II

IdEb

Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2008 with funding from

Microsoft Corporation

http://www.archive.org/details/discoveriesvolumOOyeatrich

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 i

Personality and the Intellectual Essences 5

The Musician and the Orator 9

A Banjo Player 10

The Looking-glass 1 1

The Tree of Life 12

The Praise of Old Wives' Tales 1 5

The Play of Modern Manners 1 6
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 3 3

His Mistress's Eyebrows 3 3

The Tresses of the Hair 3 5

A Tower on the Apennine 36

The Thinking of the Body 3 7

Religious Belief necessary to symbolic Art 3 9

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 neigh-
bouring country house and arriving a little before
the players, tried to open a window. My hands were
black with dirt in a moment and presently a pane of
glass and a part of the window frame came out in my
hands. Everything in this room was half in ruins,
the rotten boards cracked under my feet, and our
new proscenium and the new boards of the platform
looked out of place, and yet the room was not really
old, in spite of the musicians' gallery over the stage.
It had been built by some romantic or philanthrop-
ic landlord some three or four generations ago, and
was a memory of we knew not what unfinished
scheme.

From there I went to look for the players and called
for information on a young priest, who had invited
them, and taken upon himself the finding of an au-
dience. He lived in a high house with other priests,
and as I went in I noticed with a whimsical pleasure
a broken pane of glass in the fan-light over the door,
for he had once told me the story of an old woman
who a good many years ago quarrelled with the
b

bishop, got drunk, and hurled a stone through the
painted glass. He was a clever man, who read Mere-
dith and Ibsen, but some of his books had been pack-
ed in the fire-grate by his house-keeper, instead of
the customary view of an Italian lake or the colour-
ed tissue-paper. The players, who had been giving
a performance in a neighbouring town, had not yet
come, or were unpacking their costumes and prop-
erties at the hotel he had recommended them. We
should have time, he said, to go through the half-
ruined town and to visit the convent schools and the
cathedral, where, owing to his influence, two of our
young Irish sculptors had been set to carve an altar
and the heads of pillars. I had only heard of this
work, and I found its strangeness and simplicity —
one of them had been Rodin's pupil — could not
make me forget the meretriciousness of the archi-
tecture and the commercial commonplace of the
inlaid pavements. The new movement had seized on
the cathedral midway in its growth, and the worst of
the old & the best of the new were side by side with-
out any sign of transition. The convent school was,
as other like places have been to me — a long room
in a workhouse hospital at Portumna, in particu-
lar— a delight to the imagination and the eyes. A
new floor had been put into some ecclesiastical buil-
ding and the light from a great mullioned window,

2

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 compelthem
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
Itrayed ofFsomewhere and I took his place and when
boys came up offering two or three pence and ask-
ing to be let into the sixpenny seats I let them join
the melancholy crowd. The play professed to tell of
the heroic life of ancient Ireland but was really full
of sedentary refinement and the spirituality of cit-
ies. Every emotion was made as dainty footed and
dainty fingered as might be, and a love and pathos
where passion had faded into sentiment, emotions of
pensive and harmless people, drove shadowy young
men through the shadows of death and battle. I
watched it with growing rage. It was not my own

3

work, but I have sometimes watched my own work
with a rage made all the more salt in the mouth from
being half despair. Why should we make so much
noise about ourselves and yet have nothing to say
that was not better said in that work-house dormi-
tory, where a few flowers and a few coloured coun-
terpanes and the coloured walls had made a severe
and gracious beauty ? Presently the play was chan-
ged and our comedian began to act a li ttle 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, asl had overthatbroken window-
pane. Here was somethingsecular, abounding, even
a little vulgar, for he was gagging horribly, conde-
scending to his audience, though not without con-
tempt.

We had our supper in the priest's house, and a gov-
ernment official who had come down from Dublin,
partly out of interest in this attempt 'to educate the
people,' and partly because it was his holiday and it
was necessary to go somewhere, entertained us with
littlejokes. 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.

4

I had my breakfast by myself the next morning, for
the players had got up in the middle of the night
and driven some ten miles to catch an early train to
Dublin, and were already on their way to their shops
and offices. I had brought the visitor's book of the
hotel to turn over its pages while waiting for my
bacon and eggs, and found several pages full of ob-
scenities, scrawled there some two or three weeks
before, by Dublin visitors it seemed, for a notorious
Dublin street was mentioned. Nobody had thought
it worth his while to tear out the page or block out
the lines, and as I put the book away impressions
that had been drifting through my mind for months
rushed up into a single thought. 'If we poets are to
move the people, we must reintegrate the human
spirit in our imagination. The English have driven
away the kings, and turned the prophets into dema-
gogues and you cannot have health among a people
if you have not prophet, priest and king.'

PERSONALITY AND THE
INTELLECTUAL ESSENCES
My workin Ireland has continually set this thought
before me, 'How can I make my work mean some-
thing to vigorous and simple men whose attention
is not given to art but to a shop, or teaching in a
National School, or dispensing medicine ?' I had

5

not wanted to 'elevate them' or 'educate them/ as
these words are understood, but to make them un-
derstand my vision, and I had not wanted a large
audience, certainly not what is called a national au-
dience, but enough people for what is accidental
and temporary to lose itself in the lump. In England
where there have been so many changing activities
and so much systematic education one only escapes
from crudities and temporary interests among stu-
dents, but here there is the right audience could one
but get its ears. I have always come to this certain-
ty ,what moves natural men in the arts is what moves
them in life, and that is, intensity of personal life,
intonations that show them in a book or a play, the
strength, the essential moment of a man who would
be exciting in the market or at the dispensary door.
They must go out of the theatre with the strength
they live by strengthened with looking upon some
passion that could, whatever its chosen way of life,
strike down an enemy, fill a long stocking with mon-
ey or move a girl's heart. They have not much to do
with the speculations of science, though they have
a little, or with the speculations of metaphysics,
though they have a little. Their legs will tire on the
road if there is nothing in their hearts but vague
sentiment, and though it is charming to have an af-
fectionate feeling about flowers, that will not pull

6

the cart out of the ditch. An exciting person, whe-
ther the hero of a play or the maker of poems, will
display the greatest volume of personal energy, and
this energy must seem to come out of the body as
out of the mind. We must say to ourselves contin-
ually when we imagine a character, 'Have I given
him the roots, as it were, of all faculties necessary
for life ?' And only when one is certain of that may
one give him the one faculty that fills the imagin-
ation with joy. I even doubt if any play had ever a
great popularity that did not use, or seem to use, the
bodily energies of its principal actor to the full. Vil-
lon the robber could have delighted these Irishmen
with plays and songs, if he and they had been born
to the same traditions of word and symbol, but Shel-
ley could not; and as men came to live in towns and
to read printed books and to have many specialised
activities, it has become more possible to produce
Shelleys and less and less possible to produce Villons.
The last Villon dwindled into Robert Burns because
the highest faculties had faded, taking the sense of
beauty with them, into some sort of vague heaven
& left the lower to lumber where they best could. In
literature, partly from the lack of that spoken word
which knits us to normal man, we have lost in per-
sonahty, in our delight in the whole man — blood,
imagination,intellect, running together — but have

7

found a new delight, in essences, in states of mind, in
pure imagination, in all that comes to us most easily
in elaborate music. There are two ways before liter-
ature— upward into ever-growing subtlety, with
Verhaeren, with Mallarme, with Maeterlinck, un-
til at last, it may be, a new agreement among refined
and studious men gives birth to a new passion, and
what seems literature becomes religion; or down-
ward, taking the soul with us until all is simplified
and solidified again. That is the choice of choices —
the way of the bird until common eyes have lost us,
or to the market carts ; but we must see to it that the
soul goes with us, for the bird's song is beautiful, and
the traditions of modern imagination, growing al-
ways more musical, more lyrical, more melancholy,
casting up now a Shelley, now a Swinburne, now a
Wagner, are it may be the frenzy of those that are
about to see what the magic hymn printed by the
Abbe de Villars has called the Crown of Living and
Melodious Diamonds. If the carts have hit our fan-
cy we must have thesoul tight within our bodies, for
it has grown so fond of a beauty accumulated by
subtle generations that it will for a long time be im-
patient with our thirst for mere force, mere person-
ality, for the tumult of the blood. If it begin to slip
away we must go after it, for Shelley's Chapel of the
Morning Star is better than Burns's beer house —

8

surely it was beer not barleycorn — except at the
day's weary end ; and it is always better than that un-
comfortable place where there is no beer, the ma-
chine shop of the realists.

THE MUSICIAN AND THE ORATOR
Walter Pater says music is the type of all the Arts,
but somebody else, I forget now who, that oratory
is their type. You will side with the one or the oth-
er according to the nature of your energy, and I in
my present mood am all for the man who, with an
average audience before him, uses all means of per-
suasion— stories, laughter, tears, and but so much
music as he can discover on the wings of words. I
would even avoid the conversation of the lovers of
music, who would draw us into the impersonal land
of sound and colour, and would have no one write
with a sonata in his memory. We may even speak a
little evil of musicians, having admitted that they
will see before we do that melodious crown. We
may remind them that the housemaid does not re-
spect the piano-tuner as she does the plumber, and
of the enmity that they have aroused among all
poets. Music is the most impersonal of things and
words the most personal, and that is why musicians
do not like words. They masticate them for a long
time, being afraid they would not be able to digest

9 c

them, and when the words are so broken and soft-
ened and mixed with spittle, that they are not words
any longer, they swallow them.

A BANJO PLAYER

A girl has been playing on the banjo. She is pretty
and if I didn't listen to her I could have watched her,
and if I didn't watch her I could have listened. Her
voice, the movements of her body, the expression
of her face all said the same thing. A player of a
different temper and body would have made all d iff-
erent and might have been delightful in some other
way. A movement not of music only but of life came
to its perfection. I was delighted and I did not know
why until I thought 'that is the way my people, the
people I see in the mind's eye, play music, and I like
it because it is all personal, as personal as Villon's
poetry.' The little instrument is quite light and the
player can move freely and express a joy that is not
of the fingers and the mind only but of the whole
being; and all the while her movements call up into
the mind, so erect and natural she is, whatever is
most beautiful in her daily life. Nearly all the old
instruments were like that, even the organ was once
a little instrument and when it grew big our wise
forefathers gave it to God in the cathedrals where

lO

it befits Him to be everything. But if you sit at the
pianoit is thepiano,the mechanism, that is the im-
portant thing, and nothing of you means anything
but your fingers and your intellect.

THE LOOKING-GLASS

I have just been talking to a girl with a shrill mono-
tonous voice and an abrupt way of moving. She is
fresh from school where they have taught her his-
tory and geography 'whereby a soul can be discern-
ed,' but what is the value of an education, or even
in the long run of a science, that does not begin with
the personality, the habitual self, and illustrate all
by that? Somebody should have taught her to speak
for the most part on whatever note of her voice is
most musical, and soften those harsh notes by speak-
ing,notsinging, to somestringedinstrument, 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.?

1 1

THE TREE OF LIFE
We artists have taken over-much to heart that old
commandment about seeking after the Kingdom of
Heaven. Verlaine told me that he had tried to tran-
slate 'In Memoriam,' but could not because Ten-
nyson was 'too noble, too Anglais, and when he
should have been broken-hearted had many rem-
iniscences.' About that time I found in some Eng-
lish review an essay of his on Shakespeare. 'I had
once a fine Shakespeare,' he wrote, or some such
words, 'but I have it no longer. I write from mem-
ory.' One wondered in what vicissitude he had sold
it, and for what money; and an image of the man
rose in the imagination. To be his ordinary self as
much as possible, not a scholar or even a reader,
that was certainly his pose; and in the lecture he
gave at Oxford he insisted 'that the poet should hide
nothing of himself,' though he must speak it all
with 'a care of that dignity which should manifest
itself, if not in the perfection of form, at all events
with an invisible, insensible, but effectual endeav-
our after this lofty and severe quality, I was about
to say this virtue.' It was this feeling for his own
personality, his delight in singing his own life, even
more than that life itself, which made the genera-
tion I belong to compare him to Villon. It was not
till after his death that I understood the meaning

12

his words should have had for me, for while he liv-
ed I was interested in nothing but states of mind,
lyrical moments, intellectual essences. I would not
then have been as delighted as I am now by that ban-
jo-player, or as shocked as I am now by that girl
whose movements have grown abrupt, and whose
voice has grown harsh by the neglect of all but ex-
ternal activities. I had not learned what sweetness,
what rhythmic movement, there is in those who
have become the joy that is themselves. Without
knowing it I had come to care for nothing but im-^
personal beauty. I had set out on life with the
thought ofputtingmyvery self into poetry, andhad
understood this as a representation of my own vis-
ions and an attempt to cut away the non-essential,
but as I imagined the visions outside myself my im-
agination became full of decorative landscape and
of still life. I thought of myself as something un-
moving and silent living in the middle of my own
mind and body, a grain of sand in Bloomsbury or in
Connacht that Satan's watch fiends cannot find.
Then one day I understood quite suddenly, as the
way is, that I was seeking something unchanging
and unmixed and always outside myself, a Stone or
an Elixir that was always out of reach, and that I
myself was the fleeting thing that held out its hand.
The more I tried to make my art deliberately beau-
tiful, the more did I follow the opposite of myself,

13

for deliberate beauty is like a woman always desir-
ing man's desire. Presently I found that I entered in-
to myself and picturedmyself and not some essence
when I was not seeking beauty at all, but merely to
lighten the mind of some burden of love or bitter-
ness thrown upon it by the events of life. We are only
permitted to desire life, and all the rest should be our
complaints or our praise of that exacting mistress
who can awake our lips into song with her kisses.
But we must not give her all, we must deceive her
a little at times, for, as Le Sage says in 'The Devil
on Two Sticks,' the false lovers who do not become
melancholy or jealous with honest passion have the
happiest mistress and are rewarded the soonest and
by the most beautiful. Our deceit will give us style,
mastery, that dignity, that lofty and severe quality
Verlaine spoke of. To put it otherwise, we should
ascend out of common interests, the thoughts of the
newspapers, ofthe market-place, of men of science,
but only so far as we can carry the normal, passion-
ate, reasoning self, the personality as a whole. We
must find some place upon the Tree of Life high en-
ough for the forked branches to keep it safe, and low
enough to be out ofthe 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.

H

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 GEdipus are more cloudy. No playwright ever
has made or ever will make a character that will fol-
low us out of the theatre as Don Quixote follows us
out of the book, for no playwright can be wholly
episodical, and when one constructs, bringing one's
characters into complicated relations with one an-
other, something impersonal comes into the story.
Society, fate, 'tendency,' something not quite hu-
man begins to arrange the characters and to excite
into action only so much of their humanity as they
find it necessary to show to one another. The com-
mon heart will always love better the tales that have
something of an old wives' tale and that look upon
their hero from every side as if he alone were won-
derful, as a child does with a new penny. In plays
of a comedy too extravagant to photograph life, or
written in verse, the construction is of a necessity
woven out of naked motives and passions, but when
an atmosphere of modern reality has to be built up

15

as well, and the tendency, or fate, or society has to
be shown as it is about ourselves the characters grow
fainter and we have to read the book many times
or see the play many times before we can remem-
ber them. Even then they are onlypossible in a cer-
tain drawing-room and among such and such peo-
ple, and we must carry all that lumber in our heads. I
thought Tolstoi's 'War and Peace' the greatest story
I had ever read, and yet it has gone from me; even
Lancelot, ever a shadow,is more visible in my mem-
ory than all its substance.

THE PLAY OF MODERN MANNERS
Of all artistic forms that have had a large share of
the world's attention the worst is the play about
modern educated people. Except where it is super-
ficial or deliberately argumentative it fills one's soul
with a sense of commonness as with dust. It has one
mortal ailment. It cannot become impassioned, that
is to say vital, without making somebody gushing
and sentimental. Educated and well-bred people do
not wear their hearts upon their sleeves and they
have no artistic and charming language except light
persiflage and no powerful language at all, and when
they are deeply moved they look silently into the
fireplace. Again and again I have watched some play
of this sort with growing curiosity through the

i6

opening scene. The minor people argue, chafFone
another, hint sometimes at some deeper stream of
life just as we do in our houses, and I am content*
But all the time I have been wondering why the
chief character, the man who is to bear the burden
of fate, is gushing, sentimental and quite without
ideas. Then the great scene comes and I understand
that he cannot be well-bred or self-possessed or in-
tellectual, for if he were he would draw a chair to
the fire and there would be no duologue at the end
of the third act. Ibsen understood the difficulty and
made all his characters a little provincial that they
might not put each other out of countenance, and
made a leading article sort of poetry, phrases about
vine leaves and harps in the air it was possible to be-
lieve them using in their moments of excitement,
and if the play needed more than that they could al-
ways do something stupid. They could go out and
hoist a flag as they do at the end of Little Eyolf. One
only understands that this manner, deliberately ad-
opted one doubts not, had gone into his soul and
filled it with dust, when one has noticed that he
could no longer create a man of genius. The happiest
writers are those that, knowing this form of play is
slight and passing, keep to the surface, never show-
ing anything but the arguments and the persiflage
of daily observation, or now and then, instead of the

17 d

expression of passion, a stage picture, a man hold-
ing a woman's hand or sitting with his head in his
hands in dim light by the red glow of a fire. It was
certainly an understanding of the slightness of the
form, of its incapacity for the expression of the
deeper sorts of passion, that made the French invent
the play with a thesis, for where there is a thesis
people can grow hot in argument, almost the only
kind of passion that displays itself in our daily life.
The novel of contemporary educated life is upon
the other hand a permanent form because having
the power of psychological description it can fol-
low the thought of a man who is looking into the
grate.

HAS THE DRAMA OF CONTEM-
PORARY LIFE A ROOT OF ITS OWN

In watching a play about modern educated people
with its meagre language and its action crushed in-
to the narrow limits of possibility I have found my-
self constantly saying: 'Maybe it has its power to
move, slight as that is, from being able to suggest
fundamental contrasts and passions which roman-
tic and poetical literature haveshown to be beauti-
ful.' A man facing his enemies alone in a quarrel
over thepurity of the water in a Norwegian Spa and
using no language but that of the newspapers can

i8

call up into our minds, let us say, the passion of Cori-
olanus. The lovers and fighters of old imaginative
literature are more vivid experiences in the soul than
anything but one's own ruling passion that is itself
riddled by their thought as by lightning, and even
two dumb figures on the roads can call up all that
glory. Put the man who has no knowledge of liter-
ature before a play of this kind and he will say as he
has said in some form or other in every age at the
first shock of naturalism, 'What has brought me
out to hear nothing but the words we use at home
when we are talking of the rates?' And he will pre-
fer to it any play where there is visible beauty or
mirth, where life is exciting, at high tide as it were.
It is not his fault that he will prefer in all likelihood
a worse play although its kind may be greater, for
we have been following the lure of science for gen-
erations and forgotten him and his. I come always
back to this thought. There is something of an old
wives' tale in fine literature. The makers of it are like
an old peasant telling stories of the great famine
or the hangings of '98 or his own memories. He has
felt somethingin the depth of his mind and he wants
to make it as visible and powerful to our senses as
possible. He will use the most extravagant words or
illustrations if they suit his purpose. Or he will in-
vent a wild parable and the more his mind is on fire

19

or the more creative it is the less will he look at the
outer world or value it for its own sake. It gives him
metaphors and examples and that is all. He is even
a little scornful of it, for it seems to him while the
fit is on that the fire has gone out of it and left it but
white ashes. I cannot explain it, but I am certain
that every high thing was invented in this way, be-
tween sleeping and waking, as it were, and that
peering and peeping persons are but hawkers of
stolen goods. How elsecould their noses have grown
so ravenous or their eyes so sharp ?

WHY THE BLIND MAN IN ANCIENT
TIMES WAS MADE A POET
A description in the Iliad or the Odyssey, unlike one
in the ^neid or in most modern writers, is the swift
and natural observation of a man as he is shaped by
life. It is a refinement of the primary hungers and
has the least possible of what is merely scholarly or
exceptional. It is, above all, never too observant, too
professional, and when the book is closed we have
had our energies enriched, for we have been in the
mid-current. We have never seen anything Odys-
seus could not have seen while his thought was of
the Cyclops, or Achilles when Briseis moved him to
desire. In the art of the greatest periods there is
something careless and sudden in all habitual moods
though not in their expression,because these moods

20

are a conflagration of all the energies of active life.
In primitive times the blind man became a poet as
he becomes a fiddler in our villages, because he had
to be driven out of activities all his nature cried for,
before he could be contented with the praise of life.
And often it is Villon or Verlaine with impedi-
ments plain to all, who sings of life with the ancient
simplicity. Poets of coming days when once more
it will be possible to write as in the great epochs will
recognise that their sacrifice shall be to refuse what
blindness and evil name, or imprisonment at the
outsetting, denied to men who missed thereby the
sting of a deliberate refusal. The poets of the ages of
silver need no refusal of life, the dome of many-col-
oured glass is already shattered while they live.
They look at life deliberately and as if from beyond
life, and the greatest of them need suffer nothing
but the sadness that the saints have known. This is
their aim, and their temptation is not a passionate
activity, but the approval of their fellows, which
comes to them in full abundance only when they
delight in the general thoughts that hold together a
cultivated middle-class, where irresponsibilities of
position and poverty are lacking; the things that
are more excellent among educated men who have
political preoccupations, Augustus Caesar's affabil-
ity, all that impersonal fecundity which muddies
the intellectual passions. Ben Jonson says in the

21

Poetaster, that even the best of men without Prom-
ethean fire is but a hollow statue, and a studious man
will commonly forget after some forty winters that
of a certainty Promethean fire will burn somebody's
fingers. It may happen that poets will be made more
often by their sins than by their virtues, for gener-
al praise is unlucky, as the villages know, and not
merely as I imagine — for I am superstitious about
these things — because the praise of all but an equal
enslaves and adds a pound to the ball at the ankle
with every compliment.

All energy that comes from the whole man is as ir-
regular as the lightning, for the communicable and
forecastable and discoverable is a part only, a hun-
gry chicken under the breast of the pelican, and the
test of poetry is not in reason but in a delight not dif-
ferent from the delight that comes to a man at the
first coming of love into the heart. I knew an old man
who had spent his whole life cutting hazel and pri-
vet from the paths, and in some seventy years he had
observed little but had many imaginations. He had
never seen like a naturalist, never seen things as they
are, for his habitual mood had been that of a man
stirred in his affairs; and Shakespeare, Tintoretto,
though the times were running out when Tintoretto
painted, nearly all the great men of the renaissance,
looked at the world with eyes like his. Their minds
were never quiescent, never as it were in a mood for

22

scientific observations,always an exaltation,never —
to use known words — founded upon an elimination
of the personal factor; and their attention and the
attention of those they worked for dwelt constantly
with what is present to the mind in exaltation. I am
too modern fully to enjoy Tintoretto's Creation of
the Milky Way, I cannot fix my thoughts upon that
glowing and palpitating flesh intently enough to
forget, as I can the make-believe of a fairy tale, that
heavy drapery hanging from a cloud, though I find
my pleasure in King Lear heightened by the make-
believe that comes upon it all when the fool says:
'This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before
his time : ' — and I always find it quite natural, so lit-
tle does logic in the mere circumstance matter in the
finest art, that Richard's & Richmond's tents should
be side by side. I saw with delight the 'Knight of the
Burning Pestle' when Mr. Carr revived it,and found
it none the worse because the apprentice acted a
whole play upon the spur of the moment and with-
out committing a line to heart. When Ben Jonson's
'Epicoene' rammed a century of laughter into the
two hours' traffic, I found with amazement that al-
most every journalist had put logic on the seat, where
our lady imagination should pronounce that unjust
and favouring sentence her woman's heart is ever

23

plotting,& had felt bound to cherish none but reason-
able sympathies and to resent the baiting of that gro-
tesque old man. I have been looking over a book of
engravings made in the eighteenth century from
those wall-pictures of Herculaneum and Pompeii
that were, it seems, the work of journeymen copy-
ing from finer paintings, for the composition is al-
ways too good for the execution. I find in great num-
bers an indifference to obvious logic, to all that the
eye sees at common moments. Perseus shows Andro-
meda the death she lived by in a pool,and though the
lovers are carefully drawn the reflection is upside
down that we may see it the better. There is hardly
an old master who has not made known to us in some
like way how little he cares for what every fool can
see and every knave can praise. The men who ima-
gined the arts were not less superstitious in religion,
understanding the spiritual relations, but not the
mechanical, and finding nothing that need strain the
throat in those gnats the floods of Noah and Deucal-
ion, and in Joshua's moon at Ascalon.

CONCERNING SAINTS AND ARTISTS
I took the Indian hemp with certain followers of St.
Martin on the ground floor of a house in the Latin
Quarter. I had never taken it before, and was instruc-
ted by a boisterous young poet, whose English was

24

no better than my French. He gave me a little pellet,
if I am not forgetting, an hour before dinner, and an-
other after we had dined together at some restaurant.
As we were going through the streets to the meet-
ing-place of the Martinists, I felt suddenly that a
cloud I was looking at floated in an immense space,
and for an instant my being rushed out, as it seemed,
into that space with ecstasy. I was myself again im-
mediately, but the poet was wholly above himself,
and presently he pointed to one of the street lamps
now brightening in the fading twilight, and cried at .
the top of his voice, 'Why do you look at me with
your great eye? 'There were perhaps a dozen people
already much excited when we arrived ; and after I
had drunk some cups of coffee and eaten a pellet or
two more, I grew very anxious to dance, but did not,
as I could not remember any steps. I sat down and
closed my eyes ; but no, I had no visions, nothing but
a sensation of some dark shadow which seemed to be
telling me that some day I would go into a trance and
so out of my body for a while, but not yet. I opened
my eyes and looked at some red ornament on the
mantelpiece, and at once the room was full of har-
monies of red, but when a blue china figure caught
my eye the harmonies became blue upon the instant.
I was puzzled, for the reds were all there, nothing
had changed, but they were no longer important or

25 e

harmonious; and why had the blues so unimportant
but a moment ago become exciting and delightful?
Thereupon it struck me that I was seeing like a pain-
ter, and that in the course of the evening every one
there would change through every kind of artistic
perception.

After a while a Martinist ran towards me with a
piece of paper on which he had drawn a circle with
a dot in it, and pointing at it with his finger he cried
out, 'God, God !' Some immeasurable mystery had
been revealed, and his eyes shone; and at some time
or other a lean and shabby man, with rather a dis-
tinguished face, showed me his horoscope and poin-
ted with an ecstasy of melancholy at its evil aspects.
The boisterous poet, who was an old eater of the In-
dian hemp,had told me that it took one three months
growing used to it, three months more enjoying it,
and three months being cured of it. These men were
in their second period; but I never forgot myself,
never really rose above myself for more than a mo-
ment, and was even able to feel the absurdity of that
gaiety, an Herr Nordau among the men of genius
but one that was abashed at his own sobriety. The
sky outside was beginning to grey when there came
a knocking at the window shutters. Somebody op-
ened the window, and a woman in evening dress,

26

who was not a little bewildered to find so many peo-
ple, was helped down into the room. She had been
at a student's ball unknown to her husband, who was
asleep overhead, and had thought to have crept
home unobserved, but for a confederate at the win-
dow. All those talking or dancing men laughed in a
dreamy way; and she, understanding that there was
no judgment in the laughter of men that had no
thought but of the spectacle of the world, blushed,
laughed and darted through the room and so up-
stairs. Alas that the hangman's rope should be own
brother to that Indian happiness that keeps alone,
were it not for some stray cactus, mother of as many
dreams,an immemorial impartiality and simpleness.

THE SUBJECT MATTER OF DRAMA

I read this sentence a few days ago, or one like it, in
an obituary of Ibsen: 'Let nobody again go back to
the old ballad material of Shakespeare, to murders,
and ghosts, for what interests us on the stage is mod-
ern experience and the discussion of our interests;'
and in another part of the article Ibsen was blamed
because he had written of suicides and in other ways
made use of 'the morbid terror of death.' Dramatic
literature has for along 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

27

their absorption in the life of the moment, their de-
light in obvious originality & in obvious logic, their
shrinking from the ancient and insoluble. The wri-
ter I have quoted is much more than a journalist, but
he has lived their hurried life, and instinctively turns
to them for judgement. He is not thinking of the
great poets and painters, of the cloud of witnesses,
who are there that we may become, through our un-
derstanding of their minds, spectators of the ages,
but of this age. Drama is a means of expression, not
a special subject matter, and the dramatist is as free
to choose, where he has a mind to, as the poet of 'En-
dymion'orasthepainterof Mary Magdalene at the
door of Simon the Pharisee. So far from the discus-
sion of our interests and the immediate circumstance
of our life being the most moving to the imagination,
it is what is old and far off that sti rs us the most deep-
ly. There is a sentence in 'The Marriage of Heaven
and Heir that is meaningless until we understand
Blake's system of correspondences. 'The best wine
is the oldest, the best water the newest.'
Water is experience, immediate sensation, and wine
is emotion, and it is with the intellect, as distinguish-
ed from imagination, that we enlarge the bounds of
experience and separate it from all but itself, from
illusion, from memory, and create among other
things science and good journalism. Emotion,on the

28

other hand, grows intoxicating and delightful after
it has been enriched with the memory of old emo-
tions, with all the uncounted flavours of old exper-
ience, and it is necessarily an antiquity of thought,
emotions that have been deepened by the experien-
ces of many men of genius, that distinguishes the
cultivated man. The subject-matter of his medita-
tion and invention is old, and he will disdain a too
conscious originality in the arts as in those matters of
daily life where, is it not Balzac who says, 'we are all
conservatives?' He is above all things well bred, and
whether he write or paint will not desire a technique
that denies or obtrudes his long and noble descent.
Corneille and Racine did not deny their masters, and
when Dante spoke of his master Virgil there was no
crowing of the cock. In their day imitation was con-
scious or all but conscious, and while originality was
but so much the more a part of the man himself, so
much the deeper because unconscious, no quick an-
alysis could find out their miracle, that needed it may
be generations to reveal; but it is our imitation that
is unconscious and that waits the certainties of time.
The more religious the subject-matter of an art, the
more will it be as it were stationary, and the more
ancient will be the emotion that it arouses and the
circumstances that it calls up before our eyes. When
in the Middle Ages the pilgrim to St. Patrick's Pur-
gatory found himself on the lake side, he found a boat

29

made out of a hollow tree to ferry him to the cave of
vision. In religious painting and poetry, crowns and
swords of an ancient pattern take upon themselves
new meanings, and it is impossible to separate our
idea of what is noble from a mystic stair, where not
men and women, but robes, jewels, incidents, an-
cient utilities float upward slowly over the all but
sleeping mind, putting on emotional and spiritual
life as they ascend until they are swallowed up by
some far glory that they even were too modern and
momentary to endure. All art is dream, and what the
day is done with is dreaming ripe, and what art
moulds religion accepts, and in the end all is in the
wine cup, all is in the drunken phantasy, and the
grapes begin to stammer.

THE TWO KINDS OF ASCETICISM

It is not possible to separate an emotion or a spirit-
ual state from the image that calls it up and gives it
expression. Michael Angelo's Moses, Velasquez'
Philip the Second, the colour purple, a crucifix, call
into life an emotion or state that vanishes with them
because they are its only possible expression, and
that is why no mind is more valuable than the im-
ages it contains. The imaginative writer differs from
the saint in that he identifies himself — to the ne-
glect of his own soul, alas ! — with the soul of the

30

world, and frees himself from all that is imperman-
ent in that soul, an ascetic not of women and wine,
but of the newspapers. That which is permanent in
the soul of the world upon the other hand, the great
passions that trouble all and have but a brief recur-
ring life of flower and seed in any man, is the renun-
ciation of the saint who seeks not an eternal art, but
his own eternity. The artist stands between the saint
and the world of impermanent things, and just in so
far as his mind dwells on what is impermanent in his
sense, on all that 'modern experience and the discus-
sion of our interests,' that is to say on what never re-
curs, as desire and hope, terror and weariness, spring
and autumn recur in varying rhythms, will his mind
become critical, as distinguished from creative, and
his emotions wither. He will think less of what he
sees and more of his own attitude towards it, and will
express this attitude by an essentially critical select-
ion and emphasis. I am not quite sure of my memory
but I think that Mr. Ricketts has said in his book on
the Prado that he feels the critic in Velasquez for the
first time in painting, and we all feel the critic in
Whistler and Degas, in Browning, even in Mr.
Swinburne, in the finest art of all ages but the great-
est. The end for art is the ecastsy awakened by the
presence before an ever changing mind of what is
permanent in the world, or by the arousing of that

31

mind itself into the very delicate and fastidious
mood habitual with it when it is seeking those per-
manent & recurring things. There is a little of both
ecstasies at all times, but at this time we have a small
measure of the creative impulse itself, of the divine
vision, a great one of 'the lost traveller's dream un-
der the hill,' perhaps because all the old simple
things have been painted or written, and they will
only have meaning for us again when a new race or a
new civilisation has made us look upon all with new
eyesight.

IN THE SERPENT'S MOUTH
There is an old saying that God is a circle whose cen-
tre is everywhere. If that is true, the saint goes to the
centre, the poet and artist to the ring where every-
thing comes round again. The poet must not seek for
what is still and fixed, for that has no life for him;
and if he did his style would become cold and mon o t-
onous, and his sense of beauty faint and sickly, as are
both style and beauty to my imagination in the prose
and poetry of Newman, but be content to find his
pleasure in all that is for ever passing away that it
may come again, in the beauty of woman, in the fra-
gile flowers of spring, in momentary heroic passion,
in whatever is most fleeting, most impassioned, as it
were, for its own perfection, most eager to return in

3«

its glory. Yet perhaps he must endure the imperma-
nent a little, for these things return, but not wholly,
for no two faces are alike, and, it may be, had we
more learned eyes,no two flowers. Is it that all things
are made by the struggle of the individual and the
world, of the unchanging and the returning, and
that the saint and the poet are over all, and that the
poet has made his home in the Serpent's mouth ?

THE BLACK AND THE WHITE ARROWS

Instinct creates the recurring and the beautiful, all
the winding of the serpent ; but reason, the most ug-
ly man, as Blake called it, is a drawer of the straight
line, the maker of the arbitrary and the imperman-
ent, for no recurring spring will ever bring again
yesterday's clock. Sanctity has its straight line also,
darting from the centre, and with these arrows the
many-coloured serpent, theme of all our poetry, is
maimed and hunted. He that finds the white arrow
shall have wisdom older than the Serpent, but what
of the black arrow. How much knowledge, how
heavy a quiver of the crow-feathered ebony rods can
the soul endure?

HIS MISTRESS'S EYEBROWS

The preoccupation of our Art and Literature with
knowledge, with the surface of life, with the arbit-

33 f

rary, with mechanism, has arisen out of the root. A
careful, but not necessarily very subtle man could
foretell the history of any religion if he knew its first
principle, and that it would live long enough to ful-
fil itself. The mind can never do the same thing twice
over,and having exhausted simple beauty and mean-
ing, it passes to the strange and hidden, and at last
must find its delight, having outrun its harmonies in
the emphatic and discordant. When I was a boy at
the art school I watched an older student late return-
ed from Paris, with a wonder that had no understan-
ding in it. He was very amorous, and every new love
was the occasion of a new picture, and every new
picture was uglier than its forerunner. He was ex-
cited about his mistress's eyebrows, as was fitting,
but the interest of beauty had been exhausted by the
logical energies of Art, which destroys where it has
rummaged, and can but discover, whether it will or
no. We cannot discover our subject-matter by delib-
erate intellect, for when a subject-matter ceases to
move us we must go elsewhere, and when it moves
us, even though it be 'that old ballad material of
Shakespeare' or even 'the morbid terror of death,*
we can laugh at reason. We must not ask is the world
interested in this or that, for nothing is in question
but our own interest, and we can understand no oth-
er. Our place in the Hierarchy is settled for us by our

34

choice of a subject-matter, and all good criticism is
hieratic, delighting in setting things above one an-
other. Epic and Drama above Lyric and so on, and
not merely side by side. But it is our instinct and not
our intellect that chooses. We can deliberately re-
fashion our characters, but not our painting or our
poetry. If our characters also were not unconscious-
ly refashioned so completely by the unfolding of the
logical energies of Art, that even simple things have
in the end a new aspect in our eyes, the Arts would
not be among those things that return for ever. The
ballads that Bishop Percy gathered returned in the
Ancient Mariner, and the delight in the world of
old Greek sculptors sprang into a more delicate love-
liness in that archaistic head of the young athlete
down the long corridor to your left hand as you go
into the British Museum. Civilisation too, will not
that also destroy where it has loved, until it shall
bring the simple and natural things again and a new
Argo with all the gilding on her bows sail out to find
another fleece?

THE TRESSES OF THE HAIR
Hafiz cried to his beloved, 'I made a bargain with
that brown hair before the beginning of time, and
it shall not be broken through unending time,' and
it may be that Mistress Natureknows that we have

35

lived many times, and that whatsoever changes and
winds into itself belongs to us. She covers her eyes
away from us, but she lets us play with the tresses of
her hair.

A TOWER ON THE APENNINE
The other day I was walking towards Urbino where
I was to spend the night, having crossed the Apen-
nines from San Sepolcro, and had come to a level
place on the mountain top near the journey's end.
My friends were in a carriage somewhere behind,
on a road which was still ascending in great loops,
and I was alone amid a visionary fantastic impossible
scenery. It was sunset and the stormy clouds hung
upon mountain after mountain, and far off on one
great summit a cloud darker than the rest glimmered
with lightning. Away to the south a mediaeval tow-
er, with no building near nor any sign of life, rose
upon its solitary summit into the clouds. I saw sud-
denly in the mind's eye an old man, erect and a little
gaunt, standing in the door of the tower, while ab-
out him broke a windy light. He was the poet who
had at last, because he had done so much for the
word'ssake, come tosharein the dignity of thesaint.
He had hidden nothing of himself but he had taken
care of 'that dignity .... the perfection of form . . .
this lofty and severe quality . . . this virtue.' And

36

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 no t a hair's
breadth more nor less than six feet high. He has in
his ears well instructed voices and seeming solid
sights are before his eyes, and not as we say of many
a one, speaking in metaphor, but as this were Delphi
or Eleusis, and the substance and the voice come to
him among his memories which are of women's
faces; for was it Columbanus or another that wrote
'There is one among the birds that is perfect, and one
perfect among the fish.'

THE THINKING OF THE BODY

Those learned men who are a terror to children and
an ignominious sight in lovers' eyes, all those butts
of a traditional humour where there is something
of the wisdom of peasants, are mathematicians, the-
ologians, lawyers, men of science of various kinds.
They have followed some abstract reverie, which
stirs the brain only and needs that only, and have
therefore stood before the looking-glass without
pleasure and never known those thoughts that shape

37

the lines of the body for beauty or animation, and
wake a desire for praise or for display.
There are two pictures of Venice side by side in the
house where I am writing this, a Canaletto that has
little but careful drawing and a not very emotional
pleasure in clean bright air, and a Franz Francken,
where the blue water, that in the other stirs one so
little, can make one long to plunge into the green
depth where a cloud shadow falls. Neither painting
could move us at all, if our thought did not rush out
to the edges of our flesh, and it is so with all good
art, whether the Victory of Samothrace which re-
minds the soles of our feet of swiftness, or the Odys-
sey that would send us out under the salt wind, or
the young horsemen on the Parthenon, that seem
happier than our boyhood ever was, and in our boy-
hood's way . Art bids us touch and taste and hear and
see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls
fnathematic form, from every abstract thing, from
all that is of the brain only, from all that is not a
fountain jetting from the entire hopes, memories,
and sensations of the body. Its morality is person-
al, knows little of any general law, has no blame for
Little Musgrave, no care for Lord Barnard's house,
seems lighter than a breath and yet is hard and hea-
vy, for if a man is not ready to face toil and risk, and
in all gaiety of heart, his body will grow unshapely

38

and his heart lack the wild will that stirs desire. It
approved before all men those that talked or wrest-
led or tilted under the walls of Urbino, or sat in the
wide window seats discussing all things, with love
ever in their thought, when the wise Duchess order-
ed all, and the Lady Emilia gave the theme.

RELIGIOUS BELIEF NECESSARY
TO SYMBOLIC ART

All art is sensuous, but when a man puts only his con-
templative nature, and his more vague desires into
his art, the sensuous images through which it speaks
become broken, fleeting, uncertain,or are chosen for
their distance from general experience, and all grows
unsubstantial & fantastic. When imagination moves
in a dim world like the country of sleep in Love's
Nocturne and 'Siren there winds her dizzy hair and
sings' we go to it for delight indeed but in our weari-
ness. If we are to sojourn there that world must grow
consistent with itself, emotion must be related to
emotion by a system of ordered images, as in the Di-
vine Comedy. It must grow to be symbolic, that is,
for the soul can only achieve a distinct separated life
where many related objects at once distinguish and
arouse its energies in their fullness. All visionaries
have entered into such a world in trances, and all
ideal art has trance for warranty. Shelley seemed to

39

Matthew Arnold to beat his ineffectual wings in the
void, and I only made my pleasure in him contented
pleasure by massing in my imagination his recur-
ring images of towers and rivers, and caves with
fountains in them, and that one star of his, till his
world had grown solid underfoot and consistent
enough for the soul's habitation.
But even then I lacked something to compensate my
imagination for geographical and historical reality,
for the testimony of our ordinary senses, and found
myself wishing for and trying to imagine, as I had
also when reading Keats' Endymion, a crowd of be-
lievers who could put into all those strange sights
the strength of their belief and the rare testimony of
their visions. A little crowd had been sufficient, and
I would have had Shelley a sectary that his revelation
might have found the only sufficient evidence of re-
ligion, miracle. All symbolic art should arise out of a
real belief, and that it cannot do so in this age proves
that this age is a road and not a resting place for the
imaginative arts. I can only understand others by
myself, and I am certain that there are many who
are not moved as they desire to be by that solitary
light burning in the tower of Prince Athanais, be-
cause it has not entered into men's prayers nor light-
ed any through the sacred dark of religious contem-
plation.

40

Lyrical poems even when they but speak of emo-
tions common to all need, if not a religious belief
like the spiritual arts, a life that has leisure for itself,
and a society that is quickly stirred that our emotion
may be strengthened by the emotion of others. All
circumstance that makes emotion at once dignified
and visible, increases the poet's power, and I think
that is why I have always longed for some stringed
instrument, and a listening audience not drawn out
of the hurried streets but from a life where it would
be natural to murmur over again the singer's
thought. When I heard Ivette Guilbert the other
day, who has the lyre or as good, I was not content,
for she sang among people whose life had nothing it
could share with an exquisite art that should rise out
of life as the blade out of the spearshaft, a song out of
the mood, the fountain from its pool, all art out of the
body, laughter from a happy company. I longed to
make all things over again, that she might sing in
some great hall, where there was no one that did not
love life and speak of it continually.

THE HOLY PLACES

When all art was struck out of personality, whether
as in our daily business or in the adventure of relig-
ion, there was little separation between holy and

41 S

common things, and just as the arts themselves pas-
sed quickly from passion to divine contemplation,
from the conversation of peasants to that of princes,
the one song remembering the drunken miller and
but half forgetting Cambynskan bold; so did a man
feel himself near sacred presences vs^hen he turned
his plough from the slope of Cruachmaa or of Olym-
pus. The occupations and the places knov^n to Ho-
mer or to Hesiod, those pure first artists, might, as it
were, if but the fashioners hands had loosened, have
changed before the poem's end to symbols and van-
ished, w^inged and unwreary, into the unchanging
v^orlds v^here religion only can discover life as well
as peace. A man of that unbroken day could have all
the subtlety of Shelley, & yet use no image unknown
among the common people, and speak no thought
that was not a deduction from the common thought.
Unless the discovery of legendary knowledge and
the returning belief in miracle, or what we must
needs call so, can bring once more a new belief in the
sanctity of common ploughland, and new wonders
that reward no difficult ecclesiastical routine but the
common, wayward, spirited man, we may never see
again a Shelley and a Dickens in the one body, but
be broken to the end. We have grown jealous of the
body, and we dress it in dull unshapely clothes, that
we may cherish aspiration alone. Moliere being but

42

the master of common sense lived ever in the com-
mon dayhght, but Shakespeare could not, & Shake-
speare seems to bring us to the very market-place,
when we remember Shelley's dizzy and Landor's
calm disdain of usual daily things. And at last we
have Villiers de L'Isle Adam crying in the ecstasy
of a supreme culture, of a supreme refusal, 'as for liv-
ing, our servants will do that for us.' One of the
means of loftiness, of marmorean stillness has been
the choice of strange and far away places, for the
scenery of art, but this choice has grown bitter to
me, and there are moments when I cannot believe in
the reality of imaginations that are not inset with
the minute life of long familiar things and symbols
and places. I have come to think of even Shake-
speare's journeys to Rome or to Verona as the out-
flowing of an unrest, a dissatisfaction with natural
interests, an unstable equilibrium of the whole Eur-
opean mind that would not have come had Constan-
tinople wall been built of better stone. I am orthodox
and pray for a resurrection of the body, and am cer-
tain that a man should find his Holy Land where he
first crept upon the floor, and that familiar woods
and rivers should fade into symbol with so gradual a
change that he never discover, no not even in ecstasy
itself, that he is beyond space, and that time alone
keeps him from Primum Mobile, the Supernal
Eden, and the White Rose over all.

43

Here ends Discoveries; written by Wil-
liam Butler Yeats. Printed, upon paper
made in Ireland, by Elizabeth C. Yeats,
Esther Ryan and Beatrice Cassidy, and
published by Elizabeth C. Yeats, at the
Dun Emer Press, in the house of Evelyn
Gleeson at Dundrum,in the County of
Dublin, Ireland. Finished on the twelfth
day of September, in the year 1 907.

9^mo^

d)S

i

4t

REMOVf UHER
in 3M)n3)l *3A1SBI

"«