2. His Poetry

sometimes walking with an artificial stride in memory of Hamlet, and stopping at shop windows to look at my tie, gathered into a loose sailor-knot, and to regret that it could not be always blown out by the wind like Byron's tie in the picture.

Even the fits of abstraction of the young poet must often have been regarded as self-conscious attitudinizing by his neighbours—especially by the "stupid stout woman" who lived in the villa next to his father's, and who, as he amusingly relates, mocked him aloud:—

I had a study with a window opposite some window of hers, and one night when I was writing, I heard voices full of derision, and saw the stout woman and her family standing at the window. I have a way of acting what I write, and speaking it aloud without knowing what I am doing. Perhaps I was on my hands and knees, or looking down over the back of a chair, talking into what I imagined an abyss.

It will be seen that Mr. Yeats is as interesting a figure to himself as he is to Mr. George Moore. If he were not he would not have troubled to write his autobiography. And that would have been a loss to literature.Reveries Over Childhood and Youthis a book of extraordinary freshness. It does not, like Wordsworth'sPrelude, set forth the full account of the great influences that shaped a poet's career. But it is a delightful study of early influences, and depicts a dedicated poet in his boyhood as this has never been done before in English prose.

Of all the influences that have shaped his career, none was more important than the Irish atmosphere to which he early returned from London. He is distinctively an Irish poet, though we find him in his youth writing plays and poems in imitation of Shelley and Spenser. Irish places have done more to influence his imagination even than the masterpieces of English literature.

It was apparently while he was living in Sligo, not far from the lakes, that he conceived the longing which he afterwards expressed with such originality of charm inThe Lake Isle of Innisfree:—

My father had read to me some passage out ofWalden, and I planned to live some day in a cottage on a little island called Innisfree....I thought that, having conquered bodily desire and the inclination of my mind towards women and love, I should live as Thoreau lived, seeking wisdom.

My father had read to me some passage out ofWalden, and I planned to live some day in a cottage on a little island called Innisfree....

I thought that, having conquered bodily desire and the inclination of my mind towards women and love, I should live as Thoreau lived, seeking wisdom.

It is the little world of Sligo, indeed, that provides all the spacious and twilit landscape in Mr. Yeats's verse. Here were those fishermen and raths and mountains of the Sidhe and desolate lakes which repeat themselves as images through his work. Here, too, he had relatives eccentric and adventurous to excite his imagination, such as the

Merchant skipper that leaped overboardAfter a ragged hat in Biscay Bay.

Mr. Yeats's relations seem in his autobiography as real as the characters in fiction. Each of them is magnificently stamped with romance or comedy—the hypochondriac uncle, for example, who—

passed from winter to summer through a series of woollens that had always to be weighed; for in April or May, or whatever the date was, he had to be sure that he carried the exact number of ounces he had carried upon that date since boyhood.

For a time Mr. Yeats thought of following his father's example and becoming a painter. It was while attending an art school in Dublin that he first met A.E. He gives us a curious description of A.E. as he was then:—

He did not paint the model as we tried to, for some other image rose always before his eyes (a St. John in the Desert I remember), and already he spoke to us of his visions. His conversation, so lucid and vehement to-day, was all but incomprehensible, though now and again some phrase could be understood and repeated. One day he announced that he was leaving the Art Schools because his will was weak, and the arts or any other emotional pursuit would but weaken it further.

Mr. Yeats's memoirs, however, are not confined to prose. His volume of verse calledResponsibilitiesis almost equally autobiographical. Much of it is a record of quarrels with contemporaries—quarrels about Synge, about Hugh Lane and his pictures, about all sorts of things. He aims barbed epigrams at his adversaries. Very Yeatsian is an epigram "to a poet, who would have me praise certain bad poets, imitators of his and mine":—

You say, as I have often given tongueIn praise of what another's said or sung,'Twere politic to do the like by these;But have you known a dog to praise his fleas?

In an earlier version, the last line was still more arrogant:—

But where's the wild dog that has praised his fleas?

There is a noble arrogance again in the lines calledA Coat:—

I made my song a coat,Covered with embroideries,Out of old mythologies,From heel to throat.But the fools caught it,Wore it in the world's eye,As though they'd wrought it.Song, let them take it,For there's more enterpriseIn walking naked.

Mr. Yeats still gives some of his songs the old embroidered vesture. But his work is now more frankly personal than it used to be—at once harsher and simpler. One would not giveResponsibilitiesto a reader who knew nothing of Mr. Yeats's previous work. There is too much raging at the world in it, too little of the perfected beauty ofThe Wind Among the Reeds. One finds ugly words like "wive" and "thigh" inopportunely used, and the retort to Mr. George Moore'sHail and Farewell, though legitimately offensive, is obscure in statement. Still, there is enough beauty in the book to make it precious to the lover of literature. An Elizabethan might have made the music of the first verse ofA Woman Homer Sung.

And what splendour of praise and censure Mr. Yeats gives us inThe Second Troy:—

Why should I blame her, that she filled my daysWith misery, or that she would of lateHave taught to ignorant men most violent ways.Or hurled the little streets against the great,Had they but courage equal to desire?What could have made her peaceful with a mindThat nobleness made simple as a fire,With beauty like a tightened bow, a kindThat is not natural in an age like this,Being high and solitary, and most stern?Why, what could she have done, being what she is?Was there another Troy for her to burn?

It is curious to note in how much of his verse Mr. Yeats repeats his protest against the political passion of Ireland which once meant so much to him.All Things can Tempt Meexpresses this artistic mood of revolt with its fierce beginning:—

All things can tempt me from this craft of verse;One time it was a woman's face, or worse,The seeming needs of my fool-driven land.

Some of the most excellent pages ofReveries, however, are those which recall certain famous figures in Irish Nationalism like John O'Leary and J.F. Taylor, the orator whose temper so stood in his way.

Mr. Yeats recalls a wonderful speech Taylor once made at a meeting in Dublin at which a Lord Chancellor had apparently referred in a belittling way to Irish nationality and the Irish language:

Taylor began hesitating and stopping for words, but after speaking very badly for a little, straightened his figure and spoke as out of a dream: "I am carried to another age, a nobler court, and another Lord Chancellor is speaking. I am at the court of the first Pharaoh." Thereupon he put into the mouth of that Egyptian all his audience had listened to, but now it was spoken to the children of Israel. "If you have any spirituality as you boast, why not use our great empire to spread it through the world, why still cling to that beggarly nationality of yours? what are its history and its works weighed with those of Egypt?" Then his voice changed and sank: "I see a man at the edge of the crowd; he is standing listening there, but he will not obey"; and then, with his voice rising to a cry, "had he obeyed he would never have come down the mountain carrying in his arms the tables of the Law in the language of the outlaw."

That Mr. Yeats, in spite of his secession from politics, loves the old passionate Ireland, is clear from the poem calledSeptember, 1913, with its refrain:—

Romantic Ireland's dead and goneAnd with O'Leary in the grave.

And to this Mr. Yeats has since added a significant note:—

"Romantic Ireland's dead and gone" sounds old-fashionednow. It seemed true in 1913, but I did not foresee 1916. Thelate Dublin Rebellion, whatever one may say of its wisdom, willlong be remembered for its heroism. "They weighed so lightlywhat they gave," and gave, too, in some cases without hope ofsuccess.

Mr. Yeats is by nature a poet of the heroic world—a hater of the burgess and of the till. He boasts inResponsibilitiesof ancestors who left him

bloodThat has not passed through any huckster's loin.

There may be a good deal of vanity and gesticulation in all this, but it is the vanity and gesticulation of a man of genius. As we cannot have the genius of Mr. Yeats without the gestures, we may as well take the gestures in good part.

It is distinctly surprising to find Mr. Yeats compared to Milton and Jeremy Taylor, and Mr. Forrest Reid, who makes the comparison, does not ask us to apply it at all points. There is a remoteness about Milton's genius, however, an austere and rarefied beauty, to which Mr. Reid discovers certain likenesses in the work of Mr. Yeats. Mr. Yeats is certainly a little remote. He is so remote that some people regard his work with mixed feelings, as a rather uncanny thing. The reason may partly be that Mr. Yeats is not a singer in the ordinary tradition of poets. His poems are incantations rather than songs. They seem to call for an order of priests and priestesses to chant them. There are one or two of his early poems, likeDown by the Sally Garden, that might conceivably be sung at a fair or even at a ballad-concert. But, as Mr. Yeats has grown older, he has become more and more determinedly the magician in his robes. Even in his prose he does not lay aside his robes; it is written in the tones of the sanctuary: it is prose for worshippers. To such an extent is this so that many who do not realize that Mr. Yeats is a great artist cannot read much of his prose without convincing themselves that he is a great humbug. It is easy to understand how readers accustomed to the rationalism of the end of the century refused to take seriously a poet who wrote "spooky" explanations of his poems, such as Mr. Yeats wrote in his notes toThe Wind Among the Reeds, the most entirely good of his books. Consider, for example, the note which he wrote on that charming if somewhat perplexing poem,The Jester. "I dreamed," writes Mr. Yeats:—

I dreamed this story exactly as I have written it, and dreamed another long dream after it, trying to make out its meaning, and whether I was to write it in prose or verse. The first dream was more a vision than a dream, for it was beautiful and coherent, and gave me a sense of illumination and exaltation that one gets from visions, while the second dream was confused and meaningless. The poem has always meant a great deal to me, though, as is the way with symbolic poems, it has not always meant quite the same thing. Blake would have said, "The authors are in eternity"; and I am quite sure they can only be questioned in dreams.

Why, even those of us who count Mr. Yeats one of the immortals while he is still alive, are inclined to shy at a claim at once so solemn and so irrational as this. It reads almost like a confession of witchcraft.

Luckily, Mr. Yeats's commerce with dreams and fairies and other spirits has not all been of this evidential and disputable kind. His confessions do not convince us of his magical experiences, but his poems do. Here we have the true narrative of fairyland, the initiation into other-worldly beauty. Here we have the magician crying out against

All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,

and attempting to invoke a new—or an old—and more beautiful world into being.

The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told,

he cries, and over against the unshapely earth he sets up the "happy townland" of which he sings in one of his later and most lovely poems. It would not be easy to write a prose paraphrase ofThe Happy Townland, but who is there who can permanently resist the spell of this poem, especially of the first verse and its refrain?—

There's many a strong farmerWhose heart would break in two,If he could see the townlandThat we are riding to;Boughs have their fruit and blossomAt all times of the year;Rivers are running overWith red beer and brown beer.An old man plays the bagpipesIn a golden and silver wood;Queens, their eyes blue like the ice,Are dancing in a crowd.The little fox he murmured,"O what of the world's bane?"The sun was laughing sweetly,The moon plucked at my rein;But the little red fox murmured,"O, do not pluck at his rein,He is riding to the townlandThat is the world's bane."

The little fox he murmured,"O what of the world's bane?"The sun was laughing sweetly,The moon plucked at my rein;But the little red fox murmured,"O, do not pluck at his rein,He is riding to the townlandThat is the world's bane."

You may interpret the little red fox and the sun and the moon as you please, but is it not all as beautiful as the ringing of bells?

But Mr. Yeats, in his desire for this other world of colour and music, is no scorner of the everyday earth. His early poems especially, as Mr. Reid points out, give evidence of a wondering observation of Nature almost Wordsworthian. InThe Stolen Child, which tells of a human child that is enticed away by the fairies, the magic of the earth the child is leaving is the means by which Mr. Yeats suggests to us the magic of the world into which it is going, as in the last verse of the poem:—

Away with us he's going,The solemn eyed:He'll hear no more the lowingOf the calves on the warm hillside;Or the kettle on the hobSing peace into his breast,Or see the brown mice bobRound and round the oatmeal-chest.For he comes, the human child,To the waters and the wildWith a faery, hand in hand,From a world more full of weeping than he can understand.

There is no painting here, no adjective-work. But no painting or adjectives could better suggest all that the world and the loss of the world mean to an imaginative child than this brief collection of simple things. To readThe Stolen Childis to realize both that Mr. Yeats brought a new and delicate music into literature and that his genius had its birth in a sense of the beauty of common things. Even when in his early poems the adjectives seem to be chosen with the too delicate care of an artist, as when he notes how—

in autumnal solitudesArise the leopard-coloured trees,

his observation of the world about him is but proved the more conclusively. The trees in autumnareleopard-coloured, though a poet cannot say so without becoming dangerously ornamental.

What I have written so far, however, might convey the impression that in Mr. Yeats's poetry we have a child's rather than a man's vision at work. One might even gather that he was a passionless singer with his head in the moon. This is exactly the misunderstanding which has led many people to think of him as a minor poet.

The truth is Mr. Yeats is too original and, as it were, secret a poet to capture all at once the imagination that has already fixed the outlines of its kingdom amid the masterpieces of literature. His is a genius outside the landmarks. There is no prototype in Shelley or Keats, any more than there is in Shakespeare, for such a poem as that which was at first calledBreasal the Fisherman, but is now called simplyThe Fisherman:

Although you hide in the ebb and flowOf the pale tide when the moon has set,The people of coming days will knowAbout the casting out of my net,And how you have leaped times out of mindOver the little silver cords.And think that you were hard and unkind,And blame you with many bitter words.

There, in music as simple as a fable of Aesop, Mr. Yeats has figured the pride of genius and the passion of defeated love in words that are beautiful in themselves, but trebly beautiful in their significances.

Beautifully new, again, is the poem beginning, "I wander by the edge," which expresses the desolation of love as it is expressed in few modern poems:

I wander by the edgeOf this desolate lakeWhere wind cries in the sedge:Until the axle breakThat keeps the stars in their roundAnd hands hurl in the deepThe banners of East and WestAnd the girdle of light is unbound,Your breast will not lie by the breastOf your beloved in sleep.

Rhythms like these did not exist in the English language until Mr. Yeats invented them, and their very novelty concealed for a time the passion that is immortal in them. It is by now a threadbare saying of Wordsworth that every great artist has himself to create the taste by which he is enjoyed, but it is worth quoting once more because it is especially relevant to a discussion of the genius of Mr. Yeats. What previous artist, for example, had created the taste which would be prepared to respond imaginatively to such a revelation of a lover's triumph in the nonpareil beauty of his mistress as we have in the poem that ends:—

I cried in my dream, "O women bid the young men layTheir heads on your knees, and drown their eyes with your hair,Or remembering hers they will find no other face fairTill all the valleys of the world have been withered away,"

One may doubt at times whether Mr. Yeats does not too consciously show himself an artist of the aesthetic school in some of his epithets, such as "cloud-pale" and "dream-dimmed." His too frequent repetition of similar epithets makes woman stand out of his poems at times like a decoration, as in the pictures of Rossetti and Burne-Jones, rather than in the vehement beauty of life. It is as if the passion in his verse were again and again entangled in the devices of art. If we take his love-poems as a whole, however, the passion in them is at once vehement and beautiful.

The world has not yet sufficiently realized how deep is the passion that has given shape to Mr. Yeats's verse.The Wind Among the Reedsis a book of love-poetry quite unlike all other books of love-poetry. It utters the same moods of triumph in the beloved's beauty, of despair, of desire, of boastfulness of the poet's immortality, that we find in the love-poetry of other ages. But here are new images, almost a new language. Sometimes we have an image which fills the mind like the image in some little Chinese lyric, as in the poemHe Reproves the Curlew:—

O, curlew, cry no more in the air,Or only to the waters of the West;Because your crying brings to my mindPassion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hairThat was shaken out over my breast:There is enough evil in the crying of the wind.

This passion of loss, this sense of the beloved as of something secret and far and scarcely to be attained, like the Holy Grail, is the dominant theme of the poems, even inThe Song of Wandering Aengus, that poem of almost playful beauty, which tells of the "little silver trout" that became

—a glimmering girlWith apple blossom in her hair,Who called me by my name and ranAnd faded through the brightening air.

What a sense of long pursuit, of a life's quest, we get in the exquisite last verse—a verse which must be among the best-known of Mr. Yeats's writings afterThe Lake Isle of InnisfreeandHad I the Heaven's Embroidered Cloths:—

Though I am old with wanderingThrough hollow lands and hilly lands,I will find out where she has gone,And kiss her lips and take her hands;And walk among long dappled grass,And pluck till time and times are doneThe silver apples of the moon,The golden apples of the sun.

This is the magic of fairyland again. It seems a little distant from human passions. It is a wonderful example, however, of Mr. Yeats's genius for transforming passion into elfin dreams. The emotion is at once deeper and nearer human experience in the later poem calledThe Folly of Being Comforted. I have known readers who professed to find this poem obscure. To me it seems a miracle of phrasing and portraiture. I know no better example of the nobleness of Mr. Yeats's verse and his incomparable music.

It is the custom when praising a Russian writer to do so at the expense of all other Russian writers. It is as though most of us were monotheists in our devotion to authors, and could not endure to see any respect paid to the rivals of the god of the moment. And so one year Tolstoy is laid prone as Dagon, and, another year, Turgenev. And, no doubt, the day will come when Dostoevsky will fall from his huge eminence.

Perhaps the luckiest of all the Russian authors in this respect is Tchehov. He is so obviously not a god. He does not deliver messages to us from the mountain-top like Tolstoy, or reveal himself beautifully in sunset and star like Turgenev, or announce himself now in the hurricane and now in the thunderstorm like Dostoevsky. He is a man and a medical doctor. He pays professional visits. We may define his genius more exactly by saying that his is a general practice. There has, I think, never been so wonderful an examination of common people in literature as in the short stories of Tchehov. His world is thronged with the average man and the average woman. Other writers have also put ordinary people into books. They have written plays longer thanHamlet, and novels longer thanDon Quixote, about ordinary people. They have piled such a heap of details on the ordinary man's back as almost to squash him out of existence. In the result the reader as well as the ordinary man has a sense of oppression. He begins to long for the restoration of the big subject to literature.

Henry James complained of the littleness of the subject inMadame Bovary.He regarded it as one of the miracles of art that so great a book should have been written about so small a woman.Tom Jones, on the other hand, is a portrait of a common man of the size of which few people complain. But thenTom Jonesis a comedy, and we enjoy the continual relief of laughter. It is the tragic realists for whom the common man is a theme so perilous in its temptations to dullness. At the same time he is a theme that they were bound to treat. He is himself, indeed, the sole source and subject of tragic realism in literature. Were it not for the oppression of his futile and philoprogenitive presence, imaginative writers would be poets and romancers.

The problem of the novelist of contemporary life for whom ordinary people are more intensely real than the few magnificent personalities is how to portray ordinary people in such a way that they will become better company than they are in life. Tchehov, I think, solves the problem better than any of the other novelists. He sees, for one thing, that no man is uninteresting when he is seen as a person stumbling towards some goal, just as no man is uninteresting when his hat is blown off and he has to scuttle after it down the street. There is bound to be a break in the meanest life.

Tchehov will seek out the key situation in the life of a cabman or a charwoman, and make them glow for a brief moment in the tender light of his sympathy. He does not run sympathy as a "stunt" like so many popular novelists. He sympathizes merely in the sense that he understands in his heart as well as in his brain. He has the most unbiassed attitude, I think, of any author in the world. Mr. Edward Garnett, in his introduction to Mrs. Garnett's translation of Tchehov's tales, speaks admirably of his "profundity of acceptation." There is no writer who is less inclined to use italics in his record of human life. Perhaps Mr. Garnett goes too far when he says that Tchehov "stands close to all his characters, watching them quietly and registering their circumstances and feelings with such finality that to pass judgment on them appears supererogatory." Tchehov's judgment is at times clear enough—as clear as if it followed a summing-up from the bench. He portrays his characters instead of labelling them; but the portrait itself is the judgment. His humour makes him tolerant, but, though he describes moral and material ugliness with tolerance, he never leaves us in any doubt as to their being ugly. His attitude to a large part of life might be described as one of good-natured disgust.

In one of the newly-translated stories,Ariadne, he shows us a woman from the point of view of a disgusted lover. It is a sensitive man's picture of a woman who was even more greedy than beautiful. "This thirst for personal success ... makes people cold, and Ariadne was cold—to me, to nature, and to music." Tchehov extends towards her so little charity that he makes her run away to Italy with a bourgeois who had "a neck like goose-skin and a big Adam's apple," and who, as he talked, "breathed hard, breathing straight in my face and smelling of boiled beef." As the more sensitive lover who supplanted the bourgeois looks back, her incessant gluttony is more vivid in his thoughts than her charm:

She would sleep every day till two or three o'clock; she had her coffee and lunch in bed. At dinner she would eat soup, lobster, fish, meat, asparagus, game, and after she had gone to bed I used to bring up something, for instance, roast beef, and she would eat it with a melancholy, careworn expression, and if she waked in the night she would eat apples or oranges.

The story, it is only fair to say, is given in the words of a lover dissatisfied with lust, and the judgment may therefore be regarded as the lover's rather than as Tchehov's. Tchehov sets down the judgment, however, in a mood of acute perceptiveness of everything that is jarring and vulgar in sexual vanity. Ariadne's desire to please is never permitted to please us as, say, Beatrix Esmond's is. Her will to fascinate does not fascinate when it is refracted in Tchehov's critical mind:

She waked up every morning with the one thought of "pleasing." It was the aim and object of her life. If I told her that in such a house, in such a street, there lived a man who was not attracted by her, it would have caused her real suffering. She wanted every day to enchant, to captivate, to drive men crazy. The fact that I was in her power and reduced to a complete nonentity before her charms gave her the same sort of satisfaction that victors used to get in tournaments.... She had an extraordinary opinion of her own charms; she imagined that if somewhere, in some great assembly, men could have seen how beautifully she was made and the colour of her skin, she would have vanquished all Italy, the whole world. Her talk of her figure, of her skin, offended me, and observing this, she would, when she was angry, say all sorts of vulgar things taunting me.

A few strokes of cruelty are added to the portrait:

Even at a good-humoured moment, she could always insult a servant or kill an insect without a pang; she liked bull-fights, liked to read about murders, and was angry when prisoners were acquitted.

As one readsAriadne, one feels that those who say the artist is not a judge are in error. What he must avoid becoming is a prosecuting—perhaps even a defending—counsel.

Egoism seems to be the quality which offends Tchehov most. He is no more in love with it when it masquerades as virtue than when it parades as vice.An Artist's Story—a beautiful sad story, which might almost have been written by Turgenev—contains a fine critical portrait of a woman absorbed in the egoism of good works. She is always looking after the poor, serving on committees, full of enthusiasm for nursing and education. She lacks only that charity of the heart which loves human beings, not because they are poor, but because they are human beings. She is by nature a "boss." She "bosses" her mother and her younger sister, and when the artist falls in love with the latter, the stronger will of the woman of high principles immediately separates lovers so frivolous that they had never sat on a committee in their lives. When, the evening after the artist confesses his love, he waits for the girl to come to him in the garden of her house, he waits in vain. He goes into the house to look for her, but does not find her. Then through one of the doors he overhears the voice of the lady of the good works:

"'God ... sent ... a crow,'" she said in a loud, emphatic voice, probably dictating—"'God sent a crow a piece of cheese.... A crow ... A piece of cheese ... Who's there?" she called suddenly, hearing my steps."It's I.""Ah! Excuse me, I cannot come out to open this minute; I'm giving Dasha her lesson.""Is Ekaterina Pavlovna in the garden?""No, she went away with my sister this morning to our aunt in the province of Penza. And in the winter they will probably go abroad," she added after a pause. "'God sent ... the crow ... a piece ... of cheese....' Have you written it?"I went into the hall and stared vacantly at the pond and the village, and the sound reached me of "A piece of cheese ... God sent the crow a piece of cheese."And I went back by the way I had come here for the first time—first from the yard into the garden past the house, then into the avenue of lime-trees.... At this point I was overtaken by a small boy who gave me a note."I told my sister everything and she insisted on my parting from you," I read. "I could not wound her by disobeying. God will give you happiness. Forgive me. If only you knew how bitterly my mother and I are crying!"

"It's I."

"Ah! Excuse me, I cannot come out to open this minute; I'm giving Dasha her lesson."

"Is Ekaterina Pavlovna in the garden?"

"No, she went away with my sister this morning to our aunt in the province of Penza. And in the winter they will probably go abroad," she added after a pause. "'God sent ... the crow ... a piece ... of cheese....' Have you written it?"

I went into the hall and stared vacantly at the pond and the village, and the sound reached me of "A piece of cheese ... God sent the crow a piece of cheese."

And I went back by the way I had come here for the first time—first from the yard into the garden past the house, then into the avenue of lime-trees.... At this point I was overtaken by a small boy who gave me a note.

"I told my sister everything and she insisted on my parting from you," I read. "I could not wound her by disobeying. God will give you happiness. Forgive me. If only you knew how bitterly my mother and I are crying!"

The people who cannot wound others—those are the people whose sharp pangs we feel in our breasts as we read the stories of Tchehov. The people who wound—it is they whom he paints (or, rather, as Mr. Garnett suggests, etches) with such felicitous and untiring irony. But, though he often makes his people beautiful in their sorrow, he more often than not sets their sad figures against a common and ugly background. InAnyuta, the medical student and his mistress live in a room disgusting in its squalor:

Crumpled bed-clothes, pillows thrown about, boots, clothes, a big filthy slop—pail filled with soap-suds in which cigarette-ends were swimming, and the litter on the floor—all seemed as though purposely jumbled together in one confusion....

And, if the surroundings are no more beautiful than those in which a great part of the human race lives, neither are the people more beautiful than ordinary people. InThe Trousseau, the poor thin girl who spends her life making a trousseau for a marriage that will never take place becomes ridiculous as she flushes at the entrance of a stranger into her mother's house:

Her long nose, which was slightly pitted with small-pox, turned red first, and then the flush passed up to her eyes and her forehead.

I do not know if a blush of this sort is possible, but the thought of it is distressing.

The woman inThe Darling, who marries more than once and simply cannot live without some one to love and to be an echo to, is "not half bad" to look at. But she is ludicrous even when most unselfish and adoring—especially when she rubs with eau-de-Cologne her little, thin, yellow-faced, coughing husband with "the curls combed forward on his forehead," and wraps him in her warm shawls to an accompaniment of endearments. "'You're such a sweet pet!' she used to say with perfect sincerity, stroking his hair. 'You're such a pretty dear!'"

Thus sympathy and disgust live in a curious harmony in Tchehov's stories. And, as he seldom allows disgust entirely to drive out sympathy in himself, he seldom allows it to do so in his readers either. His world may be full of unswept rooms and unwashed men and women, but the presiding genius in it is the genius of gentleness and love and laughter. It is a dark world, but Tchehov brings light into it. There is no other author who gives so little offence as he shows us offensive things and people. He is a writer who desires above all things to see what men and women are really like—to extenuate nothing and to set down naught in malice. As a result, he is a pessimist, but a pessimist who is black without being bitter. I know no writer who leaves one with the same vision of men and women as lost sheep.

We are now apparently to have a complete edition of the tales of Tchehov in English from Mrs. Garnett. It will deserve a place, both for the author's and the translator's sake, beside her Turgenev and Dostoevsky. In lifelikeness and graciousness her work as a translator always reaches a high level. Her latest volumes confirm one in the opinion that Tchehov is, for his variety, abundance, tenderness and knowledge of the heart of the "rapacious and unclean animal" called man, the greatest short-story writer who has yet appeared on the planet.

It was Mr. Bernard Shaw who, in commenting on the rowdy reception of the Irish players in some American theatres, spoke of Lady Gregory as "the greatest living Irishwoman." She is certainly a remarkable enough writer to put a generous critic a little off his balance. Equal mistress in comedy and tragedy, essayist, gatherer of the humours of folk-lore, imaginative translator of heroic literature, venturesome translator of Molière, she has contributed a greater variety of grotesque and beautiful things to Anglo-Irish literature than any of her contemporaries.

She owes her chief fame, perhaps, to the way in which, along with Mr. G.A. Birmingham and the authors ofSome Experiences of an Irish R.M., she has kept alive the tradition of Ireland as a country in which Laughter has frequent occasion to hold both his sides. She surpasses the others in the quality of her comedy, however. Not that she is more comic, but that she is more comprehensively true to life. Mr. Birmingham has given us farce with a salt of reality; Miss Somerville and Miss Ross, practical jokers of literature, turned to reality as upper-class patrons of the comic; but Lady Gregory has gone to reality as to a cave of treasure. She is one of the discoverers of Ireland. Her genius, like Synge's, opened its eyes one day and saw spread below it the immense sea of Irish common speech, with its colour, its laughter, and its music. It is a sort of second birth which many Irish men and women of the last generation or so have experienced. The beggar on the road, the piper at the door, the old people in the workhouse, are henceforth accepted as a sort of aristocracy in exile.

Lady Gregory obviously sought out their company as the heirs to a great inheritance—an inheritance of imaginative and humorous speech. Not that she plundered them of their fantastic tropes so greedily as Synge did. She studied rather their common turn of phrase, its heights and its hollows, its exquisite illogic, its passionate underflow of poetry. Has she not herself told us how she could not get on with the character of Bartley Fallon inSpreading the News, till one day she met a melancholy man by the sea at Duras, who, after describing the crosses he endured at home, said: "But I'm thinking if I went to America, it's long ago I'd be dead. And it's a great expense for a poor man to be buried in America." Out of sentences like these—sentences seized upon with the genius of the note-book—she has made much of what is most delightful in her plays. Her sentences are steeped and dyed in life, even when her situations are as mad as hatters.

Some one has said that every great writer invents a new language. Lady Gregory, whom it would be unfair to praise as a great writer, has at least qualified as one by inventing a new language out of her knowledge of Irish peasant speech. This, perhaps, is her chief literary peril. Having discovered the beautiful dialect of the Kiltartan peasantry, she was not content to leave it a peasant dialect—as we find it in her best dramatic work,Seven Short Plays; but she set about transforming it into a tongue into which all literature and emotion might apparently be translated. Thus, she gave us Molière in Kiltartan—a ridiculously successful piece of work—and she gave us Finn and Cuchullain in modified Kiltartan, and this, too, was successful, sometimes very beautifully so. Here, however, she had masterpieces to begin with. InIrish Folk-History Plays, on the other hand, we find her embarking, not upon translation, but upon original heroic drama, in the Kiltartan language. The result is unreality as unreal as if Meredith had made a farm-labourer talk like Diana of the Crossways. Take, for instance, the first of the plays,Grania, which is founded on the story of the pursuit of Diarmuid and Grania by Finn MacCool, to whom Grania had been betrothed. When Finn, disguised as a blind beggar, visits the lovers in their tent, Grania, who does not recognize him, bids him give Finn this message from her:—

Give heed to what I say now. If you have one eye is blind, let it be turned to the place where we are, and that he might ask news of. And if you have one seeing eye, cast it upon me, and tell Finn you saw a woman no way sad or afraid, but as airy and high-minded as a mountain-filly would be challenging the winds of March!

I flatly refuse to take the high-minded mountain filly seriously as a tragic heroine, and I confess I hold Finn equally suspect, disguised as a beggar though he is, when he speaks of himself to Grania as a hard man—"as hard as a barren step-mother's slap, or a highway gander's gob." After all, in heroic literature, we must have the illusion of the heroic. If we can get the peasant statement of the heroic, that is excellent; its sincerity brings its illusion. But a mere imitation of the peasant statement of the heroic, such as Lady Gregory seems to aim at giving us in these sentences, is as pinchbeck and unreal as Macpherson'sOssian. It reaches a grotesque absurdity when at the close of Act II Finn comes back to the door of the tent and, in order to stir up Diarmuid's jealousy, says:—

It is what they were saying a while ago, the King of Foreign is grunting and sighing, grunting and sighing, around and about the big red sally tree beside the stream!

To write like that is to use not a style but a jargon.

If you want a standard of reality with which to compare these passages of Abbey-Theatre rhetoric, you have only to turn to Lady Gregory's own notes at the end ofIrish Folk-History Plays, where she records a number of peasant utterances on Irish history. Here, and not in the plays—in the tragic plays, at any rate—is the real "folk-history" of her book to be found. One may take, as an example, the note onKincora, where some one tells of the Battle of Clontarf, in which Brian Boru defeated the Danes:—

Clontarf was on the head of a game of chess. The generals of the Danes were beaten at it, and they were vexed. It was Broder, that the Brodericks are descended from, that put a dagger through Brian's heart, and he attending to his prayers. What the Danes left in Ireland were hens and weasels. And when the cock crows in the morning the country people will always say: "It is for Denmark they are crowing; crowing they are to be back in Denmark."

Lady Gregory reveals more of life—leaping, imaginative life—in that little note than in all the three acts about Grania and the three about Brian. It is because the characters in the comic plays in the book are nearer the peasantry in stature and in outlook that she is so much more successful with them than with the heroes and heroines of the tragedies. She describes the former plays as "tragic comedies"; but in the first and best of them,The Canavans, it is difficult to see where the tragedy comes in.The Canavansis really a farce of the days of Elizabeth. The principal character is a cowardly miller, who ensues nothing but his own safety in the war of loyalties and disloyalties which is destroying Ireland. He is equally afraid of the wrath of the neighbours on the one hand, and the wrath of the Government on the other. Consequently, he is at his wits' end when his brother Antony comes seeking shelter in his house, after deserting from the English Army. When the soldiers come looking for Antony, so helpless with terror is the miller, that he flies into hiding among his sacks, and his brother has to impersonate him in the interview with the officer who carries out the search. The situation obviously lends itself to comic elaborations, and Lady Gregory misses none of her opportunities. She flies off from every semblance of reality at a tangent, however, in a later scene, where Antony disguises himself as Queen Elizabeth, supposed to have come on a secret visit of inspection to Ireland, and takes in both his brother and the officer (who is himself a Canavan, anglicized under the name of Headley). This is a sheer invention of the theatre; it turns the play from living speech into machinery.The Canavans, however, has enough of present-day reality to make us forgive its occasional stage-Elizabethanism. On the whole, its humours gain nothing from their historical setting.

The White Cockade, the second of the tragic comedies, is a play about the flight of King James II after the Battle of the Boyne, and it, too, is lifeless and mechanical in so far as it is historical. King James himself is a good comic figure of a conventional sort, as he is discovered hiding in the barrel; but Sarsfield, who is meant to be heroic, is all joints and sawdust; and the mad Jacobite lady is a puppet who might have been invented by any writer of plays. "When myWhite Cockadewas produced," Lady Gregory tells us, "I was pleased to hear that Mr. Synge had said my method had made the writing of historical drama again possible." But surely, granted the possession of the dramatic gift, the historical imagination is the only thing that makes the writing of historical drama possible. Lady Gregory does not seem to me to possess the historical imagination. Not that I believe in archaeology in the theatre; but, apart from her peasant characters, she cannot give us the illusion of reality about the figures in these historical plays. If we want the illusion of reality, we shall have to turn fromThe White Cockadeto the impossible scene outside the post-office and the butcher's shop inHyacinth Halvey. As for the third of the tragic comedies,The Deliverer, it is a most interesting curiosity. In it we have an allegory of the fate of Parnell in a setting of the Egypt of the time of Moses. Moses himself—or the King's nursling, as he is called—is Parnell; and he and the other characters talk Kiltartan as to the manner born.The Delivereris grotesque and, in its way, impressive, though the conclusion, in which the King's nursling is thrown to the King's cats by his rebellious followers, invites parody. The second volume of theIrish Folk-History Plays, even if it reveals only Lady Gregory's talent rather than her genius, is full of odd and entertaining things, and the notes at the end of both of these volumes, short though they are, do give us the franchise of a wonderful world of folk-history.

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