The Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, Bastien-Lepage coven a.s.serted that an artist or a poet must paint or write in the style of his own day, and this with "The Fairy Queen," and "Lyrical Ballads,"
and Blake"s early poems in its ears, and plain to the eyes, in book or gallery, those great masterpieces of later Egypt, founded upon that work of the Ancient Kingdom already further in time from later Egypt than later Egypt is from us. I knew that I could choose my style where I pleased, that no man can deny to the human mind any power, that power once achieved; and yet I did not wish to recover the first simplicity. If I must be but a shepherd building his hut among the ruins of some fallen city, I might take porphyry or shaped marble, if it lay ready to my hand, instead of the baked clay of the first builders. If Chaucer"s personages had disengaged themselves from Chaucer"s crowd, forgotten their common goal and shrine, and after sundry magnifications become, each in his turn, the centre of some Elizabethan play, and a few years later split into their elements, and so given birth to romantic poetry, I need not reverse the cinematograph. I could take those separated elements, all that abstract love and melancholy, and give them a symbolical or mythological coherence. Not Chaucer"s rough-tongued riders, but some procession of the G.o.ds! a pilgrimage no more but perhaps a shrine! Might I not, with health and good luck to aid me, create some new "Prometheus Unbound,"
Patrick or Columbcille, Oisin or Fion, in Prometheus"s stead, and, instead of Caucasus, Croagh-Patrick or Ben Bulben? Have not all races had their first unity from a polytheism that marries them to rock and hill? We had in Ireland imaginative stories, which the uneducated cla.s.ses knew and even sang, and might we not make those stories current among the educated cla.s.ses, re-discovering for the work"s sake what I have called "the applied arts of literature,"
the a.s.sociation of literature, that is, with music, speech and dance; and at last, it might be, so deepen the political pa.s.sion of the nation that all, artist and poet, craftsman and day labourer would accept a common design? Perhaps even these images, once created and a.s.sociated with river and mountain, might move of themselves, and with some powerful even turbulent life, like those painted horses that trampled the rice fields of j.a.pan.
XXII
I used to tell the few friends to whom I could speak these secret thoughts that I would make the attempt in Ireland but fail, for our civilisation, its elements multiplying by divisions like certain low forms of life, was all powerful; but in reality I had the wildest hopes. To-day I add to that first conviction, to that first desire for unity, this other conviction, long a mere opinion vaguely or intermittently apprehended: Nations, races and individual men are unified by an image, or bundle of related images, symbolical or evocative of the state of mind, which is of all states of mind not impossible, the most difficult to that man, race or nation; because only the greatest obstacle that can be contemplated without despair rouses the will to full intensity. A powerful cla.s.s by terror, rhetoric, and organised sentimentality, may drive their people to war, but the day draws near when they cannot keep them there; and how shall they face the pure nations of the East when the day comes to do it with but equal arms? I had seen Ireland in my own time turn from the bragging rhetoric and gregarious humour of O"Connell"s generation and school, and offer herself to the solitary and proud Parnell as to her anti-self, buskin following hard on sock; and I had begun to hope, or to half-hope, that we might be the first in Europe to seek unity as deliberately as it had been sought by theologian, poet, sculptor, architect from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. Doubtless we must seek it differently, no longer considering it convenient to epitomise all human knowledge, but find it we well might, could we first find philosophy and a little pa.s.sion.
XXIII
It was the death of Parnell that convinced me that the moment had come for work in Ireland, for I knew that for a time the imagination of young men would turn from politics. There was a little Irish patriotic society of young people, clerks, shop-boys, shop-girls, and the like, called the Southwark Irish Literary Society. It had ceased to meet because each member of the committee had lectured so many times that the girls got the giggles whenever he stood up. I invited the committee to my father"s house at Bedford Park and there proposed a new organisation. After a few months spent in founding, with the help of T. W. Rolleston, who came to that first meeting and had a knowledge of committee work I lacked, the Irish Literary Society, which soon included every London Irish author and journalist, I went to Dublin and founded there a similar society.
W. B. Yeats.
Here ends "Four Years," written by William Butler Yeats. Four hundred copies of this book have been printed and published by Elizabeth C. Yeats on paper made in Ireland, at the Cuala Press, Churchtown, Dundrum, in the County of Dublin, Ireland. Finished on All Hallows"
Eve, in the year nineteen hundred and twenty one.