Part I originally appeared in _The Dome_, October,

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

DISCOVERIES. EDMUND SPENSER.

POETRY AND TRADITION; & OTHER

ESSAYS:: BEING THE EIGHTH VOLUME

OF THE COLLECTED WORKS IN VERSE

& PROSE OF WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS :: IMPRINTED

AT THE SHAKESPEARE

HEAD PRESS STRATFORD-ON-AVON

MCMVIII

CONTENTS

PAGE

DISCOVERIES:

PROPHET, PRIEST AND KING 3

PERSONALITY AND THE INTELLECTUAL ESSENCES 8

THE MUSICIAN AND THE ORATOR 12

A GUITAR PLAYER 13

THE LOOKING-GLASS 14

THE TREE OF LIFE 15

THE PRAISE OF OLD WIVES’ TALES 18

THE PLAY OF MODERN MANNERS 20

HAS THE DRAMA OF CONTEMPORARY LIFE A ROOT OF ITS OWN? 22

WHY THE BLIND MAN IN ANCIENT TIMES WAS MADE A POET 24

CONCERNING SAINTS AND ARTISTS 29

THE SUBJECT MATTER OF DRAMA 32

THE TWO KINDS OF ASCETICISM 36

IN THE SERPENT’S MOUTH 38

THE BLACK AND THE WHITE ARROWS 39

HIS MISTRESS’S EYEBROWS 39

THE TRESSES OF THE HAIR 41

A TOWER ON THE APENNINE 42

THE THINKING OF THE BODY 43

RELIGIOUS BELIEF NECESSARY TO SYMBOLIC ART 45

THE HOLY PLACES 48

EDMUND SPENSER 51

POETRY AND TRADITION 91

MODERN IRISH POETRY 113

LADY GREGORY’S CUCHULAIN OF MUIRTHEMNE 131

LADY GREGORY’S GODS AND FIGHTING MEN 147

MR. SYNGE AND HIS PLAYS 171

LIONEL JOHNSON 183

THE PATHWAY 189

BIBLIOGRAPHY 197

DISCOVERIES

PROPHET, PRIEST AND KING

THE little theatrical company I write my plays for had come to a west

of Ireland town, and was to give a performance in an old ball-room, for

there was no other room big enough. I went there from a neighbouring

country-house, and, arriving a little before the players, tried to open

a window. My hands were black with dirt in a moment, and presently a

pane of glass and a part of the window-frame came out in my hands.

Everything in this room was half in ruins, the rotten boards cracked

under my feet, and our new proscenium and the new boards of the

platform looked out of place, and yet the room was not really old, in

spite of the musicians’ gallery over the stage. It had been built by

some romantic or philanthropic landlord some three or four generations

ago, and was a memory of we knew not what unfinished scheme.

From there I went to look for the players, and called for information

on a young priest, who had invited them and taken upon himself the

finding of an audience. He lived in a high house with other priests,

and as I went in I noticed with a whimsical pleasure a broken pane of

glass in the fanlight over the door, for he had once told me the story

of an old woman who a good many years ago quarrelled with the bishop,

got drunk and hurled a stone through the painted glass. He was a clever

man who read Meredith and Ibsen, but some of his books had been packed

in the fire-grate by his housekeeper, instead of the customary view of

an Italian lake or the coloured tissue-paper. The players, who had been

giving a performance in a neighbouring town, had not yet come, or were

unpacking their costumes and properties at the hotel he had recommended

them. We should have time, he said, to go through the half-ruined

town and to visit the convent schools and the cathedral, where, owing

to his influence, two of our young Irish sculptors had been set to

carve an altar and the heads of pillars. I had only heard of this

work, and I found its strangeness and simplicity—one of them had been

Rodin’s pupil—could not make me forget the meretriciousness of the

architecture and the commercial commonplace of the inlaid pavements.

The new movement had seized on the cathedral midway in its growth, and

the worst of the old and the best of the new were side by side without

any sign of transition. The convent school was, as other like places

have been to me—a long room in a workhouse hospital at Portumna, in

particular—a delight to the imagination and the eyes. A new floor had

been put into some ecclesiastical building and the light from a great

mullioned window, cut off at the middle, fell aslant upon rows of clean

and seemingly happy children. The nuns, who show in their own convents,

where they can put what they like, a love of what is mean and pretty,

make beautiful rooms where the regulations compel them to do all with

a few colours and a few flowers. I think it was that day, but am not

sure, that I had lunch at a convent and told fairy stories to a couple

of nuns, and I hope it was not mere politeness that made them seem to

have a child’s interest in such things.

A good many of our audience, when the curtain went up in the old

ball-room, were drunk, but all were attentive, for they had a great

deal of respect for my friend, and there were other priests there.

Presently the man at the door opposite to the stage strayed off

somewhere and I took his place, and when boys came up offering two or

three pence and asking to be let into the sixpenny seats, I let them

join the melancholy crowd. The play professed to tell of the heroic

life of ancient Ireland, but was really full of sedentary refinement

and the spirituality of cities. Every emotion was made as dainty-footed

and dainty-fingered as might be, and a love and pathos where passion

had faded into sentiment, emotions of pensive and harmless people,

drove shadowy young men through the shadows of death and battle. I

watched it with growing rage. It was not my own work, but I have

sometimes watched my own work with a rage made all the more salt in

the mouth from being half despair. Why should we make so much noise

about ourselves and yet have nothing to say that was not better said

in that workhouse dormitory, where a few flowers and a few coloured

counterpanes and the coloured walls had made a severe and gracious

beauty? Presently the play was changed and our comedian began to act

a little farce, and when I saw him struggle to wake into laughter

an audience, out of whom the life had run as if it were water, I

rejoiced, as I had over that broken window-pane. Here was something

secular, abounding, even a little vulgar, for he was gagging horribly,

condescending to his audience, though not without contempt.

We had supper in the priest’s house, and a government official, who

had come down from Dublin, partly out of interest in this attempt ‘to

educate the people,’ and partly because it was his holiday and it was

necessary to go somewhere, entertained us with little jokes. Somebody,

not, I think, a priest, talked of the spiritual destiny of our race

and praised the night’s work, for the play was refined and the people

really very attentive, and he could not understand my discontent; but

presently he was silenced by the patter of jokes.

I had my breakfast by myself the next morning, for the players had got

up in the middle of the night and driven some ten miles to catch an

early train to Dublin, and were already on their way to their shops and

offices. I had brought the visitors’ book of the hotel, to turn over

its pages while waiting for my bacon and eggs, and found several pages

full of obscenities, scrawled there some two or three weeks before,

by Dublin visitors, it seemed, for a notorious Dublin street was

mentioned. Nobody had thought it worth his while to tear out the page

or block out the lines, and as I put the book away impressions that

had been drifting through my mind for months rushed up into a single

thought. ‘If we poets are to move the people, we must reintegrate the

human spirit in our imagination. The English have driven away the

kings, and turned the prophets into demagogues, and you cannot have

health among a people if you have not prophet, priest and king.’

PERSONALITY AND THE INTELLECTUAL ESSENCES

MY work in Ireland has continually set this thought before me: ‘How

can I make my work mean something to vigorous and simple men whose

attention is not given to art but to a shop, or teaching in a National

School, or dispensing medicine?’ I had not wanted to ‘elevate them’

or ‘educate them,’ as these words are understood, but to make them

understand my vision, and I had not wanted a large audience, certainly

not what is called a national audience, but enough people for what is

accidental and temporary to lose itself in the lump. In England, where

there have been so many changing activities and so much systematic

education, one only escapes from crudities and temporary interests

among students, but here there is the right audience could one but get

its ears. I have always come to this certainty: what moves natural

men in the arts is what moves them in life, and that is, intensity of

personal life, intonations that show them in a book or a play, the

strength, the essential moment of a man who would be exciting in the

market or at the dispensary door. They must go out of the theatre with

the strength they live by strengthened with looking upon some passion

that could, whatever its chosen way of life, strike down an enemy, fill

a long stocking with money or move a girl’s heart. They have not much

to do with the speculations of science, though they have a little,

or with the speculations of metaphysics, though they have a little.

Their legs will tire on the road if there is nothing in their hearts

but vague sentiment, and though it is charming to have an affectionate

feeling about flowers, that will not pull the cart out of the ditch.

An exciting person, whether the hero of a play or the maker of poems,

will display the greatest volume of personal energy, and this energy

must seem to come out of the body as out of the mind. We must say to

ourselves continually when we imagine a character: ‘Have I given him

the roots, as it were, of all faculties necessary for life?’ And only

when one is certain of that may one give him the one faculty that fills

the imagination with joy. I even doubt if any play had ever a great

popularity that did not use, or seem to use, the bodily energies of its

principal actor to the full. Villon the robber could have delighted

these Irishmen with plays and songs, if he and they had been born to

the same traditions of word and symbol, but Shelley could not; and

as men came to live in towns and to read printed books and to have

many specialised activities, it has become more possible to produce

Shelleys and less and less possible to produce Villons. The last Villon

dwindled into Robert Burns because the highest faculties had faded,

taking the sense of beauty with them, into some sort of vague heaven

and left the lower to lumber where they best could. In literature,

partly from the lack of that spoken word which knits us to normal man,

we have lost in personality, in our delight in the whole man—blood,

imagination, intellect, running together—but have found a new delight,

in essences, in states of mind, in pure imagination, in all that comes

to us most easily in elaborate music. There are two ways before

literature—upward into ever-growing subtlety, with Verhaeren, with

Mallarmé, with Maeterlinck, until at last, it may be, a new agreement

among refined and studious men gives birth to a new passion, and what

seems literature becomes religion; or downward, taking the soul with

us until all is simplified and solidified again. That is the choice of

choices—the way of the bird until common eyes have lost us, or to the

market carts; but we must see to it that the soul goes with us, for the

bird’s song is beautiful, and the traditions of modern imagination,

growing always more musical, more lyrical, more melancholy, casting

up now a Shelley, now a Swinburne, now a Wagner, are, it may be, the

frenzy of those that are about to see what the magic hymn printed

by the Abbé de Villars has called the Crown of Living and Melodious

Diamonds. If the carts have hit our fancy we must have the soul tight

within our bodies, for it has grown so fond of a beauty accumulated by

subtle generations that it will for a long time be impatient with our

thirst for mere force, mere personality, for the tumult of the blood.

If it begin to slip away we must go after it, for Shelley’s Chapel of

the Morning Star is better than Burns’s beer-house—surely it was beer,

not barleycorn—except at the day’s weary end; and it is always better

than that uncomfortable place where there is no beer, the machine shop

of the realists.

THE MUSICIAN AND THE ORATOR

WALTER PATER says music is the type of all the Arts, but somebody else,

I forget now who, that oratory is their type. You will side with the

one or the other according to the nature of your energy, and I in my

present mood am all for the man who, with an average audience before

him, uses all means of persuasion—stories, laughter, tears, and but so

much music as he can discover on the wings of words. I would even avoid

the conversation of the lovers of music, who would draw us into the

impersonal land of sound and colour, and would have no one write with

a sonata in his memory. We may even speak a little evil of musicians,

having admitted that they will see before we do that melodious crown.

We may remind them that the housemaid does not respect the piano-tuner

as she does the plumber, and of the enmity that they have aroused among

all poets. Music is the most impersonal of things and words the most

personal, and that is why musicians do not like words. They masticate

them for a long time, being afraid they would not be able to digest

them, and when the words are so broken and softened and mixed with

spittle that they are not words any longer, they swallow them.

A GUITAR PLAYER

A GIRL has been playing on the guitar. She is pretty, and if I

didn’t listen to her I could have watched her, and if I didn’t watch

her I could have listened. Her voice, the movements of her body,

the expression of her face, all said the same thing. A player of a

different temper and body would have made all different, and might have

been delightful in some other way. A movement not of music only but of

life came to its perfection. I was delighted and I did not know why

until I thought, ‘That is the way my people, the people I see in the

mind’s eye, play music, and I like it because it is all personal, as

personal as Villon’s poetry.’ The little instrument is quite light, and

the player can move freely and express a joy that is not of the fingers

and the mind only but of the whole being; and all the while her

movements call up into the mind, so erect and natural she is, whatever

is most beautiful in her daily life. Nearly all the old instruments

were like that, even the organ was once a little instrument, and when

it grew big our wise forefathers gave it to God in the cathedrals,

where it befits him to be everything. But if you sit at the piano, it

is the piano, the mechanism, that is the important thing, and nothing

of you means anything but your fingers and your intellect.

THE LOOKING-GLASS

I HAVE just been talking to a girl with a shrill monotonous voice and

an abrupt way of moving. She is fresh from school, where they have

taught her history and geography ‘whereby a soul can be discerned,’

but what is the value of an education, or even in the long run of a

science, that does not begin with the personality, the habitual self,

and illustrate all by that? Somebody should have taught her to speak

for the most part on whatever note of her voice is most musical, and

soften those harsh notes by speaking, not singing, to some stringed

instrument, taking note after note and, as it were, caressing her

words a little as if she loved the sound of them, and have taught her

after this some beautiful pantomimic dance, till it had grown a habit

to live for eye and ear. A wise theatre might make a training in strong

and beautiful life the fashion, teaching before all else the heroic

discipline of the looking-glass, for is not beauty, even as lasting

love, one of the most difficult of the arts?

THE TREE OF LIFE

WE artists have taken over-much to heart that old commandment about

seeking after the Kingdom of Heaven. Verlaine told me that he had tried

to translate ‘In Memoriam,’ but could not because Tennyson was ‘too

noble, too Anglais, and, when he should have been broken-hearted, had

many reminiscences.’ About that time I found in some English review an

essay of his on Shakespeare. ‘I had once a fine Shakespeare,’ he wrote,

or some such words, ‘but I have it no longer. I write from memory.’ One

wondered in what vicissitude he had sold it, and for what money; and an

image of the man rose in the imagination. To be his ordinary self as

much as possible, not a scholar or even a reader, that was certainly

his pose; and in the lecture he gave at Oxford he insisted ‘that the

poet should hide nothing of himself,’ though he must speak it all with

‘a care of that dignity which should manifest itself, if not in the

perfection of form, at all events with an invisible, insensible, but

effectual endeavour after this lofty and severe quality, I was about

to say this virtue.’ It was this feeling for his own personality, his

delight in singing his own life, even more than that life itself, which

made the generation I belong to compare him to Villon. It was not till

after his death that I understood the meaning his words should have

had for me, for while he lived I was interested in nothing but states

of mind, lyrical moments, intellectual essences. I would not then have

been as delighted as I am now by that guitar player, or as shocked as

I am now by that girl whose movements have grown abrupt, and whose

voice has grown harsh by the neglect of all but external activities.

I had not learned what sweetness, what rhythmic movement, there is in

those who have become the joy that is themselves. Without knowing it,

I had come to care for nothing but impersonal beauty. I had set out

on life with the thought of putting my very self into poetry, and had

understood this as a representation of my own visions and an attempt

to cut away the non-essential, but as I imagined the visions outside

myself my imagination became full of decorative landscape and of still

life. I thought of myself as something unmoving and silent living in

the middle of my own mind and body, a grain of sand in Bloomsbury or

in Connacht that Satan’s watch fiends cannot find. Then one day I

understood quite suddenly, as the way is, that I was seeking something

unchanging and unmixed and always outside myself, a Stone or an Elixir

that was always out of reach, and that I myself was the fleeting thing

that held out its hand. The more I tried to make my art deliberately

beautiful, the more did I follow the opposite of myself, for deliberate

beauty is like a woman always desiring man’s desire. Presently I found

that I entered into myself and pictured myself and not some essence

when I was not seeking beauty at all, but merely to lighten the mind

of some burden of love or bitterness thrown upon it by the events of

life. We are only permitted to desire life, and all the rest should be

our complaints or our praise of that exacting mistress who can awake

our lips into song with her kisses. But we must not give her all, we

must deceive her a little at times, for, as Le Sage says in _The

Devil on Two Sticks_, the false lovers who do not become melancholy or

jealous with honest passion have the happiest mistress and are rewarded

the soonest and by the most beautiful. Our deceit will give us style,

mastery, that dignity, that lofty and severe quality Verlaine spoke

of. To put it otherwise, we should ascend out of common interests, the

thoughts of the newspapers, of the market-place, of men of science, but

only so far as we can carry the normal, passionate, reasoning self, the

personality as a whole. We must find some place upon the Tree of Life

high enough for the forked branches to keep it safe, and low enough to

be out of the little wind-tossed boughs and twigs, for the Phœnix nest,

for the passion that is exaltation and not negation of the will, for

the wings that are always upon fire.

THE PRAISE OF OLD WIVES’ TALES

AN art may become impersonal because it has too much circumstance

or too little, because the world is too little or too much with it,

because it is too near the ground or too far up among the branches. I

met an old man out fishing a year ago, who said to me, ‘Don Quixote

and Odysseus are always near to me’; that is true for me also, for even

Hamlet and Lear and Œdipus are more cloudy. No playwright ever has made

or ever will make a character that will follow us out of the theatre

as Don Quixote follows us out of the book, for no playwright can be

wholly episodical, and when one constructs, bringing one’s characters

into complicated relations with one another, something impersonal comes

into the story. Society, fate, ‘tendency,’ something not quite human,

begins to arrange the characters and to excite into action only so much

of their humanity as they find it necessary to show to one another. The

common heart will always love better the tales that have something of

an old wives’ tale and that look upon their hero from every side as if

he alone were wonderful, as a child does with a new penny. In plays of

a comedy too extravagant to photograph life, or written in verse, the

construction is of a necessity woven out of naked motives and passions,

but when an atmosphere of modern reality has to be built up as well,

and the tendency, or fate, or society has to be shown as it is about

ourselves, the characters grow fainter, and we have to read the book

many times or see the play many times before we can remember them.

Even then they are only possible in a certain drawing-room and among

such and such people, and we must carry all that lumber in our heads. I

thought Tolstoi’s ‘War and Peace’ the greatest story I had ever read,

and yet it has gone from me; even Lancelot, ever a shadow, is more

visible in my memory than all its substance.

THE PLAY OF MODERN MANNERS

OF all artistic forms that have had a large share of the world’s

attention, the worst is the play about modern educated people. Except

where it is superficial or deliberately argumentative it fills one’s

soul with a sense of commonness as with dust. It has one mortal

ailment. It cannot become impassioned, that is to say vital, without

making somebody gushing and sentimental. Educated and well-bred people

do not wear their hearts upon their sleeves and they have no artistic

and charming language except light persiflage and no powerful language

at all, and when they are deeply moved they look silently into the

fireplace. Again and again I have watched some play of this sort with

growing curiosity through the opening scene. The minor people argue,

chaff one another, hint sometimes at some deeper stream of life just

as we do in our houses, and I am content. But all the time I have

been wondering why the chief character, the man who is to bear the

burden of fate, is gushing, sentimental and quite without ideas. Then

the great scene comes and I understand that he cannot be well-bred or

self-possessed or intellectual, for if he were he would draw a chair to

the fire and there would be no duologue at the end of the third act.

Ibsen understood the difficulty and made all his characters a little

provincial that they might not put each other out of countenance, and

made a leading article sort of poetry, phrases about vine leaves and

harps in the air it was possible to believe them using in their moments

of excitement, and if the play needed more than that, they could always

do something stupid. They could go out and hoist a flag as they do

at the end of _Little Eyolf_. One only understands that this manner,

deliberately adopted one doubts not, had gone into his soul and filled

it with dust, when one has noticed that he could no longer create a

man of genius. The happiest writers are those that, knowing this form

of play is slight and passing, keep to the surface, never showing

anything but the arguments and the persiflage of daily observation, or

now and then, instead of the expression of passion, a stage picture,

a man holding a woman’s hand or sitting with his head in his hands in

dim light by the red glow of a fire. It was certainly an understanding

of the slightness of the form, of its incapacity for the expression of

the deeper sorts of passion, that made the French invent the play with

a thesis, for where there is a thesis people can grow hot in argument,

almost the only kind of passion that displays itself in our daily

life. The novel of contemporary educated life is upon the other hand a

permanent form because having the power of psychological description it

can follow the thought of a man who is looking into the grate.

HAS THE DRAMA OF CONTEMPORARY LIFE A ROOT OF ITS OWN?

IN watching a play about modern educated people, with its meagre

language and its action crushed into the narrow limits of possibility,

I have found myself constantly saying: ‘Maybe it has its power to move,

slight as that is, from being able to suggest fundamental contrasts

and passions which romantic and poetical literature have shown to be

beautiful.’ A man facing his enemies alone in a quarrel over the purity

of the water in a Norwegian Spa and using no language but that of the

newspapers can call up into our minds, let us say, the passion of

Coriolanus. The lovers and fighters of old imaginative literature are

more vivid experiences in the soul than anything but one’s own ruling

passion that is itself riddled by their thought as by lightning, and

even two dumb figures on the roads can call up all that glory. Put the

man who has no knowledge of literature before a play of this kind and

he will say, as he has said in some form or other in every age at the

first shock of naturalism, ‘What has brought me out to hear nothing but

the words we use at home when we are talking of the rates?’ And he will

prefer to it any play where there is visible beauty or mirth, where

life is exciting, at high tide as it were. It is not his fault that he

will prefer in all likelihood a worse play although its kind may be

greater, for we have been following the lure of science for generations

and forgotten him and his. I come always back to this thought. There

is something of an old wives’ tale in fine literature. The makers

of it are like an old peasant telling stories of the great famine or

the hangings of ’98 or his own memories. He has felt something in the

depth of his mind and he wants to make it as visible and powerful

to our senses as possible. He will use the most extravagant words

or illustrations if they suit his purpose. Or he will invent a wild

parable, and the more his mind is on fire or the more creative it is,

the less will he look at the outer world or value it for its own sake.

It gives him metaphors and examples and that is all. He is even a

little scornful of it, for it seems to him while the fit is on that the

fire has gone out of it and left it but white ashes. I cannot explain

it, but I am certain that every high thing was invented in this way,

between sleeping and waking, as it were, and that peering and peeping

persons are but hawkers of stolen goods. How else could their noses

have grown so ravenous or their eyes so sharp?

WHY THE BLIND MAN IN ANCIENT TIMES WAS MADE A POET

A DESCRIPTION in the Iliad or the Odyssey, unlike one in the Æneid or

in most modern writers, is the swift and natural observation of a man

as he is shaped by life. It is a refinement of the primary hungers and

has the least possible of what is merely scholarly or exceptional. It

is, above all, never too observant, too professional, and when the

book is closed we have had our energies enriched, for we have been in

the mid-current. We have never seen anything Odysseus could not have

seen while his thought was of the Cyclops, or Achilles when Briseis

moved him to desire. In the heart of the greatest periods there is

something careless and sudden in all habitual moods though not in their

expression, because these moods are a conflagration of all the energies

of active life. In primitive times the blind man became a poet as he

becomes a fiddler in our villages, because he had to be driven out of

activities all his nature cried for before he could be contented with

the praise of life. And often it is Villon or Verlaine with impediments

plain to all, who sings of life with the ancient simplicity. Poets of

coming days, when once more it will be possible to write as in the

great epochs, will recognise that their sacrifice shall be to refuse

what blindness and evil name, or imprisonment at the outsetting,

denied to men who missed thereby the sting of a deliberate refusal.

The poets of the ages of silver need no refusal of life, the dome of

many-coloured glass is already shattered while they live. They look at

life deliberately and as if from beyond life, and the greatest of them

need suffer nothing but the sadness that the saints have known. This

is their aim, and their temptation is not a passionate activity, but

the approval of their fellows, which comes to them in full abundance

only when they delight in the general thoughts that hold together a

cultivated middle-class, where irresponsibilities of position and

poverty are lacking; the things that are more excellent among educated

men who have political pre-occupations, Augustus Cæsar’s affability,

all that impersonal fecundity which muddies the intellectual passions.

Ben Jonson says in the ‘Poetaster,’ that even the best of men without

Promethean fire is but a hollow statue, and a studious man will

commonly forget after some forty winters that of a certainty Promethean

fire will burn somebody’s fingers. It may happen that poets will be

made more often by their sins than by their virtues, for general praise

is unlucky, as the villages know, and not merely as I imagine—for I

am superstitious about these things—because the praise of all but an

equal enslaves and adds a pound to the ball at the ankle with every

compliment.

All energy that comes from the whole man is as irregular as the

lightning, for the communicable and forecastable and discoverable is a

part only, a hungry chicken under the breast of the pelican, and the

test of poetry is not in reason but in a delight not different from

the delight that comes to a man at the first coming of love into the

heart. I knew an old man who had spent his whole life cutting hazel

and privet from the paths, and in some seventy years he had observed

little but had many imaginations. He had never seen like a naturalist,

never seen things as they are, for his habitual mood had been that of

a man stirred in his affairs; and Shakespeare, Tintoretto, though the

times were running out when Tintoretto painted, nearly all the great

men of the Renaissance, looked at the world with eyes like his. Their

minds were never quiescent, never as it were in a mood for scientific

observations, always an exaltation, never—to use known words—founded

upon an elimination of the personal factor; and their attention and

the attention of those they worked for dwelt constantly with what is

present to the mind in exaltation. I am too modern fully to enjoy

Tintoretto’s Creation of the Milky Way, I cannot fix my thoughts upon

that glowing and palpitating flesh intently enough to forget, as I

can the make-believe of a fairy tale, that heavy drapery hanging from

a cloud, though I find my pleasure in _King Lear_ heightened by the

make-believe that comes upon it all when the fool says: ‘This prophecy

Merlin shall make, for I live before his time’;—and I always find it

quite natural, so little does logic in the mere circumstance matter in

the finest art, that Richard’s and Richmond’s tents should be side by

side. I saw with delight _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_ when Mr.

Carr revived it, and found it none the worse because the apprentice

acted a whole play upon the spur of the moment and without committing a

line to heart. When Ben Jonson’s _Epicœne_ rammed a century of laughter

into the two hours’ traffic, I found with amazement that almost every

journalist had put logic on the seat, where our lady imagination should

pronounce that unjust and favouring sentence her woman’s heart is ever

plotting, and had felt bound to cherish none but reasonable sympathies

and to resent the baiting of that grotesque old man. I have been

looking over a book of engravings made in the eighteenth century from

those wall-pictures of Herculaneum and Pompeii that were, it seems, the

work of journeymen copying from finer paintings, for the composition

is always too good for the execution. I find in great numbers an

indifference to obvious logic, to all that the eye sees at common

moments. Perseus shows Andromeda the death she lived by in a pool, and

though the lovers are carefully drawn the reflection is upside down

that we may see it the better. There is hardly an old master who has

not made known to us in some like way how little he cares for what

every fool can see and every knave can praise. The men who imagined

the arts were not less superstitious in religion, understanding the

spiritual relations, but not the mechanical, and finding nothing that

need strain the throat in those gnats the floods of Noah and Deucalion,

and in Joshua’s moon at Ascalon.

CONCERNING SAINTS AND ARTISTS

I TOOK the Indian hemp with certain followers of St. Martin on the

ground floor of a house in the Latin Quarter. I had never taken it

before, and was instructed by a boisterous young poet, whose English

was no better than my French. He gave me a little pellet, if I am not

forgetting, an hour before dinner, and another after we had dined

together at some restaurant. As we were going through the streets to

the meeting-place of the Martinists, I felt suddenly that a cloud I was

looking at floated in an immense space, and for an instant my being

rushed out, as it seemed, into that space with ecstasy. I was myself

again immediately, but the poet was wholly above himself, and presently

he pointed to one of the street lamps now brightening in the fading

twilight, and cried at the top of his voice, ‘Why do you look at me

with your great eye?’ There were perhaps a dozen people already much

excited when we arrived; and after I had drunk some cups of coffee and

eaten a pellet or two more, I grew very anxious to dance, but did not,

as I could not remember any steps. I sat down and closed my eyes; but

no, I had no visions, nothing but a sensation of some dark shadow which

seemed to be telling me that some day I would go into a trance and so

out of my body for awhile, but not yet. I opened my eyes and looked at

some red ornament on the mantelpiece, and at once the room was full

of harmonies of red, but when a blue china figure caught my eye the

harmonies became blue upon the instant. I was puzzled, for the reds

were all there, nothing had changed, but they were no longer important

or harmonious; and why had the blues so unimportant but a moment ago

become exciting and delightful? Thereupon it struck me that I was

seeing like a painter, and that in the course of the evening everyone

there would change through every kind of artistic perception.

After a while a Martinist ran towards me with a piece of paper on which

he had drawn a circle with a dot in it, and pointing at it with his

finger he cried out, ‘God, God!’ Some immeasurable mystery had been

revealed, and his eyes shone; and at some time or other a lean and

shabby man, with rather a distinguished face, showed me his horoscope

and pointed with an ecstasy of melancholy at its evil aspects. The

boisterous poet, who was an old eater of the Indian hemp, had told me

that it took one three months growing used to it, three months more

enjoying it, and three months being cured of it. These men were in

their second period; but I never forgot myself, never really rose above

myself for more than a moment, and was even able to feel the absurdity

of that gaiety, an Herr Nordau among the men of genius, but one that

was abashed at his own sobriety. The sky outside was beginning to grey

when there came a knocking at the window shutters. Somebody opened the

window, and a woman in evening dress, who was not a little bewildered

to find so many people, was helped down into the room. She had been at

a students’ ball unknown to her husband, who was asleep overhead, and

had thought to have crept home unobserved, but for a confederate at the

window. All those talking or dancing men laughed in a dreamy way; and

she, understanding that there was no judgment in the laughter of men

that had no thought but of the spectacle of the world, blushed, laughed

and darted through the room and so upstairs. Alas that the hangman’s

rope should be own brother to that Indian happiness that keeps alone,

were it not for some stray cactus, mother of as many dreams, an

immemorial impartiality and simpleness.

THE SUBJECT MATTER OF DRAMA

I READ this sentence a few days ago, or one like it, in an obituary

of Ibsen: ‘Let nobody again go back to the old ballad material of

Shakespeare, to murders, and ghosts, for what interests us on the

stage is modern experience and the discussion of our interests’;

and in another part of the article Ibsen was blamed because he had

written of suicides and in other ways made use of ‘the morbid terror

of death.’ Dramatic literature has for a long time been left to the

criticism of journalists, and all these, the old stupid ones and the

new clever ones, have tried to impress upon it their absorption in the

life of the moment, their delight in obvious originality and in obvious

logic, their shrinking from the ancient and insoluble. The writer I

have quoted is much more than a journalist, but he has lived their

hurried life, and instinctively turns to them for judgment. He is not

thinking of the great poets and painters, of the cloud of witnesses,

who are there that we may become, through our understanding of their

minds, spectators of the ages, but of this age. Drama is a means of

expression, not a special subject matter, and the dramatist is as free

to choose where he has a mind to as the poet of ‘Endymion’ or as the

painter of Mary Magdalene at the door of Simon the Pharisee. So far

from the discussion of our interests and the immediate circumstance of

our life being the most moving to the imagination, it is what is old

and far off that stirs us the most deeply. There is a sentence in _The

Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ that is meaningless until we understand

Blake’s system of correspondences. ‘The best wine is the oldest, the

best water the newest.’

Water is experience, immediate sensation, and wine is emotion, and

it is with the intellect, as distinguished from imagination, that we

enlarge the bounds of experience and separate it from all but itself,

from illusion, from memory, and create among other things science

and good journalism. Emotion, on the other hand, grows intoxicating

and delightful after it has been enriched with the memory of old

emotions, with all the uncounted flavours of old experience, and it is

necessarily an antiquity of thought, emotions that have been deepened

by the experiences of many men of genius, that distinguishes the

cultivated man. The subject-matter of his meditation and invention is

old, and he will disdain a too conscious originality in the arts as

in those matters of daily life where, is it not Balzac who says, ‘we

are all conservatives’? He is above all things well-bred, and whether

he write or paint will not desire a technique that denies or obtrudes

his long and noble descent. Corneille and Racine did not deny their

masters, and when Dante spoke of his master Virgil there was no crowing

of the cock. In their day imitation was conscious or all but conscious,

and while originality was but so much the more a part of the man

himself, so much the deeper because unconscious, no quick analysis

could find out their miracle, that needed, it may be, generations to

reveal; but it is our imitation that is unconscious and that waits the

certainties of time. The more religious the subject-matter of an art,

the more will it be as it were stationary, and the more ancient will

be the emotion that it arouses and the circumstances that it calls up

before our eyes. When in the Middle Ages the pilgrim to St. Patrick’s

Purgatory found himself on the lake side, he found a boat made out

of a hollow tree to ferry him to the cave of vision. In religious

painting and poetry, crowns and swords of an ancient pattern take upon

themselves new meanings, and it is impossible to separate our idea of

what is noble from a mystic stair, where not men and women, but robes,

jewels, incidents, ancient utilities float upward slowly over the all

but sleeping mind, putting on emotional and spiritual life as they

ascend until they are swallowed up by some far glory that they even

were too modern and momentary to endure. All art is dream, and what

the day is done with is dreaming ripe, and what art moulds religion

accepts, and in the end all is in the wine cup, all is in the drunken

phantasy, and the grapes begin to stammer.

THE TWO KINDS OF ASCETICISM

IT is not possible to separate an emotion or a spiritual state from

the image that calls it up and gives it expression. Michael Angelo’s

Moses, Velasquez’ Philip the Second, the colour purple, a crucifix,

call into life an emotion or state that vanishes with them because

they are its only possible expression, and that is why no mind is more

valuable than the images it contains. The imaginative writer differs

from the saint in that he identifies himself—to the neglect of his own

soul, alas!—with the soul of the world, and frees himself from all that

is impermanent in that soul, an ascetic not of women and wine, but of

the newspapers. That which is permanent in the soul of the world upon

the other hand, the great passions that trouble all and have but a

brief recurring life of flower and seed in any man, is the renunciation

of the saint who seeks not an eternal art, but his own eternity. The

artist stands between the saint and the world of impermanent things,

and just in so far as his mind dwells on what is impermanent in his

sense, on all that ‘modern experience and the discussion of our

interests,’ that is to say on what never recurs, as desire and hope,

terror and weariness, spring and autumn, recur in varying rhythms,

will his mind become critical, as distinguished from creative, and his

emotions wither. He will think less of what he sees and more of his own

attitude towards it, and will express this attitude by an essentially

critical selection and emphasis. I am not quite sure of my memory, but

I think that Mr. Ricketts has said in his book on the Prado that he

feels the critic in Velasquez for the first time in painting, and we

all feel the critic in Whistler and Degas, in Browning, even in Mr.

Swinburne, in the finest art of all ages but the greatest. The end for

art is the ecstasy awakened by the presence before an ever-changing

mind of what is permanent in the world, or by the arousing of that

mind itself into the very delicate and fastidious mood habitual with

it when it is seeking those permanent and recurring things. There is a

little of both ecstasies at all times, but at this time we have a small

measure of the creative impulse itself, of the divine vision, a great

one of ‘the lost traveller’s dream under the hill,’ perhaps because all

the old simple things have been painted or written, and they will only

have meaning for us again when a new race or a new civilisation has

made us look upon all with new eyesight.

IN THE SERPENT’S MOUTH

THERE is an old saying that God is a circle whose centre is everywhere.

If that is true, the saint goes to the centre, the poet and artist to

the ring where everything comes round again. The poet must not seek for

what is still and fixed, for that has no life for him; and if he did,

his style would become cold and monotonous, and his sense of beauty

faint and sickly, as are both style and beauty to my imagination in the

prose and poetry of Newman, but be content to find his pleasure in all

that is for ever passing away that it may come again, in the beauty of

woman, in the fragile flowers of spring, in momentary heroic passion,

in whatever is most fleeting, most impassioned, as it were, for its

own perfection, most eager to return in its glory. Yet perhaps he must

endure the impermanent a little, for these things return, but not

wholly, for no two faces are alike, and, it may be, had we more learned

eyes, no two flowers. Is it that all things are made by the struggle of

the individual and the world, of the unchanging and the returning, and

that the saint and the poet are over all, and that the poet has made

his home in the Serpent’s mouth?

THE BLACK AND THE WHITE ARROWS

INSTINCT creates the recurring and the beautiful, all the winding of

the serpent; but reason, the most ugly man, as Blake called it, is

a drawer of the straight line, the maker of the arbitrary and the

impermanent, for no recurring spring will ever bring again yesterday’s

clock. Sanctity has its straight line also, darting from the centre,

and with these arrows the many-coloured serpent, theme of all our

poetry, is maimed and hunted. He that finds the white arrow shall have

wisdom older than the Serpent, but what of the black arrow? How much

knowledge, how heavy a quiver of the crow-feathered ebony rods can the

soul endure?

HIS MISTRESS’S EYEBROWS

THE preoccupation of our Art and Literature with knowledge, with the

surface of life, with the arbitrary, with mechanism, has arisen out

of the root. A careful, but not necessarily very subtle man, could

foretell the history of any religion if he knew its first principle,

and that it would live long enough to fulfil itself. The mind can

never do the same thing twice over, and having exhausted simple

beauty and meaning, it passes to the strange and hidden, and at last

must find its delight, having outrun its harmonies in the emphatic

and discordant. When I was a boy at the art school I watched an

older student late returned from Paris, with a wonder that had no

understanding in it. He was very amorous, and every new love was the

occasion of a new picture, and every new picture was uglier than its

forerunner. He was excited about his mistress’s eyebrows, as was

fitting, but the interest of beauty had been exhausted by the logical

energies of Art, which destroys where it has rummaged, and can but

discover, whether it will or no. We cannot discover our subject-matter

by deliberate intellect, for when a subject-matter ceases to move us we

must go elsewhere, and when it moves us, even though it be ‘that old

ballad material of Shakespeare’ or even ‘the morbid terror of death,’

we can laugh at reason. We must not ask is the world interested in this

or that, for nothing is in question but our own interest, and we can

understand no other. Our place in the Hierarchy is settled for us by

our choice of a subject-matter, and all good criticism is hieratic,

delighting in setting things above one another, Epic and Drama above

Lyric and so on, and not merely side by side. But it is our instinct

and not our intellect that chooses. We can deliberately refashion our

characters, but not our painting or our poetry. If our characters also

were not unconsciously refashioned so completely by the unfolding of

the logical energies of Art, that even simple things have in the end a

new aspect in our eyes, the Arts would not be among those things that

return for ever. The ballads that Bishop Percy gathered returned in the

_Ancient Mariner_ and the delight in the world of old Greek sculptors

sprang into a more delicate loveliness in that archaistic head of

the young athlete down the long corridor to your left hand as you go

into the British Museum. Civilisation too, will not that also destroy

where it has loved, until it shall bring the simple and natural things

again and a new Argo with all the gilding on her bows sail out to find

another fleece?

THE TRESSES OF THE HAIR

HAFIZ cried to his beloved, ‘I made a bargain with that brown hair

before the beginning of time, and it shall not be broken through

unending time,’ and it may be that Mistress Nature knows that we have

lived many times, and that whatsoever changes and winds into itself

belongs to us. She covers her eyes away from us, but she lets us play

with the tresses of her hair.

A TOWER ON THE APENNINE

THE other day I was walking towards Urbino, where I was to spend

the night, having crossed the Apennines from San Sepolcro, and had

come to a level place on the mountain-top near the journey’s end. My

friends were in a carriage somewhere behind, on a road which was still

ascending in great loops, and I was alone amid a visionary fantastic

impossible scenery. It was sunset and the stormy clouds hung upon

mountain after mountain, and far off on one great summit a cloud

darker than the rest glimmered with lightning. Away south upon another

mountain a mediæval tower, with no building near nor any sign of life,

rose into the clouds. I saw suddenly in the mind’s eye an old man,

erect and a little gaunt, standing in the door of the tower, while

about him broke a windy light. He was the poet who had at last, because

he had done so much for the world’s sake, come to share in the dignity

of the saint. He had hidden nothing of himself, but he had taken care

of ‘that dignity ... the perfection of form ... this lofty and severe

quality ... this virtue.’ And though he had but sought it for the

world’s sake, or for a woman’s praise, it had come at last into his

body and his mind. Certainly as he stood there he knew how from behind

that laborious mood, that pose, that genius, no flower of himself but

all himself, looked out as from behind a mask that other Who alone

of all men, the country people say, is not a hair’s breadth more nor

less than six feet high. He has in his ears well instructed voices and

seeming solid sights are before his eyes, and not as we say of many a

one, speaking in metaphor, but as this were Delphi or Eleusis, and the

substance and the voice come to him among his memories which are of

women’s faces; for was it Columbanus or another that wrote ‘There is

one among the birds that is perfect, and one perfect among the fish’?

THE THINKING OF THE BODY

THOSE learned men who are a terror to children and an ignominious

sight in lovers’ eyes, all those butts of a traditional humour where

there is something of the wisdom of peasants, are mathematicians,

theologians, lawyers, men of science of various kinds. They have

followed some abstract reverie, which stirs the brain only and needs

that only, and have therefore stood before the looking-glass without

pleasure and never known those thoughts that shape the lines of the

body for beauty or animation, and wake a desire for praise or for

display.

There are two pictures of Venice side by side in the house where I am

writing this, a Canaletto that has little but careful drawing, and a

not very emotional pleasure in clean bright air, and a Franz Francken,

where the blue water, that in the other stirs one so little, can make

one long to plunge into the green depth where a cloud shadow falls.

Neither painting could move us at all, if our thought did not rush out

to the edges of our flesh, and it is so with all good art, whether the

Victory of Samothrace which reminds the soles of our feet of swiftness,

or the Odyssey that would send us out under the salt wind, or the young

horsemen on the Parthenon, that seem happier than our boyhood ever

was, and in our boyhood’s way. Art bids us touch and taste and hear

and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form,

from every abstract thing, from all that is of the brain only, from

all that is not a fountain jetting from the entire hopes, memories,

and sensations of the body. Its morality is personal, knows little of

any general law, has no blame for Little Musgrave, no care for Lord

Barnard’s house, seems lighter than a breath and yet is hard and heavy,

for if a man is not ready to face toil and risk, and in all gaiety

of heart, his body will grow unshapely and his heart lack the wild

will that stirs desire. It approved before all men those that talked

or wrestled or tilted under the walls of Urbino, or sat in the wide

window-seats discussing all things, with love ever in their thought,

when the wise Duchess ordered all, and the Lady Emilia gave the theme.

RELIGIOUS BELIEF NECESSARY TO SYMBOLIC ART

ALL art is sensuous, but when a man puts only his contemplative nature,

and his more vague desires into his art, the sensuous images through

which it speaks become broken, fleeting, uncertain, or are chosen for

their distance from general experience, and all grows unsubstantial

and fantastic. When imagination moves in a dim world like the country

of sleep in ‘Love’s Nocturne’ and ‘Siren there winds her dizzy hair and

sings’ we go to it for delight indeed but in our weariness. If we are

to sojourn there that world must grow consistent with itself, emotion

must be related to emotion by a system of ordered images, as in the

_Divine Comedy_. It must grow to be symbolic, that is, for the soul

can only achieve a distinct separated life where many related objects

at once distinguish and arouse its energies in their fulness. All

visionaries have entered into such a world in trances, and all ideal

art has trance for warranty. Shelley seemed to Matthew Arnold to beat

his ineffectual wings in the void, and I only made my pleasure in him

contented pleasure by massing in my imagination his recurring images of

towers and rivers, and caves with fountains in them, and that one star

of his, till his world had grown solid underfoot and consistent enough

for the soul’s habitation.

But even then I lacked something to compensate my imagination for

geographical and historical reality, for the testimony of our ordinary

senses, and found myself wishing for and trying to imagine, as I had

also when reading Keats’ _Endymion_, a crowd of believers who could

put into all those strange sights the strength of their belief and the

rare testimony of their visions. A little crowd had been sufficient,

and I would have had Shelley a sectary that his revelation might have

found the only sufficient evidence of religion, miracle. All symbolic

art should arise out of a real belief, and that it cannot do so in

this age proves that this age is a road and not a resting-place for

the imaginative arts. I can only understand others by myself, and I am

certain that there are many who are not moved as they desire to be by

that solitary light burning in the tower of Prince Athanais, because it

has not entered into men’s prayers nor lighted any through the sacred

dark of religious contemplation.

Lyrical poems even when they but speak of emotions common to all need,

if not a religious belief like the spiritual arts, a life that has

leisure for itself, and a society that is quickly stirred that our

emotion may be strengthened by the emotion of others. All circumstance

that makes emotion at once dignified and visible, increases the poet’s

power, and I think that is why I have always longed for some stringed

instrument and a listening audience not drawn out of the hurried

streets but from a life where it would be natural to murmur over again

the singer’s thought. When I heard Yvette Guilbert the other day, who

has the lyre or as good, I was not content, for she sang among people

whose life had nothing it could share with an exquisite art that should

rise out of life as the blade out of the spearshaft, a song out of the

mood, the fountain from its pool, all art out of the body, laughter

from a happy company. I longed to make all things over again, that she

might sing in some great hall, where there was no one that did not love

life and speak of it continually.

THE HOLY PLACES

WHEN all art was struck out of personality, whether as in our daily

business or in the adventure of religion, there was little separation

between holy and common things, and just as the arts themselves passed

quickly from passion to divine contemplation, from the conversation

of peasants to that of princes, the one song remembering the drunken

miller and but half forgetting Cambynskan bold; so did a man feel

himself near sacred presences when he turned his plough from the slope

of Cruachmaa or of Olympus. The occupations and the places known to

Homer or to Hesiod, those pure first artists, might, as it were, if

but the fashioners’ hands had loosened, have changed before the poem’s

end to symbols and vanished, winged and unweary, into the unchanging

worlds where religion only can discover life as well as peace. A

man of that unbroken day could have all the subtlety of Shelley,

and yet use no image unknown among the common people, and speak no

thought that was not a deduction from the common thought. Unless the

discovery of legendary knowledge and the returning belief in miracle,

or what we must needs call so, can bring once more a new belief in

the sanctity of common ploughland, and new wonders that reward no

difficult ecclesiastical routine but the common, wayward, spirited man,

we may never see again a Shelley and a Dickens in the one body, but

be broken to the end. We have grown jealous of the body, and we dress

it in dull unshapely clothes, that we may cherish aspiration alone.

Molière being but the master of common sense lived ever in the common

daylight, but Shakespeare could not, and Shakespeare seems to bring us

to the very market-place, when we remember Shelley’s dizzy and Landor’s

calm disdain of usual daily things. And at last we have Villiers de

L’Isle Adam crying in the ecstasy of a supreme culture, of a supreme

refusal, ‘as for living, our servants will do that for us.’ One of

the means of loftiness, of marmorean stillness has been the choice of

strange and far away places, for the scenery of art, but this choice

has grown bitter to me, and there are moments when I cannot believe in

the reality of imaginations that are not inset with the minute life

of long familiar things and symbols and places. I have come to think

of even Shakespeare’s journeys to Rome or to Verona as the outflowing

of an unrest, a dissatisfaction with natural interests, an unstable

equilibrium of the whole European mind that would not have come had

Constantinople wall been built of better stone. I am orthodox and pray

for a resurrection of the body, and am certain that a man should find

his Holy Land where he first crept upon the floor, and that familiar

woods and rivers should fade into symbol with so gradual a change that

he never discover, no, not even in ecstasy itself, that he is beyond

space, and that time alone keeps him from Primum Mobile, the Supernal

Eden, and the White Rose over all.

EDMUND SPENSER

_Included by kind permission of Messrs. T. C. and E. C. Jack._

I

WE know little of Spenser’s childhood and nothing of his parents,

except that his father was probably an Edmund Spenser of north-east

Lancashire, a man of good blood and ‘belonging to a house of ancient

fame.’ He was born in London in 1552, nineteen years after the death

of Ariosto, and when Tasso was about eight years old. Full of the

spirit of the Renaissance, at once passionate and artificial, looking

out upon the world now as craftsman, now as connoisseur, he was to

found his art upon theirs rather than upon the more humane, the more

noble, the less intellectual art of Malory and the Minstrels. Deafened

and blinded by their influence, as so many of us were in boyhood by

that art of Hugo, that made the old simple writers seem but as brown

bread and water, he was always to love the journey more than its end,

the landscape more than the man, and reason more than life, and the

tale less than its telling. He entered Pembroke College, Cambridge,

in 1569, and translated allegorical poems out of Petrarch and Du

Bellay. To-day a young man translates out of Verlaine and Verhaeren;

but at that day Ronsard and Du Bellay were the living poets, who

promised revolutionary and unheard-of things to a poetry moving towards

elaboration and intellect, as ours—the serpent’s tooth in his own tail

again—moves towards simplicity and instinct. At Cambridge he met with

Hobbinol of _The Shepheards Calender_, a certain Gabriel Harvey, son of

a rope-maker at Saffron Walden, but now a Fellow of Pembroke College,

a notable man, some five or six years his elder. It is usual to think

ill of Harvey, because of his dislike of rhyme and his advocacy of

classical metres, and because he complained that Spenser preferred

his _Faerie Queene_ to the _Nine Muses_, and encouraged Hobgoblin ‘to

run off with the Garland of Apollo.’ But at that crossroad, where so

many crowds mingled talking of so many lands, no one could foretell

in what bed he would sleep after nightfall. Milton was in the end to

dislike rhyme as much, and it is certain that rhyme is one of the

secondary causes of that disintegration of the personal instincts

which has given to modern poetry its deep colour for colour’s sake, its

overflowing pattern, its background of decorative landscape, and its

insubordination of detail. At the opening of a movement we are busy

with first principles, and can find out everything but the road we

are to go, everything but the weight and measure of the impulse, that

has come to us out of life itself, for that is always in defiance of

reason, always without a justification but by faith and works. Harvey

set Spenser to the making of verses in classical metre, and certain

lines have come down to us written in what Spenser called ‘Iambicum

trimetrum.’ His biographers agree that they are very bad, but, though

I cannot scan them, I find in them the charm of what seems a sincere

personal emotion. The man himself, liberated from the minute felicities

of phrase and sound, that are the temptation and the delight of rhyme,

speaks of his Mistress some thought that came to him not for the sake

of poetry, but for love’s sake, and the emotion instead of dissolving

into detached colours, into ‘the spangly gloom’ that Keats saw ‘froth

and boil’ when he put his eyes into ‘the pillowy cleft,’ speaks to her

in poignant words as if out of a tear-stained love-letter:

‘Unhappie verse, the witnesse of my unhappie state,

Make thy selfe fluttring winge for thy fast flying

Thought, and fly forth to my love wheresoever she be.

Whether lying restlesse in heavy bedde, or else

Sitting so cheerlesse at the cheerful boorde, or else

Playing alone carelesse on her heavenlie virginals.

If in bed, tell hir that my eyes can take no rest;

If at boorde tell her that my mouth can eat no meate;

If at her virginals, tell her that I can heare no mirth.’

II

He left College in his twenty-fourth year, and stayed for a while in

Lancashire, where he had relations, and there fell in love with one he

has written of in _The Shepheards Calender_ as ‘Rosalind, the widdowes

daughter of the Glenn,’ though she was, for all her shepherding, as

one learns from a College friend, ‘a gentlewoman of no mean house.’

She married Menalchus of the _Calender_ and Spenser lamented her

for years, in verses so full of disguise that one cannot say if his

lamentations come out of a broken heart or are but a useful movement

in the elaborate ritual of his poetry, a well-ordered incident in

the mythology of his imagination. To no English poet, perhaps to no

European poet before his day, had the natural expression of personal

feeling been so impossible, the clear vision of the lineaments of

human character so difficult; no other’s head and eyes had sunk so far

into the pillowy cleft. After a year of this life he went to London,

and by Harvey’s advice and introduction entered the service of the

Earl of Leicester, staying for a while in his house on the banks of

the Thames; and it was there in all likelihood that he met with the

Earl’s nephew, Sir Philip Sidney, still little more than a boy, but

with his head full of affairs of state. One can imagine that it was the

great Earl or Sir Philip Sidney that gave his imagination its moral

and practical turn, and one imagines him seeking from philosophical

men, who distrust instinct because it disturbs contemplation, and from

practical men who distrust everything they cannot use in the routine

of immediate events, that impulse and method of creation that can only

be learned with surety from the technical criticism of poets, and from

the excitement of some movement in the artistic life. Marlowe and

Shakespeare were still at school, and Ben Jonson was but five years

old. Sidney was doubtless the greatest personal influence that came

into Spenser’s life, and it was one that exalted moral zeal above every

other faculty. The great Earl impressed his imagination very deeply

also, for the lamentation over the Earl of Leicester’s death is more

than a conventional Ode to a dead patron. Spenser’s verses about men,

nearly always indeed, seem to express more of personal joy and sorrow

than those about women, perhaps because he was less deliberately a poet

when he spoke of men. At the end of a long beautiful passage he laments

that unworthy men should be in the dead Earl’s place, and compares them

to the fox—an unclean feeder—hiding in the lair ‘the badger swept.’

The imaginer of the festivals of Kenilworth was indeed the fit patron

for him, and alike, because of the strength and weakness of Spenser’s

art, one regrets that he could not have lived always in that elaborate

life a master of ceremony to the world, instead of being plunged into a

life that but stirred him to bitterness, as the way is with theoretical

minds in the tumults of events they cannot understand. In the winter

of 1579-80 he published _The Shepheards Calender_, a book of twelve

eclogues, one for every month of the year, and dedicated it to Sir

Philip Sidney. It was full of pastoral beauty and allegorical images of

current events, revealing too that conflict between the æsthetic and

moral interests that was to run through well-nigh all his works, and

it became immediately famous. He was rewarded with a place as private

secretary to the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Grey de Wilton, and sent to

Ireland, where he spent nearly all the rest of his life. After a few

years there he bought Kilcolman Castle, which had belonged to the rebel

Earl of Desmond, and the rivers and hills about this castle came much

into his poetry. Our Irish Aubeg is ‘Mulla mine, whose waves I taught

to weep,’ and the Ballyvaughan Hills, it has its rise among, ‘old

Father Mole.’ He never pictured the true countenance of Irish scenery,

for his mind turned constantly to the courts of Elizabeth and to the

umbrageous level lands, where his own race was already seeding like a

great poppy:

‘Both heaven and heavenly graces do much more

(Quoth he), abound in that same land then this:

For there all happie peace and plenteous store

Conspire in one to make contented blisse.

No wayling there nor wretchednesse is heard,

No bloodie issues nor no leprosies,

No griesly famine, nor no raging sweard,

No nightly bordrags, nor no hue and cries;

The shepheards there abroad may safely lie

On hills and downes, withouten dread or daunger,

No ravenous wolves the good mans hope destroy,

Nor outlawes fell affray the forest raunger,

The learned arts do florish in great honor,

And Poets wits are had in peerlesse price.’

Nor did he ever understand the people he lived among or the historical

events that were changing all things about him. Lord Grey de Wilton

had been recalled almost immediately, but it was his policy, brought

over ready-made in his ship, that Spenser advocated throughout all his

life, equally in his long prose book _The State of Ireland_ as in the

_Faerie Queene_, where Lord Grey was Artigall and the Iron man the

soldiers and executioners by whose hands he worked. Like an hysterical

patient he drew a complicated web of inhuman logic out of the bowels

of an insufficient premise—there was no right, no law, but that of

Elizabeth, and all that opposed her opposed themselves to God, to

civilisation, and to all inherited wisdom and courtesy, and should be

put to death. He made two visits to England, celebrating one of them

in _Colin Clouts come Home againe_, to publish the first three books

and the second three books of the _Faerie Queene_ respectively, and to

try for some English office or pension. By the help of Raleigh, now

his neighbour at Kilcolman, he had been promised a pension, but was

kept out of it by Lord Burleigh, who said, ‘All that for a song!’ From

that day Lord Burleigh became that ‘rugged forehead’ of the poems,

whose censure of this or that is complained of. During the last three

or four years of his life in Ireland he married a fair woman of his

neighbourhood, and about her wrote many intolerable artificial sonnets

and that most beautiful passage in the sixth book of the _Faerie

Queene_, which tells of Colin Clout piping to the Graces and to her;

and he celebrated his marriage in the most beautiful of all his poems,

the _Epithalamium_. His genius was pictorial, and these pictures of

happiness were more natural to it than any personal pride, or joy, or

sorrow. His new happiness was very brief, and just as he was rising to

something of Milton’s grandeur in the fragment that has been called

_Mutabilitie_, ‘the wandering companies that keep the woods,’ as he

called the Irish armies, drove him to his death. Ireland, where he

saw nothing but work for the Iron man, was in the midst of the last

struggle of the old Celtic order with England, itself about to turn

bottom upward, of the passion of the Middle Ages with the craft of the

Renaissance. Seven years after Spenser’s arrival in Ireland a large

merchant ship had carried off from Loch Swilly, by a very crafty device

common in those days, certain persons of importance. Red Hugh, a boy

of fifteen, and the coming head of Tirconnell, and various heads of

clans had been enticed on board the merchant ship to drink of a fine

vintage, and there made prisoners. All but Red Hugh were released, on

finding substitutes among the boys of their kindred, and the captives

were hurried to Dublin and imprisoned in the Burningham Tower. After

four years of captivity and one attempt that failed, Red Hugh and his

companions escaped into the Dublin mountains, one dying there of cold

and privation, and from that to their own country-side. Red Hugh allied

himself to Hugh O’Neil, the most powerful of the Irish leaders—‘Oh,

deep, dissembling heart, born to great weal or woe of thy country!’

an English historian had cried to him—an Oxford man too, a man of the

Renaissance, and for a few years defeated English armies and shook the

power of England. The Irish, stirred by these events, and with it maybe

some rumours of _The State of Ireland_ sticking in their stomachs,

drove Spenser out of doors and burnt his house, one of his children, as

tradition has it, dying in the fire. He fled to England, and died some

three months later in January, 1599, as Ben Jonson says, ‘of lack of

bread.’

During the last four or five years of his life he had seen, without

knowing that he saw it, the beginning of the great Elizabethan

poetical movement. In 1598 he had pictured the Nine Muses lamenting

each one over the evil state in England, of the things that she had

in charge, but, like William Blake’s more beautiful _Whether on Ida’s

shady brow_, their lamentations should have been a cradle-song. When

he died _Romeo and Juliet_, _Richard III._, and _Richard II._, and the

plays of Marlowe had all been acted, and in stately houses were sung

madrigals and love songs whose like has not been in the world since.

Italian influence had strengthened the old French joy that had never

died out among the upper classes, and an art was being created for

the last time in England which had half its beauty from continually

suggesting a life hardly less beautiful than itself.

III

When Spenser was buried at Westminster Abbey many poets read verses in

his praise, and threw then their verses and the pens that had written

them into his tomb. Like him they belonged, for all the moral zeal

that was gathering like a London fog, to that indolent, demonstrative

Merry England that was about to pass away. Men still wept when they

were moved, still dressed themselves in joyous colours, and spoke

with many gestures. Thoughts and qualities sometimes come to their

perfect expression when they are about to pass away, and Merry England

was dying in plays, and in poems, and in strange adventurous men. If

one of those poets who threw his copy of verses into the earth that

was about to close over his master were to come alive again, he would

find some shadow of the life he knew, though not the art he knew,

among young men in Paris, and would think that his true country. If

he came to England he would find nothing there but the triumph of the

Puritan and the merchant—those enemies he had feared and hated—and

he would weep perhaps, in that womanish way of his, to think that so

much greatness had been, not as he had hoped, the dawn, but the sunset

of a people. He had lived in the last days of what we may call the

Anglo-French nation, the old feudal nation that had been established

when the Norman and the Angevin made French the language of court

and market. In the time of Chaucer English poets still wrote much in

French, and even English labourers lilted French songs over their work;

and I cannot read any Elizabethan poem or romance without feeling the

pressure of habits of emotion, and of an order of life which were

conscious, for all their Latin gaiety, of a quarrel to the death with

that new Anglo-Saxon nation that was arising amid Puritan sermons and

Mar-Prelate pamphlets. This nation had driven out the language of

its conquerors, and now it was to overthrow their beautiful, haughty

imagination and their manners, full of abandon and wilfulness, and to

set in their stead earnestness and logic and the timidity and reserve

of a counting-house. It had been coming for a long while, for it had

made the Lollards; and when Anglo-French Chaucer was at Westminster its

poet, Langland, sang the office at St. Paul’s. Shakespeare, with his

delight in great persons, with his indifference to the State, with his

scorn of the crowd, with his feudal passion, was of the old nation, and

Spenser, though a joyless earnestness had cast shadows upon him, and

darkened his intellect wholly at times, was of the old nation too. His

_Faerie Queene_ was written in Merry England, but when Bunyan wrote

in prison the other great English allegory Modern England had been

born. Bunyan’s men would do right that they might come some day to

the Delectable Mountain, and not at all that they might live happily

in a world whose beauty was but an entanglement about their feet.

Religion had denied the sacredness of an earth that commerce was about

to corrupt and ravish, but when Spenser lived the earth had still its

sheltering sacredness. His religion, where the paganism that is natural

to proud and happy people had been strengthened by the platonism of

the Renaissance, cherished the beauty of the soul and the beauty of

the body with, as it seemed, an equal affection. He would have had men

live well, not merely that they might win eternal happiness but that

they might live splendidly among men and be celebrated in many songs.

How could one live well if one had not the joy of the Creator and of

the Giver of gifts? He says in his _Hymn to Beauty_ that a beautiful

soul, unless for some stubbornness in the ground, makes for itself a

beautiful body, and he even denies that beautiful persons ever lived

who had not souls as beautiful. They may have been tempted until they

seemed evil, but that was the fault of others. And in his _Hymn to

Heavenly Beauty_ he sets a woman little known to theology, one that

he names Wisdom or Beauty, above Seraphim and Cherubim and in the

very bosom of God, and in the _Faerie Queene_ it is pagan Venus and

her lover Adonis who create the forms of all living things and send

them out into the world, calling them back again to the gardens of

Adonis at their lives’ end to rest there, as it seems, two thousand

years between life and life. He began in English poetry, despite a

temperament that delighted in sensuous beauty alone with perfect

delight, that worship of Intellectual Beauty which Shelley carried to a

much greater subtlety and applied to the whole of life.

The qualities, to each of whom he had planned to give a Knight, he

had borrowed from Aristotle and partly Christianised, but not to the

forgetting of their heathen birth. The chief of the Knights, who

would have combined in himself the qualities of all the others, had

Spenser lived to finish the _Faerie Queene_, was King Arthur, the

representative of an ancient quality, Magnificence. Born at the moment

of change, Spenser had indeed many Puritan thoughts. It has been

recorded that he cut his hair short and half regretted his hymns to

Love and Beauty. But he has himself told us that the many-headed beast

overthrown and bound by Calidor, Knight of Courtesy, was Puritanism

itself. Puritanism, its zeal and its narrowness, and the angry

suspicion that it had in common with all movements of the ill-educated,

seemed no other to him than a slanderer of all fine things. One

doubts, indeed, if he could have persuaded himself that there could

be any virtue at all without courtesy, perhaps without something of

pageant and eloquence. He was, I think, by nature altogether a man

of that old Catholic feudal nation, but, like Sidney, he wanted to

justify himself to his new masters. He wrote of knights and ladies,

wild creatures imagined by the aristocratic poets of the twelfth

century, and perhaps chiefly by English poets who had still the French

tongue; but he fastened them with allegorical nails to a big barn

door of common-sense, of merely practical virtue. Allegory itself had

risen into general importance with the rise of the merchant class in

the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; and it was natural when that

class was about for the first time to shape an age in its image, that

the last epic poet of the old order should mix its art with his own

long-descended, irresponsible, happy art.

IV

Allegory and, to a much greater degree, symbolism are a natural

language by which the soul when entranced, or even in ordinary sleep,

communes with God and with angels. They can speak of things which

cannot be spoken of in any other language, but one will always, I

think, feel some sense of unreality when they are used to describe

things which can be described as well in ordinary words. Dante used

allegory to describe visionary things, and the first maker of _The

Romance of the Rose_, for all his lighter spirits, pretends that his

adventures came to him in a vision one May morning; while Bunyan, by

his preoccupation with heaven and the soul, gives his simple story

a visionary strangeness and intensity: he believes so little in the

world, that he takes us away from all ordinary standards of probability

and makes us believe even in allegory for a while. Spenser, on the

other hand, to whom allegory was not, as I think, natural at all,

makes us feel again and again that it disappoints and interrupts our

preoccupation with the beautiful and sensuous life he has called up

before our eyes. It interrupts us most when he copies Langland, and

writes in what he believes to be a mood of edification, and the least

when he is not quite serious, when he sets before us some procession

like a court pageant made to celebrate a wedding or a crowning. One

cannot think that he should have occupied himself with moral and

religious questions at all. He should have been content to be, as

Emerson thought Shakespeare was, a Master of the Revels to mankind. I

am certain that he never gets that visionary air which can alone make

allegory real, except when he writes out of a feeling for glory and

passion. He had no deep moral or religious life. He has never a line

like Dante’s ‘Thy Will is our Peace,’ or like Thomas à Kempis’s ‘The

Holy Spirit has liberated me from a multitude of opinions,’ or even

like Hamlet’s objection to the bare bodkin. He had been made a poet

by what he had almost learnt to call his sins. If he had not felt it

necessary to justify his art to some serious friend, or perhaps even to

‘that rugged forehead,’ he would have written all his life long, one

thinks, of the loves of shepherdesses and shepherds, among whom there

would have been perhaps the morals of the dovecot. One is persuaded

that his morality is official and impersonal—a system of life which

it was his duty to support—and it is perhaps a half understanding

of this that has made so many generations believe that he was the

first poet laureate, the first salaried moralist among the poets. His

processions of deadly sins, and his houses, where the very cornices

are arbitrary images of virtue, are an unconscious hypocrisy, an

undelighted obedience to the ‘rugged forehead,’ for all the while he

is thinking of nothing but lovers whose bodies are quivering with the

memory or the hope of long embraces. When they are not together, he

will indeed embroider emblems and images much as those great ladies of

the courts of love embroidered them in their castles; and when these

are imagined out of a thirst for magnificence and not thought out in

a mood of edification, they are beautiful enough; but they are always

tapestries for corridors that lead to lovers’ meetings or for the walls

of marriage chambers. He was not passionate, for the passionate feed

their flame in wanderings and absences, when the whole being of the

beloved, every little charm of body and of soul, is always present to

the mind, filling it with heroical subtleties of desire. He is a poet

of the delighted senses, and his song becomes most beautiful when he

writes of those islands of Phædria and Acrasia, which angered ‘that

rugged forehead,’ as it seems, but gave to Keats his _Belle Dame sans

Merci_ and his ‘perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,’ and to William

Morris his _Water of the Wondrous Isles_.

V

The dramatists lived in a disorderly world, reproached by many,

persecuted even, but following their imagination wherever it led them.

Their imagination, driven hither and thither by beauty and sympathy,

put on something of the nature of eternity. Their subject was always

the soul, the whimsical, self-awakening, self-exciting, self-appeasing

soul. They celebrated its heroical, passionate will going by its own

path to immortal and invisible things. Spenser, on the other hand,

except among those smooth pastoral scenes and lovely effeminate islands

that have made him a great poet, tried to be of his time, or rather

of the time that was all but at hand. Like Sidney, whose charm it may

be led many into slavery, he persuaded himself that we enjoy Virgil

because of the virtues of Æneas, and so planned out his immense poem

that it would set before the imagination of citizens, in whom there

would soon be no great energy, innumerable blameless Æneases. He had

learned to put the State, which desires all the abundance for itself,

in the place of the Church, and he found it possible to be moved by

expedient emotions, merely because they were expedient, and to think

serviceable thoughts with no self-contempt. He loved his Queen a little

because she was the protectress of poets and an image of that old

Anglo-French nation that lay a-dying, but a great deal because she was

the image of the State which had taken possession of his conscience.

She was over sixty years old, and ugly and, it is thought, selfish, but

in his poetry she is ‘fair Cynthia,’ ‘a crown of lilies,’ ‘the image

of the heavens,’ ‘without mortal blemish,’ and has ‘an angelic face,’

where ‘the red rose’ has ‘meddled with the white’; ‘Phœbus thrusts out

his golden head’ but to look upon her, and blushes to find himself

outshone. She is ‘a fourth Grace,’ ‘a queen of love,’ ‘a sacred saint,’

and ‘above all her sex that ever yet has been.’ In the midst of his

praise of his own sweetheart he stops to remember that Elizabeth is

more beautiful, and an old man in _Daphnaida_, although he has been

brought to death’s door by the death of a beautiful daughter, remembers

that though his daughter ‘seemed of angelic race,’ she was yet but the

primrose to the rose beside Elizabeth. Spenser had learned to look to

the State not only as the rewarder of virtue but as the maker of right

and wrong, and had begun to love and hate as it bid him. The thoughts

that we find for ourselves are timid and a little secret, but those

modern thoughts that we share with large numbers are confident and very

insolent. We have little else to-day, and when we read our newspaper

and take up its cry, above all its cry of hatred, we will not think

very carefully, for we hear the marching feet. When Spenser wrote of

Ireland he wrote as an official, and out of thoughts and emotions that

had been organised by the State. He was the first of many Englishmen to

see nothing but what he was desired to see. Could he have gone there

as a poet merely, he might have found among its poets more wonderful

imaginations than even those islands of Phædria and Acrasia. He would

have found among wandering storytellers, not indeed his own power of

rich, sustained description, for that belongs to lettered ease, but

certainly all the kingdom of Faerie, still unfaded, of which his own

poetry was often but a troubled image. He would have found men doing by

swift strokes of the imagination much that he was doing with painful

intellect, with that imaginative reason that soon was to drive out

imagination altogether and for a long time. He would have met with, at

his own door, storytellers among whom the perfection of Greek art was

indeed as unknown as his own power of detailed description, but who,

none the less, imagined or remembered beautiful incidents and strange,

pathetic out-crying that made them of Homer’s lineage. Flaubert says

somewhere, ‘There are things in Hugo, as in Rabelais, that I could

have mended, things badly built, but then what thrusts of power beyond

the reach of conscious art!’ Is not all history but the coming of that

conscious art which first makes articulate and then destroys the old

wild energy? Spenser, the first poet struck with remorse, the first

poet who gave his heart to the State, saw nothing but disorder, where

the mouths that have spoken all the fables of the poets had not yet

become silent. All about him were shepherds and shepherdesses still

living the life that made Theocritus and Virgil think of shepherd and

poet as the one thing; but though he dreamed of Virgil’s shepherds

he wrote a book to advise, among many like things, the harrying of

all that followed flocks upon the hills, and of all ‘the wandering

companies that keep the woods.’ His _View of the State of Ireland_

commends indeed the beauty of the hills and woods where they did

their shepherding, in that powerful and subtle language of his which

I sometimes think more full of youthful energy than even the language

of the great playwrights. He is ‘sure it is yet a most beautiful and

sweet country as any under heaven,’ and that all would prosper but for

those agitators, ’those wandering companies that keep the wood,’ and

he would rid it of them by a certain expeditious way. There should be

four great garrisons. ‘And those fowre garrisons issuing foorthe, at

such convenient times as they shall have intelligence or espiall upon

the enemye, will so drive him from one side to another and tennis him

amongst them, that he shall finde nowhere safe to keepe his creete,

or hide himselfe, but flying from the fire shall fall into the water,

and out of one daunger into another, that in short space his creete,

which is his moste sustenence, shall be wasted in preying, or killed in

driving, or starved for wante of pasture in the woodes, and he himselfe

brought soe lowe, that he shall have no harte nor abilitye to indure

his wretchednesse, the which will surely come to passe in very short

space; for one winters well following of him will so plucke him on his

knees that he will never be able to stand up agayne.’

He could commend this expeditious way from personal knowledge, and

could assure the Queen that the people of the country would soon

’consume themselves and devoure one another. The proofs whereof I

saw sufficiently ensampled in these late warres of Mounster; for

notwithstanding that the same was a most rich and plentifull countrey,

full of corne and cattell, that you would have thought they would

have bene able to stand long, yet ere one yeare and a halfe they were

brought to such wretchednesse, as that any stonye heart would have

rued the same. Out of every corner of the woodes and glynnes they came

creeping forth upon theyr hands, for theyr legges could not beare them;

they looked like anatomyes of death, they spake like ghosts crying out

of their graves; they did eate of the dead carrions, happy were they if

they could finde them, yea, and one another soone after, insomuch as

the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of theyr graves; and

if they found a plot of water-cresses or shamrokes, there they flocked

as to a feast for the time, yet not able long to continue therewithall;

that in short space there were none allmost left, and a most populous

and plentifull countrey suddaynely left voyde of man or beast; yet sure

in all that warre, there perished not many by the sword, but all by the

extremitye of famine.’

VI

In a few years the Four Masters were to write the history of that

time, and they were to record the goodness or the badness of Irishman

and Englishman with entire impartiality. They had seen friends and

relatives persecuted, but they would write of that man’s poisoning

and this man’s charities and of the fall of great houses, and hardly

with any other emotion than a thought of the pitiableness of all life.

Friend and enemy would be for them a part of the spectacle of the

world. They remembered indeed those Anglo-French invaders who conquered

for the sake of their own strong hand, and when they had conquered

became a part of the life about them, singing its songs, when they grew

weary of their own Iseult and Guinevere. But the Four Masters had not

come to understand, as I think, despite famines and exterminations,

that new invaders were among them, who fought for an alien State,

for an alien religion. Such ideas were difficult to them, for they

belonged to the old individual, poetical life, and spoke a language

even in which it was all but impossible to think an abstract thought.

They understood Spain, doubtless, which persecuted in the interests

of religion, but I doubt if anybody in Ireland could have understood

as yet that the Anglo-Saxon nation was beginning to persecute in the

service of ideas it believed to be the foundation of the State. I

doubt if anybody in Ireland saw that with certainty, till the Great

Demagogue had come and turned the old house of the noble into ’the

house of the Poor, the lonely house, the accursed house of Cromwell.’

He came, another Cairbry Cat Head, with that great rabble, who had

overthrown the pageantry of Church and Court, but who turned towards

him faces full of the sadness and docility of their long servitude,

and the old individual, poetical life went down, as it seems, for

ever. He had studied Spenser’s book and approved of it, as we know,

finding, doubtless, his own head there, for Spenser, a king of the old

race, carried a mirror which showed kings yet to come though but kings

of the mob. Those Bohemian poets of the theatres were wiser, for the

States that touched them nearly were the States where Helen and Dido

had sorrowed, and so their mirrors showed none but beautiful heroical

heads. They wandered in the places that pale passion loves, and were

happy, as one thinks, and troubled little about those marching and

hoarse-throated thoughts that the State has in its pay. They knew

that those marchers, with the dust of so many roads upon them, are

very robust and have great and well-paid generals to write expedient

despatches in sound prose; and they could hear mother earth singing

among her cornfields:

‘Weep not, my wanton! smile upon my knee;

When thou art old there’s grief enough for thee.’

VII

There are moments when one can read neither Milton nor Spenser,

moments when one recollects nothing but that their flesh had partly

been changed to stone, but there are other moments when one recollects

nothing but those habits of emotion that made the lesser poet

especially a man of an older, more imaginative time. One remembers

that he delighted in smooth pastoral places, because men could be busy

there or gather together there, after their work, that he could love

handiwork and the hum of voices. One remembers that he could still

rejoice in the trees, not because they were images of loneliness and

meditation, but because of their serviceableness. He could praise ‘the

builder oake,’ ’the aspine, good for staves,’ ‘the cypresse funerall,’

’the eugh, obedient to the bender’s will,’ ’the birch for shaftes,’

’the sallow for the mill,’ ’the mirrhe sweete-bleeding in the bitter

wound,’ ’the fruitful olive,’ and ‘the carver holme.’ He was of a time

before undelighted labour had made the business of men a desecration.

He carries one’s memory back to Virgil’s and Chaucer’s praise of trees,

and to the sweet-sounding song made by the old Irish poet in their

praise.

I got up from reading the _Faerie Queene_ the other day and wandered

into another room. It was in a friend’s house, and I came of a sudden

to the ancient poetry and to our poetry side by side—an engraving

of Claude’s ‘Mill’ hung under an engraving of Turner’s ‘Temple of

Jupiter.’ Those dancing country people, those cow-herds, resting after

the day’s work, and that quiet mill-race made one think of Merry

England with its glad Latin heart, of a time when men in every land

found poetry and imagination in one another’s company and in the day’s

labour. Those stately goddesses, moving in slow procession towards that

marble architrave among mysterious trees, belong to Shelley’s thought,

and to the religion of the wilderness—the only religion possible to

poetry to-day. Certainly Colin Clout, the companionable shepherd, and

Calidor, the courtly man-at-arms, are gone, and Alastor is wandering

from lonely river to river finding happiness in nothing but in that

star where Spenser too had imagined the fountain of perfect things.

This new beauty, in losing so much, has indeed found a new loftiness, a

something of religious exaltation that the old had not. It may be that

those goddesses, moving with a majesty like a procession of the stars,

mean something to the soul of man that those kindly women of the old

poets did not mean, for all the fulness of their breasts and the joyous

gravity of their eyes. Has not the wilderness been at all times a place

of prophecy?

VIII

Our poetry, though it has been a deliberate bringing back of the Latin

joy and the Latin love of beauty, has had to put off the old marching

rhythms, that once delighted more than expedient hearts, in separating

itself from a life where servile hands have become powerful. It has

ceased to have any burden for marching shoulders, since it learned

ecstasy from Smart in his mad cell, and from Blake, who made joyous

little songs out of almost unintelligible visions, and from Keats,

who sang of a beauty so wholly preoccupied with itself that its

contemplation is a kind of lingering trance. The poet, if he would not

carry burdens that are not his and obey the orders of servile lips,

must sit apart in contemplative indolence playing with fragile things.

If one chooses at hazard a Spenserian stanza out of Shelley and

compares it with any stanza by Spenser, one sees the change, though it

would be still more clear if one had chosen a lyrical passage. I will

take a stanza out of _Laon and Cythna_, for that is story-telling and

runs nearer to Spenser than the meditative _Adonais_:

‘The meteor to its far morass returned:

The beating of our veins one interval

Made still; and then I felt the blood that burned

Within her frame, mingle with mine, and fall

Around my heart like fire; and over all

A mist was spread, the sickness of a deep

And speechless swoon of joy, as might befall

Two disunited spirits when they leap

In union from this earth’s obscure and fading sleep.’

The rhythm is varied and troubled, and the lines, which are in

Spenser like bars of gold thrown ringing one upon another, are broken

capriciously. Nor is the meaning the less an inspiration of indolent

muses, for it wanders hither and thither at the beckoning of fancy. It

is now busy with a meteor and now with throbbing blood that is fire,

and with a mist that is a swoon and a sleep that is life. It is bound

together by the vaguest suggestion, while Spenser’s verse is always

rushing on to some preordained thought. ‘A popular poet’ can still

indeed write poetry of the will, just as factory girls wear the fashion

of hat or dress the moneyed classes wore a year ago, but ‘popular

poetry’ does not belong to the living imagination of the world. Old

writers gave men four temperaments, and they gave the sanguineous

temperament to men of active life, and it is precisely the sanguineous

temperament that is fading out of poetry and most obviously out of

what is most subtle and living in poetry—its pulse and breath, its

rhythm. Because poetry belongs to that element in every race which is

most strong, and therefore most individual, the poet is not stirred

to imaginative activity by a life which is surrendering its freedom

to ever new elaboration, organisation, mechanism. He has no longer

a poetical will, and must be content to write out of those parts of

himself which are too delicate and fiery for any deadening exercise.

Every generation has more and more loosened the rhythm, more and more

broken up and disorganised, for the sake of subtlety or detail, those

great rhythms which move, as it were, in masses of sound. Poetry

has become more spiritual, for the soul is of all things the most

delicately organised, but it has lost in weight and measure and in its

power of telling long stories and of dealing with great and complicated

events. _Laon and Cythna_, though I think it rises sometimes into

loftier air than the _Faerie Queene_, and _Endymion_, though its

shepherds and wandering divinities have a stranger and more intense

beauty than Spenser’s, have need of too watchful and minute attention

for such lengthy poems. In William Morris, indeed, one finds a music

smooth and unexacting like that of the old story-tellers, but not their

energetic pleasure, their rhythmical wills. One too often misses in his

_Earthly Paradise_ the minute ecstasy of modern song without finding

that old happy-go-lucky tune that had kept the story marching.

Spenser’s contemporaries, writing lyrics or plays full of lyrical

moments, write a verse more delicately organised than his and crowd

more meaning into a phrase than he, but they could not have kept one’s

attention through so long a poem. A friend who has a fine ear told me

the other day that she had read all Spenser with delight and yet could

remember only four lines. When she repeated them they were from the

poem by Matthew Roydon, which is bound up with Spenser because it is a

commendation of Sir Philip Sidney:

‘A sweet, attractive kind of grace,

A full assurance given by looks,

Continual comfort in a face,

The lineaments of Gospel books.’

Yet if one were to put even these lines beside a fine modern song

one would notice that they had a stronger and rougher energy, a

feather-weight more, if eye and ear were fine enough to notice it, of

the active will, of the happiness that comes out of life itself.

IX

I have put into this book[A] only those passages from Spenser that I

want to remember and carry about with me. I have not tried to select

what people call characteristic passages, for that is, I think, the

way to make a dull book. One never really knows anybody’s taste but

one’s own, and if one likes anything sincerely one may be certain

that there are other people made out of the same earth to like it

too. I have taken out of _The Shepheards Calender_ only those parts

which are about love or about old age, and I have taken out of the

_Faerie Queene_ passages about shepherds and lovers, and fauns and

satyrs, and a few allegorical processions. I find that though I love

symbolism, which is often the only fitting speech for some mystery of

disembodied life, I am for the most part bored by allegory, which is

made, as Blake says, ‘by the daughters of memory,’ and coldly, with no

wizard frenzy. The processions I have chosen are either those, like

the House of Mammon, that have enough ancient mythology, always an

implicit symbolism, or, like the Cave of Despair, enough sheer passion

to make one forget or forgive their allegory, or else they are, like

that vision of Scudamour, so visionary, so full of a sort of ghostly

midnight animation, that one is persuaded that they had some strange

purpose and did truly appear in just that way to some mind worn out

with war and trouble. The vision of Scudamour is, I sometimes think,

the finest invention in Spenser. Until quite lately I knew nothing of

Spenser but the parts I had read as a boy. I did not know that I had

read so far as that vision, but year after year this thought would rise

up before me coming from I knew not where. I would be alone perhaps

in some old building, and I would think suddenly ’out of that door

might come a procession of strange people doing mysterious things with

tumult. They would walk over the stone floor, then suddenly vanish,

and everything would become silent again.’ Once I saw what is called,

I think, a Board School continuation class play _Hamlet_. There was no

stage, but they walked in procession into the midst of a large room

full of visitors and of their friends. While they were walking in,

that thought came to me again from I knew not where. I was alone in a

great church watching ghostly kings and queens setting out upon their

unearthly business.

It was only last summer, when I read the Fourth Book of the _Faerie

Queene_, that I found I had been imagining over and over the enchanted

persecution of Amoret.

I give too, in a section which I call ‘Gardens of Delight,’ the good

gardens of Adonis and the bad gardens of Phædria and Acrasia, which

are mythological and symbolical, but not allegorical, and show,

more particularly those bad islands, his power of describing bodily

happiness and bodily beauty at its greatest. He seemed always to feel

through the eyes, imagining everything in pictures. Marlowe’s _Hero and

Leander_ is more energetic in its sensuality, more complicated in its

intellectual energy than this languid story, which pictures always a

happiness that would perish if the desire to which it offers so many

roses lost its indolence and its softness. There is no passion in the

pleasure he has set amid perilous seas, for he would have us understand

that there alone could the war-worn and the sea-worn man find date-less

leisure and unrepining peace.

_October, 1902._

POETRY AND TRADITION

I

WHEN Mr. O’Leary died I could not bring myself to go to his funeral,

though I had been once his close fellow-worker, for I shrank from

seeing about his grave so many whose Nationalism was different from

anything he had taught or that I could share. He belonged, as did his

friend John F. Taylor, to the romantic conception of Irish Nationality

on which Lionel Johnson and myself founded, so far as it was founded

on anything but literature, our Art and our Irish criticism. Perhaps

his spirit, if it can care for or can see old friends now, will accept

this apology for an absence that has troubled me. I learned much from

him and much from Taylor, who will always seem to me the greatest

orator I have heard; and that ideal Ireland, perhaps from this out an

imaginary Ireland, in whose service I labour, will always be in many

essentials their Ireland. They were the last to speak an understanding

of life and Nationality, built up by the generation of Grattan, which

read Homer and Virgil, and by the generation of Davis, which had been

pierced through by the idealism of Mazzini,[B] and of the European

revolutionists of the mid-century.

O’Leary had joined the Fenian movement with no hope of success as

we know, but because he believed such a movement good for the moral

character of the people; and had taken his long imprisonment without

complaining. Even to the very end, while often speaking of his prison

life, he would have thought it took from his Roman courage to describe

its hardship. The worth of a man’s acts in the moral memory, a

continual height of mind in the doing of them, seemed more to him than

their immediate result, if, indeed, the sight of many failures had not

taken away the thought of success. A man was not to lie, or even to

give up his dignity, on any patriotic plea, and I have heard him say,

‘I have but one religion, the old Persian: to bend the bow and tell

the truth,’ and again, ‘There are things a man must not do to save a

nation,’ and again, ‘A man must not cry in public to save a nation,’

and that we might not forget justice in the passion of controversy.

‘There was never cause so bad that it has not been defended by good

men for what seemed to them good reasons.’ His friend had a burning

and brooding imagination that divided men not according to their

achievement but by their degrees of sincerity, and by their mastery

over a straight and, to my thought, too obvious logic that seemed to

him essential to sincerity. Neither man had an understanding of style

or of literature in the right sense of the word, though both were great

readers, but because their imagination could come to rest no place

short of greatness, they hoped, John O’Leary especially, for an Irish

literature of the greatest kind. When Lionel Johnson and Katharine

Tynan (as she was then), and I, myself, began to reform Irish poetry,

we thought to keep unbroken the thread running up to Grattan which

John O’Leary had put into our hands, though it might be our business

to explore new paths of the labyrinth. We sought to make a more subtle

rhythm, a more organic form, than that of the older Irish poets who

wrote in English, but always to remember certain ardent ideas and high

attitudes of mind which were the nation itself, to our belief, so far

as a nation can be summarised in the intellect. If you had asked an

ancient Spartan what made Sparta Sparta, he would have answered, The

Laws of Lycurgus, and many Englishmen look back to Bunyan and to Milton

as we did to Grattan and to Mitchell. Lionel Johnson was able to take

up into his Art one portion of this tradition that I could not, for

he had a gift of speaking political thought in fine verse that I have

always lacked. I, on the other hand, was more preoccupied with Ireland

(for he had other interests), and took from Allingham and Walsh their

passion for country spiritism, and from Ferguson his pleasure in heroic

legend, and while seeing all in the light of European literature found

my symbols of expression in Ireland. One thought often possessed me

very strongly. New from the influence, mainly the personal influence,

of William Morris, I dreamed of enlarging Irish hate, till we had

come to hate with a passion of patriotism what Morris and Ruskin

hated. Mitchell had already all but poured some of that hate drawn

from Carlyle, who had it of an earlier and, as I think, cruder sort,

into the blood of Ireland, and were we not a poor nation with ancient

courage, unblackened fields, and a barbarous gift of self-sacrifice?

Ruskin and Morris had spent themselves in vain because they had

found no passion to harness to their thought, but here was unwasted

passion and precedents in the popular memory for every needed thought

and action. Perhaps, too, it would be possible to find in that new

philosophy of spiritism coming to a seeming climax in the work of

Ernest Myers, and in the investigations of uncounted obscure persons,

what could change the country spiritism into a reasoned belief that

would put its might into all the rest. A new belief seemed coming that

could be so simple and demonstratable and above all so mixed into the

common scenery of the world, that it would set the whole man on fire

and liberate him from a thousand obediences and complexities. We were

to forge in Ireland a new sword on our old traditional anvil for that

great battle that must in the end re-establish the old, confident,

joyous world. All the while I worked with this idea, founding societies

that became quickly or slowly everything I despise. One part of me

looked on, mischievous and mocking, and the other part spoke words

which were more and more unreal, as the attitude of mind became more

and more strained and difficult. Madame Maud Gonne could still draw

great crowds out of the slums by her beauty and sincerity, and speak

to them of ‘Mother Ireland with the crown of stars about her head.’

But gradually the political movement she was associated with, finding

it hard to build up any fine lasting thing, became content to attack

little persons and little things. All movements are held together

more by what they hate than what they love, for love separates and

individualises and quiets, but the nobler movements, the only movements

on which literature can found itself, hate great and lasting things.

All who have any old traditions, have something of aristocracy, but we

had opposing us from the first, though not strongly from the first,

a type of mind which had been without influence in the generation of

Grattan, and almost without it in that of Davis, and which has made a

new nation out of Ireland, that was once old and full of memories.

I remember, when I was twenty years old, arguing, on my way home from

a Young Ireland Society, that Ireland, with its hieratic Church, its

readiness to accept leadership in intellectual things—and John O’Leary

spoke much of this readiness[C]—its Latin hatred of middle paths and

uncompleted arguments, could never create a democratic poet of the

type of Burns, although it had tried to do so more than once, but that

its genius would in the long run be aristocratic and lonely. Whenever

I had known some old countryman, I had heard stories and sayings that

arose out of an imagination that would have understood Homer better

than ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ or ‘Highland Mary,’ because it

was an ancient imagination, where the sediment had found the time to

settle, and I believed that the makers of deliberate literature could

still take passion and theme, though but little thought, from such as

he. On some such old and broken stem, I thought, have all the most

beautiful roses been grafted.

II

_Him who trembles before the flame and the flood,

And the winds that blow through the starry ways;

Let the starry winds and the flame and the flood

Cover over and hide, for he has no part

With the proud, majestical, multitude._

THREE types of men have made all beautiful things. Aristocracies have

made beautiful manners, because their place in the world puts them

above the fear of life, and the countrymen have made beautiful stories

and beliefs, because they have nothing to lose and so do not fear,

and the artists have made all the rest, because Providence has filled

them with recklessness. All these look backward to a long tradition,

for, being without fear, they have held to whatever pleased them. The

others being always anxious have come to possess little that is good

in itself, and are always changing from thing to thing, for whatever

they do or have must be a means to something else, and they have so

little belief that anything can be an end in itself, that they cannot

understand you if you say ‘All the most valuable things are useless.’

They prefer the stalk to the flower, and believe that painting and

poetry exist that there may be instruction, and love that there may

be children, and theatres that busy men may rest, and holidays that

busy men may go on being busy. At all times they fear and even hate

the things that have worth in themselves, for that worth may suddenly,

as it were a fire, consume their book of Life, where the world is

represented by cyphers and symbols; and before all else, they fear

irreverent joy and unserviceable sorrow. It seems to them, that those

who have been freed by position, by poverty, or by the traditions of

Art, have something terrible about them, a light that is unendurable

to eyesight. They complain much of that commandment that we can do

almost what we will, if we do it gaily, and think that freedom is but a

trifling with the world.

If we would find a company of our own way of thinking, we must go

backward to turreted walls, to courts, to high rocky places, to little

walled towns, to jesters like that jester of Charles the Fifth who made

mirth out of his own death; to the Duke Guidobaldo in his sickness, or

Duke Frederick in his strength, to all those who understood that life

is not lived at all, if not lived for contemplation or excitement.

Certainly we could not delight in that so courtly thing, the poetry

of light love, if it were sad; for only when we are gay over a thing,

and can play with it, do we show ourselves its master, and have minds

clear enough for strength. The raging fire and the destructive sword

are portions of eternity, too great for the eye of man, wrote Blake,

and it is only before such things, before a love like that of Tristan

and Iseult, before noble or ennobled death, that the free mind permits

itself aught but brief sorrow. That we may be free from all the rest,

sullen anger, solemn virtue, calculating anxiety, gloomy suspicion,

prevaricating hope, we should be reborn in gaiety. Because there is

submission in a pure sorrow, we should sorrow alone over what is

greater than ourselves, nor too soon admit that greatness, but all that

is less than we are should stir us to some joy, for pure joy masters

and impregnates; and so to world end, strength shall laugh and wisdom

mourn.

III

IN life, courtesy and self-possession, and in the arts style, are

the sensible impressions of the free mind, for both arise out of a

deliberate shaping of all things, and from never being swept away,

whatever the emotion, into confusion or dulness. The Japanese have

numbered with heroic things courtesy at all times whatsoever, and

though a writer, who has to withdraw so much of his thought out of his

life that he may learn his craft, may find many his betters in daily

courtesy, he should never be without style, which is but high breeding

in words and in argument. He is indeed the Creator of the standards of

manners in their subtlety, for he alone can know the ancient records

and be like some mystic courtier who has stolen the keys from the

girdle of time, and can wander where it please him amid the splendours

of ancient courts.

Sometimes, it may be, he is permitted the license of cap and bell, or

even the madman’s bunch of straws, but he never forgets or leaves at

home the seal and the signature. He has at all times the freedom of the

well-bred, and being bred to the tact of words can take what theme he

pleases, unlike the bourgeoisie, who are rightly compelled to be very

strict in their conversation. Who should be free if he were not? for

none other has a continual deliberate self-delighting happiness—style,

’the only thing that is immortal in literature,’ as Sainte-Beuve has

said, a still unexpended energy, after all that the argument or the

story need, a still unbroken pleasure after the immediate end has

been accomplished—and builds this up into a most personal and wilful

fire, transfiguring words and sounds and events. It is the playing of

strength when the day’s work is done, a secret between a craftsman and

his craft, and is so inseparate in his nature, that he has it most of

all amid overwhelming emotion, and in the face of death. Shakespeare’s

persons when the last darkness has gathered about them, speak out of an

ecstasy that is one half the self-surrender of sorrow, and one half the

last playing and mockery of the victorious sword, before the defeated

world.

It is in the arrangement of events as in the words, and in that touch

of extravagance, of irony, of surprise, which is set there after the

desire of logic has been satisfied and all that is merely necessary

established, and that leaves one, not in the circling necessity, but

caught up into the freedom of self-delight; as it were, the foam upon

the cup, the long pheasant’s feather on the horse’s head, the spread

peacock over the pasty. If it be very conscious, very deliberate, as it

may be in comedy, for comedy is more personal than tragedy, we call it

phantasy, perhaps even mischievous phantasy, recognising how disturbing

it is to all that drag a ball at the ankle. This joy, because it

must be always making and mastering, remains in the hands and in the

tongue of the artist, but with his eyes he enters upon a submissive,

sorrowful contemplation of the great irremediable things, and he is

known from other men by making all he handles like himself, and yet

by the unlikeness to himself of all that comes before him in a pure

contemplation. It may have been his enemy or his love or his cause that

set him dreaming, and certainly the phœnix can but open her young wings

in a flaming nest; but all hate and hope vanishes in the dream, and if

his mistress brag of the song or his enemy fear it, it is not that

either has its praise or blame, but that the twigs of the holy nest

are not easily set afire. The verses may make his mistress famous as

Helen or give a victory to his cause, not because he has been either’s

servant, but because men delight to honour and to remember all that

have served contemplation. It had been easier to fight, to die even,

for Charles’s house with Marvel’s poem in the memory, but there is no

zeal of service that had not been an impurity in the pure soil where

the marvel grew. Timon of Athens contemplates his own end, and orders

his tomb by the beachy margent of the flood, and Cleopatra sets the

asp to her bosom, and their words move us because their sorrow is not

their own at tomb or asp, but for all men’s fate. That shaping joy has

kept the sorrow pure, as it had kept it were the emotion love or hate,

for the nobleness of the Arts is in the mingling of contraries, the

extremity of sorrow, the extremity of joy, perfection of personality,

the perfection of its surrender, overflowing turbulent energy, and

marmorean stillness; and its red rose opens at the meeting of the two

beams of the cross, and at the trysting-place of mortal and immortal,

time and eternity. No new man has ever plucked that rose, or found

that trysting-place, for he could but come to the understanding of

himself, to the mastery of unlocking words after long frequenting of

the great Masters, hardly without ancestral memory of the like. Even

knowledge is not enough, for the ’recklessness’ or negligence which

Castiglione thought necessary in good manners is necessary in this

likewise, and if a man has it not he will be gloomy, and had better to

his marketing again.

IV

WHEN I saw John O’Leary first, every young Catholic man who had

intellectual ambition fed his imagination with the poetry of Young

Ireland; and the verses of even the least known of its poets were

expounded with a devout ardour at Young Ireland Societies and the like,

and their birthdays celebrated. The School of writers I belonged to,

tried to found itself on much of the subject-matter of this poetry,

and, what was almost more in our thoughts, to begin a more imaginative

tradition in Irish literature, by a criticism at once remorseless and

enthusiastic. It was our criticism, I think, that set Clarence Mangan

at the head of the Young Ireland poets in the place of Davis, and put

Sir Samuel Ferguson, who had died with but little fame as a poet,

next in the succession. Our attacks, mine especially, on verse which

owed its position to its moral or political worth, roused a resentment

which even I find it hard to imagine to-day, and our verse was attacked

in return, and not for anything peculiar to ourselves, but for all

that it had in common with the accepted poetry of the world, and most

of all for its lack of rhetoric, its refusal to preach a doctrine or

to consider the seeming necessities of a cause. Now, after so many

years, I can see how natural, how poetical even, an opposition was,

that shows what large numbers could not call up certain high feelings

without accustomed verses, or believe we had not wronged the feeling

when we did but attack the verses. I have just read in a newspaper that

Sir Charles Gavan Duffy recited before his death his favourite poem,

one of the worst of the patriotic poems of Young Ireland, and it has

brought all this to mind, for the opposition to our School claimed him

as its leader. When I was at Siena, I noticed that the Byzantine style

persisted in faces of Madonnas for several generations after it had

given way to a more natural style, in the less loved faces of saints

and martyrs. Passion had grown accustomed to those sloping and narrow

eyes, which are almost Japanese, and to those gaunt cheeks, and would

have thought it sacrilege to change. We would not, it is likely, have

found listeners if John O’Leary, the irreproachable patriot, had not

supported us. It was as clear to him that a writer must not write

badly, or ignore the examples of the great masters in the fancied or

real service of a cause, as it was that he must not lie for it or grow

hysterical. I believed in those days that a new intellectual life would

begin, like that of Young Ireland, but more profound and personal,

and that could we but get a few plain principles accepted, new poets

and writers of prose would make an immortal music. I think I was more

blind than Johnson, though I judge this from his poems rather than

anything I remember of his talk, for he never talked ideas, but, as was

common with his generation in Oxford, facts and immediate impressions

from life. With others this renunciation was but a pose, a superficial

reaction from the disordered abundance of the middle century, but with

him it was the radical life. He was in all a traditionalist, gathering

out of the past phrases, moods, attitudes, and disliking ideas less

for their uncertainty than because they made the mind itself changing

and restless. He measured the Irish tradition by another greater

than itself, and was quick to feel any falling asunder of the two,

yet at many moments they seemed but one in his imagination. Ireland,

all through his poem of that name, speaks to him with the voice of

the great poets, and in ‘Ireland Dead’ she is still mother of perfect

heroism, but there doubt comes too.

Can it be they do repent

That they went, thy chivalry,

Those sad ways magnificent.

And in ‘Ways of War,’ dedicated to John O’Leary, he dismissed the

belief in an heroic Ireland as but a dream.

A dream! A dream! an ancient dream!

Yet ere peace come to Innisfail,

Some weapons on some field must gleam,

Some burning glory fire the Gael.

That field may lie beneath the sun,

Fair for the treading of an host:

That field in realms of thought be won,

And armed hands do their uttermost:

Some way, to faithful Innisfail,

Shall come the majesty and awe

Of martial truth, that must prevail

To lay on all the eternal law.

I do not think either of us saw that, as belief in the possibility of

armed insurrection withered, the old romantic nationalism would wither

too, and that the young would become less ready to find pleasure in

whatever they believed to be literature. Poetical tragedy, and indeed

all the more intense forms of literature, had lost their hold on the

general mass of men in other countries as life grew safe, and the sense

of comedy which is the social bond in times of peace as tragic feeling

is in times of war, had become the inspiration of popular art. I always

knew this, but I believed that the memory of danger, and the reality

of it seemed near enough sometimes, would last long enough to give

Ireland her imaginative opportunity. I could not foresee that a new

class, which had begun to rise into power under the shadow of Parnell,

would change the nature of the Irish movement, which, needing no longer

great sacrifices, nor bringing any great risk to individuals, could

do without exceptional men, and those activities of the mind that are

founded on the exceptional moment.[D] John O’Leary had spent much of

his thought in an unavailing war with the agrarian party, believing it

the root of change, but the fox that crept into the badger’s hole did

not come from there. Power passed to small shop-keepers, to clerks,

to that very class who had seemed to John O’Leary so ready to bend to

the power of others, to men who had risen above the traditions of the

countryman, without learning those of cultivated life or even educating

themselves, and who because of their poverty, their ignorance, their

superstitious piety, are much subject to all kinds of fear. Immediate

victory, immediate utility, became everything, and the conviction,

which is in all who have run great risks for a cause’s sake, in the

O’Learys and Mazzinis as in all rich natures, that life is greater than

the cause, withered, and we artists, who are the servants not of any

cause but of mere naked life, and above all of that life in its nobler

forms, where joy and sorrow are one, Artificers of the Great Moment,

became as elsewhere in Europe protesting individual voices. Ireland’s

great moment had passed, and she had filled no roomy vessels with

strong sweet wine, where we have filled our porcelain jars against the

coming winter.

_August, 1907._

MODERN IRISH POETRY

_Included by kind permission of Messrs. Methuen & Co._

THE Irish Celt is sociable, as may be known from his proverb, ‘It is

better to be quarreling than to be lonely,’ and the Irish poets of the

nineteenth century have made songs abundantly when friends and rebels

have been at hand to applaud. The Irish poets of the eighteenth century

found both at a Limerick hostelry, above whose door was written a

rhyming welcome in Gaelic to all passing poets, whether their pockets

were full or empty. Its owner, himself a famous poet, entertained his

fellows as long as his money lasted, and then took to minding the hens

and chickens of an old peasant woman for a living, and ended his days

in rags, but not, one imagines, without content. Among his friends and

guests had been Red O’Sullivan, Gaelic O’Sullivan, blind O’Heffernan,

and many another, and their songs had made the people, crushed by the

disasters of the Boyne and Aughrim, remember their ancient greatness.

The bardic order, with its perfect artifice and imperfect art, had gone

down in the wars of the seventeenth century, and poetry had found

shelter amid the turf smoke of the cabins. The powers that history

commemorates are but the coarse effects of influences delicate and

vague as the beginning of twilight, and these influences were to be

woven like a web about the hearts of men by farm-labourers, pedlars,

potato-diggers, hedge-schoolmasters, and grinders at the quern, poor

wastrels who put the troubles of their native land, or their own happy

or unhappy loves, into songs of an extreme beauty. But in the midst

of this beauty was a flitting incoherence, a fitful dying out of the

sense, as though the passion had become too great for words, as must

needs be when life is the master and not the slave of the singer.

English-speaking Ireland had meanwhile no poetic voice, for Goldsmith

had chosen to celebrate English scenery and manners; and Swift was but

an Irishman by what Mr. Balfour has called the visitation of God, and

much against his will; and Congreve by education and early association;

while Parnell, Denham, and Roscommon were poets but to their own time.

Nor did the coming with the new century of the fame of Moore set the

balance even, for his Irish melodies are too often artificial and

mechanical in their style when separated from the music that gave them

wings. Whatever he had of high poetry is in _The Light of Other Days_

and in _At the Mid Hour of Night_, which express what Matthew Arnold

has taught us to call ’the Celtic melancholy,’ with so much of delicate

beauty in the meaning and in the wavering or steady rhythm that one

knows not where to find their like in literature. His more artificial

and mechanical verse, because of the ancient music that makes it seem

natural and vivid, and because it has remembered so many beloved names

and events and places, has had the influence which might have belonged

to these exquisite verses had he written none but these.

An honest style did not come into English-speaking Ireland until

Callanan wrote three or four naive translations from the Gaelic. _Shule

Aroon_ and _Kathleen O’More_ had indeed been written for a good while,

but had no more influence than Moore’s best verses. Now, however, the

lead of Callanan was followed by a number of translators, and they

in turn by the poets of Young Ireland, who mingled a little learned

from the Gaelic ballad-writers with a great deal learned from Scott,

Macaulay, and Campbell, and turned poetry once again into a principal

means for spreading ideas of nationality and patriotism. They were full

of earnestness, but never understand that, though a poet may govern

his life by his enthusiasms, he must, when he sits down at his desk,

but use them as the potter the clay. Their thoughts were a little

insincere, because they lived in the half-illusions of their admirable

ideals; and their rhythms not seldom mechanical, because their purpose

was served when they had satisfied the dull ears of the common man.

They had no time to listen to the voice of the insatiable artist, who

stands erect, or lies asleep waiting until a breath arouses him, in

the art of every craftsman. Life was their master, as it had been the

master of the poets who gathered in the Limerick hostelry, though it

conquered them not by unreasoned love for a woman, or for native land,

but by reasoned enthusiasm, and practical energy. No man was more

sincere, no man had a less mechanical mind than Thomas Davis, and yet

he is often a little insincere and mechanical in his verse. When he sat

down to write he had so great a desire to make the peasantry courageous

and powerful that he half believed them already ’the finest peasantry

upon the earth,’ and wrote not a few such verses as—

‘Lead him to fight for native land,

His is no courage cold and wary;

The troops live not that could withstand

The headlong charge of Tipperary’—

and to-day we are paying the reckoning with much bombast. His little

book has many things of this kind, and yet we honour it for its public

spirit, and recognize its powerful influence with gratitude. He was in

the main an orator influencing men’s acts, and not a poet shaping their

emotions, and the bulk of his influence has been good. He was, indeed,

a poet of much tenderness in the simple love-songs _The Marriage_,

_A Plea for Love_, and _Mary Bhan Astór_, and, but for his ideal of

a fisherman defying a foreign soldiery, would have been as good in

_The Boatman of Kinsale_; and once or twice when he touched upon some

historic sorrow he forgot his hopes for the future and his lessons for

the present, and made moving verse.

His contemporary, Clarence Mangan, kept out of public life and its

half-illusions by a passion for books, and for drink and opium, made

an imaginative and powerful style. He translated from the German, and

imitated Oriental poetry, but little that he did on any but Irish

subjects has a lasting interest. He is usually classed with the Young

Ireland poets, because he contributed to their periodicals and shared

their political views; but his style was formed before their movement

began, and he found it the more easy for this reason, perhaps, to give

sincere expression to the mood which he had chosen, the only sincerity

literature knows of; and with happiness and cultivation might have

displaced Moore. But as it was, whenever he had no fine ancient song

to inspire him, he fell into rhetoric which was only lifted out of

commonplace by an arid intensity. In his _Irish National Hymn_, _Soul

and Country_, and the like, we look into a mind full of parched sands

where the sweet dews have never fallen. A miserable man may think well

and express himself with great vehemence, but he cannot make beautiful

things, for Aphrodite never rises from any but a tide of joy. Mangan

knew nothing of the happiness of the outer man, and it was only when

prolonging the tragic exultation of some dead bard that he knew the

unearthly happiness which clouds the outer man with sorrow, and is

the fountain of impassioned art. Like those who had gone before him,

he was the slave of life, for he had nothing of the self-knowledge,

the power of selection, the harmony of mind, which enables the poet

to be its master, and to mould the world to a trumpet for his lips.

But O’Hussey’s Ode over his outcast chief must live for generations

because of the passion that moves through its powerful images and its

mournful, wayward, and fierce rhythms.

‘Though he were even a wolf ranging the round green woods,

Though he were even a pleasant salmon in the unchainable sea,

Though he were a wild mountain eagle, he could scarce bear, he,

This sharp, sore sleet, these howling floods.’

Edward Walsh, a village schoolmaster, who hovered, like Mangan, on the

edge of the Young Ireland movement, did many beautiful translations

from the Gaelic; and Michael Doheny, while out ’on his keeping’ in

the mountains after the collapse at Ballingarry, made one of the

most moving of ballads; but in the main the poets who gathered about

Thomas Davis, and whose work has come down to us in _The Spirit of the

Nation_, were of practical and political, not of literary, importance.

Meanwhile Samuel Ferguson, William Allingham, and Aubrey de Vere were

working apart from politics; Ferguson selecting his subjects from the

traditions of the bardic age, and Allingham from those of his native

Ballyshannon, and Aubrey de Vere wavering between English, Irish,

and Catholic tradition. They were wiser than Young Ireland in the

choice of their models, for, while drawing not less from purely Irish

sources, they turned to the great poets of the world, Aubrey de Vere

owing something of his gravity to Wordsworth, Ferguson much of his

simplicity to Homer, while Allingham had trained an ear, too delicate

to catch the tune of but a single master, upon the lyric poetry of many

lands. Allingham was the best artist, but Ferguson had the more ample

imagination, the more epic aim. He had not the subtlety of feeling,

the variety of cadence of a great lyric poet, but he has touched, here

and there, an epic vastness and _naïveté_, as in the description in

_Congal_ of the mire-stiffened mantle of the giant spectre Mananan mac

Lir striking against his calves with as loud a noise as the mainsail of

a ship ’when with the coil of all its ropes it beat the sounding mast.’

He is frequently dull, for he often lacked the ’minutely appropriate

words’ necessary to embody those fine changes of feeling which enthral

the attention; but his sense of weight and size, of action and tumult,

has set him apart and solitary, an epic figure in a lyric age.

Allingham, whose pleasant destiny has made him the poet of his native

town, and put _The Winding Banks of Erne_ into the mouths of the

ballad-singers of Ballyshannon, is, on the other hand, a master of

’minutely appropriate words,’ and can wring from the luxurious sadness

of the lover, from the austere sadness of old age, the last golden drop

of beauty; but amid action and tumult he can but fold his hands. He is

the poet of the melancholy peasantry of the West, and, as years go on,

and voluminous histories and copious romances drop under the horizon,

will take his place among those minor immortals who have put their

souls into little songs to humble the proud.

The poetry of Aubrey de Vere has less architecture than the poetry

of Ferguson and Allingham, and more meditation. Indeed, his few but

ever memorable successes are enchanted islands in gray seas of stately

impersonal reverie and description, which drift by and leave no

definite recollection. One needs, perhaps, to perfectly enjoy him, a

Dominican habit, a cloister, and a breviary.

These three poets published much of their best work before and during

the Fenian movement, which, like Young Ireland, had its poets, though

but a small number. Charles Kickham, one of the ’triumvirate’ that

controlled it in Ireland; John Casey, a clerk in a flour-mill; and

Ellen O’Leary, the sister of Mr. John O’Leary, were at times very

excellent. Their verse lacks, curiously enough, the oratorical

vehemence of Young Ireland, and is plaintive and idyllic. The agrarian

movement that followed produced but little poetry, and of that little

all is forgotten but a vehement poem by Fanny Parnell and a couple of

songs by T. D. Sullivan, who is a good song-writer, though not, as the

writer has read on an election placard, ’one of the greatest poets who

ever moved the heart of man.’ But while Nationalist verse has ceased to

be a portion of the propaganda of a party, it has been written, and is

being written, under the influence of the Nationalist newspapers and

of Young Ireland societies and the like. With an exacting conscience,

and better models than Thomas Moore and the Young Irelanders, such

beautiful enthusiasm could not fail to make some beautiful verses.

But, as things are, the rhythms are mechanical, and the metaphors

conventional; and inspiration is too often worshipped as a Familiar who

labours while you sleep, or forget, or do many worthy things which are

not spiritual things.

For the most part, the Irishman of our times loves so deeply those arts

which build up a gallant personality, rapid writing, ready talking,

effective speaking to crowds, that he has no thought for the arts which

consume the personality in solitude. He loves the mortal arts which

have given him a lure to take the hearts of men, and shrinks from the

immortal, which could but divide him from his fellows. And in this

century, he who does not strive to be a perfect craftsman achieves

nothing. The poor peasant of the eighteenth century could make fine

ballads by abandoning himself to the joy or sorrow of the moment, as

the reeds abandon themselves to the wind which sighs through them,

because he had about him a world where all was old enough to be steeped

in emotion. But we cannot take to ourselves, by merely thrusting out

our hands, all we need of pomp and symbol, and if we have not the

desire of artistic perfection for an ark, the deluge of incoherence,

vulgarity, and triviality will pass over our heads. If we had no other

symbols but the tumult of the sea, the rusted gold of the thatch, the

redness of the quicken-berry, and had never known the rhetoric of the

platform and of the newspaper, we could do without laborious selection

and rejection; but, even then, though we might do much that would be

delightful, that would inspire coming times, it would not have the

manner of the greatest poetry.

Here and there, the Nationalist newspapers and the Young Ireland

societies have trained a writer who, though busy with the old models,

has some imaginative energy; while the more literary writers, the

successors of Allingham and Ferguson and De Vere, are generally more

anxious to influence and understand Irish thought than any of their

predecessors who did not take the substance of their poetry from

politics. They are distinguished too by their deliberate art, and by

their preoccupation with spiritual passions and memories.

The poetry of Lionel Johnson and Mrs. Hinkson is Catholic and devout,

but Lionel Johnson’s is lofty and austere, and like De Vere’s never

long forgets the greatness of his Church and the interior life whose

expression it is, while Mrs. Hinkson is happiest when she puts

emotions, that have the innocence of childhood, into symbols and

metaphors from the green world about her. She has no reverie nor

speculation, but a devout tenderness like that of St. Francis for

weak instinctive things, old gardeners, old fishermen, birds among

the leaves, birds tossed upon the waters. Miss Hopper belongs to that

school of writers which embodies passions, that are not the less

spiritual because no Church has put them into prayers, in stories and

symbols from old Celtic poetry and mythology. The poetry of ‘A.E.’, at

its best, finds its symbols and its stories in the soul itself, and

has a more disembodied ecstasy than any poetry of our time. He is the

chief poet of the school of Irish mystics, in which there are many

poets besides many who have heard the words, ‘If ye know these things,

happy are ye if ye do them,’ and thought the labours that bring the

mystic vision more important than the labours of any craft.

Mr. Herbert Trench and Mrs. Shorter and ‘Moira O’Neill’ are more

interested in the picturesqueness of the world than in religion. Mr.

Trench and Mrs. Shorter have put old Irish stories into vigorous modern

rhyme, and have written, the one in her _Ceann Dubh Deelish_ and the

other in _Come, let us make Love deathless_, lyrics that should become

a lasting part of Irish lyric poetry. ‘Moira O’Neill’ has written

pretty lyrics of Antrim life; but one discovers that Mrs. Hinkson or

Miss Hopper, although their work is probably less popular, comes nearer

to the peasant passion, when one compares their work and hers with

that Gaelic song translated so beautifully by Dr. Sigerson, where a

ragged man of the roads, having lost all else, is yet thankful for ’the

great love gift of sorrow,’ or with many songs translated by Dr. Hyde

in his _Love Songs of Connacht_, or by Lady Gregory in her _Poets and

Dreamers_.

Except some few Catholic and mystical poets and Professor Dowden in

one or two poems, no Irishman living in Ireland has sung excellently

of any but a theme from Irish experience, Irish history, or Irish

tradition. Trinity College, which desires to be English, has been the

mother of many verse writers and of few poets; and this can only be

because she has set herself against the national genius, and taught her

children to imitate alien styles and choose out alien themes, for it

is not possible to believe that the educated Irishman alone is prosaic

and uninventive. Her few poets have been awakened by the influence of

the farm-labourers, potato-diggers, pedlars, and hedge-schoolmasters

of the eighteenth century, and their imitators in this, and not by a

scholastic life, which, for reasons easy for all to understand and for

many to forgive, has refused the ideals of Ireland, while those of

England are but far-off murmurs. An enemy to all enthusiasms, because

all enthusiasms seemed her enemies, she has taught her children to look

neither to the world about them, nor into their own souls, where some

dangerous fire might slumber.

To remember that in Ireland the professional and landed classes have

been through the mould of Trinity College or of English universities,

and are ignorant of the very names of the best Irish writers, is to

know how strong a wind blows from the ancient legends of Ireland,

how vigorous an impulse to create is in her heart to-day. Deserted

by the classes from among whom has come the bulk of the world’s

intellect, she struggles on, gradually ridding herself of incoherence

and triviality, and slowly building up a literature in English, which,

whether important or unimportant, grows always more unlike others; nor

does it seem as if she would long lack a living literature in Gaelic,

for the movement for the preservation of Gaelic, which has been so much

more successful than anybody foresaw, has already its poets. Dr. Hyde

has written Gaelic poems which pass from mouth to mouth in the west

of Ireland. The country people have themselves fitted them to ancient

airs, and many that can neither read nor write sing them in Donegal and

Connemara and Galway. I have, indeed, but little doubt that Ireland,

communing with herself in Gaelic more and more, but speaking to foreign

countries in English, will lead many that are sick with theories and

with trivial emotion to some sweet well-waters of primeval poetry.

* * * * *

_P.S._—This essay, written in 1895, though revised from time to time,

sounds strangely to my ears to-day. I still admire much that I then

admired, but if I rewrote it now I should take more pleasure in the

temper of our writers and deal more sternly with their achievement.

The magnanimous integrity of their politics, and their own gallant

impetuous minds, needed no commendation among the young Irishmen for

whom I wrote, and a very little dispraise of their verses seemed an

attack upon the nation itself. Taylor, the orator, a man of genius and

of great learning, never forgave me what I have said of Davis here and

elsewhere, and it is easier for me to understand his anger in this year

than thirteen years ago when the lofty thought of men like Taylor and

O’Leary was the strength of Irish nationality. A new tradition is being

built up on Gaelic poetry and romance and on the writings of the school

I belong to, but the very strength of the new foundations, their lack

of obvious generalization, their instinctive nature, the impossibility

of ill-educated minds shaping the finer material, has for the moment

marred the moral temper among those who are young enough to feel the

change.

_April, 1908._

LADY GREGORY’S _CUCHULAIN OF MUIRTHEMNE_

Mr. Bullen has just shown me the fifth volume of this

edition of my writings, and I discover that a note to

the stories of _Red Hanrahan_ has been forgotten by the

printer. That note should have said that I owe thanks

to Lady Gregory, who helped me to rewrite the stories

of _Red Hanrahan_ in the beautiful country speech of

Kiltartan, and nearer to the tradition of the people

among whom he, or some likeness of him, drifted and is

remembered.—_April 14, 1908._

I

I THINK this book is the best that has come out of Ireland in my

time. Perhaps I should say that it is the best book that has ever

come out of Ireland; for the stories which it tells are a chief part

of Ireland’s gift to the imagination of the world—and it tells them

perfectly for the first time. Translators from the Irish have hitherto

retold one story or the other from some one version, and not often

with any fine understanding of English, of those changes of rhythm,

for instance, that are changes of the sense. They have translated

the best and fullest manuscripts they knew, as accurately as they

could, and that is all we have the right to expect from the first

translators of a difficult and old literature. But few of the stories

really begin to exist as great works of imagination until somebody

has taken the best out of many manuscripts. Sometimes, as in Lady

Gregory’s version of _Deirdre_, a dozen manuscripts have to give their

best before the beads are ready for the necklace. It has been as

necessary also to leave out as to add, for generations of copyists,

who had often but little sympathy with the stories they copied, have

mixed versions together in a clumsy fashion, often repeating one

incident several times, and every century has ornamented what was once

a simple story with its own often extravagant ornament. One does not

perhaps exaggerate when one says that no story has come down to us in

the form it had when the story-teller told it in the winter evenings.

Lady Gregory has done her work of compression and selection at once so

firmly and so reverently that I cannot believe that anybody, except now

and then for a scientific purpose, will need another text than this,

or than the version[E] of it the Gaelic League has begun to publish in

Modern Irish. When she has added her translations from other cycles,

she will have given Ireland its _Mabinogion_, its _Morte D’Arthur_,

its _Nibelungenlied_. She has already put a great mass of stories,

in which the ancient heart of Ireland still lives, into a shape at

once harmonious and characteristic; and without writing more than a

very few sentences of her own to link together incidents or thoughts

taken from different manuscripts, without adding more indeed than

the story-teller must often have added to amend the hesitation of a

moment. Perhaps more than all, she has discovered a fitting dialect to

tell them in. Some years ago I wrote some stories of mediæval Irish

life, and as I wrote I was sometimes made wretched by the thought

that I knew of no kind of English that befitted them as the language

of Morris’s prose stories—that lovely crooked language—befitted his

journeys to woods and wells beyond the world. I knew of no language

to write about Ireland in but our too smooth, too straight, too

logical modern English; but now Lady Gregory has discovered a speech

as beautiful as that of Morris, and a living speech into the bargain.

As she lived among her people she grew to love the beautiful speech

of those who think in Irish, and to understand that it is as true a

dialect of English as the dialect that Burns wrote in. It is some

hundreds of years old, and age gives a language authority. One finds in

it the vocabulary of the translators of the Bible, joined to an idiom

which makes it tender, compassionate, and complaisant, like the Irish

language itself. It is certainly well suited to clothe a literature

which never ceased to be folk-lore even when it was recited in the

Courts of Kings.

II

Lady Gregory could with less trouble have made a book that would have

better pleased the hasty reader. She could have plucked away details,

smoothed out characteristics till she had left nothing but the bare

stories; but a book of that kind would never have called up the past,

or stirred the imagination of a painter or a poet, and would be as

little thought of in a few years as if it had been a popular novel.

The abundance of what may seem at first irrelevant invention in a story

like the death of Conaire, is essential if we are to recall a time when

people were in love with a story, and gave themselves up to imagination

as if to a lover. One may think there are too many lyrical outbursts,

or too many enigmatical symbols here and there in some other story,

but delight will always overtake one in the end. One comes to accept

without reserve an art that is half epical, half lyrical, like that

of the historical parts of the Bible, the art of a time when perhaps

men passed more readily than they do now from one mood to another, and

found it harder than we do to keep to the mood in which one tots up

figures or banters a friend.

III

The Church when it was most powerful created an imaginative unity, for

it taught learned and unlearned to climb, as it were, to the great

moral realities through hierarchies of Cherubim and Seraphim, through

clouds of Saints and Angels who had all their precise duties and

privileges. The story-tellers of Ireland, perhaps of every primitive

country, created a like unity, only it was to the great æsthetic

realities that they taught people to climb. They created for learned

and unlearned alike, a communion of heroes, a cloud of stalwart

witnesses; but because they were as much excited as a monk over his

prayers, they did not think sufficiently about the shape of the poem

and the story. One has to get a little weary or a little distrustful

of one’s subject, perhaps, before one can lie awake thinking how one

will make the most of it. They were more anxious to describe energetic

characters, and to invent beautiful stories, than to express themselves

with perfect dramatic logic or in perfectly-ordered words. They

shared their characters and their stories, their very images, with

one another, and handed them down from generation to generation; for

nobody, even when he had added some new trait, or some new incident,

thought of claiming for himself what so obviously lived its own merry

or mournful life. The wood-carver who first put a sword into St.

Michael’s hand would have as soon claimed as his own a thought which

was perhaps put into his mind by St. Michael himself. The Irish poets

had also, it may be, what seemed a supernatural sanction, for a chief

poet had to understand not only innumerable kinds of poetry, but how

to keep himself for nine days in a trance. They certainly believed in

the historical reality of even their wildest imaginations. And so soon

as Christianity made their hearers desire a chronology that would run

side by side with that of the Bible, they delighted in arranging their

Kings and Queens, the shadows of forgotten mythologies, in long lines

that ascended to Adam and his Garden. Those who listened to them must

have felt as if the living were like rabbits digging their burrows

under walls that had been built by Gods and Giants, or like swallows

building their nests in the stone mouths of immense images, carved by

nobody knows who. It is no wonder that one sometimes hears about men

who saw in a vision ivy-leaves that were greater than shields, and

blackbirds whose thighs were like the thighs of oxen. The fruit of all

those stories, unless indeed the finest activities of the mind are but

a pastime, is the quick intelligence, the abundant imagination, the

courtly manners of the Irish country people.

IV

William Morris came to Dublin when I was a boy, and I had some talk

with him about these old stories. He had intended to lecture upon them,

but ’the ladies and gentlemen’—he put a communistic fervour of hatred

into the phrase—knew nothing about them. He spoke of the Irish account

of the battle of Clontarf and of the Norse account, and said, that one

saw the Norse and Irish tempers in the two accounts. The Norseman was

interested in the way things are done, but the Irishman turned aside,

evidently well pleased to be out of so dull a business, to describe

beautiful supernatural events. He was thinking, I suppose, of the

young man who came from Aoibhill of the Grey Rock, giving up immortal

love and youth, that he might fight and die by Murrough’s side. He

said that the Norseman had the dramatic temper, and the Irishman had

the lyrical. I think I should have said with Professor Ker, epical

and romantic rather than dramatic and lyrical, but his words, which

have so great an authority, mark the distinction very well, and not

only between Irish and Norse, but between Irish and other un-Celtic

literatures. The Irish story-teller could not interest himself with an

unbroken interest in the way men like himself burned a house, or won

wives no more wonderful than themselves. His mind constantly escaped

out of daily circumstance, as a bough that has been held down by a

weak hand suddenly straightens itself out. His imagination was always

running to Tir-nan-og, to the Land of Promise, which is as near to the

country-people of to-day as it was to Cuchulain and his companions.

His belief in its nearness, cherished in its turn the lyrical temper,

which is always athirst for an emotion, a beauty which cannot be found

in its perfection upon earth, or only for a moment. His imagination,

which had not been able to believe in Cuchulain’s greatness, until it

had brought the Great Queen, the red-eyebrowed goddess, to woo him

upon the battlefield, could not be satisfied with a friendship less

romantic and lyrical than that of Cuchulain and Ferdiad, who kissed

one another after the day’s fighting, or with a love less romantic

and lyrical than that of Baile and Aillinn, who died at the report

of one another’s deaths, and married in Tir-nan-og. His art, too, is

often at its greatest when it is most extravagant, for he only feels

himself among solid things, among things with fixed laws and satisfying

purposes, when he has reshaped the world according to his heart’s

desire. He understands as well as Blake that the ruins of time build

mansions in eternity, and he never allows anything, that we can see

and handle, to remain long unchanged. The characters must remain the

same, but the strength of Fergus may change so greatly, that he, who a

moment before was merely a strong man among many, becomes the master

of Three Blows that would destroy an army, did they not cut off the

heads of three little hills instead, and his sword, which a fool had

been able to steal out of its sheath, has of a sudden the likeness of

a rainbow. A wandering lyric moon must knead and kindle perpetually

that moving world of cloaks made out of the fleeces of Mananan; of

armed men who change themselves into sea-birds; of goddesses who

become crows; of trees that bear fruit and flower at the same time.

The great emotions of love, terror, and friendship must alone remain

untroubled by the moon in that world, which is still the world of the

Irish country-people, who do not open their eyes very wide at the most

miraculous change, at the most sudden enchantment. Its events, and

things, and people are wild, and are like unbroken horses, that are

so much more beautiful than horses that have learned to run between

shafts. One thinks of actual life, when one reads those Norse stories,

which had shadows of their decadence, so necessary were the proportions

of actual life to their efforts, when a dying man remembered his

heroism enough to look down at his wound and say, ‘Those broad spears

are coming into fashion’; but the Irish stories make us understand

why the Greeks called myths the activities of the dæmons. The great

virtues, the great joys, the great privations come in the myths, and,

as it were, take mankind between their naked arms, and without putting

off their divinity. Poets have chosen their themes more often from

stories that are all, or half, mythological, than from history or

stories that give one the sensation of history, understanding, as I

think, that the imagination which remembers the proportions of life is

but a long wooing, and that it has to forget them before it becomes the

torch and the marriage-bed.

V

One finds, as one expects, in the work of men who were not troubled

about any probabilities or necessities but those of emotion itself, an

immense variety of incident and character and of ways of expressing

emotion. Cuchulain fights man after man during the quest of the Brown

Bull, and not one of those fights is like another, and not one is

lacking in emotion or strangeness; and when one thinks imagination can

do no more, the story of the Two Bulls, emblematic of all contests,

suddenly lifts romance into prophecy. The characters too have a

distinctness we do not find among the people of the _Mabinogion_,

perhaps not even among the people of the _Morte D’Arthur_. We know we

will be long forgetting Cuchulain, whose life is vehement and full

of pleasure, as though he always remembered that it was to be soon

over; or the dreamy Fergus who betrays the sons of Usnach for a feast,

without ceasing to be noble; or Conal who is fierce and friendly and

trustworthy, but has not the sap of divinity that makes Cuchulain

mysterious to men, and beloved of women. Women indeed, with their

lamentations for lovers and husbands and sons, and for fallen rooftrees

and lost wealth, give the stories their most beautiful sentences; and,

after Cuchulain, one thinks most of certain great queens—of angry,

amorous Maeve, with her long pale face; of Findabair, her daughter, who

dies of shame and of pity; of Deirdre, who might be some mild modern

housewife but for her prophetic wisdom. If one does not set Deirdre’s

lamentations among the greatest lyric poems of the world, I think one

may be certain that the wine-press of the poets has been trodden for

one in vain; and yet I think it may be proud Emer, Cuchulain’s fitting

wife, who will linger longest in the memory. What a pure flame burns

in her always, whether she is the newly-married wife fighting for

precedence, fierce as some beautiful bird, or the confident housewife,

who would awaken her husband from his magic sleep with mocking words;

or the great queen who would get him out of the tightening net of his

doom, by sending him into the Valley of the Deaf, with Niamh, his

mistress, because he will be more obedient to her; or the woman whom

sorrow has set with Helen and Iseult and Brunnhilda, and Deirdre, to

share their immortality in the rosary of the poets.

‘“And oh! my love!” she said, “we were often in one another’s company,

and it was happy for us; for if the world had been searched from the

rising of the sun to sunset, the like would never have been found in

one place, of the Black Sainglain and the Grey of Macha, and Laeg the

chariot-driver, and myself and Cuchulain.”

‘And after that Emer bade Conal to make a wide, very deep grave for

Cuchulain; and she laid herself down beside her gentle comrade, and she

put her mouth to his mouth, and she said: “Love of my life, my friend,

my sweetheart, my one choice of the men of the earth, many is the

woman, wed or unwed, envied me until to-day; and now I will not stay

living after you.”’

VI

To us Irish these personages should be very moving, very important, for

they lived in the places where we ride and go marketing, and sometimes

they have met one another on the hills that cast their shadows upon our

doors at evening. If we will but tell these stories to our children

the Land will begin again to be a Holy Land, as it was before men

gave their hearts to Greece and Rome and Judea. When I was a child I

had only to climb the hill behind the house to see long, blue, ragged

hills flowing along the southern horizon. What beauty was lost to me,

what depth of emotion is still perhaps lacking in me, because nobody

told me, not even the merchant captains who knew everything, that

Cruachan of the Enchantments lay behind those long, blue, ragged hills!

_March, 1902._

LADY GREGORY’S

_GODS AND FIGHTING MEN_

I

A FEW months ago I was on the bare Hill of Allen, ’wide Almhuin of

Leinster,’ where Finn and the Fianna are said to have had their house,

although there are no earthen mounds there like those that mark

the sites of old houses on so many hills. A hot sun beat down upon

flowering gorse and flowerless heather; and on every side except the

east, where there were green trees and distant hills, one saw a level

horizon and brown boglands with a few green places and here and there

the glitter of water. One could imagine that had it been twilight and

not early afternoon, and had there been vapours drifting and frothing

where there were now but shadows of clouds, it would have set stirring

in one, as few places even in Ireland can, a thought that is peculiar

to Celtic romance, as I think, a thought of a mystery coming not as

with Gothic nations out of the pressure of darkness, but out of great

spaces and windy light. The hill of Teamhair, or Tara, as it is now

called, with its green mounds and its partly-wooded sides, and its more

gradual slope set among fat grazing lands, with great trees in the

hedgerows, had brought before one imaginations, not of heroes who were

in their youth for hundreds of years, or of women who came to them in

the likeness of hunted fawns, but of kings that lived brief and politic

lives, and of the five white roads that carried their armies to the

lesser kingdoms of Ireland, or brought to the great fair that had given

Teamhair its sovereignty all that sought justice or pleasure or had

goods to barter.

II

It is certain that we must not confuse these kings, as did the

mediæval chroniclers, with those half-divine kings of Almhuin. The

chroniclers, perhaps because they loved tradition too well to cast

out utterly much that they dreaded as Christians, and perhaps because

popular imagination had begun the mixture, have mixed one with another

ingeniously, making Finn the head of a kind of Militia under Cormac

MacArt, who is supposed to have reigned at Teamhair in the second

century, and making Grania, who travels to enchanted houses under

the cloak of Aengus, god of Love, and keeps her troubling beauty

longer than did Helen hers, Cormac’s daughter, and giving the stories

of the Fianna, although the impossible has thrust its proud finger

into them all, a curious air of precise history. It is only when we

separate the stories from that mediæval pedantry, as in this book,

that we recognise one of the oldest worlds that man has imagined,

an older world certainly than we find in the stories of Cuchulain,

who lived, according to the chroniclers, about the time of the birth

of Christ. They are far better known, and we may be certain of the

antiquity of incidents that are known in one form or another to every

Gaelic-speaking countryman in Ireland or in the Highlands of Scotland.

Sometimes a labourer digging near to a cromlech, or Bed of Diarmuid and

Grania as it is called, will tell one a tradition that seems older and

more barbaric than any description of their adventures or of themselves

in written text or in story that has taken form in the mouths of

professed story-tellers. Finn and the Fianna found welcome among the

court poets later than did Cuchulain; and one finds memories of Danish

invasions and standing armies mixed with the imaginations of hunters

and solitary fighters among great woods. One never hears of Cuchulain

delighting in the hunt or in woodland things; and one imagines that

the story-teller would have thought it unworthy in so great a man,

who lived a well-ordered, elaborate life, and had his chariot and his

chariot-driver and his barley-fed horses to delight in. If he is in

the woods before dawn one is not told that he cannot know the leaves

of the hazel from the leaves of the oak; and when Emer laments him no

wild creature comes into her thoughts but the cuckoo that cries over

cultivated fields. His story must have come out of a time when the wild

wood was giving way to pasture and tillage, and men had no longer a

reason to consider every cry of the birds or change of the night. Finn,

who was always in the woods, whose battles were but hours amid years

of hunting, delighted in the ’cackling of ducks from the Lake of the

Three Narrows; the scolding talk of the blackbird of Doire an Cairn;

the bellowing of the ox from the Valley of the Berries; the whistle of

the eagle from the Valley of Victories or from the rough branches of

the Ridge of the Stream; the grouse of the heather of Cruachan; the

call of the otter of Druim re Coir.’ When sorrow comes upon the queens

of the stories, they have sympathy for the wild birds and beasts that

are like themselves: ‘Credhe wife of Cael came with the others and went

looking through the bodies for her comely comrade, and crying as she

went. And as she was searching she saw a crane of the meadows and her

two nestlings, and the cunning beast the fox watching the nestlings;

and when the crane covered one of the birds to save it, he would make a

rush at the other bird, the way she had to stretch herself out over the

birds; and she would sooner have got her own death by the fox than the

nestlings to be killed by him. And Credhe was looking at that, and she

said: “It is no wonder I to have such love for my comely sweetheart,

and the bird in that distress about her nestlings.”’

III

One often hears of a horse that shivers with terror, or of a dog that

howls at something a man’s eyes cannot see, and men who live primitive

lives where instinct does the work of reason are fully conscious of

many things that we cannot perceive at all. As life becomes more

orderly, more deliberate, the supernatural world sinks farther away.

Although the gods come to Cuchulain, and although he is the son of

one of the greatest of them, their country and his are far apart, and

they come to him as god to mortal; but Finn is their equal. He is

continually in their houses; he meets with Bodb Dearg, and Aengus, and

Mananan, now as friend with friend, now as with an enemy he overcomes

in battle; and when he has need of their help his messenger can say:

‘There is not a king’s son or a prince, or a leader of the Fianna of

Ireland, without having a wife or a mother or a foster-mother or a

sweetheart of the Tuatha de Danaan.’ When the Fianna are broken up

at last, after hundreds of years of hunting, it is doubtful that he

dies at all, and certain that he comes again in some other shape, and

Oisin, his son, is made king over a divine country. The birds and

beasts that cross his path in the woods have been fighting-men or great

enchanters or fair women, and in a moment can take some beautiful or

terrible shape. We think of him and of his people as great-bodied men

with large movements, that seem, as it were, flowing out of some deep

below the shallow stream of personal impulse, men that have broad brows

and quiet eyes full of confidence in a good luck that proves every

day afresh that they are a portion of the strength of things. They are

hardly so much individual men as portions of universal nature, like the

clouds that shape themselves and reshape themselves momentarily, or

like a bird between two boughs, or like the gods that have given the

apples and the nuts; and yet this but brings them the nearer to us, for

we can remake them in our image when we will, and the woods are the

more beautiful for the thought. Do we not always fancy hunters to be

something like this, and is not that why we think them poetical when we

meet them of a sudden, as in these lines in _Pauline_?——

‘An old hunter

Talking with gods; or a high-crested chief

Sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos.’

IV

One must not expect in these stories the epic lineaments, the many

incidents, woven into one great event of, let us say, the story of

the War for the Brown Bull of Cuailgne, or that of the last gathering

at Muirthemne. Even _Diarmuid and Grania_, which is a long story,

has nothing of the clear outlines of _Deirdre_, and is indeed but a

succession of detached episodes. The men who imagined the Fianna had

the imagination of children, and as soon as they had invented one

wonder, heaped another on top of it. Children—or, at any rate, it is so

I remember my own childhood—do not understand large design, and they

delight in little shut-in places where they can play at houses more

than in great expanses where a country-side takes, as it were, the

impression of a thought. The wild creatures and the green things are

more to them than to us, for they creep towards our light by little

holes and crevices. When they imagine a country for themselves, it is

always a country where one can wander without aim, and where one can

never know from one place what another will be like, or know from the

one day’s adventure what may meet one with to-morrow’s sun. I have

wished to become a child again that I might find this book, that not

only tells me of such a country, but is fuller than any other book that

tells of heroic life, of the childhood that is in all folk-lore, dearer

to me than all the books of the western world.

V

Children play at being great and wonderful people, at the ambitions

they will put away for one reason or another before they grow into

ordinary men and women. Mankind as a whole had a like dream once;

everybody and nobody built up the dream bit by bit, and the ancient

story-tellers are there to make us remember what mankind would have

been like, had not fear and the failing will and the laws of nature

tripped up its heels. The Fianna and their like are themselves so full

of power, and they are set in a world so fluctuating and dream-like,

that nothing can hold them from being all that the heart desires.

I have read in a fabulous book that Adam had but to imagine a bird and

it was born into life, and that he created all things out of himself

by nothing more important than an unflagging fancy; and heroes who

can make a ship out of a shaving have but little less of the divine

prerogatives. They have no speculative thoughts to wander through

eternity and waste heroic blood; but how could that be otherwise?

for it is at all times the proud angels who sit thinking upon the

hill-side and not the people of Eden. One morning we meet them hunting

a stag that is ’as joyful as the leaves of a tree in summer-time’;

and whatever they do, whether they listen to the harp or follow an

enchanter over-sea, they do for the sake of joy, their joy in one

another, or their joy in pride and movement; and even their battles

are fought more because of their delight in a good fighter than because

of any gain that is in victory. They live always as if they were

playing a game; and so far as they have any deliberate purpose at all,

it is that they may become great gentlemen and be worthy of the songs

of poets. It has been said, and I think the Japanese were the first

to say it, that the four essential virtues are to be generous among

the weak, and truthful among one’s friends, and brave among one’s

enemies, and courteous at all times; and if we understand by courtesy

not merely the gentleness the story-tellers have celebrated, but a

delight in courtly things, in beautiful clothing and in beautiful

verse, one understands that it was no formal succession of trials

that bound the Fianna to one another. Only the Table Round, that is

indeed, as it seems, a rivulet from the same well-head, is bound in a

like fellowship, and there the four heroic virtues are troubled by the

abstract virtues of the cloister. Every now and then some noble knight

builds himself a cell upon the hill-side, or leaves kind women and

joyful knights to seek the vision of the Grail in lonely adventures.

But when Oisin or some kingly forerunner—Bran, son of Febal, or the

like—rides or sails in an enchanted ship to some divine country, he

but looks for a more delighted companionship, or to be in love with

faces that will never fade. No thought of any life greater than that of

love, and the companionship of those that have drawn their swords upon

the darkness of the world, ever troubles their delight in one another

as it troubles Iseult amid her love, or Arthur amid his battles. It is

one of the ailments of our speculation that thought, when it is not the

planning of something, or the doing of something or some memory of a

plain circumstance separates us from one another because it makes us

always more unlike, and because no thought passes through another’s

ear unchanged. Companionship can only be perfect when it is founded

on things, for things are always the same under the hand, and at last

one comes to hear with envy the voices of boys lighting a lantern to

ensnare moths, or of the maids chattering in the kitchen about the

fox that carried off a turkey before breakfast. This book is full of

fellowship untroubled like theirs, and made noble by a courtesy that

has gone perhaps out of the world. I do not know in literature better

friends and lovers. When one of the Fianna finds Osgar dying the proud

death of a young man, and asks is it well with him, he is answered, ‘I

am as you would have me be.’ The very heroism of the Fianna is indeed

but their pride and joy in one another, their good fellowship. Goll,

old and savage, and letting himself die of hunger in a cave because he

is angry and sorry, can speak lovely words to the wife whose help he

refuses. ‘It is best as it is,’ he said, ’and I never took the advice

of a woman east or west, and I never will take it. And oh, sweet-voiced

queen,’ he said, ‘what ails you to be fretting after me? And remember

now your silver and your gold, and your silks ... and do not be crying

tears after me, queen with the white hands,’ he said, ’but remember

your constant lover Aodh, son of the best woman of the world, that came

from Spain asking for you, and that I fought on Corcar-an-Dearg; and

go to him now,’ he said, ’for it is bad when a woman is without a good

man.’

VI

They have no asceticism, but they are more visionary than any ascetic,

and their invisible life is but the life about them made more perfect

and more lasting, and the invisible people are their own images in the

water. Their gods may have been much besides this, for we know them

from fragments of mythology picked out with trouble from a fantastic

history running backward to Adam and Eve, and many things that may have

seemed wicked to the monks who imagined that history, may have been

altered or left out; but this they must have been essentially, for

the old stories are confirmed by apparitions among the country-people

to-day. The Men of Dea fought against the mis-shapen Fomor, as Finn

fights against the Cat-Heads and the Dog-Heads; and when they are

overcome at last by men, they make themselves houses in the hearts of

hills that are like the houses of men. When they call men to their

houses and to their Country Under-Wave they promise them all that they

have upon earth, only in greater abundance. The god Midhir sings to

Queen Etain in one of the most beautiful of the stories: ‘The young

never grow old; the fields and the flowers are as pleasant to be

looking at as the blackbird’s eggs; warm streams of mead and wine flow

through that country; there is no care or no sorrow on any person; we

see others, but we ourselves are not seen.’ These gods are indeed more

wise and beautiful than men; but men, when they are great men, are

stronger than they are, for men are, as it were, the foaming tide-line

of their sea. One remembers the Druid who answered, when some one

asked him who made the world, ‘The Druids made it.’ All was indeed

but one life flowing everywhere, and taking one quality here, another

there. It sometimes seems to one as if there is a kind of day and night

of religion, and that a period when the influences are those that

shape the world is followed by a period when the greater power is in

influences that would lure the soul out of the world, out of the body.

When Oisin is speaking with St. Patrick of the friends and the life he

has outlived, he can but cry out constantly against a religion that has

no meaning for him. He laments, and the country-people have remembered

his words for centuries: ‘I will cry my fill, but not for God, but

because Finn and the Fianna are not living.’

VII

Old writers had an admirable symbolism that attributed certain

energies to the influence of the sun, and certain others to the

lunar influence. To lunar influence belong all thoughts and emotions

that were created by the community, by the common people, by nobody

knows who, and to the sun all that came from the high disciplined or

individual kingly mind. I myself imagine a marriage of the sun and

moon in the arts I take most pleasure in; and now bride and bridegroom

but exchange, as it were, full cups of gold and silver, and now they

are one in a mystical embrace. From the moon come the folk-songs

imagined by reapers and spinners out of the common impulse of their

labour, and made not by putting words together, but by mixing verses

and phrases, and the folk-tales made by the capricious mixing of

incidents known to everybody in new ways, as one deals out cards, never

getting the same hand twice over. When one hears some fine story, one

never knows whether it has not been hazard that put the last touch

of adventure. Such poetry, as it seems to me, desires an infinity

of wonder or emotion, for where there is no individual mind there

is no measurer-out, no marker-in of limits. The poor fisher has no

possession of the world and no responsibility for it; and if he dreams

of a love-gift better than the brown shawl that seems too common for

poetry, why should he not dream of a glove made from the skin of a

bird, or shoes made from the skin of a herring, or a coat made from

the glittering garment of the salmon? Was it not Æschylus who said he

but served up fragments from the banquet of Homer?—but Homer himself

found the great banquet on an earthen floor and under a broken roof.

We do not know who at the foundation of the world made the banquet for

the first time, or who put the pack of cards into rough hands; but we

do know that, unless those that have made many inventions are about

to change the nature of poetry, we may have to go where Homer went if

we are to sing a new song. Is it because all that is under the moon

thirsts to escape out of bounds, to lose itself in some unbounded tidal

stream, that the songs of the folk are mournful, and that the story

of the Fianna, whenever the queens lament for their lovers, reminds

us of songs that are still sung in country-places? Their grief, even

when it is to be brief like Grania’s, goes up into the waste places of

the sky. But in supreme art or in supreme life there is the influence

of the sun too, and the sun brings with it, as old writers tell us,

not merely discipline but joy; for its discipline is not of the kind

the multitudes impose upon us by their weight and pressure, but the

expression of the individual soul turning itself into a pure fire

and imposing its own pattern, its own music, upon the heaviness and

the dumbness that is in others and in itself. When we have drunk the

cold cup of the moon’s intoxication, we thirst for something beyond

ourselves, and the mind flows outward to a natural immensity; but if

we have drunk from the hot cup of the sun, our own fulness awakens,

we desire little, for wherever one goes one’s heart goes too; and

if any ask what music is the sweetest, we can but answer, as Finn

answered, ‘What happens.’ And yet the songs and stories that have come

from either influence are a part, neither less than the other, of the

pleasure that is the bride-bed of poetry.

VIII

Gaelic-speaking Ireland, because its art has been made, not by the

artist choosing his material from wherever he has a mind to, but

by adding a little to something which it has taken generations to

invent, has always had a popular literature. We cannot say how much

that literature has done for the vigour of the race, for who can

count the hands its praise of kings and high-hearted queens made hot

upon the sword-hilt, or the amorous eyes it made lustful for strength

and beauty? We remember indeed that when the farming people and the

labourers of the towns made their last attempt to cast out England by

force of arms they named themselves after the companions of Finn.

Even when Gaelic has gone, and the poetry with it, something of the

habit of mind remains in ways of speech and thought and ’come-all-ye’s’

and poetical saying; nor is it only among the poor that the old

thought has been for strength or weakness. Surely these old stories,

whether of Finn or Cuchulain, helped to sing the old Irish and the old

Norman-Irish aristocracy to their end. They heard their hereditary

poets and story-tellers, and they took to horse and died fighting

against Elizabeth or against Cromwell; and when an English-speaking

aristocracy had their place, it listened to no poetry indeed, but it

felt about it in the popular mind an exacting and ancient tribunal,

and began a play that had for spectators men and women that loved the

high wasteful virtues. I do not think that their own mixed blood or the

habit of their time need take all, or nearly all, credit or discredit

for the impulse that made our gentlemen of the eighteenth century fight

duels over pocket-handkerchiefs, and set out to play ball against the

gates of Jerusalem for a wager, and scatter money before the public

eye; and at last, after an epoch of such eloquence the world has hardly

seen its like, lose their public spirit and their high heart and grow

querulous and selfish as men do who have played life out not heartily

but with noise and tumult. Had they known the people and the game a

little better, they might have created an aristocracy in an age that

has lost the understanding of the word. When one reads of the Fianna,

or of Cuchulain, or of some great hero, one remembers that the fine

life is always a part played finely before fine spectators. There also

one notices the hot cup and the cold cup of intoxication; and when the

fine spectators have ended, surely the fine players grow weary, and

aristocratic life is ended. When O’Connell covered with a dark glove

the hand that had killed a man in the duelling-field, he played his

part; and when Alexander stayed his army marching to the conquest of

the world that he might contemplate the beauty of a plane-tree, he

played his part. When Osgar complained as he lay dying of the keening

of the women and the old fighting-men, he too played his part; ‘No man

ever knew any heart in me,’ he said, ’but a heart of twisted horn,

and it covered with iron; but the howling of the dogs beside me,’ he

said, ’and the keening of the old fighting-men and the crying of the

women one after another, those are the things that are vexing me.’ If

we would create a great community—and what other game is so worth

the labour?—we must recreate the old foundations of life, not as they

existed in that splendid misunderstanding of the eighteenth century,

but as they must always exist when the finest minds and Ned the beggar

and Seaghan the fool think about the same thing, although they may not

think the same thought about it.

IX

When I asked the little boy who had shown me the pathway up the Hill

of Allen if he knew stories of Finn and Oisin, he said he did not, but

that he had often heard his grandfather telling them to his mother in

Irish. He did not know Irish, but he was learning it at school, and all

the little boys he knew were learning it. In a little while he will

know enough stories of Finn and Oisin to tell them to his children some

day. It is the owners of the land whose children might never have known

what would give them so much happiness. But now they can read this book

to those that shall come after them, and it will make Slieve-naman,

Allen, and Benbulben, the great mountain that showed itself before me

every day through all my childhood and was yet unpeopled, and half

the country-sides of south and west, as populous with memories as are

Dundealgan and Emain Macha and Muirthemne; and after a while somebody

may take boy and girl to some famous place and say, ‘This land where

your fathers lived proudly and finely should be dear and dear and again

dear’; and perhaps when many names have grown musical to their ears, a

more imaginative love will have taught them a better service.

X

I need say nothing about the translation and arrangement of this book

except that it is worthy to be put beside _Cuchulain of Muirthemne_.

Such books should not be commended by written words but by spoken

words, were that possible, for the written words commending a book,

wherein something is done supremely well, remain, to sound in the ears

of a later generation, like the foolish sound of church bells from the

tower of a church when every pew is full.

_Autumn, 1903._

MR. SYNGE AND HIS PLAYS

SIX years ago I was staying in a students’ hotel in the Latin quarter,

and somebody, whose name I cannot recollect, introduced me to an

Irishman, who, even poorer than myself, had taken a room at the top

of the house. It was J. M. Synge, and I, who thought I knew the name

of every Irishman who was working at literature, had never heard of

him. He was a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, too, and Trinity

College does not, as a rule, produce artistic minds. He told me that

he had been living in France and Germany, reading French and German

Literature, and that he wished to become a writer. He had, however,

nothing to show but one or two poems and impressionistic essays, full

of that kind of morbidity that has its root in too much brooding over

methods of expression, and ways of looking upon life, which come, not

out of life, but out of literature, images reflected from mirror to

mirror. He had wandered among people whose life is as picturesque as

the middle ages, playing his fiddle to Italian sailors, and listening

to stories in Bavarian woods, but life had cast no light into his

writings. He had learned Irish years ago, but had begun to forget

it, for the only language that interested him was that conventional

language of modern poetry which has begun to make us all weary. I was

very weary of it for I had finished _The Secret Rose_, and felt how

it had separated my imagination from life, sending my Red Hanrahan,

who should have trodden the same roads with myself, into some

undiscoverable country. I said ‘Give up Paris, you will never create

anything by reading Racine, and Arthur Symons will always be a better

critic of French literature. Go to the Arran Islands. Live there as if

you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never

found expression.’ I had just come from Arran, and my imagination was

full of those gray islands where men must reap with knives because of

the stones.

He went to Arran and became a part of its life, living upon salt fish

and eggs, talking Irish for the most part, but listening also to the

beautiful English which has grown up in Irish-speaking districts, and

takes its vocabulary from the time of Malory and of the translators

of the Bible, but its idiom and its vivid metaphor from Irish. When

Mr. Synge began to write in this language, Lady Gregory had already

used it finely in her translations of Dr. Hyde’s lyrics and plays, or

of old Irish literature, but she had listened with different ears. He

made his own selection of word and phrase, choosing what would express

his own personality. Above all, he made word and phrase dance to a

very strange rhythm, which will always, till his plays have created

their own tradition, be difficult to actors who have not learned it

from his lips. It is essential, for it perfectly fits the drifting

emotion, the dreaminess, the vague yet measureless desire, for which

he would create a dramatic form. It blurs definition, clear edges,

everything that comes from the will, it turns imagination from all

that is of the present, like a gold background in a religious picture,

and it strengthens in every emotion whatever comes to it from far off,

from brooding memory and dangerous hope. When he brought _The Shadow

of the Glen_, his first play, to the Irish National Theatre Society,

the players were puzzled by the rhythm, but gradually they became

certain that his woman of the glens, as melancholy as a curlew, driven

to distraction by her own sensitiveness, her own fineness, could not

speak with any other tongue, that all his people would change their

life if the rhythm changed. Perhaps no Irish countryman had ever that

exact rhythm in his voice, but certainly if Mr. Synge had been born a

countryman, he would have spoken like that. It makes the people of his

imagination a little disembodied; it gives them a kind of innocence

even in their anger and their cursing. It is part of its maker’s

attitude towards the world, for while it makes the clash of wills among

his persons indirect and dreamy, it helps him to see the subject-matter

of his art with wise, clear-seeing, unreflecting eyes; to preserve the

innocence of good art in an age of reasons and purposes. Whether he

write of old beggars by the roadside, lamenting over the misery and

ugliness of life, or of an old Arran woman mourning her drowned sons,

or of a young wife married to an old husband, he has no wish to change

anything, to reform anything; all these people pass by as before an

open window, murmuring strange, exciting words.

If one has not fine construction, one has not drama, but if one has not

beautiful or powerful and individual speech, one has not literature,

or, at any rate, one has not great literature. Rabelais, Villon,

Shakespeare, William Blake, would have known one another by their

speech. Some of them knew how to construct a story, but all of them had

abundant, resonant, beautiful, laughing, living speech. It is only the

writers of our modern dramatic movement, our scientific dramatists,

our naturalists of the stage, who have thought it possible to be like

the greatest, and yet to cast aside even the poor persiflage of the

comedians, and to write in the impersonal language that has come, not

out of individual life, nor out of life at all, but out of necessities

of commerce, of parliament, of board schools, of hurried journeys by

rail.

If there are such things as decaying art and decaying institutions,

their decay must begin when the element they receive into their care

from the life of every man in the world, begins to rot. Literature

decays when it no longer makes more beautiful, or more vivid, the

language which unites it to all life; and when one finds the criticism

of the student, and the purpose of the reformer, and the logic of the

man of science, where there should have been the reveries of the common

heart, ennobled into some raving Lear or unabashed Don Quixote. One

must not forget that the death of language, the substitution of phrases

as nearly impersonal as algebra for words and rhythms varying from man

to man, is but a part of the tyranny of impersonal things. I have been

reading through a bundle of German plays, and have found everywhere a

desire not to express hopes and alarms common to every man that ever

came into the world, but politics or social passion, a veiled or open

propaganda. Now it is duelling that has need of reproof; now it is the

ideas of an actress, returning from the free life of the stage, that

must be contrasted with the prejudice of an old-fashioned town; now it

is the hostility of Christianity and Paganism in our own day that is

to find an obscure symbol in a bell thrown from its tower by spirits

of the wood. I compare the work of these dramatists with the greater

plays of their Scandinavian master, and remember that even he, who has

made so many clear-drawn characters, has made us no abundant character,

no man of genius in whom we could believe, and that in him also, even

when it is Emperor and Galilean that are face to face, even the most

momentous figures are subordinate to some tendency, to some movement,

to some inanimate energy, or to some process of thought whose very

logic has changed it into mechanism—always to something other than

human life.

We must not measure a young talent, whether we praise or blame, with

that of men who are among the greatest of our time, but we may say

of any talent, following out a definition, that it takes up the

tradition of great drama as it came from the hands of the masters who

are acknowledged by all time, and turns away from a dramatic movement,

which, though it has been served by fine talent, has been imposed upon

us by science, by artificial life, by a passing order.

When the individual life no longer delights in its own energy, when the

body is not made strong and beautiful by the activities of daily life,

when men have no delight in decorating the body, one may be certain

that one lives in a passing order, amid the inventions of a fading

vitality. If Homer were alive to-day, he would only resist, after a

deliberate struggle, the temptation to find his subject not in Helen’s

beauty, that every man has desired, nor in the wisdom and endurance of

Odysseus that has been the desire of every woman that has come into the

world, but in what somebody would describe, perhaps, as ’the inevitable

contest,’ arising out of economic causes, between the country-places

and small towns on the one hand, and, upon the other, the great city of

Troy, representing one knows not what ’tendency to centralization.’

Mr. Synge has in common with the great theatre of the world, with

that of Greece and that of India, with the creator of Falstaff, with

Racine, a delight in language, a preoccupation with individual life. He

resembles them also by a preoccupation with what is lasting and noble,

that came to him, not as I think from books, but while he listened

to old stories in the cottages, and contrasted what they remembered

with reality. The only literature of the Irish country-people is their

songs, full often of extravagant love, and their stories of kings

and of kings’ children. ‘I will cry my fill, but not for God, but

because Finn and the Fianna are not living,’ says Oisin in the story.

Every writer, even every small writer, who has belonged to the great

tradition, has had his dream of an impossibly noble life, and the

greater he is, the more does it seem to plunge him into some beautiful

or bitter reverie. Some, and of these are all the earliest poets of

the world, gave it direct expression; others mingle it so subtly with

reality, that it is a day’s work to disentangle it; others bring it

near by showing one whatever is most its contrary. Mr. Synge, indeed,

sets before us ugly, deformed or sinful people, but his people, moved

by no practical ambition, are driven by a dream of that impossible

life. That we may feel how intensely his woman of the glen dreams

of days that shall be entirely alive, she that is ’a hard woman to

please,’ must spend her days between a sour-faced old husband, a man

who goes mad upon the hills, a craven lad and a drunken tramp; and

those two blind people of _The Well of the Saints_ are so transformed

by the dream, that they choose blindness rather than reality. He tells

us of realities, but he knows that art has never taken more than its

symbols from anything that the eye can see or the hand measure.

It is the preoccupation of his characters with their dream that gives

his plays their drifting movement, their emotional subtlety. In most

of the dramatic writing of our time, and this is one of the reasons

why our dramatists do not find the need for a better speech, one finds

a simple motive lifted, as it were, into the full light of the stage.

The ordinary student of drama will not find anywhere in _The Well of

the Saints_ that excitement of the will in the presence of attainable

advantages, which he is accustomed to think the natural stuff of drama,

and if he see it played he will wonder why act is knitted to act so

loosely, why it is all, as it were, flat, why there is so much leisure

in the dialogue, even in the midst of passion. If he see the _Shadow of

the Glen_, he will ask, why does this woman go out of her house? Is it

because she cannot help herself, or is she content to go? Why is it not

all made clearer? And yet, like everybody when caught up into great

events, she does many things without being quite certain why she does

them. She hardly understands at moments why her action has a certain

form, more clearly than why her body is tall or short, fair or brown.

She feels an emotion that she does not understand. She is driven by

desires that need for their expression, not ‘I admire this man,’ or ‘I

must go, whether I will or no,’ but words full of suggestion, rhythms

of voice, movements that escape analysis. In addition to all this, she

has something that she shares with none but the children of one man’s

imagination. She is intoxicated by a dream which is hardly understood

by herself, but possesses her like something half-remembered on a

sudden wakening.

While I write, we are rehearsing _The Well of the Saints_, and are

painting for it decorative scenery, mountains in one or two flat

colours and without detail, ash trees and red salleys with something of

recurring pattern in their woven boughs. For though the people of the

play use no phrase they could not use in daily life, we know that we

are seeking to express what no eye has ever seen.

ABBEY THEATRE,

_January 27, 1905_.

LIONEL JOHNSON

CONTEMPORARY Irish poets believe in a spiritual life, invisible and

troubling, and express this belief in their poetry. Contemporary

English poets are interested in the glory of the world, like Mr.

Rudyard Kipling; or in the order of the world, like Mr. William Watson;

or in the passion of the world, like Mr. John Davidson; or in the

pleasure of the world, like Mr. Arthur Symons. Mr. Francis Thompson,

who has fallen under the shadow of Mr. Coventry Patmore, the poet of

an older time and in protest against that time, is alone preoccupied

with a spiritual life; and even he, except at rare moments, has less

living fervour of belief than pleasure in the gleaming and scented and

coloured symbols that are the footsteps where the belief of others has

trodden. Ireland, upon the other hand, is creating in English a poetry

as full of spiritual ardour as the poetry that praised in Gaelic _The

Country of the Two Mists_, and _The Country of the Young_, and _The

Country of the Living Heart_.

‘A.E.’ has written an ecstatic pantheistic poetry which reveals in all

things a kind of scented flame consuming them from within. Miss Hopper,

an unequal writer, whose best verses are delicate and distinguished,

has no clear vision of spiritual things, but makes material things

as frail and fragile as if they were but smouldering leaves, that we

stirred in some mid-world of dreams, as ’the gossips’ in her poem ’stir

their lives’ red ashes.’ Mrs. Hinkson, uninteresting at her worst,

as only uncritical and unspeculative writers are uninteresting, has

sometimes expressed an impassioned and instinctive Catholicism in poems

that are, as I believe, as perfect as they are beautiful, while Mr.

Lionel Johnson has in his poetry completed the trinity of the spiritual

virtues by adding Stoicism to Ecstasy and Asceticism. He has renounced

the world and built up a twilight world instead, where all the colours

are like the colours in the rainbow that is cast by the moon, and

all the people as far from modern tumults as the people upon fading

and dropping tapestries. He has so little interest in our pains and

pleasures, and is so wrapped up in his own world, that one comes from

his books wearied and exalted, as though one had posed for some noble

action in a strange _tableau vivant_ that cast its painful stillness

upon the mind instead of the body. He might have cried with Axel, ‘As

for living, our servants will do that for us.’ As Axel chose to die,

he has chosen to live among his books and between two memories—the

religious tradition of the Church of Rome and the political tradition

of Ireland. From these he gazes upon the future, and whether he write

of Sertorius or of Lucretius, or of Parnell or of ‘Ireland’s dead,’ or

of ’98, or of St. Columba or of Leo XIII., it is always with the same

cold or scornful ecstasy. He has made a world full of altar lights and

golden vestures, and murmured Latin and incense clouds, and autumn

winds and dead leaves, where one wanders remembering martyrdoms and

courtesies that the world has forgotten.

His ecstasy is the ecstasy of combat, not of submission to the Divine

will; and even when he remembers that ‘the old Saints prevail,’ he sees

the ‘one ancient Priest’ who alone offers the Sacrifice, and remembers

the loneliness of the Saints. Had he not this ecstasy of combat, he

would be the poet of those peaceful and unhappy souls, who, in the

symbolism of a living Irish visionary, are compelled to inhabit when

they die a shadowy island Paradise in the West, where the moon always

shines, and a mist is always on the face of the moon, and a music of

many sighs is always in the air, because they renounced the joy of the

world without accepting the joy of God.

1899.

THE PATHWAY

MOST of us who are writing books in Ireland to-day have some kind of

a spiritual philosophy; and some among us when we look backward upon

our lives see that the coming of a young Brahmin into Ireland helped

to give our vague thoughts a shape. When we were schoolboys we used to

discuss whatever we could find to read of mystical philosophy and to

pass crystals over each others’ hands and eyes and to fancy that we

could feel a breath flowing from them as people did in a certain German

book; and one day somebody told us he had met a Brahmin in London who

knew more of these things than any book. With a courage which I still

admire, we wrote and asked him to come and teach us, and he came with

a little bag in his hand and _Marius the Epicurean_ in his pocket, and

stayed with one of us, who gave him a plate of rice and an apple every

day at two o’clock; and for a week and all day long he unfolded what

seemed to be all wisdom. He sat there beautiful, as only an Eastern is

beautiful, making little gestures with his delicate hands, and to him

alone among all the talkers I have heard, the delight of ordered words

seemed nothing, and all thought a flight into the heart of truth.

We brought him, on the evening of his coming, to a certain club which

still discusses everything with that leisure which is the compensation

of unsuccessful countries; and there he overthrew or awed into silence

whatever metaphysics the town had. And next day, when we would have

complimented him, he was remorseful and melancholy, for was it not

‘intellectual lust’? And sometimes he would go back over something he

had said and explain to us that his argument had been a fallacy, and

apologise as though he had offended against good manners. And once,

when we questioned him of some event, he told us what he seemed to

remember, but asked us not to give much weight to his memory, for he

had found that he observed carelessly. He said, ‘We Easterns are taught

to state a principle carefully, but we are not taught to observe and to

remember and to describe a fact. Our sense of what truthfulness is is

quite different from yours.’ His principles were a part of his being,

while our facts, though he was too polite to say it, were doubtless

a part of that bodily life, which is, as he believed, an error. He

certainly did hold that we lived too much to understand the truth or

to live long, for he remembered that his father, who had been the first

of his family for two thousand years to leave his native village, had

repeated over and over upon his deathbed, ‘The West is dying because of

its restlessness.’ Once when he had spoken of some Englishman who had

gone down the crater of Vesuvius, some listener adventured: ‘We like

men who do that kind of thing, because a man should not think too much

of his life,’ but was answered solidly, ‘You do not think little of

your lives, but you think so much of your lives that you would enjoy

them everywhere, even in the crater of Vesuvius.’ Somebody asked him

if we should pray, but even prayer was too full of hope, of desire, of

life, to have any part in that acquiescence that was his beginning of

wisdom, and he answered that one should say, before sleeping: ‘I have

lived many lives. I have been a slave and a prince. Many a beloved has

sat upon my knees, and I have sat upon the knees of many a beloved.

Everything that has been shall be again.’ Beautiful words, that I

spoilt once by turning them into clumsy verse.

Nearly all that we call education was to him but a means to bring us

under the despotism of life; and I remember the bewilderment of a

schoolmaster who asked about the education of children and was told

to ‘teach them fairy tales, and that they did not possess even their

own bodies.’ I think he would not have taught anybody anything that had

to be written in prose, for he said, very seriously, ‘I have thought

much about it, and I have never been able to discover any reason why

prose should exist.’ I think he would not have trained anybody in

anything but in the arts and in philosophy, which sweeps the pathway

before them, for he certainly thought, as William Blake did, that the

‘imagination is the man himself,’ and can, if it be strong enough,

work every miracle. A man had come to him in London, and had said, ‘My

wife believes that you have the wisdom of the East and can cure her

neuralgia, from which she has suffered for years.’ He had answered:

‘Are you certain that she believes that? because, if you are, I can

cure her.’ He had gone to her and made a circle round her and recited

a poem in Sanscrit, and she had never had neuralgia since. He recited

the poem to us, and was very disappointed because we did not know by

the sound that it was a description of the spring. Not only did he

think that the imaginative arts were the only things that were quite

sinless, but he spent more than half a day proving, by many subtle and

elaborate arguments, that ‘art for art’s sake’ was the only sinless

doctrine, for any other would hide the shadow of the world as it

exists in the mind of God by shadows of the accidents and illusions of

life, and was but Sadducean blasphemy. Religion existed also for its

own sake; and every soul quivered between two emotions, the desire to

possess things, to make them a portion of its egotism, and a delight

in just and beautiful things for their own sake—and all religions were

a doctrinal or symbolical crying aloud of this delight. He would not

give his own belief a name for fear he might seem to admit that there

could be religion that expressed another delight, and if one urged him

too impetuously, he would look embarrassed and say, ‘This body is a

Brahmin.’ All other parts of religion were unimportant, for even our

desire of immortality was no better than our other desires. Before

I understood him, I asked what he would answer to one who began the

discussion by denying the immortality of the soul, for the accident

of a discussion with religious people had set him grafting upon this

stock, and he said, ‘I would say to him, What has that to do with you?’

I remember these phrases and these little fragments of argument quite

clearly, for their charm and their unexpectedness has made them cling

to the memory; but when I try to remember his philosophy as a whole, I

cannot part it from what I myself have built about it, or have gathered

in the great ruined house of ‘the prophetic books’ of William Blake;

but I am certain that he taught us by what seemed an invincible logic

that those who die, in so far as they have imagined beauty or justice,

are made a part of beauty or justice, and move through the minds of

living men, as Shelley believed; and that mind overshadows mind even

among the living, and by pathways that lie beyond the senses; and that

he measured labour by this measure, and put the hermit above all other

labourers, because, being the most silent and the most hidden, he lived

nearer to the Eternal Powers, and showed their mastery of the world.

Alcibiades fled from Socrates lest he might do nothing but listen to

him all life long, and I am certain that we, seeking as youth will for

some unknown deed and thought, all dreamed that but to listen to this

man who threw the enchantment of power about silent and gentle things,

and at last to think as he did, was the one thing worth doing and

thinking; and that all action and all words that lead to action were a

little vulgar, a little trivial. Ah, how many years it has taken me to

awake out of that dream!

1900-1908.

A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF

THE WRITINGS

OF

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

BY

ALLAN WADE.

_NOTE._

_I began to make this bibliography a good many years ago, putting

into an old note-book a list of all the writings of Mr. Yeats that I

knew, and adding others from time to time, as chance led me to find

them in newspapers or periodicals. I had no thought in doing this but

my own pleasure, and it is with a kind of wonder that I see my notes

taking the form of a book or part of a book at Mr. Bullen’s beautiful

Shakespeare Head Press._

_I do not think the arrangement of the bibliography needs any

explanation. I have not found it possible always to identify the

first appearance of poems and essays, particularly in the earlier

collections; nor have I thought it necessary to include a reference to

every letter written by Mr. Yeats to the Press, since many of these

have dealt merely with small points of fact in this or that controversy

of the moment. But otherwise I have tried to make the work as complete

as possible, and have given many details to serve as guides to those

who would study the path along which beauty has come into the world. I

have watched the roses blossoming in the garden, though I may not know

the secret of their growth._

_My thanks for help and suggestions are due to Mr. Yeats himself and to

Mr. A. H. Bullen, Mrs. Tynan Hinkson, Miss A. E. F. Horniman, Mr. John

Masefield and Mr. T. W. Rolleston. The details of the American editions

of Mr. Yeats’s books have been kindly supplied by Mr. John Quinn of New

York._

_ALLAN WADE._

_June, 1908._

_Accursed who brings to light of day

The writings I have cast away!

But blessed he that stirs them not

And lets the kind worm take the lot!_

—W.B.Y.

PART I.—ORIGINAL WORKS.

1886.

Mosada. | A Dramatic Poem. | By | W. B. Yeats. | With a | Frontispiece

Portrait of the Author | By J. B. Yeats. | Reprinted from the Dublin

University Review. | Dublin: | Printed by Sealy, Bryers, and Walker, |

94, 95 and 96 Middle Abbey Street. | 1886.

The whole enclosed in decorated border.

8vo, pp. ii and 12. Light brown paper covers.

There is no title-page, the above description being taken from the

front cover.

_Mosada_ originally appeared in _The Dublin University Review_, June,

1886.

1889.

The Wanderings of Oisin | and other Poems | by | W. B. Yeats | London |

Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1, Paternoster Square | 1889

Fcap. 8vo, pp. vi and 156. Cloth.

CONTENTS.

_The Wanderings of Oisin._

_Time and the Witch Vivien._

_The Stolen Child._ Originally appeared in _The Irish

Monthly_, December, 1886.

_Girl’s Song._

_Ephemera. An Autumn Idyll._

_An Indian Song._ Originally appeared in _The Dublin

University Review_, December, 1886.

_Kanva, the Indian, on God._ Originally appeared,

under the title _From the Book of Kauri the Indian_.

Section V., _On the Nature of God_, in _The Dublin

University Review_, October, 1886.

_Kanva on Himself._

_Jealousy._

_Song of the Last Arcadian._ Originally appeared, under

the title _An Epilogue. To ‘The Island of Statues’_

and ‘_The Seeker_,’ in _The Dublin University

Review_, October, 1885.

_King Goll._ (_Third Century._) Originally appeared,

under the title _King Goll_. _An Irish Legend_, in

_The Leisure Hour_, September, 1887.

_The Meditation of the Old Fisherman._ Originally

appeared in _The Irish Monthly_, October, 1886.

_The Ballad of Moll Magee._

_The Phantom Ship._

_A Lover’s Quarrel among the Fairies._

_Mosada._ Originally appeared in _The Dublin University

Review_, June, 1886.

_How Ferencz Renyi kept Silent._ Originally appeared in

_The Boston Pilot_.

_The Fairy Doctor._ Originally appeared in _The Irish

Fireside_, September 10, 1887.

_Falling of the Leaves._

_Miserrimus._ Originally appeared in _The Dublin

University Review_, October, 1886.

_The Priest and the Fairy._

_The Fairy Pedant._ Originally appeared in _The Irish

Monthly_, March, 1887.

_She who dwelt among the Sycamores. A Fancy._

Originally appeared in _The Irish Monthly_,

September, 1887.

_On Mr. Nettleship’s Picture at the Royal Hibernian

Academy_, 1885. Originally appeared in _The Dublin

University Review_, April, 1886.

_A Legend._

_An Old Song re-sung._

_Street Dancers._ This poem appeared in _The Leisure

Hour_, March, 1890.

_To an Isle in the Water._

_Quatrains and Aphorisms._ The first quatrain

originally appeared in _The Dublin University

Review_, February, 1886, under the title _Life_, and

the second and sixth in January, 1886, under the

title _In a Drawing Room_.

_The Seeker._ Originally appeared, under the title _The

Seeker. A Dramatic Poem. In Two Scenes_, in _The

Dublin University Review_, September, 1885.

_Island of Statues._ Originally appeared, under the

title _The Island of Statues. An Arcadian Faery Tale.

In Two Acts_, in _The Dublin University Review_,

April, May, June and July, 1885.

1891.

Ganconagh | John Sherman | and | Dhoya | London | T. Fisher Unwin |

Paternoster Square | M DCCC XCI

24mo, pp. iv and 196. _The Pseudonym Library_, issued in yellow paper

and in light brown linen. No. 10.

CONTENTS.

_Ganconagh’s Apology._

_John Sherman._

_Dhoya._

1892.

The | Countess Kathleen | and various Legends and Lyrics. | By | W. B.

Yeats. | “He who tastes a crust of bread | tastes all the stars and all

| the heavens.” | Paracelsus ab Hohenheim | Cameo Series | T. Fisher

Unwin Paternoster Sq. | London E.C. MDCCCXCII.

12mo, pp. 144. Paper boards with vellum back. Published in the Cameo

Series. Frontispiece by J. T. Nettleship.

CONTENTS.

_Preface._

_The Countess Cathleen._

_To the Rose upon the Rood of Time._

_Fergus and the Druid._ Originally appeared in _The

National Observer_, May 21, 1891.

_The Rose of the World._ Originally appeared, under

the title _Rosa Mundi_, in _The National Observer_,

January 2, 1892.

_The Peace of the Rose._ Originally appeared in _The

National Observer_, February 13, 1892.

_The Death of Cuchullin._ Originally appeared in

_United Ireland_, June 11, 1892.

_The White Birds._ Originally appeared in _The National

Observer_, May 7, 1892.

_Father Gilligan._ Originally appeared, under the title

_Father Gilligan_. (_A Legend told by the People of

Castleisland, Kerry._), in _The Scots Observer_, July

5, 1890.

_Father O’Hart._ Appeared, under the title _The Priest

of Coloony_ in _Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish

Peasantry_, 1888.

_When You are Old._

_The Sorrow of Love._

_The Ballad of the Old Foxhunter._ Originally appeared

in _East and West_, November, 1889.

_A Fairy Song._ Originally appeared in _The National

Observer_, September 12, 1891.

_The Pity of Love._

_The Lake Isle of Innisfree._ Originally appeared in

_The National Observer_, December 13, 1890.

_A Cradle Song._ Originally appeared in _The Scots

Observer_, April 19, 1890.

_The Man who Dreamed of Fairy Land._ Originally

appeared, under the title _A Man who dreamed of

Fairyland_, in _The National Observer_, February 7,

1891.

_Dedication of Irish Tales._ Originally appeared in

_Representative Irish Tales_, 1890.

_The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner._ Originally

appeared in _The Scots Observer_, November 15, 1890.

_When You are Sad._

_The Two Trees._

_They went forth to the Battle, but they always Fell._

_An Epitaph._ Originally appeared in _The National

Observer_, December 12, 1891.

_Apologia Addressed to Ireland in the Coming Days._

_Notes._

1893.

The Celtic Twilight. [in red] | Men and Women, Dhouls and | Faeries. |

By | W. B. Yeats. | With a frontispiece by J. B. Yeats. | (Press mark

of Lawrence and Bullen) | London: | Lawrence and Bullen, [in red] | 16,

Henrietta St., Covent Garden. | 1893.

18mo, pp. xii and 212. Cloth.

CONTENTS.

Poem: _Time drops in decay_. Originally appeared, under

the title _The Moods_, in _The Bookman_, Aug., 1893.

_The Host._ Originally appeared under the title _The

Faery Host_, in _The National Observer_, October 7,

1893.

_This Book._

_A Teller of Tales._ A part of this essay originally

appeared in the introduction to _Fairy and Folk Tales

of the Irish Peasantry_, 1888.

_Belief and Unbelief._ A part of this essay originally

appeared in an essay _Irish Fairies_ in _The Leisure

Hour_, October, 1890.

_A Visionary._ Originally appeared, under the title _An

Irish Visionary_, in _The National Observer_, October

3, 1891.

_Village Ghosts._ Originally appeared in _The Scots

Observer_, May 11, 1889.

_A Knight of the Sheep._ Originally appeared, under the

title _An Impression_, in _The Speaker_, October 21,

1893.

_The Sorcerers._

_The Last Gleeman._ Originally appeared in _The

National Observer_, May 6, 1893.

_Regina, Regina Pigmeorum, Veni._

_Kidnappers._ Originally appeared in _The Scots

Observer_, June 15, 1889.

_The Untiring Ones._

_The Man and his Boots._

_A Coward._

_The Three O’Byrnes and the Evil Faeries._ Originally

appeared as part of an essay _Irish Fairies_ in _The

Leisure Hour_, October, 1890.

_Drumcliff and Rosses._ Originally appeared, under

the title _Columkille and Rosses_, in _The Scots

Observer_, October 5, 1889.

_The Thick Skull of the Fortunate._

_The Religion of a Sailor._

_Concerning the Nearness Together of Heaven, Earth and

Purgatory._

_The Eaters of Precious Stones._

_Our Lady of the Hills._ Originally appeared in _The

Speaker_, November 11, 1893.

_The Golden Age._

_A Remonstrance with Scotsmen for having soured the

disposition of their Ghosts and Faeries._ Originally

appeared under the title _Scots and Irish Fairies_ in

_The Scots Observer_, March 2, 1889.

_The Four Winds of Desire._

_Into the Twilight._ Originally appeared, under

the title _The Celtic Twilight_ in _The National

Observer_, July 29, 1893.

1894.

The Land | of Heart’s | Desire | by | W. B. Yeats. | London: T. Fisher

| Unwin, Paternoster | Square. MDCCCXCIV

The left-hand side of the title-page bears Aubrey

Beardsley’s design for the Avenue Theatre poster,

much reduced in size and printed in black.

Sm. 4to, pp. 48. Pink paper cover, bearing reprint of

the title-page.

1895.

Poems | By W. B. Yeats | London: Published by T. Fisher Unwin. | No.

XI: Paternoster Buildings: MDCCCXCV [The whole forms part of a design

by H.G.F.]

Cr. 8vo, pp. xii and 288. Cloth.

CONTENTS.

_Preface._ (Dated Sligo, March 24, 1895.)

_To Some I have talked with by the fire._ Originally

appeared in _The Bookman_, May, 1895.

_The Wanderings of Usheen._[F]

_The Countess Cathleen._[G]

_The Land of Heart’s Desire._

_The Rose_:

_To the Rose upon the Rood of Time._[G]

_Fergus and the Druid._[G]

_The Death of Cuhoolin._[G]

_The Rose of the World._[G]

_The Rose of Peace._[G]

_The Rose of Battle._[G]

_A Faery Song._[G]

_The Lake Isle of Innisfree._[G]

_A Cradle Song._[G]

_The Pity of Love._[G]

_The Sorrow of Love._[G]

_When You are Old._[G]

_The White Birds._[G]

_A Dream of Death._[G]

_A Dream of a Blessed Spirit._ Originally appeared,

under the title _Kathleen_, in _The National

Observer_, October 31, 1891.

_The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland._[G]

_The Dedication to a Book of Stories selected from

the Irish Novelists._[G]

_The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner._[G]

_The Ballad of Father Gilligan._[G]

_The Two Trees._[G]

_To Ireland in the Coming Times._[G]

_Crossways_:

_The Song of the Happy Shepherd._[F]

_The Sad Shepherd._[F]

_The Cloak, the Boat, and the Shoes._[F] (A

re-writing of the first lines of _Island of

Statues_.)

_Anashuya and Vijaya._[F]

_The Indian upon God._[F]

_The Indian to his Love._[F]

_The Falling of the Leaves._[F]

_Ephemera._[F]

_The Madness of King Goll._[F]

_The Stolen Child._[F]

_To an Isle in the Water._[F]

_Down by the Salley Gardens._[F]

_The Meditation of the Old Fisherman._[F]

_The Ballad of Father O’Hart._[G]

_The Ballad of Moll Magee._[F]

_The Ballad of the Foxhunter._[G]

_Glossary._

1899. Second Edition, revised.

This edition has a portrait of the author by J. B. Yeats facing

title-page, the preface is re-written, and the contents re-arranged

thus:—

_Preface._ (Dated February 24, 1899.)

_To Some I have talked with by the fire._

_The Countess Cathleen._

_The Rose._

_The Land of Heart’s Desire._

_Crossways._

_The Wanderings of Oisin._

_Glossary._

1901. Third Edition, revised.

This edition has a new preface, dated January, 1901, and the note in

the glossary on _The Countess Cathleen_ is much enlarged.

1897.

The Secret Rose: [in red] | By W. B. Yeats, with | Illustrations by J.

B. | Yeats. | (Press mark of Lawrence and Bullen) | Lawrence & Bullen,

Limited, [in red] | 16 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, | London,

MDCCCXCVII.

Cr. 8vo, pp. xii and 268. Cloth.

CONTENTS.

_Dedication to ‘A.E.’_

_To the Secret Rose._ Originally appeared, under the

title _O’Sullivan Rua to the Secret Rose_, in _The

Savoy_, September, 1896.

_The Binding of the Hair._ Originally appeared in _The

Savoy_, January, 1896.

_The Wisdom of the King._ Originally appeared, under

the title _Wisdom_, in _The New Review_, Sept., 1895.

_Where there is Nothing, there is God._ Originally

appeared in _The Sketch_, October 21, 1896.

_The Crucifixion of the Outcast._ Originally appeared,

under the title _A Crucifixion_, in _The National

Observer_, March 24, 1894.

_Out of the Rose._ Originally appeared in _The National

Observer_, May 27, 1893.

_The Curse of the Fires and of the Shadows._ Originally

appeared in _The National Observer_, Aug. 5, 1893.

_The Heart of the Spring._ Originally appeared in _The

National Observer_, April 15, 1893.

_Of Costello the Proud, of Oona the Daughter of Dermott

and of the Bitter Tongue._ Originally appeared, under

the title _Costello the Proud, Oona MacDermott and

the Bitter Tongue_, in _The Pageant_, 1896.

_The Book of the Great Dhoul and Hanrahan the Red._

Originally appeared, under the title _The Devil’s

Book_, in _The National Observer_, November 26, 1892.

_The Twisting of the Rope and Hanrahan the Red._

Originally appeared, under the title _The Twisting of

the Rope_, in _The National Observer_, December 24,

1892.

_Kathleen the Daughter of Hoolihan and Hanrahan

the Red._ Originally appeared, under the title

_Kathleen-ny-Houlihan_, in _The National Observer_,

Aug. 4, 1894.

_The Curse of Hanrahan the Red._ Originally appeared,

under the title _The Curse of O’Sullivan the Red upon

Old Age_, in _The National Observer_, September 29,

1894.

_The Vision of Hanrahan the Red._ Originally appeared,

under the title _The Vision of O’Sullivan the Red_,

in _The New Review_, April, 1896.

_The Death of Hanrahan the Red._ Originally appeared,

under the title _The Death of O’Sullivan the Red_, in

_The New Review_, December, 1896.

_The Rose of Shadow._ Originally appeared under

the title _Those Who Live in the Storm_, in _The

Speaker_, July 21, 1894.

_The Old Men of the Twilight._ Originally appeared,

under the title _St. Patrick and the Pedants_, in

_The Weekly Sun Literary Supplement_, December 1,

1895.

_Rosa Alchemica._ Originally appeared in _The Savoy_,

April, 1896.

The Tables of the Law. | The Adoration of the Magi. | By W. B. Yeats. |

(Press mark of Lawrence and Bullen) | Privately Printed | MDCCCXCVII.

Cr. 8vo, pp. 48. Cloth. Portrait by J. B. Yeats facing title-page.

CONTENTS.

_The Tables of the Law._ Originally appeared in _The

Savoy_, November, 1896.

_The Adoration of the Magi._

One hundred and ten copies printed.

1904. First published edition:—

The Tables of the Law | and | The Adoration of the Magi | by | W. B.

Yeats | London | Elkin Mathews, Vigo Street | 1904

Royal 16mo, pp. 60 and iv of advertisements. Paper covers. No. 17 of

_The Vigo Cabinet Series_.

CONTENTS.

_Prefatory Note._

_The Tables of the Law._

_The Adoration of the Magi._

Also an Edition de Luxe, limited.

1899.

The Wind | Among the Reeds | By | W. B. Yeats | London: Elkin Mathews |

Vigo Street, W., 1899.

Cr. 8vo, pp. viii and 108. Cloth.

CONTENTS.

_The Hosting of the Sidhe._ For original appearance see

under title _The Host_, in _The Celtic Twilight_,

1893.

_The Everlasting Voices._ Originally appeared, under

the title _Everlasting Voices_, in _The New Review_,

January, 1896.

_The Moods._ For original appearance see _The Celtic

Twilight_, 1893.

_Aedh tells of the Rose in his Heart._ Originally

appeared, under the title _The Rose in my Heart_, in

_The National Observer_, November 12, 1892.

_The Host of the Air._ Originally appeared, under the

title _The Stolen Bride_, in _The Bookman_, Nov.,

1893.

_Breasal the Fisherman._ Originally appeared, under

the title _Bressel the Fisherman_, in _The Cornish

Magazine_, December, 1898.

_A Cradle Song._ Originally appeared as the first of

_Two Poems concerning Peasant Visionaries_, in _The

Savoy_, April, 1896.

_Into the Twilight._ For original appearance see _The

Celtic Twilight_, 1893.

_The Song of Wandering Aengus._

_The Song of the Old Mother._ Originally appeared in

_The Bookman_, April, 1894.

_The Fiddler of Dooney._ Originally appeared in _The

Bookman_, December, 1892.

_The Heart of the Woman._ Originally appeared in the

story _The Rose of Shadow_, in _The Secret Rose_.

_Aedh Laments the Loss of Love._ Originally appeared as

the second of _Aodh to Dectora. Three Songs_, in _The

Dome_, May, 1898.

_Mongan Laments the Change that has come upon him and

his Beloved._ Originally appeared, under the title

_The Desire of Man and of Woman_, in _The Dome_,

June, 1897.

_Michael Robartes bids his Beloved be at Peace._

Originally appeared, under the title _The Shadowy

Horses_, in _The Savoy_, January, 1896.

_Hanrahan reproves the Curlew._ Originally appeared,

under the title _Windlestraws_. 1. _O’Sullivan Rua to

the Curlew_, in _The Savoy_, November, 1896.

_Michael Robartes remembers forgotten Beauty._

Originally appeared, under the title _O’Sullivan Rua

to Mary Lavell_, in _The Savoy_, July, 1896.

_A Poet to his Beloved._ Originally appeared, under the

title _O’Sullivan the Red to Mary Lavell_, in _The

Senate_, March, 1896.

_Aedh gives his Beloved certain Rhymes_. Originally

appeared in the story _The Binding of the Hair_. See

_The Secret Rose_, 1897.

_To my Heart, bidding it have no Fear._ Originally

appeared, under the title _Windlestraws_. 11. _Out of

the Old Days_, in _The Savoy_, November, 1896.

_The Cap and Bells._ Originally appeared, under the

title _Cap and Bell_, in _The National Observer_,

March 17, 1894.

_The Valley of the Black Pig._ Originally appeared,

as the second of _Two Poems concerning Peasant

Visionaries_, in _The Savoy_, April, 1896.

_Michael Robartes asks Forgiveness because of his many

Moods._ Originally appeared, under the title _The

Twilight of Forgiveness_, in _The Saturday Review_,

November 2, 1895.

_Aedh tells of a Valley full of Lovers._ Originally

appeared under the title _The Valley of Lovers_, in

_The Saturday Review_, January 9, 1897.

_Aedh tells of the perfect Beauty._ Originally

appeared, under the title _O’Sullivan the Red to Mary

Lavell_, in _The Senate_, March, 1896.

_Aedh hears the Cry of the Sedge._ Originally appeared

as the first of _Aodh to Dectora. Three Songs_, in

_The Dome_, May, 1898.

_Aedh thinks of those who have spoken Evil of his

Beloved._ Originally appeared as the third of _Aodh

to Dectora. Three Songs_, in _The Dome_, May, 1898.

_The Blessed._ Originally appeared in _The Yellow

Book_, Volume XIII, April, 1897.

_The Secret Rose._ For original appearance see under

_The Secret Rose_, 1897.

_Hanrahan laments because of his Wanderings._

Originally appeared, under the title _O’Sullivan

the Red upon his Wanderings_, in _The New Review_,

August, 1897.

_The Travail of Passion._ Originally appeared in _The

Savoy_, January, 1896.

_The Poet pleads with his Friend for old Friends._

Originally appeared, under the title _Song_, in _The

Saturday Review_, July 24, 1897.

_Hanrahan Speaks to the Lovers of his Songs in coming

Days._ Originally appeared in the story _The Vision

of Hanrahan the Red_. See _The Secret Rose_, 1897.

_Aedh pleads with the Elemental Powers._ Originally

appeared, under the title _Aodh Pleads with the

Elemental Powers_, in _The Dome_, December, 1898.

_Aedh wishes his Beloved were dead._

_Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven._

_Mongan thinks of his past Greatness._ Originally

appeared, under the title _Song of Mongan_, in _The

Dome_, October, 1898.

_Notes._

1900.

The Shadowy Waters | By W. B. Yeats | London: Hodder and | Stoughton |

27 Paternoster Row: MCM

Cr. 4to, pp. 60. Cloth.

CONTENTS.

_I walked among the seven woods of Coole._ Originally

appeared, under the title _Introduction to a Dramatic

Poem_, in _The Speaker_, December 1, 1900.

_The Shadowy Waters._ Originally appeared in _The North

American Review_, May, 1900.

1902.

The Celtic Twilight [in red] | By W. B. Yeats | A. H. Bullen, [in red]

18 Cecil Court | St. Martin’s Lane, London, W.C. | MCMII

Cr. 8vo, pp. x and 236. Cloth.

Portrait by J. B. Yeats facing title-page.

CONTENTS.

Poem: _Time drops in decay._

_The Hosting of the Sidhe._

_This Book._ I. 1893. II. 1902.

_A Teller of Tales._

_Belief and Unbelief._

_Mortal Help._ Originally appeared in The Speaker,

April 19, 1902.

_A Visionary._ (With a new footnote.)

_Village Ghosts._

‘_Dust hath closed Helen’s Eye._’ I. 1900. II. 1902.

Part I originally appeared in _The Dome_, October,

1899.

_A Knight of the Sheep._

_An Enduring Heart._ Originally appeared in _The

Speaker_, April 26, 1902.

_The Sorcerers._ (With a new footnote.)

_The Devil._ Originally appeared in _The Speaker_,

April 19, 1902.

_Happy and Unhappy Theologians._ Originally appeared in

_The Speaker_, February 15, 1902.

_The Last Gleeman._

_Regina, Regina Pigmeorum Veni._ (With a new footnote.)

‘_And Fair, Fierce Women._’ Originally appeared in _The

Speaker_, April 19, 1902.

_Enchanted Woods._ Originally appeared in _The

Speaker_, January 18, 1902.

_Miraculous Creatures._ Originally appeared in _The

Speaker_, April 26, 1902.

_Aristotle of the Books._ Originally appeared in _The

Speaker_, April 19, 1902.

_The Swine of the Gods._ Originally appeared in _The

Speaker_, April 19, 1902.

_A Voice._ Originally appeared in _The Speaker_, April

19, 1902.

_Kidnappers._ (With a new footnote.)

_The Untiring Ones._ (With a new footnote.)

_Earth, Fire and Water._ Originally appeared in _The

Speaker_, March 15, 1902.

_The Old Town._ Originally appeared in _The Speaker_,

March 15, 1902.

_The Man and his Boots._

_A Coward._

_The Three O’Byrnes and the Evil Faeries._

_Drumcliffe and Rosses._

_The Thick Skull of the Fortunate._ I. 1893. II. 1902.

_The Religion of a Sailor._

_Concerning the nearness together of Heaven, Earth and

Purgatory._ 1892 and 1902.

_The Eaters of Precious Stones._

_Our Lady of the Hills._

_The Golden Age._

_A Remonstrance with Scotsmen for having soured the

disposition of their Ghosts and Faeries._

_War._ Originally appeared in _The Speaker_, March 15,

1902.

_The Queen and the Fool._ Originally appeared, under

the title _The Fool of Faery_, in _The Kensington_,

June, 1901.

_The Friends of the People of Faery._ Originally

appeared as part of an essay, _The Tribes of Danu_,

in _The New Review_, November, 1897.

_Dreams that have no moral._

_By the Roadside._ Originally appeared in _An Claideamh

Soluis_, July 13, 1901.

_Into the Twilight._

Cathleen ni Hoolihan | A Play in One Act and | in Prose by W. B. Yeats

| (ornament) [in red] | Printed at the Caradoc | Press Chiswick for A.

H. | Bullen 18 Cecil Court Lon | don MDCCCCII

Pott 8vo, pp. vi (blank) and 34. Paper boards with leather back.

Printed in red and black.

_Cathleen ni Hoolihan_ originally appeared in _Samhain_, 1902.

1903.

Ideas of Good and [in red] | Evil. [in red] By W. B. Yeats | A. H.

Bullen [in red] 47 Great Russell | Street, London, W.C. MCMIII

Cr. 8vo, pp. viii and 342. Paper boards with cloth back.

CONTENTS.

_What is ‘Popular Poetry?’_ Originally appeared in _The

Cornhill Magazine_, March, 1902.

_Speaking to the Psaltery._ Originally appeared in _The

Monthly Review_, May, 1902.

_Magic._ Originally appeared in _The Monthly Review_,

September, 1901.

_The Happiest of the Poets._ Originally appeared in

_The Fortnightly Review_, March, 1903.

_The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry:_

I. _His Ruling Ideas._ Originally appeared in _The

Dome_, July, 1900.

II. _His Ruling Symbols._

_At Stratford-on-Avon._ Originally appeared in _The Speaker_, May 11

and 18, 1901.

_William Blake and the Imagination._ Originally appeared under the

title _William Blake_, in _The Academy_, June 19, 1897.

_William Blake and his Illustrations to the Divine Comedy:_

I. _His Opinions upon Art._ Originally appeared in

_The Savoy_, July, 1896.

II. _His Opinions upon Dante._ Originally appeared in

_The Savoy_, August, 1896.

III. _The Illustrations of Dante._ Originally

appeared in _The Savoy_, September, 1896.

_Symbolism in Painting._ Originally appeared as part of the

introduction to _A Book of Images_, 1898.

_The Symbolism of Poetry._ Originally appeared in _The Dome_, April,

1900.

_The Theatre._ The first section of this essay originally appeared in

_The Dome_, April, 1899. The second originally appeared as part of an

essay, _The Irish Literary Theatre_, 1900, in _The Dome_, Jan., 1900.

_The Celtic Element in Literature._ The first section of this essay

originally appeared in _Cosmopolis_, June, 1898.

_The Autumn of the Body._ For original appearance see _The Autumn of

the Flesh_ in _Literary Ideals in Ireland_.

_The Moods._ Originally appeared as part of one of a series of articles

on _Irish National Literature_, in _The Bookman_, August, 1895.

_The Body of the Father Christian Rosencrux._ Originally appeared as

part of one of a series of articles on _Irish National Literature_, in

_The Bookman_, September, 1895.

_The Return of Ulysses._ Originally appeared, under the title _Mr.

Robert Bridges_, in _The Bookman_, June, 1897.

_Ireland and the Arts._ Originally appeared in _The United Irishman_,

August 31, 1901.

_The Galway Plains._ Originally appeared, under the title _Poets and

Dreamers_, in _The New Liberal Review_, March, 1903.

_Emotion of Multitude._

Where There is Nothing: | being Volume One of Plays | for an Irish

Theatre: by | W. B. Yeats | London: A. H. Bullen, 47, Great | Russell

Street, W.C. 1903.

Cr. 8vo, pp. xii and 132. Paper boards with cloth back.

CONTENTS.

_Dedication of Volumes One and Two of Plays for an

Irish Theatre._

_Where There is Nothing._ Originally appeared as

a supplement to _The United Irishman_, Samhain,

(Autumn) 1902.

In the Seven Woods: being poems | chiefly of the Irish Heroic Age | By

William Butler Yeats | The Dun Emer Press | Dundrum | MCMIII

8vo, pp. viii [unnumbered, i-iv blank] and 68 [the last four blank].

Linen with paper label. The book printed in red and black.

CONTENTS.

_In the Seven Woods._

_The Old Age of Queen Maeve._ Originally appeared in

_The Fortnightly Review_, April, 1903.

_Baile and Aillinn._ Originally appeared in _The

Monthly Review_, July, 1902.

_The Arrow._

_The Folly of Being Comforted._ Originally appeared in

_The Speaker_, January 11, 1902.

_The Withering of the Boughs._ Originally appeared,

under the title _Echtge of Streams_, in _The

Speaker_, August 25, 1900.

_Adam’s Curse._ Originally appeared in _The Monthly

Review_, December, 1902.

_The Song of Red Hanrahan._ Originally appeared, under

the title _Cathleen, Daughter of Hoolihan_, in _A

Broadsheet_, April, 1903.

_The Old Men admiring themselves in the Water._

Originally appeared in _The Pall Mall Magazine_,

January, 1903.

_Under the Moon._ Originally appeared in _The Speaker_,

June 15, 1901.

_The Players ask for a Blessing on the Psalteries and

themselves._

_The Rider from the North._ Originally appeared, under

the title _The Happy Townland_, in _The Weekly

Critical Review_, June, 1903.

_On Baile’s Strand, a Play._

Edition limited to 325 copies.

The Hour-Glass | a Morality | By | W. B. Yeats | London | Wm.

Heinemann, 21 Bedford St., W.C. | 1903

Demy 8vo, pp. 16 [the last two blank].

_The Hour-Glass_ originally appeared in _The North

American Review_, September, 1903.

A few copies only of this edition were printed, for purposes of

copyright.

1904.

The Hour-Glass, Cathleen | ni Hoolihan, The Pot of | Broth: Being

Volume Two of | Plays for an Irish Theatre: | By W. B. Yeats | London:

A. H. Bullen, 47, Great | Russell Street, W.C. 1904.

Cr. 8vo, pp. viii and 84. Paper boards with cloth back.

CONTENTS.

_The Hour-Glass: A Morality._ For original appearance

see above, under date 1903.

_Cathleen ni Hoolihan._ For original appearance see

above, under date 1902.

_The Pot of Broth._

_Note on the Music._

The King’s Threshold: and | On Baile’s Strand: Being | Volume Three of

Plays | for an Irish Theatre: By | W. B. Yeats | London: A. H. Bullen,

47, Great | Russell Street, W.C. 1904.

Cr. 8vo, pp. viii and 120. Paper boards with cloth back.

CONTENTS.

_Note._

_A Prologue._ Originally appeared in _The United

Irishman_, September 9, 1903.

[The Prologue, which was accidentally dropped from later editions, ran

thus:—

A PROLOGUE.[H]

_An _Old Man_ with a red dressing-gown, red slippers

and red night-cap, holding a brass candlestick with a

guttering candle in it, comes on from side of stage

and goes in front of the dull green curtain._

_Old Man._ I’ve got to speak the prologue. [_He shuffles on a few

steps._] My nephew, who is one of the play actors, came to me, and I

in my bed, and my prayers said, and the candle put out, and he told me

there were so many characters in this new play, that all the company

were in it, whether they had been long or short at the business, and

that there wasn’t one left to speak the prologue. Wait a bit, there’s a

draught here. [_He pulls the curtain closer together._] That’s better.

And that’s why I am here, and maybe I’m a fool for my pains.

And my nephew said, there are a good many plays to be played for you,

some to-night and some on other nights through the winter, and the most

of them are simple enough, and tell out their story to the end. But as

to the big play you are to see to-night, my nephew taught me to say

what the poet had taught him to say about it. [_Puts down candlestick

and puts right finger on left thumb._] First, he who told the story of

Seanchan on King Guaire’s threshold long ago in the old books told it

wrongly, for he was a friend of the king, or maybe afraid of the king,

and so he put the king in the right. But he that tells the story now,

being a poet, has put the poet in the right.

And then [_touches other finger_] I am to say: Some think it would be a

finer tale if Seanchan had died at the end of it, and the king had the

guilt at his door, for that might have served the poet’s cause better

in the end. But that is not true, for if he that is in the story but

a shadow and an image of poetry had not risen up from the death that

threatened him, the ending would not have been true and joyful enough

to be put into the voices of players and proclaimed in the mouths of

trumpets, and poetry would have been badly served. [_He takes up the

candlestick again._

And as to what happened Seanchan after, my nephew told me he didn’t

know, and the poet didn’t know, and it’s likely there’s nobody that

knows. But my nephew thinks he never sat down at the king’s table

again, after the way he had been treated, but that he went to some

quiet green place in the hills with Fedelm, his sweetheart, where the

poor people made much of him because he was wise, and where he made

songs and poems, and it’s likely enough he made some of the old songs

and the old poems the poor people on the hillsides are saying and

singing to-day. [_A trumpet-blast._

Well, it’s time for me to be going. That trumpet means that the curtain

is going to rise, and after a while the stage there will be filled up

with great ladies and great gentlemen, and poets, and a king with a

crown on him, and all of them as high up in themselves with the pride

of their youth and their strength and their fine clothes as if there

was no such thing in the world as cold in the shoulders, and speckled

shins, and the pains in the bones and the stiffness in the joints that

make an old man that has the whole load of the world on him ready for

his bed.

[_He begins to shuffle away, and then stops._

And it would be better for me, that nephew of mine to be thinking less

of his play-acting, and to have remembered to boil down the knap-weed

with a bit of threepenny sugar, for me to be wetting my throat with now

and again through the night, and drinking a sup to ease the pains in my

bones.

[_He goes out at side of stage._]

_The King’s Threshold._

_On Baile’s Strand._ Originally appeared in _In the

Seven Woods_, 1903.

Stories of Red Hanrahan by | William Butler Yeats | The Dun Emer Press

| Dundrum MCMIV

8vo, pp. viii [unnumbered, i-ii blank] and 64 [last seven blank].

Paper boards with linen back, paper labels on front and side. The book

printed in red and black; woodcut under Table of Contents on p. viii.

CONTENTS.

_Red Hanrahan._ Originally appeared in _The Independent

Review_, December, 1903.

_The Twisting of the Rope._

_Hanrahan and Cathleen the daughter of Hoolihan._

_Red Hanrahan’s Curse._

_Hanrahan’s Vision._ Originally appeared, under

the title _Red Hanrahan’s Vision_, in _McClure’s

Magazine_, March, 1905.

_The Death of Hanrahan._

Edition limited to 500 copies.

These stories are a re-telling in simpler language of some of the

stories in _The Secret Rose_.

1906.

Poems, 1899-1905 [in red] | By W. B. Yeats | London: A. H. Bullen |

Dublin: Maunsel & Co., | Ltd. | 1906.

Cr. 8vo, pp. xvi and 280. Cloth.

CONTENTS.

_Preface._ [Dated _In the Seven Woods_, 18 May, 1906.]

_I walked among the seven woods of Coole._[I]

_The Harp of Aengus._[I]

_The Shadowy Waters._ [A new version.]

_On Baile’s Strand._ [A new version.] _The Song of the

Women_ (pp. 102-104) originally appeared, under the

title _Against Witchcraft_, in _The Shanachie_ [No.

I., Spring, 1906].

_In the Seven Woods_:

_In the Seven Woods._[J]

_The Old Age of Queen Maeve._[J]

_Baile and Aillinn._[J]

_The Arrow._[J]

_The Folly of being Comforted._[J]

_Old Memory._ Originally appeared in _Wayfarer’s

Love_, 1904.

_Never Give all the Heart._ Originally appeared in

_McClure’s Magazine_, December, 1905.

_The Withering of the Boughs._[I]

_Adam’s Curse._[I]

_The Song of Red Hanrahan._[I]

_The Old Men admiring themselves in the Water._[I]

_Under the Moon._[I]

_The Players ask for a Blessing on the Psalteries and

themselves._[I]

_The Happy Townland._[I]

_The Entrance of Deirdre._ Two verses of this poem

originally appeared, under the title _Queen

Edaine_, in _McClure’s Magazine_, September, 1905,

and the whole poem under the title _The Praise of

Deirdre_, in _The Shanachie_ [No. I., Spring, 1906].

_The King’s Threshold._ [A new version.]

_Notes._

1907.

The Shadowy Waters, | By W. B. Yeats. | Acting Version, | As first

played at the Abbey Theatre, December 8th, 1906. | A. H. Bullen, | 47

Great Russell Street, London, W.C. | 1907.

Cr. 8vo, pp. 28. Green paper cover.

This is a slightly different version from that printed in _Poems_,

1899-1905.

Deirdre By W. B. Yeats | Being Volume Five of Plays | for an Irish

Theatre | London: A. H. Bullen | Dublin: Maunsel & Co., Ltd. | 1907.

Cr. 8vo, pp. viii and 48. Paper boards with cloth back.

CONTENTS.

_Deirdre._ For original appearance of the song _Why is

it, Queen Edain said_, see _The Entrance of Deirdre_,

in _Poems_, 1899-1905.

_Note._

Discoveries; A Volume of Essays | By William Butler Yeats. | (Woodcut)

| Dun Emer Press | Dundrum | MCMVII

8vo, pp. xvi [unnumbered, i-xi blank] and 56 [the last eleven blank].

Paper boards with linen back. The book printed in red and black.

CONTENTS.

_Prophet, Priest and King._

_Personality and the Intellectual Essences._

_The Musician and the Orator._

_A Banjo Player._

_The Looking-glass._

These five chapters appeared, under the general title

_My Thoughts and my Second Thoughts_, in _The

Gentleman’s Magazine_, September, 1906.

_The Tree of Life._

_The Praise of Old Wives’ Tales._

_The Play of Modern Manners._

_Has the Drama of Contemporary Life a Root of its Own?_

_Why the Blind Man in Ancient Times was made a Poet._

These five chapters appeared, under the general

title _My Thoughts and my Second Thoughts_, in The

Gentleman’s Magazine, October, 1906.

_Concerning Saints and Artists._

_The Subject Matter of Drama._

_The Two Kinds of Asceticism._

_In the Serpent’s Mouth._

_The Black and the White Arrows._

_His Mistress’s Eyebrows._

_The Tresses of the Hair._

These seven chapters appeared, under the general

title _My Thoughts and my Second Thoughts_, in _The

Gentleman’s Magazine,_ November, 1906.

_A Tower on the Apennine._

_The Thinking of the Body._

_Religious Belief necessary to symbolic Art._

_The Holy Places._

These four chapters appeared, under the general title

_Discoveries_, in The _Shanachie_, Autumn, 1907.

Edition limited to 200 copies.

1908.

The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats.

Imprinted at the Shakespeare Head Press, Stratford-on-Avon, MCMVIII.

Eight volumes. Demy 8vo. Quarter vellum back with grey linen sides.

With portraits by John S. Sargent, R.A., Signor Mancini, Charles

Shannon and J. B. Yeats.

VOLUME I.

CONTENTS.

_The Wind Among the Reeds._

_The Old Age of Queen Maeve._

_Baile and Aillinn._

_In the Seven Woods._

_Ballads and Lyrics._

_The Rose._

_The Wanderings of Oisin._

_Notes._

A few poems have been moved from _The Wind Among the Reeds_ to _Ballads

and Lyrics_ and _The Rose_. Two poems are added to _In the Seven

Woods_. These are:—

_The Hollow Wood._ Originally appeared in _The Twisting

of the Rope_ in _Stories of Red Hanrahan_, 1904.

_O do not love too long._ Originally appeared in _The

Acorn_, October, 1905.

VOLUME II.

_The King’s Threshold._

_On Baile’s Strand._

_Deirdre._

_The Shadowy Waters._

_Appendix I: Acting Version of ‘The Shadowy Waters.’_

_Appendix II: A different version of Deirdre’s

entrance._

_Appendix III: The Legendary and Mythological

Foundation of the Plays._

_Appendix IV_: The Dates and Places of Performance of

Plays.

VOLUME III.

_The Countess Cathleen._

_The Land of Heart’s Desire._

_The Unicorn from the Stars._ By Lady Gregory and W. B.

Yeats.

_Appendix: The Countess Cathleen._

_Notes._

_Music_ by Florence Farr and others.

VOLUME IV.

_The Hour-Glass._

_Cathleen ni Houlihan._

_The Golden Helmet._

_The Irish Dramatic Movement._ Under this title are

printed the greater part of Mr. Yeats’s contributions

to _Samhain_, 1901-1906, and to _The Arrow_,

1906-1907, and two essays, _An Irish National

Theatre_ and _The Theatre, the Pulpit, and the

Newspapers_, which originally appeared in _The United

Irishman_, October 10 and 17, 1903.

_Appendix I: ‘The Hour-Glass.’_

_Appendix II: ‘Cathleen ni Hoolihan.’_

_Appendix III: ‘The Golden Helmet.’_

_Appendix IV_: Dates and Places of the First

Performance of New Plays produced by the National

Theatre Society and its predecessors.

VOLUME V.

_The Celtic Twilight._

_Stories of Red Hanrahan._

VOLUME VI.

_Ideas of Good and Evil._

VOLUME VII.

_The Secret Rose._

[The _Red Hanrahan_ stories are here omitted from _The Secret Rose_ as

the later versions of them appear in Volume V. Two other stories which

appeared in the volume of 1897 are also omitted.]

_Rosa Alchemica._

_The Tables of the Law._

_The Adoration of the Magi._

_John Sherman._ With a new Preface.

_Dhoya._

VOLUME VIII.

_Discoveries._

_Edmund Spenser._ Originally appeared as the

introduction to _Poems of Spenser_, 1906.

_Poetry and Tradition._

_Modern Irish Poetry._ Originally appeared as the

introduction to _A Book of Irish Verse_, 1895.

_Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne._ Originally

appeared as the preface to _Cuchulain of Muirthemne_,

1902.

_Lady Gregory’s Gods and Fighting Men._ Originally

appeared as the preface to _Gods and Fighting Men_,

1904.

_Mr. Synge and his Plays._ Originally appeared as the

introduction to _The Well of the Saints_, 1905.

_Lionel Johnson._ For original appearance see _A

Treasury of Irish Poetry_, 1900.

_The Pathway._ Originally appeared, under the title

_The Way of Wisdom_, in _The Speaker_, April 14, 1900.