New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1903-11-21
think, be found to have as distinct a quality as
that Of Villon or OF Heine" Here is the poem;

think, be found to have distinct quality as
that Of Villon or OF Hene." Here is the poem;
There are three fine devils eating my heart
They left me, my grief! without a thing;
And an empty pocket, my ruin and my woe
Rarefooted bare legged, without any covering:
And nv body miserable ugly thing.
Love left ne like coal upon the moor,
Worse than the cough worse than the fever itself
Worse than any curse ct all under the SUM-
Is the devil that is called Love by the people
l would not take. or give, or ask for kiss!
There must be some explanation of the curl
ously distorted perspective In which Lady Greg
ory and with her, a great many devoted stu
dents of Irish literature see it's characteristic
figures and we think il Is unconsciously sup
piled by Mr.. Yeats in his ideas of Good and
Evil" our thoughts and emotions are often
but spray" he says, flung up from hidden tides
that follow a moon no eye can see" This is
true enough, and it is very well expressed, but
all through his collection Of essays Mr. Yeats
gives US the impression that the evanescent
spray and not the mighty tide is, for him, the
finest thing in letters. He talks Of certain mod
ern writer's as struggling against that pictu-
rescue and decIamatory way of writing, against
that externally which time of scientific and
political thought has brought into literature"
He wants nothing concrete. He is all for the
symbol and the world well lost, and declares
that he cannot get 1t out OF his mind that this
age Of criticism is about TO pass. and an age Of
IMAGINATION Of emotion, Of mood, of revelation
about to come in its place" But We must quote
the rest Of his passage on this point intact:
Certainly belief in a eupersensual world is at
hand again, and when the notion that we are
''phantoms OF the earth and water has gone
down the wind. we will trust our own being and
all IL desires to invent, and when the external
world is more the standard Of reality we Will
learn again that the great passions are angels
OF God and that to embody them 'uncurbed in
their eternal glory" even for their labor Tor
the ending of mans peace and prosperity, is
more than to comment however wisely. upon
the tendencies Of our time, or to express the
socialistc, or humanitarian, or other forces or
our time or even Ito sum up" our time, as the
phrase is; for Art is a revelation, and not crit
icism and the life OF the artist is in the old
saving THE wind bloweth where IL lsteth, and
thou nearest the sound thereof. but canst not
tell whence It coneth and whittier ii goeth; so
is every one that is born Of the spirit"
The closing sentence in this wordy deliver
ance suggests that Mr.. Yeats's heart is in the
right place but we cannot resist the suspicion
that his protest against this age of criticism"
is really a protest against the dominance Of the
r-cwer Of consecutive thought. Again and again
in this book. when we think that he is going to
tell us something worth hearing about popular
poetry, magic. or the writings Of William
Norris. and Shelley. and William Blake, he
drifts into a queer mist of metaphysical musing,
and makes US feel that, for him, nothing tan
gible could by any miracle be made merely
beautiful. But he cannot divorce the inner from
the outer life, the soul from the body, and the
great flaw in all his criticism resides in his as
sumption that our modern civilized life is all
wrong, and can produce beauty until those
who live it learn a complete detachment from its
conditions. The poet Of his ideal we would take
TO be a creature having naught to do with his
time. a kind Of disembodied spirit. moving
wraithlike in the inane. Now. the vague, the
amorphous IS just what we find in, for example
"Cuchulain OF Muirthemre," and it is because
they have an instructive preference for the
vague and the anonymous that Mr.. Yeats and
Lady Gregory and all their followers SO dote
upon Irish literature.
There are times when these qualities carry a
certain wistful and melancholy charm with
them. There are poems in Mr.. Yeats's other
book, IN the Seven Woods" which are touched
by haunting mystery. But this atmosphere of
the Cets-their most precious possession-is not
enough TO make masterpiece, and ii is IN mis-
taking it for something great and potential that
the Irish movement has courted failure.
Those who lead it have preferred the shadow to
the substance They find in touching senti-
ment, picturesquely expressed, more than any
thing which the constructive genius. bringing
reasoning powers as well as inspiration to his
task, could hope TO achieve. They announce an
idea, and then, with wandering attention, drift
into contemplation OF another, and, with child
like simplicity, produce writings IN prose and in
verse that begin and end nowhere. In short, the
explanation OF that distorted perspective to
which We have referred seems TO to lie in
irnpulsive feeling and loose thinking. These
Celts talk wonderfully at large and around and
about, but when you ask them for a perfect
poem they give you a handful Of pretty lines;
when you ask them for bread they give you a