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PASSAGES FROM THE LETTERS OF JOHN BUTLER YEATS: SELECTED BY EZRA POUND.

THE CU ALA PRESS

CHURCHTOWN

DUNDRUM

MCMXVII

PR

PASSAGES FROM THE LETTERS OF JOHN BUTLER YEATS.

Four hundred copies of this book have been printed.

EDITOR'S NOTE

The letters from which the following pages are taken, were written to W. B. Yeats between 1911 and 1916. In making a selection from them my great fear is not that I shall leave out something, for I must leave out a great deal, but that I shall lose the personality of the author; that by snatching at sal- ient thoughts I shall seem to show him as hurried, or even sententious. The making of sages is danger- ous, and even the humane and delightful Confucius has been spoken of in my hearing as a dealer in plat- itude, which he was not. If Mr. Yeats senior is shown in these pages as a preacher, and the vigour of his thought might at times warrant this loathsome su- spicion, the fault is in reality mine, for in the letters themselves there is only the air of leisure. The thought drifts up as easily as a cloud in the heavens, and as clear cut as clouds on bright days. I can only hope that I have not made them polemical and that, since I must perforce choose according to my own lights, I have not made my choice narrow, or made him seem too much like myself, or allied him to my own generation, perhaps more than he himself would have wished. The motto I have set over the book is from an early letter, some words heard in a dream; and if because of the cadence and because of an accidental rhyme, they are not very good prose

nor yet good verse, they are for all that a fine thing to have heard in a dream, having the aimlessness of a dream, or of life, and perhaps its profundity. The omission of 'mentem'in the quotation on page fifty five is, so far as I am concerned, deliberate. Anyone might have quoted the line correctly and any editor might have emended it. As it stands now the latin is, to my mind at least, more a part of the writer's own thought. The unessential word has been worn away, and with such attrition I leave it. Ezra Pound, May 2Oth, 1916.

The Apple-tree has been made free,

A SELECTION OF PASSAGES FROM THE LETTERS OF JOHN BUTLER YEATS.

Damn nervous energy and damn efficiency. They have killed good manners as they have killed conver- sation, for sake of which good manners exist, and they have killed art and literature.

August i ith, 1908.

Desire and not emotion is the substance of art. Emo- tion is of its nature transitory and is rebellious and impatient, bent only on one thing, an expression as disorderly and violent as itself. I fancy that much of what is called post-impressionist painting is of this kind, and certainly what is called the artistic temper- ament prides itself on the number and violence of its emotions. Desire implies constant self-control and a search for what may help it to maintain itself in full , force and effectiveness. A work of art, made as it is lout of desire, is itself a proof that the artist possesses all the qualities of self-examination and self-restraint which in the actual world constitute what is called moral greatness.

In a work of art, as in a great man, there must be something more than what is called force. There must be distinction and a rarity of feeling. In these German commanders there is plenty offeree, there is no distinction.

February 6th, 1915. b

Besides with the man of poetical temperament ex- j^perience is an end in itself. Others go through life, as 1 though they were tourists, with their eyes open for

enjoyment and some kind of profitable speculation.

February 6th, 1915.

The war will last till the money gives out, and poetry and art never cease while life lasts. Here in America they get rid of their sorrow by denying that it exists, in loud asseveration of immense bodily activity, and by bad poetry and a sort of organised sentimental- ity. They don't get drunk like the poor Irish labour- er, too civilized for that. They have other methods just as effective and morally quite innocent; and the result is, for the man who insists on his sorrow, that America with all its joyousness and cult of happiness is a sterile land, and its women, who with us are all clothed with sensitiveness, go forth in a shining pan- oply of incessant movement from sensation to sensa- tion and from ambition to ambition, taking care never to stop long enough in one place for sorrow to overtake them, delightful to look at but poor com- panions in our mortal pilgrimage. 'Come with me to the house of mourning/ 'the wisdom of the world is foolishness/ are true sentences, tho'in the mouths of the godly, absurd. 'Except for one or two I have

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never had a happy day,' said the magnificently for- tunate Goethe. The never dying aches of the probe of pain are in every bosom; only while others resort to some kind of laudanum the poets let these work, finding in them the root of happiness, the only sort which, though it be twin with sorrow, is without a fleck on its purity.

November 1914.

Liberty is an English thought, and there it remains. It is not yet an American, French or German thought ; for though an Englishman has not the idea or theory of liberty common in France and Amer- ica, he has, which they have not, the feeling in his blood and in his bones. An Englishman believes he has a right to do what he likes with himself, which includes his beliefs and whims, and with his proper- ty, and property includes wife and children and serv- ants and oxen and asses and the stranger within his gates.

Other nations follow reason, and their poetry is the lean music of argument and rhetoric. Ideals and noble theories and all the rest, which Americans follow after, are the enemy plucking the unit man, the individual, out of his sublmiej^olitude to place him in this or that fraternity and in the bonds of

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sympathy or antipathy with his fellows. From this noisy kingdom the Englishman, whether boor or scholar, whether poet or not, turns away to follow imagination, which is the voice of essential longing, so that his poetry, if by favour of the gods it be al- lowed to exist in tangible and visible form, is true poetry. We have the cries of the wild beasts and the singing of birds. English poetry is the human cry, it explains nothing, since to explain is to weaken, and that is not its purpose.

A man is most intense when alone. If he seeks company it is to lessen and relax a mood that had become in- tolerable.

Let him keep his courage and remain alone and pre- sently will burst from him the human cry which is poetry, the cry of a spirit, at the selfsame moment tormented and appeased. The Englishman is un- spoiled,he does not keep much company like the effi- cient German or the sprightly Frenchman, at least it was so in his uncorrupted days.

November igth, 1914.

Carlyle was by nature all poet and musician, but his Scotch conscience put a veto on his natural inclina- tions. He married an ugly wife, thereby perhaps scaring away the Muses. It is often so.

December 2 1 st, 1914. 4

A friend of mine, a fine classical scholar, told me that, in his experience, mathematicians could only talk of the price of things; tell them, he said, what you pay for your boots. I once met Dr. Salmon at dinner, and was much flattered by his taking me aside and asking me what I paid for my lodgings, I thought that the great man was interested in me. Professor Dowden, his relation and my friend, unde- ceived me. He said it was only Salmon's way. All his long life Dr. Salmon sought for scientific and practi- cal truth, and has left a distinguished name.

December 23rd, 1914.

I want to bore you a little further on my theories as to poetry. Dream is the excuse of all art and poetry. It is the dream-world against the actual. Every man lives in the first, so far as he is governed by feeling: governed by intellect and practicality he enters the second. Photography, if it attained perfection and could reproduce everything in nature, not merely the forms and the light and shades but all the grada- tions of colour, would produce pictures that would convince no one. No, we should say, that is not the sunrise or the sunset as I have seen them.

January I2th, 1915. 5

Shaw denounced Shakespeare, not finding him suffi- ciently serious and instructive.

February gth, 1915.

A Saint will prove that what he says is true by argu- ment and by evidence, or perhaps very naturally and quite properly (& it is sometimes but not always the poet's way) he will rely on the persuasiveness of truth itself and content himself with the mere revelation.

In my studio in London I always encouraged the models to talk, it amused them and it amused me, and they were always eager for it; and I found that I was interested in the talk, not of those who told me in- teresting things, so much as of those who were by na- tural gift truthful tellers. If in these latter there was any spark of originality, it was surprising how inter- esting became their talk about nothing. Let the man who has not a profound intellect become a lawyer, or a doctor, or a member of Parliament, (and in this latter case he may become Premier of England,) but let him shun poetry. In his sphere, which I admit is not that of science, or political economy, or socio- logy, or medicine, or law, but one all by itself, the poet must seek and find luminous truth, and must \ seek it by the ordinary mental processes employed in all the other spheres.

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The real poet with the real sincerity is a man of prose until he has found the truth he is seeking.

A passion forjtruth is in all children. How they will tease yoiTwith questions, how they will imperil their eyes and their limbs in every kind of experiment! Afterwards in the man it dies away.

Man never has changed and never 'will change^ the same y ester day ^ to-day and for ever. Of course by various ad- justments we provide that he is not so dangerous to himself and others, but the wrath of Achilles is still here, it lights up again and again in one's bosom, though a new prudence restrains its expression.

Wordsworth would not have made the homicidal Achilles lovable.

Aeschylus knew everything that is to be known about punishment, all that the modern prison refor- mer knows, and all that is known to the twenty three men now lying in 'the Dead House' and waiting their turn, and what is known to their executioner.

I wish that minor poets would recognise that the law which the great ones obey so willingly is equally incumbent on them. A — with his unrivalled facility

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in verse and rhyme was ever chasing the will o' the wisp of poetry, but he could not, or rather would not think, and we know the sorrowful event. B — also refused to think ; you see, thought to him looked menacing, it glared at him, and had a piratical air. Intellectually he was bold as any poet, liking strange conclusions, but his sensitive and affectionate nature pleaded with him, and so he resigned himself to live for ever with Dr. — and his father, and his wife and children and finally, corrupted and bought over by these affections, he became an open fighter and joined the armies of the foolish, doing battle against his own intellect.

Perhaps the excuse for B — is that he could not think, and had not the real passion for truth. He had not the poet's curiosity ; and if he had, it would only have led him into some fond and foolish sex booth. (This is a wicked and libellous thought for which there is no foundation.)

Aeschylus' Athena is not beautiful till we see her timid with the Furies, then at once we see her beauti- ful in every action and in every word she speaks ; and Death,which makes even the worst man pitiable,has given the added touch of beauty to many a man who till then excited only admiration. There is no beauty

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unless we can discover some flaw or weakness. If we hunger after knowlege, as I say we do, we hunger also after pity : or is it, because otherwise we feel that the picture is not true, the facts not all there?

August 1 4th, 1915.

An indulged facility is the clever man's curse in painting, in writing, whether prose or poetry, and in life itself. In writing a letter one generally escapes it, be- cause one is so interested in the per son who is to receive the letter. A French writer never forgets his readers, his sympathetic mind makes that impossible, besides which there is in France a set of readers educated in criticism and to the highest vigilance of attention and active in assertion of their rights. Hence the su- preme excellence of French prose. But this sympa- thetic bond, which is good for the writer of prose, is bad for verse. French verse is never solitai

Democracy devours its poets and artists.

A poet escapes it because he loves the accurate and intimate truth. He does not seek the original, but the truth; and to his dismay and consternation, it may be, he finds the original, thereby to incur hostility and misunderstanding.

August i /th, 1915. 9 c

The folk-lore mind, like the Athenian, accepts re- ligion as machinery and vehicle for poetic thought, and the medieval mind was carefully trained by its own teachers to believe as poets believe and little children. At the present moment Irish Catholic children listen in rapture to sermons that describe Hell in horrible detail. What would make a Protes- tant child shriek or lie sleepless at night is to them like a page of Dante ; their little bodies thrill with an ecstasy of fear, and their eyes dilate with wonder. iModern creeds, Catholic and Protestant, claim a Iliteral belief and so are useless for poetry. A religious ' poet is a contradiction in terms.

Religion is only a vehicle, a splendid or impressive

machinery where a man can stage his thoughts. It

was a sound instinct of the Catholic Church which

has made them tell their congregations to accept

submissively and without examination the dogmas.

iiTo think too curiously would be to invoke the literal

\beliefi which is fatal to the imaginative mind, and

yet there must be a certain amount of credence.

It would spoil my pleasure in Homer to be told that it was produced by a poet who was not Greek and had never been to Troy, or to hear that there never

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was anything resembling the Siege of Troy. I sup- pose it is in creeds as in everything else: one mus have some sort of reality in order to build on it own chimeras.

fin religion, in life and everything, each man makes Uiis own creed. It seems as if mortal man retained

amid universal loss one gift of the gods, the faculty

of creation.

Amid war and treacheries and murders, with Ger- many like a great Dragon spouting flame and smoke, I pursue the even tenor of my letter-writing. I see Americans as impulsive as school girls & as change- able as an April sky, always attractive for that reason, yet constantly disappointing because without prin- ciple. I see the English all stiff and starched with principle, even in matters where impulse should have full play, and therefore, while reliable, always unattractive, and sometimes because of self-com- placency insolent and repulsive.

A painter producing what does not interest him will fall back on facility and produce to order 'modes of thought and expression accepted among the best people.'

ii

Imagination is the faculty by which truth is made real to the sentient man.

In his age, and a citizen of Athens, Aeschylus could not fail to taste of every experience. So he wrote of punishments with the omniscience of a great poet, and the cold morsel on his plate became a live coal. But what can poets make of Liberty, Equality, Fra- ternity. In Coleridge's time these were in the air, and so he and Southey tried to realize them imaginative- ly, and for that purpose projected a socialist com- munity on the banks of the Susquehanna; for, rea- soned they, Susquehanna is a word with a beautiful sound and so may be a key to the riddle. H — and his wife called on J. T. Nettleship, bring- ing with them their little boy. Harry, being then as now full of inquisitive energy, went searching through all the studio which was large and crowded with studio furniture. After a time the parents thought they would see what he was doing, perhaps because of his having become suddenly still. They found him amazed before a nude girl model who was hidden behind a screen. In his Bible lessons Harry could have explained to his teacher all about Eve.

Napoleon made campaigns, Herbert Spencer wrote great books: it is as if one were to convert Niagara

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Falls into electrical machinery. Not so the poet, he wishes to go on feeling.

Each particular sense and appetite and passion has its own craving for the knowledge which is its guid- ance, and that is true of even the most brutish nat- ures. For this reason poets must be learned with all the learning of their time, and Apollo's songs be laden with Apollo's wisdom. Had not Homer known all about the art of war and the ideas and tra- ditions of heroes and all the secrets of policy, he had not dared to enter the tents of the Sons of Atreus.

I will add some remarks on T — . You once said of him a very true thing, a most penetrating criticism. You said his intellect lacked sensuousness, in fact it lacked everything, for he was interested in nothing except cleverness. It was his misfortune, not his fault ; a bad education which taught him to find nothing worth while in his fellow-men except what may be described as the Social Contact^ how people met each other in drawing-rooms and parlours; a cockney bringing up and characteristic of London middle- class life.

I think if poets take to abstract thought, socio4^-~ logical or metaphysical, they lose their feeling for

'

.^concrete thoughts. It is as though a man deserted his wife and children to give himself to philan- thropy. As I have already said, a true poet likes to know his subject thoroughly. A philanthropist conver- ted to poetry would hand his philantrophic work over to a secretary or a committee of ladies, and disappear and be found, if ever found, in some nook or corner or garret. It might be a martyrdom, or what is called purely selfish and sensual, but it would jbe detachment for the sake of reality and intensity.

August 27th, 1915

The philosophical world in America is just now possessed by the theory of service. Man exists to serve is their idea, and it is an idea so easy to under- stand and so amicable and attractive that it appeals to a Democracy that is at once shallow-minded and sentimental.

The idea of service recognizes only two types of men: he who would rule and he who would be ruled. I hotly and fiercely contend that there is an- other type, the man 'who does not want to rule or to be ruled^ and that this is the man 'who 'writes the poetry ', the other sort doing the rhetoric; and that because this type abounds in England, England abounds in poe- try. England, that country which more than any

other abounds also in men who are selfish and ar- rogant and hypocritical and in fact in every form of the unamiable. Since these very qualities gener- ate the right atmosphere, a poet born in England inherits for himself the perfect solitude of self-isola- tion. Shakespeare was possibly the most amiable and considerate of men. In France or in modern America he would have been the most brilliant and most effective of rhetoricians. Born in England, which has no value for rhetoric, he became with pain and dread and constant sense of loneliness the man we know or think or hope to know.

I take up some lines of poetry and say I will explain them and make the effort, always to end in giving it up. No explanation is possible. There is nothing to be done except to read out with friendliest voice the lines I started to make plain. What can be explained is \ not poetry. It is when the powers of explanation de- sert him that the poet writes verse. M — has not much intellect, yet she has a certain potency of sleepy sensuousness. When she was a little girl they tried to teach her the multiplication table,all in vain, till an innocent young man who has since entered the church, was hired ; he set the multiplication table to music and she learned it all quite easily. M — 's home is in the inexplicable; she never leaves it. This kind

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youth wedded the multiplication table to that world and she understood. She and your mother had the greatest affection for him and loved to talk of him. They despised him, since he was so 'unpractical* and without force in a material world.

September 6th, 1915.

I hope I am not writing too many notes and run- ning to seed. Have you read 'Balder dead' by Mat- thew Arnold? I have just read it with great pleasure /but for the end^ where it finishes in a sort of evangel- 1 mysticism of weak-minded amiability.

A mystic is a man who believes what he likes to be- lt" I lieve and makes a system of it and plumes himself on M I doing so.

I call myself a Greek, because I will not pretend to .know what I do not know, and because I reject a j faith which is not true to fact.

September 6th, 1915.

Character is the self-evolved enemy of personality, and yet, if the petrifaction be partial, it is sometimes its friend; as in life one may part with some of one's freedom to preserve the rest, a secret well known to Englishmen and unknown among Americans, who

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dissipate their energies in a world of forever shifting ideals and opinions.

There are many natures who find in anger and in hatred (which is anger systematised) a great comfort and source of inward harmony. Doubtless Napol- eon's hatred of England must have sustained him through many a weary hour of labour and patience. In a mind like Napoleon's such an instinctf?would have full sway ; he was without fear or pity, and then there was his faculty for overcoming all practical difficulties. Verily Napoleon's anger must have been terrible, a great personality in harmony with itself, all melted together in wrath and power. He said to Metternich, 'You don't know what goes on in a mind like mine and how little I think of a mil- lion lives being lost.' One thing is certain, in his case personality never sank down into the ashes of char- acter. Character may be called the peace of old age, and sometimes it is premature.

Personality has other enemies besides the slow petri- faction of character; there is for instance self-efface- ment, whereby a man becomes a nullity; both are born out of personality, tho' the exact opposites of each other.

i7 a

Everything in animated nature has one desire, to per- sist. It is the law of plants and animals and of the microbes that destroy life or rather that incessantly change it.

To me Carlyle looked like a mad school-master. Lamb could not look a school-master, nor mad, be- cause of the rhythm and beauty of his facial lines; just as a beautiful woman cannot be a scold, her face would deny her words.

September 7th, 1915.

I am much too ready to give my opinion on the poets, for I know nothing about them and only talk with the rashness of ignorance. The Muses who are nine, quite enough to keep each other in counten- ance, won't visit a man who can't promise them a solitary tete-a-tete. I had not this to give. Again I have been reading Matthew Arnold. He is a true poet and only incidentally a teacher. Walt Whitman is a teacher in every line he wrote; and while Mat- thew Arnold concerned himself with teaching his own fellow-countrymen, Walt is a missionary, ad- dressing all mankind and calling upon his own coun- trymen to arise and be a missionary nation. France and America are the two missionary nations.

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Except in her missionary mood, America seems to be without national consciousness or national pride.

No American of those I have met or heard has ever felt the in ward and innermost essence of poetry, be- cause it is not among the American opportunities \ to live the solitary life, they all frequent the high- I ways and high roads. It is implicitly and even ex- i plicitly an offence to steal away into by-ways and thickets.

September nth, 1915.

Here is yet another note. You will remind me that Blake was a mystic. I know that Blake's poetry is not intelligible without a knowledge of Blake's

Cnystical doctrines. Yet mysticism was never the \ubstance of 'his poetry > only its machinery. You need lot be a believer in his mysticism to enj oy his poem, 'Oh Rose, thou art sick.' The substance of his poetry is himself, revolting and desiring. His mysticism was a make-believe, a sort of working hypothesis as good as another. He could write about it in prose and contentiously assert his belief. When he wrote his poems it dropped into the background, and it did not matter whether you believed it or not, so apart from all creeds was his poetry. I like a poem to have fine machinery, but if this machinery is

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made to appear anything more than that, the spell of the poetry is broken.

Out in the world, among his enemies and his friends, Blake was a polemical mystic. In his poetry it was only a device, a kind of stage scenery, and a delight to understand and to think about, and yet all the time a something apart, that helped but was never more than a help.

Browning constantly makes his mystical beliefs an essential part of his poetry, thereby showing he did not know the true doctrine of poetry. Religion is to Aeschylus a machinery and no more. His gods and goddesses and his furies are vivid as life, and yet they are only machinery,the substance being

1 himself and his relations to human life and conduct. A real believer, sitting at a play of Aeschylus, would miss everything^ but the Greeks did not believe except as artists believe. Thus were they bred and nurtured.

r/*To what I have said above I would add a corollary.

i All the beliefs, all the creeds that have ever been,

) are to the artistic mind a machinery and a vehicle

\ for his own creed, which is that of all artists that have

\ ever existed, that he himself exists and that 'what he

'wants is more and still more existence.

September 7th, 1915. 20

Style is the human voice. Each book has its own voice murmuring from the pages, and I always hear it myself, in which I think I have been anticipated by Charles Lamb.

September i ith, 1915.

Intellect is made up of the various instincts, each seeking its own prey, and for that purpose all help- ing each other with the strongest instincts in com- mand.

September 2 1 st, 1915.

In every great poet is a Herbert Spencer, in other words, every poet is a thinker, and every great poet a great thinker. Truth sought by the ordinary men- tal processes, by collecting and classifying facts and drawing right conclusions, is as important to the poet as to the Herbert Spencers; only there is a dif- ference ; when truth falls on the lap of a poet he takes it and assimilates it and incorporates it into the liv- ing man. Truth is the object sought alike by the poet and the thinker, only with the poet it is truth seen \ in passion.

When I read Aeschylus I feel that here is a man who understands. I do not feel this when I read Shelley. Shelley leaves me cold because he leaves me unin- formed. His 'fine' things tell me so little. He does

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inot 'take hold of me.' Aeschylus' 'Prometheus' is a

ftragedy. Shelley's a poem of dream and joyous hope

land a world of illusion, half -illusion.

' In Shelley poetry is the essential, at least it is often

so; so that there is lassitude and a lack of intensity.

In Aeschylus the poetry is always accidental and in-

J"*Cidental, and truth the essential; and if he add to the

| plain words that a Herbert Spencer might have used tropes and figures and metaphors and a world of imagery and the music of verse, it is because he had facts to communicate which could not be put into the language of scientific prose.

Truth seen in passion is the substance of poetry . And yfto him who has not the vision of truth the poetry « tells nothing.

Because of his passion for truth the man with a poet- ical mind dislikes improvisation.

Have you noticed how Tolstoi, who though he wrote in prose was yet a man of poetical mind, very seldom generalizes and avoids with an almost con- scious intention the brilliant phrase? In his descrip- tions and narratives he masses his facts and draws his conclusions naively, and expresses himself like any peasant, that is if one could suppose a peasant

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miraculously endowed with the language of a Ho- mer. On the other hand Conrad likes to shorten everything into a phrase : Conrad, a great artist, who like a Frenchman looks for effects, but without the humility, the profound wonder and patience and in- vincible curiosity of the poetical mind.

I would add that I think Tolstoi turned away from the educated man and the people of culture to as-^ sociate with the peasant because he found in the latter the passion for truth which is the soul and the * body of poetry. Cultivated people have other things to think about. G — P — had this kind of mind; brought up in Paris he would have lost it. And when I say the truth seen in passion is the substance of poetry, do I not imply that it is the kind of truth which excites passsion and none other that poets oc- cupy themselves with?

I think children are witnesses on my behalf. A child does not care for a story which it is not satisfied is true ; that is why ghost stories and folk-lore and fairy tales told to them by simple people, nurses and oth- ers, are so much more effective than all these fairy tales etc. 'vamped up' by modern authors. When, a little boy I was spelling my way in trembling de- light and fear through Robinson Crusoe, my elders

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told me it was fiction. I hurried to my father who completely reassured me. I remember the very place in the room at our house in the country where he gave me the reassurance.

We believe in Aeschylus' Furies because they fit the I facts, exactly as one believes in a ghost. In Shelley's 1 play there are very few facts and these are not par- ticularly exciting, being obvious make-believe.

The modern quest for ideas is fatal to poetry. A new idea is property of the intellect and is matter for scientists and writers on morals. When it has be- come an old idea, so old that it is part of one's bring- ing up, it has then entered into our sensibilities and has become part and parcel of the personality of the whole man, whose voice is poetry, the crooning, la- menting and longing voice of lamentation and love V and sorrowful hope, in which is no controversy with anyone ; and only when the personality is knit and the man at peace with himself, can poetry stream forth and there is a truce among the warring elements.

May 2nd, 1913.

The Puritans made the momentous discovery that human nature was in itself bad and for its sins con- demned to eternal death ; after that came commerce.

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The merchant who did not adopt the dogma and believe all men bad would end in bankruptcy. In thought I have always seen the Puritan minister sitting in company with the father of the family in a sort of horrid conspiracy to poison life at its sources. The young men and maidens are exhorted to re- member that the love which makes them see each other as angelic beings comes from the devil, and that the friendship which invites to mutual trust is deception, and so on, and that every kind of amuse- ment is a snare. The father of a growing family and the head of a thriving business liked every word of this doctrine; it fitted in with all his plans. 'Human nature is dirty, my sons and my daughters and the men I employ are bad and naturally faithless, let me coerce them, and since I myself and my wife are of evil tendencies, let us coerce and resist ourselves.' Out of this came the England we know, where everyone hates and distrusts his neighbour, and where everyone is selfish, its civilization an organ- ized selfishness.

Growing up in such an atmosphere, what was there for the poet to do? Shakespeare, they say, had not discovered the beauty of natural scenery — never mind. He inherited or created for himself a pro- found sense of the beauty and wonder and mystery and tragedy of human nature. Worship nature, say

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Wordsworth and the later poets, and as to man, let us if we can save his soul. God has revealed himself in death and the laws of bitter necessity ; let us teach man to humble himself in piety and submission be- fore these laws, since thereby he will become suc- cessful in this life and afterwards be happy in Etern- ity. . . . Let us worship human nature, said the elder poets, and curse the laws of bitter necessity which keep man from the fulfilment of his desires.

The telling of a human tale was nothing to Mat- thew Arnold, whether it was 'Jesse' by Rider Hag- gard, or 'Tom Jones,* or 'David Copperfield.'Why, except for the shallowest kind of amusement, re- produce a thing so common and unsatisfactory as the human Drama? George Eliot indeed saved herself by tacking on to her stories many ethical lessons of good import, and critics have laboured to prove that Shakespeare also was a teacher bent on the saving of souls; his tragedies and comedies all written to make man more deeply conscious of these bitter laws of necessity, and that they are the voice of God. His Drama had no such lesson, every event that unfolded itself before his eyes, every man or woman that em- erged in daily contemporary life, whether heroic or farcical, all he saw he could re-edit, as it were, so

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as to make the spectacle more splendid or more piti- ful, for this he conceived his mission. And as to phil- osophy, he had none except that which is born with us; prudence as regards the certainties, and hope and courage as regards everything else.

If he had a doctrine, it is that the joyous should be more joyous and the sorrowful be more sorrowful. He so loved human nature that nowhere would he curb it; he does not love his mortal servitude, and has no part or parcel with these tame poets who go about with bowed heads celebrating their submis- sion. Have you noticed that Lamb caught something of this fearlessness from his Elizabethan studies; in his note is a certain capricious wildness. In Belgium they improve the singing of caged birds by putting out their eyes. Coleridge and Words- worth are like those birds; hence their singing has a certain pathos, the pathos of the situation. To think of Lamb is to see his bright eyes humorous and changeable, and a little defiantly vigilant. I see Wordsworth with heavy downcast eyelids, and Coleridge with eyes that yearn upwards, as it were, from some abyss of the lost. Wordsworth is a con- tented slave; Coleridge might have thought with Blake and sung the songs of liberty, but his dreadful school-master had done his work too efficiently to

27

fail. I would make a new classification for poets, separating the wild from the tame.

When Matthew Arnold would save souls, he does it with a certain smallness, he is thinking only or chief- ly of his own class. Wordsworth addresses all man- kind. Arnold is the superior person; Wordsworth a proud man and writer with condescension. Neither knew that the great poets sing out of a broken heart, that they may escape into the delirium of beauty and ecstasy.

The taste for scenery has this advantage over the taste for human nature; the heart is not bruised. Yet since scenery is never absurd as are poor mortals, neither is there laughter nor genial pity. We love scenery principally because the feelings it creates are tranquil and easily controlled, so that we can enjoy our full measure of self-content; dealing with hu- man nature the poet cannot be the superior person nor can he be proud.

Solitude is good for the intellect but a drain on the spirits.

December 26th.

It is not the hunt for the dollar but the attendant practicality which destroys art and poetry.

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He asks me to send him more articles, only not too literary or artistic.

Looking back over things various I find we always take at his own high estimate a baby, and then at his own estimate or a little higher an old man; but this old man had never estimated himself. He was, he told me, a carpenter in his village, and all his family carpenters, and here he was in Buffalo treated as one of the fathers of the city by its most fashionable and most 'cultured' ladies. I tried to find more about him, but they could only tell me that he lived With his sister ina cottage*

July 2oth, 1912.

If you had met this old Donegal man, once Derry peasant, carpenter, and maker of coffins for all his neighbours, with his peasant's seriousness, which is really a poet's seriousness, (totally unlike that of the saint who is only half a man, or of the moralist who is not half a man, or anything else except a concen- tration in one mortal of all our most unpleasant qualities,) you would want to praise his poetry.

I think he is the only 'serious' man I have met in America. Zealots are plenty and of every colour, but not this true seriousness,

August 1 3th, 1913. 29

Tennyson was caught, and as to Browning he was born in a cage. Of course the humdrum dignity of the professor's life & the dull fraternity of T. C. D. might not affect you, except to make you want to defy them; but the constant effort to inspire and im- press the students, and the constant descent to their level would stop your progress ^ and losing your spon- taneity you would lose your happiness, your intel- lectual happiness. My advice to you is to keep your- self free from any shadow of restraint.

The Scotch intellect loves the explicit, and does not really care for beauty; the far- withdrawn. They are what you call a Democratic people. The painters paint as Stevenson writes; everything is pervaded through and through with this vice of teaching and explaining.

Thoreau writes like an immortal, he had nothing great to say, but he says it with the finest dignity and reticence; and Stevenson had a good deal to say, but he says it as if he longed for your applause and sym- pathy, for sake of which he will throw overboard everything that does not serve his social and affec- tionate desires.

August 2nd, 1911.

3°

I have on the stocks a long letter for you, all about the prosaic American mind, and that it is so because they believe in happiness and pursue it; whereas the poetical mind believes in ecstasy, and knows that there cannot be ecstasy without pain: pain and ec- stasy are the poetical gospel. The saint also believed in pain as the producer pf ecstasy . Then came the re- ligions and the churches, above all Puritanism, teaching their doctrine of happiness. Wordsworth and the Philosophical poets are tainted with the same heresy, 'joy in widest commonalty spread/ The Americans are the most idealistic and imagin- ative people in the world, and the most prosaic, be- cause like Wordsworth, the most prosaic of poets, they believe in happiness, and happiness to them as to Wordsworth means 'mens sana in corpore sano;' every one efficient in the tasks of modern life, the least heroic of doctrines.

I met a young American poet,handsome,and besides elated by winning some prize or other for a poem. He said to me in his arrogant way, that poetry is a by- product of life. Why I said, 'it is life itself/ 'I don't agree with you' was all he condescended to reply. This young man expressed the American idea.

Poetry is the only reality, everything else is change and chimera. By incessant change and surprise and

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movement, and by never having a dull moment they think they find happiness, and perhaps they do; happiness being that sort of thing. The Universities fall into step with the common people and must do so in this democratic age. So when you come here you must raise your voice for poetry, and point out that it has nothing to do with happiness, and that the saints are on your side; tho' the churches and the religions, especially the fancy ones, are against you. Words- worth had this depressing creed of happiness, yet instinctively was a poersff'uggling in the evil bond- age, rebuking his good an gels, yet at times listening to them.

October 22nd, 1913.

We live in a time of transition, that is opinions abound but not the certitude of belief. Now true

i poetry, self involved and self absorbed, can only be when there is certitude.

I think when we talk of Beauty we generally mean the certitude ofbelief.

This is an age of transition, of opinions working with each other, each opinion a belief struggling to be born, nothing but pain and travail; for that very reason it should be an age of poets, of men scared a- way into flight. Goethe sought all his life for two

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certitudes, that of scientific truth and of art. Had there not been this intellectual war and strife, he would have lived as other men treading the safe path of custom.

C — 's play is still a great success. He will soon think himself a great man, and Synge only second-rate, and the excellent Presbyterian will perhaps agree with him. My father, tho' a low Churchman, hated Presbyterianism and Presbyterians. Why? Because he knew like members of his own family the Cath- olic peasants of Drumcliffe. In his time there were forty houses between the rectory gate and the round tower, now there is only one. In my grandfather's time he & the parish priest were friends. Maynooth did not exist, and the priest was educated in the lib- eral atmosphere of a French College, and possibly both of them read Voltaire and Gibbon. One of the peasants told me he remembered the priest getting up a bonfire to celebrate my grandfather's return to the parish from a protracted sojourn in Dublin.

November i8th, 1913.

The Democrat is proud of his reasoning power and rightly so, and yet it is all he has got. When he attempts poetry he only succeeds in being didactic and elo- quent, and eloquent of what? — duty and morality

33 f '

and 'upliftment,' matters which, however valuable, are not poetry. One cannot be eloquent of beauty, one can only pull away the curtain, and the less said about the vision the better: it would be ca getting in the way.'

December 25th, 1913.

Whether James Stephens is a poet or a prose writer turns upon whether or not he is enough self-centred to do his thinking and his feeling all by himself. If he cannot do his best without having someone to assail, or cajole, or persuade, then he is of the prose writers and only incidentally a poet.

It used to be a curious experience to listen to Isaac Butt when speaking at the Four Courts on some case which had appealed to him. At times he would stand perfectly still and begin to chant his sentences, and it would be quite evident to every one present that he had forgotten all about the jury, and the judge, and the opposing counsel, or that he was in a court of justice at all. I have seen his lips tremble and his face turn white; except in such rare passages he was the most business-like and legal-minded of all the Irish bar- risters, and he was never a rhetorician; nothing was said by him for the sake of effect, every thing came

34

spontaneously from some profound intellectual con- viction or emotional disturbance. If the latter, we had the red cheek gone all white and the trembling lip, if the former, we had the subtleties and all the resources of his immense knowledge.The black eyes were luminous with kindness which nothing could tire, because with a profound conviction went, in his case, a profound hopefulness and a belief that all men were good men, the belief itself a vision. He certainly was of the race of poets, a visionary; he looked the self-centred man; a man apart, and only incidentally the lawyer and the politician. People used to wonder what he did with himself in London ; his secretaries,who were innumerable and all work- ing for love not for pay, knew nothing; like the true poet he sought obscurity, his visions haunted him, and my father told me it was always impossible to draw Butt into an argument, always, he had other things to think about. Alas, his amazing career in T. C. D. and his amazing success at the Bar; a lead- ing Q. C. before he was thirty; his early brilliancy in politics, when Disraeli would walk with him in the lobby of the House with his arm through his, promising to make him a Cabinet Minister; finally the vision of a regenerated Ireland; — all these drew him away, and the poor Muse could only visit him in strange places ; herself an exile, in those days, ban- ished by the respectable poets and bishops and all the

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old mumbling bigotries of religious and social ha- tred— Butt, who loved humanity too much to hate any man knew too much of history to hate any opin- ion; besides how can a self-centred man with visions to follow hate? The career of Butt and its disasters are enough to prove the necessity of the Irish poet- ical movement.

I see that Stephens denounces Fielding as not much better than an after-dinner speaker. What nonsense ! yHe says the profoundest things, and besides he was /a man attended by visions. He says some things \about George Meredith with which I quite agree. Some time ago, long before I saw this article, I used to say that Meredith had the cruelty of the sedentary man, as George Eliot had that of the old maid, and I compared him with the kindly and the fearless Fielding. People don't realize and don't remember that Christ was a man tempted in all things. Of how few men could this be said? Certainly not of Mere- dith or of George Eliot, and yet it would be true of Fielding. Once lecturing in Dublin I proposed that the word 'invitation' should be substituted for 'temptation' since we really came on earth to be tempted, and that in most cases it was our business not to resist but to yield to it and take the conse- quences, even tho'it required the courage of a hero. St. Francis was a man of pleasure who had gone the round of the passions. This was the history of all the

great saints. It is only the great sinner who can do the two things of hating the sin and loving the sinner; the other sort only hate the sinner. They do not hate the sin of which they know nothing except that it looks rosily ', even tho' like George Meredith they have a conviction interpenetrated with logical knowledge that its looks deceive.

May loth, 1914.

I am haunted by single lines, plucked here and there by infallible instinct ; there is no critic like the mem- ory.

What strange people the English are! I have just read a powerful review of the Parnell love-letters in one of the great English papers. All through Parnell is spoken of as the English gentleman for some cur- ious reason interested in Ireland, 'this is so strange in a man of English birth and English education/ etc. The fact that Parnell was a personality (tho* of quite^x a limited sort) is enough to prove that he could not / be modern English. Their characteristic product is > the highly educated and highly efficient mediocrity, such as were Gladstone and Peel.

June 2nd, 1914.

It seems to me that the modern movement is to- wards a creating of art out of some single emotion^

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which of course is an impossibility. Art achieves its\ triumphs great and small by involving the univers- \ ality of the feelings. Love by itself is lust, that is^" primitive animalism; and anger, what is it but homi- cide ? Art lifts us out of the sphere of mere bestiality, art is a musician and touches every chord in the hu- man harp, in other words a single feeling becomes a mood, and the artist is a man with a natural tendency thus to convert every single feeling into a mood; he is a moody man. Browning was not a great poet because he tended away from the true mood of the whole man into the false mood of the idea; certain- ly he did not linger in the bestial sphere, yet reading him I am not a free man, he shackles me all the time with logic and philosophy and opinion, he binds me to the ground with thorns not of the flesh. I have again been reading Homer. Under his spell I follow this and that desire in untrammelled flight, he talks constantly of the winds as separate personal- ities ; the South wind and the East wind working to- gether, and yet each separately like two dogs chasing a hare. My emotions aroused by him are like these winds, only there are thousands of them all working together, and yet separately in a riot of enjoyment; and the poor hare they chase is precisely that single emotion that dared to start up and lead its single existence, like a cry of quarrelling from some

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distempered servant that at dead of night rouses the whole household, even to the head of the household in his tasselled night-cap. Meantime do not forget the poor servant is a dependent born in the family. She will soon return to her senses and her duty , sooth- ed and obedient, flattered even by the clamour she has caused, and glad to be forgiven.

I spent yesterday with D — and dined at the Cler- mont on Riverside: a French actress was with us, and it was very pleasant. At a dinner three are com- pany and two are none.

Marseillaise pleases because it frees the crovudby giv- ing it a soul.

June 22nd, 1914.

I will write again of the solitary man. First of all, alone among men, he is himself and only himself. The companionable man is himself and someone else, seeking expression through the medium of prose or action, thinking of other people and there- fore always leaning towards compromise and for that reason working in a spirit of insincerity. Poetry \ is the voice of the solitary, as resonant and as pure/ and lonely as the song of the lark at sunrise. If the lark were to bother itself about the 'Collective Soul' of the Universe it would not sing at all.

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Again the solitary is the only man who retains his spiritual integrity. With the companionable, belief is opinion living in the heat of talk or action, and dying away as that heat fades. Outside mathematics and science there is no such thing as belief positive,;-| yet there is a certain intensity of feeling whether of love or hope, sorrow or fear which we label belief;] with the solitary man this remains a feeling and i& something personal, and therefore the very sub-' stance of poetry. With the companionable it crys- tallizes into opinion which is the substance of prose, and is conceived and brought forth in emulous or angry contention. To keep his faith alive, Carlyle was obliged all his long life to be incessantly scold- ing and prophesying and speaking to the people. Coventry Patmore was a companionable man, and consequently a poor believer in the dogmas he so in- tolerantly professed. Always did he write in the heat of hatred, the most companionable of all the pas- sions. The man who hates is the furthest from being a solitary, and is a man dependent on having about him the people he hates whether in actual presence or in his mind's eye. In my own life I knew a well- educated and rather pretty woman who was the most hospitable soul alive. Why thus hospitable? Because she was burning to meet people whom she might contradict in incessant wrangle ; we were giv- en Circean welcome. In the poet of 'The Dreadful

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Night* we have a true solitary; Landor also; al- though in his case it was perhaps the result of a con- scious effort. Browning always a companionable man, a sublime showman with a voice of titanic vol- ume, sometimes incoherent but always dominating in his energy and learning ; evermore would he stand in the public eye. There are times in the life of every man when he is visited by the solitary spirit; so it happens that occasionally Browning sang melo- dious syllables. Coleridge was solitary; whether hch wrote or talked, always in soliloquy; hence that per- ( sonal charm, which seems to have fascinated every- \ one except the splenetic and self-willed Carlyle. The old hermits were right in their instinct for the desert since it meant a living to one's self, wrong in that it meant a separation from human voices and from the faces of men, women and children, an up- rooting of the human plant from its natural sur- roundings. We are here to be tempted, it is the law of human life; for which reason I would banish the word temptation, a word of evil history, and sub- stitute for it the word invitation. Temptation im- plies a something to be resisted, invitation a some- thing to be accepted or refused according to good sense and sound discussion. How often do we see an over-timid man become a human nullity through his shrinking from every temptation!

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pThere is yet another distinction. The solitary man i follows imagination, the companionable submits to I his reason and cultivates it; for reason brings people together whereas imagination separates them. Im- agination incessantly moulds its credo out of desires which it at once inflames and harmonizes, shifting as they shift in endless mutation, not to be captured in any definition, for it is inexplicable and incom- municable. When I reason I arrive at conclusions and say things in which if I reason rightly all men can be made to agree; when I follow imagination j every thought of the mind and every feeling are my I own private property and sealed with my own seal. Reason is a school-master calling his boys into school, imagination a school-master in happy mood dismissing them to wander in the woods, for the space of that holiday every boy to be his own mas- ter. The solitary treads a narrow path, where two cannot walk abreast, though we may follow in his footsteps wondering whither he is leading us; the companionable keeps about him a company of friends and enemies without whose mingled friend- ship and hatred he can do nothing, himself the nois- iest of a noisy cavalcade.

And now I come to my innermost thought and the occasion of all this writing; the solitary has charm whereas the companionable compels his followers.

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When the companionable says I am your friend and will help you ; or to a girl that he loves her, his voice does not penetrate so deeply and so touchingly as when the solitary speaks. And is not the reason this, that with the companionable there is always a some- thing with which to assent or dissent, he is a manu- factured article, manufactured by himself or others, and to approve or disapprove is a matter of opinion and demands an effort of that sort that divides a man from himself and from his fellows, debilitating the personality? The solitary is one of the forces of na- ture,with which no man can argue ; every action and every thought of his mind and every feeling comes from sources beyond our utmost ken. And in thus describing the solitary, am I not uncovering what is the essence of that true poetry which I have called the voice of the solitary?

Have you read any of Hardy's novels? Judging by one of them I have just been reading and by his por- trait and the look in his eyes, I would call him a true solitary. Meredith seems to me one of the compan- ionable; his nerves always stretched in social excite- ment, soothed or irritated by the people about him, so that he is much occupied in argumentatively communicating with his fellow creatures. He sel- dom trod the narrow path of the elect of poetry, but valiantly walked abroad with his companions, a

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talker, and alecturer,and a master of incisive speech. In Hardy's sentences there is always an undersound which is the croon of poetry and like the noise of the sea breaking on far away rock-bound shores. Throughout the world of poetry and art do we not find at the present time a wealth of expression with a poverty of meaning, and is not this because the companionable are far in excess of the solitary? The method of the companionable is to find some truth on which all men agree, and by harping on that to rouse his fellow mortals to spiritual excitement and intellectual effort. Carlyle, for instance, knowing that all men hated lies, proceeded to show that the world was living contentedly with every kind of sham. All the meaning as regards thought and idea

j and philosophy in Carlyle might be contained in a few pages, but what a wealth of expression expended

' in the presenting of that meaning! In Blake, as in all the great poets, the wealth of meaning beggars the wealth of expression ; even though the words are strained to their utmost capacity, and every variety of rhythm and verse and intonation and mental at- titude and gesture be pressed into the service, it is only after much study that one gets the meaning, and even this does not suffice unless there be kind- led in us a mood identical with that of the poet. For the meaning is not a something to be communicated

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or explained, but to be revealed,a vision and a dreamA no more ; we see it or we do not see, that is all. What can be communicated or explained is prose, let the companionable man look to it, it belongs to his pro- vince. Sometimes indeed the soul in Carlyle escapes from its bondage, but it has become a whimpering ghost, yet by its forlorn solitariness a, manifest soul. Had Carlyle not been a Scotchman and a Puritan he would have been a solitary and a poet, but alas! he imprisoned his soul in that dungeon of self-hatred which is Puritanism. Perhaps also, he was too impa- tient to learn the difficult language of verse. There was, no doubt, his notion of Scotch dignity, requir- ing that a man should earn a competency, to turn him away from the unprofitable trade. No wonder that Carlyle was melancholy, since the source of melancholy is, that a man deny his own soul. To every man is given a soul, in each and all of us is a deep well of tenderness, sometimes called love, and it is the function of poetry and art to fill that well till it is overflowing, tapping all the sources of memory and hope and fear and all knowledge and all intellect and all pleasure and pain; especially must pain yield its bitter savour.

April 2nd, 1915.

Touching this doctrine of sincerity, I dare swear that it might be plausibly contended that it is a good

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and noble doctrine in the puritan sense of the word, since a man by striving to be sincere approaches nobleness and virtue; but of that I say nothing pos- itive, since I do not wish to subscribe straight off to the idea that a man is naturally good, and this altho' apparently it was Shakespeare's and a Renaissance doctrine.

January ayth, 1916.

Stendhal said that a novel should be like a looking- glass dawdling along the road. That describes Dos- toievsky's method. Dickens was a romancist, and romance Stendhal hated. Dostoievsky finds and Dickens invents, yet both are filled with a kind of natural goodness. Not so George Eliot; in her I find the law, always the law. She is hard on life and al- most seems to loathe what is its most naive expres- sion, a pretty and charming girl. George Meredith is also full of this law, particularly as being a man of class (by adoption;) his business with the law is to administer rather than suffer from it, he is more than of class, he is the superman by right of his clev- erness and education ; it is this last which makes him so dear to college dons et hoc genus omne.

Pity flows through Dostoievsky like a river which has burst its dams. In him is no class consciousness. All the conventions constructed by the clever and

the educated and the well-to-do for their own sus- tenance in conceit and comfort, are swept away by the flood, and being a born story-teller he wants to tell us all about it: exactly as if there had been an actual flood and his house and children swept away, the survivor would want to tell all about it to the first person who came along.

January 1 3th, 1916.

She tells me that she likes best in the world hard work, she asks for it, as a dope fiend asks for his laud- anum.

A man on his death-bed or after he has been snub- bed by his wife may enjoy a few momentjs of soli- tude, the rest of his life is a noisy self-deseryinggre- gariousness. He fears solitude as a child fears the dark, indeed it is a universal dread which one must learn how to conquer. A poet learns his lesson gen-\ erally by finding himself early in life shunned, he is \ odd. 'Why was I born with a different face?' Blake I asked. Genius is fundamentally odd and men hate/ the exceptional.

I sometimes think that the ferocious methods of discipline in old-time schools and homes had one good result, it acquainted the unhappy boy with solitude. In America they make war on solitude. It

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must not be. A glimpse of it frightens them and breaks their hearts with pity. Their whole civiliza- tion consists in inventions by which to drive it away and send it to the nether depths. Their great doctrine, their gospel, is service, and people are run off their feet in efforts to keep faith- ful to it, and it is the very consummation of the soci- able life. People are never themselves except in soli- tude ; here people are expected to be above themselves. This is being constantly dinned into our ears. Emer- son was among the offenders. Thoreau reacted and tried, I think, to be below himself; and often people, socialists, anarchists and humbler humourists are below even human nature. We are grimacing so as to be sociable in some effective way. There is plenty of evidence to show that Shakespeare shunned the controversies of his age; was not this because he would guard his sincerity, as jealous for it as a virgin for her virtue ? cThe dyer's hand becomes subdued to what it works in.'

January 6th, 1916.

There is nothing to me more interesting than the / attitude which the artists take up towards theory and philosophy,or to sum them up in one word,opin- kms. Of these the artist is never the devotee, he plays with them, he treats them as a wealthy nobleman

does his various castles which he inhabits from time to time but never permanently; and the reason is obvious, the artist is interested in personality which is infinite, whereas 'opinions are always finite/

I think the English dislike of theories etc. through their long history is because of their poetical minds and their preoccupation with personality and its freedom.

January loth, 1915.

Over and over again I am reading that novel by Dos- toievsky, 'The Insulted and Injured/ and what I no- tice most is that he writes without phrases, and next, that in his study of any human personality he does not, as we do, taught by our betters, seek to find some gorgeous quality of pride or strength or self-control or power, but just the fundamental spark of kindness ; as a man poking in a furnace of ashes and cinders would try to find if there was anywhere a kindled coal, that he may blow upon it with the bellows and set all alight. He avoids phrases because he avoids half-thoughts and self deception, and in avoiding phrases he escapes being literary. The literary man as such merely embroiders and decorates life with delusive ornament, he is not in real touch with any- thing and is a poor artist, for his only skill is decor- ation. I won't call him a poor artist, that is unfair,

49 h

but he is a minor artist, and we enjoy his work in our moods of idleness and luxurious self-contem- plation as we enjoy a pretty boudoir or well-arranged drawing-room. When he seeks what I call kindness, though he himself would not call it by that name, he is seeking the vital principle and the source of life by which we grow and live. Our psychological chemists will some day discover it and label it with a sounding name.

The worst criminal is in Dostoievsky's mind a thwarted lover. He said of himself that he had a de- testable character; he did not mind except for its inconveniences, because he knew what was the mat- ter with him.

December 29th, 1915.

These poets live so much in the street that they ac- quire all its habits and have none of their own. The artist must always be an aristocrat and disdain the street. I measure a people not by its number or its amount of well-being but by the number of its aristo- crats.

America does not like the exceptional and is in this a true democracy. Sincerity is not for her, it is an of- fence against her tyrannous instincts.

January I4th, 1916.

5°

Sympathy has also its selfishness. This you would find out if you lived for a space among sympathetic people. A man of exceptional ideas or exceptional character has a bad time of it among these people, far better to live with Englishmen, who taking no interest in him would leave him alone. In France it is a bad thing to say of any one 'he is so reserved,' whereas in England this is a passport to their good opinion. The Englishman does not want to be trou- bled: the sympathetic Frenchman wants to be trou- bled, his sympathy craves for its nutriment and would seize upon you and bring to bear on you all its force and winning ways so that you might re- shape yourself and be companionable and conver- sible. Exposed in this atmosphere, Shakespeare would have been a rhetorical poet and a social wit and the chief of French poets.

To live constantly with oneself is like wearing a hairshirt next the skin ; but it is not only wholesome, it is illuminating, and the man who undergoes it knows far more about beauty and the wisdom which is beauty than the man brought up in sympathetic society. He lives, as it were, in the full blaze; the others in a light tempered by general consent to so- ciety's weak eyes.

January 2oth, 1916,

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A gentleman is such, simply because he has not the doctrine of getting on and the habit of it. For this reason a poor peasant and a true artist are gentlemen, but people talk as if the doctrine of getting on was greater than all the law and the prophets.

The contest is not against material things, but be- ... / tween those who want to get onand those whodon't I want to get on, having other important things to *\ attend to.

July i at, 1908.

BREVIORA By selection we keep poetry alive.

Being uplifted is the American recreation ; with this kind of existence they make their blood quite thin and colourless.

These Americans are making huge efforts to get away from the concrete and live in the abstract ; this is their plan for living the higher life, and nothing comes of it except delirious activity.

In America there is no intellectual life in anything, every thing is movement and a mode of motion. The

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three legs which represent the Isle of Man should be adopted by America, it would suit them better than the eagle. ,

It is better to be illogical than inhuman; never to be illogical is a poor kind of pride, and belongs to a people who aim at instructing the world, and suc- ceed in being rhetorical and eloquent and always charmingly lucid, yet might do better.

There is nothing in them which cannot find an easy expression in speech or action. There is no reason why they should seek the assistance of the nine muses.

A few days ago at lunch a man recited to me a long poemy all uplift, amiable with glittering pantheism, and asked me triumphantly was not that poetry? Fancy a state of mind in which the prettiest girl was the same as the ugliest.

Poetry is the last refuge and asylum of the individual of whom oratory is the enemy.

In the great quality of in tensity poetry has never ad- L vanced and can never advance.

The poet must keep away from crowds and their

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interests. In true poetry we look for the word, the line, the concrete allusion. In spurious poetry, as it is in America, we look for the idea and having found it then rest.

Aristocracies and pessimists are malign, and the whole of Nietzsche is malign ;so are college dons and their retinue, but so were not Shakespeare and Shel- ley. Wordsworth was malign, so was Byron and so is Swinburne. These people could not get away from their self-importance.

March 24th, 1909.

Perhaps you would like to know something of my lecture. I said that S — F — and R — became poets because they were literary men and admired Words- worth and other poets, you because you had convic- tions, convictions that were desires, such as could never be imprisoned in opinions.

(To W. B. Y.) April i4th, 1909.

The supremacy of the will-power infers the male- diction of human nature, that has cursed English life and English letters. I referred to Bunyan as fore- most in the malediction movement. He would have called Hamlet 'Mr. Facing Both-ways,' and Juliet

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'Mistress Bold Face,' or 'Carnality' and Romeo 'Mr. Lovelorn,' and Macbeth 'Mr. Henpecked' etc. finding where he could epithets and names to belit- tle and degrade the temple of human nature and all its altars.

This servile stamp was all over Wordsworth, and Shelley showed the scar in his efforts to escape.

Carlyle's strong man is a man who destroys friend- ship, love, affection, everything to attain some pur- pose which may be commercial gain, or may be some triviality of the moral or religious order.

I pointed out also that the peasant of Aran and the pagan of Virgil's time both worship the Dii Min- ores, the lesser gods of the hearth, both living in 'haunted houses.' I reminded them that Virgil, whom Carlyle describes as a 'lachrymose poet,' was to J. P. Curran, a man sprung from Irish peasants, 'the prince of sensitive poets,' whom he read every day. Suntlachrymaererumetmortalia me tangunt.

January I2th, 1910.

Had Shakespeare possessed a strong will or an ad- miration for it,he would have gone over like Brown- ing and Wordsworth to the side of the authorities

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and the preceptors, instead of remaining, as he did, among aristocratic publicans and sinners.

March 5th, 1910.

Man talks best to his sweetheart if she is his intel- lectual equal, next best to his male friends, but as the numbers increase the talk deteriorates. Talking for effect or rhetoric gradually alloying the true in- timacy.

Lamb was a finer spirit than Wordsworth, there was more intimacy working like some subtle acid, a de- licious and benevolent acid.

Junea6th, 1910.

They sought for the sensation of power in thus mu- tilating their own characters.

September, 1910.

Personality has a difficult time in America. Their idea of equality, of individual independence, and their constant fraternal desire to find each other alike, are enemies; also intellect itself which makes people think alike and their moral ideas. You can- not have two opinions on the fifth proposition, or on a question of conduct. Personality seeks inces- santly to give itself and yet remains aloof and a mys- tery. Democracy also is the enemy to personality.

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The public personality swallows the individual as the Catholic Church does its votaries. The dearth of personality makes all men alike, all so obvious that we are no longer interested in each other except in argument or in drilling each other.

January, 1913.

When E — 's unamiable meagre-faced and meagre- bodied wife died he sai d to J — D — 'When a young man's wife dies it is not much — is nothing to what it is with an old man.' Yet D — , who knew them well, said he never knew them to talk to each other but once, and then it was about the butcher's bill.

Tolstoi and Dostoievsky found that the highest compliment they could bestow on any of their heroes was to praise his kindness or goodness, the others talking all the time of strength and self-con- trol, and these qualities not in the cause of some en- thusiasm of the heart, but in the carrying out of some strict rule imposed ab extra.

December, 1915.

In obeying rules, the highest even, we should never forget that in so doing we are not alive.

1915.

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CHARACTERIZATIONS It is quite possible to be lyrical and not poetical.

July, 1906.

A mood is personality in strong action.

The writer says of one man, 'he would solve every difficulty in life by some kind of violence.' Of an- other: 'his character is too strong for his intellect. Of an elderly young girl: she has the simplicity and naivete of an old dry-as-dust, an old savant.

Like most loungers (except X — )he is always talk- ing for effect, so that you must not interrupt him or expect to be enlightened by him. He has been very successful with women.

AMERICAN WOMEN

I used to compare her to a temple, perhaps however it is a temple carved out of blanc-mange.

Ideas or rather suggestions of ideas, which are here like summer flies for abundance and for their slight- ness and littleness, keep all the women absurdly ac- tive and restless.

America is full of ideas, yet only suggestions of ideas, not a whole idea among them.

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She has that kind of cleverness which draws all its ideas from the outside, not from within. The effect is that after a time you become exhausted and de- pleted, since she cannot replenish you.

To praise and denounce is ethical and puritanical. \/Carlyle is here the prophet. To criticise is neither to praise nor to denounce.

THE AMERICANS

Of course they interpret Whitman literally, as a few years ago they did the Bible, the same lunacy in an- other form.

K — is a good honest man who helped everyone, friends as well as relations. He has just lost his wife and is very pious, piety and uxoriousness combining to make him long for death in order that he may meet her in heaven.

She is unlike the ordinary American girl, being not at all flighty, although dealing much in suffragette movements and occultism and other combustible material, but is essentially feminine and American in that she is always looking for the idea, resolute to find the moral shut within the bosom of a rose.

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His morality on the level with that of an high class English statesman dealing with Ireland or Africa, without the statesman's decorous hypocrisy, as also without his temporising prudence or his University education.

The most deliciously uninteresting young girl I ever met, her perfect aplomb in selfishness was a per- petual surprise and pleasure.

Occasionally I meet Englishmen here and find them very peppery and explosive or else mild and broken- hearted. They always take me to be English and then get cross when they find out the truth.

He does not look to me like a man who would write well, a curiously protestant face.

A perfectly disinterested, an absolutely unselfish love of making mischief, mischief for its own dear sake, is an Irish characteristic.

If an Englishman says with Longfellow 'Life is earnest,' at once I see a great platitude in the sky, vague and shad owing. If a latter-day American says it, lam aware of a long train of deductive reasoning, pendent from such a thesis as that all men are equal, and the air resounds with the rhetoric of orators, professors and young ladies.

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Here ends cPassages from the Letters of John Butler Yeats/ selected by Ezra Pound. Published and printed by Eliza- beth Corbet Yeats on paper made in Ire- land, at the Cuala Press, Churchtown, Dundrum, in the County of Dublin, Ireland. Finished in the last week of February, nineteen hundred and seven- teen.

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Yeats, John Butler

Passages from tha l-tters

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