Discoveries

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 neigh-

bouring 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 philanthrop-

ic 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 au-

dience. 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 fan-light 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 Mere-

dith and Ibsen, but some of his books had been pack-

ed in the fire-grate by his house-keeper, instead of

the customary view of an Italian lake or the colour-

ed tissue-paper. The players, who had been giving

a performance in a neighbouring town, had not yet

come, or were unpacking their costumes and prop-

erties 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 archi-

tecture 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 & the best of the new were side by side with-

out 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 particu-

lar — a delight to the imagination and the eyes. A

new floor had been put into some ecclesiastical buil-

ding 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

I trayed off somewhere and I took his place and when

boys came up offering two or three pence and ask-

ing 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 cit-

ies. 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 work-house dormi-

tory, where a few flowers and a few coloured coun-

terpanes and the coloured walls had made a severe

and gracious beauty ? Presently the play was chan-

ged 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 l had over that broken window-

pane. Here was something secular, abounding, even

a little vulgar, for he was gagging horribly, conde-

scending to his audience, though not without con-

tempt.

 

We had our supper in the priest's house, and a gov-

ernment 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 visitor's book of the

hotel to turn over its pages while waiting for my

bacon and eggs, and found several pages full of ob-

scenities, 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 dema-

gogues 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 some-

thing 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 un-

derstand my vision, and I had not wanted a large

audience, certainly not what is called a national au-

dience, 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 stu-

dents, but here there is the right audience could one

but get its ears. I have always come to this certain-

ty ,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 mon-

ey 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 af-

fectionate feeling about flowers, that will not pull

the cart out of the ditch. An exciting person, whe-

ther 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 contin-

ually 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 imagin-

ation 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. Vil-

lon 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 Shel-

ley 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

& 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 per-

sonality, 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 liter-

ature — upward into ever-growing subtlety, with

Verhaeren, with Mallarmé, with Maeterlinck, un-

til 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 down-

ward, 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 al-

ways 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

Abbe de Villars has called the Crown of Living and

Melodious Diamonds. If the carts have hit our fan-

cy 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 im-

patient with our thirst for mere force, mere person-

ality, 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 un-

comfortable place where there is no beer, the ma-

chine 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 oth-

er 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 per-

suasion — 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 re-

spect 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 soft-

ened and mixed with spittle, that they are not words

any longer, they swallow them.

 

A BANJO PLAYER

 

A girl has been playing on the banjo. 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 diff-

erent 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 im-

portant 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 mono-

tonous voice and an abrupt way of moving. She is

fresh from school where they have taught her his-

tory and geography 'whereby a soul can be discern-

ed,' 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 speak-

ing, 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 tran-

slate 'In Memoriam,' but could not because Ten-

nyson was 'too noble, too Anglais, and when he

should have been broken-hearted had many rem-

iniscences.' About that time I found in some Eng-

lish 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 mem-

ory.' 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 endeav-

our 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 genera-

tion 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 liv-

ed 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 ban-

jo-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 ex-

ternal 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 im-

personal 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 vis-

ions and an attempt to cut away the non-essential,

but as I imagined the visions outside myself my im-

agination became full of decorative landscape and

of still life. I thought of myself as something un-

moving 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 beau-

tiful, the more did I follow the opposite of myself,

for deliberate beauty is like a woman always desir-

ing man's desire. Presently I found that I entered in-

to 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 bitter-

ness 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, passion-

ate, reasoning self, the personality as a whole. We

must find some place upon the Tree of Life high en-

ough for the forked branches to keep it safe, and low

enough to be out of the little wind-tossed boughs

and twigs, for the Phoenix 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 Oedipus are more cloudy. No playwright ever

has made or ever will make a character that will fol-

low 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 an-

other, something impersonal comes into the story.

Society, fate, 'tendency,' something not quite hu-

man 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 com-

mon 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 won-

derful, 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 remem-

ber them. Even then they are only possible in a cer-

tain drawing-room and among such and such peo-

ple, 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 mem-

ory 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 super-

ficial 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 in-

tellectual, 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 be-

lieve them using in their moments of excitement,

and if the play needed more than that they could al-

ways 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 ad-

opted 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 show-

ing 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 hold-

ing 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 fol-

low the thought of a man who is looking into the

grate.

 

HAS THE DRAMA OF CONTEM-

PORARY LIFE A ROOT OF ITS OWN

 

In watching a play about modern educated people

with its meagre language and its action crushed in-

to the narrow limits of possibility I have found my-

self constantly saying: 'Maybe it has its power to

move, slight as that is, from being able to suggest

fundamental contrasts and passions which roman-

tic and poetical literature haveshown to be beauti-

ful.' A man facing his enemies alone in a quarrel

over thepurity 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 Cori-

olanus. 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 liter-

ature 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 pre-

fer 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 gen-

erations 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  n 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 in-

vent 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, be-

tween sleeping and waking, as it were, and that

peering and peeping persons are but hawkers of

stolen goods. How elsecould 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 ^neid 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 Odys-

seus could not have seen while his thought was of

the Cyclops, or Achilles when Briseis moved him to

desire. In the art 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 impedi-

ments 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-col-

oured 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 preoccupations, Augustus Caesar's affabil-

ity, all that impersonal fecundity which muddies

the intellectual passions. Ben Jonson says in the

Poetaster, that even the best of men without Prom-

ethean 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 gener-

al 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 ir-

regular as the lightning, for the communicable and

forecastable and discoverable is a part only, a hun-

gry chicken under the breast of the pelican, and the

test of poetry is not in reason but in a delight not dif-

ferent 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 pri-

vet 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 lit-

tle does logic in the mere circumstance matter in the

finest art, that Richard's & 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 with-

out committing a line to heart. When Ben Jonson's

'Epicoene' rammed a century of laughter into the

two hours' traffic, I found with amazement that al-

most 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,& had felt bound to cherish none but reason-

able sympathies and to resent the baiting of that gro-

tesque 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 copy-

ing from finer paintings, for the composition is al-

ways too good for the execution. I find in great num-

bers an indifference to obvious logic, to all that the

eye sees at common moments. Perseus shows Andro-

meda 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 ima-

gined 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 Deucal-

ion, 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 instruc-

ted 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 an-

other after we had dined together at some restaurant.

As we were going through the streets to the meet-

ing-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 im-

mediately, 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 a while, but not yet. I opened

my eyes and looked at some red ornament on the

mantelpiece, and at once the room was full of har-

monies 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 pain-

ter, and that in the course of the evening every one

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 dis-

tinguished face, showed me his horoscope and poin-

ted with an ecstasy of melancholy at its evil aspects.

The boisterous poet, who was an old eater of the In-

dian 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 mo-

ment, 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 op-

ened the window, and a woman in evening dress,

who was not a little bewildered to find so many peo-

ple, was helped down into the room. She had been

at a student's ball unknown to her husband, who was

asleep overhead, and had thought to have crept

home unobserved, but for a confederate at the win-

dow. 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 up-

stairs. 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 mod-

ern 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 de-

light in obvious originality & in obvious logic, their

shrinking from the ancient and insoluble. The wri-

ter I have quoted is much more than a journalist, but

he has lived their hurried life, and instinctively turns

to them for judgement. He is not thinking of the

great poets and painters, of the cloud of witnesses,

who are there that we may become, through our un-

derstanding 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 'En-

dymion'orasthepainterof Mary Magdalene at the

door of Simon the Pharisee. So far from the discus-

sion 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 sti rs us the most deep-

ly. There is a sentence in 'The Marriage of Heaven

and Heir 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 distinguish-

ed 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 emo-

tions, with all the uncounted flavours of old exper-

ience, and it is necessarily an antiquity of thought,

emotions that have been deepened by the experien-

ces of many men of genius, that distinguishes the

cultivated man. The subject-matter of his medita-

tion 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 con-

scious 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 an-

alysis 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 Pur-

gatory 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, an-

cient 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 spirit-

ual 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 im-

ages it contains. The imaginative writer differs from

the saint in that he identifies himself — to the ne-

glect of his own soul, alas ! — with the soul of the

world, and frees himself from all that is imperman-

ent 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 recur-

ring life of flower and seed in any man, is the renun-

ciation 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 discus-

sion of our interests,' that is to say on what never re-

curs, 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 select-

ion 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 great-

est. The end for art is the ecastsy awakened by the

presence before an ever changing mind of what is

permanent in the world, or by the arousing of that

 

31

 

 

 

mind itself into the very delicate and fastidious

mood habitual with it when it is seeking those per-

manent & 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 un-

der 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 cen-

tre is everywhere. If that is true, the saint goes to the

centre, the poet and artist to the ring where every-

thing 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 mon o t-

onous, 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 forever passing away that it

may come again, in the beauty of woman, in the fra-

gile 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 imperma-

nent 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 ug-

ly man, as Blake called it, is a drawer of the straight

line, the maker of the arbitrary and the imperman-

ent, 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 arbit-

rary, 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 ful-

fil itself. The mind can never do the same thing twice

over,and having exhausted simple beauty and mean-

ing, 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 return-

ed from Paris, with a wonder that had no understan-

ding 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 ex-

cited 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 delib-

erate 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 oth-

er. 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 an-

other. 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 re-

fashion our characters, but not our painting or our

poetry. If our characters also were not unconscious-

ly 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 love-

liness 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 Apen-

nines 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 to the south a mediaeval tow-

er, with no building near nor any sign of life, rose

upon its solitary summit into the clouds. I saw sud-

denly in the mind's eye an old man, erect and a little

gaunt, standing in the door of the tower, while ab-

out him broke a windy light. He was the poet who

had at last, because he had done so much for the

word'ssake, come tosharein the dignity of thesaint.

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 word'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, the-

ologians, 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 re-

minds the soles of our feet of swiftness, or the Odys-

sey 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 boy-

hood's way . Art bids us touch and taste and hear and

see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls

fnathematic 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 person-

al, 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 hea-

vy, 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 wrest-

led 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 order-

ed 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 con-

templative 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 & 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 weari-

ness. 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 Di-

vine 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 fullness. 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 recur-

ring 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 be-

lievers 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 re-

ligion, 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, be-

cause it has not entered into men's prayers nor light-

ed any through the sacred dark of religious contem-

plation. Lyrical poems even when they but speak of emo-

tions 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 Ivette 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 relig-

ion, there was little separation between holy and

common things, and just as the arts themselves pas-

sed 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 vs^hen he turned

his plough from the slope of Cruachmaa or of Olym-

pus. The occupations and the places known to Ho-

mer 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 van-

ished, w^inged and unwreary, into the unchanging

v^orlds v^here religion only can discover life as well

as peace. A man of that unbroken day could have all

the subtlety of Shelley, & 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. Moliere being but

the master of common sense lived ever in the com-

mon dayhght, but Shakespeare could not, & Shake-

speare 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 liv-

ing, 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 Shake-

speare's journeys to Rome or to Verona as the out-

flowing of an unrest, a dissatisfaction with natural

interests, an unstable equilibrium of the whole Eur-

opean mind that would not have come had Constan-

tinople wall been built of better stone. I am orthodox

and pray for a resurrection of the body, and am cer-

tain 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.

 

Here ends Discoveries; written by Wil-

liam Butler Yeats. Printed, upon paper

made in Ireland, by Elizabeth C. Yeats,

Esther Ryan and Beatrice Cassidy, and

published by Elizabeth C. Yeats, at the

Dun Emer Press, in the house of Evelyn

Gleeson at Dundrum,in the County of

Dublin, Ireland. Finished on the twelfth

day of September, in the year 1907.