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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Discoveries, by William Butler Yeats
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Discoveries
+       A Volume of Essays
+
+Author: William Butler Yeats
+
+Release Date: July 5, 2010 [EBook #33087]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DISCOVERIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Brian Foley and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Two hundred copies of this book have been printed.
+
+
+
+
+  DISCOVERIES; A VOLUME OF ESSAYS
+  BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS.
+
+
+  DUN EMER PRESS
+  DUNDRUM
+  MCMVII
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  Prophet, Priest and King                            Page 1
+
+  Personality and the Intellectual Essences                5
+
+  The Musician and the Orator                              9
+
+  A Banjo Player                                          10
+
+  The Looking-glass                                       11
+
+  The Tree of Life                                        12
+
+  The Praise of Old Wives' Tales                          15
+
+  The Play of Modern Manners                              16
+
+  Has the Drama of Contemporary Life a Root of its Own    18
+
+  Why the Blind Man in Ancient Times was made a Poet      20
+
+  Concerning Saints and Artists                           24
+
+  The Subject Matter of Drama                             27
+
+  The Two Kinds of Asceticism                             30
+
+  In the Serpent's Mouth                                  32
+
+  The Black and the White Arrows                          33
+
+  His Mistress's Eyebrows                                 33
+
+  The Tresses of the Hair                                 35
+
+  A Tower on the Apennine                                 36
+
+  The Thinking of the Body                                37
+
+  Religious Belief necessary to symbolic Art              39
+
+  The Holy Places                                         41
+
+
+
+
+DISCOVERIES
+
+
+
+
+PROPHET, PRIEST AND KING
+
+
+The little theatrical company I write my plays for had come to a west of
+Ireland town and was to give a performance in an old ball-room, for
+there was no other room big enough. I went there from a neighbouring
+country house and arriving a little before the players, tried to open a
+window. My hands were black with dirt in a moment and presently a pane
+of glass and a part of the window frame came out in my hands. Everything
+in this room was half in ruins, the rotten boards cracked under my feet,
+and our new proscenium and the new boards of the platform looked out of
+place, and yet the room was not really old, in spite of the musicians'
+gallery over the stage. It had been built by some romantic or
+philanthropic landlord some three or four generations ago, and was a
+memory of we knew not what unfinished scheme.
+
+From there I went to look for the players and called for information on
+a young priest, who had invited them, and taken upon himself the finding
+of an audience. He lived in a high house with other priests, and as I
+went in I noticed with a whimsical pleasure a broken pane of glass in
+the 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 Meredith and Ibsen, but some of his books had been packed in the
+fire-grate by his house-keeper, instead of the customary view of an
+Italian lake or the coloured tissue-paper. The players, who had been
+giving a performance in a neighbouring town, had not yet come, or were
+unpacking their costumes and properties at the hotel he had recommended
+them. We should have time, he said, to go through the half-ruined town
+and to visit the convent schools and the cathedral, where, owing to his
+influence, two of our young Irish sculptors had been set to carve an
+altar and the heads of pillars. I had only heard of this work, and I
+found its strangeness and simplicity--one of them had been Rodin's
+pupil--could not make me forget the meretriciousness of the architecture
+and the commercial commonplace of the inlaid pavements. The new movement
+had seized on the cathedral midway in its growth, and the worst of the
+old & the best of the new were side by side without any sign of
+transition. The convent school was, as other like places have been to
+me--a long room in a workhouse hospital at Portumna, in particular--a
+delight to the imagination and the eyes. A new floor had been put into
+some ecclesiastical building and the light from a great mullioned
+window, cut off at the middle, fell aslant upon rows of clean and
+seemingly happy children. The nuns, who show in their own convents,
+where they can put what they like, a love of what is mean and pretty,
+make beautiful rooms where the regulations compel them to do all with a
+few colours and a few flowers. I think it was that day, but am not sure,
+that I had lunch at a convent and told fairy stories to a couple of
+nuns, and I hope it was not mere politeness that made them seem to have
+a child's interest in such things.
+
+A good many of our audience, when the curtain went up in the old
+ball-room, were drunk, but all were attentive for they had a great deal
+of respect for my friend and there were other priests there. Presently
+the man at the door opposite to the stage strayed off somewhere and I
+took his place and when boys came up offering two or three pence and
+asking to be let into the sixpenny seats I let them join the melancholy
+crowd. The play professed to tell of the heroic life of ancient Ireland
+but was really full of sedentary refinement and the spirituality of
+cities. Every emotion was made as dainty footed and dainty fingered as
+might be, and a love and pathos where passion had faded into sentiment,
+emotions of pensive and harmless people, drove shadowy young men through
+the shadows of death and battle. I watched it with growing rage. It was
+not my own work, but I have sometimes watched my own work with a rage
+made all the more salt in the mouth from being half despair. Why should
+we make so much noise about ourselves and yet have nothing to say that
+was not better said in that work-house dormitory, where a few flowers
+and a few coloured counterpanes and the coloured walls had made a severe
+and gracious beauty? Presently the play was changed and our comedian
+began to act a little farce, and when I saw him struggle to wake into
+laughter an audience, out of whom the life had run as if it were water,
+I rejoiced, as I had over that broken window-pane. Here was something
+secular, abounding, even a little vulgar, for he was gagging horribly,
+condescending to his audience, though not without contempt.
+
+We had our supper in the priest's house, and a government official who
+had come down from Dublin, partly out of interest in this attempt 'to
+educate the people,' and partly because it was his holiday and it was
+necessary to go somewhere, entertained us with little jokes. Somebody,
+not I think a priest, talked of the spiritual destiny of our race and
+praised the night's work, for the play was refined and the people really
+very attentive, and he could not understand my discontent; but presently
+he was silenced by the patter of jokes.
+
+I had my breakfast by myself the next morning, for the players had got
+up in the middle of the night and driven some ten miles to catch an
+early train to Dublin, and were already on their way to their shops and
+offices. I had brought the visitor's book of the hotel to turn over its
+pages while waiting for my bacon and eggs, and found several pages full
+of obscenities, scrawled there some two or three weeks before, by Dublin
+visitors it seemed, for a notorious Dublin street was mentioned. Nobody
+had thought it worth his while to tear out the page or block out the
+lines, and as I put the book away impressions that had been drifting
+through my mind for months rushed up into a single thought. 'If we poets
+are to move the people, we must reintegrate the human spirit in our
+imagination. The English have driven away the kings, and turned the
+prophets into demagogues and you cannot have health among a people if
+you have not prophet, priest and king.'
+
+
+
+
+PERSONALITY AND THE INTELLECTUAL ESSENCES
+
+
+My work in Ireland has continually set this thought before me, 'How can
+I make my work mean something to vigorous and simple men whose attention
+is not given to art but to a shop, or teaching in a National School, or
+dispensing medicine?' I had not wanted to 'elevate them' or 'educate
+them,' as these words are understood, but to make them understand my
+vision, and I had not wanted a large audience, certainly not what is
+called a national audience, but enough people for what is accidental and
+temporary to lose itself in the lump. In England where there have been
+so many changing activities and so much systematic education one only
+escapes from crudities and temporary interests among students, but here
+there is the right audience could one but get its ears. I have always
+come to this certainty, what moves natural men in the arts is what moves
+them in life, and that is, intensity of personal life, intonations that
+show them in a book or a play, the strength, the essential moment of a
+man who would be exciting in the market or at the dispensary door. They
+must go out of the theatre with the strength they live by strengthened
+with looking upon some passion that could, whatever its chosen way of
+life, strike down an enemy, fill a long stocking with money or move a
+girl's heart. They have not much to do with the speculations of science,
+though they have a little, or with the speculations of metaphysics,
+though they have a little. Their legs will tire on the road if there is
+nothing in their hearts but vague sentiment, and though it is charming
+to have an affectionate feeling about flowers, that will not pull the
+cart out of the ditch. An exciting person, whether the hero of a play or
+the maker of poems, will display the greatest volume of personal energy,
+and this energy must seem to come out of the body as out of the mind. We
+must say to ourselves continually when we imagine a character, 'Have I
+given him the roots, as it were, of all faculties necessary for life?'
+And only when one is certain of that may one give him the one faculty
+that fills the imagination with joy. I even doubt if any play had ever a
+great popularity that did not use, or seem to use, the bodily energies
+of its principal actor to the full. Villon the robber could have
+delighted these Irishmen with plays and songs, if he and they had been
+born to the same traditions of word and symbol, but Shelley could not;
+and as men came to live in towns and to read printed books and to have
+many specialised activities, it has become more possible to produce
+Shelleys and less and less possible to produce Villons. The last Villon
+dwindled into Robert Burns because the highest faculties had faded,
+taking the sense of beauty with them, into some sort of vague heaven &
+left the lower to lumber where they best could. In literature, partly
+from the lack of that spoken word which knits us to normal man, we have
+lost in personality, in our delight in the whole man--blood,
+imagination, intellect, running together--but have found a new delight,
+in essences, in states of mind, in pure imagination, in all that comes
+to us most easily in elaborate music. There are two ways before
+literature--upward into ever-growing subtlety, with Verhaeren, with
+Mallarmé, with Maeterlinck, until at last, it may be, a new agreement
+among refined and studious men gives birth to a new passion, and what
+seems literature becomes religion; or downward, taking the soul with us
+until all is simplified and solidified again. That is the choice of
+choices--the way of the bird until common eyes have lost us, or to the
+market carts; but we must see to it that the soul goes with us, for the
+bird's song is beautiful, and the traditions of modern imagination,
+growing always more musical, more lyrical, more melancholy, casting up
+now a Shelley, now a Swinburne, now a Wagner, are it may be the frenzy
+of those that are about to see what the magic hymn printed by the Abbé
+de Villars has called the Crown of Living and Melodious Diamonds. If the
+carts have hit our fancy we must have the soul tight within our bodies,
+for it has grown so fond of a beauty accumulated by subtle generations
+that it will for a long time be impatient with our thirst for mere
+force, mere personality, for the tumult of the blood. If it begin to
+slip away we must go after it, for Shelley's Chapel of the Morning Star
+is better than Burns's beer house--surely it was beer not
+barleycorn--except at the day's weary end; and it is always better than
+that uncomfortable place where there is no beer, the machine shop of the
+realists.
+
+
+
+
+THE MUSICIAN AND THE ORATOR
+
+
+Walter Pater says music is the type of all the Arts, but somebody else,
+I forget now who, that oratory is their type. You will side with the one
+or the other according to the nature of your energy, and I in my present
+mood am all for the man who, with an average audience before him, uses
+all means of persuasion--stories, laughter, tears, and but so much music
+as he can discover on the wings of words. I would even avoid the
+conversation of the lovers of music, who would draw us into the
+impersonal land of sound and colour, and would have no one write with a
+sonata in his memory. We may even speak a little evil of musicians,
+having admitted that they will see before we do that melodious crown. We
+may remind them that the housemaid does not respect the piano-tuner as
+she does the plumber, and of the enmity that they have aroused among all
+poets. Music is the most impersonal of things and words the most
+personal, and that is why musicians do not like words. They masticate
+them for a long time, being afraid they would not be able to digest
+them, and when the words are so broken and softened and mixed with
+spittle, that they are not words any longer, they swallow them.
+
+
+
+
+A 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 different and might have been
+delightful in some other way. A movement not of music only but of life
+came to its perfection. I was delighted and I did not know why until I
+thought 'that is the way my people, the people I see in the mind's eye,
+play music, and I like it because it is all personal, as personal as
+Villon's poetry.' The little instrument is quite light and the player
+can move freely and express a joy that is not of the fingers and the
+mind only but of the whole being; and all the while her movements call
+up into the mind, so erect and natural she is, whatever is most
+beautiful in her daily life. Nearly all the old instruments were like
+that, even the organ was once a little instrument and when it grew big
+our wise forefathers gave it to God in the cathedrals where it befits
+Him to be everything. But if you sit at the piano it is the piano, the
+mechanism, that is the important thing, and nothing of you means
+anything but your fingers and your intellect.
+
+
+
+
+THE LOOKING-GLASS
+
+
+I have just been talking to a girl with a shrill monotonous voice and an
+abrupt way of moving. She is fresh from school where they have taught
+her history and geography 'whereby a soul can be discerned,' but what is
+the value of an education, or even in the long run of a science, that
+does not begin with the personality, the habitual self, and illustrate
+all by that? Somebody should have taught her to speak for the most part
+on whatever note of her voice is most musical, and soften those harsh
+notes by speaking, not singing, to some stringed instrument, taking note
+after note and, as it were, caressing her words a little as if she loved
+the sound of them, and have taught her after this some beautiful
+pantomimic dance, till it had grown a habit to live for eye and ear. A
+wise theatre might make a training in strong and beautiful life the
+fashion, teaching before all else the heroic discipline of the
+looking-glass, for is not beauty, even as lasting love, one of the most
+difficult of the arts?
+
+
+
+
+THE TREE OF LIFE
+
+
+We artists have taken over-much to heart that old commandment about
+seeking after the Kingdom of Heaven. Verlaine told me that he had tried
+to translate 'In Memoriam,' but could not because Tennyson was 'too
+noble, too Anglais, and when he should have been broken-hearted had many
+reminiscences.' About that time I found in some English review an essay
+of his on Shakespeare. 'I had once a fine Shakespeare,' he wrote, or
+some such words, 'but I have it no longer. I write from memory.' One
+wondered in what vicissitude he had sold it, and for what money; and an
+image of the man rose in the imagination. To be his ordinary self as
+much as possible, not a scholar or even a reader, that was certainly his
+pose; and in the lecture he gave at Oxford he insisted 'that the poet
+should hide nothing of himself,' though he must speak it all with 'a
+care of that dignity which should manifest itself, if not in the
+perfection of form, at all events with an invisible, insensible, but
+effectual endeavour after this lofty and severe quality, I was about to
+say this virtue.' It was this feeling for his own personality, his
+delight in singing his own life, even more than that life itself, which
+made the generation I belong to compare him to Villon. It was not till
+after his death that I understood the meaning his words should have had
+for me, for while he lived I was interested in nothing but states of
+mind, lyrical moments, intellectual essences. I would not then have been
+as delighted as I am now by that banjo-player, or as shocked as I am now
+by that girl whose movements have grown abrupt, and whose voice has
+grown harsh by the neglect of all but external activities. I had not
+learned what sweetness, what rhythmic movement, there is in those who
+have become the joy that is themselves. Without knowing it I had come to
+care for nothing but impersonal beauty. I had set out on life with the
+thought of putting my very self into poetry, and had understood this as
+a representation of my own visions and an attempt to cut away the
+non-essential, but as I imagined the visions outside myself my
+imagination became full of decorative landscape and of still life. I
+thought of myself as something unmoving and silent living in the middle
+of my own mind and body, a grain of sand in Bloomsbury or in Connacht
+that Satan's watch fiends cannot find. Then one day I understood quite
+suddenly, as the way is, that I was seeking something unchanging and
+unmixed and always outside myself, a Stone or an Elixir that was always
+out of reach, and that I myself was the fleeting thing that held out its
+hand. The more I tried to make my art deliberately beautiful, the more
+did I follow the opposite of myself, for deliberate beauty is like a
+woman always desiring man's desire. Presently I found that I entered
+into myself and pictured myself and not some essence when I was not
+seeking beauty at all, but merely to lighten the mind of some burden of
+love or bitterness thrown upon it by the events of life. We are only
+permitted to desire life, and all the rest should be our complaints or
+our praise of that exacting mistress who can awake our lips into song
+with her kisses. But we must not give her all, we must deceive her a
+little at times, for, as Le Sage says in 'The Devil on Two Sticks,' the
+false lovers who do not become melancholy or jealous with honest passion
+have the happiest mistress and are rewarded the soonest and by the most
+beautiful. Our deceit will give us style, mastery, that dignity, that
+lofty and severe quality Verlaine spoke of. To put it otherwise, we
+should ascend out of common interests, the thoughts of the newspapers,
+of the market-place, of men of science, but only so far as we can carry
+the normal, passionate, reasoning self, the personality as a whole. We
+must find some place upon the Tree of Life high enough for the forked
+branches to keep it safe, and low enough to be out of the little
+wind-tossed boughs and twigs, for the 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 follow us out of the theatre as Don Quixote
+follows us out of the book, for no playwright can be wholly episodical,
+and when one constructs, bringing one's characters into complicated
+relations with one another, something impersonal comes into the story.
+Society, fate, 'tendency,' something not quite human begins to arrange
+the characters and to excite into action only so much of their humanity
+as they find it necessary to show to one another. The common heart will
+always love better the tales that have something of an old wives' tale
+and that look upon their hero from every side as if he alone were
+wonderful, as a child does with a new penny. In plays of a comedy too
+extravagant to photograph life, or written in verse, the construction is
+of a necessity woven out of naked motives and passions, but when an
+atmosphere of modern reality has to be built up as well, and the
+tendency, or fate, or society has to be shown as it is about ourselves
+the characters grow fainter and we have to read the book many times or
+see the play many times before we can remember them. Even then they are
+only possible in a certain drawing-room and among such and such people,
+and we must carry all that lumber in our heads. I thought Tolstoi's 'War
+and Peace' the greatest story I had ever read, and yet it has gone from
+me; even Lancelot, ever a shadow, is more visible in my memory than all
+its substance.
+
+
+
+
+THE PLAY OF MODERN MANNERS
+
+
+Of all artistic forms that have had a large share of the world's
+attention the worst is the play about modern educated people. Except
+where it is superficial or deliberately argumentative it fills one's
+soul with a sense of commonness as with dust. It has one mortal ailment.
+It cannot become impassioned, that is to say vital, without making
+somebody gushing and sentimental. Educated and well-bred people do not
+wear their hearts upon their sleeves and they have no artistic and
+charming language except light persiflage and no powerful language at
+all, and when they are deeply moved they look silently into the
+fireplace. Again and again I have watched some play of this sort with
+growing curiosity through the opening scene. The minor people argue,
+chaff one another, hint sometimes at some deeper stream of life just as
+we do in our houses, and I am content. But all the time I have been
+wondering why the chief character, the man who is to bear the burden of
+fate, is gushing, sentimental and quite without ideas. Then the great
+scene comes and I understand that he cannot be well-bred or
+self-possessed or intellectual, for if he were he would draw a chair to
+the fire and there would be no duologue at the end of the third act.
+Ibsen understood the difficulty and made all his characters a little
+provincial that they might not put each other out of countenance, and
+made a leading article sort of poetry, phrases about vine leaves and
+harps in the air it was possible to believe them using in their moments
+of excitement, and if the play needed more than that they could always
+do something stupid. They could go out and hoist a flag as they do at
+the end of Little Eyolf. One only understands that this manner,
+deliberately adopted one doubts not, had gone into his soul and filled
+it with dust, when one has noticed that he could no longer create a man
+of genius. The happiest writers are those that, knowing this form of
+play is slight and passing, keep to the surface, never showing anything
+but the arguments and the persiflage of daily observation, or now and
+then, instead of the expression of passion, a stage picture, a man
+holding a woman's hand or sitting with his head in his hands in dim
+light by the red glow of a fire. It was certainly an understanding of
+the slightness of the form, of its incapacity for the expression of the
+deeper sorts of passion, that made the French invent the play with a
+thesis, for where there is a thesis people can grow hot in argument,
+almost the only kind of passion that displays itself in our daily life.
+The novel of contemporary educated life is upon the other hand a
+permanent form because having the power of psychological description it
+can follow the thought of a man who is looking into the grate.
+
+
+
+
+HAS THE DRAMA OF CONTEMPORARY LIFE A ROOT OF ITS OWN
+
+
+In watching a play about modern educated people with its meagre language
+and its action crushed into the narrow limits of possibility I have
+found myself constantly saying: 'Maybe it has its power to move, slight
+as that is, from being able to suggest fundamental contrasts and
+passions which romantic and poetical literature have shown to be
+beautiful.' A man facing his enemies alone in a quarrel over the purity
+of the water in a Norwegian Spa and using no language but that of the
+newspapers can call up into our minds, let us say, the passion of
+Coriolanus. The lovers and fighters of old imaginative literature are
+more vivid experiences in the soul than anything but one's own ruling
+passion that is itself riddled by their thought as by lightning, and
+even two dumb figures on the roads can call up all that glory. Put the
+man who has no knowledge of literature before a play of this kind and he
+will say as he has said in some form or other in every age at the first
+shock of naturalism, 'What has brought me out to hear nothing but the
+words we use at home when we are talking of the rates?' And he will
+prefer to it any play where there is visible beauty or mirth, where life
+is exciting, at high tide as it were. It is not his fault that he will
+prefer in all likelihood a worse play although its kind may be greater,
+for we have been following the lure of science for generations and
+forgotten him and his. I come always back to this thought. There is
+something of an old wives' tale in fine literature. The makers of it are
+like an old peasant telling stories of the great famine or the hangings
+of '98 or his own memories. He has felt something in the depth of his
+mind and he wants to make it as visible and powerful to our senses as
+possible. He will use the most extravagant words or illustrations if
+they suit his purpose. Or he will invent a wild parable and the more his
+mind is on fire or the more creative it is the less will he look at the
+outer world or value it for its own sake. It gives him metaphors and
+examples and that is all. He is even a little scornful of it, for it
+seems to him while the fit is on that the fire has gone out of it and
+left it but white ashes. I cannot explain it, but I am certain that
+every high thing was invented in this way, between sleeping and waking,
+as it were, and that peering and peeping persons are but hawkers of
+stolen goods. How else could their noses have grown so ravenous or their
+eyes so sharp?
+
+
+
+
+WHY THE BLIND MAN IN ANCIENT TIMES WAS MADE A POET
+
+
+A description in the Iliad or the Odyssey, unlike one in the Ćneid or in
+most modern writers, is the swift and natural observation of a man as he
+is shaped by life. It is a refinement of the primary hungers and has the
+least possible of what is merely scholarly or exceptional. It is, above
+all, never too observant, too professional, and when the book is closed
+we have had our energies enriched, for we have been in the mid-current.
+We have never seen anything Odysseus could not have seen while his
+thought was of the Cyclops, or Achilles when Briseis moved him to
+desire. In the 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 impediments plain to all, who
+sings of life with the ancient simplicity. Poets of coming days when
+once more it will be possible to write as in the great epochs will
+recognise that their sacrifice shall be to refuse what blindness and
+evil name, or imprisonment at the outsetting, denied to men who missed
+thereby the sting of a deliberate refusal. The poets of the ages of
+silver need no refusal of life, the dome of many-coloured glass is
+already shattered while they live. They look at life deliberately and as
+if from beyond life, and the greatest of them need suffer nothing but
+the sadness that the saints have known. This is their aim, and their
+temptation is not a passionate activity, but the approval of their
+fellows, which comes to them in full abundance only when they delight in
+the general thoughts that hold together a cultivated middle-class, where
+irresponsibilities of position and poverty are lacking; the things that
+are more excellent among educated men who have political preoccupations,
+Augustus Cćsar's affability, all that impersonal fecundity which muddies
+the intellectual passions. Ben Jonson says in the Poetaster, that even
+the best of men without Promethean fire is but a hollow statue, and a
+studious man will commonly forget after some forty winters that of a
+certainty Promethean fire will burn somebody's fingers. It may happen
+that poets will be made more often by their sins than by their virtues,
+for general praise is unlucky, as the villages know, and not merely as I
+imagine--for I am superstitious about these things--because the praise
+of all but an equal enslaves and adds a pound to the ball at the ankle
+with every compliment.
+
+All energy that comes from the whole man is as irregular as the
+lightning, for the communicable and forecastable and discoverable is a
+part only, a hungry chicken under the breast of the pelican, and the
+test of poetry is not in reason but in a delight not different from the
+delight that comes to a man at the first coming of love into the heart.
+I knew an old man who had spent his whole life cutting hazel and privet
+from the paths, and in some seventy years he had observed little but had
+many imaginations. He had never seen like a naturalist, never seen
+things as they are, for his habitual mood had been that of a man stirred
+in his affairs; and Shakespeare, Tintoretto, though the times were
+running out when Tintoretto painted, nearly all the great men of the
+renaissance, looked at the world with eyes like his. Their minds were
+never quiescent, never as it were in a mood for scientific
+observations, always an exaltation, never--to use known words--founded
+upon an elimination of the personal factor; and their attention and the
+attention of those they worked for dwelt constantly with what is present
+to the mind in exaltation. I am too modern fully to enjoy Tintoretto's
+Creation of the Milky Way, I cannot fix my thoughts upon that glowing
+and palpitating flesh intently enough to forget, as I can the
+make-believe of a fairy tale, that heavy drapery hanging from a cloud,
+though I find my pleasure in King Lear heightened by the make-believe
+that comes upon it all when the fool says: 'This prophecy Merlin shall
+make, for I live before his time:'--and I always find it quite natural,
+so little does logic in the mere circumstance matter in the finest art,
+that Richard's & Richmond's tents should be side by side. I saw with
+delight the 'Knight of the Burning Pestle' when Mr. Carr revived it, and
+found it none the worse because the apprentice acted a whole play upon
+the spur of the moment and without committing a line to heart. When Ben
+Bronson's 'Epicoene' rammed a century of laughter into the two hours'
+traffic, I found with amazement that almost every journalist had put
+logic on the seat, where our lady imagination should pronounce that
+unjust and favouring sentence her woman's heart is ever plotting, & had
+felt bound to cherish none but reasonable sympathies and to resent the
+baiting of that grotesque old man. I have been looking over a book of
+engravings made in the eighteenth century from those wall-pictures of
+Herculaneum and Pompeii that were, it seems, the work of journeymen
+copying from finer paintings, for the composition is always too good for
+the execution. I find in great numbers an indifference to obvious logic,
+to all that the eye sees at common moments. Perseus shows Andromeda the
+death she lived by in a pool, and though the lovers are carefully drawn
+the reflection is upside down that we may see it the better. There is
+hardly an old master who has not made known to us in some like way how
+little he cares for what every fool can see and every knave can praise.
+The men who imagined the arts were not less superstitious in religion,
+understanding the spiritual relations, but not the mechanical, and
+finding nothing that need strain the throat in those gnats the floods of
+Noah and Deucalion, and in Joshua's moon at Ascalon.
+
+
+
+
+CONCERNING SAINTS AND ARTISTS
+
+
+I took the Indian hemp with certain followers of St. Martin on the
+ground floor of a house in the Latin Quarter. I had never taken it
+before, and was instructed by a boisterous young poet, whose English was
+no better than my French. He gave me a little pellet, if I am not
+forgetting, an hour before dinner, and another after we had dined
+together at some restaurant. As we were going through the streets to the
+meeting-place of the Martinists, I felt suddenly that a cloud I was
+looking at floated in an immense space, and for an instant my being
+rushed out, as it seemed, into that space with ecstasy. I was myself
+again immediately, but the poet was wholly above himself, and presently
+he pointed to one of the street lamps now brightening in the fading
+twilight, and cried at the top of his voice, 'Why do you look at me with
+your great eye?' There were perhaps a dozen people already much excited
+when we arrived; and after I had drunk some cups of coffee and eaten a
+pellet or two more, I grew very anxious to dance, but did not, as I
+could not remember any steps. I sat down and closed my eyes; but no, I
+had no visions, nothing but a sensation of some dark shadow which seemed
+to be telling me that some day I would go into a trance and so out of my
+body for 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 harmonies
+of red, but when a blue china figure caught my eye the harmonies became
+blue upon the instant. I was puzzled, for the reds were all there,
+nothing had changed, but they were no longer important or harmonious;
+and why had the blues so unimportant but a moment ago become exciting
+and delightful? Thereupon it struck me that I was seeing like a painter,
+and that in the course of the evening 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 distinguished face, showed me his horoscope
+and pointed with an ecstasy of melancholy at its evil aspects. The
+boisterous poet, who was an old eater of the Indian hemp, had told me
+that it took one three months growing used to it, three months more
+enjoying it, and three months being cured of it. These men were in their
+second period; but I never forgot myself, never really rose above myself
+for more than a moment, and was even able to feel the absurdity of that
+gaiety, an Herr Nordau among the men of genius but one that was abashed
+at his own sobriety. The sky outside was beginning to grey when there
+came a knocking at the window shutters. Somebody opened the window, and
+a woman in evening dress, who was not a little bewildered to find so
+many people, was helped down into the room. She had been at a 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 window. All
+those talking or dancing men laughed in a dreamy way; and she,
+understanding that there was no judgment in the laughter of men that had
+no thought but of the spectacle of the world, blushed, laughed and
+darted through the room and so upstairs. Alas that the hangman's rope
+should be own brother to that Indian happiness that keeps alone, were it
+not for some stray cactus, mother of as many dreams, an immemorial
+impartiality and simpleness.
+
+
+
+
+THE SUBJECT MATTER OF DRAMA
+
+
+I read this sentence a few days ago, or one like it, in an obituary of
+Ibsen: 'Let nobody again go back to the old ballad material of
+Shakespeare, to murders, and ghosts, for what interests us on the stage
+is modern experience and the discussion of our interests;' and in
+another part of the article Ibsen was blamed because he had written of
+suicides and in other ways made use of 'the morbid terror of death.'
+Dramatic literature has for a long time been left to the criticism of
+journalists, and all these, the old stupid ones and the new clever ones,
+have tried to impress upon it their absorption in the life of the
+moment, their delight in obvious originality & in obvious logic, their
+shrinking from the ancient and insoluble. The writer I have quoted is
+much more than a journalist, but he has lived their hurried life, and
+instinctively turns to them for 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 understanding of their minds, spectators of
+the ages, but of this age. Drama is a means of expression, not a special
+subject matter, and the dramatist is as free to choose, where he has a
+mind to, as the poet of 'Endymion' or as the painter of Mary Magdalene
+at the door of Simon the Pharisee. So far from the discussion of our
+interests and the immediate circumstance of our life being the most
+moving to the imagination, it is what is old and far off that stirs us
+the most deeply. There is a sentence in 'The Marriage of Heaven and
+Hell' that is meaningless until we understand Blake's system of
+correspondences. 'The best wine is the oldest, the best water the
+newest.'
+
+Water is experience, immediate sensation, and wine is emotion, and it is
+with the intellect, as distinguished from imagination, that we enlarge
+the bounds of experience and separate it from all but itself, from
+illusion, from memory, and create among other things science and good
+journalism. Emotion, on the other hand, grows intoxicating and
+delightful after it has been enriched with the memory of old emotions,
+with all the uncounted flavours of old experience, and it is necessarily
+an antiquity of thought, emotions that have been deepened by the
+experiences of many men of genius, that distinguishes the cultivated
+man. The subject-matter of his meditation and invention is old, and he
+will disdain a too conscious originality in the arts as in those matters
+of daily life where, is it not Balzac who says, 'we are all
+conservatives?' He is above all things well bred, and whether he write
+or paint will not desire a technique that denies or obtrudes his long
+and noble descent. Corneille and Racine did not deny their masters, and
+when Dante spoke of his master Virgil there was no crowing of the cock.
+In their day imitation was conscious or all but conscious, and while
+originality was but so much the more a part of the man himself, so much
+the deeper because unconscious, no quick analysis could find out their
+miracle, that needed it may be generations to reveal; but it is our
+imitation that is unconscious and that waits the certainties of time.
+The more religious the subject-matter of an art, the more will it be as
+it were stationary, and the more ancient will be the emotion that it
+arouses and the circumstances that it calls up before our eyes. When in
+the Middle Ages the pilgrim to St. Patrick's Purgatory found himself on
+the lakeside, he found a boat made out of a hollow tree to ferry him to
+the cave of vision. In religious painting and poetry, crowns and swords
+of an ancient pattern take upon themselves new meanings, and it is
+impossible to separate our idea of what is noble from a mystic stair,
+where not men and women, but robes, jewels, incidents, ancient utilities
+float upward slowly over the all but sleeping mind, putting on emotional
+and spiritual life as they ascend until they are swallowed up by some
+far glory that they even were too modern and momentary to endure. All
+art is dream, and what the day is done with is dreaming ripe, and what
+art moulds religion accepts, and in the end all is in the wine cup, all
+is in the drunken phantasy, and the grapes begin to stammer.
+
+
+
+
+THE TWO KINDS OF ASCETICISM
+
+
+It is not possible to separate an emotion or a spiritual state from the
+image that calls it up and gives it expression. Michael Angelo's Moses,
+Velasquez' Philip the Second, the colour purple, a crucifix, call into
+life an emotion or state that vanishes with them because they are its
+only possible expression, and that is why no mind is more valuable than
+the images it contains. The imaginative writer differs from the saint in
+that he identifies himself--to the neglect of his own soul, alas!--with
+the soul of the world, and frees himself from all that is impermanent
+in that soul, an ascetic not of women and wine, but of the newspapers.
+That which is permanent in the soul of the world upon the other hand,
+the great passions that trouble all and have but a brief recurring life
+of flower and seed in any man, is the renunciation of the saint who
+seeks not an eternal art, but his own eternity. The artist stands
+between the saint and the world of impermanent things, and just in so
+far as his mind dwells on what is impermanent in his sense, on all that
+'modern experience and the discussion of our interests,' that is to say
+on what never recurs, as desire and hope, terror and weariness, spring
+and autumn recur in varying rhythms, will his mind become critical, as
+distinguished from creative, and his emotions wither. He will think less
+of what he sees and more of his own attitude towards it, and will
+express this attitude by an essentially critical selection and emphasis.
+I am not quite sure of my memory but I think that Mr. Ricketts has said
+in his book on the Prado that he feels the critic in Velasquez for the
+first time in painting, and we all feel the critic in Whistler and
+Degas, in Browning, even in Mr. Swinburne, in the finest art of all ages
+but the greatest. The end for art is the ecstasy awakened by the
+presence before an ever changing mind of what is permanent in the world,
+or by the arousing of that mind itself into the very delicate and
+fastidious mood habitual with it when it is seeking those permanent &
+recurring things. There is a little of both ecstasies at all times, but
+at this time we have a small measure of the creative impulse itself, of
+the divine vision, a great one of 'the lost traveller's dream under the
+hill,' perhaps because all the old simple things have been painted or
+written, and they will only have meaning for us again when a new race or
+a new civilisation has made us look upon all with new eyesight.
+
+
+
+
+IN THE SERPENT'S MOUTH
+
+
+There is an old saying that God is a circle whose centre is everywhere.
+If that is true, the saint goes to the centre, the poet and artist to
+the ring where everything comes round again. The poet must not seek for
+what is still and fixed, for that has no life for him; and if he did his
+style would become cold and monotonous, and his sense of beauty faint
+and sickly, as are both style and beauty to my imagination in the prose
+and poetry of Newman, but be content to find his pleasure in all that is
+for ever passing away that it may come again, in the beauty of woman, in
+the fragile flowers of spring, in momentary heroic passion, in whatever
+is most fleeting, most impassioned, as it were, for its own perfection,
+most eager to return in its glory. Yet perhaps he must endure the
+impermanent a little, for these things return, but not wholly, for no
+two faces are alike, and, it may be, had we more learned eyes, no two
+flowers. Is it that all things are made by the struggle of the
+individual and the world, of the unchanging and the returning, and that
+the saint and the poet are over all, and that the poet has made his home
+in the Serpent's mouth?
+
+
+
+
+THE BLACK AND THE WHITE ARROWS
+
+
+Instinct creates the recurring and the beautiful, all the winding of the
+serpent; but reason, the most ugly man, as Blake called it, is a drawer
+of the straight line, the maker of the arbitrary and the impermanent,
+for no recurring spring will ever bring again yesterday's clock.
+Sanctity has its straight line also, darting from the centre, and with
+these arrows the many-coloured serpent, theme of all our poetry, is
+maimed and hunted. He that finds the white arrow shall have wisdom older
+than the Serpent, but what of the black arrow. How much knowledge, how
+heavy a quiver of the crow-feathered ebony rods can the soul endure?
+
+
+
+
+HIS MISTRESS'S EYEBROWS
+
+
+The preoccupation of our Art and Literature with knowledge, with the
+surface of life, with the arbitrary, with mechanism, has arisen out of
+the root. A careful, but not necessarily very subtle man could foretell
+the history of any religion if he knew its first principle, and that it
+would live long enough to fulfil itself. The mind can never do the same
+thing twice over, and having exhausted simple beauty and meaning, it
+passes to the strange and hidden, and at last must find its delight,
+having outrun its harmonies in the emphatic and discordant. When I was a
+boy at the art school I watched an older student late returned from
+Paris, with a wonder that had no understanding in it. He was very
+amorous, and every new love was the occasion of a new picture, and every
+new picture was uglier than its forerunner. He was excited about his
+mistress's eyebrows, as was fitting, but the interest of beauty had been
+exhausted by the logical energies of Art, which destroys where it has
+rummaged, and can but discover, whether it will or no. We cannot
+discover our subject-matter by deliberate intellect, for when a
+subject-matter ceases to move us we must go elsewhere, and when it moves
+us, even though it be 'that old ballad material of Shakespeare' or even
+'the morbid terror of death,' we can laugh at reason. We must not ask is
+the world interested in this or that, for nothing is in question but our
+own interest, and we can understand no other. Our place in the Hierarchy
+is settled for us by our choice of a subject-matter, and all good
+criticism is hieratic, delighting in setting things above one another,
+Epic and Drama above Lyric and so on, and not merely side by side. But
+it is our instinct and not our intellect that chooses. We can
+deliberately refashion our characters, but not our painting or our
+poetry. If our characters also were not unconsciously refashioned so
+completely by the unfolding of the logical energies of Art, that even
+simple things have in the end a new aspect in our eyes, the Arts would
+not be among those things that return for ever. The ballads that Bishop
+Percy gathered returned in the Ancient Mariner, and the delight in the
+world of old Greek sculptors sprang into a more delicate loveliness in
+that archaistic head of the young athlete down the long corridor to your
+left hand as you go into the British Museum. Civilisation too, will not
+that also destroy where it has loved, until it shall bring the simple
+and natural things again and a new Argo with all the gilding on her bows
+sail out to find another fleece?
+
+
+
+
+THE TRESSES OF THE HAIR
+
+
+Hafiz cried to his beloved, 'I made a bargain with that brown hair
+before the beginning of time, and it shall not be broken through
+unending time,' and it may be that Mistress Nature knows that we have
+lived many times, and that whatsoever changes and winds into itself
+belongs to us. She covers her eyes away from us, but she lets us play
+with the tresses of her hair.
+
+
+
+
+A TOWER ON THE APENNINE
+
+
+The other day I was walking towards Urbino where I was to spend the
+night, having crossed the Apennines from San Sepolcro, and had come to a
+level place on the mountain top near the journey's end. My friends were
+in a carriage somewhere behind, on a road which was still ascending in
+great loops, and I was alone amid a visionary fantastic impossible
+scenery. It was sunset and the stormy clouds hung upon mountain after
+mountain, and far off on one great summit a cloud darker than the rest
+glimmered with lightning. Away to the south a medićval tower, with no
+building near nor any sign of life, rose upon its solitary summit into
+the clouds. I saw suddenly in the mind's eye an old man, erect and a
+little gaunt, standing in the door of the tower, while about him broke a
+windy light. He was the poet who had at last, because he had done so
+much for the word's sake, come to share in the dignity of the saint. He
+had hidden nothing of himself but he had taken care of 'that dignity ...
+the perfection of form ... this lofty and severe quality ... this
+virtue.' And though he had but sought it for the 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, theologians,
+lawyers, men of science of various kinds. They have followed some
+abstract reverie, which stirs the brain only and needs that only, and
+have therefore stood before the looking-glass without pleasure and never
+known those thoughts that shape the lines of the body for beauty or
+animation, and wake a desire for praise or for display.
+
+There are two pictures of Venice side by side in the house where I am
+writing this, a Canaletto that has little but careful drawing and a not
+very emotional pleasure in clean bright air, and a Franz Francken, where
+the blue water, that in the other stirs one so little, can make one long
+to plunge into the green depth where a cloud shadow falls. Neither
+painting could move us at all, if our thought did not rush out to the
+edges of our flesh, and it is so with all good art, whether the Victory
+of Samothrace which reminds the soles of our feet of swiftness, or the
+Odyssey that would send us out under the salt wind, or the young
+horsemen on the Parthenon, that seem happier than our boyhood ever was,
+and in our boyhood's way. Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see
+the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every
+abstract thing, from all that is of the brain only, from all that is not
+a fountain jetting from the entire hopes, memories, and sensations of
+the body. Its morality is personal, knows little of any general law, has
+no blame for Little Musgrave, no care for Lord Barnard's house, seems
+lighter than a breath and yet is hard and heavy, for if a man is not
+ready to face toil and risk, and in all gaiety of heart, his body will
+grow unshapely and his heart lack the wild will that stirs desire. It
+approved before all men those that talked or wrestled or tilted under
+the walls of Urbino, or sat in the wide window seats discussing all
+things, with love ever in their thought, when the wise Duchess ordered
+all, and the Lady Emilia gave the theme.
+
+
+
+
+RELIGIOUS BELIEF NECESSARY TO SYMBOLIC ART
+
+
+All art is sensuous, but when a man puts only his contemplative nature,
+and his more vague desires into his art, the sensuous images through
+which it speaks become broken, fleeting, uncertain, or are chosen for
+their distance from general experience, and all grows unsubstantial &
+fantastic. When imagination moves in a dim world like the country of
+sleep in Love's Nocturne and 'Siren there winds her dizzy hair and
+sings' we go to it for delight indeed but in our weariness. If we are to
+sojourn there that world must grow consistent with itself, emotion must
+be related to emotion by a system of ordered images, as in the Divine
+Comedy. It must grow to be symbolic, that is, for the soul can only
+achieve a distinct separated life where many related objects at once
+distinguish and arouse its energies in their 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 recurring images of towers and rivers,
+and caves with fountains in them, and that one star of his, till his
+world had grown solid underfoot and consistent enough for the soul's
+habitation.
+
+But even then I lacked something to compensate my imagination for
+geographical and historical reality, for the testimony of our ordinary
+senses, and found myself wishing for and trying to imagine, as I had
+also when reading Keats' Endymion, a crowd of believers who could put
+into all those strange sights the strength of their belief and the rare
+testimony of their visions. A little crowd had been sufficient, and I
+would have had Shelley a sectary that his revelation might have found
+the only sufficient evidence of religion, miracle. All symbolic art
+should arise out of a real belief, and that it cannot do so in this age
+proves that this age is a road and not a resting place for the
+imaginative arts. I can only understand others by myself, and I am
+certain that there are many who are not moved as they desire to be by
+that solitary light burning in the tower of Prince Athanais, because it
+has not entered into men's prayers nor lighted any through the sacred
+dark of religious contemplation.
+
+Lyrical poems even when they but speak of emotions common to all need,
+if not a religious belief like the spiritual arts, a life that has
+leisure for itself, and a society that is quickly stirred that our
+emotion may be strengthened by the emotion of others. All circumstance
+that makes emotion at once dignified and visible, increases the poet's
+power, and I think that is why I have always longed for some stringed
+instrument, and a listening audience not drawn out of the hurried
+streets but from a life where it would be natural to murmur over again
+the singer's thought. When I heard 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 religion, there was little separation
+between holy and common things, and just as the arts themselves passed
+quickly from passion to divine contemplation, from the conversation of
+peasants to that of princes, the one song remembering the drunken miller
+and but half forgetting Cambynskan bold; so did a man feel himself near
+sacred presences when he turned his plough from the slope of Cruachmaa
+or of Olympus. The occupations and the places known to Homer or to
+Hesiod, those pure first artists, might, as it were, if but the
+fashioners hands had loosened, have changed before the poem's end to
+symbols and vanished, winged and unweary, into the unchanging worlds
+where religion only can discover life as well as peace. A man of that
+unbroken day could have all the subtlety of Shelley, & 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 common daylight, but Shakespeare could
+not, & Shakespeare seems to bring us to the very market-place, when we
+remember Shelley's dizzy and Landor's calm disdain of usual daily
+things. And at last we have Villiers de L'Isle Adam crying in the
+ecstasy of a supreme culture, of a supreme refusal, 'as for living, our
+servants will do that for us.' One of the means of loftiness, of
+marmorean stillness has been the choice of strange and far away places,
+for the scenery of art, but this choice has grown bitter to me, and
+there are moments when I cannot believe in the reality of imaginations
+that are not inset with the minute life of long familiar things and
+symbols and places. I have come to think of even Shakespeare's journeys
+to Rome or to Verona as the outflowing of an unrest, a dissatisfaction
+with natural interests, an unstable equilibrium of the whole European
+mind that would not have come had Constantinople wall been built of
+better stone. I am orthodox and pray for a resurrection of the body, and
+am certain that a man should find his Holy Land where he first crept
+upon the floor, and that familiar woods and rivers should fade into
+symbol with so gradual a change that he never discover, no not even in
+ecstasy itself, that he is beyond space, and that time alone keeps him
+from Primum Mobile, the Supernal Eden, and the White Rose over all.
+
+
+
+
+Here ends Discoveries; written by William 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.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Discoveries, by William Butler Yeats
+
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+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Discoveries: A Volume of Essays, by William Butler Yeats.
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+
+    p {margin-top: .75em; text-align: justify; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+
+    body {margin-left: 12%; margin-right: 12%;}
+
+    .pagenum {position: absolute; left: 92%; font-size: smaller; text-align: right; font-style: normal;}
+
+    h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 {text-align: center; clear: both;}
+
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+
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Discoveries, by William Butler Yeats
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Discoveries
+       A Volume of Essays
+
+Author: William Butler Yeats
+
+Release Date: July 5, 2010 [EBook #33087]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DISCOVERIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Brian Foley and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+<p class="center">Two hundred copies of this book have been printed.</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h2>DISCOVERIES; A VOLUME OF ESSAYS<br />
+BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS.</h2>
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/horse.png" alt="" /></div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>DUN EMER PRESS<br />DUNDRUM<br />MCMVII</h3>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="contents">
+<tr><td>Prophet, Priest and King</td><td align="right">Page <a href="#Page_1">1</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Personality and the Intellectual Essences</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_5">5</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Musician and the Orator</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_9">9</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>A Banjo Player</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_10">10</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Looking-glass</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_11">11</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Tree of Life</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_12">12</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Praise of Old Wives&#8217; Tales</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_15">15</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Play of Modern Manners</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_16">16</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Has the Drama of Contemporary Life a Root of its Own</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_18">18</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Why the Blind Man in Ancient Times was made a Poet</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_20">20</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Concerning Saints and Artists</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_24">24</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Subject Matter of Drama</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_27">27</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Two Kinds of Asceticism</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_30">30</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>In the Serpent&#8217;s Mouth</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_32">32</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Black and the White Arrows</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_33">33</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>His Mistress&#8217;s Eyebrows</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_33">33</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Tresses of the Hair</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_35">35</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>A Tower on the Apennine</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_36">36</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Thinking of the Body</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_37">37</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>Religious Belief necessary to symbolic Art</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_39">39</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>The Holy Places</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_41">41</a></td></tr></table>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+<h1>DISCOVERIES</h1>
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h2>PROPHET, PRIEST AND KING</h2>
+
+<p>The little theatrical company I write my plays for had come to a west of
+Ireland town and was to give a performance in an old ball-room, for
+there was no other room big enough. I went there from a neighbouring
+country house and arriving a little before the players, tried to open a
+window. My hands were black with dirt in a moment and presently a pane
+of glass and a part of the window frame came out in my hands. Everything
+in this room was half in ruins, the rotten boards cracked under my feet,
+and our new proscenium and the new boards of the platform looked out of
+place, and yet the room was not really old, in spite of the musicians&#8217;
+gallery over the stage. It had been built by some romantic or
+philanthropic landlord some three or four generations ago, and was a
+memory of we knew not what unfinished scheme.</p>
+
+<p>From there I went to look for the players and called for information on
+a young priest, who had invited them, and taken upon himself the finding
+of an audience. He lived in a high house with other priests, and as I
+went in I noticed with a whimsical pleasure a broken pane of glass in
+the 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span> bishop, got drunk,
+and hurled a stone through the painted glass. He was a clever man, who
+read Meredith and Ibsen, but some of his books had been packed in the
+fire-grate by his house-keeper, instead of the customary view of an
+Italian lake or the coloured tissue-paper. The players, who had been
+giving a performance in a neighbouring town, had not yet come, or were
+unpacking their costumes and properties at the hotel he had recommended
+them. We should have time, he said, to go through the half-ruined town
+and to visit the convent schools and the cathedral, where, owing to his
+influence, two of our young Irish sculptors had been set to carve an
+altar and the heads of pillars. I had only heard of this work, and I
+found its strangeness and simplicity&mdash;one of them had been Rodin&#8217;s
+pupil&mdash;could not make me forget the meretriciousness of the architecture
+and the commercial commonplace of the inlaid pavements. The new movement
+had seized on the cathedral midway in its growth, and the worst of the
+old &amp; the best of the new were side by side without any sign of
+transition. The convent school was, as other like places have been to
+me&mdash;a long room in a workhouse hospital at Portumna, in particular&mdash;a
+delight to the imagination and the eyes. A new floor had been put into
+some ecclesiastical building and the light from a great mullioned
+window,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span> 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&#8217;s interest in such things.</p>
+
+<p>A good many of our audience, when the curtain went up in the old
+ball-room, were drunk, but all were attentive for they had a great deal
+of respect for my friend and there were other priests there. Presently
+the man at the door opposite to the stage strayed off somewhere and I
+took his place and when boys came up offering two or three pence and
+asking to be let into the sixpenny seats I let them join the melancholy
+crowd. The play professed to tell of the heroic life of ancient Ireland
+but was really full of sedentary refinement and the spirituality of
+cities. Every emotion was made as dainty footed and dainty fingered as
+might be, and a love and pathos where passion had faded into sentiment,
+emotions of pensive and harmless people, drove shadowy young men through
+the shadows of death and battle. I watched it with growing rage. It was
+not my own<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> 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 dormitory, where a few flowers
+and a few coloured counterpanes and the coloured walls had made a severe
+and gracious beauty? Presently the play was changed and our comedian
+began to act a little farce, and when I saw him struggle to wake into
+laughter an audience, out of whom the life had run as if it were water,
+I rejoiced, as I had over that broken window-pane. Here was something
+secular, abounding, even a little vulgar, for he was gagging horribly,
+condescending to his audience, though not without contempt.</p>
+
+<p>We had our supper in the priest&#8217;s house, and a government official who
+had come down from Dublin, partly out of interest in this attempt &#8216;to
+educate the people,&#8217; 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&#8217;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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>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&#8217;s book of the hotel to turn over its
+pages while waiting for my bacon and eggs, and found several pages full
+of obscenities, scrawled there some two or three weeks before, by Dublin
+visitors it seemed, for a notorious Dublin street was mentioned. Nobody
+had thought it worth his while to tear out the page or block out the
+lines, and as I put the book away impressions that had been drifting
+through my mind for months rushed up into a single thought. &#8216;If we poets
+are to move the people, we must reintegrate the human spirit in our
+imagination. The English have driven away the kings, and turned the
+prophets into demagogues and you cannot have health among a people if
+you have not prophet, priest and king.&#8217;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+<h2>PERSONALITY AND THE INTELLECTUAL ESSENCES</h2>
+
+<p>My work in Ireland has continually set this thought before me, &#8216;How can
+I make my work mean something to vigorous and simple men whose attention
+is not given to art but to a shop, or teaching in a National School, or
+dispensing medicine?&#8217; I had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> not wanted to &#8216;elevate them&#8217; or &#8216;educate
+them,&#8217; as these words are understood, but to make them understand my
+vision, and I had not wanted a large audience, certainly not what is
+called a national audience, but enough people for what is accidental and
+temporary to lose itself in the lump. In England where there have been
+so many changing activities and so much systematic education one only
+escapes from crudities and temporary interests among students, but here
+there is the right audience could one but get its ears. I have always
+come to this certainty, what moves natural men in the arts is what moves
+them in life, and that is, intensity of personal life, intonations that
+show them in a book or a play, the strength, the essential moment of a
+man who would be exciting in the market or at the dispensary door. They
+must go out of the theatre with the strength they live by strengthened
+with looking upon some passion that could, whatever its chosen way of
+life, strike down an enemy, fill a long stocking with money or move a
+girl&#8217;s heart. They have not much to do with the speculations of science,
+though they have a little, or with the speculations of metaphysics,
+though they have a little. Their legs will tire on the road if there is
+nothing in their hearts but vague sentiment, and though it is charming
+to have an affectionate feeling about flowers, that will not pull<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> the
+cart out of the ditch. An exciting person, whether the hero of a play or
+the maker of poems, will display the greatest volume of personal energy,
+and this energy must seem to come out of the body as out of the mind. We
+must say to ourselves continually when we imagine a character, &#8216;Have I
+given him the roots, as it were, of all faculties necessary for life?&#8217;
+And only when one is certain of that may one give him the one faculty
+that fills the imagination with joy. I even doubt if any play had ever a
+great popularity that did not use, or seem to use, the bodily energies
+of its principal actor to the full. Villon the robber could have
+delighted these Irishmen with plays and songs, if he and they had been
+born to the same traditions of word and symbol, but Shelley could not;
+and as men came to live in towns and to read printed books and to have
+many specialised activities, it has become more possible to produce
+Shelleys and less and less possible to produce Villons. The last Villon
+dwindled into Robert Burns because the highest faculties had faded,
+taking the sense of beauty with them, into some sort of vague heaven &amp;
+left the lower to lumber where they best could. In literature, partly
+from the lack of that spoken word which knits us to normal man, we have
+lost in personality, in our delight in the whole man&mdash;blood,
+imagination, intellect, running together&mdash;but have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> found a new delight,
+in essences, in states of mind, in pure imagination, in all that comes
+to us most easily in elaborate music. There are two ways before
+literature&mdash;upward into ever-growing subtlety, with Verhaeren, with
+Mallarm&eacute;, with Maeterlinck, until at last, it may be, a new agreement
+among refined and studious men gives birth to a new passion, and what
+seems literature becomes religion; or downward, taking the soul with us
+until all is simplified and solidified again. That is the choice of
+choices&mdash;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&#8217;s song is beautiful, and the traditions of modern imagination,
+growing always more musical, more lyrical, more melancholy, casting up
+now a Shelley, now a Swinburne, now a Wagner, are it may be the frenzy
+of those that are about to see what the magic hymn printed by the Abb&eacute;
+de Villars has called the Crown of Living and Melodious Diamonds. If the
+carts have hit our fancy we must have the soul tight within our bodies,
+for it has grown so fond of a beauty accumulated by subtle generations
+that it will for a long time be impatient with our thirst for mere
+force, mere personality, for the tumult of the blood. If it begin to
+slip away we must go after it, for Shelley&#8217;s Chapel of the Morning Star
+is better than Burns&#8217;s beer house&mdash;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span>surely it was beer not
+barleycorn&mdash;except at the day&#8217;s weary end; and it is always better than
+that uncomfortable place where there is no beer, the machine shop of the
+realists.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+<h2>THE MUSICIAN AND THE ORATOR</h2>
+
+<p>Walter Pater says music is the type of all the Arts, but somebody else,
+I forget now who, that oratory is their type. You will side with the one
+or the other according to the nature of your energy, and I in my present
+mood am all for the man who, with an average audience before him, uses
+all means of persuasion&mdash;stories, laughter, tears, and but so much music
+as he can discover on the wings of words. I would even avoid the
+conversation of the lovers of music, who would draw us into the
+impersonal land of sound and colour, and would have no one write with a
+sonata in his memory. We may even speak a little evil of musicians,
+having admitted that they will see before we do that melodious crown. We
+may remind them that the housemaid does not respect the piano-tuner as
+she does the plumber, and of the enmity that they have aroused among all
+poets. Music is the most impersonal of things and words the most
+personal, and that is why musicians do not like words. They masticate
+them for a long time, being afraid they would not be able to digest<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span>
+them, and when the words are so broken and softened and mixed with
+spittle, that they are not words any longer, they swallow them.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+<h2>A BANJO PLAYER</h2>
+
+<p>A girl has been playing on the banjo. She is pretty and if I didn&#8217;t
+listen to her I could have watched her, and if I didn&#8217;t watch her I
+could have listened. Her voice, the movements of her body, the
+expression of her face all said the same thing. A player of a different
+temper and body would have made all different and might have been
+delightful in some other way. A movement not of music only but of life
+came to its perfection. I was delighted and I did not know why until I
+thought &#8216;that is the way my people, the people I see in the mind&#8217;s eye,
+play music, and I like it because it is all personal, as personal as
+Villon&#8217;s poetry.&#8217; 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> it befits
+Him to be everything. But if you sit at the piano it is the piano, the
+mechanism, that is the important thing, and nothing of you means
+anything but your fingers and your intellect.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+<h2>THE LOOKING-GLASS</h2>
+
+<p>I have just been talking to a girl with a shrill monotonous voice and an
+abrupt way of moving. She is fresh from school where they have taught
+her history and geography &#8216;whereby a soul can be discerned,&#8217; but what is
+the value of an education, or even in the long run of a science, that
+does not begin with the personality, the habitual self, and illustrate
+all by that? Somebody should have taught her to speak for the most part
+on whatever note of her voice is most musical, and soften those harsh
+notes by speaking, not singing, to some stringed instrument, taking note
+after note and, as it were, caressing her words a little as if she loved
+the sound of them, and have taught her after this some beautiful
+pantomimic dance, till it had grown a habit to live for eye and ear. A
+wise theatre might make a training in strong and beautiful life the
+fashion, teaching before all else the heroic discipline of the
+looking-glass, for is not beauty, even as lasting love, one of the most
+difficult of the arts?</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE TREE OF LIFE</h2>
+
+<p>We artists have taken over-much to heart that old commandment about
+seeking after the Kingdom of Heaven. Verlaine told me that he had tried
+to translate &#8216;In Memoriam,&#8217; but could not because Tennyson was &#8216;too
+noble, too Anglais, and when he should have been broken-hearted had many
+reminiscences.&#8217; About that time I found in some English review an essay
+of his on Shakespeare. &#8216;I had once a fine Shakespeare,&#8217; he wrote, or
+some such words, &#8216;but I have it no longer. I write from memory.&#8217; 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 &#8216;that the poet
+should hide nothing of himself,&#8217; though he must speak it all with &#8216;a
+care of that dignity which should manifest itself, if not in the
+perfection of form, at all events with an invisible, insensible, but
+effectual endeavour after this lofty and severe quality, I was about to
+say this virtue.&#8217; It was this feeling for his own personality, his
+delight in singing his own life, even more than that life itself, which
+made the generation I belong to compare him to Villon. It was not till
+after his death that I understood the meaning<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> his words should have had
+for me, for while he lived I was interested in nothing but states of
+mind, lyrical moments, intellectual essences. I would not then have been
+as delighted as I am now by that banjo-player, or as shocked as I am now
+by that girl whose movements have grown abrupt, and whose voice has
+grown harsh by the neglect of all but external activities. I had not
+learned what sweetness, what rhythmic movement, there is in those who
+have become the joy that is themselves. Without knowing it I had come to
+care for nothing but impersonal beauty. I had set out on life with the
+thought of putting my very self into poetry, and had understood this as
+a representation of my own visions and an attempt to cut away the
+non-essential, but as I imagined the visions outside myself my
+imagination became full of decorative landscape and of still life. I
+thought of myself as something unmoving and silent living in the middle
+of my own mind and body, a grain of sand in Bloomsbury or in Connacht
+that Satan&#8217;s watch fiends cannot find. Then one day I understood quite
+suddenly, as the way is, that I was seeking something unchanging and
+unmixed and always outside myself, a Stone or an Elixir that was always
+out of reach, and that I myself was the fleeting thing that held out its
+hand. The more I tried to make my art deliberately beautiful, the more
+did I follow the opposite of myself,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> for deliberate beauty is like a
+woman always desiring man&#8217;s desire. Presently I found that I entered
+into myself and pictured myself and not some essence when I was not
+seeking beauty at all, but merely to lighten the mind of some burden of
+love or bitterness thrown upon it by the events of life. We are only
+permitted to desire life, and all the rest should be our complaints or
+our praise of that exacting mistress who can awake our lips into song
+with her kisses. But we must not give her all, we must deceive her a
+little at times, for, as Le Sage says in &#8216;The Devil on Two Sticks,&#8217; the
+false lovers who do not become melancholy or jealous with honest passion
+have the happiest mistress and are rewarded the soonest and by the most
+beautiful. Our deceit will give us style, mastery, that dignity, that
+lofty and severe quality Verlaine spoke of. To put it otherwise, we
+should ascend out of common interests, the thoughts of the newspapers,
+of the market-place, of men of science, but only so far as we can carry
+the normal, passionate, reasoning self, the personality as a whole. We
+must find some place upon the Tree of Life high enough for the forked
+branches to keep it safe, and low enough to be out of the little
+wind-tossed boughs and twigs, for the Ph&oelig;nix nest, for the passion
+that is exaltation and not negation of the will, for the wings that are
+always upon fire.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE PRAISE OF OLD WIVES&#8217; TALES</h2>
+
+<p>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 &#8216;Don Quixote and Odysseus are
+always near to me;&#8217; that is true for me also, for even Hamlet and Lear
+and &OElig;dipus are more cloudy. No playwright ever has made or ever will
+make a character that will follow us out of the theatre as Don Quixote
+follows us out of the book, for no playwright can be wholly episodical,
+and when one constructs, bringing one&#8217;s characters into complicated
+relations with one another, something impersonal comes into the story.
+Society, fate, &#8216;tendency,&#8217; something not quite human begins to arrange
+the characters and to excite into action only so much of their humanity
+as they find it necessary to show to one another. The common heart will
+always love better the tales that have something of an old wives&#8217; tale
+and that look upon their hero from every side as if he alone were
+wonderful, as a child does with a new penny. In plays of a comedy too
+extravagant to photograph life, or written in verse, the construction is
+of a necessity woven out of naked motives and passions, but when an
+atmosphere of modern reality has to be built up<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> as well, and the
+tendency, or fate, or society has to be shown as it is about ourselves
+the characters grow fainter and we have to read the book many times or
+see the play many times before we can remember them. Even then they are
+only possible in a certain drawing-room and among such and such people,
+and we must carry all that lumber in our heads. I thought Tolstoi&#8217;s &#8216;War
+and Peace&#8217; the greatest story I had ever read, and yet it has gone from
+me; even Lancelot, ever a shadow, is more visible in my memory than all
+its substance.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+<h2>THE PLAY OF MODERN MANNERS</h2>
+
+<p>Of all artistic forms that have had a large share of the world&#8217;s
+attention the worst is the play about modern educated people. Except
+where it is superficial or deliberately argumentative it fills one&#8217;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> opening scene. The minor people argue,
+chaff one another, hint sometimes at some deeper stream of life just as
+we do in our houses, and I am content. But all the time I have been
+wondering why the chief character, the man who is to bear the burden of
+fate, is gushing, sentimental and quite without ideas. Then the great
+scene comes and I understand that he cannot be well-bred or
+self-possessed or intellectual, for if he were he would draw a chair to
+the fire and there would be no duologue at the end of the third act.
+Ibsen understood the difficulty and made all his characters a little
+provincial that they might not put each other out of countenance, and
+made a leading article sort of poetry, phrases about vine leaves and
+harps in the air it was possible to believe them using in their moments
+of excitement, and if the play needed more than that they could always
+do something stupid. They could go out and hoist a flag as they do at
+the end of Little Eyolf. One only understands that this manner,
+deliberately adopted one doubts not, had gone into his soul and filled
+it with dust, when one has noticed that he could no longer create a man
+of genius. The happiest writers are those that, knowing this form of
+play is slight and passing, keep to the surface, never showing anything
+but the arguments and the persiflage of daily observation, or now and
+then, instead of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> expression of passion, a stage picture, a man
+holding a woman&#8217;s hand or sitting with his head in his hands in dim
+light by the red glow of a fire. It was certainly an understanding of
+the slightness of the form, of its incapacity for the expression of the
+deeper sorts of passion, that made the French invent the play with a
+thesis, for where there is a thesis people can grow hot in argument,
+almost the only kind of passion that displays itself in our daily life.
+The novel of contemporary educated life is upon the other hand a
+permanent form because having the power of psychological description it
+can follow the thought of a man who is looking into the grate.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+<h2>HAS THE DRAMA OF CONTEMPORARY LIFE A ROOT OF ITS OWN</h2>
+
+<p>In watching a play about modern educated people with its meagre language
+and its action crushed into the narrow limits of possibility I have
+found myself constantly saying: &#8216;Maybe it has its power to move, slight
+as that is, from being able to suggest fundamental contrasts and
+passions which romantic and poetical literature have shown to be
+beautiful.&#8217; A man facing his enemies alone in a quarrel over the purity
+of the water in a Norwegian Spa and using no language but that of the
+newspapers can <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>call up into our minds, let us say, the passion of
+Coriolanus. The lovers and fighters of old imaginative literature are
+more vivid experiences in the soul than anything but one&#8217;s own ruling
+passion that is itself riddled by their thought as by lightning, and
+even two dumb figures on the roads can call up all that glory. Put the
+man who has no knowledge of literature before a play of this kind and he
+will say as he has said in some form or other in every age at the first
+shock of naturalism, &#8216;What has brought me out to hear nothing but the
+words we use at home when we are talking of the rates?&#8217; And he will
+prefer to it any play where there is visible beauty or mirth, where life
+is exciting, at high tide as it were. It is not his fault that he will
+prefer in all likelihood a worse play although its kind may be greater,
+for we have been following the lure of science for generations and
+forgotten him and his. I come always back to this thought. There is
+something of an old wives&#8217; tale in fine literature. The makers of it are
+like an old peasant telling stories of the great famine or the hangings
+of &#8217;98 or his own memories. He has felt something in the depth of his
+mind and he wants to make it as visible and powerful to our senses as
+possible. He will use the most extravagant words or illustrations if
+they suit his purpose. Or he will invent a wild parable and the more his
+mind is on fire<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> or the more creative it is the less will he look at the
+outer world or value it for its own sake. It gives him metaphors and
+examples and that is all. He is even a little scornful of it, for it
+seems to him while the fit is on that the fire has gone out of it and
+left it but white ashes. I cannot explain it, but I am certain that
+every high thing was invented in this way, between sleeping and waking,
+as it were, and that peering and peeping persons are but hawkers of
+stolen goods. How else could their noses have grown so ravenous or their
+eyes so sharp?</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+<h2>WHY THE BLIND MAN IN ANCIENT TIMES WAS MADE A POET</h2>
+
+<p>A description in the Iliad or the Odyssey, unlike one in the &AElig;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 Odysseus 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>are a conflagration of all the energies of active life. In
+primitive times the blind man became a poet as he becomes a fiddler in
+our villages, because he had to be driven out of activities all his
+nature cried for, before he could be contented with the praise of life.
+And often it is Villon or Verlaine with impediments plain to all, who
+sings of life with the ancient simplicity. Poets of coming days when
+once more it will be possible to write as in the great epochs will
+recognise that their sacrifice shall be to refuse what blindness and
+evil name, or imprisonment at the outsetting, denied to men who missed
+thereby the sting of a deliberate refusal. The poets of the ages of
+silver need no refusal of life, the dome of many-coloured glass is
+already shattered while they live. They look at life deliberately and as
+if from beyond life, and the greatest of them need suffer nothing but
+the sadness that the saints have known. This is their aim, and their
+temptation is not a passionate activity, but the approval of their
+fellows, which comes to them in full abundance only when they delight in
+the general thoughts that hold together a cultivated middle-class, where
+irresponsibilities of position and poverty are lacking; the things that
+are more excellent among educated men who have political preoccupations,
+Augustus C&aelig;sar&#8217;s affability, all that impersonal fecundity which muddies
+the intellectual passions. Ben Jonson says in the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span>Poetaster, that even
+the best of men without Promethean fire is but a hollow statue, and a
+studious man will commonly forget after some forty winters that of a
+certainty Promethean fire will burn somebody&#8217;s fingers. It may happen
+that poets will be made more often by their sins than by their virtues,
+for general praise is unlucky, as the villages know, and not merely as I
+imagine&mdash;for I am superstitious about these things&mdash;because the praise
+of all but an equal enslaves and adds a pound to the ball at the ankle
+with every compliment.</p>
+
+<p>All energy that comes from the whole man is as irregular as the
+lightning, for the communicable and forecastable and discoverable is a
+part only, a hungry chicken under the breast of the pelican, and the
+test of poetry is not in reason but in a delight not different from the
+delight that comes to a man at the first coming of love into the heart.
+I knew an old man who had spent his whole life cutting hazel and privet
+from the paths, and in some seventy years he had observed little but had
+many imaginations. He had never seen like a naturalist, never seen
+things as they are, for his habitual mood had been that of a man stirred
+in his affairs; and Shakespeare, Tintoretto, though the times were
+running out when Tintoretto painted, nearly all the great men of the
+renaissance, looked at the world with eyes like his. Their minds were
+never quiescent, never as it were in a mood for <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>scientific
+observations, always an exaltation, never&mdash;to use known words&mdash;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&#8217;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: &#8216;This prophecy Merlin shall
+make, for I live before his time:&#8217;&mdash;and I always find it quite natural,
+so little does logic in the mere circumstance matter in the finest art,
+that Richard&#8217;s &amp; Richmond&#8217;s tents should be side by side. I saw with
+delight the &#8216;Knight of the Burning Pestle&#8217; when Mr. Carr revived it, and
+found it none the worse because the apprentice acted a whole play upon
+the spur of the moment and without committing a line to heart. When Ben
+Bronson&#8217;s &#8216;Epic&oelig;ne&#8217; rammed a century of laughter into the two hours&#8217;
+traffic, I found with amazement that almost every journalist had put
+logic on the seat, where our lady imagination should pronounce that
+unjust and favouring sentence her woman&#8217;s heart is ever<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> plotting, &amp; had
+felt bound to cherish none but reasonable sympathies and to resent the
+baiting of that grotesque old man. I have been looking over a book of
+engravings made in the eighteenth century from those wall-pictures of
+Herculaneum and Pompeii that were, it seems, the work of journeymen
+copying from finer paintings, for the composition is always too good for
+the execution. I find in great numbers an indifference to obvious logic,
+to all that the eye sees at common moments. Perseus shows Andromeda the
+death she lived by in a pool, and though the lovers are carefully drawn
+the reflection is upside down that we may see it the better. There is
+hardly an old master who has not made known to us in some like way how
+little he cares for what every fool can see and every knave can praise.
+The men who imagined the arts were not less superstitious in religion,
+understanding the spiritual relations, but not the mechanical, and
+finding nothing that need strain the throat in those gnats the floods of
+Noah and Deucalion, and in Joshua&#8217;s moon at Ascalon.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+<h2>CONCERNING SAINTS AND ARTISTS</h2>
+
+<p>I took the Indian hemp with certain followers of St. Martin on the
+ground floor of a house in the Latin Quarter. I had never taken it
+before, and was instructed by a boisterous young poet, whose English was
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>no better than my French. He gave me a little pellet, if I am not
+forgetting, an hour before dinner, and another after we had dined
+together at some restaurant. As we were going through the streets to the
+meeting-place of the Martinists, I felt suddenly that a cloud I was
+looking at floated in an immense space, and for an instant my being
+rushed out, as it seemed, into that space with ecstasy. I was myself
+again immediately, but the poet was wholly above himself, and presently
+he pointed to one of the street lamps now brightening in the fading
+twilight, and cried at the top of his voice, &#8216;Why do you look at me with
+your great eye?&#8217; 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 harmonies
+of red, but when a blue china figure caught my eye the harmonies became
+blue upon the instant. I was puzzled, for the reds were all there,
+nothing had changed, but they were no longer important or <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>harmonious;
+and why had the blues so unimportant but a moment ago become exciting
+and delightful? Thereupon it struck me that I was seeing like a painter,
+and that in the course of the evening every one there would change
+through every kind of artistic perception.</p>
+
+<p>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, &#8216;God, God!&#8217; Some immeasurable mystery had been
+revealed, and his eyes shone; and at some time or other a lean and
+shabby man, with rather a distinguished face, showed me his horoscope
+and pointed with an ecstasy of melancholy at its evil aspects. The
+boisterous poet, who was an old eater of the Indian hemp, had told me
+that it took one three months growing used to it, three months more
+enjoying it, and three months being cured of it. These men were in their
+second period; but I never forgot myself, never really rose above myself
+for more than a moment, and was even able to feel the absurdity of that
+gaiety, an Herr Nordau among the men of genius but one that was abashed
+at his own sobriety. The sky outside was beginning to grey when there
+came a knocking at the window shutters. Somebody opened the window, and
+a woman in evening dress,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> who was not a little bewildered to find so
+many people, was helped down into the room. She had been at a student&#8217;s
+ball unknown to her husband, who was asleep overhead, and had thought to
+have crept home unobserved, but for a confederate at the window. All
+those talking or dancing men laughed in a dreamy way; and she,
+understanding that there was no judgment in the laughter of men that had
+no thought but of the spectacle of the world, blushed, laughed and
+darted through the room and so upstairs. Alas that the hangman&#8217;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.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+<h2>THE SUBJECT MATTER OF DRAMA</h2>
+
+<p>I read this sentence a few days ago, or one like it, in an obituary of
+Ibsen: &#8216;Let nobody again go back to the old ballad material of
+Shakespeare, to murders, and ghosts, for what interests us on the stage
+is modern experience and the discussion of our interests;&#8217; and in
+another part of the article Ibsen was blamed because he had written of
+suicides and in other ways made use of &#8216;the morbid terror of death.&#8217;
+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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> their absorption in the life of the
+moment, their delight in obvious originality &amp; in obvious logic, their
+shrinking from the ancient and insoluble. The writer I have quoted is
+much more than a journalist, but he has lived their hurried life, and
+instinctively turns to them for 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 understanding of their minds, spectators of
+the ages, but of this age. Drama is a means of expression, not a special
+subject matter, and the dramatist is as free to choose, where he has a
+mind to, as the poet of &#8216;Endymion&#8217; or as the painter of Mary Magdalene
+at the door of Simon the Pharisee. So far from the discussion of our
+interests and the immediate circumstance of our life being the most
+moving to the imagination, it is what is old and far off that stirs us
+the most deeply. There is a sentence in &#8216;The Marriage of Heaven and
+Hell&#8217; that is meaningless until we understand Blake&#8217;s system of
+correspondences. &#8216;The best wine is the oldest, the best water the
+newest.&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>Water is experience, immediate sensation, and wine is emotion, and it is
+with the intellect, as distinguished from imagination, that we enlarge
+the bounds of experience and separate it from all but itself, from
+illusion, from memory, and create among other things science and good
+journalism. Emotion, on the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> other hand, grows intoxicating and
+delightful after it has been enriched with the memory of old emotions,
+with all the uncounted flavours of old experience, and it is necessarily
+an antiquity of thought, emotions that have been deepened by the
+experiences of many men of genius, that distinguishes the cultivated
+man. The subject-matter of his meditation and invention is old, and he
+will disdain a too conscious originality in the arts as in those matters
+of daily life where, is it not Balzac who says, &#8216;we are all
+conservatives?&#8217; He is above all things well bred, and whether he write
+or paint will not desire a technique that denies or obtrudes his long
+and noble descent. Corneille and Racine did not deny their masters, and
+when Dante spoke of his master Virgil there was no crowing of the cock.
+In their day imitation was conscious or all but conscious, and while
+originality was but so much the more a part of the man himself, so much
+the deeper because unconscious, no quick analysis could find out their
+miracle, that needed it may be generations to reveal; but it is our
+imitation that is unconscious and that waits the certainties of time.
+The more religious the subject-matter of an art, the more will it be as
+it were stationary, and the more ancient will be the emotion that it
+arouses and the circumstances that it calls up before our eyes. When in
+the Middle Ages the pilgrim to St. Patrick&#8217;s Purgatory found himself on
+the lakeside, he found a boat <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>made out of a hollow tree to ferry him to
+the cave of vision. In religious painting and poetry, crowns and swords
+of an ancient pattern take upon themselves new meanings, and it is
+impossible to separate our idea of what is noble from a mystic stair,
+where not men and women, but robes, jewels, incidents, ancient utilities
+float upward slowly over the all but sleeping mind, putting on emotional
+and spiritual life as they ascend until they are swallowed up by some
+far glory that they even were too modern and momentary to endure. All
+art is dream, and what the day is done with is dreaming ripe, and what
+art moulds religion accepts, and in the end all is in the wine cup, all
+is in the drunken phantasy, and the grapes begin to stammer.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+<h2>THE TWO KINDS OF ASCETICISM</h2>
+
+<p>It is not possible to separate an emotion or a spiritual state from the
+image that calls it up and gives it expression. Michael Angelo&#8217;s Moses,
+Velasquez&#8217; Philip the Second, the colour purple, a crucifix, call into
+life an emotion or state that vanishes with them because they are its
+only possible expression, and that is why no mind is more valuable than
+the images it contains. The imaginative writer differs from the saint in
+that he identifies himself&mdash;to the neglect of his own soul, alas!&mdash;with
+the soul of the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>world, and frees himself from all that is impermanent
+in that soul, an ascetic not of women and wine, but of the newspapers.
+That which is permanent in the soul of the world upon the other hand,
+the great passions that trouble all and have but a brief recurring life
+of flower and seed in any man, is the renunciation of the saint who
+seeks not an eternal art, but his own eternity. The artist stands
+between the saint and the world of impermanent things, and just in so
+far as his mind dwells on what is impermanent in his sense, on all that
+&#8216;modern experience and the discussion of our interests,&#8217; that is to say
+on what never recurs, as desire and hope, terror and weariness, spring
+and autumn recur in varying rhythms, will his mind become critical, as
+distinguished from creative, and his emotions wither. He will think less
+of what he sees and more of his own attitude towards it, and will
+express this attitude by an essentially critical selection and emphasis.
+I am not quite sure of my memory but I think that Mr. Ricketts has said
+in his book on the Prado that he feels the critic in Velasquez for the
+first time in painting, and we all feel the critic in Whistler and
+Degas, in Browning, even in Mr. Swinburne, in the finest art of all ages
+but the greatest. The end for art is the ecstasy awakened by the
+presence before an ever changing mind of what is permanent in the world,
+or by the arousing of that <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>mind itself into the very delicate and
+fastidious mood habitual with it when it is seeking those permanent &amp;
+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 &#8216;the lost traveller&#8217;s dream under the
+hill,&#8217; 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.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+<h2>IN THE SERPENT&#8217;S MOUTH</h2>
+
+<p>There is an old saying that God is a circle whose centre is everywhere.
+If that is true, the saint goes to the centre, the poet and artist to
+the ring where everything comes round again. The poet must not seek for
+what is still and fixed, for that has no life for him; and if he did his
+style would become cold and monotonous, and his sense of beauty faint
+and sickly, as are both style and beauty to my imagination in the prose
+and poetry of Newman, but be content to find his pleasure in all that is
+for ever passing away that it may come again, in the beauty of woman, in
+the fragile flowers of spring, in momentary heroic passion, in whatever
+is most fleeting, most impassioned, as it were, for its own perfection,
+most eager to return in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> its glory. Yet perhaps he must endure the
+impermanent a little, for these things return, but not wholly, for no
+two faces are alike, and, it may be, had we more learned eyes, no two
+flowers. Is it that all things are made by the struggle of the
+individual and the world, of the unchanging and the returning, and that
+the saint and the poet are over all, and that the poet has made his home
+in the Serpent&#8217;s mouth?</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+<h2>THE BLACK AND THE WHITE ARROWS</h2>
+
+<p>Instinct creates the recurring and the beautiful, all the winding of the
+serpent; but reason, the most ugly man, as Blake called it, is a drawer
+of the straight line, the maker of the arbitrary and the impermanent,
+for no recurring spring will ever bring again yesterday&#8217;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?</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+<h2>HIS MISTRESS&#8217;S EYEBROWS</h2>
+
+<p>The preoccupation of our Art and Literature with knowledge, with the
+surface of life, with the arbitrary,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> with mechanism, has arisen out of
+the root. A careful, but not necessarily very subtle man could foretell
+the history of any religion if he knew its first principle, and that it
+would live long enough to fulfil itself. The mind can never do the same
+thing twice over, and having exhausted simple beauty and meaning, it
+passes to the strange and hidden, and at last must find its delight,
+having outrun its harmonies in the emphatic and discordant. When I was a
+boy at the art school I watched an older student late returned from
+Paris, with a wonder that had no understanding in it. He was very
+amorous, and every new love was the occasion of a new picture, and every
+new picture was uglier than its forerunner. He was excited about his
+mistress&#8217;s eyebrows, as was fitting, but the interest of beauty had been
+exhausted by the logical energies of Art, which destroys where it has
+rummaged, and can but discover, whether it will or no. We cannot
+discover our subject-matter by deliberate intellect, for when a
+subject-matter ceases to move us we must go elsewhere, and when it moves
+us, even though it be &#8216;that old ballad material of Shakespeare&#8217; or even
+&#8216;the morbid terror of death,&#8217; we can laugh at reason. We must not ask is
+the world interested in this or that, for nothing is in question but our
+own interest, and we can understand no other. Our place in the Hierarchy
+is settled for us by our<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> choice of a subject-matter, and all good
+criticism is hieratic, delighting in setting things above one another,
+Epic and Drama above Lyric and so on, and not merely side by side. But
+it is our instinct and not our intellect that chooses. We can
+deliberately refashion our characters, but not our painting or our
+poetry. If our characters also were not unconsciously refashioned so
+completely by the unfolding of the logical energies of Art, that even
+simple things have in the end a new aspect in our eyes, the Arts would
+not be among those things that return for ever. The ballads that Bishop
+Percy gathered returned in the Ancient Mariner, and the delight in the
+world of old Greek sculptors sprang into a more delicate loveliness in
+that archaistic head of the young athlete down the long corridor to your
+left hand as you go into the British Museum. Civilisation too, will not
+that also destroy where it has loved, until it shall bring the simple
+and natural things again and a new Argo with all the gilding on her bows
+sail out to find another fleece?</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+<h2>THE TRESSES OF THE HAIR</h2>
+
+<p>Hafiz cried to his beloved, &#8216;I made a bargain with that brown hair
+before the beginning of time, and it shall not be broken through
+unending time,&#8217; and it may be that Mistress Nature knows that we have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+<h2>A TOWER ON THE APENNINE</h2>
+
+<p>The other day I was walking towards Urbino where I was to spend the
+night, having crossed the Apennines from San Sepolcro, and had come to a
+level place on the mountain top near the journey&#8217;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 medi&aelig;val tower, with no
+building near nor any sign of life, rose upon its solitary summit into
+the clouds. I saw suddenly in the mind&#8217;s eye an old man, erect and a
+little gaunt, standing in the door of the tower, while about him broke a
+windy light. He was the poet who had at last, because he had done so
+much for the word&#8217;s sake, come to share in the dignity of the saint. He
+had hidden nothing of himself but he had taken care of &#8216;that dignity ...
+the perfection of form ... this lofty and severe quality ... this
+virtue.&#8217; And<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> though he had but sought it for the word&#8217;s sake, or for a
+woman&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;s faces; for was it
+Columbanus or another that wrote &#8216;There is one among the birds that is
+perfect, and one perfect among the fish.&#8217;</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+<h2>THE THINKING OF THE BODY</h2>
+
+<p>Those learned men who are a terror to children and an ignominious sight
+in lovers&#8217; eyes, all those butts of a traditional humour where there is
+something of the wisdom of peasants, are mathematicians, theologians,
+lawyers, men of science of various kinds. They have followed some
+abstract reverie, which stirs the brain only and needs that only, and
+have therefore stood before the looking-glass without pleasure and never
+known those thoughts that shape<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> the lines of the body for beauty or
+animation, and wake a desire for praise or for display.</p>
+
+<p>There are two pictures of Venice side by side in the house where I am
+writing this, a Canaletto that has little but careful drawing and a not
+very emotional pleasure in clean bright air, and a Franz Francken, where
+the blue water, that in the other stirs one so little, can make one long
+to plunge into the green depth where a cloud shadow falls. Neither
+painting could move us at all, if our thought did not rush out to the
+edges of our flesh, and it is so with all good art, whether the Victory
+of Samothrace which reminds the soles of our feet of swiftness, or the
+Odyssey that would send us out under the salt wind, or the young
+horsemen on the Parthenon, that seem happier than our boyhood ever was,
+and in our boyhood&#8217;s way. Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see
+the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every
+abstract thing, from all that is of the brain only, from all that is not
+a fountain jetting from the entire hopes, memories, and sensations of
+the body. Its morality is personal, knows little of any general law, has
+no blame for Little Musgrave, no care for Lord Barnard&#8217;s house, seems
+lighter than a breath and yet is hard and heavy, for if a man is not
+ready to face toil and risk, and in all gaiety of heart, his body will
+grow unshapely<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> and his heart lack the wild will that stirs desire. It
+approved before all men those that talked or wrestled or tilted under
+the walls of Urbino, or sat in the wide window seats discussing all
+things, with love ever in their thought, when the wise Duchess ordered
+all, and the Lady Emilia gave the theme.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+<h2>RELIGIOUS BELIEF NECESSARY TO SYMBOLIC ART</h2>
+
+<p>All art is sensuous, but when a man puts only his contemplative nature,
+and his more vague desires into his art, the sensuous images through
+which it speaks become broken, fleeting, uncertain, or are chosen for
+their distance from general experience, and all grows unsubstantial &amp;
+fantastic. When imagination moves in a dim world like the country of
+sleep in Love&#8217;s Nocturne and &#8216;Siren there winds her dizzy hair and
+sings&#8217; we go to it for delight indeed but in our weariness. If we are to
+sojourn there that world must grow consistent with itself, emotion must
+be related to emotion by a system of ordered images, as in the Divine
+Comedy. It must grow to be symbolic, that is, for the soul can only
+achieve a distinct separated life where many related objects at once
+distinguish and arouse its energies in their fullness. All visionaries
+have entered into such a world in trances, and all ideal art has trance
+for warranty. Shelley seemed to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> Matthew Arnold to beat his ineffectual
+wings in the void, and I only made my pleasure in him contented pleasure
+by massing in my imagination his recurring images of towers and rivers,
+and caves with fountains in them, and that one star of his, till his
+world had grown solid underfoot and consistent enough for the soul&#8217;s
+habitation.</p>
+
+<p>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&#8217; Endymion, a crowd of believers who could put
+into all those strange sights the strength of their belief and the rare
+testimony of their visions. A little crowd had been sufficient, and I
+would have had Shelley a sectary that his revelation might have found
+the only sufficient evidence of religion, miracle. All symbolic art
+should arise out of a real belief, and that it cannot do so in this age
+proves that this age is a road and not a resting place for the
+imaginative arts. I can only understand others by myself, and I am
+certain that there are many who are not moved as they desire to be by
+that solitary light burning in the tower of Prince Athanais, because it
+has not entered into men&#8217;s prayers nor lighted any through the sacred
+dark of religious contemplation.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>Lyrical poems even when they but speak of emotions common to all need,
+if not a religious belief like the spiritual arts, a life that has
+leisure for itself, and a society that is quickly stirred that our
+emotion may be strengthened by the emotion of others. All circumstance
+that makes emotion at once dignified and visible, increases the poet&#8217;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&#8217;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.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+<h2>THE HOLY PLACES</h2>
+
+<p>When all art was struck out of personality, whether as in our daily
+business or in the adventure of religion, there was little separation
+between holy and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>common things, and just as the arts themselves passed
+quickly from passion to divine contemplation, from the conversation of
+peasants to that of princes, the one song remembering the drunken miller
+and but half forgetting Cambynskan bold; so did a man feel himself near
+sacred presences when he turned his plough from the slope of Cruachmaa
+or of Olympus. The occupations and the places known to Homer or to
+Hesiod, those pure first artists, might, as it were, if but the
+fashioners hands had loosened, have changed before the poem&#8217;s end to
+symbols and vanished, winged and unweary, into the unchanging worlds
+where religion only can discover life as well as peace. A man of that
+unbroken day could have all the subtlety of Shelley, &amp; 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>the master of
+common sense lived ever in the common daylight, but Shakespeare could
+not, &amp; Shakespeare seems to bring us to the very market-place, when we
+remember Shelley&#8217;s dizzy and Landor&#8217;s calm disdain of usual daily
+things. And at last we have Villiers de L&#8217;Isle Adam crying in the
+ecstasy of a supreme culture, of a supreme refusal, &#8216;as for living, our
+servants will do that for us.&#8217; One of the means of loftiness, of
+marmorean stillness has been the choice of strange and far away places,
+for the scenery of art, but this choice has grown bitter to me, and
+there are moments when I cannot believe in the reality of imaginations
+that are not inset with the minute life of long familiar things and
+symbols and places. I have come to think of even Shakespeare&#8217;s journeys
+to Rome or to Verona as the outflowing of an unrest, a dissatisfaction
+with natural interests, an unstable equilibrium of the whole European
+mind that would not have come had Constantinople wall been built of
+better stone. I am orthodox and pray for a resurrection of the body, and
+am certain that a man should find his Holy Land where he first crept
+upon the floor, and that familiar woods and rivers should fade into
+symbol with so gradual a change that he never discover, no not even in
+ecstasy itself, that he is beyond space, and that time alone keeps him
+from Primum Mobile, the Supernal Eden, and the White Rose over all.</p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+<p class="note">Here ends Discoveries; written by William 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.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Discoveries, by William Butler Yeats
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+</pre>
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+</body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Discoveries, by William Butler Yeats
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Discoveries
+       A Volume of Essays
+
+Author: William Butler Yeats
+
+Release Date: July 5, 2010 [EBook #33087]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DISCOVERIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Brian Foley and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Two hundred copies of this book have been printed.
+
+
+
+
+  DISCOVERIES; A VOLUME OF ESSAYS
+  BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS.
+
+
+  DUN EMER PRESS
+  DUNDRUM
+  MCMVII
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  Prophet, Priest and King                            Page 1
+
+  Personality and the Intellectual Essences                5
+
+  The Musician and the Orator                              9
+
+  A Banjo Player                                          10
+
+  The Looking-glass                                       11
+
+  The Tree of Life                                        12
+
+  The Praise of Old Wives' Tales                          15
+
+  The Play of Modern Manners                              16
+
+  Has the Drama of Contemporary Life a Root of its Own    18
+
+  Why the Blind Man in Ancient Times was made a Poet      20
+
+  Concerning Saints and Artists                           24
+
+  The Subject Matter of Drama                             27
+
+  The Two Kinds of Asceticism                             30
+
+  In the Serpent's Mouth                                  32
+
+  The Black and the White Arrows                          33
+
+  His Mistress's Eyebrows                                 33
+
+  The Tresses of the Hair                                 35
+
+  A Tower on the Apennine                                 36
+
+  The Thinking of the Body                                37
+
+  Religious Belief necessary to symbolic Art              39
+
+  The Holy Places                                         41
+
+
+
+
+DISCOVERIES
+
+
+
+
+PROPHET, PRIEST AND KING
+
+
+The little theatrical company I write my plays for had come to a west of
+Ireland town and was to give a performance in an old ball-room, for
+there was no other room big enough. I went there from a neighbouring
+country house and arriving a little before the players, tried to open a
+window. My hands were black with dirt in a moment and presently a pane
+of glass and a part of the window frame came out in my hands. Everything
+in this room was half in ruins, the rotten boards cracked under my feet,
+and our new proscenium and the new boards of the platform looked out of
+place, and yet the room was not really old, in spite of the musicians'
+gallery over the stage. It had been built by some romantic or
+philanthropic landlord some three or four generations ago, and was a
+memory of we knew not what unfinished scheme.
+
+From there I went to look for the players and called for information on
+a young priest, who had invited them, and taken upon himself the finding
+of an audience. He lived in a high house with other priests, and as I
+went in I noticed with a whimsical pleasure a broken pane of glass in
+the 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 Meredith and Ibsen, but some of his books had been packed in the
+fire-grate by his house-keeper, instead of the customary view of an
+Italian lake or the coloured tissue-paper. The players, who had been
+giving a performance in a neighbouring town, had not yet come, or were
+unpacking their costumes and properties at the hotel he had recommended
+them. We should have time, he said, to go through the half-ruined town
+and to visit the convent schools and the cathedral, where, owing to his
+influence, two of our young Irish sculptors had been set to carve an
+altar and the heads of pillars. I had only heard of this work, and I
+found its strangeness and simplicity--one of them had been Rodin's
+pupil--could not make me forget the meretriciousness of the architecture
+and the commercial commonplace of the inlaid pavements. The new movement
+had seized on the cathedral midway in its growth, and the worst of the
+old & the best of the new were side by side without any sign of
+transition. The convent school was, as other like places have been to
+me--a long room in a workhouse hospital at Portumna, in particular--a
+delight to the imagination and the eyes. A new floor had been put into
+some ecclesiastical building and the light from a great mullioned
+window, cut off at the middle, fell aslant upon rows of clean and
+seemingly happy children. The nuns, who show in their own convents,
+where they can put what they like, a love of what is mean and pretty,
+make beautiful rooms where the regulations compel them to do all with a
+few colours and a few flowers. I think it was that day, but am not sure,
+that I had lunch at a convent and told fairy stories to a couple of
+nuns, and I hope it was not mere politeness that made them seem to have
+a child's interest in such things.
+
+A good many of our audience, when the curtain went up in the old
+ball-room, were drunk, but all were attentive for they had a great deal
+of respect for my friend and there were other priests there. Presently
+the man at the door opposite to the stage strayed off somewhere and I
+took his place and when boys came up offering two or three pence and
+asking to be let into the sixpenny seats I let them join the melancholy
+crowd. The play professed to tell of the heroic life of ancient Ireland
+but was really full of sedentary refinement and the spirituality of
+cities. Every emotion was made as dainty footed and dainty fingered as
+might be, and a love and pathos where passion had faded into sentiment,
+emotions of pensive and harmless people, drove shadowy young men through
+the shadows of death and battle. I watched it with growing rage. It was
+not my own work, but I have sometimes watched my own work with a rage
+made all the more salt in the mouth from being half despair. Why should
+we make so much noise about ourselves and yet have nothing to say that
+was not better said in that work-house dormitory, where a few flowers
+and a few coloured counterpanes and the coloured walls had made a severe
+and gracious beauty? Presently the play was changed and our comedian
+began to act a little farce, and when I saw him struggle to wake into
+laughter an audience, out of whom the life had run as if it were water,
+I rejoiced, as I had over that broken window-pane. Here was something
+secular, abounding, even a little vulgar, for he was gagging horribly,
+condescending to his audience, though not without contempt.
+
+We had our supper in the priest's house, and a government official who
+had come down from Dublin, partly out of interest in this attempt 'to
+educate the people,' and partly because it was his holiday and it was
+necessary to go somewhere, entertained us with little jokes. Somebody,
+not I think a priest, talked of the spiritual destiny of our race and
+praised the night's work, for the play was refined and the people really
+very attentive, and he could not understand my discontent; but presently
+he was silenced by the patter of jokes.
+
+I had my breakfast by myself the next morning, for the players had got
+up in the middle of the night and driven some ten miles to catch an
+early train to Dublin, and were already on their way to their shops and
+offices. I had brought the visitor's book of the hotel to turn over its
+pages while waiting for my bacon and eggs, and found several pages full
+of obscenities, scrawled there some two or three weeks before, by Dublin
+visitors it seemed, for a notorious Dublin street was mentioned. Nobody
+had thought it worth his while to tear out the page or block out the
+lines, and as I put the book away impressions that had been drifting
+through my mind for months rushed up into a single thought. 'If we poets
+are to move the people, we must reintegrate the human spirit in our
+imagination. The English have driven away the kings, and turned the
+prophets into demagogues and you cannot have health among a people if
+you have not prophet, priest and king.'
+
+
+
+
+PERSONALITY AND THE INTELLECTUAL ESSENCES
+
+
+My work in Ireland has continually set this thought before me, 'How can
+I make my work mean something to vigorous and simple men whose attention
+is not given to art but to a shop, or teaching in a National School, or
+dispensing medicine?' I had not wanted to 'elevate them' or 'educate
+them,' as these words are understood, but to make them understand my
+vision, and I had not wanted a large audience, certainly not what is
+called a national audience, but enough people for what is accidental and
+temporary to lose itself in the lump. In England where there have been
+so many changing activities and so much systematic education one only
+escapes from crudities and temporary interests among students, but here
+there is the right audience could one but get its ears. I have always
+come to this certainty, what moves natural men in the arts is what moves
+them in life, and that is, intensity of personal life, intonations that
+show them in a book or a play, the strength, the essential moment of a
+man who would be exciting in the market or at the dispensary door. They
+must go out of the theatre with the strength they live by strengthened
+with looking upon some passion that could, whatever its chosen way of
+life, strike down an enemy, fill a long stocking with money or move a
+girl's heart. They have not much to do with the speculations of science,
+though they have a little, or with the speculations of metaphysics,
+though they have a little. Their legs will tire on the road if there is
+nothing in their hearts but vague sentiment, and though it is charming
+to have an affectionate feeling about flowers, that will not pull the
+cart out of the ditch. An exciting person, whether the hero of a play or
+the maker of poems, will display the greatest volume of personal energy,
+and this energy must seem to come out of the body as out of the mind. We
+must say to ourselves continually when we imagine a character, 'Have I
+given him the roots, as it were, of all faculties necessary for life?'
+And only when one is certain of that may one give him the one faculty
+that fills the imagination with joy. I even doubt if any play had ever a
+great popularity that did not use, or seem to use, the bodily energies
+of its principal actor to the full. Villon the robber could have
+delighted these Irishmen with plays and songs, if he and they had been
+born to the same traditions of word and symbol, but Shelley could not;
+and as men came to live in towns and to read printed books and to have
+many specialised activities, it has become more possible to produce
+Shelleys and less and less possible to produce Villons. The last Villon
+dwindled into Robert Burns because the highest faculties had faded,
+taking the sense of beauty with them, into some sort of vague heaven &
+left the lower to lumber where they best could. In literature, partly
+from the lack of that spoken word which knits us to normal man, we have
+lost in personality, in our delight in the whole man--blood,
+imagination, intellect, running together--but have found a new delight,
+in essences, in states of mind, in pure imagination, in all that comes
+to us most easily in elaborate music. There are two ways before
+literature--upward into ever-growing subtlety, with Verhaeren, with
+Mallarme, with Maeterlinck, until at last, it may be, a new agreement
+among refined and studious men gives birth to a new passion, and what
+seems literature becomes religion; or downward, taking the soul with us
+until all is simplified and solidified again. That is the choice of
+choices--the way of the bird until common eyes have lost us, or to the
+market carts; but we must see to it that the soul goes with us, for the
+bird's song is beautiful, and the traditions of modern imagination,
+growing always more musical, more lyrical, more melancholy, casting up
+now a Shelley, now a Swinburne, now a Wagner, are it may be the frenzy
+of those that are about to see what the magic hymn printed by the Abbe
+de Villars has called the Crown of Living and Melodious Diamonds. If the
+carts have hit our fancy we must have the soul tight within our bodies,
+for it has grown so fond of a beauty accumulated by subtle generations
+that it will for a long time be impatient with our thirst for mere
+force, mere personality, for the tumult of the blood. If it begin to
+slip away we must go after it, for Shelley's Chapel of the Morning Star
+is better than Burns's beer house--surely it was beer not
+barleycorn--except at the day's weary end; and it is always better than
+that uncomfortable place where there is no beer, the machine shop of the
+realists.
+
+
+
+
+THE MUSICIAN AND THE ORATOR
+
+
+Walter Pater says music is the type of all the Arts, but somebody else,
+I forget now who, that oratory is their type. You will side with the one
+or the other according to the nature of your energy, and I in my present
+mood am all for the man who, with an average audience before him, uses
+all means of persuasion--stories, laughter, tears, and but so much music
+as he can discover on the wings of words. I would even avoid the
+conversation of the lovers of music, who would draw us into the
+impersonal land of sound and colour, and would have no one write with a
+sonata in his memory. We may even speak a little evil of musicians,
+having admitted that they will see before we do that melodious crown. We
+may remind them that the housemaid does not respect the piano-tuner as
+she does the plumber, and of the enmity that they have aroused among all
+poets. Music is the most impersonal of things and words the most
+personal, and that is why musicians do not like words. They masticate
+them for a long time, being afraid they would not be able to digest
+them, and when the words are so broken and softened and mixed with
+spittle, that they are not words any longer, they swallow them.
+
+
+
+
+A 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 different and might have been
+delightful in some other way. A movement not of music only but of life
+came to its perfection. I was delighted and I did not know why until I
+thought 'that is the way my people, the people I see in the mind's eye,
+play music, and I like it because it is all personal, as personal as
+Villon's poetry.' The little instrument is quite light and the player
+can move freely and express a joy that is not of the fingers and the
+mind only but of the whole being; and all the while her movements call
+up into the mind, so erect and natural she is, whatever is most
+beautiful in her daily life. Nearly all the old instruments were like
+that, even the organ was once a little instrument and when it grew big
+our wise forefathers gave it to God in the cathedrals where it befits
+Him to be everything. But if you sit at the piano it is the piano, the
+mechanism, that is the important thing, and nothing of you means
+anything but your fingers and your intellect.
+
+
+
+
+THE LOOKING-GLASS
+
+
+I have just been talking to a girl with a shrill monotonous voice and an
+abrupt way of moving. She is fresh from school where they have taught
+her history and geography 'whereby a soul can be discerned,' but what is
+the value of an education, or even in the long run of a science, that
+does not begin with the personality, the habitual self, and illustrate
+all by that? Somebody should have taught her to speak for the most part
+on whatever note of her voice is most musical, and soften those harsh
+notes by speaking, not singing, to some stringed instrument, taking note
+after note and, as it were, caressing her words a little as if she loved
+the sound of them, and have taught her after this some beautiful
+pantomimic dance, till it had grown a habit to live for eye and ear. A
+wise theatre might make a training in strong and beautiful life the
+fashion, teaching before all else the heroic discipline of the
+looking-glass, for is not beauty, even as lasting love, one of the most
+difficult of the arts?
+
+
+
+
+THE TREE OF LIFE
+
+
+We artists have taken over-much to heart that old commandment about
+seeking after the Kingdom of Heaven. Verlaine told me that he had tried
+to translate 'In Memoriam,' but could not because Tennyson was 'too
+noble, too Anglais, and when he should have been broken-hearted had many
+reminiscences.' About that time I found in some English review an essay
+of his on Shakespeare. 'I had once a fine Shakespeare,' he wrote, or
+some such words, 'but I have it no longer. I write from memory.' One
+wondered in what vicissitude he had sold it, and for what money; and an
+image of the man rose in the imagination. To be his ordinary self as
+much as possible, not a scholar or even a reader, that was certainly his
+pose; and in the lecture he gave at Oxford he insisted 'that the poet
+should hide nothing of himself,' though he must speak it all with 'a
+care of that dignity which should manifest itself, if not in the
+perfection of form, at all events with an invisible, insensible, but
+effectual endeavour after this lofty and severe quality, I was about to
+say this virtue.' It was this feeling for his own personality, his
+delight in singing his own life, even more than that life itself, which
+made the generation I belong to compare him to Villon. It was not till
+after his death that I understood the meaning his words should have had
+for me, for while he lived I was interested in nothing but states of
+mind, lyrical moments, intellectual essences. I would not then have been
+as delighted as I am now by that banjo-player, or as shocked as I am now
+by that girl whose movements have grown abrupt, and whose voice has
+grown harsh by the neglect of all but external activities. I had not
+learned what sweetness, what rhythmic movement, there is in those who
+have become the joy that is themselves. Without knowing it I had come to
+care for nothing but impersonal beauty. I had set out on life with the
+thought of putting my very self into poetry, and had understood this as
+a representation of my own visions and an attempt to cut away the
+non-essential, but as I imagined the visions outside myself my
+imagination became full of decorative landscape and of still life. I
+thought of myself as something unmoving and silent living in the middle
+of my own mind and body, a grain of sand in Bloomsbury or in Connacht
+that Satan's watch fiends cannot find. Then one day I understood quite
+suddenly, as the way is, that I was seeking something unchanging and
+unmixed and always outside myself, a Stone or an Elixir that was always
+out of reach, and that I myself was the fleeting thing that held out its
+hand. The more I tried to make my art deliberately beautiful, the more
+did I follow the opposite of myself, for deliberate beauty is like a
+woman always desiring man's desire. Presently I found that I entered
+into myself and pictured myself and not some essence when I was not
+seeking beauty at all, but merely to lighten the mind of some burden of
+love or bitterness thrown upon it by the events of life. We are only
+permitted to desire life, and all the rest should be our complaints or
+our praise of that exacting mistress who can awake our lips into song
+with her kisses. But we must not give her all, we must deceive her a
+little at times, for, as Le Sage says in 'The Devil on Two Sticks,' the
+false lovers who do not become melancholy or jealous with honest passion
+have the happiest mistress and are rewarded the soonest and by the most
+beautiful. Our deceit will give us style, mastery, that dignity, that
+lofty and severe quality Verlaine spoke of. To put it otherwise, we
+should ascend out of common interests, the thoughts of the newspapers,
+of the market-place, of men of science, but only so far as we can carry
+the normal, passionate, reasoning self, the personality as a whole. We
+must find some place upon the Tree of Life high enough for the forked
+branches to keep it safe, and low enough to be out of the little
+wind-tossed boughs and twigs, for the 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 follow us out of the theatre as Don Quixote
+follows us out of the book, for no playwright can be wholly episodical,
+and when one constructs, bringing one's characters into complicated
+relations with one another, something impersonal comes into the story.
+Society, fate, 'tendency,' something not quite human begins to arrange
+the characters and to excite into action only so much of their humanity
+as they find it necessary to show to one another. The common heart will
+always love better the tales that have something of an old wives' tale
+and that look upon their hero from every side as if he alone were
+wonderful, as a child does with a new penny. In plays of a comedy too
+extravagant to photograph life, or written in verse, the construction is
+of a necessity woven out of naked motives and passions, but when an
+atmosphere of modern reality has to be built up as well, and the
+tendency, or fate, or society has to be shown as it is about ourselves
+the characters grow fainter and we have to read the book many times or
+see the play many times before we can remember them. Even then they are
+only possible in a certain drawing-room and among such and such people,
+and we must carry all that lumber in our heads. I thought Tolstoi's 'War
+and Peace' the greatest story I had ever read, and yet it has gone from
+me; even Lancelot, ever a shadow, is more visible in my memory than all
+its substance.
+
+
+
+
+THE PLAY OF MODERN MANNERS
+
+
+Of all artistic forms that have had a large share of the world's
+attention the worst is the play about modern educated people. Except
+where it is superficial or deliberately argumentative it fills one's
+soul with a sense of commonness as with dust. It has one mortal ailment.
+It cannot become impassioned, that is to say vital, without making
+somebody gushing and sentimental. Educated and well-bred people do not
+wear their hearts upon their sleeves and they have no artistic and
+charming language except light persiflage and no powerful language at
+all, and when they are deeply moved they look silently into the
+fireplace. Again and again I have watched some play of this sort with
+growing curiosity through the opening scene. The minor people argue,
+chaff one another, hint sometimes at some deeper stream of life just as
+we do in our houses, and I am content. But all the time I have been
+wondering why the chief character, the man who is to bear the burden of
+fate, is gushing, sentimental and quite without ideas. Then the great
+scene comes and I understand that he cannot be well-bred or
+self-possessed or intellectual, for if he were he would draw a chair to
+the fire and there would be no duologue at the end of the third act.
+Ibsen understood the difficulty and made all his characters a little
+provincial that they might not put each other out of countenance, and
+made a leading article sort of poetry, phrases about vine leaves and
+harps in the air it was possible to believe them using in their moments
+of excitement, and if the play needed more than that they could always
+do something stupid. They could go out and hoist a flag as they do at
+the end of Little Eyolf. One only understands that this manner,
+deliberately adopted one doubts not, had gone into his soul and filled
+it with dust, when one has noticed that he could no longer create a man
+of genius. The happiest writers are those that, knowing this form of
+play is slight and passing, keep to the surface, never showing anything
+but the arguments and the persiflage of daily observation, or now and
+then, instead of the expression of passion, a stage picture, a man
+holding a woman's hand or sitting with his head in his hands in dim
+light by the red glow of a fire. It was certainly an understanding of
+the slightness of the form, of its incapacity for the expression of the
+deeper sorts of passion, that made the French invent the play with a
+thesis, for where there is a thesis people can grow hot in argument,
+almost the only kind of passion that displays itself in our daily life.
+The novel of contemporary educated life is upon the other hand a
+permanent form because having the power of psychological description it
+can follow the thought of a man who is looking into the grate.
+
+
+
+
+HAS THE DRAMA OF CONTEMPORARY LIFE A ROOT OF ITS OWN
+
+
+In watching a play about modern educated people with its meagre language
+and its action crushed into the narrow limits of possibility I have
+found myself constantly saying: 'Maybe it has its power to move, slight
+as that is, from being able to suggest fundamental contrasts and
+passions which romantic and poetical literature have shown to be
+beautiful.' A man facing his enemies alone in a quarrel over the purity
+of the water in a Norwegian Spa and using no language but that of the
+newspapers can call up into our minds, let us say, the passion of
+Coriolanus. The lovers and fighters of old imaginative literature are
+more vivid experiences in the soul than anything but one's own ruling
+passion that is itself riddled by their thought as by lightning, and
+even two dumb figures on the roads can call up all that glory. Put the
+man who has no knowledge of literature before a play of this kind and he
+will say as he has said in some form or other in every age at the first
+shock of naturalism, 'What has brought me out to hear nothing but the
+words we use at home when we are talking of the rates?' And he will
+prefer to it any play where there is visible beauty or mirth, where life
+is exciting, at high tide as it were. It is not his fault that he will
+prefer in all likelihood a worse play although its kind may be greater,
+for we have been following the lure of science for generations and
+forgotten him and his. I come always back to this thought. There is
+something of an old wives' tale in fine literature. The makers of it are
+like an old peasant telling stories of the great famine or the hangings
+of '98 or his own memories. He has felt something in the depth of his
+mind and he wants to make it as visible and powerful to our senses as
+possible. He will use the most extravagant words or illustrations if
+they suit his purpose. Or he will invent a wild parable and the more his
+mind is on fire or the more creative it is the less will he look at the
+outer world or value it for its own sake. It gives him metaphors and
+examples and that is all. He is even a little scornful of it, for it
+seems to him while the fit is on that the fire has gone out of it and
+left it but white ashes. I cannot explain it, but I am certain that
+every high thing was invented in this way, between sleeping and waking,
+as it were, and that peering and peeping persons are but hawkers of
+stolen goods. How else could their noses have grown so ravenous or their
+eyes so sharp?
+
+
+
+
+WHY THE BLIND MAN IN ANCIENT TIMES WAS MADE A POET
+
+
+A description in the Iliad or the Odyssey, unlike one in the AEneid or in
+most modern writers, is the swift and natural observation of a man as he
+is shaped by life. It is a refinement of the primary hungers and has the
+least possible of what is merely scholarly or exceptional. It is, above
+all, never too observant, too professional, and when the book is closed
+we have had our energies enriched, for we have been in the mid-current.
+We have never seen anything Odysseus could not have seen while his
+thought was of the Cyclops, or Achilles when Briseis moved him to
+desire. In the 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 impediments plain to all, who
+sings of life with the ancient simplicity. Poets of coming days when
+once more it will be possible to write as in the great epochs will
+recognise that their sacrifice shall be to refuse what blindness and
+evil name, or imprisonment at the outsetting, denied to men who missed
+thereby the sting of a deliberate refusal. The poets of the ages of
+silver need no refusal of life, the dome of many-coloured glass is
+already shattered while they live. They look at life deliberately and as
+if from beyond life, and the greatest of them need suffer nothing but
+the sadness that the saints have known. This is their aim, and their
+temptation is not a passionate activity, but the approval of their
+fellows, which comes to them in full abundance only when they delight in
+the general thoughts that hold together a cultivated middle-class, where
+irresponsibilities of position and poverty are lacking; the things that
+are more excellent among educated men who have political preoccupations,
+Augustus Caesar's affability, all that impersonal fecundity which muddies
+the intellectual passions. Ben Jonson says in the Poetaster, that even
+the best of men without Promethean fire is but a hollow statue, and a
+studious man will commonly forget after some forty winters that of a
+certainty Promethean fire will burn somebody's fingers. It may happen
+that poets will be made more often by their sins than by their virtues,
+for general praise is unlucky, as the villages know, and not merely as I
+imagine--for I am superstitious about these things--because the praise
+of all but an equal enslaves and adds a pound to the ball at the ankle
+with every compliment.
+
+All energy that comes from the whole man is as irregular as the
+lightning, for the communicable and forecastable and discoverable is a
+part only, a hungry chicken under the breast of the pelican, and the
+test of poetry is not in reason but in a delight not different from the
+delight that comes to a man at the first coming of love into the heart.
+I knew an old man who had spent his whole life cutting hazel and privet
+from the paths, and in some seventy years he had observed little but had
+many imaginations. He had never seen like a naturalist, never seen
+things as they are, for his habitual mood had been that of a man stirred
+in his affairs; and Shakespeare, Tintoretto, though the times were
+running out when Tintoretto painted, nearly all the great men of the
+renaissance, looked at the world with eyes like his. Their minds were
+never quiescent, never as it were in a mood for scientific
+observations, always an exaltation, never--to use known words--founded
+upon an elimination of the personal factor; and their attention and the
+attention of those they worked for dwelt constantly with what is present
+to the mind in exaltation. I am too modern fully to enjoy Tintoretto's
+Creation of the Milky Way, I cannot fix my thoughts upon that glowing
+and palpitating flesh intently enough to forget, as I can the
+make-believe of a fairy tale, that heavy drapery hanging from a cloud,
+though I find my pleasure in King Lear heightened by the make-believe
+that comes upon it all when the fool says: 'This prophecy Merlin shall
+make, for I live before his time:'--and I always find it quite natural,
+so little does logic in the mere circumstance matter in the finest art,
+that Richard's & Richmond's tents should be side by side. I saw with
+delight the 'Knight of the Burning Pestle' when Mr. Carr revived it, and
+found it none the worse because the apprentice acted a whole play upon
+the spur of the moment and without committing a line to heart. When Ben
+Bronson's 'Epicoene' rammed a century of laughter into the two hours'
+traffic, I found with amazement that almost every journalist had put
+logic on the seat, where our lady imagination should pronounce that
+unjust and favouring sentence her woman's heart is ever plotting, & had
+felt bound to cherish none but reasonable sympathies and to resent the
+baiting of that grotesque old man. I have been looking over a book of
+engravings made in the eighteenth century from those wall-pictures of
+Herculaneum and Pompeii that were, it seems, the work of journeymen
+copying from finer paintings, for the composition is always too good for
+the execution. I find in great numbers an indifference to obvious logic,
+to all that the eye sees at common moments. Perseus shows Andromeda the
+death she lived by in a pool, and though the lovers are carefully drawn
+the reflection is upside down that we may see it the better. There is
+hardly an old master who has not made known to us in some like way how
+little he cares for what every fool can see and every knave can praise.
+The men who imagined the arts were not less superstitious in religion,
+understanding the spiritual relations, but not the mechanical, and
+finding nothing that need strain the throat in those gnats the floods of
+Noah and Deucalion, and in Joshua's moon at Ascalon.
+
+
+
+
+CONCERNING SAINTS AND ARTISTS
+
+
+I took the Indian hemp with certain followers of St. Martin on the
+ground floor of a house in the Latin Quarter. I had never taken it
+before, and was instructed by a boisterous young poet, whose English was
+no better than my French. He gave me a little pellet, if I am not
+forgetting, an hour before dinner, and another after we had dined
+together at some restaurant. As we were going through the streets to the
+meeting-place of the Martinists, I felt suddenly that a cloud I was
+looking at floated in an immense space, and for an instant my being
+rushed out, as it seemed, into that space with ecstasy. I was myself
+again immediately, but the poet was wholly above himself, and presently
+he pointed to one of the street lamps now brightening in the fading
+twilight, and cried at the top of his voice, 'Why do you look at me with
+your great eye?' There were perhaps a dozen people already much excited
+when we arrived; and after I had drunk some cups of coffee and eaten a
+pellet or two more, I grew very anxious to dance, but did not, as I
+could not remember any steps. I sat down and closed my eyes; but no, I
+had no visions, nothing but a sensation of some dark shadow which seemed
+to be telling me that some day I would go into a trance and so out of my
+body for 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 harmonies
+of red, but when a blue china figure caught my eye the harmonies became
+blue upon the instant. I was puzzled, for the reds were all there,
+nothing had changed, but they were no longer important or harmonious;
+and why had the blues so unimportant but a moment ago become exciting
+and delightful? Thereupon it struck me that I was seeing like a painter,
+and that in the course of the evening 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 distinguished face, showed me his horoscope
+and pointed with an ecstasy of melancholy at its evil aspects. The
+boisterous poet, who was an old eater of the Indian hemp, had told me
+that it took one three months growing used to it, three months more
+enjoying it, and three months being cured of it. These men were in their
+second period; but I never forgot myself, never really rose above myself
+for more than a moment, and was even able to feel the absurdity of that
+gaiety, an Herr Nordau among the men of genius but one that was abashed
+at his own sobriety. The sky outside was beginning to grey when there
+came a knocking at the window shutters. Somebody opened the window, and
+a woman in evening dress, who was not a little bewildered to find so
+many people, was helped down into the room. She had been at a 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 window. All
+those talking or dancing men laughed in a dreamy way; and she,
+understanding that there was no judgment in the laughter of men that had
+no thought but of the spectacle of the world, blushed, laughed and
+darted through the room and so upstairs. Alas that the hangman's rope
+should be own brother to that Indian happiness that keeps alone, were it
+not for some stray cactus, mother of as many dreams, an immemorial
+impartiality and simpleness.
+
+
+
+
+THE SUBJECT MATTER OF DRAMA
+
+
+I read this sentence a few days ago, or one like it, in an obituary of
+Ibsen: 'Let nobody again go back to the old ballad material of
+Shakespeare, to murders, and ghosts, for what interests us on the stage
+is modern experience and the discussion of our interests;' and in
+another part of the article Ibsen was blamed because he had written of
+suicides and in other ways made use of 'the morbid terror of death.'
+Dramatic literature has for a long time been left to the criticism of
+journalists, and all these, the old stupid ones and the new clever ones,
+have tried to impress upon it their absorption in the life of the
+moment, their delight in obvious originality & in obvious logic, their
+shrinking from the ancient and insoluble. The writer I have quoted is
+much more than a journalist, but he has lived their hurried life, and
+instinctively turns to them for 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 understanding of their minds, spectators of
+the ages, but of this age. Drama is a means of expression, not a special
+subject matter, and the dramatist is as free to choose, where he has a
+mind to, as the poet of 'Endymion' or as the painter of Mary Magdalene
+at the door of Simon the Pharisee. So far from the discussion of our
+interests and the immediate circumstance of our life being the most
+moving to the imagination, it is what is old and far off that stirs us
+the most deeply. There is a sentence in 'The Marriage of Heaven and
+Hell' that is meaningless until we understand Blake's system of
+correspondences. 'The best wine is the oldest, the best water the
+newest.'
+
+Water is experience, immediate sensation, and wine is emotion, and it is
+with the intellect, as distinguished from imagination, that we enlarge
+the bounds of experience and separate it from all but itself, from
+illusion, from memory, and create among other things science and good
+journalism. Emotion, on the other hand, grows intoxicating and
+delightful after it has been enriched with the memory of old emotions,
+with all the uncounted flavours of old experience, and it is necessarily
+an antiquity of thought, emotions that have been deepened by the
+experiences of many men of genius, that distinguishes the cultivated
+man. The subject-matter of his meditation and invention is old, and he
+will disdain a too conscious originality in the arts as in those matters
+of daily life where, is it not Balzac who says, 'we are all
+conservatives?' He is above all things well bred, and whether he write
+or paint will not desire a technique that denies or obtrudes his long
+and noble descent. Corneille and Racine did not deny their masters, and
+when Dante spoke of his master Virgil there was no crowing of the cock.
+In their day imitation was conscious or all but conscious, and while
+originality was but so much the more a part of the man himself, so much
+the deeper because unconscious, no quick analysis could find out their
+miracle, that needed it may be generations to reveal; but it is our
+imitation that is unconscious and that waits the certainties of time.
+The more religious the subject-matter of an art, the more will it be as
+it were stationary, and the more ancient will be the emotion that it
+arouses and the circumstances that it calls up before our eyes. When in
+the Middle Ages the pilgrim to St. Patrick's Purgatory found himself on
+the lakeside, he found a boat made out of a hollow tree to ferry him to
+the cave of vision. In religious painting and poetry, crowns and swords
+of an ancient pattern take upon themselves new meanings, and it is
+impossible to separate our idea of what is noble from a mystic stair,
+where not men and women, but robes, jewels, incidents, ancient utilities
+float upward slowly over the all but sleeping mind, putting on emotional
+and spiritual life as they ascend until they are swallowed up by some
+far glory that they even were too modern and momentary to endure. All
+art is dream, and what the day is done with is dreaming ripe, and what
+art moulds religion accepts, and in the end all is in the wine cup, all
+is in the drunken phantasy, and the grapes begin to stammer.
+
+
+
+
+THE TWO KINDS OF ASCETICISM
+
+
+It is not possible to separate an emotion or a spiritual state from the
+image that calls it up and gives it expression. Michael Angelo's Moses,
+Velasquez' Philip the Second, the colour purple, a crucifix, call into
+life an emotion or state that vanishes with them because they are its
+only possible expression, and that is why no mind is more valuable than
+the images it contains. The imaginative writer differs from the saint in
+that he identifies himself--to the neglect of his own soul, alas!--with
+the soul of the world, and frees himself from all that is impermanent
+in that soul, an ascetic not of women and wine, but of the newspapers.
+That which is permanent in the soul of the world upon the other hand,
+the great passions that trouble all and have but a brief recurring life
+of flower and seed in any man, is the renunciation of the saint who
+seeks not an eternal art, but his own eternity. The artist stands
+between the saint and the world of impermanent things, and just in so
+far as his mind dwells on what is impermanent in his sense, on all that
+'modern experience and the discussion of our interests,' that is to say
+on what never recurs, as desire and hope, terror and weariness, spring
+and autumn recur in varying rhythms, will his mind become critical, as
+distinguished from creative, and his emotions wither. He will think less
+of what he sees and more of his own attitude towards it, and will
+express this attitude by an essentially critical selection and emphasis.
+I am not quite sure of my memory but I think that Mr. Ricketts has said
+in his book on the Prado that he feels the critic in Velasquez for the
+first time in painting, and we all feel the critic in Whistler and
+Degas, in Browning, even in Mr. Swinburne, in the finest art of all ages
+but the greatest. The end for art is the ecstasy awakened by the
+presence before an ever changing mind of what is permanent in the world,
+or by the arousing of that mind itself into the very delicate and
+fastidious mood habitual with it when it is seeking those permanent &
+recurring things. There is a little of both ecstasies at all times, but
+at this time we have a small measure of the creative impulse itself, of
+the divine vision, a great one of 'the lost traveller's dream under the
+hill,' perhaps because all the old simple things have been painted or
+written, and they will only have meaning for us again when a new race or
+a new civilisation has made us look upon all with new eyesight.
+
+
+
+
+IN THE SERPENT'S MOUTH
+
+
+There is an old saying that God is a circle whose centre is everywhere.
+If that is true, the saint goes to the centre, the poet and artist to
+the ring where everything comes round again. The poet must not seek for
+what is still and fixed, for that has no life for him; and if he did his
+style would become cold and monotonous, and his sense of beauty faint
+and sickly, as are both style and beauty to my imagination in the prose
+and poetry of Newman, but be content to find his pleasure in all that is
+for ever passing away that it may come again, in the beauty of woman, in
+the fragile flowers of spring, in momentary heroic passion, in whatever
+is most fleeting, most impassioned, as it were, for its own perfection,
+most eager to return in its glory. Yet perhaps he must endure the
+impermanent a little, for these things return, but not wholly, for no
+two faces are alike, and, it may be, had we more learned eyes, no two
+flowers. Is it that all things are made by the struggle of the
+individual and the world, of the unchanging and the returning, and that
+the saint and the poet are over all, and that the poet has made his home
+in the Serpent's mouth?
+
+
+
+
+THE BLACK AND THE WHITE ARROWS
+
+
+Instinct creates the recurring and the beautiful, all the winding of the
+serpent; but reason, the most ugly man, as Blake called it, is a drawer
+of the straight line, the maker of the arbitrary and the impermanent,
+for no recurring spring will ever bring again yesterday's clock.
+Sanctity has its straight line also, darting from the centre, and with
+these arrows the many-coloured serpent, theme of all our poetry, is
+maimed and hunted. He that finds the white arrow shall have wisdom older
+than the Serpent, but what of the black arrow. How much knowledge, how
+heavy a quiver of the crow-feathered ebony rods can the soul endure?
+
+
+
+
+HIS MISTRESS'S EYEBROWS
+
+
+The preoccupation of our Art and Literature with knowledge, with the
+surface of life, with the arbitrary, with mechanism, has arisen out of
+the root. A careful, but not necessarily very subtle man could foretell
+the history of any religion if he knew its first principle, and that it
+would live long enough to fulfil itself. The mind can never do the same
+thing twice over, and having exhausted simple beauty and meaning, it
+passes to the strange and hidden, and at last must find its delight,
+having outrun its harmonies in the emphatic and discordant. When I was a
+boy at the art school I watched an older student late returned from
+Paris, with a wonder that had no understanding in it. He was very
+amorous, and every new love was the occasion of a new picture, and every
+new picture was uglier than its forerunner. He was excited about his
+mistress's eyebrows, as was fitting, but the interest of beauty had been
+exhausted by the logical energies of Art, which destroys where it has
+rummaged, and can but discover, whether it will or no. We cannot
+discover our subject-matter by deliberate intellect, for when a
+subject-matter ceases to move us we must go elsewhere, and when it moves
+us, even though it be 'that old ballad material of Shakespeare' or even
+'the morbid terror of death,' we can laugh at reason. We must not ask is
+the world interested in this or that, for nothing is in question but our
+own interest, and we can understand no other. Our place in the Hierarchy
+is settled for us by our choice of a subject-matter, and all good
+criticism is hieratic, delighting in setting things above one another,
+Epic and Drama above Lyric and so on, and not merely side by side. But
+it is our instinct and not our intellect that chooses. We can
+deliberately refashion our characters, but not our painting or our
+poetry. If our characters also were not unconsciously refashioned so
+completely by the unfolding of the logical energies of Art, that even
+simple things have in the end a new aspect in our eyes, the Arts would
+not be among those things that return for ever. The ballads that Bishop
+Percy gathered returned in the Ancient Mariner, and the delight in the
+world of old Greek sculptors sprang into a more delicate loveliness in
+that archaistic head of the young athlete down the long corridor to your
+left hand as you go into the British Museum. Civilisation too, will not
+that also destroy where it has loved, until it shall bring the simple
+and natural things again and a new Argo with all the gilding on her bows
+sail out to find another fleece?
+
+
+
+
+THE TRESSES OF THE HAIR
+
+
+Hafiz cried to his beloved, 'I made a bargain with that brown hair
+before the beginning of time, and it shall not be broken through
+unending time,' and it may be that Mistress Nature knows that we have
+lived many times, and that whatsoever changes and winds into itself
+belongs to us. She covers her eyes away from us, but she lets us play
+with the tresses of her hair.
+
+
+
+
+A TOWER ON THE APENNINE
+
+
+The other day I was walking towards Urbino where I was to spend the
+night, having crossed the Apennines from San Sepolcro, and had come to a
+level place on the mountain top near the journey's end. My friends were
+in a carriage somewhere behind, on a road which was still ascending in
+great loops, and I was alone amid a visionary fantastic impossible
+scenery. It was sunset and the stormy clouds hung upon mountain after
+mountain, and far off on one great summit a cloud darker than the rest
+glimmered with lightning. Away to the south a mediaeval tower, with no
+building near nor any sign of life, rose upon its solitary summit into
+the clouds. I saw suddenly in the mind's eye an old man, erect and a
+little gaunt, standing in the door of the tower, while about him broke a
+windy light. He was the poet who had at last, because he had done so
+much for the word's sake, come to share in the dignity of the saint. He
+had hidden nothing of himself but he had taken care of 'that dignity ...
+the perfection of form ... this lofty and severe quality ... this
+virtue.' And though he had but sought it for the 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, theologians,
+lawyers, men of science of various kinds. They have followed some
+abstract reverie, which stirs the brain only and needs that only, and
+have therefore stood before the looking-glass without pleasure and never
+known those thoughts that shape the lines of the body for beauty or
+animation, and wake a desire for praise or for display.
+
+There are two pictures of Venice side by side in the house where I am
+writing this, a Canaletto that has little but careful drawing and a not
+very emotional pleasure in clean bright air, and a Franz Francken, where
+the blue water, that in the other stirs one so little, can make one long
+to plunge into the green depth where a cloud shadow falls. Neither
+painting could move us at all, if our thought did not rush out to the
+edges of our flesh, and it is so with all good art, whether the Victory
+of Samothrace which reminds the soles of our feet of swiftness, or the
+Odyssey that would send us out under the salt wind, or the young
+horsemen on the Parthenon, that seem happier than our boyhood ever was,
+and in our boyhood's way. Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see
+the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every
+abstract thing, from all that is of the brain only, from all that is not
+a fountain jetting from the entire hopes, memories, and sensations of
+the body. Its morality is personal, knows little of any general law, has
+no blame for Little Musgrave, no care for Lord Barnard's house, seems
+lighter than a breath and yet is hard and heavy, for if a man is not
+ready to face toil and risk, and in all gaiety of heart, his body will
+grow unshapely and his heart lack the wild will that stirs desire. It
+approved before all men those that talked or wrestled or tilted under
+the walls of Urbino, or sat in the wide window seats discussing all
+things, with love ever in their thought, when the wise Duchess ordered
+all, and the Lady Emilia gave the theme.
+
+
+
+
+RELIGIOUS BELIEF NECESSARY TO SYMBOLIC ART
+
+
+All art is sensuous, but when a man puts only his contemplative nature,
+and his more vague desires into his art, the sensuous images through
+which it speaks become broken, fleeting, uncertain, or are chosen for
+their distance from general experience, and all grows unsubstantial &
+fantastic. When imagination moves in a dim world like the country of
+sleep in Love's Nocturne and 'Siren there winds her dizzy hair and
+sings' we go to it for delight indeed but in our weariness. If we are to
+sojourn there that world must grow consistent with itself, emotion must
+be related to emotion by a system of ordered images, as in the Divine
+Comedy. It must grow to be symbolic, that is, for the soul can only
+achieve a distinct separated life where many related objects at once
+distinguish and arouse its energies in their 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 recurring images of towers and rivers,
+and caves with fountains in them, and that one star of his, till his
+world had grown solid underfoot and consistent enough for the soul's
+habitation.
+
+But even then I lacked something to compensate my imagination for
+geographical and historical reality, for the testimony of our ordinary
+senses, and found myself wishing for and trying to imagine, as I had
+also when reading Keats' Endymion, a crowd of believers who could put
+into all those strange sights the strength of their belief and the rare
+testimony of their visions. A little crowd had been sufficient, and I
+would have had Shelley a sectary that his revelation might have found
+the only sufficient evidence of religion, miracle. All symbolic art
+should arise out of a real belief, and that it cannot do so in this age
+proves that this age is a road and not a resting place for the
+imaginative arts. I can only understand others by myself, and I am
+certain that there are many who are not moved as they desire to be by
+that solitary light burning in the tower of Prince Athanais, because it
+has not entered into men's prayers nor lighted any through the sacred
+dark of religious contemplation.
+
+Lyrical poems even when they but speak of emotions common to all need,
+if not a religious belief like the spiritual arts, a life that has
+leisure for itself, and a society that is quickly stirred that our
+emotion may be strengthened by the emotion of others. All circumstance
+that makes emotion at once dignified and visible, increases the poet's
+power, and I think that is why I have always longed for some stringed
+instrument, and a listening audience not drawn out of the hurried
+streets but from a life where it would be natural to murmur over again
+the singer's thought. When I heard 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 religion, there was little separation
+between holy and common things, and just as the arts themselves passed
+quickly from passion to divine contemplation, from the conversation of
+peasants to that of princes, the one song remembering the drunken miller
+and but half forgetting Cambynskan bold; so did a man feel himself near
+sacred presences when he turned his plough from the slope of Cruachmaa
+or of Olympus. The occupations and the places known to Homer or to
+Hesiod, those pure first artists, might, as it were, if but the
+fashioners hands had loosened, have changed before the poem's end to
+symbols and vanished, winged and unweary, into the unchanging worlds
+where religion only can discover life as well as peace. A man of that
+unbroken day could have all the subtlety of Shelley, & 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 common daylight, but Shakespeare could
+not, & Shakespeare seems to bring us to the very market-place, when we
+remember Shelley's dizzy and Landor's calm disdain of usual daily
+things. And at last we have Villiers de L'Isle Adam crying in the
+ecstasy of a supreme culture, of a supreme refusal, 'as for living, our
+servants will do that for us.' One of the means of loftiness, of
+marmorean stillness has been the choice of strange and far away places,
+for the scenery of art, but this choice has grown bitter to me, and
+there are moments when I cannot believe in the reality of imaginations
+that are not inset with the minute life of long familiar things and
+symbols and places. I have come to think of even Shakespeare's journeys
+to Rome or to Verona as the outflowing of an unrest, a dissatisfaction
+with natural interests, an unstable equilibrium of the whole European
+mind that would not have come had Constantinople wall been built of
+better stone. I am orthodox and pray for a resurrection of the body, and
+am certain that a man should find his Holy Land where he first crept
+upon the floor, and that familiar woods and rivers should fade into
+symbol with so gradual a change that he never discover, no not even in
+ecstasy itself, that he is beyond space, and that time alone keeps him
+from Primum Mobile, the Supernal Eden, and the White Rose over all.
+
+
+
+
+Here ends Discoveries; written by William 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.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Discoveries, by William Butler Yeats
+
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