understood that our 'natural magic' is but the ancient religion of the
world, the ancient worship of nature and that troubled ecstasy before her,
that certainty of all beautiful places being haunted, which it brought
into men's minds. The ancient religion is in that passage of the
_Mabinogion_ about the making of 'Flower Aspect.' Gwydion and Math made
her 'by charms and illusions' 'out of flowers.' 'They took the blossoms of
the oak, and the blossoms of the broom, and the blossoms of the
meadow-sweet, and produced from them a maiden the fairest and most
graceful that man ever saw; and they baptized her, and called her Flower
Aspect'; and one finds it in the not less beautiful passage about the
burning Tree, that has half its beauty from calling up a fancy of leaves
so living and beautiful, they can be of no less living and beautiful a
thing than flame: 'They saw a tall tree by the side of the river, one half
of which was in flames from the root to the top, and the other half was
green and in full leaf.' And one finds it very certainly in the quotations
he makes from English poets to prove a Celtic influence in English poetry;
in Keats's 'magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in faery
lands forlorn'; in his 'moving waters at their priest-like task of pure
ablution round earth's human shore'; in Shakespeare's 'floor of heaven,'
'inlaid with patens of bright gold'; and in his Dido standing 'on the wild
sea banks,' 'a willow in her hand,' and waving it in the ritual of the old
worship of nature and the spirits of nature, to wave 'her love to come
again to Carthage.' And his other examples have the delight and wonder of
devout worshippers among the haunts of their divinities. Is there not such
delight and wonder in the description of Olwen in the _Mabinogion_: 'More
yellow was her hair than the flower of the broom, and her skin was whiter
than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands and her fingers than
the blossoms of the wood-anemone amidst the spray of the meadow
fountains.' And is there not such delight and wonder in--

  'Meet we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,
  By paved fountain or by rushy brook,
  Or on the beached margent of the sea'?

If men had never dreamed that fair women could be made out of flowers, or
rise up out of meadow fountains and paved fountains, neither passage could
have been written. Certainly, the descriptions of nature made in what
Matthew Arnold calls 'the faithful way,' or in what he calls 'the Greek
way,' would have lost nothing if all the meadow fountains or paved
fountains were meadow fountains and paved fountains and nothing more. When
Keats wrote, in the Greek way, which adds lightness and brightness to
nature--

  'What little town by river or sea-shore
  Or mountain built with quiet citadel,
  Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn';

when Shakespeare wrote in the Greek way--

  'I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
  Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows';

when Virgil wrote in the Greek way--

  'Muscosi fontes et somno mollior herba,'

and

  'Pallentes violas et summa papavera carpens
  Narcissum et florem jungit bene olentis anethi';

they looked at nature without ecstasy, but with the affection a man feels
for the garden where he has walked daily and thought pleasant thoughts.
They looked at nature in the modern way, the way of people who are
poetical, but are more interested in one another than in a nature which
has faded to be but friendly and pleasant, the way of people who have
forgotten the ancient religion.

Men who lived in a world where anything might flow and change, and become
any other thing; and among great gods whose passions were in the flaming
sunset, and in the thunder and the thunder-shower, had not our thoughts of
weight and measure. They worshipped nature and the abundance of nature,
and had always, as it seems, for a supreme ritual that tumultuous dance
among the hills or in the depths of the woods, where unearthly ecstasy
fell upon the dancers, until they seemed the gods or the godlike beasts,
and felt their souls overtopping the moon; and, as some think, imagined
for the first time in the world the blessed country of the gods and of the
happy dead. They had imaginative passions because they did not live within
our own strait limits, and were nearer to ancient chaos, every man's
desire, and had immortal models about them. The hare that ran by among the
dew might have sat upon his haunches when the first man was made, and the
poor bunch of rushes under their feet might have been a goddess laughing
among the stars; and with but a little magic, a little waving of the
hands, a little murmuring of the lips, they too could become a hare or a
bunch of rushes, and know immortal love and immortal hatred.

All folk literature, and all literature that keeps the folk tradition,
delights in unbounded and immortal things. The _Kalevala_ delights in the
seven hundred years that Luonaton wanders in the depths of the sea with
Wäinämöinen in her womb, and the Mahomedan king in the Song of Roland,
pondering upon the greatness of Charlemagne, repeats over and over, 'He is
three hundred years old, when will he weary of war?' Cuchulain in the
Irish folk tale had the passion of victory, and he overcame all men, and
died warring upon the waves, because they alone had the strength to
overcome him. The lover in the Irish folk song bids his beloved come with
him into the woods, and see the salmon leap in the rivers, and hear the
cuckoo sing, because death will never find them in the heart of the woods.
Oisin, new come from his three hundred years of faeryland, and of the love
that is in faeryland, bids St. Patrick cease his prayers a while and
listen to the blackbird, because it is the blackbird of Darrycarn that
Finn brought from Norway, three hundred years before, and set its nest
upon the oak-tree with his own hands. Surely if one goes far enough into
the woods, one will find there all that one is seeking? Who knows how many
centuries the birds of the woods have been singing?

All folk literature has indeed a passion whose like is not in modern
literature and music and art, except where it has come by some straight
or crooked way out of ancient times. Love was held to be a fatal sickness
in ancient Ireland, and there is a love-poem in _The Songs of Connacht_
that is like a death cry: 'My love, O she is my love, the woman who is
most for destroying me, dearer is she for making me ill than the woman who
would be for making me well. She is my treasure, O she is my treasure, the
woman of the grey eyes ... a woman who would not lay a hand under my
head.... She is my love, O she is my love, the woman who left no strength
in me; a woman who would not breathe a sigh after me, a woman who would
not raise a stone at my tomb.... She is my secret love, O she is my secret
love. A woman who tells me nothing,... a woman who does not remember me
to be out.... She is my choice, O she is my choice, the woman who would
not look back at me, the woman who would not make peace with me.... She is
my desire, O she is my desire: a woman dearest to me under the sun, a
woman who would not pay me heed, if I were to sit by her side. It is she
ruined my heart and left a sigh for ever in me.' There is another song
that ends, 'The Erne shall be in strong flood, the hills shall be torn
down, and the sea shall have red waves, and blood shall be spilled, and
every mountain valley and every moor shall be on high, before you shall
perish, my little black rose.' Nor do the old Irish weigh and measure
their hatred. The nurse of O'Sullivan Bere in the folk song prays that the
bed of his betrayer may be the red hearth-stone of hell for ever. And an
Elizabethan Irish poet cries: 'Three things are waiting for my death. The
devil, who is waiting for my soul and cares nothing for my body or my
wealth; the worms, who are waiting for my body but care nothing for my
soul or my wealth; my children, who are waiting for my wealth and care
nothing for my body or my soul. O Christ, hang all three in the one
noose.' Such love and hatred seek no mortal thing but their own infinity,
and such love and hatred soon become love and hatred of the idea. The
lover who loves so passionately can soon sing to his beloved like the
lover in the poem by 'A. E.,' 'A vast desire awakes and grows into
forgetfulness of thee.'

When an early Irish poet calls the Irishman famous for much loving, and a
proverb, a friend has heard in the Highlands of Scotland, talks of the
lovelessness of the Irishman, they may say but the same thing, for if your
passion is but great enough it leads you to a country where there are many
cloisters. The hater who hates with too good a heart soon comes also to
hate the idea only; and from this idealism in love and hatred comes, as I
think, a certain power of saying and forgetting things, especially a power
of saying and forgetting things in politics, which others do not say and
forget. The ancient farmers and herdsmen were full of love and hatred,
and made their friends gods, and their enemies the enemies of gods, and
those who keep their tradition are not less mythological. From this
'mistaking dreams,' which are perhaps essences, for 'realities' which are
perhaps accidents, from this 'passionate, turbulent reaction against the
despotism of fact,' comes, it may be, that melancholy which made all
ancient peoples delight in tales that end in death and parting, as modern
peoples delight in tales that end in marriage bells; and made all ancient
peoples, who like the old Irish had a nature more lyrical than dramatic,
delight in wild and beautiful lamentations. Life was so weighed down by
the emptiness of the great forests and by the mystery of all things, and
by the greatness of its own desires, and, as I think, by the loneliness of
much beauty; and seemed so little and so fragile and so brief, that
nothing could be more sweet in the memory than a tale that ended in death
and parting, and than a wild and beautiful lamentation. Men did not mourn
merely because their beloved was married to another, or because learning
was bitter in the mouth, for such mourning believes that life might be
happy were it different, and is therefore the less mourning; but because
they had been born and must die with their great thirst unslaked. And so
it is that all the august sorrowful persons of literature, Cassandra and
Helen and Deirdre, and Lear and Tristan, have come out of legends and are
indeed but the images of the primitive imagination mirrored in the little
looking-glass of the modern and classic imagination. This is that
'melancholy a man knows when he is face to face' with nature, and thinks
'he hears her communing with him about' the mournfulness of being born and
of dying; and how can it do otherwise than call into his mind 'its exiles,
its flights across the seas,' that it may stir the ever-smouldering ashes?
No Gaelic poetry is so popular in Gaelic-speaking places as the
lamentations of Oisin, old and miserable, remembering the companions and
the loves of his youth, and his three hundred years in faeryland, and his
faery love: all dreams withering in the winds of time lament in his
lamentations: 'The clouds are long above me this night; last night was a
long night to me; although I find this day long, yesterday was still
longer. Every day that comes to me is long.... No one in this great world
is like me--a poor old man dragging stones. The clouds are long above me
this night. I am the last man of the Fianna, the great Oisin, the son of
Finn, listening to the sound of bells. The clouds are long above me this
night.' Matthew Arnold quotes the lamentation of Leyrach Hen as a type of
the Celtic melancholy, but I prefer to quote it as a type of the primitive
melancholy; 'O my crutch, is it not autumn when the fern is red and the
water flag yellow? Have I not hated that which I love?... Behold, old age,
which makes sport of me, from the hair of my head and my teeth, to my
eyes which women loved. The four things I have all my life most hated fall
upon me together--coughing and old age, sickness and sorrow. I am old, I
am alone, shapeliness and warmth are gone from me, the couch of honour
shall be no more mine; I am miserable, I am bent on my crutch. How evil
was the lot allotted to Leyrach, the night he was brought forth! Sorrows
without end and no deliverance from his burden.' An Elizabethan writer
describes extravagant sorrow by calling it 'to weep Irish'; and Oisin and
Leyrach Hen are, I think, a little nearer even to us modern Irish than
they are to most people. That is why our poetry and much of our thought is
melancholy. 'The same man,' writes Dr. Hyde in the beautiful prose which
he first writes in Gaelic, 'who will to-day be dancing, sporting,
drinking, and shouting, will be soliloquizing by himself to-morrow, heavy
and sick and sad in his own lonely little hut, making a croon over
departed hopes, lost life, the vanity of this world, and the coming of
death.'

IV

Matthew Arnold asks how much of the Celt must one imagine in the ideal man
of genius. I prefer to say, how much of the ancient hunters and fishers
and of the ecstatic dancers among hills and woods must one imagine in the
ideal man of genius. Certainly a thirst for unbounded emotion and a wild
melancholy are troublesome things in the world, and do not make its life
more easy or orderly, but it may be the arts are founded on the life
beyond the world, and that they must cry in the ears of our penury until
the world has been consumed and become a vision. Certainly, as Samuel
Palmer wrote, 'Excess is the vivifying spirit of the finest art, and we
must always seek to make excess more abundantly excessive.' Matthew Arnold
has said that if he were asked 'where English got its turn for melancholy
and its turn for natural magic,' he 'would answer with little doubt that
it got much of its melancholy from a Celtic source, with no doubt at all
that from a Celtic source is got nearly all its natural magic.'

I will put this differently and say that literature dwindles to a mere
chronicle of circumstance, or passionless phantasies, and passionless
meditations, unless it is constantly flooded with the passions and beliefs
of ancient times, and that of all the fountains of the passions and
beliefs of ancient times in Europe, the Sclavonic, the Finnish, the
Scandinavian, and the Celtic, the Celtic alone has been for centuries
close to the main river of European literature. It has again and again
brought 'the vivifying spirit' 'of excess' into the arts of Europe. Ernest
Renan has told how the visions of purgatory seen by pilgrims to Lough
Derg--once visions of the pagan under-world, as the boat made out of a
hollow tree that bore the pilgrim to the holy island were alone enough to
prove--gave European thought new symbols of a more abundant penitence; and
had so great an influence that he has written, 'It cannot be doubted for a
moment that to the number of poetical themes Europe owes to the genius of
the Celt is to be added the framework of the divine comedy.'

A little later the legends of Arthur and his table, and of the Holy Grail,
once it seems the cauldron of an Irish God, changed the literature of
Europe, and it may be changed, as it were, the very roots of man's
emotions by their influence on the spirit of chivalry and on the spirit of
romance; and later still Shakespeare found his Mab, and probably his Puck,
and one knows not how much else of his faery kingdom, in Celtic legend;
while at the beginning of our own day Sir Walter Scott gave Highland
legends and Highland excitability so great a mastery over all romance
that they seem romance herself.

In our own time Scandinavian tradition, because of the imagination of
Richard Wagner and of William Morris and of the earlier and, as I think,
greater Heinrich Ibsen, has created a new romance, and through the
imagination of Richard Wagner, become all but the most passionate element
in the arts of the modern world. There is indeed but one other element as
passionate, the still unfaded legends of Arthur and of the Holy Grail; and
now a new fountain of legends, and, as I think, a more abundant fountain
than any in Europe, is being opened, the great fountain of Gaelic legends;
the tale of Deirdre, who alone among the women who have set men mad was at
once the white flame and the red flame, wisdom and loveliness; the tale of
the Sons of Tuireann, with its unintelligible mysteries, an old Grail
Quest as I think; the tale of the four children changed into four swans,
and lamenting over many waters; the tale of the love of Cuchulain for an
immortal goddess, and his coming home to a mortal woman in the end; the
tale of his many battles at the ford with that dear friend he kissed
before the battles, and over whose dead body he wept when he had killed
him; the tale of his death and of the lamentations of Emer; the tale of
the flight of Grainne with Diarmuid, strangest of all tales of the
fickleness of woman, and the tale of the coming of Oisin out of faeryland,
and of his memories and lamentations. 'The Celtic movement,' as I
understand it, is principally the opening of this fountain, and none can
measure of how great importance it may be to coming times, for every new
fountain of legends is a new intoxication for the imagination of the
world. It comes at a time when the imagination of the world is as ready,
as it was at the coming of the tales of Arthur and of the Grail, for a
new intoxication. The reaction against the rationalism of the eighteenth
century has mingled with a reaction against the materialism of the
nineteenth century, and the symbolical movement, which has come to
perfection in Germany in Wagner, in England in the Pre-Raphaelites, and in
France in Villiers De l'Isle Adam, and Mallarmé, and Maeterlinck, and has
stirred the imagination of Ibsen and D'Annunzio, is certainly the only
movement that is saying new things. The arts by brooding upon their own
intensity have become religious, and are seeking, as I think Verhaeren has
said, to create a sacred book. They must, as religious thought has always
done, utter themselves through legends; and the Sclavonic and Finnish
legends tell of strange woods and seas, and the Scandinavian legends are
held by a great master, and tell also of strange woods and seas, and the
Welsh legends are held by almost as many great masters as the Greek
legends, while the Irish legends move among known woods and seas, and
have so much of a new beauty, that they may well give the opening century
its most memorable symbols.

1897.

I could have written this essay with much more precision and have much
better illustrated my meaning if I had waited until Lady Gregory had
finished her book of legends, _Cuchulain of Muirthemne_, a book to set
beside the _Morte D'Arthur_ and the _Mabinogion_.

1902.

THE AUTUMN OF THE BODY

Our thoughts and emotions are often but spray flung up from hidden tides
that follow a moon no eye can see. I remember that when I first began to
write I desired to describe outward things as vividly as possible, and
took pleasure, in which there was, perhaps, a little discontent, in
picturesque and declamatory books. And then quite suddenly I lost the
desire of describing outward things, and found that I took little pleasure
in a book unless it was spiritual and unemphatic. I did not then
understand that the change was from beyond my own mind, but I understand
now that writers are struggling all over Europe, though not often with a
philosophic understanding of their struggle, against that picturesque and
declamatory way of writing, against that 'externality' which a time of
scientific and political thought has brought into literature. This
struggle has been going on for some years, but it has only just become
strong enough to draw within itself the little inner world which alone
seeks more than amusement in the arts. In France, where movements are more
marked, because the people are pre-eminently logical, _The Temptation of
S. Anthony_, the last great dramatic invention of the old romanticism,
contrasts very plainly with _Axël_, the first great dramatic invention of
the new; and Maeterlinck has followed Count Villiers de l'Isle Adam.
Flaubert wrote unforgettable descriptions of grotesque, bizarre, and
beautiful scenes and persons, as they show to the ear and to the eye, and
crowded them with historic and ethnographical details; but Count Villiers
de l'Isle Adam swept together, by what seemed a sudden energy, words
behind which glimmered a spiritual and passionate mood, as the flame
glimmers behind the dusky blue and red glass in an Eastern lamp; and
created persons from whom has fallen all even of personal characteristic
except a thirst for that hour when all things shall pass away like a
cloud, and a pride like that of the Magi following their star over many
mountains; while Maeterlinck has plucked away even this thirst and this
pride and set before us faint souls, naked and pathetic shadows already
half vapour and sighing to one another upon the border of the last abyss.
There has been, as I think, a like change in French painting, for one sees
everywhere, instead of the dramatic stories and picturesque moments of an
older school, frail and tremulous bodies unfitted for the labour of life,
and landscape where subtle rhythms of colour and of form have overcome the
clear outline of things as we see them in the labour of life.

There has been a like change in England, but it has come more gradually
and is more mixed with lesser changes than in France. The poetry which
found its expression in the poems of writers like Browning and of
Tennyson, and even of writers, who are seldom classed with them, like
Swinburne, and like Shelley in his earlier years, pushed its limits as far
as possible, and tried to absorb into itself the science and politics, the
philosophy and morality of its time; but a new poetry, which is always
contracting its limits, has grown up under the shadow of the old. Rossetti
began it, but was too much of a painter in his poetry to follow it with a
perfect devotion; and it became a movement when Mr. Lang and Mr. Gosse and
Mr. Dobson devoted themselves to the most condensed of lyric poems, and
when Mr. Bridges, a more considerable poet, elaborated a rhythm too
delicate for any but an almost bodiless emotion, and repeated over and
over the most ancient notes of poetry, and none but these. The poets who
followed have either, like Mr. Kipling, turned from serious poetry
altogether, and so passed out of the processional order, or speak out of
some personal or spiritual passion in words and types and metaphors that
draw one's imagination as far as possible from the complexities of modern
life and thought. The change has been more marked in English painting,
which, when intense enough to belong to the procession order, began to
cast out things, as they are seen by minds plunged in the labour of life,
so much before French painting that ideal art is sometimes called English
art upon the Continent.

I see, indeed, in the arts of every country those faint lights and faint
colours and faint outlines and faint energies which many call 'the
decadence,' and which I, because I believe that the arts lie dreaming of
things to come, prefer to call the autumn of the body. An Irish poet whose
rhythms are like the cry of a sea-bird in autumn twilight has told its
meaning in the line, 'The very sunlight's weary, and it's time to quit the
plough.' Its importance is the greater because it comes to us at the
moment when we are beginning to be interested in many things which
positive science, the interpreter of exterior law, has always denied:
communion of mind with mind in thought and without words, foreknowledge in
dreams and in visions, and the coming among us of the dead, and of much
else. We are, it may be, at a crowning crisis of the world, at the moment
when man is about to ascend, with the wealth, he has been so long
gathering, upon his shoulders, the stairway he has been descending from
the first days. The first poets, if one may find their images in the
_Kalevala_, had not Homer's preoccupation with things, and he was not so
full of their excitement as Virgil. Dante added to poetry a dialectic
which, although he made it serve his laborious ecstasy, was the invention
of minds trained by the labour of life, by a traffic among many things,
and not a spontaneous expression of an interior life; while Shakespeare
shattered the symmetry of verse and of drama that he might fill them with
things and their accidental relations to one another.

Each of these writers had come further down the stairway than those who
had lived before him, but it was only with the modern poets, with Goethe
and Wordsworth and Browning, that poetry gave up the right to consider all
things in the world as a dictionary of types and symbols and began to call
itself a critic of life and an interpreter of things as they are.
Painting, music, science, politics, and even religion, because they have
felt a growing belief that we know nothing but the fading and flowering of
the world, have changed in numberless elaborate ways. Man has wooed and
won the world, and has fallen weary, and not, I think, for a time, but
with a weariness that will not end until the last autumn, when the stars
shall be blown away like withered leaves. He grew weary when he said,
'These things that I touch and see and hear are alone real,' for he saw
them without illusion at last, and found them but air and dust and
moisture. And now he must be philosophical above everything, even about
the arts, for he can only return the way he came, and so escape from
weariness, by philosophy. The arts are, I believe, about to take upon
their shoulders the burdens that have fallen from the shoulders of
priests, and to lead us back upon our journey by filling our thoughts with
the essences of things, and not with things. We are about to substitute
once more the distillation of alchemy for the analyses of chemistry and
for some other sciences; and certain of us are looking everywhere for the
perfect alembic that no silver or golden drop may escape. Mr. Symons has
written lately on M. Mallarmé's method, and has quoted him as saying that
we should 'abolish the pretension, æsthetically an error, despite its
dominion over almost all the masterpieces, to enclose within the subtle
pages other than--for example--the horror of the forest or the silent
thunder in the leaves, not the intense dense wood of the trees,' and as
desiring to substitute for the old lyric afflatus or the enthusiastic
personal direction of the phrase' words 'that take light from mutual
reflection, like an actual trail of fire over precious stones,' and 'to
make an entire word hitherto unknown to the language' 'out of many
vocables.' Mr. Symons understands these and other sentences to mean that
poetry will henceforth be a poetry of essences, separated one from another
in little and intense poems. I think there will be much poetry of this
kind, because of an ever more arduous search for an almost disembodied
ecstasy, but I think we will not cease to write long poems, but rather
that we will write them more and more as our new belief makes the world
plastic under our hands again. I think that we will learn again how to
describe at great length an old man wandering among enchanted islands,
his return home at last, his slow-gathering vengeance, a flitting shape of
a goddess, and a flight of arrows, and yet to make all of these so
different things 'take light by mutual reflection, like an actual trail of
fire over precious stones,' and become 'an entire word,' the signature or
symbol of a mood of the divine imagination as imponderable as 'the horror
of the forest or the silent thunder in the leaves.'

1898.

THE MOODS

Literature differs from explanatory and scientific writing in being
wrought about a mood, or a community of moods, as the body is wrought
about an invisible soul; and if it uses argument, theory, erudition,
observation, and seems to grow hot in assertion or denial, it does so
merely to make us partakers at the banquet of the moods. It seems to me
that these moods are the labourers and messengers of the Ruler of All, the
gods of ancient days still dwelling on their secret Olympus, the angels of
more modern days ascending and descending upon their shining ladder; and
that argument, theory, erudition, observation, are merely what Blake
called 'little devils who fight for themselves,' illusions of our visible
passing life, who must be made serve the moods, or we have no part in
eternity. Everything that can be seen, touched, measured, explained,
understood, argued over, is to the imaginative artist nothing more than a
means, for he belongs to the invisible life, and delivers its ever new and
ever ancient revelation. We hear much of his need for the restraints of
reason, but the only restraint he can obey is the mysterious instinct that
has made him an artist, and that teaches him to discover immortal moods in
mortal desires, an undecaying hope in our trivial ambitions, a divine love
in sexual passion.

1895.

THE BODY OF THE FATHER CHRISTIAN ROSENCRUX

The followers of the Father Christian Rosencrux, says the old tradition,
wrapped his imperishable body in noble raiment and laid it under the house
of their order, in a tomb containing the symbols of all things in heaven
and earth, and in the waters under the earth, and set about him
inextinguishable magical lamps, which burnt on generation after
generation, until other students of the order came upon the tomb by
chance. It seems to me that the imagination has had no very different
history during the last two hundred years, but has been laid in a great
tomb of criticism, and had set over it inextinguishable magical lamps of
wisdom and romance, and has been altogether so nobly housed and apparelled
that we have forgotten that its wizard lips are closed, or but opened for
the complaining of some melancholy and ghostly voice. The ancients and
the Elizabethans abandoned themselves to imagination as a woman abandons
herself to love, and created great beings who made the people of this
world seem but shadows, and great passions which made our loves and
hatreds appear but ephemeral and trivial phantasies; but now it is not the
great persons, or the great passions we imagine, which absorb us, for the
persons and passions in our poems are mainly reflections our mirror has
caught from older poems or from the life about us, but the wise comments
we make upon them, the criticism of life we wring from their fortunes.
Arthur and his Court are nothing, but the many-coloured lights that play
about them are as beautiful as the lights from cathedral windows; Pompilia
and Guido are but little, while the ever-recurring meditations and
expositions which climax in the mouth of the Pope are among the wisest of
the Christian age. I cannot get it out of my mind that this age of
criticism is about to pass, and an age of imagination, of emotion, of
moods, of revelation, about to come in its place; for certainly belief in
a supersensual world is at hand again; and when the notion that we are
'phantoms of the earth and water' has gone down the wind, we will trust
our own being and all it desires to invent; and when the external world is
no more the standard of reality, we will learn again that the great
Passions are angels of God, and that to embody them 'uncurbed in their
eternal glory,' even in their labour for the ending of man's peace and
prosperity, is more than to comment, however wisely, upon the tendencies
of our time, or to express the socialistic, or humanitarian, or other
forces of our time, or even 'to sum up' our time, as the phrase is; for
Art is a revelation, and not a criticism, and the life of the artist is in
the old saying, 'The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the
sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth;
so is every one that is born of the spirit.'

1895.

THE RETURN OF ULYSSES

M. Maeterlinck, in his beautiful _Treasure of the Humble_, compares the
dramas of our stage to the paintings of an obsolete taste; and the dramas
of the stage for which he hopes, to the paintings of a taste that cannot
become obsolete. 'The true artist,' he says, 'no longer chooses Marius
triumphing over the Cimbrians, or the assassination of the Duke of Guise,
as fit subjects for his art; for he is well aware that the psychology of
victory or murder is but elementary and exceptional, and that the solemn
voice of men and things, the voice that issues forth so timidly and
hesitatingly, cannot be heard amidst the idle uproar of acts of violence.
And therefore will he place on his canvas a house lost in the heart of the
country, a door open at the end of a passage, a face or hands at rest.' I
do not understand him to mean that our dramas should have no victories or
murders, for he quotes for our example plays that have both, but only that
their victories and murders shall not be to excite our nerves, but to
illustrate the reveries of a wisdom which shall be as much a part of the
daily life of the wise as a face or hands at rest. And certainly the
greater plays of the past ages have been built after such a fashion. If
this fashion is about to become our fashion also, and there are signs that
it is, plays like some of Mr. Robert Bridges will come out of that
obscurity into which all poetry, that is not lyrical poetry, has fallen,
and even popular criticism will begin to know something about them. Some
day the few among us, who care for poetry more than any temporal thing,
and who believe that its delights cannot be perfect when we read it alone
in our rooms and long for one to share its delights, but that they might
be perfect in the theatre, when we share them friend with friend, lover
with beloved, will persuade a few idealists to seek out the lost art of
speaking, and seek out ourselves the lost art, that is perhaps nearest of
all arts to eternity, the subtle art of listening. When that day comes we
will talk much of Mr. Bridges; for did he not write scrupulous, passionate
poetry to be sung and to be spoken, when there were few to sing and as yet
none to speak? There is one play especially, _The Return of Ulysses_,
which we will praise for perfect after its kind, the kind of our new drama
of wisdom, for it moulds into dramatic shape, and with as much as possible
of literal translation, those closing books of the Odyssey which are
perhaps the most perfect poetry of the world, and compels that great tide
of song to flow through delicate dramatic verse, with little abatement of
its own leaping and clamorous speed. As I read, the gathering passion
overwhelms me, as it did when Homer himself was the singer, and when I
read at last the lines in which the maid describes to Penelope the battle
with the suitors, at which she looks through the open door, I tremble
with excitement.

  '_Penelope_: Alas! what cries! Say, is the prince still safe?

  _The Maid_: He shieldeth himself well, and striketh surely;
  His foes fall down before him. Ah! now what can I see?
  Who cometh? Lo! a dazzling helm, a spear
  Of silver or electron; sharp and swift
  The piercings. How they fall! Ha! shields are raised
  In vain. I am blinded, or the beggar-man
  Hath waxed in strength. He is changed, he is young. O strange!
  He is all in golden armour. These are gods
  That slay the suitors. (_Runs to Penelope._) O lady, forgive me.
  Tis Ares' self. I saw his crispèd beard;
  I saw beneath his helm his curlèd locks.'

The coming of Athene helmed 'in silver or electron' and her transformation
of Ulysses are not, as the way is with the only modern dramas that popular
criticism holds to be dramatic, the climax of an excitement of the nerves,
but of that unearthly excitement which has wisdom for fruit, and is of
like kind with the ecstasy of the seers, an altar flame, unshaken by the
winds of the world, and burning every moment with whiter and purer
brilliance.

Mr. Bridges has written it in what is practically the classical manner, as
he has done in _Achilles in Scyros_--a placid and charming setting for
many placid and charming lyrics--

  'And ever we keep a feast of delight
  The betrothal of hearts, when spirits unite,
  Creating an offspring of joy, a treasure
      Unknown to the bad, for whom
      The gods foredoom
      The glitter of pleasure
      And a dark tomb.'

The poet who writes best in the Shakespearian manner is a poet with a
circumstantial and instinctive mind, who delights to speak with strange
voices and to see his mind in the mirror of Nature; while Mr. Bridges,
like most of us to-day, has a lyrical and meditative mind, and delights to
speak with his own voice and to see Nature in the mirror of his mind. In
reading his plays in a Shakespearian manner, I find that he is constantly
arranging his story in such and such a way because he has read that the
persons he is writing of did such and such things, and not because his
soul has passed into the soul of their world and understood its
unchangeable destinies. His _Return of Ulysses_ is admirable in beauty,
because its classical gravity of speech, which does not, like
Shakespeare's verse, desire the vivacity of common life, purifies and
subdues all passion into lyrical and meditative ecstasies, and because the
unity of place and time in the late acts compels a logical rather than
instinctive procession of incidents; and if the Shakespearian _Nero:
Second Part_ approaches it in beauty and in dramatic power, it is because
it eddies about Nero and Seneca, who had both, to a great extent, lyrical
and meditative minds. Had Mr. Bridges been a true Shakespearian, the pomp
and glory of the world would have drowned that subtle voice that speaks
amid our heterogeneous lives of a life lived in obedience to a lonely and
distinguished ideal.

II

The more a poet rids his verses of heterogeneous knowledge and irrelevant
analysis, and purifies his mind with elaborate art, the more does the
little ritual of his verse resemble the great ritual of Nature, and become
mysterious and inscrutable. He becomes, as all the great mystics have
believed, a vessel of the creative power of God; and whether he be a great
poet or a small poet, we can praise the poems, which but seem to be his,
with the extremity of praise that we give this great ritual which is but
copied from the same eternal model. There is poetry that is like the white
light of noon, and poetry that has the heaviness of woods, and poetry that
has the golden light of dawn or of sunset; and I find in the poetry of
Mr. Bridges in the plays, but still more in the lyrics, the pale colours,
the delicate silence, the low murmurs of cloudy country days, when the
plough is in the earth, and the clouds darkening towards sunset; and had I
the great gift of praising, I would praise it as I would praise these
things.

1896.

IRELAND AND THE ARTS

The arts have failed; fewer people are interested in them every
generation. The mere business of living, of making money, of amusing
oneself, occupies people more and more, and makes them less and less
capable of the difficult art of appreciation. When they buy a picture it
generally shows a long-current idea, or some conventional form that can be
admired in that lax mood one admires a fine carriage in or fine horses in;
and when they buy a book it is so much in the manner of the picture that
it is forgotten, when its moment is over, as a glass of wine is forgotten.
We who care deeply about the arts find ourselves the priesthood of an
almost forgotten faith, and we must, I think, if we would win the people
again, take upon ourselves the method and the fervour of a priesthood. We
must be half humble and half proud. We see the perfect more than others,
it may be, but we must find the passions among the people. We must
baptize as well as preach.

The makers of religions have established their ceremonies, their form of
art, upon fear of death, on the hope of the father in his child, upon the
love of man and woman. They have even gathered into their ceremonies the
ceremonies of more ancient faiths, for fear a grain of the dust turned
into crystal in some past fire, a passion that had mingled with the
religious idea, might perish if the ancient ceremony perished. They have
renamed wells and images and given new meanings to ceremonies of spring
and midsummer and harvest. In very early days the arts were so possessed
by this method that they were almost inseparable from religion, going side
by side with it into all life. But, to-day, they have grown, as I think,
too proud, too anxious to live alone with the perfect, and so one sees
them, as I think, like charioteers standing by deserted chariots and
holding broken reins in their hands, or seeking to go upon their way drawn
by the one passion which alone remains to them out of the passions of the
world. We should not blame them, but rather a mysterious tendency in
things which will have its end some day. In England, men like William
Morris, seeing about them passions so long separated from the perfect that
it seemed as if they could not be changed until society had been changed,
tried to unite the arts once more to life by uniting them to use. They
advised painters to paint fewer pictures upon canvas, and to burn more of
them on plates; and they tried to persuade sculptors that a candlestick
might be as beautiful as a statue. But here in Ireland, when the arts have
grown humble, they will find two passions ready to their hands, love of
the Unseen Life and love of country. I would have a devout writer or
painter often content himself with subjects taken from his religious
beliefs; and if his religious beliefs are those of the majority, he may at
last move hearts in every cottage. While even if his religious beliefs are
those of some minority, he will have a better welcome than if he wrote of
the rape of Persephone, or painted the burning of Shelley's body. He will
have founded his work on a passion which will bring him to many besides
those who have been trained to care for beautiful things by a special
education. If he is a painter or a sculptor he will find churches awaiting
his hand everywhere, and if he follows the masters of his craft our other
passion will come into his work also, for he will show his Holy Family
winding among hills like those of Ireland, and his Bearer of the Cross
among faces copied from the faces of his own town. Our art teachers should
urge their pupils into this work, for I can remember, when I was myself a
Dublin art student, how I used to despond, when eagerness burned low, as
it always must now and then, at seeing no market at all.

But I would rather speak to those who, while moved in other things than
the arts by love of country, are beginning to write, as I was some sixteen
years ago, without any decided impulse to one thing more than another, and
especially to those who are convinced, as I was convinced, that art is
tribeless, nationless, a blossom gathered in No Man's Land. The Greeks,
the only perfect artists of the world, looked within their own borders,
and we, like them, have a history fuller than any modern history of
imaginative events; and legends which surpass, as I think, all legends but
theirs in wild beauty, and in our land, as in theirs, there is no river or
mountain that is not associated in the memory with some event or legend;
while political reasons have made love of country, as I think, even
greater among us than among them. I would have our writers and craftsmen
of many kinds master this history and these legends, and fix upon their
memory the appearance of mountains and rivers and make it all visible
again in their arts, so that Irishmen, even though they had gone thousands
of miles away, would still be in their own country. Whether they chose for
the subject the carrying off of the Brown Bull, or the coming of Patrick,
or the political struggle of later times, the other world comes so much
into it all that their love of it would move in their hands also, and as
much, it may be, as in the hands of the Greek craftsmen. In other words, I
would have Ireland recreate the ancient arts, the arts as they were
understood in Judæa, in India, in Scandinavia, in Greece and Rome, in
every ancient land; as they were understood when they moved a whole people
and not a few people who have grown up in a leisured class and made this
understanding their business.

I think that my reader[2] will have agreed with most that I have said up
till now, for we all hope for arts like these. I think indeed I first
learned to hope for them myself in Young Ireland Societies, or in reading
the essays of Davis. An Englishman, with his belief in progress, with his
instinctive preference for the cosmopolitan literature of the last
century, may think arts like these parochial, but they are the arts we
have begun the making of.

I will not, however, have all my readers with me when I say that no
writer, no artist, even though he choose Brian Boroihme or S. Patrick for
his subject, should try to make his work popular. Once he has chosen a
subject he must think of nothing but giving it such an expression as will
please himself. As Walt Whitman has written--

  'The oration is to the orator, the acting is to the actor and actress,
      not to the audience:
  And no man understands any greatness or goodness but his own or the
      indication of his own.'

He must make his work a part of his own journey towards beauty and truth.
He must picture saint or hero, or hillside, as he sees them, not as he is
expected to see them, and he must comfort himself, when others cry out
against what he has seen, by remembering that no two men are alike, and
that there is no 'excellent beauty without strangeness.' In this matter he
must be without humility. He may, indeed, doubt the reality of his vision
if men do not quarrel with him as they did with the Apostles, for there is
only one perfection and only one search for perfection, and it sometimes
has the form of the religious life and sometimes of the artistic life; and
I do not think these lives differ in their wages, for 'The end of art is
peace,' and out of the one as out of the other comes the cry: _Sero te
amavi, Pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova! Sero te amavi!_

The Catholic Church is not the less the Church of the people because the
Mass is spoken in Latin, and art is not less the art of the people
because it does not always speak in the language they are used to. I once
heard my friend Mr. Ellis say, speaking at a celebration in honour of a
writer whose fame had not come till long after his death, 'It is not the
business of a poet to make himself understood, but it is the business of
the people to understand him. That they are at last compelled to do so is
the proof of his authority.' And certainly if you take from art its
martyrdom, you will take from it its glory. It might still reflect the
passing modes of mankind, but it would cease to reflect the face of God.

If our craftsmen were to choose their subjects under what we may call, if
we understand faith to mean that belief in a spiritual life which is not
confined to one Church, the persuasion of their faith and their country,
they would soon discover that although their choice seemed arbitrary at
first, it had obeyed what was deepest in them. I could not now write of
any other country but Ireland, for my style has been shaped by the
subjects I have worked on, but there was a time when my imagination seemed
unwilling, when I found myself writing of some Irish event in words that
would have better fitted some Italian or Eastern event, for my style had
been shaped in that general stream of European literature which has come
from so many watersheds, and it was slowly, very slowly, that I made a new
style. It was years before I could rid myself of Shelley's Italian light,
but now I think my style is myself. I might have found more of Ireland if
I had written in Irish, but I have found a little, and I have found all
myself. I am persuaded that if the Irishmen who are painting conventional
pictures or writing conventional books on alien subjects, which have been
worn away like pebbles on the shore, would do the same, they, too, might
find themselves. Even the landscape-painter, who paints a place that he
loves, and that no other man has painted, soon discovers that no style
learned in the studios is wholly fitted to his purpose. And I cannot but
believe that if our painters of Highland cattle and moss-covered barns
were to care enough for their country to care for what makes it different
from other countries, they would discover, when struggling, it may be, to
paint the exact grey of the bare Burren Hills, and of a sudden it may be,
a new style, their very selves. And I admit, though in this I am moved by
some touch of fanaticism, that even when I see an old subject written of
or painted in a new way, I am yet jealous for Cuchulain, and for Baile,
and Aillinn, and for those grey mountains that still are lacking their
celebration. I sometimes reproach myself because I cannot admire Mr.
Hughes' beautiful, piteous _Orpheus and Eurydice_ with an unquestioning
mind. I say with my lips, 'The Spirit made it, for it is beautiful, and
the Spirit bloweth where it listeth,' but I say in my heart, 'Aengus and
Etain would have served his turn;' but one cannot, perhaps, love or
believe at all if one does not love or believe a little too much.

And I do not think with unbroken pleasure of our scholars who write about
German writers or about periods of Greek history. I always remember that
they could give us a number of little books which would tell, each book
for some one country, or some one parish, the verses, or the stories, or
the events that would make every lake or mountain a man can see from his
own door an excitement in his imagination. I would have some of them leave
that work of theirs which will never lack hands, and begin to dig in
Ireland, the garden of the future, understanding that here in Ireland the
spirit of man may be about to wed the soil of the world.

Art and scholarship like these I have described would give Ireland more
than they received from her, for they would make love of the unseen more
unshakable, more ready to plunge deep into the abyss, and they would make
love of country more fruitful in the mind, more a part of daily life. One
would know an Irishman into whose life they had come--and in a few
generations they would come into the life of all, rich and poor--by
something that set him apart among men. He himself would understand that
more was expected of him than of others because he had greater
possessions. The Irish race would have become a chosen race, one of the
pillars that uphold the world.

1901.

THE GALWAY PLAINS

Lady Gregory has just given me her beautiful _Poets and Dreamers_, and it
has brought to mind a day two or three years ago when I stood on the side
of Slieve Echtge, looking out over Galway. The Burren Hills were to my
left, and though I forget whether I could see the cairn over Bald Conan of
the Fianna, I could certainly see many places there that are in poems and
stories. In front of me, over many miles of level Galway plains, I saw a
low blue hill flooded with evening light. I asked a countryman who was
with me what hill that was, and he told me it was Cruachmaa of the Sidhe.
I had often heard of Cruachmaa of the Sidhe even as far north as Sligo,
for the country people have told me a great many stories of the great host
of the Sidhe who live there, still fighting and holding festivals.

I asked the old countryman about it, and he told me of strange women who
had come from it, and who would come into a house having the appearance of
countrywomen, but would know all that had happened in that house; and how
they would always pay back with increase, though not by their own hands,
whatever was given to them. And he had heard, too, of people who had been
carried away into the hill, and how one man went to look for his wife
there, and dug into the hill and all but got his wife again, but at the
very moment she was coming out to him, the pick he was digging with struck
her upon the head and killed her. I asked him if he had himself seen any
of its enchantments, and he said, 'Sometimes when I look over to the hill,
I see a mist lying on the top of it, that goes away after a while.'

A great part of the poems and stories in Lady Gregory's book were made or
gathered between Burren and Cruachmaa. It was here that Raftery, the
wandering country poet of ninety years ago, praised and blamed, chanting
fine verses, and playing badly on his fiddle. It is here the ballads of
meeting and parting have been sung, and some whose lamentations for defeat
are still remembered may have passed through this plain flying from the
battle of Aughrim.

'I will go up on the mountain alone; and I will come hither from it again.
It is there I saw the camp of the Gael, the poor troop thinned, not
keeping with one another; Och Ochone!' And here, if one can believe many
devout people whose stories are in the book, Christ has walked upon the
roads, bringing the needy to some warm fireside, and sending one of His
Saints to anoint the dying.

I do not think these country imaginations have changed much for centuries,
for they are still busy with those two themes of the ancient Irish poets,
the sternness of battle and the sadness of parting and death. The emotion
that in other countries has made many love songs has here been given, in
a long wooing, to danger, that ghostly bride. It is not a difference in
the substance of things that the lamentations that were sung after battles
are now sung for men who have died upon the gallows.

The emotion has become not less, but more noble, by the change, for the
man who goes to his death with the thought--

  'It is with the people I was,
  It is not with the law I was,'

has behind him generations of poetry and poetical life.

The poets of to-day speak with the voice of the unknown priest who wrote,
some two hundred years ago, that _Sorrowful Lament for Ireland_, Lady
Gregory has put into passionate and rhythmical prose--

  'I do not know of anything under the sky
  That is friendly or favourable to the Gael,
  But only the sea that our need brings us to,
  Or the wind that blows to the harbour
  The ship that is bearing us away from Ireland;
  And there is reason that these are reconciled with us,
  For we increase the sea with our tears,
  And the wandering wind with our sighs.'

There is still in truth upon these great level plains a people, a
community bound together by imaginative possessions, by stories and poems
which have grown out of its own life, and by a past of great passions
which can still waken the heart to imaginative action. One could still, if
one had the genius, and had been born to Irish, write for these people
plays and poems like those of Greece. Does not the greatest poetry always
require a people to listen to it? England or any other country which takes
its tune from the great cities and gets its taste from schools and not
from old custom, may have a mob, but it cannot have a people. In England
there are a few groups of men and women who have good taste, whether in
cookery or in books; and the great multitudes but copy them or their
copiers. The poet must always prefer the community where the perfected
minds express the people, to a community that is vainly seeking to copy
the perfected minds. To have even perfectly the thoughts that can be
weighed, the knowledge that can be got from books, the precision that can
be learned at school, to belong to any aristocracy, is to be a little pool
that will soon dry up. A people alone are a great river; and that is why I
am persuaded that where a people has died, a nation is about to die.

1903.

EMOTION OF MULTITUDE

I have been thinking a good deal about plays lately, and I have been
wondering why I dislike the clear and logical construction which seems
necessary if one is to succeed on the Modern Stage. It came into my head
the other day that this construction, which all the world has learnt from
France, has everything of high literature except the emotion of multitude.
The Greek drama has got the emotion of multitude from its chorus, which
called up famous sorrows, long-leaguered Troy, much-enduring Odysseus, and
all the gods and heroes to witness, as it were, some well-ordered fable,
some action separated but for this from all but itself. The French play
delights in the well-ordered fable, but by leaving out the chorus it has
created an art where poetry and imagination, always the children of
far-off multitudinous things, must of necessity grow less important than
the mere will. This is why, I said to myself, French dramatic poetry is
so often a little rhetorical, for rhetoric is the will trying to do the
work of the imagination. The Shakespearean Drama gets the emotion of
multitude out of the sub-plot which copies the main plot, much as a shadow
upon the wall copies one's body in the firelight. We think of King Lear
less as the history of one man and his sorrows than as the history of a
whole evil time. Lear's shadow is in Gloster, who also has ungrateful
children, and the mind goes on imagining other shadows, shadow beyond
shadow till it has pictured the world. In _Hamlet_, one hardly notices, so
subtly is the web woven, that the murder of Hamlet's father and the sorrow
of Hamlet are shadowed in the lives of Fortinbras and Ophelia and Laertes,
whose fathers, too, have been killed. It is so in all the plays, or in all
but all, and very commonly the sub-plot is the main plot working itself
out in more ordinary men and women, and so doubly calling up before us
the image of multitude. Ibsen and Maeterlinck have on the other hand
created a new form, for they get multitude from the Wild Duck in the
Attic, or from the Crown at the bottom of the Fountain, vague symbols that
set the mind wandering from idea to idea, emotion to emotion. Indeed all
the great Masters have understood, that there cannot be great art without
the little limited life of the fable, which is always the better the
simpler it is, and the rich, far-wandering, many-imaged life of the
half-seen world beyond it. There are some who understand that the simple
unmysterious things living as in a clear noon-light are of the nature of
the sun, and that vague many-imaged things have in them the strength of
the moon. Did not the Egyptian carve it on emerald that all living things
have the sun for father and the moon for mother, and has it not been said
that a man of genius takes the most after his mother?

1903.

Footnotes:

[1] 'Marianne's Dream' was certainly copied from a real dream of
somebody's, but like images come to the mystic in his waking state.

[2] This essay was first published in the _United Irishman_.

Transcriber's Note:

Unmatched quotation marks and spelling variants are presented as in
the original text.

End of Project Gutenberg's Ideas of Good and Evil, by William Butler Yeats