has trance for warranty. Shelley seemed to Matthew Arnold to beat\nhis ineffectual wings in the void, and I only made my pleasure in him\ncontented pleasure by massing in my imagination his recurring images of\ntowers and rivers, and caves with fountains in them, and that one star\nof his, till his world had grown solid underfoot and consistent enough\nfor the soul's habitation.\n\nBut even then I lacked something to compensate my imagination for\ngeographical and historical reality, for the testimony of our ordinary\nsenses, and found myself wishing for and trying to imagine, as I had\nalso when reading Keats' _Endymion_, a crowd of believers who could put\ninto all those strange sights the strength of their belief and the rare\ntestimony of their visions. A little crowd had been sufficient, and I\nwould have had Shelley a sectary that his revelation might have found\nthe only sufficient evidence of religion, miracle. All symbolic art\nshould arise out of a real belief, and that it cannot do so in this age\nproves that this age is a road and not a resting-place for the\nimaginative arts. I can only understand others by myself, and I am\ncertain that there are many who are not moved as they desire to be by\nthat solitary light burning in the tower of Prince Athanais, because it\nhas not entered into men's prayers nor lighted any through the sacred\ndark of religious contemplation.\n\nLyrical poems, when they but speak of emotions common to all, require\nnot indeed a religious belief like the spiritual arts, but a life that\nhas leisure for itself, and a society that is quickly stirred that our\nemotion may be strengthened by the emotion of others. All circumstance\nthat makes emotion at once dignified and visible, increases the poet's\npower, and I think that is why I have always longed for some stringed\ninstrument, and a listening audience, not drawn out of the hurried\nstreets, but from a life where it would be natural to murmur over again\nthe singer's thought. When I heard Yvette Guilbert the other day, who\nhas the lyre or as good, I was not content, for she sang among people\nwhose life had nothing it could share with an exquisite art, that should\nrise out of life as the blade out of the spearshaft, a song out of the\nmood, the fountain from its pool, all art out of the body, laughter from\na happy company. I longed to make all things over again, that she might\nsing in some great hall, where there was no one that did not love life\nand speak of it continually.\n\n\nTHE HOLY PLACES\n\nWhen all art was struck out of personality, whether as in our daily\nbusiness or in the adventure of religion, there was little separation\nbetween holy and common things, and just as the arts themselves passed\nquickly from passion to divine contemplation, from the conversation of\npeasants to that of princes, the one song remembering the drunken miller\nand but half forgetting Cambuscan bold; so did a man feel himself near\nsacred presences when he turned his plough from the slope of Cruachmaa\nor of Olympus. The occupations and the places known to Homer or to\nHesiod, those pure first artists, might, as it were, if but the\nfashioners' hands had loosened, have changed before the poem's end to\nsymbols and vanished, winged and unweary, into the unchanging worlds\nwhere religion alone can discover life as well as peace. A man of that\nunbroken day could have all the subtlety of Shelley, and yet use no\nimage unknown among the common people, and speak no thought that was\nnot a deduction from the common thought. Unless the discovery of\nlegendary knowledge and the returning belief in miracle, or what we must\nneeds call so, can bring once more a new belief in the sanctity of\ncommon ploughland, and new wonders that reward no difficult\necclesiastical routine but the common, wayward, spirited man, we may\nnever see again a Shelley and a Dickens in the one body, but be broken\nto the end. We have grown jealous of the body, and we dress it in dull\nunshapely clothes, that we may cherish aspiration alone. Moliere being\nbut the master of common sense lived ever in the common daylight, but\nShakespeare could not, and Shakespeare seems to bring us to the very\nmarketplace, when we remember Shelley's dizzy and Landor's calm disdain\nof usual daily things. And at last we have Villiers de L'Isle-Adam\ncrying in the ecstasy of a supreme culture, of a supreme refusal, 'as\nfor living, our servants will do that for us.' One of the means of\nloftiness, of marmorean stillness has been the choice of strange and\nfar-away places, for the scenery of art, but this choice has grown\nbitter to me, and there are moments when I cannot believe in the reality\nof imaginations that are not inset with the minute life of long familiar\nthings and symbols and places. I have come to think of even\nShakespeare's journeys to Rome or to Verona as the outflowing of an\nunrest, a dissatisfaction with natural interests, an unstable\nequilibrium of the whole European mind that would not have come had John\nPalaeologus cherished, despite that high and heady look, copied by Burne\nJones for his Cophetua, a hearty disposition to fight the Turk. I am\northodox and pray for a resurrection of the body, and am certain that a\nman should find his Holy Land where he first crept upon the floor, and\nthat familiar woods and rivers should fade into symbol with so gradual a\nchange that he never discover, no, not even in ecstasy itself, that he\nis beyond space, and that time alone keeps him from Primum Mobile, the\nSupernal Eden, and the White Rose over all.\n\n1906.\n\n\n\n\nPOETRY AND TRADITION\n\n\nI\n\nWhen Mr. O'Leary died I could not bring myself to go to his funeral,\nthough I had been once his close fellow-worker, for I shrank from seeing\nabout his grave so many whose Nationalism was different from anything he\nhad taught or that I could share. He belonged, as did his friend John F.\nTaylor, to the romantic conception of Irish Nationality on which Lionel\nJohnson and myself founded, so far as it was founded on anything but\nliterature, our Art and our Irish criticism. Perhaps his spirit, if it\ncan care for or can see old friends now, will accept this apology for an\nabsence that has troubled me. I learned much from him and much from\nTaylor, who will always seem to me the greatest orator I have heard; and\nthat ideal Ireland, perhaps from this out an imaginary Ireland, in whose\nservice I labour, will always be in many essentials their Ireland. They\nwere the last to speak an understanding of life and Nationality, built\nup by the generation of Grattan, which read Homer and Virgil, and by the\ngeneration of Davis, which had been pierced through by the idealism of\nMazzini,[2] and of the European revolutionists of the mid-century.\n\nO'Leary had joined the Fenian movement with no hope of success as we\nknow, but because he believed such a movement good for the moral\ncharacter of the people; and had taken his long imprisonment without\ncomplaining. Even to the very end, while often speaking of his prison\nlife, he would have thought it took from his Roman courage to describe\nits hardship. The worth of a man's acts in the moral memory, a continual\nheight of mind in the doing of them, seemed more to him than their\nimmediate result, if, indeed, the sight of many failures had not taken\naway the thought of success. A man was not to lie, or even to give up\nhis dignity, on any patriotic plea, and I have heard him say, 'I have\nbut one religion, the old Persian: to bend the bow and tell the truth,'\nand again, 'There are things a man must not do to save a nation,' and\nagain, 'A man must not cry in public to save a nation,' and that we\nmight not forget justice in the passion of controversy, 'There was never\ncause so bad that it has not been defended by good men for what seemed\nto them good reasons.' His friend had a burning and brooding imagination\nthat divided men not according to their achievement but by their degrees\nof sincerity, and by their mastery over a straight and, to my thought,\ntoo obvious logic that seemed to him essential to sincerity. Neither man\nhad an understanding of style or of literature in the right sense of the\nword, though both were great readers, but because their imagination\ncould come to rest no place short of greatness, they hoped, John O'Leary\nespecially, for an Irish literature of the greatest kind. When Lionel\nJohnson and Katharine Tynan (as she was then), and I, myself, began to\nreform Irish poetry, we thought to keep unbroken the thread running up\nto Grattan which John O'Leary had put into our hands, though it might be\nour business to explore new paths of the labyrinth. We sought to make a\nmore subtle rhythm, a more organic form, than that of the older Irish\npoets who wrote in English, but always to remember certain ardent ideas\nand high attitudes of mind which were the nation itself, to our belief,\nso far as a nation can be summarised in the intellect. If you had asked\nan ancient Spartan what made Sparta Sparta, he would have answered, The\nLaws of Lycurgus, and many Englishmen look back to Bunyan and to Milton\nas we did to Grattan and to Mitchell. Lionel Johnson was able to take up\ninto his Art one portion of this tradition that I could not, for he had\na gift of speaking political thought in fine verse that I have always\nlacked. I, on the other hand, was more preoccupied with Ireland (for he\nhad other interests), and took from Allingham and Walsh their passion\nfor country spiritism, and from Ferguson his pleasure in heroic legend,\nand while seeing all in the light of European literature found my\nsymbols of expression in Ireland. One thought often possessed me very\nstrongly. New from the influence, mainly the personal influence, of\nWilliam Morris, I dreamed of enlarging Irish hate, till we had come to\nhate with a passion of patriotism what Morris and Ruskin hated. Mitchell\nhad already all but poured some of that hate drawn from Carlyle, who had\nit of an earlier and, as I think, cruder sort, into the blood of\nIreland, and were we not a poor nation with ancient courage, unblackened\nfields and a barbarous gift of self-sacrifice? Ruskin and Morris had\nspent themselves in vain because they had found no passion to harness to\ntheir thought, but here was unwasted passion and precedents in the\npopular memory for every needed thought and action. Perhaps, too, it\nwould be possible to find in that new philosophy of spiritism coming to\na seeming climax in the work of Fredrick Myers, and in the\ninvestigations of uncounted obscure persons, what could change the\ncountry spiritism into a reasoned belief that would put its might into\nall the rest. A new belief seemed coming that could be so simple and\ndemonstrable and above all so mixed into the common scenery of the\nworld, that it would set the whole man on fire and liberate him from a\nthousand obediences and complexities. We were to forge in Ireland a new\nsword on our old traditional anvil for that great battle that must in\nthe end re-establish the old, confident, joyous world. All the while I\nworked with this idea, founding societies that became quickly or slowly\neverything I despised. One part of me looked on, mischievous and\nmocking, and the other part spoke words which were more and more unreal,\nas the attitude of mind became more and more strained and difficult.\nMadame Maud Gonne could still draw great crowds out of the slums by her\nbeauty and sincerity, and speak to them of 'Mother Ireland with the\ncrown of stars about her head.' But gradually the political movement\nshe was associated with, finding it hard to build up any fine lasting\nthing, became content to attack little persons and little things. All\nmovements are held together more by what they hate than by what they\nlove, for love separates and individualises and quiets, but the nobler\nmovements, the only movements on which literature can found itself, hate\ngreat and lasting things. All who have any old traditions have something\nof aristocracy, but we had opposing us from the first, though not\nstrongly from the first, a type of mind which had been without influence\nin the generation of Grattan, and almost without it in that of Davis,\nand which has made a new nation out of Ireland, that was once old and\nfull of memories.\n\nI remember, when I was twenty years old, arguing, on my way home from a\nYoung Ireland Society, that Ireland, with its hieratic Church, its\nreadiness to accept leadership in intellectual things,--and John O'Leary\nspoke much of this readiness,[3]--its Latin hatred of middle paths and\nuncompleted arguments, could never create a democratic poet of the type\nof Burns, although it had tried to do so more than once, but that its\ngenius would in the long run be aristocratic and lonely. Whenever I had\nknown some old countryman, I had heard stories and sayings that arose\nout of an imagination that would have understood Homer better than _The\nCotter's Saturday Night_ or _Highland Mary_, because it was an ancient\nimagination, where the sediment had found the time to settle, and I\nbelieve that the makers of deliberate literature could still take\npassion and theme, though but little thought, from such as he. On some\nsuch old and broken stem, I thought, have all the most beautiful roses\nbeen grafted.\n\n\nII\n\n  Him who trembles before the flame and the flood,\n  And the winds that blow through the starry ways;\n  Let the starry winds and the flame and the flood\n  Cover over and hide, for he has no part\n  With the proud, majestical multitude.\n\nThree types of men have made all beautiful things. Aristocracies have\nmade beautiful manners, because their place in the world puts them above\nthe fear of life, and the countrymen have made beautiful stories and\nbeliefs, because they have nothing to lose and so do not fear, and the\nartists have made all the rest, because Providence has filled them with\nrecklessness. All these look backward to a long tradition, for, being\nwithout fear, they have held to whatever pleased them. The others being\nalways anxious have come to possess little that is good in itself, and\nare always changing from thing to thing, for whatever they do or have\nmust be a means to something else, and they have so little belief that\nanything can be an end in itself, that they cannot understand you if\nyou say, 'All the most valuable things are useless.' They prefer the\nstalk to the flower, and believe that painting and poetry exist that\nthere may be instruction, and love that there may be children, and\ntheatres that busy men may rest, and holidays that busy men may go on\nbeing busy. At all times they fear and even hate the things that have\nworth in themselves, for that worth may suddenly, as it were a fire,\nconsume their book of Life, where the world is represented by cyphers\nand symbols; and before all else, they fear irreverent joy and\nunserviceable sorrow. It seems to them, that those who have been freed\nby position, by poverty, or by the traditions of Art, have something\nterrible about them, a light that is unendurable to eyesight. They\ncomplain much of that commandment that we can do almost what we will, if\nwe do it gaily, and think that freedom is but a trifling with the world.\n\nIf we would find a company of our own way of thinking, we must go\nbackward to turreted walls, to courts, to high rocky places, to little\nwalled towns, to jesters like that jester of Charles the Fifth who made\nmirth out of his own death; to the Duke Guidobaldo in his sickness, or\nDuke Frederick in his strength, to all those who understood that life is\nnot lived, if not lived for contemplation or excitement.\n\nCertainly we could not delight in that so courtly thing, the poetry of\nlight love, if it were sad; for only when we are gay over a thing, and\ncan play with it, do we show ourselves its master, and have minds clear\nenough for strength. The raging fire and the destructive sword are\nportions of eternity, too great for the eye of man, wrote Blake, and it\nis only before such things, before a love like that of Tristan and\nIseult, before noble or ennobled death, that the free mind permits\nitself aught but brief sorrow. That we may be free from all the rest,\nsullen anger, solemn virtue, calculating anxiety, gloomy suspicion,\nprevaricating hope, we should be reborn in gaiety. Because there is\nsubmission in a pure sorrow, we should sorrow alone over what is greater\nthan ourselves, nor too soon admit that greatness, but all that is less\nthan we are should stir us to some joy, for pure joy masters and\nimpregnates; and so to world end, strength shall laugh and wisdom mourn.\n\n\nIII\n\nIn life courtesy and self-possession, and in the arts style, are the\nsensible impressions of the free mind, for both arise out of a\ndeliberate shaping of all things, and from never being swept away,\nwhatever the emotion, into confusion or dulness. The Japanese have\nnumbered with heroic things courtesy at all times whatsoever, and though\na writer, who has to withdraw so much of his thought out of his life\nthat he may learn his craft, may find many his betters in daily\ncourtesy, he should never be without style, which is but high breeding\nin words and in argument. He is indeed the Creator of the standards of\nmanners in their subtlety, for he alone can know the ancient records and\nbe like some mystic courtier who has stolen the keys from the girdle of\ntime, and can wander where it please him amid the splendours of ancient\ncourts.\n\nSometimes, it may be, he is permitted the license of cap and bell, or\neven the madman's bunch of straws, but he never forgets or leaves at\nhome the seal and the signature. He has at all times the freedom of the\nwell-bred, and being bred to the tact of words can take what theme he\npleases, unlike the linen drapers, who are rightly compelled to be very\nstrict in their conversation. Who should be free if he were not? for\nnone other has a continual deliberate self-delighting happiness--style,\n'the only thing that is immortal in literature,' as Sainte-Beuve has\nsaid, a still unexpended energy, after all that the argument or the\nstory need, a still unbroken pleasure after the immediate end has been\naccomplished--and builds this up into a most personal and wilful fire,\ntransfiguring words and sounds and events. It is the playing of strength\nwhen the day's work is done, a secret between a craftsman and his craft,\nand is so inseparate in his nature, that he has it most of all amid\noverwhelming emotion, and in the face of death. Shakespeare's persons,\nwhen the last darkness has gathered about them, speak out of an ecstasy\nthat is one half the self-surrender of sorrow, and one half the last\nplaying and mockery of the victorious sword, before the defeated world.\n\nIt is in the arrangement of events as in the words, and in that touch of\nextravagance, of irony, of surprise, which is set there after the desire\nof logic has been satisfied and all that is merely necessary\nestablished, and that leaves one, not in the circling necessity, but\ncaught up into the freedom of self-delight: it is, as it were, the foam\nupon the cup, the long pheasant's feather on the horse's head, the\nspread peacock over the pasty. If it be very conscious, very deliberate,\nas it may be in comedy, for comedy is more personal than tragedy, we\ncall it phantasy, perhaps even mischievous phantasy, recognising how\ndisturbing it is to all that drag a ball at the ankle. This joy, because\nit must be always making and mastering, remains in the hands and in the\ntongue of the artist, but with his eyes he enters upon a submissive,\nsorrowful contemplation of the great irremediable things, and he is\nknown from other men by making all he handles like himself, and yet by\nthe unlikeness to himself of all that comes before him in a pure\ncontemplation. It may have been his enemy or his love or his cause that\nset him dreaming, and certainly the phoenix can but open her young\nwings in a flaming nest; but all hate and hope vanishes in the dream,\nand if his mistress brag of the song or his enemy fear it, it is not\nthat either has its praise or blame, but that the twigs of the holy nest\nare not easily set afire. The verses may make his mistress famous as\nHelen or give a victory to his cause, not because he has been either's\nservant, but because men delight to honour and to remember all that have\nserved contemplation. It had been easier to fight, to die even, for\nCharles's house with Marvel's poem in the memory, but there is no zeal\nof service that had not been an impurity in the pure soil where the\nmarvel grew. Timon of Athens contemplates his own end, and orders his\ntomb by the beachy margent of the flood, and Cleopatra sets the asp to\nher bosom, and their words move us because their sorrow is not their own\nat tomb or asp, but for all men's fate. That shaping joy has kept the\nsorrow pure, as it had kept it were the emotion love or hate, for the\nnobleness of the Arts is in the mingling of contraries, the extremity of\nsorrow, the extremity of joy, perfection of personality, the perfection\nof its surrender, overflowing turbulent energy, and marmorean stillness;\nand its red rose opens at the meeting of the two beams of the cross, and\nat the trysting-place of mortal and immortal, time and eternity. No new\nman has ever plucked that rose, or found that trysting-place, for he\ncould but come to the understanding of himself, to the mastery of\nunlocking words after long frequenting of the great Masters, hardly\nwithout ancestral memory of the like. Even knowledge is not enough, for\nthe 'recklessness' Castiglione thought necessary in good manners is\nnecessary in this likewise, and if a man has it not he will be gloomy,\nand had better to his marketing again.\n\n\nIV\n\nWhen I saw John O'Leary first, every young catholic man who had\nintellectual ambition fed his imagination with the poetry of Young\nIreland; and the verses of even the least known of its poets were\nexpounded with a devout ardour at Young Ireland Societies and the like,\nand their birthdays celebrated. The School of writers I belonged to\ntried to found itself on much of the subject-matter of this poetry, and,\nwhat was almost more in our thoughts, to begin a more imaginative\ntradition in Irish literature, by a criticism at once remorseless and\nenthusiastic. It was our criticism, I think, that set Clarence Mangan at\nthe head of the Young Ireland poets in the place of Davis, and put Sir\nSamuel Ferguson, who had died with but little fame as a poet, next in\nthe succession. Our attacks, mine especially, on verse which owed its\nposition to its moral or political worth, roused a resentment which even\nI find it hard to imagine to-day, and our verse was attacked in return,\nand not for anything peculiar to ourselves, but for all that it had in\ncommon with the accepted poetry of the world, and most of all for its\nlack of rhetoric, its refusal to preach a doctrine or to consider the\nseeming necessities of a cause. Now, after so many years, I can see how\nnatural, how poetical, even, an opposition was, that shows what large\nnumbers could not call up certain high feelings without accustomed\nverses, or believe we had not wronged the feeling when we did but attack\nthe verses. I have just read in a newspaper that Sir Charles Gavan Duffy\nrecited upon his death bed his favourite poem, one of the worst of the\npatriotic poems of Young Ireland, and it has brought all this to mind,\nfor the opposition to our School claimed him as its leader. When I was\nat Siena, I noticed that the Byzantine style persisted in faces of\nMadonnas for several generations after it had given way to a more\nnatural style, in the less loved faces of saints and martyrs. Passion\nhad grown accustomed to those sloping and narrow eyes, which are almost\nJapanese, and to those gaunt cheeks, and would have thought it sacrilege\nto change. We would not, it is likely, have found listeners if John\nO'Leary, the irreproachable patriot, had not supported us. It was as\nclear to him that a writer must not write badly, or ignore the examples\nof the great masters in the fancied or real service of a cause, as it\nwas that he must not lie for it or grow hysterical. I believed in those\ndays that a new intellectual life would begin, like that of Young\nIreland, but more profound and personal, and that could we but get a few\nplain principles accepted, new poets and writers of prose would make an\nimmortal music. I think I was more blind than Johnson, though I judge\nthis from his poems rather than anything I remember of his talk, for he\nnever talked ideas, but, as was common with his generation in Oxford,\nfacts and immediate impressions from life. With others this renunciation\nwas but a pose, a superficial reaction from the disordered abundance of\nthe middle century, but with him it was the radical life. He was in all\na traditionalist, gathering out of the past phrases, moods, attitudes,\nand disliking ideas less for their uncertainty than because they made\nthe mind itself changing and restless. He measured the Irish tradition\nby another greater than itself, and was quick to feel any falling\nasunder of the two, yet at many moments they seemed but one in his\nimagination. Ireland, all through his poem of that name, speaks to him\nwith the voice of the great poets, and in _Ireland Dead_ she is still\nmother of perfect heroism, but there doubt comes too.\n\n  Can it be they do repent\n  That they went, thy chivalry,\n  Those sad ways magnificent?\n\nAnd in _Ways of War_, dedicated to John O'Leary, he dismissed the belief\nin an heroic Ireland as but a dream.\n\n  A dream! a dream! an ancient dream!\n  Yet ere peace come to Innisfail,\n  Some weapons on some field must gleam,\n  Some burning glory fire the Gael.\n\n  That field may lie beneath the sun,\n  Fair for the treading of an host:\n  That field in realms of thought be won,\n  And armed hands do their uttermost:\n\n  Some way, to faithful Innisfail,\n  Shall come the majesty and awe\n  Of martial truth, that must prevail\n  To lay on all the eternal law.\n\nI do not think either of us saw that, as belief in the possibility of\narmed insurrection withered, the old romantic nationalism would wither\ntoo, and that the young would become less ready to find pleasure in\nwhatever they believed to be literature. Poetical tragedy, and indeed\nall the more intense forms of literature, had lost their hold on the\ngeneral mass of men in other countries as life grew safe, and the sense\nof comedy which is the social bond in times of peace as tragic feeling\nis in times of war, had become the inspiration of popular art. I always\nknew this, but I believed that the memory of danger, and the reality of\nit seemed near enough sometimes, would last long enough to give Ireland\nher imaginative opportunity. I could not foresee that a new class,\nwhich had begun to rise into power under the shadow of Parnell, would\nchange the nature of the Irish movement, which, needing no longer great\nsacrifices, nor bringing any great risk to individuals, could do without\nexceptional men, and those activities of the mind that are founded on\nthe exceptional moment.[4] John O'Leary had spent much of his thought in\nan unavailing war with the agrarian party, believing it the root of\nchange, but the fox that crept into the badger's hole did not come from\nthere. Power passed to small shop-keepers, to clerks, to that very class\nwho had seemed to John O'Leary so ready to bend to the power of others,\nto men who had risen above the traditions of the countryman, without\nlearning those of cultivated life or even educating themselves, and who\nbecause of their poverty, their ignorance, their superstitious piety,\nare much subject to all kinds of fear. Immediate victory, immediate\nutility, became everything, and the conviction, which is in all who have\nrun great risks for a cause's sake, in the O'Learys and Mazzinis as in\nall rich natures, that life is greater than the cause, withered, and we\nartists, who are the servants not of any cause but of mere naked life,\nand above all of that life in its nobler forms, where joy and sorrow are\none, Artificers of the Great Moment, became as elsewhere in Europe\nprotesting individual voices. Ireland's great moment had passed, and she\nhad filled no roomy vessels with strong sweet wine, where we have filled\nour porcelain jars against the coming winter.\n\nAugust, 1907.\n\n\n\n\nPREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION OF JOHN M. SYNGE'S POEMS AND TRANSLATIONS\n\n  'The Lonely returns to the Lonely, the Divine to the Divinity.'\n                                                             --_Proclus_\n\n\nI\n\nWhile this work was passing through the press Mr. J. M. Synge died. Upon\nthe morning of his death one friend of his and mine, though away in the\ncountry, felt the burden of some heavy event, without understanding\nwhere or for whom it was to happen; but upon the same morning one of my\nsisters said, 'I think Mr. Synge will recover, for last night I dreamed\nof an ancient galley labouring in a storm and he was in the galley, and\nsuddenly I saw it run into bright sunlight and smooth sea, and I heard\nthe keel grate upon the sand.' The misfortune was for the living\ncertainly, that must work on, perhaps in vain, to magnify the minds and\nhearts of our young men, and not for the dead that, having cast off the\nailing body, is now, as I believe, all passionate and fiery, an heroical\nthing. Our Daimon is as dumb as was that of Socrates, when they brought\nin the hemlock; and if we speak among ourselves, it is of the thoughts\nthat have no savour because we cannot hear his laughter, of the work\nmore difficult because of the strength he has taken with him, of the\nastringent joy and hardness that was in all he did, and of his fame in\nthe world.\n\n\nII\n\nIn his Preface he speaks of these poems as having been written during\nthe last sixteen or seventeen years, though the greater number were\nwritten very recently, and many during his last illness. _An Epitaph_\nand _On an Anniversary_ show how early the expectation of death came to\nhim, for they were made long ago. But the book as a whole is a farewell,\nwritten when life began to slip from him. He was a reserved man, and\nwished no doubt by a vague date to hide when still living what he felt\nand thought, from those about him. I asked one of the nurses in the\nhospital where he died if he knew he was dying, and she said, 'He may\nhave known it for months, but he would not have spoken of it to anyone.'\nEven the translations of poems that he has made his own by putting them\ninto that melancholy dialect of his, seem to express his emotion at the\nmemory of poverty and the approach of death. The whole book is of a kind\nalmost unknown in a time when lyricism has become abstract and\nimpersonal.\n\n\nIII\n\nNow and then in history some man will speak a few simple sentences which\nnever die, because his life gives them energy and meaning. They affect\nus as do the last words of Shakespeare's people that gather up into\nthemselves the energy of elaborate events, and they in their turn put\nstrange meaning into half-forgotten things and accidents, like cries\nthat reveal the combatants in some dim battle. Often a score of words\nwill be enough, as when we repeat to ourselves, 'I am a servant of the\nLord God of War and I understand the lovely art of the Muses,' all that\nremains of a once famous Greek poet and sea rover. And is not that\nepitaph Swift made in Latin for his own tomb more immortal than his\npamphlets, perhaps than his great allegory? 'He has gone where fierce\nindignation will lacerate his heart no more.' I think this book too has\ncertain sentences, fierce or beautiful or melancholy that will be\nremembered in our history, having behind their passion his quarrel with\nignorance, and those passionate events, his books.\n\nBut for the violent nature that strikes brief fire in _A Question_,\nhidden though it was under much courtesy and silence, his genius had\nnever borne those lion cubs of his. He could not have loved had he not\nhated, nor honoured had he not scorned; though his hatred and his scorn\nmoved him but seldom, as I think, for his whole nature was lifted up\ninto a vision of the world, where hatred played with the grotesque and\nlove became an ecstatic contemplation of noble life.\n\nHe once said to me, 'We must unite asceticism, stoicism, ecstasy; two of\nthese have often come together, but not all three:' and the strength\nthat made him delight in setting the hard virtues by the soft, the\nbitter by the sweet, salt by mercury, the stone by the elixir, gave him\na hunger for harsh facts, for ugly surprising things, for all that\ndefies our hope. In _The Passing of the Shee_ he is repelled by the\ncontemplation of a beauty too far from life to appease his mood; and in\nhis own work, benign images ever present to his soul must have beside\nthem malignant reality, and the greater the brightness, the greater must\nthe darkness be. Though like 'Usheen after the Fenians' he remembers his\nmaster and his friends, he cannot put from his mind coughing and old age\nand the sound of the bells. The old woman in _The Riders to the Sea_, in\nmourning for her six fine sons, mourns for the passing of all beauty and\nstrength, while the drunken woman of _The Tinker's Wedding_ is but the\nmore drunken and the more thieving because she can remember great\nqueens. And what is it but desire of ardent life, like that of Usheen\nfor his 'golden salmon of the sea, cleen hawk of the air,' that makes\nthe young girls of _The Playboy of the Western World_ prefer to any\npeaceful man their eyes have looked upon, a seeming murderer? Person\nafter person in these laughing, sorrowful, heroic plays is, 'the like of\nthe little children do be listening to the stories of an old woman, and\ndo be dreaming after in the dark night it's in grand houses of gold they\nare, with speckled horses to ride, and do be waking again in a short\nwhile and they destroyed with the cold, and the thatch dripping, maybe,\nand the starved ass braying in the yard.'\n\n\nIV\n\nIt was only at the last in his unfinished _Deirdre of the Sorrows_ that\nhis mood changed. He knew some twelve months ago that he was dying,\nthough he told no one about it but his betrothed, and he gave all his\nthought to this play, that he might finish it. Sometimes he would\ndespond and say that he could not; and then his betrothed would act it\nfor him in his sick room, and give him heart to write again. And now by\na strange chance, for he began the play before the last failing of his\nhealth, his persons awake to no disillusionment but to death only, and\nas if his soul already thirsted for the fiery fountains there is nothing\ngrotesque, but beauty only.\n\n\nV\n\nHe was a solitary, undemonstrative man, never asking pity, nor\ncomplaining, nor seeking sympathy but in this book's momentary cries:\nall folded up in brooding intellect, knowing nothing of new books and\nnewspapers, reading the great masters alone; and he was but the more\nhated because he gave his country what it needed, an unmoved mind where\nthere is a perpetual last day, a trumpeting, and coming up to judgment.\n\nApril 4, 1909.\n\n\n\n\nJ. M. SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME\n\n\nI\n\nOn Saturday, January 26th, 1907, I was lecturing in Aberdeen, and when\nmy lecture was over I was given a telegram which said, 'Play great\nsuccess.' It had been sent from Dublin after the second act of _The\nPlayboy of the Western World_, then being performed for the first time.\nAfter one in the morning, my host brought to my bedroom this second\ntelegram, 'Audience broke up in disorder at the word shift.' I knew no\nmore until I got the Dublin papers on my way from Belfast to Dublin on\nTuesday morning. On the Monday night no word of the play had been heard.\nAbout forty young men had sat on the front seats of the pit, and stamped\nand shouted and blown trumpets from the rise to the fall of the curtain.\nOn the Tuesday night also the forty young men were there. They wished to\nsilence what they considered a slander upon Ireland's womanhood. Irish\nwomen would never sleep under the same roof with a young man without a\nchaperon, nor admire a murderer, nor use a word like 'shift'; nor could\nanyone recognise the countrymen and women of Davis and Kickham in these\npoetical, violent, grotesque persons, who used the name of God so\nfreely, and spoke of all things that hit their fancy.\n\nA patriotic journalism which had seen in Synge's capricious imagination\nthe enemy of all it would have young men believe, had for years prepared\nfor this hour, by that which is at once the greatest and most ignoble\npower of journalism, the art of repeating a name again and again with\nsome ridiculous or evil association. The preparation had begun after the\nfirst performance of _The Shadow of the Glen_, Synge's first play, with\nan assertion made in ignorance but repeated in dishonesty, that he had\ntaken his fable and his characters, not from his own mind nor that\nprofound knowledge of cot and curragh he was admitted to possess, but\n'from a writer of the Roman decadence.' Some spontaneous dislike had\nbeen but natural, for genius like his can but slowly, amid what it has\nof harsh and strange, set forth the nobility of its beauty, and the\ndepth of its compassion; but the frenzy that would have silenced his\nmaster-work was, like most violent things artificial, the defence of\nvirtue by those that have but little, which is the pomp and gallantry of\njournalism and its right to govern the world.\n\nAs I stood there watching, knowing well that I saw the dissolution of a\nschool of patriotism that held sway over my youth, Synge came and stood\nbeside me, and said, 'A young doctor has just told me that he can hardly\nkeep himself from jumping on to a seat, and pointing out in that howling\nmob those whom he is treating for venereal disease.'\n\n\nII\n\nThomas Davis, whose life had the moral simplicity which can give to\nactions the lasting influence that style alone can give to words, had\nunderstood that a country which has no national institutions must show\nits young men images for the affections, although they be but diagrams\nof what it should be or may be. He and his school imagined the Soldier,\nthe Orator, the Patriot, the Poet, the Chieftain, and above all the\nPeasant; and these, as celebrated in essay and songs and stories,\npossessed so many virtues that no matter how England, who, as Mitchell\nsaid, 'had the ear of the world,' might slander us, Ireland, even though\nshe could not come at the world's other ear, might go her way unabashed.\nBut ideas and images which have to be understood and loved by large\nnumbers of people, must appeal to no rich personal experience, no\npatience of study, no delicacy of sense; and if at rare moments some\n_Memory of the Dead_ can take its strength from one; at all other\nmoments manner and matter will be rhetorical, conventional, sentimental;\nand language, because it is carried beyond life perpetually, will be as\nwasted as the thought, with unmeaning pedantries and silences, and a\ndread of all that has salt and savour. After a while, in a land that\nhas given itself to agitation over-much, abstract thoughts are raised up\nbetween men's minds and Nature, who never does the same thing twice, or\nmakes one man like another, till minds, whose patriotism is perhaps\ngreat enough to carry them to the scaffold, cry down natural impulse\nwith the morbid persistence of minds unsettled by some fixed idea. They\nare preoccupied with the nation's future, with heroes, poets, soldiers,\npainters, armies, fleets, but only as these things are understood by a\nchild in a national school, while a secret feeling that what is so\nunreal needs continual defence makes them bitter and restless. They are\nlike some state which has only paper money, and seeks by punishments to\nmake it buy whatever gold can buy. They no longer love, for only life is\nloved, and at last, a generation is like an hysterical woman who will\nmake unmeasured accusations and believe impossible things, because of\nsome logical deduction from a solitary thought which has turned a\nportion of her mind to stone.\n\n\nIII\n\nEven if what one defends be true, an attitude of defence, a continual\napology, whatever the cause, makes the mind barren because it kills\nintellectual innocence; that delight in what is unforeseen, and in the\nmere spectacle of the world, the mere drifting hither and thither that\nmust come before all true thought and emotion. A zealous Irishman,\nespecially if he lives much out of Ireland, spends his time in a\nnever-ending argument about Oliver Cromwell, the Danes, the penal laws,\nthe rebellion of 1798, the famine, the Irish peasant, and ends by\nsubstituting a traditional casuistry for a country; and if he be a\nCatholic, yet another casuistry that has professors, schoolmasters,\nletter-writing priests and the authors of manuals to make the meshes\nfine, comes between him and English literature, substituting arguments\nand hesitations for the excitement at the first reading of the great\npoets which should be a sort of violent imaginative puberty. His\nhesitations and arguments may have been right, the Catholic philosophy\nmay be more profound than Milton's morality, or Shelley's vehement\nvision; but none the less do we lose life by losing that recklessness\nCastiglione thought necessary even in good manners, and offend our Lady\nTruth, who would never, had she desired an anxious courtship, have\ndigged a well to be her parlour.\n\nI admired, though we were always quarrelling, J. F. Taylor, the orator,\nwho died just before the first controversy over these plays. It often\nseemed to me that when he spoke Ireland herself had spoken, one got that\nsense of surprise that comes when a man has said what is unforeseen\nbecause it is far from the common thought, and yet obvious because when\nit has been spoken, the gate of the mind seems suddenly to roll back and\nreveal forgotten sights and let loose lost passions. I have never heard\nhim speak except in some Irish literary or political society, but there\nat any rate, as in conversation, I found a man whose life was a\nceaseless reverie over the religious and political history of Ireland.\nHe saw himself pleading for his country before an invisible jury,\nperhaps of the great dead, against traitors at home and enemies abroad,\nand a sort of frenzy in his voice and the moral elevation of his\nthoughts gave him for the moment style and music. One asked oneself\nagain and again, 'Why is not this man an artist, a man of genius, a\ncreator of some kind?' The other day under the influence of memory, I\nread through his one book, a life of Owen Roe O'Neill, and found there\nno sentence detachable from its context because of wisdom or beauty.\nEverything was argued from a premise; and wisdom and style, whether in\nlife or letters, come from the presence of what is self-evident, from\nthat which requires but statement, from what Blake called 'naked beauty\ndisplayed.' The sense of what was unforeseen and obvious, the rolling\nbackward of the gates, had gone with the living voice, with the nobility\nof will that made one understand what he saw and felt in what was now\nbut argument and logic. I found myself in the presence of a mind like\nsome noisy and powerful machine, of thought that was no part of wisdom\nbut the apologetic of a moment, a woven thing, no intricacy of leaf and\ntwig, of words with no more of salt and of savour than those of a Jesuit\nprofessor of literature, or of any other who does not know that there is\nno lasting writing which does not define the quality, or carry the\nsubstance of some pleasure. How can one, if one's mind be full of\nabstractions and images created not for their own sake but for the sake\nof party, even if there were still the need, make pictures for the\nmind's eye and sounds that delight the ear, or discover thoughts that\ntighten the muscles, or quiver and tingle in the flesh, and so stand\nlike St. Michael with the trumpet that calls the body to resurrection?\n\n\nIV\n\nYoung Ireland had taught a study of our history with the glory of\nIreland for event, and this for lack, when less than Taylor studied, of\ncomparison with that of other countries wrecked the historical instinct.\nAn old man with an academic appointment, who was a leader in the attack\nupon Synge sees in the eleventh century romance of Deirdre a retelling\nof the first five-act tragedy outside the classic languages, and this\ntragedy from his description of it was certainly written on the\nElizabethan model; while an allusion to a copper boat, a marvel of magic\nlike Cinderella's slipper, persuades him that the ancient Irish had\nforestalled the modern dockyards in the making of metal ships. The man\nwho doubted, let us say, our fabulous ancient kings running up to Adam,\nor found but mythology in some old tale, was as hated as if he had\ndoubted the authority of Scripture. Above all no man was so ignorant,\nthat he had not by rote familiar arguments and statistics to drive away\namid familiar applause all those had they but found strange truth in the\nworld or in their mind, whose knowledge has passed out of memory and\nbecome an instinct of hand or eye. There was no literature, for\nliterature is a child of experience always, of knowledge never; and the\nnation itself, instead of being a dumb struggling thought seeking a\nmouth to utter it or hand to show it, a teeming delight that would\nre-create the world, had become, at best, a subject of knowledge.\n\n\nV\n\nTaylor always spoke with confidence, though he was no determined man,\nbeing easily flattered or jostled from his way; and this, putting as it\nwere his fiery heart into his mouth, made him formidable. And I have\nnoticed that all those who speak the thoughts of many, speak\nconfidently, while those who speak their own thoughts are hesitating and\ntimid, as though they spoke out of a mind and body grown sensitive to\nthe edge of bewilderment among many impressions. They speak to us that\nwe may give them certainty, by seeing what they have seen; and so it is,\nthat enlargement of experience does not come from those oratorical\nthinkers, or from those decisive rhythms that move large numbers of men,\nbut from writers that seem by contrast as feminine as the soul when it\nexplores in Blake's picture the recesses of the grave, carrying its\nfaint lamp trembling and astonished; or as the Muses who are never\npictured as one-breasted Amazons, but as women needing protection.\nIndeed, all art which appeals to individual man and awaits the\nconfirmation of his senses and his reveries, seems when arrayed against\nthe moral zeal, the confident logic, the ordered proof of journalism, a\ntrifling, impertinent, vexatious thing, a tumbler who has unrolled his\ncarpet in the way of a marching army.\n\n\nVI\n\nI attack things that are as dear to many as some holy image carried\nhither and thither by some broken clan, and can but say that I have felt\nin my body the affections I disturb, and believed that if I could raise\nthem into contemplation I would make possible a literature, that,\nfinding its subject-matter all ready in men's minds, would be, not as\nours is, an interest for scholars, but the possession of a people. I\nhave founded societies with this aim, and was indeed founding one in\nParis when I first met with J. M. Synge, and I have known what it is to\nbe changed by that I would have changed, till I became argumentative and\nunmannerly, hating men even in daily life for their opinions. And though\nI was never convinced that the anatomies of last year's leaves are a\nliving forest, nor thought a continual apologetic could do other than\nmake the soul a vapour and the body a stone; nor believed that\nliterature can be made by anything but by what is still blind and dumb\nwithin ourselves, I have had to learn how hard in one who lives where\nforms of expression and habits of thought have been born, not for the\npleasure of begetting but for the public good, is that purification from\ninsincerity, vanity, malignity, arrogance, which is the discovery of\nstyle. But it became possible to live when I had learnt all I had not\nlearnt in shaping words, in defending Synge against his enemies, and\nknew that rich energies, fine, turbulent or gracious thoughts, whether\nin life or letters, are but love-children.\n\nSynge seemed by nature unfitted to think a political thought, and with\nthe exception of one sentence, spoken when I first met him in Paris,\nthat implied some sort of nationalist conviction, I cannot remember that\nhe spoke of politics or showed any interest in men in the mass, or in\nany subject that is studied through abstractions and statistics. Often\nfor months together he and I and Lady Gregory would see no one outside\nthe Abbey Theatre, and that life, lived as it were in a ship at sea,\nsuited him, for unlike those whose habit of mind fits them to judge of\nmen in the mass, he was wise in judging individual men, and as wise in\ndealing with them as the faint energies of ill-health would permit; but\nof their political thoughts he long understood nothing. One night when\nwe were still producing plays in a little hall, certain members of the\nCompany told him that a play on the Rebellion of '98 would be a great\nsuccess. After a fortnight he brought them a scenario which read like a\nchapter out of Rabelais. Two women, a Protestant and a Catholic, take\nrefuge in a cave, and there quarrel about religion, abusing the Pope or\nQueen Elizabeth and Henry VIII, but in low voices, for the one fears to\nbe ravished by the soldiers, the other by the rebels. At last one woman\ngoes out because she would sooner any fate than such wicked company.\nYet, I doubt if he would have written at all if he did not write of\nIreland, and for it, and I know that he thought creative art could only\ncome from such preoccupation. Once, when in later years, anxious about\nthe educational effect of our movement, I proposed adding to the Abbey\nCompany a second Company to play international drama, Synge, who had not\nhitherto opposed me, thought the matter so important that he did so in a\nformal letter.\n\nI had spoken of a German municipal theatre as my model, and he said that\nthe municipal theatres all over Europe gave fine performances of old\nclassics, but did not create (he disliked modern drama for its sterility\nof speech, and perhaps ignored it), and that we would create nothing if\nwe did not give all our thoughts to Ireland. Yet in Ireland he loved\nonly what was wild in its people, and in 'the grey and wintry sides of\nmany glens.' All the rest, all that one reasoned over, fought for, read\nof in leading articles, all that came from education, all that came down\nfrom Young Ireland--though for this he had not lacked a little\nsympathy--first wakened in him perhaps that irony which runs through all\nhe wrote, but once awakened, he made it turn its face upon the whole of\nlife. The women quarrelling in the cave would not have amused him, if\nsomething in his nature had not looked out on most disputes, even those\nwherein he himself took sides, with a mischievous wisdom. He told me\nonce that when he lived in some peasant's house, he tried to make those\nabout him forget that he was there, and it is certain that he was silent\nin any crowded room. It is possible that low vitality helped him to be\nobservant and contemplative, and made him dislike, even in solitude,\nthose thoughts which unite us to others, much as we all dislike, when\nfatigue or illness has sharpened the nerves, hoardings covered with\nadvertisements, the fronts of big theatres, big London hotels, and all\narchitecture which has been made to impress the crowd. What blindness\ndid for Homer, lameness for Hephaestus, asceticism for any saint you\nwill, bad health did for him by making him ask no more of life than that\nit should keep him living, and above all perhaps by concentrating his\nimagination upon one thought, health itself. I think that all noble\nthings are the result of warfare; great nations and classes, of warfare\nin the visible world, great poetry and philosophy, of invisible warfare,\nthe division of a mind within itself, a victory, the sacrifice of a man\nto himself. I am certain that my friend's noble art, so full of passion\nand heroic beauty, is the victory of a man who in poverty and sickness\ncreated from the delight of expression, and in the contemplation that\nis born of the minute and delicate arrangement of images, happiness, and\nhealth of mind. Some early poems have a morbid melancholy, and he\nhimself spoke of early work he had destroyed as morbid, for as yet the\ncraftsmanship was not fine enough to bring the artist's joy which is of\none substance with that of sanctity. In one poem he waits at some street\ncorner for a friend, a woman perhaps, and while he waits and gradually\nunderstands that nobody is coming, sees two funerals and shivers at the\nfuture; and in another written on his twenty-fifth birthday, he wonders\nif the twenty-five years to come shall be as evil as those gone by.\nLater on, he can see himself as but a part of the spectacle of the world\nand mix into all he sees that flavour of extravagance, or of humour, or\nof philosophy, that makes one understand that he contemplates even his\nown death as if it were another's and finds in his own destiny but as it\nwere a projection through a burning glass of that general to men. There\nis in the creative joy an acceptance of what life brings, because we\nhave understood the beauty of what it brings, or a hatred of death for\nwhat it takes away, which arouses within us, through some sympathy\nperhaps with all other men, an energy so noble, so powerful, that we\nlaugh aloud and mock, in the terror or the sweetness of our exaltation,\nat death and oblivion.\n\nIn no modern writer that has written of Irish life before him, except it\nmay be Miss Edgeworth in _Castle Rackrent_, was there anything to change\na man's thought about the world or stir his moral nature, for they but\nplay with pictures, persons and events, that whether well or ill\nobserved are but an amusement for the mind where it escapes from\nmeditation, a child's show that makes the fables of his art as\nsignificant by contrast as some procession painted on an Egyptian wall;\nfor in these fables, an intelligence, on which the tragedy of the world\nhad been thrust in so few years, that Life had no time to brew her\nsleepy drug, has spoken of the moods that are the expression of its\nwisdom. All minds that have a wisdom come of tragic reality seem morbid\nto those that are accustomed to writers who have not faced reality at\nall; just as the saints, with that Obscure Night of the Soul, which fell\nso certainly that they numbered it among spiritual states, one among\nother ascending steps, seem morbid to the rationalist and the\nold-fashioned Protestant controversialist. The thought of journalists,\nlike that of the Irish novelists, is neither healthy nor unhealthy, for\nit has not risen to that state where either is possible, nor should we\ncall it happy; for who would have sought happiness, if happiness were\nnot the supreme attainment of man, in heroic toils, in the cell of the\nascetic, or imagined it above the cheerful newspapers, above the clouds?\n\n\nVII\n\nNot that Synge brought out of the struggle with himself any definite\nphilosophy, for philosophy in the common meaning of the word is created\nout of an anxiety for sympathy or obedience, and he was that rare, that\ndistinguished, that most noble thing, which of all things still of the\nworld is nearest to being sufficient to itself, the pure artist. Sir\nPhilip Sidney complains of those who could hear 'sweet tunes' (by which\nhe understands could look upon his lady) and not be stirred to\n'ravishing delight.'\n\n  'Or if they do delight therein, yet are so closed with wit,\n  As with sententious lips to set a title vain on it;\n  Oh let them hear these sacred tunes, and learn in Wonder's schools\n  To be, in things past bonds of wit, fools if they be not fools!'\n\nIreland for three generations has been like those churlish logicians.\nEverything is argued over, everything has to take its trial before the\ndull sense and the hasty judgment, and the character of the nation has\nso changed that it hardly keeps but among country people, or where some\nfamily tradition is still stubborn, those lineaments that made Borrow\ncry out as he came from among the Irish monks, his friends and\nentertainers for all his Spanish Bible scattering, 'Oh, Ireland, mother\nof the bravest soldiers and of the most beautiful women!' It was, as I\nbelieve, to seek that old Ireland which took its mould from the\nduellists and scholars of the eighteenth century and from generations\nolder still, that Synge returned again and again to Aran, to Kerry, and\nto the wild Blaskets.\n\n\nVIII\n\n'When I got up this morning,' he writes, after he had been a long time\nin Innismaan, 'I found that the people had gone to Mass and latched the\nkitchen door from the outside, so that I could not open it to give\nmyself light.\n\n'I sat for nearly an hour beside the fire with a curious feeling that I\nshould be quite alone in this little cottage. I am so used to sitting\nhere with the people that I have never felt the room before as a place\nwhere any man might live and work by himself. After a while as I\nwaited, with just light enough from the chimney to let me see the\nrafters and the greyness of the walls, I became indescribably mournful,\nfor I felt that this little corner on the face of the world, and the\npeople who live in it, have a peace and dignity from which we are shut\nfor ever.' This life, which he describes elsewhere as the most primitive\nleft in Europe, satisfied some necessity of his nature. Before I met him\nin Paris he had wandered over much of Europe, listening to stories in\nthe Black Forest, making friends with servants and with poor people, and\nthis from an aesthetic interest, for he had gathered no statistics, had\nno money to give, and cared nothing for the wrongs of the poor, being\ncontent to pay for the pleasure of eye and ear with a tune upon the\nfiddle. He did not love them the better because they were poor and\nmiserable, and it was only when he found Innismaan and the Blaskets,\nwhere there is neither riches nor poverty, neither what he calls 'the\nnullity of the rich' nor 'the squalor of the poor' that his writing\nlost its old morbid brooding, that he found his genius and his peace.\nHere were men and women who under the weight of their necessity lived,\nas the artist lives, in the presence of death and childhood, and the\ngreat affections and the orgiastic moment when life outleaps its limits,\nand who, as it is always with those who have refused or escaped the\ntrivial and the temporary, had dignity and good manners where manners\nmattered. Here above all was silence from all our great orator took\ndelight in, from formidable men, from moral indignation, from the\n'sciolist' who 'is never sad,' from all in modern life that would\ndestroy the arts; and here, to take a thought from another playwright of\nour school, he could love Time as only women and great artists do and\nneed never sell it.\n\n\nIX\n\nAs I read _The Aran Islands_ right through for the first time since he\nshowed it me in manuscript, I come to understand how much knowledge of\nthe real life of Ireland went to the creation of a world which is yet as\nfantastic as the Spain of Cervantes. Here is the story of _The Playboy_,\nof _The Shadow of the Glen_; here is the ghost on horseback and the\nfinding of the young man's body of _Riders to the Sea_, numberless ways\nof speech and vehement pictures that had seemed to owe nothing to\nobservation, and all to some overflowing of himself, or to some mere\nnecessity of dramatic construction. I had thought the violent quarrels\nof _The Well of the Saints_ came from his love of bitter condiments, but\nhere is a couple that quarrel all day long amid neighbours who gather as\nfor a play. I had defended the burning of Christy Mahon's leg on the\nground that an artist need but make his characters self-consistent, and\nyet, that too was observation, for 'although these people are kindly\ntowards each other and their children, they have no sympathy for the\nsuffering of animals, and little sympathy for pain when the person who\nfeels it is not in danger.' I had thought it was in the wantonness of\nfancy Martin Dhoul accused the smith of plucking his living ducks, but a\nfew lines farther on, in this book where moral indignation is unknown, I\nread, 'Sometimes when I go into a cottage, I find all the women of the\nplace down on their knees plucking the feathers from live ducks and\ngeese.'\n\nHe loves all that has edge, all that is salt in the mouth, all that is\nrough to the hand, all that heightens the emotions by contest, all that\nstings into life the sense of tragedy; and in this book, unlike the\nplays where nearness to his audience moves him to mischief, he shows it\nwithout thought of other taste than his. It is so constant, it is all\nset out so simply, so naturally, that it suggests a correspondence\nbetween a lasting mood of the soul and this life that shares the\nharshness of rocks and wind. The food of the spiritual-minded is sweet,\nan Indian scripture says, but passionate minds love bitter food. Yet he\nis no indifferent observer, but is certainly kind and sympathetic to\nall about him. When an old and ailing man, dreading the coming winter,\ncries at his leaving, not thinking to see him again; and he notices that\nthe old man's mitten has a hole in it where the palm is accustomed to\nthe stick, one knows that it is with eyes full of interested affection\nas befits a simple man and not in the curiosity of study. When he had\nleft the Blaskets for the last time, he travelled with a lame pensioner\nwho had drifted there, why heaven knows, and one morning having missed\nhim from the inn where they were staying, he believed he had gone back\nto the island, and searched everywhere and questioned everybody, till he\nunderstood of a sudden that he was jealous as though the island were a\nwoman.\n\nThe book seems dull if you read much at a time, as the later Kerry\nessays do not, but nothing that he has written recalls so completely to\nmy senses the man as he was in daily life; and as I read, there are\nmoments when every line of his face, every inflection of his voice,\ngrows so clear in memory that I cannot realise that he is dead. He was\nno nearer when we walked and talked than now while I read these\nunarranged, unspeculating pages, wherein the only life he loved with his\nwhole heart reflects itself as in the still water of a pool. Thought\ncomes to him slowly, and only after long seemingly unmeditative\nwatching, and when it comes (and he had the same character in matters of\nbusiness), it is spoken without hesitation and never changed. His\nconversation was not an experimental thing, an instrument of research,\nand this made him silent; while his essays recall events, on which one\nfeels that he pronounces no judgment even in the depth of his own mind,\nbecause the labour of Life itself had not yet brought the philosophic\ngeneralisation, which was almost as much his object as the emotional\ngeneralisation of beauty. A mind that generalises rapidly, continually\nprevents the experience that would have made it feel and see deeply,\njust as a man whose character is too complete in youth seldom grows into\nany energy of moral beauty. Synge had indeed no obvious ideals, as\nthese are understood by young men, and even as I think disliked them,\nfor he once complained to me that our modern poetry was but the poetry\n'of the lyrical boy,' and this lack makes his art have a strange\nwildness and coldness, as of a man born in some far-off spacious land\nand time.\n\n\nX\n\nThere are artists like Byron, like Goethe, like Shelley, who have\nimpressive personalities, active wills and all their faculties at the\nservice of the will; but he belonged to those who like Wordsworth, like\nColeridge, like Goldsmith, like Keats, have little personality, so far\nas the casual eye can see, little personal will, but fiery and brooding\nimagination. I cannot imagine him anxious to impress, or convince in any\ncompany, or saying more than was sufficient to keep the talk circling.\nSuch men have the advantage that all they write is a part of knowledge,\nbut they are powerless before events and have often but one visible\nstrength, the strength to reject from life and thought all that would\nmar their work, or deafen them in the doing of it; and only this so long\nas it is a passive act. If Synge had married young or taken some\nprofession, I doubt if he would have written books or been greatly\ninterested in a movement like ours; but he refused various opportunities\nof making money in what must have been an almost unconscious\npreparation. He had no life outside his imagination, little interest in\nanything that was not its chosen subject. He hardly seemed aware of the\nexistence of other writers. I never knew if he cared for work of mine,\nand do not remember that I had from him even a conventional compliment,\nand yet he had the most perfect modesty and simplicity in daily\nintercourse, self-assertion was impossible to him. On the other hand, he\nwas useless amidst sudden events. He was much shaken by the _Playboy_\nriot; on the first night confused and excited, knowing not what to do,\nand ill before many days, but it made no difference in his work. He\nneither exaggerated out of defiance nor softened out of timidity. He\nwrote on as if nothing had happened, altering _The Tinker's Wedding_ to\na more unpopular form, but writing a beautiful serene _Deirdre_, with,\nfor the first time since his _Riders to the Sea_, no touch of sarcasm or\ndefiance. Misfortune shook his physical nature while it left his\nintellect and his moral nature untroubled. The external self, the mask,\nthe persona, was a shadow, character was all.\n\n\nXI\n\nHe was a drifting silent man full of hidden passion, and loved wild\nislands, because there, set out in the light of day, he saw what lay\nhidden in himself. There is passage after passage in which he dwells\nupon some moment of excitement. He describes the shipping of pigs at\nKilronan on the North Island for the English market: 'when the steamer\nwas getting near, the whole drove was moved down upon the slip and the\ncurraghs were carried out close to the sea. Then each beast was caught\nin its turn and thrown on its side, while its legs were hitched together\nin a single knot, with a tag of rope remaining, by which it could be\ncarried.\n\n'Probably the pain inflicted was not great, yet the animals shut their\neyes and shrieked with almost human intonations, till the suggestion of\nthe noise became so intense that the men and women who were merely\nlooking on grew wild with excitement, and the pigs waiting their turn\nfoamed at the mouth and tore each other with their teeth.\n\n'After a while there was a pause. The whole slip was covered with a mass\nof sobbing animals, with here and there a terrified woman crouching\namong the bodies and patting some special favourite, to keep it quiet\nwhile the curraghs were being launched. Then the screaming began again\nwhile the pigs were carried out and laid in their places, with a\nwaistcoat tied round their feet to keep them from damaging the canvas.\nThey seemed to know where they were going, and looked up at me over the\ngunnel with an ignoble desperation that made me shudder to think that I\nhad eaten this whimpering flesh. When the last curragh went out, I was\nleft on the slip with a band of women and children, and one old boar who\nsat looking out over the sea.\n\n'The women were over-excited, and when I tried to talk to them they\ncrowded round me and began jeering and shrieking at me because I am not\nmarried. A dozen screamed at a time, and so rapidly that I could not\nunderstand all they were saying, yet I was able to make out that they\nwere taking advantage of the absence of their husbands to give me the\nfull volume of their contempt. Some little boys who were listening threw\nthemselves down, writhing with laughter among the seaweed, and the young\ngirls grew red and embarrassed and stared down in the surf.' The book is\nfull of such scenes. Now it is a crowd going by train to the Parnell\ncelebration, now it is a woman cursing her son who made himself a spy\nfor the police, now it is an old woman keening at a funeral. Kindred to\nhis delight in the harsh grey stones, in the hardship of the life there,\nin the wind and in the mist, there is always delight in every moment of\nexcitement, whether it is but the hysterical excitement of the women\nover the pigs, or some primary passion. Once indeed, the hidden passion\ninstead of finding expression by its choice among the passions of others\nshows itself in the most direct way of all, that of dream. 'Last night,'\nhe writes, at Innismaan, 'after walking in a dream among buildings with\nstrangely intense light on them, I heard a faint rhythm of music\nbeginning far away on some stringed instrument.\n\n'It came closer to me, gradually increasing in quickness and volume with\nan irresistibly definite progression. When it was quite near the sound\nbegan to move in my nerves and blood, to urge me to dance with them.\n\n'I knew that if I yielded I would be carried away into some moment of\nterrible agony, so I struggled to remain quiet, holding my knees\ntogether with my hands.\n\n'The music increased continually, sounding like the strings of harps\ntuned to a forgotten scale, and having a resonance as searching as the\nstrings of the 'cello.\n\n'Then the luring excitement became more powerful than my will, and my\nlimbs moved in spite of me.\n\n'In a moment I swept away in a whirlwind of notes. My breath and my\nthoughts and every impulse of my body became a form of the dance, till I\ncould not distinguish between the instrument or the rhythm and my own\nperson or consciousness.\n\n'For a while it seemed an excitement that was filled with joy; then it\ngrew into an ecstasy where all existence was lost in the vortex of\nmovement. I could not think that there had been a life beyond the\nwhirling of the dance.\n\n'Then with a shock, the ecstasy turned to agony and rage. I struggled to\nfree myself but seemed only to increase the passion of the steps I moved\nto. When I shrieked I could only echo the notes of the rhythm.\n\n'At last, with a movement of uncontrollable frenzy I broke back to\nconsciousness and awoke.\n\n'I dragged myself trembling to the window of the cottage and looked out.\nThe moon was glittering across the bay and there was no sound anywhere\non the island.'\n\n\nXII\n\nIn all drama which would give direct expression to reverie, to the\nspeech of the soul with itself, there is some device that checks the\nrapidity of dialogue. When Oedipus speaks out of the most vehement\npassions, he is conscious of the presence of the chorus, men before whom\nhe must keep up appearances, 'children latest born of Cadmus' line' who\ndo not share his passion. Nobody is hurried or breathless. We listen to\nreports and discuss them, taking part as it were in a council of state.\nNothing happens before our eyes. The dignity of Greek drama, and in a\nlesser degree of that of Corneille and Racine, depends, as contrasted\nwith the troubled life of Shakespearean drama, on an almost even speed\nof dialogue, and on a so continuous exclusion of the animation of common\nlife, that thought remains lofty and language rich. Shakespeare, upon\nwhose stage everything may happen, even the blinding of Gloster, and who\nhas no formal check except what is implied in the slow, elaborate\nstructure of blank verse, obtains time for reverie by an often\nencumbering Euphuism, and by such a loosening of his plot as will give\nhis characters the leisure to look at life from without. Maeterlinck--to\nname the first modern of the old way who comes to mind--reaches the same\nend, by choosing instead of human beings persons who are as faint as a\nbreath upon a looking-glass, symbols who can speak a language slow and\nheavy with dreams because their own life is but a dream. Modern drama,\non the other hand, which accepts the tightness of the classic plot,\nwhile expressing life directly, has been driven to make indirect its\nexpression of the mind, which it leaves to be inferred from some\ncommon-place sentence or gesture as we infer it in ordinary life; and\nthis is, I believe, the cause of the perpetual disappointment of the\nhope imagined this hundred years that France or Spain or Germany or\nScandinavia will at last produce the master we await.\n\nThe divisions in the arts are almost all in the first instance\ntechnical, and the great schools of drama have been divided from one\nanother by the form or the metal of their mirror, by the check chosen\nfor the rapidity of dialogue. Synge found the check that suited his\ntemperament in an elaboration of the dialects of Kerry and Aran. The\ncadence is long and meditative, as befits the thought of men who are\nmuch alone, and who when they meet in one another's houses--as their way\nis at the day's end--listen patiently, each man speaking in turn and for\nsome little time, and taking pleasure in the vaguer meaning of the words\nand in their sound. Their thought, when not merely practical, is as full\nof traditional wisdom and extravagant pictures as that of some AEschylean\nchorus, and no matter what the topic is, it is as though the present\nwere held at arm's length. It is the reverse of rhetoric, for the\nspeaker serves his own delight, though doubtless he would tell you that\nlike Raftery's whiskey-drinking it was but for the company's sake. A\nmedicinal manner of speech too, for it could not even express, so little\nabstract it is and so rammed with life, those worn generalisations of\nnational propaganda. 'I'll be telling you the finest story you'd hear\nany place from Dundalk to Ballinacree with great queens in it, making\nthemselves matches from the start to the end, and they with shiny silks\non them.... I've a grand story of the great queens of Ireland, with\nwhite necks on them the like of Sarah Casey, and fine arms would hit you\na slap.... What good am I this night, God help me? What good are the\ngrand stories I have when it's few would listen to an old woman, few but\na girl maybe would be in great fear the time her hour was come, or\nlittle child wouldn't be sleeping with the hunger on a cold night.' That\nhas the flavour of Homer, of the Bible, of Villon, while Cervantes\nwould have thought it sweet in the mouth though not his food. This use\nof Irish dialect for noble purpose by Synge, and by Lady Gregory, who\nhad it already in her _Cuchulain of Muirthemne_, and by Dr. Hyde in\nthose first translations he has not equalled since, has done much for\nNational dignity. When I was a boy I was often troubled and sorrowful\nbecause Scottish dialect was capable of noble use, but the Irish of\nobvious roystering humour only; and this error fixed on my imagination\nby so many novelists and rhymers made me listen badly. Synge wrote down\nwords and phrases wherever he went, and with that knowledge of Irish\nwhich made all our country idioms easy to his hand, found it so rich a\nthing, that he had begun translating into it fragments of the great\nliteratures of the world, and had planned a complete version of _The\nImitation of Christ_. It gave him imaginative richness and yet left to\nhim the sting and tang of reality. How vivid in his translation from\nVillon are those 'eyes with a big gay look out of them would bring\nfolly from a great scholar.' More vivid surely than anything in\nSwinburne's version, and how noble those words which are yet simple\ncountry speech, in which his Petrarch mourns that death came upon Laura\njust as time was making chastity easy, and the day come when 'lovers may\nsit together and say out all things are in their hearts,' and 'my sweet\nenemy was making a start, little by little, to give over her great\nwariness, the way she was wringing a sweet thing out of my sharp\nsorrow.'\n\n\nXIII\n\nOnce when I had been saying that though it seemed to me that a\nconventional descriptive passage encumbered the action at the moment of\ncrisis, I liked _The Shadow of the Glen_ better than _Riders to the\nSea_, that is, for all the nobility of its end, its mood of Greek\ntragedy, too passive in suffering, and had quoted from Matthew Arnold's\nintroduction to _Empedocles on Etna_, Synge answered, 'It is a curious\nthing that _The Riders to the Sea_ succeeds with an English but not with\nan Irish audience, and _The Shadow of the Glen_, which is not liked by\nan English audience, is always liked in Ireland, though it is disliked\nthere in theory.' Since then _The Riders to the Sea_ has grown into\ngreat popularity in Dublin, partly because with the tactical instinct of\nan Irish mob, the demonstrators against _The Playboy_ both in the press\nand in the theatre, where it began the evening, selected it for\napplause. It is now what Shelley's _Cloud_ was for many years a comfort\nto those who do not like to deny altogether the genius they cannot\nunderstand. Yet I am certain that, in the long run, his grotesque plays\nwith their lyric beauty, their violent laughter, _The Playboy of the\nWestern World_ most of all, will be loved for holding so much of the\nmind of Ireland. Synge has written of _The Playboy_, 'anyone who has\nlived in real intimacy with the Irish peasantry will know that the\nwildest sayings in this play are tame indeed compared with the fancies\none may hear at any little hillside cottage of Geesala, or Carraroe, or\nDingle Bay.' It is the strangest, the most beautiful expression in drama\nof that Irish fantasy, which overflowing through all Irish Literature\nthat has come out of Ireland itself (compare the fantastic Irish account\nof the Battle of Clontarf with the sober Norse account) is the unbroken\ncharacter of Irish genius. In modern days this genius has delighted in\nmischievous extravagance, like that of the Gaelic poet's curse upon his\nchildren, 'There are three things that I hate, the devil that is waiting\nfor my soul, the worms that are waiting for my body, my children, who\nare waiting for my wealth and care neither for my body nor my soul: Oh,\nChrist hang all in the same noose!' I think those words were spoken with\na delight in their vehemence that took out of anger half the bitterness\nwith all the gloom. An old man on the Aran Islands told me the very tale\non which _The Playboy_ is founded, beginning with the words, 'If any\ngentleman has done a crime we'll hide him. There was a gentleman that\nkilled his father, and I had him in my own house six months till he got\naway to America.' Despite the solemnity of his slow speech his eyes\nshone as the eyes must have shone in that Trinity College branch of the\nGaelic League which began every meeting with prayers for the death of an\nold Fellow of College who disliked their movement, or as they certainly\ndo when patriots are telling how short a time the prayers took to the\nkilling of him. I have seen a crowd, when certain Dublin papers had\nwrought themselves into an imaginary loyalty, so possessed by what\nseemed the very genius of satiric fantasy, that one all but looked to\nfind some feathered heel among the cobble stones. Part of the delight of\ncrowd or individual is always that somebody will be angry, somebody take\nthe sport for gloomy earnest. We are mocking at his solemnity, let us\ntherefore so hide our malice that he may be more solemn still, and the\nlaugh run higher yet. Why should we speak his language and so wake him\nfrom a dream of all those emotions which men feel because they should,\nand not because they must? Our minds, being sufficient to themselves,\ndo not wish for victory but are content to elaborate our extravagance,\nif fortune aid, into wit or lyric beauty, and as for the rest 'There are\nnights when a king like Conchobar would spit upon his arm-ring and\nqueens will stick out their tongues at the rising moon.' This habit of\nthe mind has made Oscar Wilde and Mr. Bernard Shaw the most celebrated\nmakers of comedy to our time, and if it has sounded plainer still in the\nconversation of the one, and in some few speeches of the other, that is\nbut because they have not been able to turn out of their plays an alien\ntrick of zeal picked up in struggling youth. Yet, in Synge's plays also,\nfantasy gives the form and not the thought, for the core is always as in\nall great art, an over-powering vision of certain virtues, and our\ncapacity for sharing in that vision is the measure of our delight. Great\nart chills us at first by its coldness or its strangeness, by what seems\ncapricious, and yet it is from these qualities it has authority, as\nthough it had fed on locust and wild honey. The imaginative writer\nshows us the world as a painter does his picture, reversed in a\nlooking-glass that we may see it, not as it seems to eyes habit has made\ndull, but as we were Adam and this the first morning; and when the new\nimage becomes as little strange as the old we shall stay with him,\nbecause he has, besides, the strangeness, not strange to him, that made\nus share his vision, sincerity that makes us share his feeling.\n\nTo speak of one's emotions without fear or moral ambition, to come out\nfrom under the shadow of other men's minds, to forget their needs, to be\nutterly oneself, that is all the Muses care for. Villon, pander, thief\nand man-slayer, is as immortal in their eyes, and illustrates in the cry\nof his ruin as great a truth as Dante in abstract ecstasy, and touches\nour compassion more. All art is the disengaging of a soul from place and\nhistory, its suspension in a beautiful or terrible light, to await the\nJudgment, and yet, because all its days were a Last Day, judged already.\nIt may show the crimes of Italy as Dante did, or Greek mythology like\nKeats, or Kerry and Galway villages, and so vividly that ever after I\nshall look at all with like eyes, and yet I know that Cino da Pistoia\nthought Dante unjust, that Keats knew no Greek, that those country men\nand women are neither so lovable nor so lawless as 'mine author sung it\nme'; that I have added to my being, not my knowledge.\n\n\nXIV\n\nI wrote the most of these thoughts in my diary on the coast of Normandy,\nand as I finished came upon Mont Saint Michel, and thereupon doubted for\na day the foundation of my school. Here I saw the places of assembly,\nthose cloisters on the rock's summit, the church, the great halls where\nmonks, or knights, or men at arms sat at meals, beautiful from ornament\nor proportion. I remembered ordinances of the Popes forbidding\ndrinking-cups with stems of gold to these monks who had but a bare\ndormitory to sleep in. Even when imagining, the individual had taken\nmore from his fellows and his fathers than he gave; one man finishing\nwhat another had begun; and all that majestic fantasy, seeming more of\nEgypt than of Christendom, spoke nothing to the solitary soul, but\nseemed to announce whether past or yet to come an heroic temper of\nsocial men, a bondage of adventure and of wisdom. Then I thought more\npatiently and I saw that what had made these but as one and given them\nfor a thousand years the miracles of their shrine and temporal rule by\nland and sea, was not a condescension to knave or dolt, an\nimpoverishment of the common thought to make it serviceable and easy,\nbut a dead language and a communion in whatever, even to the greatest\nsaint, is of incredible difficulty. Only by the substantiation of the\nsoul I thought, whether in literature or in sanctity, can we come upon\nthose agreements, those separations from all else that fasten men\ntogether lastingly; for while a popular and picturesque Burns and Scott\ncan but create a province, and our Irish cries and grammars serve some\npassing need, Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe and all who travel in\ntheir road with however poor a stride define races and create\neverlasting loyalties. Synge, like all of the great kin, sought for the\nrace, not through the eyes or in history, or even in the future, but\nwhere those monks found God, in the depths of the mind, and in all art\nlike his, although it does not command--indeed because it does not--may\nlie the roots of far-branching events. Only that which does not teach,\nwhich does not cry out, which does not persuade, which does not\ncondescend, which does not explain, is irresistible. It is made by men\nwho expressed themselves to the full, and it works through the best\nminds; whereas the external and picturesque and declamatory writers,\nthat they may create kilts and bagpipes and newspapers and guidebooks,\nleave the best minds empty, and in Ireland and Scotland, England runs\ninto the hole. It has no array of arguments and maxims, because the\ngreat and the simple (and the Muses have never known which of the two\nmost pleases them) need their deliberate thought for the day's work,\nand yet will do it worse if they have not grown into or found about\nthem, most perhaps in the minds of women, the nobleness of emotion\nassociated with the scenery and events of their country by those great\npoets who have dreamed it in solitude, and who to this day in Europe are\ncreating indestructible spiritual races, like those religion has created\nin the East.\n\nSeptember 14th, 1910.\n\n\n\n\nTHE TRAGIC THEATRE\n\n\nI did not find a word in the printed criticism of Synge's _Deirdre of\nthe Sorrows_ about the qualities that made certain moments seem to me\nthe noblest tragedy, and the play was judged by what seemed to me but\nwheels and pulleys necessary to the effect, but in themselves nothing.\n\nUpon the other hand, those who spoke to me of the play never spoke of\nthese wheels and pulleys, but if they cared at all for the play, cared\nfor the things I cared for. One's own world of painters, of poets, of\ngood talkers, of ladies who delight in Ricard's portraits or Debussey's\nmusic, all those whose senses feel instantly every change in our mother\nthe moon, saw the stage in one way; and those others who look at plays\nevery night, who tell the general playgoer whether this play or that\nplay is to his taste, saw it in a way so different that there is\ncertainly some body of dogma--whether in the instincts or in the\nmemory, pushing the ways apart. A printed criticism, for instance, found\nbut one dramatic moment, that when Deirdre in the second act overhears\nher lover say that he may grow weary of her; and not one--if I remember\nrightly--chose for praise or explanation the third act which alone had\nsatisfied the author, or contained in any abundance those sentences that\nwere quoted at the fall of the curtain and for days after.\n\nDeirdre and her lover, as Synge tells the tale, returned to Ireland,\nthough it was nearly certain they would die there, because death was\nbetter than broken love, and at the side of the open grave that had been\ndug for one and would serve for both, quarrelled, losing all they had\ngiven their life to keep. 'Is it not a hard thing that we should miss\nthe safety of the grave and we trampling its edge?' That is Deirdre's\ncry at the outset of a reverie of passion that mounts and mounts till\ngrief itself has carried her beyond grief into pure contemplation. Up to\nthis the play has been a Master's unfinished work, monotonous and\nmelancholy, ill-arranged, little more than a sketch of what it would\nhave grown to, but now I listened breathless to sentences that may never\npass away, and as they filled or dwindled in their civility of sorrow,\nthe player, whose art had seemed clumsy and incomplete, like the writing\nitself, ascended into that tragic ecstasy which is the best that\nart--perhaps that life--can give. And at last when Deirdre, in the\nparoxysm before she took her life, touched with compassionate fingers\nhim that had killed her lover, we knew that the player had become, if\nbut for a moment, the creature of that noble mind which had gathered its\nart in waste islands, and we too were carried beyond time and persons to\nwhere passion, living through its thousand purgatorial years, as in the\nwink of an eye, becomes wisdom; and it was as though we too had touched\nand felt and seen a disembodied thing.\n\nOne dogma of the printed criticism is that if a play does not contain\ndefinite character, its constitution is not strong enough for the stage,\nand that the dramatic moment is always the contest of character with\ncharacter.\n\nIn poetical drama there is, it is held, an antithesis between character\nand lyric poetry, for lyric poetry--however much it move you when read\nout of a book--can, as these critics think, but encumber the action. Yet\nwhen we go back a few centuries and enter the great periods of drama,\ncharacter grows less and sometimes disappears, and there is much lyric\nfeeling, and at times a lyric measure will be wrought into the dialogue,\na flowing measure that had well-befitted music, or that more lumbering\none of the sonnet. Suddenly it strikes us that character is continuously\npresent in comedy alone, and that there is much tragedy, that of\nCorneille, that of Racine, that of Greece and Rome, where its place is\ntaken by passions and motives, one person being jealous, another full of\nlove or remorse or pride or anger. In writers of tragi-comedy (and\nShakespeare is always a writer of tragi-comedy) there is indeed\ncharacter, but we notice that it is in the moments of comedy that\ncharacter is defined, in Hamlet's gaiety let us say; while amid the\ngreat moments, when Timon orders his tomb, when Hamlet cries to Horatio\n'absent thee from felicity awhile,' when Anthony names 'Of many thousand\nkisses the poor last,' all is lyricism, unmixed passion, 'the integrity\nof fire.' Nor does character ever attain to complete definition in these\nlamps ready for the taper, no matter how circumstantial and gradual the\nopening of events, as it does in Falstaff who has no passionate purpose\nto fulfill, or as it does in Henry the Fifth whose poetry, never touched\nby lyric heat, is oratorical; nor when the tragic reverie is at its\nheight do we say, 'How well that man is realised, I should know him were\nI to meet him in the street,' for it is always ourselves that we see\nupon the stage, and should it be a tragedy of love we renew, it may be,\nsome loyalty of our youth, and go from the theatre with our eyes dim for\nan old love's sake.\n\nI think it was while rehearsing a translation of _Les Fourberies de\nScapin_ in Dublin, and noticing how passionless it all was, that I saw\nwhat should have been plain from the first line I had written, that\ntragedy must always be a drowning and breaking of the dykes that\nseparate man from man, and that it is upon these dykes comedy keeps\nhouse. But I was not certain of the site (one always doubts when one\nknows no testimony but one's own); till somebody told me of a certain\nletter of Congreve's. He describes the external and superficial\nexpressions of 'humour' on which farce is founded and then defines\n'humour' itself, the foundation of comedy as a 'singular and unavoidable\nway of doing anything peculiar to one man only, by which his speech and\nactions are distinguished from all other men,' and adds to it that\n'passions are too powerful in the sex to let humour have its course,' or\nas I would rather put it, that you can find but little of what we call\ncharacter in unspoiled youth, whatever be the sex, for as he indeed\nshows in another sentence, it grows with time like the ash of a burning\nstick, and strengthens towards middle life till there is little else at\nseventy years.\n\nSince then I have discovered an antagonism between all the old art and\nour new art of comedy and understand why I hated at nineteen years\nThackeray's novels and the new French painting. A big picture of\ncocottes sitting at little tables outside a cafe, by some follower of\nManet's, was exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy while I was a\nstudent at a life class there, and I was miserable for days. I found no\ndesirable place, no man I could have wished to be, no woman I could have\nloved, no Golden Age, no lure for secret hope, no adventure with myself\nfor theme out of that endless tale I told myself all day long. Years\nafter I saw the _Olympia_ of Manet at the Luxembourg and watched it\nwithout hostility indeed, but as I might some incomparable talker whose\nprecision of gesture gave me pleasure, though I did not understand his\nlanguage. I returned to it again and again at intervals of years, saying\nto myself, 'some day I will understand'; and yet, it was not until Sir\nHugh Lane brought the _Eva Gonzales_ to Dublin, and I had said to\nmyself, 'How perfectly that woman is realised as distinct from all\nother women that have lived or shall live' that I understood I was\ncarrying on in my own mind that quarrel between a tragedian and a\ncomedian which the Devil on Two Sticks in Le Sage showed to the young\nman who had climbed through the window.\n\nThere is an art of the flood, the art of Titian when his Ariosto, and\nhis Bacchus and Ariadne, give new images to the dreams of youth, and of\nShakespeare when he shows us Hamlet broken away from life by the\npassionate hesitations of his reverie. And we call this art poetical,\nbecause we must bring more to it than our daily mood if we would take\nour pleasure; and because it delights in picturing the moment of\nexaltation, of excitement, of dreaming (or in the capacity for it, as in\nthat still face of Ariosto's that is like some vessel soon to be full of\nwine). And there is an art that we call real, because character can only\nexpress itself perfectly in a real world, being that world's creature,\nand because we understand it best through a delicate discrimination of\nthe senses which is but entire wakefulness, the daily mood grown cold\nand crystalline.\n\nWe may not find either mood in its purity, but in mainly tragic art one\ndistinguishes devices to exclude or lessen character, to diminish the\npower of that daily mood, to cheat or blind its too clear perception. If\nthe real world is not altogether rejected, it is but touched here and\nthere, and into the places we have left empty we summon rhythm, balance,\npattern, images that remind us of vast passions, the vagueness of past\ntimes, all the chimeras that haunt the edge of trance; and if we are\npainters, we shall express personal emotion through ideal form, a\nsymbolism handled by the generations, a mask from whose eyes the\ndisembodied looks, a style that remembers many masters, that it may\nescape contemporary suggestion; or we shall leave out some element of\nreality as in Byzantine painting, where there is no mass, nothing in\nrelief, and so it is that in the supreme moment of tragic art there\ncomes upon one that strange sensation as though the hair of one's head\nstood up. And when we love, if it be in the excitement of youth, do we\nnot also, that the flood may find no stone to convulse, no wall to\nnarrow it, exclude character or the signs of it by choosing that beauty\nwhich seems unearthly because the individual woman is lost amid the\nlabyrinth of its lines as though life were trembling into stillness and\nsilence, or at last folding itself away? Some little irrelevance of\nline, some promise of character to come, may indeed put us at our ease,\n'give more interest' as the humour of the old man with the basket does\nto Cleopatra's dying; but should it come as we had dreamed in love's\nfrenzy to our dying for that woman's sake, we would find that the\ndiscord had its value from the tune.\n\nNor have we chosen illusion in choosing the outward sign of that moral\ngenius that lives among the subtlety of the passions, and can for her\nmoment make her of the one mind with great artists and poets. In the\nstudio we may indeed say to one another 'character is the only beauty,'\nbut when we choose a wife, as when we go to the gymnasium to be shaped\nfor woman's eyes, we remember academic form, even though we enlarge a\nlittle the point of interest and choose \"a painter's beauty,\" finding it\nthe more easy to believe in the fire because it has made ashes.\n\nWhen we look at the faces of the old tragic paintings, whether it is in\nTitian or in some painter of medieval China, we find there sadness and\ngravity, a certain emptiness even, as of a mind that waited the supreme\ncrisis (and indeed it seems at times as if the graphic art, unlike\npoetry which sings the crisis itself, were the celebration of waiting).\nWhereas in modern art, whether in Japan or Europe, 'vitality' (is not\nthat the great word of the studios?), the energy, that is to say, which\nis under the command of our common moments, sings, laughs, chatters or\nlooks its busy thoughts.\n\nCertainly we have here the Tree of Life and that of the knowledge of\nGood and Evil which is rooted in our interests, and if we have forgotten\ntheir differing virtues it is surely because we have taken delight in a\nconfusion of crossing branches. Tragic art, passionate art, the drowner\nof dykes, the confounder of understanding, moves us by setting us to\nreverie, by alluring us almost to the intensity of trance. The persons\nupon the stage, let us say, greaten till they are humanity itself. We\nfeel our minds expand convulsively or spread out slowly like some\nmoon-brightened image-crowded sea. That which is before our eyes\nperpetually vanishes and returns again in the midst of the excitement it\ncreates, and the more enthralling it is, the more do we forget it.\n\nAugust, 1910.\n\n\n\n\nJOHN SHAWE-TAYLOR\n\n\nThere is a portrait of John Shawe-Taylor by a celebrated painter in the\nDublin Municipal Gallery, but painted in the midst of a movement of the\narts that exalts characteristics above the more typical qualities, it\ndoes not show us that beautiful and gracious nature. There is an\nexaggeration of the hollows of the cheeks and of the form of the bones\nwhich empties the face of the balance and delicacy of its lines. He was\na very handsome man, as women who have imagination and tradition\nunderstand those words, and had he not been so, mind and character had\nbeen different. There are certain men, certain famous commanders of\nantiquity, for instance, of whose good looks the historian always\nspeaks, and whose good looks are the image of their faculty; and these\nmen copying hawk or leopard have an energy of swift decision, a power of\nsudden action, as if their whole body were their brain.\n\nA few years ago he was returning from America, and the liner reached\nQueenstown in a storm so great that the tender that came out to it for\npassengers returned with only one man. It was John Shawe-Taylor, who had\nleaped as it was swept away from the ship.\n\nThe achievement that has made his name historic and changed the history\nof Ireland came from the same faculty of calculation and daring, from\nthat instant decision of the hawk, between the movement of whose wings\nand the perception of whose eye no time passes capable of division. A\nproposal for a Land Conference had been made, and cleverer men than he\nwere but talking the life out of it. Every argument for and against had\nbeen debated over and over, and it was plain that nothing but argument\nwould come of it. One day we found a letter in the daily papers, signed\nwith his name, saying that a conference would be held on a certain date,\nand that certain leaders of the landlords and of the tenants were\ninvited. He had made his swift calculation, probably he could not have\ntold the reason for it, a decision had arisen out of his instinct. He\nwas then almost an unknown man. Had the letter failed, he would have\nseemed a crack-brained fool to his life's end; but the calculation of\nhis genius was justified. He had, as men of his type have often, given\nan expression to the hidden popular desires; and the expression of the\nhidden is the daring of the mind. When he had spoken, so many others\nspoke that the thing was taken out of the mouths of the leaders, it was\nas though some power deeper than our daily thought had spoken, and men\nrecognised that common instinct, that common sense which is genius. Men\nlike him live near this power because of something simple and impersonal\nwithin them which is, as I believe, imaged in the fire of their minds,\nas in the shape of their bodies and their faces.\n\nI do not think I have known another man whose motives were so entirely\npure, so entirely unmixed with any personal calculation, whether of\nambition, of prudence or of vanity. He caught up into his imagination\nthe public gain as other men their private gain. For much of his life he\nhad seemed, though a good soldier and a good shot, and a good rider to\nhounds, to care deeply for nothing but religion, and this religion, so\ncuriously lacking in denominational limits, concerned itself alone with\nthe communion of the soul with God. Such men, before some great\ndecision, will sometimes give to the analysis of their own motive the\nenergy that other men give to the examination of the circumstances\nwherein they act, and it is often those who attain in this way to purity\nof motive who act most wisely at moments of great crisis. It is as\nthough they sank a well through the soil where our habits have been\nbuilt, and where our hopes take root and are again uprooted, to the\nlasting rock and to the living stream. They are those for whom Tennyson\nclaimed the strength of ten, and the common and clever wonder at their\nsimplicity and at a triumph that has always an air of miracle about it.\n\nSome two years ago Ireland lost a great aesthetic genius, and it may be\nit should mourn, as it must mourn John Synge always, that which is gone\nfrom it in this man's moral genius. And yet it may be that, though he\ndied in early manhood, his work was finished, that the sudden flash of\nhis mind was of those things that come but seldom in a lifetime, and\nthat his name is as much a part of history as though he had lived\nthrough many laborious years.\n\nJuly 1, 1911.\n\n\n\n\nEDMUND SPENSER\n\n\nI\n\nWe know little of Spenser's childhood and nothing of his parents, except\nthat his father was probably an Edmund Spenser of north-east Lancashire,\na man of good blood and 'belonging to a house of ancient fame.' He was\nborn in London in 1552, nineteen years after the death of Ariosto, and\nwhen Tasso was about eight years old. Full of the spirit of the\nRenaissance, at once passionate and artificial, looking out upon the\nworld now as craftsman, now as connoisseur, he was to found his art upon\ntheirs rather than upon the more humane, the more noble, the less\nintellectual art of Malory and the Minstrels. Deafened and blinded by\ntheir influence, as so many of us were in boyhood by that art of Hugo,\nthat made the old simple writers seem but as brown bread and water, he\nwas always to love the journey more than its end, the landscape more\nthan the man, and reason more than life, and the tale less than its\ntelling. He entered Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1569, and translated\nallegorical poems out of Petrarch and Du Bellay. To-day a young man\ntranslates out of Verlaine and Verhaeren; but at that day Ronsard and Du\nBellay were the living poets, who promised revolutionary and unheard-of\nthings to a poetry moving towards elaboration and intellect, as\nours--the serpent's tooth in his own tail again--moves towards\nsimplicity and instinct. At Cambridge he met with Hobbinol of _The\nShepheards Calender_, a certain Gabriel Harvey, son of a rope-maker at\nSaffron Walden, but now a Fellow of Pembroke College, a notable man,\nsome five or six years his elder. It is usual to think ill of Harvey\nbecause of his dislike of rhyme and his advocacy of classical metres,\nand because he complained that Spenser preferred his _Faerie Queene_ to\nthe _Nine Muses_, and encouraged Hobgoblin 'to run off with the Garland\nof Apollo.' But at that crossroad, where so many crowds mingled talking\nof so many lands, no one could foretell in what bed he would sleep after\nnightfall. Milton was in the end to dislike rhyme as much, and it is\ncertain that rhyme is one of the secondary causes of that disintegration\nof the personal instincts which has given to modern poetry its deep\ncolour for colour's sake, its overflowing pattern, its background of\ndecorative landscape, and its insubordination of detail. At the opening\nof a movement we are busy with first principles, and can find out\neverything but the road we are to go, everything but the weight and\nmeasure of the impulse, that has come to us out of life itself, for that\nis always in defiance of reason, always without a justification but by\nfaith and works. Harvey set Spenser to the making of verses in classical\nmetre, and certain lines have come down to us written in what Spenser\ncalled 'Iambicum trimetrum.' His biographers agree that they are very\nbad, but, though I cannot scan them, I find in them the charm of what\nseems a sincere personal emotion. The man himself, liberated from the\nminute felicities of phrase and sound, that are the temptation and the\ndelight of rhyme, speaks of his Mistress some thought that came to him\nnot for the sake of poetry, but for love's sake, and the emotion instead\nof dissolving into detached colours, into 'the spangly gloom' that Keats\nsaw 'froth and boil' when he put his eyes into 'the pillowy cleft,'\nspeaks to her in poignant words as if out of a tear-stained love-letter:\n\n  'Unhappie verse, the witnesse of my unhappie state,\n  Make thy selfe fluttring winge for thy fast flying\n  Thought, and fly forth to my love wheresoever she be.\n  Whether lying restlesse in heavy bedde, or else\n  Sitting so cheerlesse at the cheerful boorde, or else\n  Playing alone carelesse on her heavenlie virginals.\n  If in bed, tell hir that my eyes can take no rest;\n  If at boorde tell her that my mouth can eat no meate\n  If at her virginals, tell her that I can heare no mirth.'\n\n\nII\n\nHe left College in his twenty-fourth year, and stayed for a while in\nLancashire, where he had relations, and there fell in love with one he\nhas written of in _The Shepheards Calender_ as 'Rosalind, the widdowes\ndaughter of the Glenn,' though she was, for all her shepherding, as one\nlearns from a College friend, 'a gentlewoman of no mean house.' She\nmarried Menalchus of the _Calender_ and Spenser lamented her for years,\nin verses so full of disguise that one cannot say if his lamentations\ncome out of a broken heart or are but a useful movement in the elaborate\nritual of his poetry, a well-ordered incident in the mythology of his\nimagination. To no English poet, perhaps to no European poet before his\nday, had the natural expression of personal feeling been so impossible,\nthe clear vision of the lineaments of human character so difficult; no\nother's head and eyes had sunk so far into the pillowy cleft. After a\nyear of this life he went to London, and by Harvey's advice and\nintroduction entered the service of the Earl of Leicester, staying for a\nwhile in his house on the banks of the Thames; and it was there in all\nlikelihood that he met with the Earl's nephew, Sir Philip Sidney, still\nlittle more than a boy, but with his head full of affairs of state. One\ncan imagine that it was the great Earl or Sir Philip Sidney that gave\nhis imagination its moral and practical turn, and one imagines him\nseeking from philosophical men, who distrust instinct because it\ndisturbs contemplation, and from practical men who distrust everything\nthey cannot use in the routine of immediate events, that impulse and\nmethod of creation that can only be learned with surety from the\ntechnical criticism of poets, and from the excitement of some movement\nin the artistic life. Marlowe and Shakespeare were still at school, and\nBen Jonson was but five years old. Sidney was doubtless the greatest\npersonal influence that came into Spenser's life, and it was one that\nexalted moral zeal above every other faculty. The great Earl impressed\nhis imagination very deeply also, for the lamentation over the Earl of\nLeicester's death is more than a conventional Ode to a dead patron.\nSpenser's verses about men, nearly always indeed, seem to express more\nof personal joy and sorrow than those about women, perhaps because he\nwas less deliberately a poet when he spoke of men. At the end of a long\nbeautiful passage he laments that unworthy men should be in the dead\nEarl's place, and compares them to the fox--an unclean feeder--hiding in\nthe lair 'the badger swept.' The imaginer of the festivals of Kenilworth\nwas indeed the fit patron for him, and alike, because of the strength\nand weakness of Spenser's art, one regrets that he could not have lived\nalways in that elaborate life, a master of ceremony to the world,\ninstead of being plunged into a life that but stirred him to bitterness,\nas the way is with theoretical minds in the tumults of events they\ncannot understand. In the winter of 1579-80 he published _The Shepheards\nCalender_, a book of twelve eclogues, one for every month of the year,\nand dedicated it to Sir Philip Sidney. It was full of pastoral beauty\nand allegorical images of current events, revealing too that conflict\nbetween the aesthetic and moral interests that was to run through\nwell-nigh all his works, and it became immediately famous. He was\nrewarded with a place as private secretary to the Lord Lieutenant, Lord\nGrey de Wilton, and sent to Ireland, where he spent nearly all the rest\nof his life. After a few years there he bought Kilcolman Castle, which\nhad belonged to the rebel Earl of Desmond, and the rivers and hills\nabout this castle came much into his poetry. Our Irish Aubeg is 'Mulla\nmine, whose waves I taught to weep,' and the Ballyvaughan Hills, it has\nits rise among 'old Father Mole.' He never pictured the true countenance\nof Irish scenery, for his mind turned constantly to the courts of\nElizabeth and to the umbrageous level lands, where his own race was\nalready seeding like a great poppy:\n\n  'Both heaven and heavenly graces do much more\n  (Quoth he), abound in that same land then this:\n  For there all happie peace and plenteous store\n  Conspire in one to make contented blisse.\n  No wayling there nor wretchednesse is heard,\n  No bloodie issues nor no leprosies,\n  No griesly famine, nor no raging sweard,\n  No nightly bordrags, nor no hue and cries;\n  The shepheards there abroad may safely lie\n  On hills and downes, withouten dread or daunger,\n  No ravenous wolves the good mans hope destroy,\n  Nor outlawes fell affray the forest raunger,\n  The learned arts do florish in great honor,\n  And Poets wits are had in peerlesse price.'\n\nNor did he ever understand the people he lived among or the historical\nevents that were changing all things about him. Lord Grey de Wilton had\nbeen recalled almost immediately, but it was his policy, brought over\nready-made in his ship, that Spenser advocated throughout all his life,\nequally in his long prose book _The State of Ireland_ as in the _Faerie\nQueene_, where Lord Grey was Artigall and the Iron man the soldiers and\nexecutioners by whose hands he worked. Like an hysterical patient he\ndrew a complicated web of inhuman logic out of the bowels of an\ninsufficient premise--there was no right, no law, but that of Elizabeth,\nand all that opposed her opposed themselves to God, to civilisation, and\nto all inherited wisdom and courtesy, and should be put to death. He\nmade two visits to England, celebrating one of them in _Colin Clouts\ncome Home againe_, to publish the first three books and the second three\nbooks of the _Faerie Queene_ respectively, and to try for some English\noffice or pension. By the help of Raleigh, now his neighbour at\nKilcolman, he had been promised a pension, but was kept out of it by\nLord Burleigh, who said, 'All that for a song!' From that day Lord\nBurleigh became that 'rugged forehead' of the poems, whose censure of\nthis or that is complained of. During the last three or four years of\nhis life in Ireland he married a fair woman of his neighbourhood, and\nabout her wrote many intolerable artificial sonnets and that most\nbeautiful passage in the sixth book of the _Faerie Queene_, which tells\nof Colin Clout piping to the Graces and to her; and he celebrated his\nmarriage in the most beautiful of all his poems, the _Epithalamium_. His\ngenius was pictorial, and these pictures of happiness were more natural\nto it than any personal pride, or joy, or sorrow. His new happiness was\nvery brief, and just as he was rising to something of Milton's grandeur\nin the fragment that has been called _Mutabilitie_, 'the wandering\ncompanies that keep the woods,' as he called the Irish armies, drove him\nto his death. Ireland, where he saw nothing but work for the Iron man,\nwas in the midst of the last struggle of the old Celtic order with\nEngland, itself about to turn bottom upward, of the passion of the\nMiddle Ages with the craft of the Renaissance. Seven years after\nSpenser's arrival in Ireland a large merchant ship had carried off from\nLoch Swilly, by a very crafty device common in those days, certain\npersons of importance. Red Hugh, a boy of fifteen, and the coming head\nof Tirconnell, and various heads of clans had been enticed on board the\nmerchant ship to drink of a fine vintage, and there made prisoners. All\nbut Red Hugh were released, on finding substitutes among the boys of\ntheir kindred, and the captives were hurried to Dublin and imprisoned in\nthe Birmingham Tower. After four years of captivity and one attempt\nthat failed, Red Hugh and certain of his companions escaped into the\nDublin mountains, one dying there of cold and privation, and from that\nto their own country-side. Red Hugh allied himself to Hugh O'Neil, the\nmost powerful of the Irish leaders--'Oh, deep, dissembling heart, born\nto great weal or woe of thy country!' an English historian had cried to\nhim--an Oxford man too, a man of the Renaissance, and for a few years\ndefeated English armies and shook the power of England. The Irish,\nstirred by these events, and with it maybe some rumours of _The State of\nIreland_ sticking in their stomachs, drove Spenser out of doors and\nburnt his house, one of his children, as tradition has it, dying in the\nfire. He fled to England, and died some three months later in January,\n1599, as Ben Jonson says, 'of lack of bread.'\n\nDuring the last four or five years of his life he had seen, without\nknowing that he saw it, the beginning of the great Elizabethan poetical\nmovement. In 1598 he had pictured the Nine Muses lamenting each one\nover the evil state in England, of the things that she had in charge,\nbut, like William Blake's more beautiful _Whether on Ida's shady brow_,\ntheir lamentations should have been a cradle-song. When he died _Romeo\nand Juliet_, _Richard III._, and _Richard II._, and the plays of Marlowe\nhad all been acted, and in stately houses were sung madrigals and love\nsongs whose like has not been in the world since. Italian influence had\nstrengthened the old French joy that had never died out among the upper\nclasses, and an art was being created for the last time in England which\nhad half its beauty from continually suggesting a life hardly less\nbeautiful than itself.\n\n\nIII\n\nWhen Spenser was buried at Westminster Abbey many poets read verses in\nhis praise, and then threw their verses and the pens that had written\nthem into his tomb. Like him they belonged, for all the moral zeal that\nwas gathering like a London fog, to that indolent, demonstrative Merry\nEngland that was about to pass away. Men still wept when they were\nmoved, still dressed themselves in joyous colours, and spoke with many\ngestures. Thoughts and qualities sometimes come to their perfect\nexpression when they are about to pass away, and Merry England was dying\nin plays, and in poems, and in strange adventurous men. If one of those\npoets who threw his copy of verses into the earth that was about to\nclose over his master were to come alive again, he would find some\nshadow of the life he knew, though not the art he knew, among young men\nin Paris, and would think that his true country. If he came to England\nhe would find nothing there but the triumph of the Puritan and the\nmerchant--those enemies he had feared and hated--and he would weep\nperhaps, in that womanish way of his, to think that so much greatness\nhad been, not as he had hoped, the dawn, but the sunset of a people. He\nhad lived in the last days of what we may call the Anglo-French nation,\nthe old feudal nation that had been established when the Norman and the\nAngevin made French the language of court and market. In the time of\nChaucer English poets still wrote much in French, and even English\nlabourers lilted French songs over their work; and I cannot read any\nElizabethan poem or romance without feeling the pressure of habits of\nemotion, and of an order of life which were conscious, for all their\nLatin gaiety, of a quarrel to the death with that new Anglo-Saxon nation\nthat was arising amid Puritan sermons and Mar-Prelate pamphlets. This\nnation had driven out the language of its conquerors, and now it was to\noverthrow their beautiful haughty imagination and their manners, full of\nabandon and wilfulness, and to set in their stead earnestness and logic\nand the timidity and reserve of a counting-house. It had been coming for\na long while, for it had made the Lollards; and when Anglo-French\nChaucer was at Westminster its poet, Langland, sang the office at St.\nPaul's. Shakespeare, with his delight in great persons, with his\nindifference to the State, with his scorn of the crowd, with his feudal\npassion, was of the old nation, and Spenser, though a joyless\nearnestness had cast shadows upon him, and darkened his intellect wholly\nat times, was of the old nation too. His _Faerie Queene_ was written in\nMerry England, but when Bunyan wrote in prison the other great English\nallegory, Modern England had been born. Bunyan's men would do right that\nthey might come some day to the Delectable Mountain, and not at all that\nthey might live happily in a world whose beauty was but an entanglement\nabout their feet. Religion had denied the sacredness of an earth that\ncommerce was about to corrupt and ravish, but when Spenser lived the\nearth had still its sheltering sacredness. His religion, where the\npaganism that is natural to proud and happy people had been strengthened\nby the platonism of the Renaissance, cherished the beauty of the soul\nand the beauty of the body with, as it seemed, an equal affection. He\nwould have had men live well, not merely that they might win eternal\nhappiness but that they might live splendidly among men and be\ncelebrated in many songs. How could one live well if one had not the joy\nof the Creator and of the Giver of gifts? He says in his _Hymn to\nBeauty_ that a beautiful soul, unless for some stubbornness in the\nground, makes for itself a beautiful body, and he even denies that\nbeautiful persons ever lived who had not souls as beautiful. They may\nhave been tempted until they seemed evil, but that was the fault of\nothers. And in his _Hymn to Heavenly Beauty_ he sets a woman little\nknown to theology, one that he names Wisdom or Beauty, above Seraphim\nand Cherubim and in the very bosom of God, and in the _Faerie Queene_ it\nis pagan Venus and her lover Adonis who create the forms of all living\nthings and send them out into the world, calling them back again to the\ngardens of Adonis at their lives' end to rest there, as it seems, two\nthousand years between life and life. He began in English poetry,\ndespite a temperament that delighted in sensuous beauty alone with\nperfect delight, that worship of Intellectual Beauty which Shelley\ncarried to a greater subtlety and applied to the whole of life.\n\nThe qualities, to each of whom he had planned to give a Knight, he had\nborrowed from Aristotle and partly Christianised, but not to the\nforgetting of their heathen birth. The chief of the Knights, who would\nhave combined in himself the qualities of all the others, had Spenser\nlived to finish the _Faerie Queene_, was King Arthur, the representative\nof an ancient quality, Magnificence. Born at the moment of change,\nSpenser had indeed many Puritan thoughts. It has been recorded that he\ncut his hair short and half regretted his hymns to Love and Beauty. But\nhe has himself told us that the many-headed beast overthrown and bound\nby Calidor, Knight of Courtesy, was Puritanism itself. Puritanism, its\nzeal and its narrowness, and the angry suspicion that it had in common\nwith all movements of the ill-educated, seemed no other to him than a\nslanderer of all fine things. One doubts, indeed, if he could have\npersuaded himself that there could be any virtue at all without\ncourtesy, perhaps without something of pageant and eloquence. He was, I\nthink, by nature altogether a man of that old Catholic feudal nation,\nbut, like Sidney, he wanted to justify himself to his new masters. He\nwrote of knights and ladies, wild creatures imagined by the aristocratic\npoets of the twelfth century, and perhaps chiefly by English poets who\nhad still the French tongue; but he fastened them with allegorical nails\nto a big barn door of common sense, of merely practical virtue. Allegory\nitself had risen into general importance with the rise of the merchant\nclass in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; and it was natural\nwhen that class was about for the first time to shape an age in its\nimage, that the last epic poet of the old order should mix its art with\nhis own long-descended, irresponsible, happy art.\n\n\nIV\n\nAllegory and, to a much greater degree, symbolism are a natural language\nby which the soul when entranced, or even in ordinary sleep, communes\nwith God and with angels. They can speak of things which cannot be\nspoken of in any other language, but one will always, I think, feel some\nsense of unreality when they are used to describe things which can be\ndescribed as well in ordinary words. Dante used allegory to describe\nvisionary things, and the first maker of _The Romance of the Rose_, for\nall his lighter spirits, pretends that his adventures came to him in a\nvision one May morning; while Bunyan, by his preoccupation with heaven\nand the soul, gives his simple story a visionary strangeness and\nintensity: he believes so little in the world, that he takes us away\nfrom all ordinary standards of probability and makes us believe even in\nallegory for a while. Spenser, on the other hand, to whom allegory was\nnot, as I think, natural at all, makes us feel again and again that it\ndisappoints and interrupts our preoccupation with the beautiful and\nsensuous life he has called up before our eyes. It interrupts us most\nwhen he copies Langland, and writes in what he believes to be a mood of\nedification, and the least when he is not quite serious, when he sets\nbefore us some procession like a court pageant made to celebrate a\nwedding or a crowning. One cannot think that he should have occupied\nhimself with moral and religious questions at all. He should have been\ncontent to be, as Emerson thought Shakespeare was, a Master of the\nRevels to mankind. I am certain that he never gets that visionary air\nwhich can alone make allegory real, except when he writes out of a\nfeeling for glory and passion. He had no deep moral or religious life.\nHe has never a line like Dante's 'Thy Will is our Peace,' or like Thomas\na Kempis's 'The Holy Spirit has liberated me from a multitude of\nopinions,' or even like Hamlet's objection to the bare bodkin. He had\nbeen made a poet by what he had almost learnt to call his sins. If he\nhad not felt it necessary to justify his art to some serious friend, or\nperhaps even to 'that rugged forehead,' he would have written all his\nlife long, one thinks, of the loves of shepherdesses and shepherds,\namong whom there would have been perhaps the morals of the dovecot. One\nis persuaded that his morality is official and impersonal--a system of\nlife which it was his duty to support--and it is perhaps a half\nunderstanding of this that has made so many generations believe that he\nwas the first poet laureate, the first salaried moralist among the\npoets. His processions of deadly sins, and his houses, where the very\ncornices are arbitrary images of virtue, are an unconscious hypocrisy,\nan undelighted obedience to the 'rugged forehead,' for all the while he\nis thinking of nothing but lovers whose bodies are quivering with the\nmemory or the hope of long embraces. When they are not together, he will\nindeed embroider emblems and images much as those great ladies of the\ncourts of love embroidered them in their castles; and when these are\nimagined out of a thirst for magnificence and not thought out in a mood\nof edification, they are beautiful enough; but they are always\ntapestries for corridors that lead to lovers' meetings or for the walls\nof marriage chambers. He was not passionate, for the passionate feed\ntheir flame in wanderings and absences, when the whole being of the\nbeloved, every little charm of body and of soul, is always present to\nthe mind, filling it with heroical subtleties of desire. He is a poet of\nthe delighted senses, and his song becomes most beautiful when he writes\nof those islands of Phaedria and Acrasia, which angered 'that rugged\nforehead,' as it seems, but gave to Keats his _Belle Dame sans Merci_\nand his 'perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,' and to William Morris\nhis 'waters of the wondrous Isle.'\n\n\nV\n\nThe dramatists lived in a disorderly world, reproached by many,\npersecuted even, but following their imagination wherever it led them.\nTheir imagination, driven hither and thither by beauty and sympathy, put\non something of the nature of eternity. Their subject was always the\nsoul, the whimsical, self-awakening, self-exciting, self-appeasing soul.\nThey celebrated its heroical, passionate will going by its own path to\nimmortal and invisible things. Spenser, on the other hand, except among\nthose smooth pastoral scenes and lovely effeminate islands that have\nmade him a great poet, tried to be of his time, or rather of the time\nthat was all but at hand. Like Sidney, whose charm it may be led many\ninto slavery, he persuaded himself that we enjoy Virgil because of the\nvirtues of AEneas, and so planned out his immense poem that it would set\nbefore the imagination of citizens, in whom there would soon be no great\nenergy, innumerable blameless AEneases. He had learned to put the State,\nwhich desires all the abundance for itself, in the place of the Church,\nand he found it possible to be moved by expedient emotions, merely\nbecause they were expedient, and to think serviceable thoughts with no\nself-contempt. He loved his Queen a little because she was the\nprotectress of poets and an image of that old Anglo-French nation that\nlay a-dying, but a great deal because she was the image of the State\nwhich had taken possession of his conscience. She was over sixty years\nold, and ugly and, it is thought, selfish, but in his poetry she is\n'fair Cynthia,' 'a crown of lilies,' 'the image of the heavens,'\n'without mortal blemish,' and has 'an angelic face,' where 'the red\nrose' has 'meddled with the white'; 'Phoebus thrusts out his golden\nhead' but to look upon her, and blushes to find himself outshone. She is\n'a fourth Grace,' 'a queen of love,' 'a sacred saint,' and 'above all\nher sex that ever yet has been.' In the midst of his praise of his own\nsweetheart he stops to remember that Elizabeth is more beautiful, and an\nold man in _Daphnaida_, although he has been brought to death's door by\nthe death of a beautiful daughter, remembers that though his daughter\n'seemed of angelic race,' she was yet but the primrose to the rose\nbeside Elizabeth. Spenser had learned to look to the State not only as\nthe rewarder of virtue but as the maker of right and wrong, and had\nbegun to love and hate as it bid him. The thoughts that we find for\nourselves are timid and a little secret, but those modern thoughts that\nwe share with large numbers are confident and very insolent. We have\nlittle else to-day, and when we read our newspaper and take up its cry,\nabove all its cry of hatred, we will not think very carefully, for we\nhear the marching feet. When Spenser wrote of Ireland he wrote as an\nofficial, and out of thoughts and emotions that had been organised by\nthe State. He was the first of many Englishmen to see nothing but what\nhe was desired to see. Could he have gone there as a poet merely, he\nmight have found among its poets more wonderful imaginations than even\nthose islands of Phaedria and Acrasia. He would have found among\nwandering story-tellers, not indeed his own power of rich, sustained\ndescription, for that belongs to lettered ease, but certainly all the\nkingdom of Faerie, still unfaded, of which his own poetry was often but\na troubled image. He would have found men doing by swift strokes of the\nimagination much that he was doing with painful intellect, with that\nimaginative reason that soon was to drive out imagination altogether and\nfor a long time. He would have met with, at his own door, story-tellers\namong whom the perfection of Greek art was indeed as unknown as his own\npower of detailed description, but who, none the less, imagined or\nremembered beautiful incidents and strange, pathetic outcrying that made\nthem of Homer's lineage. Flaubert says somewhere, 'There are things in\nHugo, as in Rabelais, that I could have mended, things badly built, but\nthen what thrusts of power beyond the reach of conscious art!' Is not\nall history but the coming of that conscious art which first makes\narticulate and then destroys the old wild energy? Spenser, the first\npoet struck with remorse, the first poet who gave his heart to the\nState, saw nothing but disorder, where the mouths that have spoken all\nthe fables of the poets had not yet become silent. All about him were\nshepherds and shepherdesses still living the life that made Theocritus\nand Virgil think of shepherd and poet as the one thing; but though he\ndreamed of Virgil's shepherds he wrote a book to advise, among many like\nthings, the harrying of all that followed flocks upon the hills, and of\nall 'the wandering companies that keep the woods.' His _View of the\nState of Ireland_ commends indeed the beauty of the hills and woods\nwhere they did their shepherding, in that powerful and subtle language\nof his which I sometimes think more full of youthful energy than even\nthe language of the great playwrights. He is 'sure it is yet a most\nbeautiful and sweet country as any under heaven,' and that all would\nprosper but for those agitators, 'those wandering companies that keep\nthe woods,' and he would rid it of them by a certain expeditious way.\nThere should be four great garrisons. 'And those fowre garrisons issuing\nfoorthe, at such convenient times as they shall have intelligence or\nespiall upon the enemye, will so drive him from one side to another and\ntennis him amongst them, that he shall finde nowhere safe to keepe his\ncreete, or hide himselfe, but flying from the fire shall fall into the\nwater, and out of one daunger into another, that in short space his\ncreete, which is his moste sustenence, shall be wasted in preying, or\nkilled in driving, or starved for wante of pasture in the woodes, and he\nhimselfe brought soe lowe, that he shall have no harte nor abilitye to\nindure his wretchednesse, the which will surely come to passe in very\nshort space; for one winters well following of him will so plucke him on\nhis knees that he will never be able to stand up agayne.'\n\nHe could commend this expeditious way from personal knowledge, and could\nassure the Queen that the people of the country would soon 'consume\nthemselves and devoure one another. The proofs whereof I saw\nsufficiently ensampled in these late warres of Mounster; for\nnotwithstanding that the same was a most rich and plentifull countrey,\nfull of corne and cattell, that you would have thought they would have\nbene able to stand long, yet ere one yeare and a halfe they were brought\nto such wretchednesse, as that any stonye heart would have rued the\nsame. Out of every corner of the woodes and glynnes they came creeping\nforth upon theyr hands, for theyr legges could not beare them; they\nlooked like anatomyes of death, they spake like ghosts crying out of\ntheir graves; they did eate of the dead carrions, happy were they if\nthey could finde them, yea, and one another soone after, insomuch as the\nvery carcasses they spared not to scrape out of theyr graves; and if\nthey found a plot of watercresses or shamrokes, there they flocked as to\na feast for the time, yet not able long to continue therewithall; that\nin short space there were none allmost left, and a most populous and\nplentifull countrey suddaynely left voyde of man or beast; yet sure in\nall that warre, there perished not many by the sword, but all by the\nextremitye of famine.'\n\n\nVI\n\nIn a few years the Four Masters were to write the history of that time,\nand they were to record the goodness or the badness of Irishman and\nEnglishman with entire impartiality. They had seen friends and relatives\npersecuted, but they would write of that man's poisoning and this man's\ncharities and of the fall of great houses, and hardly with any other\nemotion than a thought of the pitiableness of all life. Friend and enemy\nwould be for them a part of the spectacle of the world. They remembered\nindeed those Anglo-French invaders who conquered for the sake of their\nown strong hand, and when they had conquered became a part of the life\nabout them, singing its songs, when they grew weary of their own Iseult\nand Guinevere. The Four Masters had not come to understand, as I think,\ndespite famines and exterminations, that new invaders were among them,\nwho fought for an alien State, for an alien religion. Such ideas were\ndifficult to them, for they belonged to the old individual, poetical\nlife, and spoke a language even, in which it was all but impossible to\nthink an abstract thought. They understood Spain, doubtless, which\npersecuted in the interests of religion, but I doubt if anybody in\nIreland could have understood as yet that the Anglo-Saxon nation was\nbeginning to persecute in the service of ideas it believed to be the\nfoundation of the State. I doubt if anybody in Ireland saw that with\ncertainty, till the Great Demagogue had come and turned the old house of\nthe noble into 'the house of the Poor, the lonely house, the accursed\nhouse of Cromwell.' He came, another Cairbry Cat Head, with that great\nrabble, who had overthrown the pageantry of Church and Court, but who\nturned towards him faces full of the sadness and docility of their long\nservitude, and the old individual, poetical life went down, as it seems,\nfor ever. He had studied Spenser's book and approved of it, as we know,\nfinding, doubtless, his own head there, for Spenser, a king of the old\nrace, carried a mirror which showed kings yet to come though but kings\nof the mob. Those Bohemian poets of the theatres were wiser, for the\nStates that touched them nearly were the States where Helen and Dido had\nsorrowed, and so their mirrors showed none but beautiful heroical heads.\nThey wandered in the places that pale passion loves, and were happy, as\none thinks, and troubled little about those marching and\nhoarse-throated thoughts that the State has in its pay. They knew that\nthose marchers, with the dust of so many roads upon them, are very\nrobust and have great and well-paid generals to write expedient\ndespatches in sound prose; and they could hear mother earth singing\namong her cornfields:\n\n  'Weep not, my wanton! smile upon my knee;\n  When thou art old there's grief enough for thee.'\n\n\nVII\n\nThere are moments when one can read neither Milton nor Spenser, moments\nwhen one recollects nothing but that their flesh had partly been changed\nto stone, but there are other moments when one recollects nothing but\nthose habits of emotion that made the lesser poet especially a man of an\nolder, more imaginative time. One remembers that he delighted in smooth\npastoral places, because men could be busy there or gather together\nthere, after their work, that he could love handiwork and the hum of\nvoices. One remembers that he could still rejoice in the trees, not\nbecause they were images of loneliness and meditation, but because of\ntheir serviceableness. He could praise 'the builder oake,' 'the aspine,\ngood for staves,' 'the cypresse funerall,' 'the eugh, obedient to the\nbender's will,' 'the birch for shaftes,' 'the sallow for the mill,' 'the\nmirrhe sweete-bleeding in the bitter wound,' 'the fruitful olive,' and\n'the carver holme.' He was of a time before undelighted labour had made\nthe business of men a desecration. He carries one's memory back to\nVirgil's and Chaucer's praise of trees, and to the sweet-sounding song\nmade by the old Irish poet in their praise.\n\nI got up from reading the _Faerie Queene_ the other day and wandered\ninto another room. It was in a friend's house, and I came of a sudden to\nthe ancient poetry and to our poetry side by side--an engraving of\nClaude's 'Mill' hung under an engraving of Turner's 'Temple of Jupiter.'\nThose dancing country-people, those cow-herds, resting after the day's\nwork, and that quiet mill-race made one think of Merry England with its\nglad Latin heart, of a time when men in every land found poetry and\nimagination in one another's company and in the day's labour. Those\nstately goddesses, moving in slow procession towards that marble\narchitrave among mysterious trees, belong to Shelley's thought, and to\nthe religion of the wilderness--the only religion possible to poetry\nto-day. Certainly Colin Clout, the companionable shepherd, and Calidor,\nthe courtly man-at-arms, are gone, and Alastor is wandering from lonely\nriver to river finding happiness in nothing but in that star where\nSpenser too had imagined the fountain of perfect things. This new\nbeauty, in losing so much, has indeed found a new loftiness, a something\nof religious exaltation that the old had not. It may be that those\ngoddesses, moving with a majesty like a procession of the stars, mean\nsomething to the soul of man that those kindly women of the old poets\ndid not mean, for all the fulness of their breasts and the joyous\ngravity of their eyes. Has not the wilderness been at all times a place\nof prophecy?\n\n\nVIII\n\nOur poetry, though it has been a deliberate bringing back of the Latin\njoy and the Latin love of beauty, has had to put off the old marching\nrhythms, that once delighted more than expedient hearts, in separating\nitself from a life where servile hands have become powerful. It has\nceased to have any burden for marching shoulders, since it learned\necstasy from Smart in his mad cell, and from Blake, who made joyous\nlittle songs out of almost unintelligible visions, and from Keats, who\nsang of a beauty so wholly preoccupied with itself that its\ncontemplation is a kind of lingering trance. The poet, if he would not\ncarry burdens that are not his and obey the orders of servile lips, must\nsit apart in contemplative indolence playing with fragile things.\n\nIf one chooses at hazard a Spenserian stanza out of Shelley and compares\nit with any stanza by Spenser, one sees the change, though it would be\nstill more clear if one had chosen a lyrical passage. I will take a\nstanza out of _Laon and Cythna_, for that is story-telling and runs\nnearer to Spenser than the meditative _Adonais_:\n\n  'The meteor to its far morass returned:\n  The beating of our veins one interval\n  Made still; and then I felt the blood that burned\n  Within her frame, mingle with mine, and fall\n  Around my heart like fire; and over all\n  A mist was spread, the sickness of a deep\n  And speechless swoon of joy, as might befall\n  Two disunited spirits when they leap\n  In union from this earth's obscure and fading sleep.\n\nThe rhythm is varied and troubled, and the lines, which are in Spenser\nlike bars of gold thrown ringing one upon another, are broken\ncapriciously. Nor is the meaning the less an inspiration of indolent\nmuses, for it wanders hither and thither at the beckoning of fancy. It\nis now busy with a meteor and now with throbbing blood that is fire, and\nwith a mist that is a swoon and a sleep that is life. It is bound\ntogether by the vaguest suggestion, while Spenser's verse is always\nrushing on to some preordained thought. 'A popular poet' can still\nindeed write poetry of the will, just as factory girls wear the fashion\nof hat or dress the moneyed classes wore a year ago, but 'popular\npoetry' does not belong to the living imagination of the world. Old\nwriters gave men four temperaments, and they gave the sanguineous\ntemperament to men of active life, and it is precisely the sanguineous\ntemperament that is fading out of poetry and most obviously out of what\nis most subtle and living in poetry--its pulse and breath, its rhythm.\nBecause poetry belongs to that element in every race which is most\nstrong, and therefore most individual, the poet is not stirred to\nimaginative activity by a life which is surrendering its freedom to ever\nnew elaboration, organisation, mechanism. He has no longer a poetical\nwill, and must be content to write out of those parts of himself which\nare too delicate and fiery for any deadening exercise. Every generation\nhas more and more loosened the rhythm, more and more broken up and\ndisorganised, for the sake of subtlety of detail, those great rhythms\nwhich move, as it were, in masses of sound. Poetry has become more\nspiritual, for the soul is of all things the most delicately organised,\nbut it has lost in weight and measure and in its power of telling long\nstories and of dealing with great and complicated events. _Laon and\nCythna_, though I think it rises sometimes into loftier air than the\n_Faerie Queene_; and _Endymion_, though its shepherds and wandering\ndivinities have a stranger and more intense beauty than Spenser's, have\nneed of too watchful and minute attention for such lengthy poems. In\nWilliam Morris, indeed, one finds a music smooth and unexacting like\nthat of the old story-tellers, but not their energetic pleasure, their\nrhythmical wills. One too often misses in his _Earthly Paradise_ the\nminute ecstasy of modern song without finding that old happy-go-lucky\ntune that had kept the story marching.\n\nSpenser's contemporaries, writing lyrics or plays full of lyrical\nmoments, write a verse more delicately organised than his and crowd more\nmeaning into a phrase than he, but they could not have kept one's\nattention through so long a poem. A friend who has a fine ear told me\nthe other day that she had read all Spenser with delight and yet could\nremember only four lines. When she repeated them they were from the poem\nby Matthew Roydon, which is bound up with Spenser because it is a\ncommendation of Sir Philip Sidney:\n\n  'A sweet, attractive kind of grace,\n  A full assurance given by looks,\n  Continual comfort in a face,\n  The lineaments of Gospel books.'\n\nYet if one were to put even these lines beside a fine modern song one\nwould notice that they had a stronger and rougher energy, a\nfeatherweight more, if eye and ear were fine enough to notice it, of the\nactive will, of the happiness that comes out of life itself.\n\n\nIX\n\nI have put into this book[5] only those passages from Spenser that I\nwant to remember and carry about with me. I have not tried to select\nwhat people call characteristic passages, for that is, I think, the way\nto make a dull book. One never really knows anybody's taste but one's\nown, and if one likes anything sincerely one may be certain that there\nare other people made out of the same earth to like it too. I have taken\nout of _The Shepheards Calender_ only those parts which are about love\nor about old age, and I have taken out of the _Faerie Queene_ passages\nabout shepherds and lovers, and fauns and satyrs, and a few allegorical\nprocessions. I find that though I love symbolism, which is often the\nonly fitting speech for some mystery of disembodied life, I am for the\nmost part bored by allegory, which is made, as Blake says, 'by the\ndaughters of memory,' and coldly, with no wizard frenzy. The processions\nI have chosen are either those, like the House of Mammon, that have\nenough ancient mythology, always an implicit symbolism, or, like the\nCave of Despair, enough sheer passion to make one forget or forgive\ntheir allegory, or else they are, like that vision of Scudamour, so\nvisionary, so full of a sort of ghostly midnight animation, that one is\npersuaded that they had some strange purpose and did truly appear in\njust that way to some mind worn out with war and trouble. The vision of\nScudamour is, I sometimes think, the finest invention in Spenser. Until\nquite lately I knew nothing of Spenser but the parts I had read as a\nboy. I did not know that I had read so far as that vision, but year\nafter year this thought would rise up before me coming from I knew not\nwhere. I would be alone perhaps in some old building, and I would think\nsuddenly 'out of that door might come a procession of strange people\ndoing mysterious things with tumult. They would walk over the stone\nfloor, then suddenly vanish, and everything would become silent again.'\nOnce I saw what is called, I think, a Board School continuation class\nplay _Hamlet_. There was no stage, but they walked in procession into\nthe midst of a large room full of visitors and of their friends. While\nthey were walking in, that thought came to me again from I knew not\nwhere. I was alone in a great church watching ghostly kings and queens\nsetting out upon their unearthly business.\n\nIt was only last summer, when I read the Fourth Book of the _Faerie\nQueene_, that I found I had been imagining over and over the enchanted\npersecution of Amoret.\n\nI give too, in a section which I call 'Gardens of Delight,' the good\ngardens of Adonis and the bad gardens of Phaedria and Acrasia, which are\nmythological and symbolical, but not allegorical, and show, more\nparticularly those bad islands, his power of describing bodily happiness\nand bodily beauty at its greatest. He seemed always to feel through the\neyes, imagining everything in pictures. Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_ is\nmore energetic in its sensuality, more complicated in its intellectual\nenergy than this languid story, which pictures always a happiness that\nwould perish if the desire to which it offers so many roses lost its\nindolence and its softness. There is no passion in the pleasure he has\nset amid perilous seas, for he would have us understand that there alone\ncould the war-worn and the sea-worn man find dateless leisure and\nunrepining peace.\n\nOctober, 1902.\n\n\n\n\nFootnotes:\n\n[1] I had forgotten Falstaff, who is an episode in a chronicle play.\n\n[2] Rose Kavanagh, the poet, wrote to her religious adviser from, I\nthink, Leitrim, where she lived, and asked him to get her the works of\nMazzini. He replied, 'You must mean Manzone.'\n\n[3] I have heard him say more than once, 'I will not say our people know\ngood from bad, but I will say that they don't hate the good when it is\npointed out to them, as a great many people do in England.'\n\n[4] A small political organiser told me once that he and a certain\nfriend got together somewhere in Tipperary a great meeting of farmers\nfor O'Leary on his coming out of prison, and O'Leary had said at it:\n'The landlords gave us some few leaders, and I like them for that, and\nthe artisans have given us great numbers of good patriots, and so I like\nthem best: but you I do not like at all, for you have never given us\nanyone.' I have known but one that had his moral courage, and that was a\nwoman with beauty to give her courage and self-possession.\n\n[5] _Poems of Spenser: Selected and with an Introduction by W. B.\nYeats._ (T. C. and E. C. Jack, Edinburgh, N.D.)\n\n\n\n\nThe following pages contain advertisements of Macmillan books by the same\nauthor, and other poetic works.\n\n\nNew Poems and Essays\n\nBY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS\n\n\"Mr. Yeats is probably the most important as well as the most widely\nknown of the men concerned directly in the so-called Celtic renaissance.\nMore than this, he stands among the few men to be reckoned with in\nmodern poetry.\"--_New York Herald._\n\n\nThe Green Helmet and Other Poems\n\n_Decorated cloth, 12mo, $1.25_\n\nThe initial piece in this volume is a deliciously conceived heroic\nfarce, quaint in humor and sprightly in action. It tells of the\ndifficulty in which two simple Irish folk find themselves when they\nenter into an agreement with an apparition of the sea, who demands that\nthey knock off his head and who maintains that after they have done that\nhe will knock off theirs. There is a real meaning in the play which it\nwill not take the thoughtful reader long to discover. Besides this there\nare a number of shorter poems, notably one in which Mr. Yeats answers\nhis critics of \"The Playboy of the Western World.\"\n\n\nPlays\n\n_New edition. Cloth. 12mo. $2.00 net_\n\nThis edition of Mr. Yeats's plays has been thoroughly revised and\ncontains considerable new matter in the way of appendices. \"The Countess\nCathleen\" and \"The Land of Heart's Desire\" are presented in new form,\nthe versions being those which the Irish Players use.\n\n\nOther Works by William Butler Yeats\n\n\nLyrical and Dramatic Poems\n\n  IN TWO VOLUMES\n\n  VOL. I. LYRICAL                _$1.75 net_\n  VOL. II. PLAYS (REVISED)       _$2.00 net_\n\nThe two-volume edition of the Irish poet's works includes everything he\nhas done in verse up to the present time. The first volume contains his\nlyrics; the second includes all of his five dramas in verse: \"The\nCountess Cathleen,\" \"The Land of Heart's Desire,\" \"The King's\nThreshold,\" \"On Baile's Strand,\" and \"The Shadowy Waters.\"\n\nWilliam Butler Yeats stands among the few men to be reckoned with in\nmodern poetry, especially of a dramatic character. _The New York Sun_,\nfor example, refers to him as \"an important factor in English\nliterature,\" and continues:--\n\n\"'Cathleen ni Hoolihan' is a perfect piece of artistic work, poetic and\nwonderfully dramatic to read, and, we should imagine, far more dramatic\nin the acting. Maeterlinck has never done anything so true or effective\nas this short prose drama of Mr. Yeats's. There is not a superfluous\nword in the play and no word that does not tell. It must be dangerous to\nrepresent it in Ireland, for it is an Irish Marseillaise.... In 'The\nHour Glass' a noble and poetic idea is carried out effectively, while 'A\nPot of Broth' is merely a dramatized humorous anecdote. But 'Cathleen ni\nHoolihan' stirs the blood, and in itself establishes Mr. Yeats's\nreputation for good.\"\n\n\nOther Works\n\n  The Celtic Twilight                 _12mo, $1.50 net_\n  The Hour Glass and Other Plays      _12mo, $1.25 net_\n  Ideas of Good and Evil              _12mo, $1.50 net_\n  In the Seven Woods                  _12mo, $1.00 net_\n\n\nW. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory\n\n  Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays    _12mo, $1.50 net_\n\n\nFires\n\nBY W. W. GIBSON\n\nAuthor of \"Daily Bread,\" \"Womenkind,\" etc.\n\n_Cloth, 12mo, $1.25 net_\n\nIn this striking book of verse Mr. Gibson writes of simple, homely folk\nwith touching sympathy. The author's previous book, \"Daily Bread,\" was\nheralded far and wide as the book of the year in the field of poetry; in\n\"Fires\" are contained many of the same characteristics which\ndistinguished it. The story of a girl whose lover is struck dead by a\nflying bit of stone; of a wife who has unusual patience with her\nhusband's shortcomings; of a flute player; of a shop and a shopkeeper;\nof a machine and those who feed it--these are the subjects of a number\nof the separate pieces.\n\n\n_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_\n\n  Daily Bread   In Three Books   _12mo, $1.25 net_\n  Womenkind                      _12mo, $1.25 net_\n\n\"There is a man in England who with sufficient plainness and sufficient\nprofoundness is addressing himself to life, and daring to chant his own\ntimes and social circumstances, who ought to become known to America. He\nis bringing a message which might well rouse his day and generation to\nan understanding of and a sympathy with life's disinherited--the\noverworked masses.\"\n\n\"A Millet in word-painting, who writes with a terrible simplicity, is\nWilfrid Wilson Gibson, born in Hexham, England, in 1878, of whom Canon\nCheyne wrote: 'A new poet of the people has risen up among us--the story\nof a soul is written as plainly in \"Daily Bread\" as in \"The Divine\nComedy\" and in \"Paradise Lost.\"'\"\n\n\"Mr. Gibson is a genuine singer of his own day, and turns into appealing\nharmony the world's harshly jarring notes of poverty and pain.\"\n\n_--Abridged from an article in \"The Outlook.\"_\n\n\nA BOOK THAT HAS BEEN WAITED FOR\n\n_THE MODERN READER'S CHAUCER_\n\nThe Complete Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer\n\n  Now first put into modern English by\n  JOHN S. P. TATLOCK\n  Author of \"The Development and Chronology of Chaucer's Works,\"\n\n  and\n\n  PERCY MACKAYE\n  Author of \"The Canterbury Pilgrims,\" etc.\n\n  _With 32 full-page illustrations in color by Warwick Goble_\n\n  _Decorated cloth, 4to, $5.00 net_\n\nAny one unversed in old English is familiar with the difficulty of\nreading Chaucer in the original--to many it is not only a difficulty,\nbut an impossibility. The vast literary wealth of Chaucer's writings has\nbeen therefore up to this time beyond the grasp of the general\nreader--for there has been no complete rendering in modern English. It\nis to do away with this condition that \"The Modern Reader's Chaucer\" has\nbeen prepared. Adhering closely to the original, the editors have\nrendered in modern English all the wonderful tales of this early poet. A\nparticular feature of the volume is the illustrations, of which there\nare thirty-two in colors from paintings by Warwick Goble, the celebrated\nEnglish artist. From the standpoint of artistic book making it is to be\ndoubted if a handsomer book will be published for some time to come or\neven one which will stand comparison with this.\n\n\n  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY\n\n  Publishers        64-66 Fifth Avenue         New York","title":"The Cutting of an Agate","tradition":"myth-cosmogony","translated_text":null,"word_count":46174}