The sun., 1903-12-27

woodsl" So much for the later work of
William Butler Yeats!
Oh this New England boiled dinner
style of criticism! Why cant criticism
be imaginative, as well as observantP
New England boiled dinner is excellent
fare at times; who has not succumbed to
the temptings of corned beef and cabbage?
Yet it is not the ambrosia OF the gods.
Poets cannot live upon its sensible stun
1t seems to me that at times all artistic
America feeds on nothing but New England
boiled dinners, Its flavor has penetrated.
with its healthy effluvia, our entire lit
erature. beginning with the time OF those
historic humbugs, the Pilgrim Fathers to
the newest volume of verse, immaculate
in its prosody, sexless in it's emotion. from
The pen Of some genteel impassioned college
professor. Even the much revered New
England school Of poetry is really corned
beef and cabbage. AS Swinburne put it,
the short, exquisite music,
subtle and simple and sombre and sweet,
of Edgar Poe. All the rest that is not OF
mocking birds is of corn crakes, varied,
but at best for an instant, by some scant
winded twitter of linnet or of wren He
was thinking of the New England school,
that school which crowded the entire
cosmos Of lofty thinking into ts odes and
psalms, but forgot one little ingredient
real poetry.
Now, the current critical comment which
lis ready with the phrases 1decadent,'
immoral" is of the New England boiled
dinner sort-only the dinner is cold!
Yeats says: "Our daily life has fallen
among prosaic things and ignoble things,
but our dreams remember the enchanted
valleys" He remembers his dreams,
tenuous as they sometimes are, and many
of them troubled. AS he has grown, the
contours Of his work are tirmer, the con-
tent weishtier. A comparison of "The
Land of the Hearts Desire" and son
Baile's Strand" will prove this. One is
the stuff out of which visions are woven;
the other, despite its slight resemblances
to Maeterlnck notably at the close, when
the fool tells the blind man Of the drama
is OF heroic mould. The mad king thrust
ing and slashing at the tumbling breakers,
after he has discovered that he has slain
his own son. is a figure of antique and
tragic stature We hear more of the mu-
sician, the folk-lorist, the brooding Rosi-
crucian-is Yeats not his own Michael
Robartes?-n the earlier verse; but in this
image of hero and king quite as insane
as Xerxes and Canute, we begin to feel the
dramatic potentiality of the young Irish
poet. In "The Hour-Gass" there is a note
Of faith hitherto absent
The artistic creeds Of Mr.. Yeats are
clearly formulated in his collection Of
prose essays, ideas Of Good and Evil
very Nietzsche-lke title. In this book
Blake and Nietzsche are happily compared.
We learn what he thinks of the theatre,
Of the Celtic elements in literature, of -the
emotion of multitude" and there is a record
of the good work of Mr.. Benson and his
company at Stratford -on-Avon One idea,
among a thousand others, is worthy of quo
tation. In speaking Of Matthew Arnold and
his phrase "the natural magic of the Celt,"
Mr. Yeats writes: Il do not think he under
stood that our natural magic is but the
ancient worship of nature and that troubled
ecstasy before her, that certainty of all
beautiful places being haunted, which
is brought into mems minds" The thirst
for the unfounded emotion and a wild
are troublesome things in
tnlS WOTlu, SlBHS tbt poel.
He believes that France has everything
of high literature except the emotion Of
multitude, the quality we find in the Greek
plays with their chorus The Shake
spearian drama gets the emotion Of multi
tude out of the sub-plot. which copies
the main plot. Ibsen and Maeterlinck
get it by creating 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 emotion,
emotion to emotion Mr.. Yeats finds
French dramatic poetry too rhetorical
rhetoric is the will trying to do the work
Of the imagination and the French play
too logical, too we'll ordered.
Alas! 1t is dramatic technique that
counts in the construction of a play. All
the imagination in the world, all the poetic
dreams, are naught if the architectural
quantity be left out. l find Mr.. Yeats's
plays full of the impalpable charm-he al
most makes the invisible visible!-we catch
in Chopin, Chopin in one of his evanescent
secret moods But place these shapes Of
beauty out from the dusk Of dreams, place
them before "the fire of the footlights,
and they waver and evaporate. Mr..
Yeats and his associates must carve their
creations from harder material than lovely
words, lovely dreams. To be beautiful
upon the stage, with a spiritual beauty is
terrible, brave undertaking. Maeterlinck
dared to be so; so did Ibsen-though his is
the beauty of characterization. Mr., Yeats
would mould from the mist his humans.
In tho acted drama this is impossible.
Shakespeare himself did not accomplish
the feat, because, being in all matters
realst, practical man of the theatre, he
did not attempt it. His dreams are always
realized.
In the end, the puolic-alas it is the
TRUTHS the final court of appeal. NJ.
Huysmanss 4ten superior persons of the
universe" are a myth, a delightful, in
effectual myth. The Irish Independents
must go out into the world and test their
blades in the heat of its forge This they
have done in Dublin and London, with but
Indifferent results, fear, The claustral
attitude is not for dramatists, though it
Is effective as a pose poetic Rumors,
disquieting ones, have reached us of the
sceptic spirit displayed by the elect. This
is saddening To be "citizen OF eternity"
one must not mock at ones mission! What
Mr. Yeats says of Mr.. Benson and his
Shakespearian company is in the main
true, though ! witnessed last summer a