RESPONSIBILITIES. *

I have not at the moment access to Mr. Yeats' volumes
so I may seem to misrepresent them in recalling an early impression.
But looking back, I seem to recall broken lights across water
touched with moon-light, wisps of cloud, sea-coasts always
haunted and forests with the imminent sense of the presence
somewhere behind the dunes or the great beeches of some mani-
festation of some sea or forest spirit - always beautiful spirits
but of a misty transient beauty as if they had been conjured to
life from some region inhabited by half-spirits, half-humans
- a moon-country, it seemed, to be apprehended it is true only
by a poet, and a fair country if you happen to be one of the
moon-born, but a place where reflections upon water, mist rising
from water, mist merging into clouds and fairies with irridescent
wings and "little people" seem all wrought of the same vague,
semi-transparent substance. It is a place where Undine might
have wandered, where Pellius and Mellisande might have talked
with the swan-sister of Grima's fairy-tale, and the beast who was
a prince might well have mourned among the stray, wilful ghosts
that haunt the "windy precipice" of Tara.

In this new volume, it is true, we have still green reeds
and beneath the water fish speaking - as innocent and as remote
from life as the heiratic rows of fishes in some early Italian

*Responsibilities and other Poems* by William Butler Yeats,
Macmillan and Co. St. Martin's Street. London.

scene of the flood or of creation - still kings and queens
move within "pale green light" as it filters through forest trees
upon the ground-ivy's blue, but beyond all these, mingled among
them in the bock, but cut apart from them as clear altar-fire,
blazing to a single point in the misty forest of these moon-
dreams, there are poems of another mood of a greater, sterner
intensity.

In re-reading such poems as "Friends", "No Troy to Burn",
"When Helen Lived", - there are a dozen or more others of equal
beauty - as we cry out with the poet

"That men desert
For some trivial affair
Or noisy, insolent sport,
Beauty that we have won
From bitterest hours"

it seems that Mr. Yeats' responsibility, although he tells us
that he has "come close on forty-nine" has only just begun.

For we, "the young" of this generation are sick of self-
analysis, self-torture, self-appreciation. The ill-starred
nineties which, historically speaking, claims Mr. Yeats, was
a band of robust virtue compared with our own decade. For what
are we, *les jeunes* in ourselves? First, a memory of the few,
the really great, who have gone irreparably from us, next the hope
that some may return, not broken by the bitterness of their
experience but taut and aflame for the creation of beauty,
and then, crouched as in a third line of battered trenches,
are the few of us who are left, hanging on against all odds, in
the wavering belief that we are the link, the torch-bearers.
And upon us, almost with us, is the enemy.

For us the enemy is not the great mass of inert life, the so-called middle-classes and general heaviness of the world against which the artist has always a legitimate quarrel, but for us, there has been a more treacherous force at work, a more subtle adversary. The chief enemy is not the middle-classes and the Philistine upon whom the young men of the nineties whetted their wit. It is the great overwhelming mechanical daemon, the devil of machinery, of which we can hardly repeat too often, the war is the hideous offspring.

This daemon took for its own perhaps the most robust talent of our generation. It crept upon us and claimed its own. From our band, at best a few against many millions; it has taken the most stalwart. The nineties was at one for all its internal, personal friction - the nineties at least held one common law as sacred, at least never condescended to the worship of material efficiency. The nineties, thank God, were not efficient, neither did they fall down before some Juggernaut of planes and angles. The nineties were ill-starred, but they had at least a star.

And what has all this thrade to do with Mr. Yeats and his
responsibility? A great deal. For Mr. Yeats and we few, the
remnant who still persist in the worship of beauty other than
the grace of the steel-girder are in somewhat the same position.
For Mr. Yeats may be said to represent the last line of trenches
for his own defeated generation as we for the present generation.
Though our generation, inasmuch as its cubes and angles seem a

4

sort of incantation, a symbol for the forces that brought on
this world calamity, seems harmfully worthy to compare with the
nineties in its hopeless stand against the evil of ugliness.
Our generation did not stand against the enemy - it was the enemy.

But I will not say that it is the enemy. For it has merged
into this struggle with its own much lauded guns and aeroplanes,
it has become a part of the struggle and is no longer a self-willed
agent. The guns they praised, the beauty of the machines they
loved, are no more as a god set apart for worship but a devil
over whom neither they now we have any more control. The black-
magic of triangles and broken arcs has conquered
and we who are helpless before this force of destruction can
only hope for some more powerful magic, some subtle and more
potent daemon to set it right.

They called it to life but we are none the less responsible,
we are all a part of this world calamity, we can not stand apart
with Pharasaic gesture. But we can do this. We can wait,
endure, confess the past was all a mistake, turn to the future and
hope for the generation to follow.

And this is why I feel that Mr Yeats' responsibility has
only just begun. For it seems in moments of despair that we
have no past, no future. But Mr. Yeats has both. Can we not
spiritually join our forces, and chastened with old calamities,
re redefine and reconstruct boundaries and barriers, and reinvoke
some golden city, sterner than the dream-cities, and wrought
more firm to endure than those riveted of steel and break with iron
girders,

H.D.