Awhile they live again those passionate moments, not knowing they are dead, and then they know and may awake or half awake to be our visitors. How is their dream changed as Time drops away and their sensesmultiply? Does their stature alter, do their eyes grow more brilliant? Certainly the dreams stay the longer, the greater their passion when alive: Helen may still open her chamber door to Paris or watch him from the wall, and know she is dreaming but because nights and days are poignant or the stars unreckonably bright. Surely of the passionate dead we can but cry in words Ben Jonson meant for none but Shakespeare: “So rammed” are they “with life they can but grow in life with being.”
The inflowing from their mirrored life, who themselves receive it from the Condition of Fire, falls upon the Winding Path called the Path of the Serpent, and that inflowing coming alike to men and to animals is called natural. There is another inflowwhich is not natural but intellectual, and is from the fire; and it descends through souls who pass for a lengthy or a brief period out of the mirror life, as we in sleep out of the bodily life, and though it may fall upon a sleeping serpent, it falls principally upon straight paths. In so far as a man is like all other men, the inflow finds him upon the winding path, and in so far as he is a saint or sage, upon the straight path.
Daemon and man are opposites; man passes from heterogeneous objects to the simplicity of fire, and the Daemon is drawn to objects because through them he obtains power, the extremity of choice. For only in men’s minds can he meet even those in the Condition of Fire who are not of his own kin. He, by using his mediatorial shades,brings man again and again to the place of choice, heightening temptation that the choice may be as final as possible, imposing his own lucidity upon events, leading his victim to whatever among works not impossible is the most difficult. He suffers with man as some firm-souled man suffers with the woman he but loves the better because she is extravagant and fickle. His descending power is neither the winding nor the straight line but zigzag, illuminating the passive and active properties, the tree’s two sorts of fruit: it is the sudden lightning, for all his acts of power are instantaneous. We perceive in a pulsation of the artery, and after slowly decline.
Each Daemon is drawn to whatever man or, if its nature is more general, to whatever nation it most differs from, and it shapes intoits own image the antithetical dream of man or nation. The Jews had already shown by the precious metals, by the ostentatious wealth of Solomon’s temple, the passion that has made them the money-lenders of the modern world. If they had not been rapacious, lustful, narrow and persecuting beyond the people of their time, the incarnation had been impossible; but it was an intellectual impulse from the Condition of Fire that shaped their antithetical self into that of the classic world. So always it is an impulse from some Daemon that gives to our vague, unsatisfied desire, beauty, a meaning and a form all can accept.
Only in rapid and subtle thought, or in faint accents heard in the quiet of the mind, can the thought of the spirit come to us but little changed; for a mind, that graspsobjects simultaneously according to the degree of its liberation, does not think the same thought with the mind that sees objects one after another. The purpose of most religious teaching, of the insistence upon the submission to God’s will above all, is to make certain of the passivity of the vehicle where it is most pure and most tenuous. When we are passive where the vehicle is coarse, we become mediumistic, and the spirits who mould themselves in that coarse vehicle can only rarely and with great difficulty speak their own thoughts and keep their own memory. They are subject to a kind of drunkenness and are stupefied, old writers said, as if with honey, and readily mistake our memory for their own, and believe themselves whom and what we please. We bewilder and overmaster them, for once they are among the perceptions of successiveobjects, our reason, being but an instrument created and sharpened by those objects, is stronger than their intellect, and they can but repeat with brief glimpses from another state, our knowledge and our words.
A friend once dreamed that she saw many dragons climbing upon the steep side of a cliff and continually falling. Henry More thought that those who, after centuries of life, failed to find the rhythmic body and to pass into the Condition of Fire, were born again. Edmund Spenser, who was among More’s masters, affirmed that nativity without giving it a cause:
“After that they againe retourned beene,They in that garden planted be agayne,And grow afresh, as they had never seeneFleshy corruption, nor mortal payne.Some thousand years so doen they ther remayne,And then of him are clad with other hew,Or sent into the chaungeful world agayne,Till thither they retourn where first they grew:So like a wheele, around they roam from old to new.”
The dead who speak to us deny metempsychosis, perhaps because they but know a little better what they knew alive; while the dead in Asia, for perhaps no better reason, affirm it, and so we are left amid plausibilities and uncertainties.
But certainly it is always to the Condition of Fire, where emotion is not brought to any sudden stop, where there is neither wall nor gate, that we would rise; and the maskplucked from the oak-tree is but my imagination of rhythmic body. We may pray to that last condition by any name so long as we do not pray to it as a thing or a thought, and most prayers call it man or woman or child:
“For mercy has a human heart,Pity a human face.”
Within ourselves Reason and Will, who are the man and woman, hold out towards a hidden altar, a laughing or crying child.
When I remember that Shelley calls our minds “mirrors of the fire for which all thirst,” I cannot but ask the question all have asked, “What or who has cracked the mirror?” I begin to study the only self that I can know, myself, and to wind the thread upon the perne again.
At certain moments, always unforeseen, I become happy, most commonly when at hazard I have opened some book of verse. Sometimes it is my own verse when, instead of discovering new technical flaws, I read with all the excitement of the first writing. Perhaps I am sitting in some crowded restaurant, the open book beside me, or closed, my excitement having over-brimmed the page. I look at the strangers near as if I had known them all my life, and it seems strange that I cannot speak to them: everything fills me with affection, I have no longer any fears or any needs; I do not even remember that this happy mood must come to an end. It seems as if the vehicle had suddenly grown pure and far extended and so luminous that one half imagines that the images fromAnima Mundi, embodied there and drunk with that sweetness, would, as some country drunkardwho had thrown a wisp into his own thatch, burn up time.
It may be an hour before the mood passes, but latterly I seem to understand that I enter upon it the moment I cease to hate. I think the common condition of our life is hatred—I know that this is so with me—irritation with public or private events or persons. There is no great matter in forgetfulness of servants, or the delays of tradesmen, but how forgive the ill-breeding of Carlyle, or the rhetoric of Swinburne, or that woman who murmurs over the dinner-table the opinion of her daily paper? And only a week ago last Sunday, I hated the spaniel who disturbed a partridge on her nest, a trout who took my bait and yet broke away unhooked. The books say that our happiness comes from the opposite of hate, but I am not certain, for we may loveunhappily. And plainly, when I have closed a book too stirred to go on reading, and in those brief intense visions of sleep, I have something about me that, though it makes me love, is more like innocence. I am in the place where the daemon is, but I do not think he is with me until I begin to make a new personality, selecting among those images, seeking always to satisfy a hunger grown out of conceit with daily diet; and yet as I write the words, “I select,” I am full of uncertainty, not knowing when I am the finger, when the clay. Once, twenty years ago, I seemed to awake from sleep to find my body rigid, and to hear a strange voice speaking these words through my lips as through lips of stone: “We make an image of him who sleeps, and it is not him who sleeps, and we call it Emmanuel.”
As I go up and down my stair and pass the gilded Moorish wedding-chest where I keep my “barbarous words,” I wonder will I take to them once more, for I am baffled by those voices that still speak as to Odysseus but as the bats; or now that I shall in a little be growing old, to some kind of simple piety like that of an old woman.
May9, 1917.
My Dear “Maurice”—I was often in France before you were born or when you were but a little child. When I went for the first or second time Mallarmé had just written: “All our age is full of the trembling of the veil of the temple.” One met everywhere young men of letters who talked of magic. A distinguished English man of letters asked me to call with him on Stanislas de Gaeta because he did not dare go alone to that mysterious house. I met from time to time with the German poet Doukenday, a grave Swede whom I only discovered after years to have been Strindberg, then looking for the philosopher’s stone in a lodging near the Luxembourg; and one day in the chambers ofStuart Merrill the poet, I spoke with a young Arabic scholar who displayed a large, roughly-made gold ring which had grown to the shape of his finger. Its gold had no hardening alloy, he said, because it was made by his master, a Jewish Rabbi, of alchemical gold. My critical mind—was it friend or enemy?—mocked, and yet I was delighted. Paris was as legendary as Connaught. This new pride, that of the adept, was added to the pride of the artist. Villiers de L’Isle Adam, the haughtiest of men, had but lately died. I had read hisAxelslowly and laboriously as one reads a sacred book—my French was very bad—and had applauded it upon the stage. As I could not follow the spoken words, I was not bored even where Axel and the Commander discussed philosophy for a half-hour instead of beginning their duel. If I felt impatient it was only that they delayedthe coming of the adept Janus, for I hoped to recognise the moment when Axel cries: “I know that lamp, it was burning before Solomon”; or that other when he cries: “As for living, our servants will do that for us.”
The movement of letters had been haughty even before Magic had touched it. Rimbaud had sung: “Am I an old maid that I should fear the embrace of death?” And everywhere in Paris and in London young men boasted of the garret, and claimed to have no need of what the crowd values.
Last summer you, who were at the age I was when first I heard of Mallarmé and of Verlaine, spoke much of the French poets young men and women read to-day. Claudel I already somewhat knew, but you read to me for the first time from Jammes a dialogue between a poet and a bird, that made us cry, and a whole volume of Peguy’sMystère dela Charité de Jeanne d’Arc. Nothing remained the same but the preoccupation with religion, for these poets submitted everything to the Pope, and all, even Claudel, a proud oratorical man, affirmed that they saw the world with the eyes of vine-dressers and charcoal-burners. It was no longer the soul, self-moving and self-teaching—the magical soul—but Mother France and Mother Church.
Have not my thoughts run through a like round, though I have not found my tradition in the Catholic Church, which was not the church of my childhood, but where the tradition is, as I believe, more universal and more ancient?
W. B. Y.
May11, 1917.
Printed in the United States of America.
The following pages contain advertisements of books by the same author or on kindred subjects.ResponsibilitiesByWILLIAM BUTLER YEATSCloth, $1.25“William Butler Yeats is by far the biggest poetic personality living among us at present. He is great both as a lyric and dramatist poet.”—John Masefield.“This poetry has the rhythm that is incantation and sorcery, that is not of the senses nor of the spirit, but of a mingling which is exaltation.”—Chicago Evening Post.Under the title of “Responsibilities” William Butler Yeats brings together some of his recent poems. Notable still for his freshness of thought, his keen originality, and his purely poetic conception of thoughts and facts, Mr. Yeats sometimes makes us wonder how he has so long been able to hold his style above the ever rising level of modern poetry. No man stands so apart in his own perfection as does this Irish poet and playwright, in his art of discovering truths remote and beautiful. Serious, vital thoughts he veils, as the genuine poet, in a cloak of fine rhythmical expression.It is, after all, as a poet that the majority of people like to think of Mr. Yeats, and this splendid collection, the first in a number of years, is assured of a warm welcome.BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATSThe Cutting of an Agate12mo, $1.50“Mr. Yeats is probably the most important as well as the most widely known of the men concerned directly in the so-called Celtic renaissance. More than this, he stands among the few men to be reckoned with in modern poetry.”—New York Herald.The Green Helmet and Other PoemsDecorated cloth, 12mo, $1.25The initial piece in this volume is a deliciously conceived heroic farce, quaint in humor and sprightly in action. It tells of the difficulty in which two simple Irish folk find themselves when they enter into an agreement with an apparition of the sea, who demands that they knock off his head and who maintains that after they have done that he will knock off theirs. There is a real meaning in the play which it will not take the thoughtful reader long to discover. Besides this there are a number of shorter poems, notably one in which Mr. Yeats answers the critics of “The Playboy of the Western World.”Lyrical and Dramatic PoemsIn Two VolumesVol. I. Lyrical Poems, $2.00 Leather, $2.25Vol. II. Plays (Revised), $2.00 Leather, $2.25The two-volume edition of the Irish poet’s works included everything he has done in verse up to the present time. The first volume contains his lyrics; the second includes all of his five dramas in verse: “The Countess Cathleen,” “The Land of Heart’s Desire,” “The King’s Threshold,” “On Baile’s Strand,” and “The Shadowy Waters.”Reveries Over Childhood and Youth$2.00In this book the celebrated Irish author gives us his reminiscences of his childhood and youth. The memories are written, as is to be expected, in charming prose. They have the appeal invariably attached to the account of a sensitive childhood.The Hour Glass and Other Plays$1.25“The Hour Glass” is one of Mr. Yeats’ noble and effective plays, and with the other plays in the volume, make a small, but none the less representative collection.Stories of Red Hanrahan$1.25These tales belong to the realm of pure lyrical expression. They are mysterious and shadowy, full of infinite subtleties and old wisdom of folklore, and sad with the gray wistful Celtic sadness.“Lovers of Mr. Yeats’s suggestive and delicate writing will find him at his best in this volume.”—Springfield Republican.Ideas of Good and Evil$1.50Essays on art and life, wherein are set forth much of Yeats’ philosophy, his love of beauty, his hope for Ireland and for Irish artistic achievement.The Celtic Twilight$1.50A collection of tales from Irish life and of Irish fancy, retold from peasants’ stories with no additions except an occasional comment.THE WORKS OF RABINDRANATH TAGOREBOLPUR EDITIONHUNGRY STONES AND OTHER STORIES.FRUIT GATHERING.CHITRA: A Play in one act.THE CRESCENT MOON: Child Poems.THE GARDENER: Love Poems.GITANJALI: Religious Poems.THE KING OF THE DARK CHAMBER: A Play.THE SONGS OF KABIR.SADHANA: The Realization of Life.THE POST OFFICE: A Play.Each volume decorated cloth, $1.50; leather, $2.00.This new edition of the works of Rabindranath Tagore will recommend itself to those who desire to possess the various poems and plays of the great Hindu writer in the best possible printings and bindings. Great care has been taken with the physical appearance of the books. In addition to the special design that has been made for the cover, there are special end papers and decorated title pages in each book. Altogether this edition promises to become the standard one of this distinguished poet and seer.THE MACMILLAN COMPANYPublishers64-66 Fifth AvenueNew York
The following pages contain advertisements of books by the same author or on kindred subjects.
Responsibilities
ByWILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Cloth, $1.25
“William Butler Yeats is by far the biggest poetic personality living among us at present. He is great both as a lyric and dramatist poet.”
—John Masefield.
“This poetry has the rhythm that is incantation and sorcery, that is not of the senses nor of the spirit, but of a mingling which is exaltation.”
—Chicago Evening Post.
Under the title of “Responsibilities” William Butler Yeats brings together some of his recent poems. Notable still for his freshness of thought, his keen originality, and his purely poetic conception of thoughts and facts, Mr. Yeats sometimes makes us wonder how he has so long been able to hold his style above the ever rising level of modern poetry. No man stands so apart in his own perfection as does this Irish poet and playwright, in his art of discovering truths remote and beautiful. Serious, vital thoughts he veils, as the genuine poet, in a cloak of fine rhythmical expression.
It is, after all, as a poet that the majority of people like to think of Mr. Yeats, and this splendid collection, the first in a number of years, is assured of a warm welcome.
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The Cutting of an Agate
12mo, $1.50
“Mr. Yeats is probably the most important as well as the most widely known of the men concerned directly in the so-called Celtic renaissance. More than this, he stands among the few men to be reckoned with in modern poetry.”—New York Herald.
The Green Helmet and Other Poems
Decorated cloth, 12mo, $1.25
The initial piece in this volume is a deliciously conceived heroic farce, quaint in humor and sprightly in action. It tells of the difficulty in which two simple Irish folk find themselves when they enter into an agreement with an apparition of the sea, who demands that they knock off his head and who maintains that after they have done that he will knock off theirs. There is a real meaning in the play which it will not take the thoughtful reader long to discover. Besides this there are a number of shorter poems, notably one in which Mr. Yeats answers the critics of “The Playboy of the Western World.”
Lyrical and Dramatic Poems
In Two Volumes
Vol. I. Lyrical Poems, $2.00 Leather, $2.25Vol. II. Plays (Revised), $2.00 Leather, $2.25
The two-volume edition of the Irish poet’s works included everything he has done in verse up to the present time. The first volume contains his lyrics; the second includes all of his five dramas in verse: “The Countess Cathleen,” “The Land of Heart’s Desire,” “The King’s Threshold,” “On Baile’s Strand,” and “The Shadowy Waters.”
Reveries Over Childhood and Youth
$2.00
In this book the celebrated Irish author gives us his reminiscences of his childhood and youth. The memories are written, as is to be expected, in charming prose. They have the appeal invariably attached to the account of a sensitive childhood.
The Hour Glass and Other Plays
$1.25
“The Hour Glass” is one of Mr. Yeats’ noble and effective plays, and with the other plays in the volume, make a small, but none the less representative collection.
Stories of Red Hanrahan
$1.25
These tales belong to the realm of pure lyrical expression. They are mysterious and shadowy, full of infinite subtleties and old wisdom of folklore, and sad with the gray wistful Celtic sadness.
“Lovers of Mr. Yeats’s suggestive and delicate writing will find him at his best in this volume.”—Springfield Republican.
Ideas of Good and Evil
$1.50
Essays on art and life, wherein are set forth much of Yeats’ philosophy, his love of beauty, his hope for Ireland and for Irish artistic achievement.
The Celtic Twilight
$1.50
A collection of tales from Irish life and of Irish fancy, retold from peasants’ stories with no additions except an occasional comment.
THE WORKS OF RABINDRANATH TAGORE
BOLPUR EDITION
HUNGRY STONES AND OTHER STORIES.FRUIT GATHERING.CHITRA: A Play in one act.THE CRESCENT MOON: Child Poems.THE GARDENER: Love Poems.GITANJALI: Religious Poems.THE KING OF THE DARK CHAMBER: A Play.THE SONGS OF KABIR.SADHANA: The Realization of Life.THE POST OFFICE: A Play.
Each volume decorated cloth, $1.50; leather, $2.00.
This new edition of the works of Rabindranath Tagore will recommend itself to those who desire to possess the various poems and plays of the great Hindu writer in the best possible printings and bindings. Great care has been taken with the physical appearance of the books. In addition to the special design that has been made for the cover, there are special end papers and decorated title pages in each book. Altogether this edition promises to become the standard one of this distinguished poet and seer.
THE MACMILLAN COMPANYPublishers64-66 Fifth AvenueNew York
Footnotes:
[1]Translated by Arthur Symons fromSan Juan de la Cruz.
[2]I have no better authority for Caesarea than Landor’s play.