{"collection":"philosophy-ethics","full_text_available":true,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/gutenberg_33338/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/gutenberg_33338","id":"gutenberg_33338","license":"Public Domain (US)","rights_basis":"gutenberg_metadata_copyright_false","source":"gutenberg","source_url":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33338","summary":null,"tags":["Category: Essays, Letters & Speeches","Category: Philosophy & Ethics","Essays","Nobel Prizes in Literature"],"text":"Produced by Brian Foley and the Online Distributed\nProofreading Team at http://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\nPER AMICA SILENTIA LUNAE\n\n\n\n\n  OTHER WORKS OF WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS\n\n  POEMS AND PLAYS, 2 volumes:\n\n     I--Lyrics. $2.00.\n    II--DRAMATIC POEMS. $2.00.\n\n  THE CELTIC TWILIGHT. $1.50.\n\n  IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL. $1.50.\n\n  STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN. $1.25.\n\n  REVERIES OVER CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. Illustrated. $2.00.\n\n  RESPONSIBILITIES AND OTHER POEMS. $1.25.\n\n  THE TABLES OF THE LAW. $1.25.\n\n  THE HOUR GLASS AND OTHER PLAYS. $1.25.\n\n  THE GREEN HELMET AND OTHER POEMS. $1.25.\n\n  THE CUTTING OF AN AGATE. $1.50.\n\n  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.\n\n\n\n\nPER AMICA SILENTIA LUNAE\n\n\n\n\n_SPECIAL LIMITED EDITION_\n\n\n\n\n  PER AMICA SILENTIA LUNAE\n\n\n  BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS\n\n\n  New York\n  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY\n  1918\n  _All rights reserved_\n\n\n\n\n  COPYRIGHT, 1918,\n  BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.\n\n  Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1918.\n\n\n  Norwood Press\n  J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.\n  Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.\n\n\n\n\nPROLOGUE\n\n\nMY DEAR \"MAURICE\"--You will remember that afternoon in Calvados last\nsummer when your black Persian \"Minoulooshe,\" who had walked behind us for\na good mile, heard a wing flutter in a bramble-bush? For a long time we\ncalled her endearing names in vain. She seemed resolute to spend her night\namong the brambles. She had interrupted a conversation, often interrupted\nbefore, upon certain thoughts so long habitual that I may be permitted to\ncall them my convictions. When I came back to London my mind ran again and\nagain to those conversations and I could not rest till I had written out\nin this little book all that I had said or would have said. Read it some\nday when \"Minoulooshe\" is asleep.\n\nW. B. YEATS.\n\n_May_ 11, 1917.\n\n\n\n\nEGO DOMINUS TUUS\n\n\nHIC\n\n  On the grey sand beside the shallow stream,\n  Under your old wind-beaten tower, where still\n  A lamp burns on above the open book\n  That Michael Robartes left, you walk in the moon,\n  And, though you have passed the best of life, still trace,\n  Enthralled by the unconquerable delusion,\n  Magical shapes.\n\nILLE\n\n                     By the help of an image\n  I call to my own opposite, summon all\n  That I have handled least, least looked upon.\n\nHIC\n\n  And I would find myself and not an image.\n\nILLE\n\n  That is our modern hope, and by its light\n  We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind\n  And lost the old nonchalance of the hand;\n  Whether we have chosen chisel, pen, or brush,\n  We are but critics, or but half create,\n  Timid, entangled, empty, and abashed,\n  Lacking the countenance of our friends.\n\nHIC\n\n                                    And yet,\n  The chief imagination of Christendom,\n  Dante Alighieri, so utterly found himself,\n  That he has made that hollow face of his\n  More plain to the mind's eye than any face\n  But that of Christ.\n\nILLE\n\n                 And did he find himself,\n  Or was the hunger that had made it hollow\n  A hunger for the apple on the bough\n  Most out of reach? And is that spectral image\n  The man that Lapo and that Guido knew?\n  I think he fashioned from his opposite\n  An image that might have been a stony face,\n  Staring upon a Beduin's horse-hair roof,\n  From doored and windowed cliff, or half upturned\n  Among the coarse grass and the camel dung.\n  He set his chisel to the hardest stone;\n  Being mocked by Guido for his lecherous life,\n  Derided and deriding, driven out\n  To climb that stair and eat that bitter bread,\n  He found the unpersuadable justice, he found\n  The most exalted lady loved by a man.\n\nHIC\n\n  Yet surely there are men who have made their art\n  Out of no tragic war; lovers of life,\n  Impulsive men, that look for happiness,\n  And sing when they have found it.\n\nILLE\n\n                              No, not sing,\n  For those that love the world serve it in action,\n  Grow rich, popular, and full of influence;\n  And should they paint or write still is it action,\n  The struggle of the fly in marmalade.\n  The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours,\n  The sentimentalist himself; while art\n  Is but a vision of reality.\n  What portion in the world can the artist have,\n  Who has awakened from the common dream,\n  But dissipation and despair?\n\nHIC\n\n                                  And yet,\n  No one denies to Keats love of the world,\n  Remember his deliberate happiness.\n\nILLE\n\n  His art is happy, but who knows his mind?\n  I see a schoolboy, when I think of him,\n  With face and nose pressed to a sweetshop window,\n  For certainly he sank into his grave,\n  His senses and his heart unsatisfied;\n  And made--being poor, ailing and ignorant,\n  Shut out from all the luxury of the world,\n  The ill-bred son of a livery stable keeper--\n  Luxuriant song.\n\nHIC\n\n              Why should you leave the lamp\n  Burning alone beside an open book,\n  And trace these characters upon the sand?\n  A style is found by sedentary toil,\n  And by the imitation of great masters.\n\nILLE\n\n  Because I seek an image, not a book;\n  Those men that in their writings are most wise\n  Own nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts.\n  I call to the mysterious one who yet\n  Shall walk the wet sand by the water's edge,\n  And look most like me, being indeed my double,\n  And prove of all imaginable things\n  The most unlike, being my anti-self,\n  And, standing by these characters, disclose\n  All that I seek; and whisper it as though\n  He were afraid the birds, who cry aloud\n  Their momentary cries before it is dawn,\n  Would carry it away to blasphemous men.\n\n_December_ 1915.\n\n\n\n\nPER AMICA SILENTIA LUNAE\n\n\n\n\nANIMA HOMINIS\n\n\nI\n\nWhen I come home after meeting men who are strange to me, and sometimes\neven after talking to women, I go over all I have said in gloom and\ndisappointment. Perhaps I have overstated everything from a desire to vex\nor startle, from hostility that is but fear; or all my natural thoughts\nhave been drowned by an undisciplined sympathy. My fellow-diners have\nhardly seemed of mixed humanity, and how should I keep my head among\nimages of good and evil, crude allegories.\n\nBut when I shut my door and light the candle, I invite a Marmorean Muse,\nan art, where no thought or emotion has come to mind because another man\nhas thought or felt something different, for now there must be no\nreaction, action only, and the world must move my heart but to the heart's\ndiscovery of itself, and I begin to dream of eyelids that do not quiver\nbefore the bayonet: all my thoughts have ease and joy, I am all virtue and\nconfidence. When I come to put in rhyme what I have found it will be a\nhard toil, but for a moment I believe I have found myself and not my\nanti-self. It is only the shrinking from toil perhaps that convinces me\nthat I have been no more myself than is the cat the medicinal grass it is\neating in the garden.\n\nHow could I have mistaken for myself an heroic condition that from early\nboyhood has made me superstitious? That which comes as complete, as\nminutely organised, as are those elaborate, brightly lighted buildings and\nsceneries appearing in a moment, as I lie between sleeping and waking,\nmust come from above me and beyond me. At times I remember that place in\nDante where he sees in his chamber the \"Lord of Terrible Aspect,\" and how,\nseeming \"to rejoice inwardly that it was a marvel to see, speaking, he\nsaid, many things among the which I could understand but few, and of these\nthis: ego dominus tuus\"; or should the conditions come, not as it were in\na gesture--as the image of a man--but in some fine landscape, it is of\nBoehme, maybe, that I think, and of that country where we \"eternally\nsolace ourselves in the excellent beautiful flourishing of all manner of\nflowers and forms, both trees and plants, and all kinds of fruit.\"\n\n\nII\n\nWhen I consider the minds of my friends, among artists and emotional\nwriters, I discover a like contrast. I have sometimes told one close\nfriend that her only fault is a habit of harsh judgment with those who\nhave not her sympathy, and she has written comedies where the wickedest\npeople seem but bold children. She does not know why she has created that\nworld where no one is ever judged, a high celebration of indulgence, but\nto me it seems that her ideal of beauty is the compensating dream of a\nnature wearied out by over-much judgment. I know a famous actress who in\nprivate life is like the captain of some buccaneer ship holding his crew\nto good behaviour at the mouth of a blunderbuss, and upon the stage she\nexcels in the representation of women who stir to pity and to desire\nbecause they need our protection, and is most adorable as one of those\nyoung queens imagined by Maeterlinck who have so little will, so little\nself, that they are like shadows sighing at the edge of the world. When I\nlast saw her in her own house she lived in a torrent of words and\nmovements, she could not listen, and all about her upon the walls were\nwomen drawn by Burne-Jones in his latest period. She had invited me in the\nhope that I would defend those women, who were always listening, and are\nas necessary to her as a contemplative Buddha to a Japanese Samurai,\nagainst a French critic who would persuade her to take into her heart in\ntheir stead a Post-Impressionist picture of a fat, ruddy, nude woman lying\nupon a Turkey carpet.\n\nThere are indeed certain men whose art is less an opposing virtue than a\ncompensation for some accident of health or circumstance. During the riots\nover the first production of the _Playboy of the Western World_ Synge was\nconfused, without clear thought, and was soon ill--indeed the strain of\nthat week may perhaps have hastened his death--and he was, as is usual\nwith gentle and silent men, scrupulously accurate in all his statements.\nIn his art he made, to delight his ear and his mind's eye, voluble\ndaredevils who \"go romancing through a romping lifetime ... to the dawning\nof the Judgment Day.\" At other moments this man, condemned to the life of\na monk by bad health, takes an amused pleasure in \"great queens ... making\nthemselves matches from the start to the end.\" Indeed, in all his\nimagination he delights in fine physical life, in life where the moon\npulls up the tide. The last act of _Deirdre of the Sorrows_, where his art\nis at its noblest, was written upon his death-bed. He was not sure of any\nworld to come, he was leaving his betrothed and his unwritten play--\"Oh,\nwhat a waste of time,\" he said to me; he hated to die, and in the last\nspeeches of Deirdre and in the middle act he accepted death and dismissed\nlife with a gracious gesture. He gave to Deirdre the emotion that seemed\nto him most desirable, most difficult, most fitting, and maybe saw in\nthose delighted seven years, now dwindling from her, the fulfilment of his\nown life.\n\n\nIII\n\nWhen I think of any great poetical writer of the past (a realist is an\nhistorian and obscures the cleavage by the record of his eyes) I\ncomprehend, if I know the lineaments of his life, that the work is the\nman's flight from his entire horoscope, his blind struggle in the network\nof the stars. William Morris, a happy, busy, most irascible man, described\ndim colour and pensive emotion, following, beyond any man of his time, an\nindolent muse; while Savage Landor topped us all in calm nobility when the\npen was in his hand, as in the daily violence of his passion when he had\nlaid it down. He had in his _Imaginary Conversations_ reminded us, as it\nwere, that the Venus de Milo is a stone, and yet he wrote when the copies\ndid not come from the printer as soon as he expected: \"I have ... had the\nresolution to tear in pieces all my sketches and projects and to forswear\nall future undertakings. I have tried to sleep away my time and pass\ntwo-thirds of the twenty-four hours in bed. I may speak of myself as a\ndead man.\" I imagine Keats to have been born with that thirst for luxury\ncommon to many at the outsetting of the Romantic Movement, and not able,\nlike wealthy Beckford, to slake it with beautiful and strange objects. It\ndrove him to imaginary delights; ignorant, poor, and in poor health, and\nnot perfectly well-bred, he knew himself driven from tangible luxury;\nmeeting Shelley, he was resentful and suspicious because he, as Leigh Hunt\nrecalls, \"being a little too sensitive on the score of his origin, felt\ninclined to see in every man of birth his natural enemy.\"\n\n\nIV\n\nSome thirty years ago I read a prose allegory by Simeon Solomon, long out\nof print and unprocurable, and remember or seem to remember a sentence, \"a\nhollow image of fulfilled desire.\" All happy art seems to me that hollow\nimage, but when its lineaments express also the poverty or the\nexasperation that set its maker to the work, we call it tragic art. Keats\nbut gave us his dream of luxury; but while reading Dante we never long\nescape the conflict, partly because the verses are at moments a mirror of\nhis history, and yet more because that history is so clear and simple that\nit has the quality of art. I am no Dante scholar, and I but read him in\nShadwell or in Dante Rossetti, but I am always persuaded that he\ncelebrated the most pure lady poet ever sung and the Divine Justice, not\nmerely because death took that lady and Florence banished her singer, but\nbecause he had to struggle in his own heart with his unjust anger and his\nlust; while unlike those of the great poets, who are at peace with the\nworld and at war with themselves, he fought a double war. \"Always,\" says\nBoccaccio, \"both in youth and maturity he found room among his virtues for\nlechery\"; or as Matthew Arnold preferred to change the phrase, \"his\nconduct was exceeding irregular.\" Guido Cavalcanti, as Rossetti translates\nhim, finds \"too much baseness\" in his friend:\n\n  \"And still thy speech of me, heartfelt and kind,\n  Hath made me treasure up thy poetry;\n  But now I dare not, for thy abject life,\n  Make manifest that I approve thy rhymes.\"\n\nAnd when Dante meets Beatrice in Eden, does she not reproach him because,\nwhen she had taken her presence away, he followed in spite of warning\ndreams, false images, and now, to save him in his own despite, she has\n\"visited ... the Portals of the Dead,\" and chosen Virgil for his courier?\nWhile Gino da Pistoia complains that in his _Commedia_ his \"lovely\nheresies ... beat the right down and let the wrong go free\":\n\n  \"Therefore his vain decrees, wherein he lied,\n  Must be like empty nutshells flung aside;\n  Yet through the rash false witness set to grow,\n  French and Italian vengeance on such pride\n  May fall like Anthony on Cicero.\"\n\nDante himself sings to Giovanni Guirino \"at the approach of death\";\n\n  \"The King, by whose rich grave his servants be\n  With plenty beyond measure set to dwell,\n  Ordains that I my bitter wrath dispel,\n  And lift mine eyes to the great Consistory.\"\n\n\nV\n\nWe make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with\nourselves, poetry. Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from\nremembering the crowd they have won or may win, we sing amid our\nuncertainty; and, smitten even in the presence of the most high beauty by\nthe knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm shudders. I think, too, that no\nfine poet, no matter how disordered his life, has ever, even in his mere\nlife, had pleasure for his end. Johnson and Dowson, friends of my youth,\nwere dissipated men, the one a drunkard, the other a drunkard and mad\nabout women, and yet they had the gravity of men who had found life out\nand were awakening from the dream; and both, one in life and art and one\nin art and less in life, had a continual preoccupation with religion. Nor\nhas any poet I have read of or heard of or met with been a sentimentalist.\nThe other self, the anti-self or the antithetical self, as one may choose\nto name it, comes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion\nis reality. The sentimentalists are practical men who believe in money, in\nposition, in a marriage bell, and whose understanding of happiness is to\nbe so busy whether at work or at play, that all is forgotten but the\nmomentary aim. They find their pleasure in a cup that is filled from\nLethe's wharf, and for the awakening, for the vision, for the revelation\nof reality, tradition offers us a different word--ecstasy. An old artist\nwrote to me of his wanderings by the quays of New York, and how he found\nthere a woman nursing a sick child, and drew her story from her. She\nspoke, too, of other children who had died: a long tragic story. \"I\nwanted to paint her,\" he wrote, \"if I denied myself any of the pain I\ncould not believe in my own ecstasy.\" We must not make a false faith by\nhiding from our thoughts the causes of doubt, for faith is the highest\nachievement of the human intellect, the only gift man can make to God, and\ntherefore it must be offered in sincerity. Neither must we create, by\nhiding ugliness, a false beauty as our offering to the world. He only can\ncreate the greatest imaginable beauty who has endured all imaginable\npangs, for only when we have seen and foreseen what we dread shall we be\nrewarded by that dazzling unforeseen wing-footed wanderer. We could not\nfind him if he were not in some sense of our being and yet of our being\nbut as water with fire, a noise with silence. He is of all things not\nimpossible the most difficult, for that only which comes easily can never\nbe a portion of our being, \"Soon got, soon gone,\" as the proverb says. I\nshall find the dark grow luminous, the void fruitful when I understand I\nhave nothing, that the ringers in the tower have appointed for the hymen\nof the soul a passing bell.\n\nThe last knowledge has often come most quickly to turbulent men, and for a\nseason brought new turbulence. When life puts away her conjuring tricks\none by one, those that deceive us longest may well be the wine-cup and the\nsensual kiss, for our Chambers of Commerce and of Commons have not the\ndivine architecture of the body, nor has their frenzy been ripened by the\nsun. The poet, because he may not stand within the sacred house but lives\namid the whirlwinds that beset its threshold, may find his pardon.\n\n\nVI\n\nI think the Christian saint and hero, instead of being merely\ndissatisfied, make deliberate sacrifice. I remember reading once an\nautobiography of a man who had made a daring journey in disguise to\nRussian exiles in Siberia, and his telling how, very timid as a child, he\nschooled himself by wandering at night through dangerous streets. Saint\nand hero cannot be content to pass at moments to that hollow image and\nafter become their heterogeneous selves, but would always, if they could,\nresemble the antithetical self. There is a shadow of type on type, for in\nall great poetical styles there is saint or hero, but when it is all over\nDante can return to his chambering and Shakespeare to his \"pottle pot.\"\nThey sought no impossible perfection but when they handled paper or\nparchment. So too will saint or hero, because he works in his own flesh\nand blood and not in paper or parchment, have more deliberate\nunderstanding of that other flesh and blood.\n\nSome years ago I began to believe that our culture, with its doctrine of\nsincerity and self-realisation, made us gentle and passive, and that the\nMiddle Ages and the Renaissance were right to found theirs upon the\nimitation of Christ or of some classic hero. St. Francis and Caesar Borgia\nmade themselves over-mastering, creative persons by turning from the\nmirror to meditation upon a mask. When I had this thought I could see\nnothing else in life. I could not write the play I had planned, for all\nbecame allegorical, and though I tore up hundreds of pages in my endeavour\nto escape from allegory, my imagination became sterile for nearly five\nyears and I only escaped at last when I had mocked in a comedy my own\nthought. I was always thinking of the element of imitation in style and in\nlife, and of the life beyond heroic imitation. I find in an old diary: \"I\nthink all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other\nlife, on a re-birth as something not one's self, something created in a\nmoment and perpetually renewed; in playing a game like that of a child\nwhere one loses the infinite pain of self-realisation, in a grotesque or\nsolemn painted face put on that one may hide from the terror of\njudgment.... Perhaps all the sins and energies of the world are but the\nworld's flight from an infinite blinding beam\"; and again at an earlier\ndate: \"If we cannot imagine ourselves as different from what we are, and\ntry to assume that second self, we cannot impose a discipline upon\nourselves though we may accept one from others. Active virtue, as\ndistinguished from the passive acceptance of a code, is therefore\ntheatrical, consciously dramatic, the wearing of a mask.... Wordsworth,\ngreat poet though he be, is so often flat and heavy partly because his\nmoral sense, being a discipline he had not created, a mere obedience, has\nno theatrical element. This increases his popularity with the better kind\nof journalists and politicians who have written books.\"\n\n\nVII\n\nI thought the hero found hanging upon some oak of Dodona an ancient mask,\nwhere perhaps there lingered something of Egypt, and that he changed it to\nhis fancy, touching it a little here and there, gilding the eyebrows or\nputting a gilt line where the cheekbone comes; that when at last he\nlooked out of its eyes he knew another's breath came and went within his\nbreath upon the carven lips, and that his eyes were upon the instant fixed\nupon a visionary world: how else could the god have come to us in the\nforest? The good, unlearned books say that He who keeps the distant stars\nwithin His fold comes without intermediary, but Plutarch's precepts and\nthe experience of old women in Soho, ministering their witchcraft to\nservant girls at a shilling apiece, will have it that a strange living man\nmay win for Daemon an illustrious dead man; but now I add another thought:\nthe Daemon comes not as like to like but seeking its own opposite, for man\nand Daemon feed the hunger in one another's hearts. Because the ghost is\nsimple, the man heterogeneous and confused, they are but knit together\nwhen the man has found a mask whose lineaments permit the expression of\nall the man most lacks, and it may be dreads, and of that only.\n\nThe more insatiable in all desire, the more resolute to refuse deception\nor an easy victory, the more close will be the bond, the more violent and\ndefinite the antipathy.\n\n\nVIII\n\nI think that all religious men have believed that there is a hand not ours\nin the events of life, and that, as somebody says in _Wilhelm Meister_,\naccident is destiny; and I think it was Heraclitus who said: the Daemon is\nour destiny. When I think of life as a struggle with the Daemon who would\never set us to the hardest work among those not impossible, I understand\nwhy there is a deep enmity between a man and his destiny, and why a man\nloves nothing but his destiny. In an Anglo-Saxon poem a certain man is\ncalled, as though to call him something that summed up all heroism, \"Doom\neager.\" I am persuaded that the Daemon delivers and deceives us, and that\nhe wove that netting from the stars and threw the net from his shoulder.\nThen my imagination runs from Daemon to sweetheart, and I divine an\nanalogy that evades the intellect. I remember that Greek antiquity has bid\nus look for the principal stars, that govern enemy and sweetheart alike,\namong those that are about to set, in the Seventh House as the astrologers\nsay; and that it may be \"sexual love,\" which is \"founded upon spiritual\nhate,\" is an image of the warfare of man and Daemon; and I even wonder if\nthere may not be some secret communion, some whispering in the dark\nbetween Daemon and sweetheart. I remember how often women, when in love,\ngrow superstitious, and believe that they can bring their lovers good\nluck; and I remember an old Irish story of three young men who went\nseeking for help in battle into the house of the gods at Slieve-na-mon.\n\"You must first be married,\" some god told them, \"because a man's good or\nevil luck comes to him through a woman.\"\n\nI sometimes fence for half-an-hour at the day's end, and when I close my\neyes upon the pillow I see a foil playing before me, the button to my\nface. We meet always in the deep of the mind, whatever our work, wherever\nour reverie carries us, that other Will.\n\n\nIX\n\nThe poet finds and makes his mask in disappointment, the hero in defeat.\nThe desire that is satisfied is not a great desire, nor has the shoulder\nused all its might that an unbreakable gate has never strained. The saint\nalone is not deceived, neither thrusting with his shoulder nor holding out\nunsatisfied hands. He would climb without wandering to the antithetical\nself of the world, the Indian narrowing his thought in meditation or\ndriving it away in contemplation, the Christian copying Christ, the\nantithetical self of the classic world. For a hero loves the world till it\nbreaks him, and the poet till it has broken faith; but while the world was\nyet debonair, the saint has turned away, and because he renounced\nExperience itself, he will wear his mask as he finds it. The poet or the\nhero, no matter upon what bark they found their mask, so teeming their\nfancy, somewhat change its lineaments, but the saint, whose life is but a\nround of customary duty, needs nothing the whole world does not need, and\nday by day he scourges in his body the Roman and Christian conquerors:\nAlexander and Caesar are famished in his cell. His nativity is neither in\ndisappointment nor in defeat, but in a temptation like that of Christ in\nthe Wilderness, a contemplation in a single instant perpetually renewed of\nthe Kingdom of the World; all, because all renounced, continually present\nshowing their empty thrones. Edwin Ellis, remembering that Christ also\nmeasured the sacrifice, imagined himself in a fine poem as meeting at\nGolgotha the phantom of \"Christ the Less,\" the Christ who might have lived\na prosperous life without the knowledge of sin, and who now wanders\n\"companionless a weary spectre day and night.\"\n\n  \"I saw him go and cried to him\n  'Eli, thou hast forsaken me.'\n  The nails were burning through each limb,\n  He fled to find felicity.\"\n\nAnd yet is the saint spared, despite his martyr's crown and his vigil of\ndesire, defeat, disappointed love, and the sorrow of parting.\n\n  \"O Night, that did'st lead thus,\n  O Night, more lovely than the dawn of light,\n  O Night, that broughtest us\n  Lover to lover's sight,\n  Lover with loved in marriage of delight!\n\n  Upon my flowery breast,\n  Wholly for him, and save himself for none,\n  There did I give sweet rest\n  To my beloved one;\n  The fanning of the cedars breathed thereon.\n\n  When the first morning air\n  Blew from the tower, and waved his locks aside,\n  His hand, with gentle care,\n  Did wound me in the side,\n  And in my body all my senses died.\n\n  All things I then forgot,\n  My cheek on him who for my coming came;\n  All ceased and I was not,\n  Leaving my cares and shame\n  Among the lilies, and forgetting them.\"[1]\n\n\nX\n\nIt is not permitted to a man, who takes up pen or chisel, to seek\noriginality, for passion is his only business, and he cannot but mould or\nsing after a new fashion because no disaster is like another. He is like\nthose phantom lovers in the Japanese play who, compelled to wander side by\nside and never mingle, cry: \"We neither wake nor sleep and passing our\nnights in a sorrow which is in the end a vision, what are these scenes of\nspring to us?\" If when we have found a mask we fancy that it will not\nmatch our mood till we have touched with gold the cheek, we do it\nfurtively, and only where the oaks of Dodona cast their deepest shadow,\nfor could he see our handiwork the Daemon would fling himself out, being\nour enemy.\n\n\nXI\n\nMany years ago I saw, between sleeping and waking, a woman of incredible\nbeauty shooting an arrow into the sky, and from the moment when I made my\nfirst guess at her meaning I have thought much of the difference between\nthe winding movement of nature and the straight line, which is called in\nBalzac's _Seraphita_ the \"Mark of Man,\" but comes closer to my meaning as\nthe mark of saint or sage. I think that we who are poets and artists, not\nbeing permitted to shoot beyond the tangible, must go from desire to\nweariness and so to desire again, and live but for the moment when vision\ncomes to our weariness like terrible lightning, in the humility of the\nbrutes. I do not doubt those heaving circles, those winding arcs, whether\nin one man's life or in that of an age, are mathematical, and that some in\nthe world, or beyond the world, have foreknown the event and pricked upon\nthe calendar the life-span of a Christ, a Buddha, a Napoleon: that every\nmovement, in feeling or in thought, prepares in the dark by its own\nincreasing clarity and confidence its own executioner. We seek reality\nwith the slow toil of our weakness and are smitten from the boundless and\nthe unforeseen. Only when we are saint or sage, and renounce Experience\nitself, can we, in the language of the Christian Caballa, leave the sudden\nlightning and the path of the serpent and become the bowman who aims his\narrow at the centre of the sun.\n\n\nXII\n\nThe doctors of medicine have discovered that certain dreams of the night,\nfor I do not grant them all, are the day's unfulfilled desire, and that\nour terror of desires condemned by the conscience has distorted and\ndisturbed our dreams. They have only studied the breaking into dream of\nelements that have remained unsatisfied without purifying discouragement.\nWe can satisfy in life a few of our passions and each passion but a\nlittle, and our characters indeed but differ because no two men bargain\nalike. The bargain, the compromise, is always threatened, and when it is\nbroken we become mad or hysterical or are in some way deluded; and so when\na starved or banished passion shows in a dream we, before awaking, break\nthe logic that had given it the capacity of action and throw it into chaos\nagain. But the passions, when we know that they cannot find fulfilment,\nbecome vision; and a vision, whether we wake or sleep, prolongs its power\nby rhythm and pattern, the wheel where the world is butterfly. We need no\nprotection, but it does, for if we become interested in ourselves, in our\nown lives, we pass out of the vision. Whether it is we or the vision that\ncreate the pattern, who set the wheel turning, it is hard to say, but\ncertainly we have a hundred ways of keeping it near us: we select our\nimages from past times, we turn from our own age and try to feel Chaucer\nnearer than the daily paper. It compels us to cover all it cannot\nincorporate, and would carry us when it comes in sleep to that moment when\neven sleep closes her eyes and dreams begin to dream; and we are taken up\ninto a clear light and are forgetful even of our own names and actions and\nyet in perfect possession of ourselves murmur like Faust, \"Stay, moment,\"\nand murmur in vain.\n\n\nXIII\n\nA poet, when he is growing old, will ask himself if he cannot keep his\nmask and his vision without new bitterness, new disappointment. Could he\nif he would, knowing how frail his vigour from youth up, copy Landor who\nlived loving and hating, ridiculous and unconquered, into extreme old age,\nall lost but the favour of his muses.\n\n  The mother of the muses we are taught\n  Is memory; she has left me; they remain\n  And shake my shoulder urging me to sing.\n\nSurely, he may think, now that I have found vision and mask I need not\nsuffer any longer. He will buy perhaps some small old house where like\nAriosto he can dig his garden, and think that in the return of birds and\nleaves, or moon and sun, and in the evening flight of the rooks he may\ndiscover rhythm and pattern like those in sleep and so never awake out of\nvision. Then he will remember Wordsworth withering into eighty years,\nhonoured and empty-witted, and climb to some waste room and find,\nforgotten there by youth, some bitter crust.\n\n_February_ 25, 1917.\n\n\n\n\nANIMA MUNDI\n\n\nI\n\nI have always sought to bring my mind close to the mind of Indian and\nJapanese poets, old women in Connaught, mediums in Soho, lay brothers whom\nI imagine dreaming in some mediaeval monastery the dreams of their\nvillage, learned authors who refer all to antiquity; to immerse it in the\ngeneral mind where that mind is scarce separable from what we have begun\nto call \"the subconscious\"; to liberate it from all that comes of councils\nand committees, from the world as it is seen from universities or from\npopulous towns; and that I might so believe I have murmured evocations and\nfrequented mediums, delighted in all that displayed great problems\nthrough sensuous images, or exciting phrases, accepting from abstract\nschools but a few technical words that are so old they seem but broken\narchitraves fallen amid bramble and grass, and have put myself to school\nwhere all things are seen: _A Tenedo Tacitae per Amica Silentia Lunae_. At\none time I thought to prove my conclusions by quoting from diaries where I\nhave recorded certain strange events the moment they happened, but now I\nhave changed my mind--I will but say like the Arab boy that became Vizier:\n\"O brother, I have taken stock in the desert sand and of the sayings of\nantiquity.\"\n\n\nII\n\nThere is a letter of Goethe's, though I cannot remember where, that\nexplains evocation, though he was but thinking of literature. He described\nsome friend who had complained of literary sterility as too intelligent.\nOne must allow the images to form with all their associations before one\ncriticises. \"If one is critical too soon,\" he wrote, \"they will not form\nat all.\" If you suspend the critical faculty, I have discovered, either as\nthe result of training, or, if you have the gift, by passing into a slight\ntrance, images pass rapidly before you. If you can suspend also desire,\nand let them form at their own will, your absorption becomes more complete\nand they are more clear in colour, more precise in articulation, and you\nand they begin to move in the midst of what seems a powerful light. But\nthe images pass before you linked by certain associations, and indeed in\nthe first instance you have called them up by their association with\ntraditional forms and sounds. You have discovered how, if you can but\nsuspend will and intellect, to bring up from the \"subconscious\" anything\nyou already possess a fragment of. Those who follow the old rule keep\ntheir bodies still and their minds awake and clear, dreading especially\nany confusion between the images of the mind and the objects of sense;\nthey seek to become, as it were, polished mirrors.\n\nI had no natural gift for this clear quiet, as I soon discovered, for my\nmind is abnormally restless; and I was seldom delighted by that sudden\nluminous definition of form which makes one understand almost in spite of\noneself that one is not merely imagining. I therefore invented a new\nprocess. I had found that after evocation my sleep became at moments full\nof light and form, all that I had failed to find while awake; and I\nelaborated a symbolism of natural objects that I might give myself dreams\nduring sleep, or rather visions, for they had none of the confusion of\ndreams, by laying upon my pillow or beside my bed certain flowers or\nleaves. Even to-day, after twenty years, the exaltations and the messages\nthat came to me from bits of hawthorn or some other plant seem of all\nmoments of my life the happiest and the wisest. After a time, perhaps\nbecause the novelty wearing off the symbol lost its power, or because my\nwork at the Irish Theatre became too exciting, my sleep lost its\nresponsiveness. I had fellow-scholars, and now it was I and now they who\nmade some discovery. Before the mind's eye, whether in sleep or waking,\ncame images that one was to discover presently in some book one had never\nread, and after looking in vain for explanation to the current theory of\nforgotten personal memory, I came to believe in a great memory passing on\nfrom generation to generation. But that was not enough, for these images\nshowed intention and choice. They had a relation to what one knew and yet\nwere an extension of one's knowledge. If no mind was there, why should I\nsuddenly come upon salt and antimony, upon the liquefaction of the gold,\nas they were understood by the alchemists, or upon some detail of\ncabalistic symbolism verified at last by a learned scholar from his\nnever-published manuscripts, and who can have put together so ingeniously,\nworking by some law of association and yet with clear intention and\npersonal application, certain mythological images. They had shown\nthemselves to several minds, a fragment at a time, and had only shown\ntheir meaning when the puzzle picture had been put together. The thought\nwas again and again before me that this study had created a contact or\nmingling with minds who had followed a like study in some other age, and\nthat these minds still saw and thought and chose. Our daily thought was\ncertainly but the line of foam at the shallow edge of a vast luminous sea:\nHenry More's _Anima Mundi_, Wordsworth's \"immortal sea which brought us\nhither ... and near whose edge the children sport,\" and in that sea there\nwere some who swam or sailed, explorers who perhaps knew all its shores.\n\n\nIII\n\nI had always to compel myself to fix the imagination upon the minds behind\nthe personifications, and yet the personifications were themselves living\nand vivid. The minds that swayed these seemingly fluid images had\ndoubtless form, and those images themselves seemed, as it were, mirrored\nin a living substance whose form is but change of form. From tradition and\nperception, one thought of one's own life as symbolised by earth, the\nplace of heterogeneous things, the images as mirrored in water and the\nimages themselves one could divine but as air; and beyond it all there\nwas, I felt confident, certain aims and governing loves, the fire that\nmakes all simple. Yet the images themselves were fourfold, and one judged\ntheir meaning in part from the predominance of one out of the four\nelements, or that of the fifth element, the veil hiding another four, a\nbird born out of the fire.\n\n\nIV\n\nI longed to know something even if it were but the family and Christian\nnames of those minds that I could divine, and that yet remained always as\nit seemed impersonal. The sense of contact came perhaps but two or three\ntimes with clearness and certainty, but it left among all to whom it came\nsome trace, a sudden silence, as it were, in the midst of thought or\nperhaps at moments of crisis a faint voice. Were our masters right when\nthey declared so solidly that we should be content to know these presences\nthat seemed friendly and near but as \"the phantom\" in Coleridge's poem,\nand to think of them perhaps, as having, as St. Thomas says, entered upon\nthe eternal possession of themselves in one single moment?\n\n  \"All look and likeness caught from earth,\n  All accident of kin and birth,\n  Had passed away. There was no trace\n  Of ought on that illumined face,\n  Upraised beneath the rifted stone,\n  But of one spirit all her own;\n  She, she herself and only she,\n  Shone through her body visibly.\"\n\n\nV\n\nOne night I heard a voice that said: \"The love of God for every human soul\nis infinite, for every human soul is unique; no other can satisfy the same\nneed in God.\" Our masters had not denied that personality outlives the\nbody or even that its rougher shape may cling to us a while after death,\nbut only that we should seek it in those who are dead. Yet when I went\namong the country people, I found that they sought and found the old\nfragilities, infirmities, physiognomies that living stirred affection. The\nSpiddal knowledgeable man, who had his knowledge from his sister's ghost,\nnoticed every hallowe'en, when he met her at the end of the garden, that\nher hair was greyer. Had she perhaps to exhaust her allotted years in the\nneighbourhood of her home, having died before her time? Because no\nauthority seemed greater than that of this knowledge running backward to\nthe beginning of the world, I began that study of spiritism so despised by\nStanislas de Gaeta, the one eloquent learned scholar who has written of\nmagic in our generation.\n\n\nVI\n\nI know much that I could never have known had I not learnt to consider in\nthe after life what, there as here, is rough and disjointed; nor have I\nfound that the mediums in Connaught and Soho have anything I cannot find\nsome light on in Henry More, who was called during his life the holiest\nman now walking upon the earth.\n\nAll souls have a vehicle or body, and when one has said that, with More\nand the Platonists one has escaped from the abstract schools who seek\nalways the power of some church or institution, and found oneself with\ngreat poetry, and superstition which is but popular poetry, in a pleasant\ndangerous world. Beauty is indeed but bodily life in some ideal condition.\nThe vehicle of the human soul is what used to be called the animal\nspirits, and Henry More quotes from Hippocrates this sentence: \"The mind\nof man is ... not nourished from meats and drinks from the belly, but by a\nclear luminous substance that redounds by separation from the blood.\"\nThese animal spirits fill up all parts of the body and make up the body of\nair, as certain writers of the seventeenth century have called it. The\nsoul has a plastic power, and can after death, or during life, should the\nvehicle leave the body for a while, mould it to any shape it will by an\nact of imagination, though the more unlike to the habitual that shape is,\nthe greater the effort. To living and dead alike, the purity and\nabundance of the animal spirits are a chief power. The soul can mould from\nthese an apparition clothed as if in life, and make it visible by showing\nit to our mind's eye, or by building into its substance certain particles\ndrawn from the body of a medium till it is as visible and tangible as any\nother object. To help that building the ancients offered fragrant gum, the\nodour of flowers, and it may be pieces of virgin wax. The half\nmaterialised vehicle slowly exudes from the skin in dull luminous drops or\ncondenses from a luminous cloud, the light fading as weight and density\nincrease. The witch, going beyond the medium, offered to the slowly\nanimating phantom certain drops of her blood. The vehicle once separate\nfrom the living man or woman may be moulded by the souls of others as\nreadily as by its own soul, and even it seems by the souls of the living.\nIt becomes a part for a while of that stream of images which I have\ncompared to reflections upon water. But how does it follow that souls who\nnever have handled the modelling tool or the brush, make perfect images?\nThose materialisations who imprint their powerful faces upon paraffin wax,\nleave there sculpture that would have taken a good artist, making and\nimagining, many hours. How did it follow that an ignorant woman could, as\nHenry More believed, project her vehicle in so good a likeness of a hare,\nthat horse and hound and huntsman followed with the bugle blowing? Is not\nthe problem the same as of those finely articulated scenes and patterns\nthat come out of the dark, seemingly completed in the winking of an eye,\nas we are lying half asleep, and of all those elaborate images that drift\nin moments of inspiration or evocation before the mind's eye? Our animal\nspirits or vehicles are but as it were a condensation of the vehicle of\n_Anima Mundi_, and give substance to its images in the faint\nmaterialisation of our common thought, or more grossly when a ghost is our\nvisitor. It should be no great feat, once those images have dipped into\nour vehicle, to take their portraits in the photographic camera. Henry\nMore will have it that a hen scared by a hawk when the cock is treading,\nhatches out a hawkheaded chicken (I am no stickler for the fact), because\nbefore the soul of the unborn bird could give the shape \"the deeply\nimpassioned fancy of the mother\" called from the general cistern of form a\ncompeting image. \"The soul of the world,\" he runs on, \"interposes and\ninsinuates into all generations of things while the matter is fluid and\nyielding, which would induce a man to believe that she may not stand idle\nin the transformation of the vehicle of the daemons, but assist the\nfancies and desires, and so help to clothe them and to utter them\naccording to their own pleasures; or it may be sometimes against their\nwills as the unwieldiness of the mother's fancy forces upon her a\nmonstrous birth.\" Though images appear to flow and drift, it may be that\nwe but change in our relation to them, now losing, now finding with the\nshifting of our minds; and certainly Henry More speaks by the book,\nclaiming that those images may be hard to the right touch as \"pillars of\ncrystal\" and as solidly coloured as our own to the right eyes. Shelley, a\ngood Platonist, seems in his earliest work to set this general soul in the\nplace of God, an opinion, one may find from More's friend Cudworth now\naffirmed, now combated, by classic authority; but More would steady us\nwith a definition. The general soul as apart from its vehicle is \"a\nsubstance incorporeal but without sense and animadversion pervading the\nwhole matter of the universe and exercising a plastic power therein,\naccording to the sundry predispositions and occasions, in the parts it\nworks upon, raising such phenomena in the world, by directing the parts of\nthe matter and their motion as cannot be resolved into mere mechanical\npowers.\" I must assume that \"sense and animadversion,\" perception and\ndirection, are always faculties of individual soul, and that, as Blake\nsaid, \"God only acts or is in existing beings or men.\"\n\n\nVII\n\nThe old theological conception of the individual soul as bodiless or\nabstract led to what Henry More calls \"contradictory debate\" as to how\nmany angels \"could dance booted and spurred upon the point of a needle,\"\nand made it possible for rationalist physiology to persuade us that our\nthought has no corporeal existence but in the molecules of the brain.\nShelley was of opinion that the \"thoughts which are called real or\nexternal objects\" differed but in regularity of occurrence from\n\"hallucinations, dreams and ideas of madmen,\" and noticed that he had\ndreamed, therefore lessening the difference, \"three several times between\nintervals of two or more years the same precise dream.\" If all our mental\nimages no less than apparitions (and I see no reason to distinguish) are\nforms existing in the general vehicle of _Anima Mundi_, and mirrored in\nour particular vehicle, many crooked things are made straight. I am\npersuaded that a logical process, or a series of related images, has body\nand period, and I think of _Anima Mundi_ as a great pool or garden where\nit spreads through allotted growth like a great water plant or branches\nmore fragrantly in the air. Indeed as Spenser's Garden of Adonis:\n\n              \"There is the first seminary\n  Of all things that are born to live and die\n  According to their kynds.\"\n\nThe soul by changes of \"vital congruity,\" More says, draws to it a certain\nthought, and this thought draws by its association the sequence of many\nthoughts, endowing them with a life in the vehicle meted out according to\nthe intensity of the first perception. A seed is set growing, and this\ngrowth may go on apart from the power, apart even from the knowledge of\nthe soul. If I wish to \"transfer\" a thought I may think, let us say, of\nCinderella's slipper, and my subject may see an old woman coming out of a\nchimney; or going to sleep I may wish to wake at seven o'clock and, though\nI never think of it again, I shall wake upon the instant. The thought has\ncompleted itself, certain acts of logic, turns, and knots in the stem have\nbeen accomplished out of sight and out of reach as it were. We are always\nstarting these parasitic vegetables and letting them coil beyond our\nknowledge, and may become, like that lady in Balzac who, after a life of\nsanctity, plans upon her deathbed to fly with her renounced lover. After\ndeath a dream, a desire she had perhaps ceased to believe in, perhaps\nceased almost to remember, must have recurred again and again with its\nanguish and its happiness. We can only refuse to start the wandering\nsequence or, if start it does, hold it in the intellectual light where\ntime gallops, and so keep it from slipping down into the sluggish\nvehicle. The toil of the living is to free themselves from an endless\nsequence of objects, and that of the dead to free themselves from an\nendless sequence of thoughts. One sequence begets another, and these have\npower because of all those things we do, not for their own sake but for an\nimagined good.\n\n\nVIII\n\nSpiritism, whether of folk-lore or of the seance room, the visions of\nSwedenborg, and the speculation of the Platonists and Japanese plays, will\nhave it that we may see at certain roads and in certain houses old murders\nacted over again, and in certain fields dead huntsmen riding with horse\nand hound, or ancient armies fighting above bones or ashes. We carry to\n_Anima Mundi_ our memory, and that memory is for a time our external\nworld; and all passionate moments recur again and again, for passion\ndesires its own recurrence more than any event, and whatever there is of\ncorresponding complacency or remorse is our beginning of judgment; nor do\nwe remember only the events of life, for thoughts bred of longing and of\nfear, all those parasitic vegetables that have slipped through our\nfingers, come again like a rope's end to smite us upon the face; and as\nCornelius Agrippa writes: \"We may dream ourselves to be consumed in flame\nand persecuted by daemons,\" and certain spirits have complained that they\nwould be hard put to it to arouse those who died, believing they could not\nawake till a trumpet shrilled. A ghost in a Japanese play is set afire by\na fantastic scruple, and though a Buddhist priest explains that the fire\nwould go out of itself if the ghost but ceased to believe in it, it cannot\ncease to believe. Cornelius Agrippa called such dreaming souls\nhobgoblins, and when Hamlet refused the bare bodkin because of what dreams\nmay come, it was from no mere literary fancy. The soul can indeed, it\nappears, change these objects built about us by the memory, as it may\nchange its shape; but the greater the change, the greater the effort and\nthe sooner the return to the habitual images. Doubtless in either case the\neffort is often beyond its power. Years ago I was present when a woman\nconsulted Madame Blavatsky for a friend who saw her newly-dead husband\nnightly as a decaying corpse and smelt the odour of the grave. When he was\ndying, said Madame Blavatsky, he thought the grave the end, and now that\nhe is dead cannot throw off that imagination. A Brahmin once told an\nactress friend of mine that he disliked acting, because if a man died\nplaying Hamlet, he would be Hamlet in eternity. Yet after a time the soul\npartly frees itself and becomes \"the shape changer\" of the legends, and\ncan cast, like the mediaeval magician, what illusions it would. There is\nan Irish countryman in one of Lady Gregory's books who had eaten with a\nstranger on the road, and some while later vomited, to discover he had but\neaten chopped up grass. One thinks, too, of the spirits that show\nthemselves in the images of wild creatures.\n\n\nIX\n\nThe dead, as the passionate necessity wears out, come into a measure of\nfreedom and may turn the impulse of events, started while living, in some\nnew direction, but they cannot originate except through the living. Then\ngradually they perceive, although they are still but living in their\nmemories, harmonies, symbols, and patterns, as though all were being\nrefashioned by an artist, and they are moved by emotions, sweet for no\nimagined good but in themselves, like those of children dancing in a ring;\nand I do not doubt that they make love in that union which Swedenborg has\nsaid is of the whole body and seems from far off an incandescence.\nHitherto shade has communicated with shade in moments of common memory\nthat recur like the figures of a dance in terror or in joy, but now they\nrun together like to like, and their Covens and Fleets have rhythm and\npattern. This running together and running of all to a centre and yet\nwithout loss of identity, has been prepared for by their exploration of\ntheir moral life, of its beneficiaries and its victims, and even of all\nits untrodden paths, and all their thoughts have moulded the vehicle and\nbecome event and circumstance.\n\n\nX\n\nThere are two realities, the terrestrial and the condition of fire. All\npower is from the terrestrial condition, for there all opposites meet and\nthere only is the extreme of choice possible, full freedom. And there the\nheterogeneous is, and evil, for evil is the strain one upon another of\nopposites; but in the condition of fire is all music and all rest. Between\nis the condition of air where images have but a borrowed life, that of\nmemory or that reflected upon them when they symbolise colours and\nintensities of fire, the place of shades who are \"in the whirl of those\nwho are fading,\" and who cry like those amorous shades in the Japanese\nplay:\n\n     \"That we may acquire power\n  Even in our faint substance,\n  We will show forth even now,\n  And though it be but in a dream,\n  Our form of repentance.\"\n\nAfter so many rhythmic beats the soul must cease to desire its images, and\ncan, as it were, close its eyes.\n\nWhen all sequence comes to an end, time comes to an end, and the soul puts\non the rhythmic or spiritual body or luminous body and contemplates all\nthe events of its memory and every possible impulse in an eternal\npossession of itself in one single moment. That condition is alone\nanimate, all the rest is phantasy, and from thence come all the passions,\nand some have held, the very heat of the body.\n\n  Time drops in decay,\n  Like a candle burnt out,\n  And the mountains and the woods\n  Have their day, have their day.\n  What one, in the rout\n  Of the fire-born moods,\n  Has fallen away?\n\n\nXI\n\nThe soul cannot have much knowledge till it has shaken off the habit of\ntime and of place, but till that hour it must fix its attention upon what\nis near, thinking of objects one after another as we run the eye or the\nfinger over them. Its intellectual power cannot but increase and alter as\nits perceptions grow simultaneous. Yet even now we seem at moments to\nescape from time in what we call prevision, and from place when we see\ndistant things in a dream and in concurrent dreams. A couple of years ago,\nwhile in meditation, my head seemed surrounded by a conventional sun's\nrays, and when I went to bed I had a long dream of a woman with her hair\non fire. I awoke and lit a candle, and discovered presently from the odour\nthat in doing so I had set my own hair on fire. I dreamed very lately that\nI was writing a story, and at the same time I dreamed that I was one of\nthe characters in that story and seeking to touch the heart of some girl\nin defiance of the author's intention; and concurrently with all that, I\nwas as another self trying to strike with the button of a foil a great\nchina jar. The obscurity of the prophetic books of William Blake, which\nwere composed in a state of vision, comes almost wholly from these\nconcurrent dreams. Everybody has some story or some experience of the\nsudden knowledge in sleep or waking of some event, a misfortune for the\nmost part happening to some friend far off.\n\n\nXII\n\nThe dead living in their memories, are, I am persuaded, the source of all\nthat we call instinct, and it is their love and their desire, all\nunknowing, that make us drive beyond our reason, or in defiance of our\ninterest it may be; and it is the dream martens that, all unknowing, are\nmaster-masons to the living martens building about church windows their\nelaborate nests; and in their turn, the phantoms are stung to a keener\ndelight from a concord between their luminous pure vehicle and our strong\nsenses. It were to reproach the power or the beneficence of God, to\nbelieve those children of Alexander who died wretchedly could not throw an\nurnful to the heap, nor that Caesarea[2] murdered in childhood, whom\nCleopatra bore to Caesar, nor that so brief-lived younger Pericles\nAspasia bore being so nobly born.\n\n\nXIII\n\nBecause even the most wise dead can but arrange their memories as we\narrange pieces upon a chess-board and obey remembered words alone, he who\nwould turn magician is forbidden by the Zoroastrian oracle to change\n\"barbarous words\" of invocation. Communication with _Anima Mundi_ is\nthrough the association of thoughts or images or objects; and the famous\ndead and those of whom but a faint memory lingers, can still--and it is\nfor no other end that, all unknowing, we value posthumous fame--tread the\ncorridor and take the empty chair. A glove or a name can call their\nbearer; the shadows come to our elbow amid their old undisturbed\nhabitations, and \"materialisation\" itself is easier, it may be, among\nwalls, or by rocks and trees, that carry upon them particles the vehicles\ncast off in some extremity while they had still animate bodies.\n\nCertainly the mother returns from the grave, and with arms that may be\nvisible and solid, for a hurried moment, can comfort a neglected child or\nset the cradle rocking; and in all ages men have known and affirmed that\nwhen the soul is troubled, those that are a shade and a song:\n\n                                 \"live there,\n  And live like winds of light on dark or stormy air.\"\n\n\nXIV\n\nAwhile they live again those passionate moments, not knowing they are\ndead, and then they know and may awake or half awake to be our visitors.\nHow is their dream changed as Time drops away and their senses multiply?\nDoes their stature alter, do their eyes grow more brilliant? Certainly the\ndreams stay the longer, the greater their passion when alive: Helen may\nstill open her chamber door to Paris or watch him from the wall, and know\nshe is dreaming but because nights and days are poignant or the stars\nunreckonably bright. Surely of the passionate dead we can but cry in words\nBen Jonson meant for none but Shakespeare: \"So rammed\" are they \"with life\nthey can but grow in life with being.\"\n\n\nXV\n\nThe inflowing from their mirrored life, who themselves receive it from the\nCondition of Fire, falls upon the Winding Path called the Path of the\nSerpent, and that inflowing coming alike to men and to animals is called\nnatural. There is another inflow which is not natural but intellectual,\nand is from the fire; and it descends through souls who pass for a lengthy\nor a brief period out of the mirror life, as we in sleep out of the bodily\nlife, and though it may fall upon a sleeping serpent, it falls principally\nupon straight paths. In so far as a man is like all other men, the inflow\nfinds him upon the winding path, and in so far as he is a saint or sage,\nupon the straight path.\n\n\nXVI\n\nDaemon and man are opposites; man passes from heterogeneous objects to the\nsimplicity of fire, and the Daemon is drawn to objects because through\nthem he obtains power, the extremity of choice. For only in men's minds\ncan he meet even those in the Condition of Fire who are not of his own\nkin. He, by using his mediatorial shades, brings man again and again to\nthe place of choice, heightening temptation that the choice may be as\nfinal as possible, imposing his own lucidity upon events, leading his\nvictim to whatever among works not impossible is the most difficult. He\nsuffers with man as some firm-souled man suffers with the woman he but\nloves the better because she is extravagant and fickle. His descending\npower is neither the winding nor the straight line but zigzag,\nilluminating the passive and active properties, the tree's two sorts of\nfruit: it is the sudden lightning, for all his acts of power are\ninstantaneous. We perceive in a pulsation of the artery, and after slowly\ndecline.\n\n\nXVII\n\nEach Daemon is drawn to whatever man or, if its nature is more general, to\nwhatever nation it most differs from, and it shapes into its own image\nthe antithetical dream of man or nation. The Jews had already shown by the\nprecious metals, by the ostentatious wealth of Solomon's temple, the\npassion that has made them the money-lenders of the modern world. If they\nhad not been rapacious, lustful, narrow and persecuting beyond the people\nof their time, the incarnation had been impossible; but it was an\nintellectual impulse from the Condition of Fire that shaped their\nantithetical self into that of the classic world. So always it is an\nimpulse from some Daemon that gives to our vague, unsatisfied desire,\nbeauty, a meaning and a form all can accept.\n\n\nXVIII\n\nOnly in rapid and subtle thought, or in faint accents heard in the quiet\nof the mind, can the thought of the spirit come to us but little changed;\nfor a mind, that grasps objects simultaneously according to the degree of\nits liberation, does not think the same thought with the mind that sees\nobjects one after another. The purpose of most religious teaching, of the\ninsistence upon the submission to God's will above all, is to make certain\nof the passivity of the vehicle where it is most pure and most tenuous.\nWhen we are passive where the vehicle is coarse, we become mediumistic,\nand the spirits who mould themselves in that coarse vehicle can only\nrarely and with great difficulty speak their own thoughts and keep their\nown memory. They are subject to a kind of drunkenness and are stupefied,\nold writers said, as if with honey, and readily mistake our memory for\ntheir own, and believe themselves whom and what we please. We bewilder and\novermaster them, for once they are among the perceptions of successive\nobjects, our reason, being but an instrument created and sharpened by\nthose objects, is stronger than their intellect, and they can but repeat\nwith brief glimpses from another state, our knowledge and our words.\n\n\nXIX\n\nA friend once dreamed that she saw many dragons climbing upon the steep\nside of a cliff and continually falling. Henry More thought that those\nwho, after centuries of life, failed to find the rhythmic body and to pass\ninto the Condition of Fire, were born again. Edmund Spenser, who was among\nMore's masters, affirmed that nativity without giving it a cause:\n\n  \"After that they againe retourned beene,\n  They in that garden planted be agayne,\n  And grow afresh, as they had never seene\n  Fleshy corruption, nor mortal payne.\n  Some thousand years so doen they ther remayne,\n  And then of him are clad with other hew,\n  Or sent into the chaungeful world agayne,\n  Till thither they retourn where first they grew:\n  So like a wheele, around they roam from old to new.\"\n\nThe dead who speak to us deny metempsychosis, perhaps because they but\nknow a little better what they knew alive; while the dead in Asia, for\nperhaps no better reason, affirm it, and so we are left amid\nplausibilities and uncertainties.\n\n\nXX\n\nBut certainly it is always to the Condition of Fire, where emotion is not\nbrought to any sudden stop, where there is neither wall nor gate, that we\nwould rise; and the mask plucked from the oak-tree is but my imagination\nof rhythmic body. We may pray to that last condition by any name so long\nas we do not pray to it as a thing or a thought, and most prayers call it\nman or woman or child:\n\n  \"For mercy has a human heart,\n  Pity a human face.\"\n\nWithin ourselves Reason and Will, who are the man and woman, hold out\ntowards a hidden altar, a laughing or crying child.\n\n\nXXI\n\nWhen I remember that Shelley calls our minds \"mirrors of the fire for\nwhich all thirst,\" I cannot but ask the question all have asked, \"What or\nwho has cracked the mirror?\" I begin to study the only self that I can\nknow, myself, and to wind the thread upon the perne again.\n\nAt certain moments, always unforeseen, I become happy, most commonly when\nat hazard I have opened some book of verse. Sometimes it is my own verse\nwhen, instead of discovering new technical flaws, I read with all the\nexcitement of the first writing. Perhaps I am sitting in some crowded\nrestaurant, the open book beside me, or closed, my excitement having\nover-brimmed the page. I look at the strangers near as if I had known them\nall my life, and it seems strange that I cannot speak to them: everything\nfills me with affection, I have no longer any fears or any needs; I do not\neven remember that this happy mood must come to an end. It seems as if the\nvehicle had suddenly grown pure and far extended and so luminous that one\nhalf imagines that the images from _Anima Mundi_, embodied there and drunk\nwith that sweetness, would, as some country drunkard who had thrown a\nwisp into his own thatch, burn up time.\n\nIt may be an hour before the mood passes, but latterly I seem to\nunderstand that I enter upon it the moment I cease to hate. I think the\ncommon condition of our life is hatred--I know that this is so with\nme--irritation with public or private events or persons. There is no great\nmatter in forgetfulness of servants, or the delays of tradesmen, but how\nforgive the ill-breeding of Carlyle, or the rhetoric of Swinburne, or that\nwoman who murmurs over the dinner-table the opinion of her daily paper?\nAnd only a week ago last Sunday, I hated the spaniel who disturbed a\npartridge on her nest, a trout who took my bait and yet broke away\nunhooked. The books say that our happiness comes from the opposite of\nhate, but I am not certain, for we may love unhappily. And plainly, when\nI have closed a book too stirred to go on reading, and in those brief\nintense visions of sleep, I have something about me that, though it makes\nme love, is more like innocence. I am in the place where the daemon is,\nbut I do not think he is with me until I begin to make a new personality,\nselecting among those images, seeking always to satisfy a hunger grown out\nof conceit with daily diet; and yet as I write the words, \"I select,\" I am\nfull of uncertainty, not knowing when I am the finger, when the clay.\nOnce, twenty years ago, I seemed to awake from sleep to find my body\nrigid, and to hear a strange voice speaking these words through my lips as\nthrough lips of stone: \"We make an image of him who sleeps, and it is not\nhim who sleeps, and we call it Emmanuel.\"\n\n\nXXII\n\nAs I go up and down my stair and pass the gilded Moorish wedding-chest\nwhere I keep my \"barbarous words,\" I wonder will I take to them once more,\nfor I am baffled by those voices that still speak as to Odysseus but as\nthe bats; or now that I shall in a little be growing old, to some kind of\nsimple piety like that of an old woman.\n\n_May_ 9, 1917.\n\n\n\n\nEPILOGUE\n\n\nMY DEAR \"MAURICE\"--I was often in France before you were born or when you\nwere but a little child. When I went for the first or second time Mallarme\nhad just written: \"All our age is full of the trembling of the veil of the\ntemple.\" One met everywhere young men of letters who talked of magic. A\ndistinguished English man of letters asked me to call with him on\nStanislas de Gaeta because he did not dare go alone to that mysterious\nhouse. I met from time to time with the German poet Doukenday, a grave\nSwede whom I only discovered after years to have been Strindberg, then\nlooking for the philosopher's stone in a lodging near the Luxembourg; and\none day in the chambers of Stuart Merrill the poet, I spoke with a young\nArabic scholar who displayed a large, roughly-made gold ring which had\ngrown to the shape of his finger. Its gold had no hardening alloy, he\nsaid, because it was made by his master, a Jewish Rabbi, of alchemical\ngold. My critical mind--was it friend or enemy?--mocked, and yet I was\ndelighted. Paris was as legendary as Connaught. This new pride, that of\nthe adept, was added to the pride of the artist. Villiers de L'Isle Adam,\nthe haughtiest of men, had but lately died. I had read his _Axel_ slowly\nand laboriously as one reads a sacred book--my French was very bad--and\nhad applauded it upon the stage. As I could not follow the spoken words, I\nwas not bored even where Axel and the Commander discussed philosophy for a\nhalf-hour instead of beginning their duel. If I felt impatient it was only\nthat they delayed the coming of the adept Janus, for I hoped to recognise\nthe moment when Axel cries: \"I know that lamp, it was burning before\nSolomon\"; or that other when he cries: \"As for living, our servants will\ndo that for us.\"\n\nThe movement of letters had been haughty even before Magic had touched it.\nRimbaud had sung: \"Am I an old maid that I should fear the embrace of\ndeath?\" And everywhere in Paris and in London young men boasted of the\ngarret, and claimed to have no need of what the crowd values.\n\nLast summer you, who were at the age I was when first I heard of Mallarme\nand of Verlaine, spoke much of the French poets young men and women read\nto-day. Claudel I already somewhat knew, but you read to me for the first\ntime from Jammes a dialogue between a poet and a bird, that made us cry,\nand a whole volume of Peguy's _Mystere de la Charite de Jeanne d'Arc_.\nNothing remained the same but the preoccupation with religion, for these\npoets submitted everything to the Pope, and all, even Claudel, a proud\noratorical man, affirmed that they saw the world with the eyes of\nvine-dressers and charcoal-burners. It was no longer the soul, self-moving\nand self-teaching--the magical soul--but Mother France and Mother Church.\n\nHave not my thoughts run through a like round, though I have not found my\ntradition in the Catholic Church, which was not the church of my\nchildhood, but where the tradition is, as I believe, more universal and\nmore ancient?\n\nW. B. Y.\n\n_May_ 11, 1917.\n\n\nPrinted in the United States of America.\n\n\n\n\nThe following pages contain advertisements of books by the same author or\non kindred subjects.\n\n\nResponsibilities\n\nBY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS\n\n_Cloth, $1.25_\n\n     \"William Butler Yeats is by far the biggest poetic personality living\n     among us at present. He is great both as a lyric and dramatist poet.\"\n\n       --_John Masefield._\n\n     \"This poetry has the rhythm that is incantation and sorcery, that is\n     not of the senses nor of the spirit, but of a mingling which is\n     exaltation.\"\n\n       --_Chicago Evening Post._\n\nUnder the title of \"Responsibilities\" William Butler Yeats brings together\nsome of his recent poems. Notable still for his freshness of thought, his\nkeen originality, and his purely poetic conception of thoughts and facts,\nMr. Yeats sometimes makes us wonder how he has so long been able to hold\nhis style above the ever rising level of modern poetry. No man stands so\napart in his own perfection as does this Irish poet and playwright, in his\nart of discovering truths remote and beautiful. Serious, vital thoughts he\nveils, as the genuine poet, in a cloak of fine rhythmical expression.\n\nIt is, after all, as a poet that the majority of people like to think of\nMr. Yeats, and this splendid collection, the first in a number of years,\nis assured of a warm welcome.\n\n\n\n\nBY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS\n\nThe Cutting of an Agate\n\n_12mo, $1.50_\n\n     \"Mr. Yeats is probably the most important as well as the most widely\n     known of the men concerned directly in the so-called Celtic\n     renaissance. More than this, he stands among the few men to be\n     reckoned with in modern poetry.\"--_New York Herald._\n\n\nThe Green Helmet and Other Poems\n\n_Decorated cloth, 12mo, $1.25_\n\n     The initial piece in this volume is a deliciously conceived heroic\n     farce, quaint in humor and sprightly in action. It tells of the\n     difficulty in which two simple Irish folk find themselves when they\n     enter into an agreement with an apparition of the sea, who demands\n     that they knock off his head and who maintains that after they have\n     done that he will knock off theirs. There is a real meaning in the\n     play which it will not take the thoughtful reader long to discover.\n     Besides this there are a number of shorter poems, notably one in\n     which Mr. Yeats answers the critics of \"The Playboy of the Western\n     World.\"\n\n\nLyrical and Dramatic Poems\n\n  In Two Volumes\n  _Vol. I. Lyrical Poems, $2.00 Leather, $2.25_\n  _Vol. II. Plays (Revised), $2.00 Leather, $2.25_\n\n     The two-volume edition of the Irish poet's works included everything\n     he has done in verse up to the present time. The first volume\n     contains his lyrics; the second includes all of his five dramas in\n     verse: \"The Countess Cathleen,\" \"The Land of Heart's Desire,\" \"The\n     King's Threshold,\" \"On Baile's Strand,\" and \"The Shadowy Waters.\"\n\n\nReveries Over Childhood and Youth\n\n_$2.00_\n\n     In this book the celebrated Irish author gives us his reminiscences\n     of his childhood and youth. The memories are written, as is to be\n     expected, in charming prose. They have the appeal invariably attached\n     to the account of a sensitive childhood.\n\n\nThe Hour Glass and Other Plays _$1.25_\n\n     \"The Hour Glass\" is one of Mr. Yeats' noble and effective plays, and\n     with the other plays in the volume, make a small, but none the less\n     representative collection.\n\n\nStories of Red Hanrahan\n\n_$1.25_\n\n     These tales belong to the realm of pure lyrical expression. They are\n     mysterious and shadowy, full of infinite subtleties and old wisdom of\n     folklore, and sad with the gray wistful Celtic sadness.\n\n     \"Lovers of Mr. Yeats's suggestive and delicate writing will find him\n     at his best in this volume.\"--_Springfield Republican._\n\n\nIdeas of Good and Evil _$1.50_\n\n     Essays on art and life, wherein are set forth much of Yeats'\n     philosophy, his love of beauty, his hope for Ireland and for Irish\n     artistic achievement.\n\n\nThe Celtic Twilight _$1.50_\n\n     A collection of tales from Irish life and of Irish fancy, retold from\n     peasants' stories with no additions except an occasional comment.\n\n\n\nTHE WORKS OF RABINDRANATH TAGORE\n\nBOLPUR EDITION\n\n  HUNGRY STONES AND OTHER STORIES.\n  FRUIT GATHERING.\n  CHITRA: A Play in one act.\n  THE CRESCENT MOON: Child Poems.\n  THE GARDENER: Love Poems.\n  GITANJALI: Religious Poems.\n  THE KING OF THE DARK CHAMBER: A Play.\n  THE SONGS OF KABIR.\n  SADHANA: The Realization of Life.\n  THE POST OFFICE: A Play.\n\nEach volume decorated cloth, $1.50; leather, $2.00.\n\nThis new edition of the works of Rabindranath Tagore will recommend itself\nto those who desire to possess the various poems and plays of the great\nHindu writer in the best possible printings and bindings. Great care has\nbeen taken with the physical appearance of the books. In addition to the\nspecial design that has been made for the cover, there are special end\npapers and decorated title pages in each book. Altogether this edition\npromises to become the standard one of this distinguished poet and seer.\n\n  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY\n  Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York\n\n\n\n\nFootnotes:\n\n[1] Translated by Arthur Symons from _San Juan de la Cruz_.\n\n[2] I have no better authority for Caesarea than Landor's play.","title":"Per Amica Silentia Lunae","tradition":"philosophy-ethics","translated_text":null,"word_count":13258}