some and so exasperating, is not the kind of brain to produce permanent poetry. "A peasant was in the dock for a violent assault. The clerk read the indictment with all its legal jargon. The prisoner to the warder: "What's all that he says?" Warder: "He says ye hit Pat Curry with yer spade on the side of his head." Prisoner: "Bedad an' I did." Warder: "Then This dialogue, plade not guilty." loud and in the full hearing of the court. "Read Wordsworth's two poems on Burns; kind, merciful, steady, glowing, manly they are, with some strong phrases, good lines, and human feeling all through, winding up in two stanzas at the close. These are among the pieces that make Wordsworth a poet to live with; he repairs the daily wear and tear, puts back what the fret of the day has rubbed thin or rubbed off, sends us forth in the morning whole." Robert Browning, whose normality in appearance and conversation pleased sensible folk and shocked idolaters, summed up in two stanzas the difference between the popular conception of a poet and the real truth. One might almost take the first stanza as representing the Irish, and the second the English tempera ment. "Touch him ne'er so lightly, into song he broke: Soil so quick-receptive,-not one featherseed, Not one flower-dust fell but straight its fall awoke Vitalising virtue: song would song succeed Sudden as spontaneous-prove a poet-soul!" Indeed? Rock's the song-soil rather, surface hard and bare: Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage Vainly both expend,-few flowers awaken there: Quiet in its cleft broods-what the after age Knows and names a pine, a nation's heritage. People who never grow up may have a certain kind of fascination, but they will not write great poetry. It is exactly the other way with creative artists; they grow up faster than the average. The maturity of Keats is astonishing. Now I believe that in the last forty years Ireland has really begun to grow up. The fantastic, happy-go-lucky Irishman is becoming as rare in real life as he is on the stage. Spirituality has taken the place of frivolity. Mr. Yeats's wonderful lamentation, September 1913, that sounds like the wailing of the wind, actually gives us a reason why Irishmen are getting the attention of the world in poetry, as well as in fiction and drama. What need you, being come to sense, And add the halfpence to the pence Yet they were of a different kind. The names that stilled your childish play They have gone about the world like wind, But little time had they to pray For whom the hangman's rope was spun, Was it for this the wild geese spread Yet could we turn the years again, William Butler Yeats has done more for English poetry than any other Irishman, for he is the greatest poet in the English language that Ireland has ever produced. He is a notable figure in contemporary literature, having made additions to verse, prose and stage-plays. He has by no means obliterated Clarence Mangan, but he has surpassed him. Mr. Yeats was born at Dublin, June 13, 1865. His father was an honour man at Trinity College, taking the highest distinction in Political Economy. After practising law, he became a painter, which profession he still adorns. The future poet studied art for three years, but when twenty-one years old definitely devoted himself to literature. Apart from his original work, one of his foremost services to humanity was his advice to that strange genius, John Synge for it was owing to the influence of his friend that Synge became a creative writer, and he had, alas! little time to lose. Mr. Yeats published his first poem in 1886. Since that date, despite his preoccupation with the management of the Abbey Theatre, he has produced a long list of works in verse and prose, decidedly unequal in merit, but shining with the light of a luminous mind. From the first, Mr. Yeats has seemed to realise that he could serve Ireland best by making beautiful and enduring works of art, rather than by any form of political agitation. This is well; for despite the fact that a total ineptitude for statesmanship seldom prevents the enthusiast from issuing and spreading dogmatic propaganda, a merely elementary conception of the principle of division of labour should make us all rejoice when the artist confines himself to art. True artists are scarce and precious; and although practical men of business often regard them as superfluous luxuries, the truth is that we cannot live without them. As poet and dramatist, Mr. Yeats has done more for his country than he could have accomplished in any other way. Never was there more exclusively an artist. He writes pure, not applied poetry. I care little for his theories of symbolism, magic and what not. Poets are judged not by their theories, not by the "schools" to which they give passionate adherence, but simply and solely by the quality of their work. No amount of theory, no correctness of method, no setting up of new or defence of old standards, no elevated ideals can make a poet if he have not the divine gift. Theories have hardly more ef. fect on the actual value of his poetry than the colour of the ink in which he writes. The reason why it is interesting to read what Mr. Yeats says about his love of magic and of symbols is not because there is any truth or falsehood in these will-o'-the-wisps, but because he is such an artist that even when he writes in prose, his style is so beautiful, so harmonious that one is forced to listen. Literary art has enormous power in propelling a projectile of thought. I do not doubt that the chief reason for the immense effect of such a philosophy as that of Schopenhauer or that of Nietzsche is because each man was a literary artist-indeed I think both were greater writers than thinkers. A good thing this is for their fame, for art lasts longer than thought. The fashion of a man's thought may pass away; his knowledge and his ideas may lose their stamp, either because they prove to be false or because they become universally current. Everybody believes Copernicus, but nobody reads him. Yet when a book, no matter how obsolete in thought, is marked by great beauty of style, it lives forever. Consider the case of Sir Thomas Browne. Art is the great preservative. Mr. Yeats has a genius for names and titles. His names, like those of Rossetti's, are sweet symphonies. The Wind Among the Reeds, The Shadowy Waters, The Secret Rose, The Land of Heart's Desire, The Island of Statues are poems in themselves, and give separate pleasure like an overture without the opera. Perhaps it is not too fanciful to observe that The Wind Among the Reeds suggests better than any other arrangement of words the lovely minor melodies of our poet, while The Shadowy Waters gives exactly the picture that comes into one's mind in thinking of his poems. There is an extraordinary fluidity in his verse, like running water under the shade of overhanging branches. One feels that Mr. Yeats loves these titles, and chooses them with affectionate solicitude, like a father naming beautiful children. The love poetry of Mr. Yeats, like the love poetry of Poe, is swept with passion, but the passion is mingled with unutterable reverence. It is unlike much modern love poetry in its spiritual exaltation. Just as manners have become more free, and intimacies that once took months to develop, now need only minutes, so much contemporary verse-tribute to women is so detailed, so bold, so cock-sure, that the elaborate compliments only half-conceal a sneer. all such work love is born of desire its sole foundation-and hence is equally short-lived and fleeting. In the poems of Mr. Yeats, desire seems to follow rather than to precede love. Love thus takes on, as it ought to, something of the beauty of holi ness. In Fasten your hair with a golden pin, I bade my heart build these poor rhymes: You need but lift a pearl-pale hand, A still more characteristic love- a In mysticism, in symbolism, and in the quality of his imagination, Mr. Yeats of course reminds us of Maeterlinck. He has the same twilit atmosphere, peopled with elusive dream-footed figures, that make no more noise than the wings of an owl. He is of imagination all compact. He is neither a teacher nor prophet; he seems to turn away from the real sorrows of life, yes, even from its real joys, to dwell in a world of his own creation. He invites us thither, if we care to go; and if we go not, we cannot understand either his art or his ideas. But if we wander with him in the shadowy darkness, like the lonely man in Titanic alleys accompanied only by Psyche, we shall see strange visions. We may be led to the door of a legended tomb; we may be led along the border of dim waters; but we shall live for a time in the realm of Beauty, and be the better for the experience, even though it resemble nothing in the town and country that we know. Mr. Yeats, like Browning, writes both lyrical poems and dramas; but he is at the opposite remove from Browning in everything except the gift of song. Browning was so devoted to the dramatic aspect of art, that he carried the drama even into its seemingly contradictory form, the lyric. Every lyric is a little one-act play, and he called them dramatic lyrics. Mr. Yeats, on the other hand, is so essentially a lyric poet, that instead of writing dramatic lyrics, he writes lyric dramas. Even his stage-plays are primarily lyrical. Those who are interested in Mr. Yeats's theory of speaking, reciting, or chanting poetry to the psaltery should read his book, Ideas of Good and Evil, which contains some of his most significant articles of faith, written in limpid and beautiful prose. Mr. Yeats cannot write on any subject without illuminating it by the light of his own imagination; and I find his essays in criticism full of original thought-the result of years of brooding reflection. In these short pieces his genius is as clear as it is in his poems. I admire his absolute devotion to the art of poetry. He knows that politicians and "practical" men at the very best regard him as a harmless dreamer; for to them he seems to be talking in his sleep just when he ought to be wide awake. But more regard him as worse than harmless, for they cannot understand how, in the midst of political excitement, he can calmly go on writ ing poems and lyrical dramas. But he will not apologise. Nor will he use his poetic genius for any purpose except for the creation of beauty and the interpretation of life. He will not turn Pegasus into a dray-horse, and make him haul cart-loads of political or moral_propaganda. In his fine apologia, The Cutting of an Agate, he states and restates his creed: "Literature decays when it no longer makes more beautiful, or more vivid, the language which unites it to all life, and when one finds the criticism of the student, and the purpose of the reformer, and the logic of the man of science, where there should have been the reveries of the common heart, ennobled into some raving Lear or unabashed Don Quixote. . . . I have been reading through a bundle of German plays, and have found everywhere a desire not to express hopes and alarms common to every man that ever came into the world, but politics or social passion, a veiled or open propaganda. If Homer were alive to-day, he would only resist, after a deliberate struggle, the temptation to find his subject not in Helen's beauty, that every man has desired, nor in the wisdom and endurance of Odysseus that has been the desire of every woman that has come into the world, but in what somebody would describe, perhaps, as 'the inevitable contest,' arising out of economic causes, between the country-places and small towns on the one hand, and, upon the other, the great city of Troy, representing one knows not what 'tendency to centralisation.' In other words, if I understand him correctly, Mr. Yeats believes that in writing pure rather than applied poetry, he is not turning his back on great issues to do filigree work, but is merely turning aside from questions of temporary import to that which is fixed and eternal, life itself. John Millington Synge was born near Dublin, April 16, 1871, and died in Dublin, March 24, 1909. It is a curious thing that the three great Irishmen of the Celtic renaissancethe only men who were truly in spired by genius-originally studied another form of art than literature. Mr. Yeats studied painting for years; A. E. is a painter of distinction; Synge was an accomplished musician before he became a man of letters. There is not the slightest doubt that the effect of these sister arts upon the literary work of the Great Three is pervasive and powerful. The books of Mr. Yeats and Mr. Russell are full of word-pictures; and the rhythm of Synge's strange prose, which Mr. Ernest Boyd ingeniously traces to Dr. Hyde's translations, is full of harmonies. Dr. Hyde ought to be one of the happiest men in the world; he has not only witnessed a new and wonderful literary revival in his country, but he has the satisfaction of knowing that he is vitally connected with its birth and bloom. Synge had the greatest mental endowment of all the Irish writers of his time. He had an amazingly powerful mind. At Trinity College he took prizes in Hebrew and in Irish, and at the same time gained a scholarship in harmony and counterpoint at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. As a boy, "he knew the note and plumage of every bird, and when and where they were to be found." As a man, he could easily have mastered the note of every human being, as in addition to his knowledge of ancient languages, he seems to have become proficient in German, French, and Italian with singular speed and ease. He was an excellent performer on the piano, flute, and violin, did conjuring tricks, and delighted the natives of the Aran Islands with his penny whistle. He must have had a positive genius for concentration, obtaining a real command over anything to which he cared to devote his attention. Mr. Yeats found him in that ramshackle old Hôtel Corneille in the Latin Quarter, busily writing literary criticism in French and Eng. lish, and told him as an inspired messenger to go to the primitive folk in Ireland and become a creative artist. He went; and in a few years reached the summit of dramatic achievement. Synge was a terrible person, as terrible in his way as Swift. When Carlyle saw Daniel Webster, he said, "I should hate to be that man's nig ger." I do not envy any of the men or women who, for whatever reason, incurred the wrath of Synge. He was never noisy or explosive, like a dog whose barks are discounted, to whom one soon ceases to pay any attention; we all know the futile and petty irascibility of the shallowminded. Synge was like a mastiff who bites without warning. Irony was the common chord in his composition. position. He studied life and hated death; hated the gossip of the world, which seemed to him the gabble of fools. Physically he was a sick man, and felt his tether. thought it frightful that he should have to die, while so many idiots lived long. He never forgave men and women for their folly, and the only reason why he did not forgive God was because he was not sure of His existence. The lady addressed in the following "poem" must have read it with queasy emotion, and without the slightest difficulty have unwillingly learned it by heart. A photograph of her face immediately after its perusal would look like futurist art. THE CURSE He To a sister of an enemy of the author's who disapproved of "The Playboy." Lord, confound this surly sister, Blight her brow with blotch and blister, Cramp her larynx, lung, and liver, Let her live to earn her dinners (Mountjoy is a prison). Irish exaggeration is as often seen in plenary curses as in plenary bless |