No More Learning

I asked a
countryman who was with me what hill that was, and he told me it was
Cruachmaa of the Sidhe. I had often heard of Cruachmaa of the Sidhe
even as far north as Sligo, for the country people have told me a great
many stories of the great host of the Sidhe who live there, still
fighting and holding festivals.

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

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

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

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

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

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

has behind him generations of poetry and poetical life.

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

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

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

1903.




EMOTION OF MULTITUDE


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

1903.




_Printed by_ A. H. BULLEN, _at The Shakespeare Head Press,
Stratford-on-Avon. _

* * * * *

Transcriber's Notes:

Obvious punctuation errors repaired.

Page 33, "spirit" changed to "spirits" (spirits did not and)

Page 39, "battle-fielde" changed to "battle-fields" (studies and
battle-fields)

Page 139, "difcult" changed to "difficult" (have not been difficult)

Page 246, "Shakepearian" changed to "Shakespearian" (best in the
Shakespearian)





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? The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of
William Butler Yeats, Vol. 6 (of 8), by William Butler Yeats

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
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Title: The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, Vol. 6 (of 8)
Ideas of Good and Evil

Author: William Butler Yeats

Release Date: August 5, 2015 [EBook #49613]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WORKS OF W B YEATS, VOL 6 ***




Produced by Emmy, mollypit and the Online Distributed
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THE COLLECTED WORKS OF WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
BEING THE SIXTH VOLUME OF
THE COLLECTED WORKS IN
VERSE & PROSE OF WILLIAM
BUTLER YEATS :: IMPRINTED
AT THE SHAKESPEARE HEAD
PRESS STRATFORD-ON-AVON
MCMVIII


LONDON:
CHAPMAN & HALL
LIMITED




CONTENTS


PAGE

WHAT IS 'POPULAR POETRY'? 1

SPEAKING TO THE PSALTERY 13

MAGIC 23

THE HAPPIEST OF THE POETS 55

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SHELLEY'S POETRY 71

AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON 111

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE IMAGINATION 131

WILLIAM BLAKE AND HIS ILLUSTRATIONS TO THE
'DIVINE COMEDY' 138

SYMBOLISM IN PAINTING 176

THE SYMBOLISM OF POETRY 185

THE THEATRE 200

THE CELTIC ELEMENT IN LITERATURE 210

THE AUTUMN OF THE BODY 230

THE MOODS 238

THE BODY OF THE FATHER CHRISTIAN ROSENCRUX 240

THE RETURN OF ULYSSES 243

IRELAND AND THE ARTS 249

THE GALWAY PLAINS 259

EMOTION OF MULTITUDE 264




WHAT IS 'POPULAR POETRY'?


I THINK it was a Young Ireland Society that set my mind running on
'popular poetry. ' We used to discuss everything that was known to us
about Ireland, and especially Irish literature and Irish history. We
had no Gaelic, but paid great honour to the Irish poets who wrote in
English, and quoted them in our speeches. I could have told you at that
time the dates of the birth and death, and quoted the chief poems, of
men whose names you have not heard, and perhaps of some whose names I
have forgotten. I knew in my heart that the most of them wrote badly,
and yet such romance clung about them, such a desire for Irish poetry
was in all our minds, that I kept on saying, not only to others but
to myself, that most of them wrote well, or all but well. I had read
Shelley and Spenser and had tried to mix their styles together in a
pastoral play which I have not come to dislike much, and yet I do not
think Shelley or Spenser ever moved me as did these poets. I thought
one day--I can remember the very day when I thought it--'If somebody
could make a style which would not be an English style and yet would
be musical and full of colour, many others would catch fire from him,
and we would have a really great school of ballad poetry in Ireland.
If these poets, who have never ceased to fill the newspapers and the
ballad-books with their verses, had a good tradition they would write
beautifully and move everybody as they move me. ' Then a little later on
I thought, 'If they had something else to write about besides political
opinions, if more of them would write about the beliefs of the people
like Allingham, or about old legends like Ferguson, they would find
it easier to get a style. ' Then, with a deliberateness that still
surprises me, for in my heart of hearts I have never been quite certain
that one should be more than an artist, that even patriotism is more
than an impure desire in an artist, I set to work to find a style and
things to write about that the ballad writers might be the better.

They are no better, I think, and my desire to make them so was, it may
be, one of the illusions Nature holds before one, because she knows
that the gifts she has to give are not worth troubling about. It is for
her sake that we must stir ourselves, but we would not trouble to get
out of bed in the morning, or to leave our chairs once we are in them,
if she had not her conjuring bag. She wanted a few verses from me, and
because it would not have seemed worth while taking so much trouble
to see my books lie on a few drawing-room tables, she filled my head
with thoughts of making a whole literature, and plucked me out of the
Dublin art schools where I should have stayed drawing from the round,
and sent me into a library to read bad translations from the Irish,
and at last down into Connaught to sit by turf fires. I wanted to
write 'popular poetry' like those Irish poets, for I believed that all
good literatures were popular, and even cherished the fancy that the
Adelphi melodrama, which I had never seen, might be good literature,
and I hated what I called the coteries. I thought that one must write
without care, for that was of the coteries, but with a gusty energy
that would put all straight if it came out of the right heart. I had
a conviction, which indeed I have still, that one's verses should
hold, as in a mirror, the colours of one's own climate and scenery in
their right proportion; and, when I found my verses too full of the
reds and yellows Shelley gathered in Italy, I thought for two days of
setting things right, not as I should now by making rhythms faint
and nervous and filling my images with a certain coldness, a certain
wintry wildness, but by eating little and sleeping upon a board. I felt
indignant with Matthew Arnold because he complained that somebody,
who had translated Homer into a ballad measure, had tried to write
epic to the tune of Yankee Doodle. It seemed to me that it did not
matter what tune one wrote to, so long as that gusty energy came often
enough and strongly enough. And I delighted in Victor Hugo's book
upon Shakespeare, because he abused critics and coteries and thought
that Shakespeare wrote without care or premeditation and to please
everybody. I would indeed have had every illusion had I believed in
that straightforward logic, as of newspaper articles, which so tickles
the ears of the shopkeepers; but I always knew that the line of Nature
is crooked, that, though we dig the canal beds as straight as we can,
the rivers run hither and thither in their wildness.

From that day to this I have been busy among the verses and stories
that the people make for themselves, but I had been busy a very little
while before I knew that what we call popular poetry never came from
the people at all. Longfellow, and Campbell, and Mrs. Hemans, and
Macaulay in his _Lays_, and Scott in his longer poems are the poets
of the middle class, of people who have unlearned the unwritten
tradition which binds the unlettered, so long as they are masters of
themselves, to the beginning of time and to the foundation of the
world, and who have not learned the written tradition which has been
established upon the unwritten. I became certain that Burns, whose
greatness has been used to justify the littleness of others, was in
part a poet of the middle class, because though the farmers he sprang
from and lived among had been able to create a little tradition of
their own, less a tradition of ideas than of speech, they had been
divided by religious and political changes from the images and emotions
which had once carried their memories backward thousands of years.
Despite his expressive speech which sets him above all other popular
poets, he has the triviality of emotion, the poverty of ideas, the
imperfect sense of beauty of a poetry whose most typical expression is
in Longfellow. Longfellow has his popularity, in the main, because he
tells his story or his idea so that one needs nothing but his verses
to understand it. No words of his borrow their beauty from those that
used them before, and one can get all that there is in story and
idea without seeing them as if moving before a half-faded curtain
embroidered with kings and queens, their loves and battles and their
days out hunting, or else with holy letters and images of so great
antiquity that nobody can tell the god or goddess they would commend
to an unfading memory. Poetry that is not popular poetry presupposes,
indeed, more than it says, though we, who cannot know what it is to be
disinherited, only understand how much more, when we read it in its
most typical expressions, in the _Epipsychidion_ of Shelley, or in
Spenser's description of the gardens of Adonis, or when we meet the
misunderstandings of others. Go down into the street and read to your
baker or your candlestick-maker any poem which is not popular poetry.
I have heard a baker, who was clever enough with his oven, deny that
Tennyson could have known what he was writing when he wrote 'Warming
his five wits, the white owl in the belfry sits,' and once when I read
out Omar Khayyam to one of the best of candlestick-makers, he said,
'What is the meaning of "we come like water and like wind we go"? ' Or
go down into the street with some thought whose bare meaning must be
plain to everybody; take with you Ben Jonson's 'Beauty like sorrow
dwelleth everywhere,' and find out how utterly its enchantment depends
on an association of beauty with sorrow which written tradition has
from the unwritten, which had it in its turn from ancient religion; or
take with you these lines in whose bare meaning also there is nothing
to stumble over, and find out what men lose who are not in love with
Helen.

'Brightness falls from the air,
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust hath closed Helen's eye. '

I pick my examples at random, for I am writing where I have no books to
turn the pages of, but one need not go east of the sun or west of the
moon in so simple a matter.

On the other hand, when Walt Whitman writes in seeming defiance of
tradition, he needs tradition for his protection, for the butcher and
the baker and the candlestick-maker grow merry over him when they meet
his work by chance. Nature, which cannot endure emptiness, has made
them gather conventions which cannot disguise their low birth though
they copy, as from far off, the dress and manners of the well-bred and
the well-born. The gatherers mock all expression that is wholly unlike
their own, just as little boys in the street mock at strangely-dressed
people and at old men who talk to themselves.

There is only one kind of good poetry, for the poetry of the coteries,
which presupposes the written tradition, does not differ in kind
from the true poetry of the people, which presupposes the unwritten
tradition. Both are alike strange and obscure, and unreal to all who
have not understanding, and both, instead of that manifest logic,
that clear rhetoric of the 'popular poetry,' glimmer with thoughts
and images whose 'ancestors were stout and wise,' 'anigh to Paradise'
'ere yet men knew the gift of corn. ' It may be that we know as little
of their descent as men knew of 'the man born to be a king' when they
found him in that cradle marked with the red lion crest, and yet we
know somewhere in the heart that they have been sung in temples, in
ladies' chambers, and our nerves quiver with a recognition they were
shaped to by a thousand emotions. If men did not remember or half
remember impossible things, and, it may be, if the worship of sun and
moon had not left a faint reverence behind it, what Aran fisher-girl
would sing--

'It is late last night the dog was speaking of you; the snipe was
speaking of you in her deep marsh. It is you are the lonely bird
throughout the woods; and that you may be without a mate until you find
me.

'You promised me and you said a lie to me, that you would be before me
where the sheep are flocked. I gave a whistle and three hundred cries
to you; and I found nothing there but a bleating lamb.

'You promised me a thing that was hard for you, a ship of gold under a
silver mast; twelve towns and a market in all of them, and a fine white
court by the side of the sea.

'You promised me a thing that is not possible; that you would give me
gloves of the skin of a fish; that you would give me shoes of the skin
of a bird, and a suit of the dearest silk in Ireland.

'My mother said to me not to be talking with you, to-day or to-morrow
or on Sunday. It was a bad time she took for telling me that, it was
shutting the door after the house was robbed. . . .

'You have taken the east from me, you have taken the west from me, you
have taken what is before me and what is behind me; you have taken the
moon, you have taken the sun from me, and my fear is great you have
taken God from me. '

The Gael of the Scottish islands could not sing his beautiful song
over a bride, had he not a memory of the belief that Christ was the
only man who measured six feet and not a little more or less, and was
perfectly shaped in all other ways, and if he did not remember old
symbolical observances--

I bathe thy palms
In showers of wine,
In the cleansing fire,
In the juice of raspberries,
In the milk of honey.

* * * * *

Thou art the joy of all joyous things,
Thou art the light of the beam of the sun,
Thou art the door of the chief of hospitality,
Thou art the surpassing pilot star,
Thou art the step of the deer of the hill,
Thou art the step of the horse of the plain,
Thou art the grace of the sun rising,
Thou art the loveliness of all lovely desires.

The lovely likeness of the Lord
Is in thy pure face,
The loveliest likeness that was upon earth.

I soon learned to cast away one other illusion of 'popular poetry. ' I
learned from the people themselves, before I learned it from any book,
that they cannot separate the idea of an art or a craft from the idea
of a cult with ancient technicalities and mysteries. They can hardly
separate mere learning from witchcraft, and are fond of the words and
verses that keep half their secret to themselves. Indeed, it is certain
that before the counting-house had created a new class and a new art
without breeding and without ancestry, and set this art and this class
between the hut and the castle, and between the hut and the cloister,
the art of the people was as closely mingled with the art of the
coteries as was the speech of the people that delighted in rhythmical
animation, in idiom, in images, in words full of far-off suggestion,
with the unchanging speech of the poets.

Now I see a new generation in Ireland which discusses Irish literature
and history in Young Ireland societies, and societies with newer names,
and there are far more than when I was a boy who would make verses for
the people. They have the help, too, of a vigorous journalism, and this
journalism sometimes urges them to desire the direct logic, the clear
rhetoric, of 'popular poetry. ' It sees that Ireland has no cultivated
minority, and it does not see, though it would cast out all English
things, that its literary ideal belongs more to England than to other
countries. I have hope that the new writers will not fall into its
illusion, for they write in Irish, and for a people the counting-house
has not made forgetful. Among the seven or eight hundred thousand who
have had Irish from the cradle, there is, perhaps, nobody who has not
enough of the unwritten tradition to know good verses from bad ones, if
he have enough mother-wit. Among all that speak English in Australia,
in America, in Great Britain, are there many more than the ten thousand
the prophet saw, who have enough of the written tradition education has
set in room of the unwritten to know good verses from bad ones, even
though their mother-wit has made them Ministers of the Crown or what
you will? Nor can things be better till that ten thousand have gone
hither and thither to preach their faith that 'the imagination is the
man himself,' and that the world as imagination sees it is the durable
world, and have won men as did the disciples of Him who

His seventy disciples sent
Against religion and government.

1901.




SPEAKING TO THE PSALTERY.


I

I HAVE always known that there was something I disliked about singing,
and I naturally dislike print and paper, but now at last I understand
why, for I have found something better. I have just heard a poem spoken
with so delicate a sense of its rhythm, with so perfect a respect for
its meaning, that if I were a wise man and could persuade a few people
to learn the art I would never open a book of verses again. A friend,
who was here a few minutes ago, has sat with a beautiful stringed
instrument upon her knee, her fingers passing over the strings, and
has spoken to me some verses from Shelley's _Skylark_ and Sir Ector's
lamentation over the dead Launcelot out of the _Morte d' Arthur_ and
some of my own poems. Wherever the rhythm was most delicate, wherever
the emotion was most ecstatic, her art was the most beautiful, and yet,
although she sometimes spoke to a little tune, it was never singing,
as we sing to-day, never anything but speech. A singing note, a word
chanted as they chant in churches, would have spoiled everything; nor
was it reciting, for she spoke to a notation as definite as that of
song, using the instrument which murmured sweetly and faintly, under
the spoken sounds, to give her the changing notes. Another speaker
could have repeated all her effects, except those which came from her
own beautiful voice that would have given her fame if the only art that
gives the speaking voice its perfect opportunity were as well known
among us as it was known in the ancient world.


II

Since I was a boy I have always longed to hear poems spoken to a harp,
as I imagined Homer to have spoken his, for it is not natural to enjoy
an art only when one is by oneself. Whenever one finds a fine verse
one wants to read it to somebody, and it would be much less trouble
and much pleasanter if we could all listen, friend by friend, lover
by beloved. Images used to rise up before me, as I am sure they have
arisen before nearly everybody else who cares for poetry, of wild-eyed
men speaking harmoniously to murmuring wires while audiences in
many-coloured robes listened, hushed and excited. Whenever I spoke of
my desire to anybody they said I should write for music, but when
I heard anything sung I did not hear the words, or if I did their
natural pronunciation was altered and their natural music was altered,
or it was drowned in another music which I did not understand. What
was the good of writing a love-song if the singer pronounced love,
'lo-o-o-o-o-ve,' or even if he said 'love,' but did not give it its
exact place and weight in the rhythm? Like every other poet, I spoke
verses in a kind of chant when I was making them, and sometimes, when
I was alone on a country road, I would speak them in a loud chanting
voice, and feel that if I dared I would speak them in that way to
other people. One day I was walking through a Dublin street with the
Visionary I have written about in _The Celtic Twilight_, and he began
speaking his verses out aloud with the confidence of those who have
the inner light. He did not mind that people stopped and looked after
him even on the far side of the road, but went on through poem after
poem. Like myself, he knew nothing of music, but was certain that he
had written them to a manner of music, and he had once asked somebody
who played on a wind instrument of some kind, and then a violinist,
to write out the music and play it. The violinist had played it,
or something like it, but had not written it down; but the man with
the wind instrument said it could not be played because it contained
quarter-tones and would be out of tune. We were not at all convinced
by this, and one day, when we were staying with a Galway friend who is
a learned musician, I asked him to listen to our verses, and to the
way we spoke them. The Visionary found to his surprise that he did
not make every poem to a different tune, and to the surprise of the
musician that he did make them all to two quite definite tunes, which
are, it seems, like very simple Arabic music. It was, perhaps, to some
such music, I thought, that Blake sang his _Songs of Innocence_ in Mrs.
Williams' drawing-room, and perhaps he, too, spoke rather than sang. I,
on the other hand, did not often compose to a tune, though I sometimes
did, yet always to notes that could be written down and played on my
friend's organ, or turned into something like a Gregorian hymn if one
sang them in the ordinary way. I varied more than the Visionary, who
never forgot his two tunes, one for long and one for short lines,
and could not always speak a poem in the same way, but always felt
that certain ways were right, and that I would know one of them if I
remembered the way I first spoke the poem. When I got to London I gave
the notation, as it had been played on the organ, to the friend who has
just gone out, and she spoke it to me, giving my words a new quality by
the beauty of her voice.


III

Then we began to wander through the wood of error; we tried speaking
through music in the ordinary way under I know not whose evil
influence, until we got to hate the two competing tunes and rhythms
that were so often at discord with one another, the tune and rhythm
of the verse and the tune and rhythm of the music. Then we tried,
persuaded by somebody who thought quarter-tones and less intervals
the especial mark of speech as distinct from singing, to write out
what we did in wavy lines. On finding something like these lines in
Tibetan music, we became so confident that we covered a large piece
of pasteboard, which now blows up my fire in the morning, with a
notation in wavy lines as a demonstration for a lecture; but at last
Mr. Dolmetsch put us back to our first thought. He made us a beautiful
instrument half psaltery half lyre which contains, I understand, all
the chromatic intervals within the range of the speaking voice; and he
taught us to regulate our speech by the ordinary musical notes.

Some of the notations he taught us--those in which there is no lilt, no
recurring pattern of sounds--are like this notation for a song out of
the first Act of _The Countess Cathleen_.

It is written in the old C clef, which is, I am told, the most
reasonable way to write it, for it would be below the stave on the
treble clef or above it on the bass clef. The central line of the stave
corresponds to the middle C of the piano; the first note of the poem
is therefore D. The marks of long and short over the syllables are not
marks of scansion, but show the syllables one makes the voice hurry or
linger over.

[Illustration: Music]

Impetuous heart, be still, be still;
Your sorrowful love may never be told;
Cover it with a lonely tune
He who could bend all things to his will
Has covered the door of the infinite fold
With the pale stars and the wandering moon

One needs, of course, a far less complicated notation than a singer,
and one is even permitted slight modifications of the fixed note when
dramatic expression demands it and the instrument is not sounding. The
notation which regulates the general form of the sound leaves it free
to add a complexity of dramatic expression from its own incommunicable
genius which compensates the lover of speech for the lack of complex
musical expression. Ordinary speech is formless, and its variety is
like the variety which separates bad prose from the regulated speech
of Milton, or anything that is formless and void from anything that has
form and beauty. The orator, the speaker who has some little of the
great tradition of his craft, differs from the debater very largely
because he understands how to assume that subtle monotony of voice
which runs through the nerves like fire.

Even when one is speaking to a single note sounded faintly on the
Psaltery, if one is sufficiently practised to speak on it without
thinking about it one can get an endless variety of expression. All
art is, indeed, a monotony in external things for the sake of an
interior variety, a sacrifice of gross effects to subtle effects, an
asceticism of the imagination. But this new art, new in modern life
I mean, will have to train its hearers as well as its speakers, for
it takes time to surrender gladly the gross effects one is accustomed
to, and one may well find mere monotony at first where one soon learns
to find a variety as incalculable as in the outline of faces or in
the expression of eyes. Modern acting and recitation have taught us
to fix our attention on the gross effects till we have come to think
gesture and the intonation that copies the accidental surface of life
more important than the rhythm; and yet we understand theoretically
that it is precisely this rhythm that separates good writing from
bad, that it is the glimmer, the fragrance, the spirit of all intense
literature. I do not say that we should speak our plays to musical
notes, for dramatic verse will need its own method, and I have hitherto
experimented with short lyric poems alone; but I am certain that, if
people would listen for a while to lyrical verse spoken to notes, they
would soon find it impossible to listen without indignation to verse
as it is spoken in our leading theatres. They would get a subtlety of
hearing that would demand new effects from actors and even from public
speakers, and they might, it may be, begin even to notice one another's
voices till poetry and rhythm had come nearer to common life.

I cannot tell what changes this new art is to go through, or to what
greatness or littleness of fortune; but I can imagine little stories in
prose with their dialogues in metre going pleasantly to the strings.
I am not certain that I shall not see some Order naming itself from
the Golden Violet of the Troubadours or the like, and having among its
members none but well-taught and well-mannered speakers who will keep
the new art from disrepute. They will know how to keep from singing
notes and from prosaic lifeless intonations, and they will always
understand, however far they push their experiments, that poetry and
not music is their object; and they will have by heart, like the Irish
_File_, so many poems and notations that they will never have to bend
their heads over the book to the ruin of dramatic expression and of
that wild air the bard had always about him in my boyish imagination.
They will go here and there speaking their verses and their little
stories wherever they can find a score or two of poetical-minded people
in a big room, or a couple of poetical-minded friends sitting by the
hearth, and poets will write them poems and little stories to the
confounding of print and paper. I, at any rate, from this out mean to
write all my longer poems for the stage, and all my shorter ones for
the Psaltery, if only some strong angel keep me to my good resolutions.

1902.




MAGIC.


I

I BELIEVE in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call
magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not
know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the
visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed;
and I believe in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been handed
down from early times, and been the foundations of nearly all magical
practices. These doctrines are--

(1) That the borders of our minds are ever shifting, and that many
minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a
single mind, a single energy.

(2) That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our
memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.