It is fortunate indeed that Irish mythology, in attracting Mr. Yeats's imagination, laid hold of something which mythology had never found before-a great artist to absorb and interpret it. This is a new thing in Irish literature. The Gaelic bards and sagamen had the creative touch and musical utterance, but next to no sense of the profound rhythms of life and thought. Moore was an accomplished mechanician of verse, but could rarely produce anything outside his regular stock of tunes. Ferguson had the 'grand manner,' but not always the sustained and arduous intensity of poetic passion informing every vibrating line; and Mangan, who had this intensity at times, fell-like many Irish poets of high natural endowment— too easily into the trivial and commonplace both in thought and diction. Mr. Yeats, however, with a certain reservation which I shall refer to later, is an artist pur sang. Though he has deemed much of his work not worth republishing, I do not think he has ever written one feeble or worthless passage-one that is not alive with the life of the imagination, and that does not re-echo in some degree the music at the heart of things. He has in this way set a shining example to Irish writers of this and following generations-he has set the standard of achievement at a height that the strongest may only attain, as Mr. Yeats attained it, by strenuous, unflinching toil and an ear ever open to the whisper of perfection. But what of the substance, the matter, conveyed to us by all this beautiful art? This is not an indifferent question. It cannot be answered by saying that Mr. Yeats's verse lives and shines and sings, and is sufficiently criticised when we show that it does so. Art is to help us to live-not to live well or ill, but simply to live. If, however, it induces bewildered or unnatural or unwholesome moods, it is not helping us towards life-but towards death. On the other hand, life is more vast and varied than any one individual or any one epoch can know. The poet may be a pioneer on its dim frontiers, as well as a cultivator of its rich fields of traditional and familiar toil. Mr. Yeats's work is for the most part done on the frontier of life. He has followed up doubtful gleams, interpreted mysteries, made himself a philosophy of dreams. The reader, however, who bestows upon Mr. Yeats's poetry the attention it deserves, will perceive that his mind is no mere Eolian harp answering to the faint breathings of a wind from another world. Behind Mr. Yeats's 'wizard song' a keen, questioning, co-ordinating intellect is at work-like Baudelaire he tills his plot of ground 'avec le fer de la raison.' It is ill translating the philosophy of a poet, which he reveals poetically, into scientific language; but it may perhaps be said, without overstraining the attempt to formalise and define, that Mr. Yeats-like the Oriental mystics who formulated their creed, and the Celtic mystics who did not, regards the outer world as a creation of spiritual activitybids us cultivate the inward life, the inward vision, as the sure path to truth and peace. The profound and beautiful poem named 'The Two Trees,' which is included in the selection here given, seems to me to contain as much of his scheme of thought as can be put into form so compressed. The idea is of course in itself neither new nor rare; but what is rare is Mr. Yeats's firm grasp of it, his rich and subtle illustration of it, the new and beautiful vesture of imagination he has found for it. But Mr. Yeats has still, it may be hoped, a long literary career before him, and many new fields of work to enter upon. it may be observed that the ground he has already covered is not wanting in extent and variety. Poems like 'Father Gilligan' or 'The Old Pensioner' or the 'Fiddler of Dooney' show a command of simple objective emotion which may yet be developed in work of what is called a more 'popular' character than Mr. Yeats has so far done. Some love-poems, moreover, such as 'When you are Old' or 'The Cloths of Heaven,' have for all their rare and spiritual grace a strain of human passion more intense than that of many lyrists who have won fame by singing of nothing but love. Whether these qualities will ever yield work of great tragic power is a question that the future must decide. Mr. Yeats's dramatic experiments appear to testify to some impulse in this direction. His first published work and his second were both in dramatic form, and his COUNTESS CATHLEEN and the LAND OF HEART'S DESIRE are not only dramas, but have attained the natural end of a drama -that of being acted. Yet I do not know that Mr. Yeats's dramatic work forms, so far, an exception to the general rule that good drama can only be written by poets both gifted with the dramatic imagination and intimately familiar with the stage. In dramatic composition Mr. Yeats appears to be moving about in worlds not realised. There are, no doubt, dramatists of the 'literary' school, who seem to ignore the fact that in assuming dramatic form a poem also assumes certain stringent laws and responsibilities foreign to other forms of poetry. I grant that if d'Annunzio, for instance, is a dramatist, so is Mr. Yeats; and I grant also that a sort of pageant accompanied by recitative may be a legitimate and interesting form of art, so long as it is kept strictly within its own conventions. Yet I cannot but think that Mr. Yeats's dramatic enterprises are a step in the wrong direction, or rather I should say a step for which a certain training and discipline are needed that his talent has not hitherto undergone. This is one reservation I have to make in my admiration for a poet whom I consider the first of living writers in the English language. Another, and a much slighter one, concerns itself with his occasional use of terms which are purely symbolic and not vitalised by the imagination. Probably Mr. Yeats has caught this habit from his study of Blake-Blake, who might have left volumes of immortal verse had not his intellect mastered his imagination and led him into limitless deserts of dry symbolism. Mr. Yeats's imagination, as I have already said, is usually supreme in these matters; it burns up the symbol, and a winged creature soars singing from the flame. But the mystic in him is sometimes, especially in his later work, found adoring the mere stigmata of mysticism; and then one thinks with dismay that a finer and stronger genius than Blake's may some day lose itself in that dreary waste inhabited by Los and Orc and Enitharmion. But these forebodings soon vanish when one hears again the 'lake water lapping' on the shores of Innisfree, or the K K murmuring of the bell-branch which Mr. Yeats has taken from the hand of nameless singers who moved the heart of Ireland a thousand years ago— It charmed away the merchant from his guile, T. W. ROLLESTON. W. B. Yeats was born in Dublin, June 13, 1866; the eldest son of J. B. Yeats, R.H.A., a well-known Irish artist. He was educated chiefly at the High School, Harcourt Street, Dublin, but spent much of his early life in the County Sligo, where his grandparents lived. The scenery of the Rosses has entered deeply into his poetry, as those who know that region will readily perceive. In 1885 he published THE Island of StaTUES, a romantic drama, in The Dublin University Review. MOSADA, a short dramatic piece, was published in the same year as a brochure by Sealy Bryers and Walker, Dublin. The WANDERINGS OF OISÍN AND OTHER POEMS appeared in 1888 and the COUNTESS CATHLEEN in 1892. His collected poems have appeared in two editions, the latest in 1899, and the latter year saw also the publication of the WIND AMONG THE REEDS. The CELTIC TWILIGHT and the SECRET ROSE are volumes of prose tales and sketches. Mr. Yeats took a prominent part in the foundation of the Irish Literary Societies of Dublin and of London, under the auspices of the former of which his COUNTESS CATHLEEN was acted in 1899, at the Antient Concert Rooms in Dublin, in connection with the enterprise known as the Irish Literary Theatre. In 1892 Mr. Yeats collaborated with Mr. E. J. Ellis in bringing out a sumptuous edition of the works of William Blake, with a memoir and an exposition of Blake's philosophy (Quaritch). THE HOSTING OF THE SIDHE THE host is riding from Knocknarea The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round, Our arms are waving, our lips are apart; We come between him and the deed of his hand— The host is rushing 'twixt night and day, And where is there hope or deed as fair? Caolte tossing his burning hair, And Niamh calling: Away, come away. MICHAEL ROBARTES REMEMBERS FORGOTTEN BEAUTY WHEN my arms wrap you round, I press My heart upon the loveliness That has long faded from the world; By dreaming ladies upon cloth That has made fat the murderous moth; Where such grey clouds of incense rose Brood her high lonely mysteries. |