by W. B. Yeats
The young Dublin man who sticks to his books becomes a pedant because he only believes in external things. I will then describe a debate at Oxford a few years ago when I felt so much pity for that young brilliant man full of feminine sensitiveness. Surely the ideal of culture expressed by Pater can only create feminine souls. The soul becomes a mirror not a brazier. This culture is self-knowledge in so far as the self is a calm, deliberating, discriminating thing, for when we have awakened our tastes, and criticized the world in tasting it, we have come to know ourselves; ourselves, not as misers, or spendthrifts, or magistrates, or pleaders, but as men, face to face with what is permanent in the world. Newman defines culture as wise receptivity, though I do not think he uses these words. Culture of this kind produces the most perfect flowers in a few high-bred women. It gives to its sons an exquisite delicacy. I will then compare the culture of the Renaissance, which seems to me founded not on self-knowledge but on knowledge of some other self, Christ or Caesar, not on delicate sincerity but on imitative energy.
XXVIII
This morning I got a letter telling me of A--- C---’s illness. I did not recognize her son’s writing at first, and my mind wandered, I suppose because I was not well. I thought my mother was ill and that my sister was asking me to come at once: then I remembered that my mother died years ago and that more than kin was at stake. She has been to me mother, friend, sister and brother. I cannot realize the world without her---she brought to my wavering thoughts steadfast nobility. All the day the thought of losing her is like a conflagration in the rafters. Friendship is all the house I have.
XXIX
A--- C--- is better but writes in pencil that she ‘very nearly slipped away’. All Wednesday I heard Castiglione’s phrase ringing in my memory, ‘Never be it spoken without tears, the Duchess, too, is dead’, and that phrase, which---coming where it did among the numbering of his dead---often moved me till my eyes dimmed, brought before me now all his sorrow and my own, as though one saw the worth of life fade for ever.
Sickness brought me this Thought, in that scale of his: Why should I be dismayed Though flame had burned the whole World, as it were a coal, Now I have seen it weighed Against a soul?
XXX
I went for a walk in the woods with little E--- and we talked of religion. He said, ‘There is no longer belief, nobody with belief ever comes to my Bible Class but you yourself. If people believed, they would talk of God and Christ. They think it good taste not to talk of such things, and yet people always talk of what they care for. Belief makes a mind abundant.’ I thought of the perpetual desire of all lovers to talk of their love and how many lovers’ quarrels have come from it. I said, ‘What of the Dublin theosophists?’ He said fiercely, ‘They are thieves. They pick up names and thoughts all over the world and these never become being in their minds, never become their own, because they have no worship.’ He is not easy to understand, but I gradually drew from him these thoughts. ‘They are all self, all presumption. They do not know what it is to abase themselves before Christ, or their own Gods, or anything. If one does that, one is filled with life. Christ is so full of life that it flows into us. The whole world is vivid to us. They are all self, and so they despise the foundation.’ He means by the foundation, life, nature. I said, ‘But what are the forms they see?’ He answered, ‘They can only be lesser spirits--- part of what they call the Astral---creatures that live on them and draw away their life’. I said, ‘Must one therefore either feed or be fed?’ He said, ‘Yes, surely. Have you not noticed that they are all fluid, tenuous, flimsy-minded? You know Miss A--- B---? They are all like that. It is the astral fluid. There is no life, the life has been sucked out. They despise the foundation, and that no one can do till after the resurrection. They are all self, and so they live on stolen goods. Of course there are a few chosen spirits who need not enter into life, but they are very few. Ah! if only one could see all boys and girls after nineteen married.’ He told me earlier in the day that once when mountaineering he was in great danger. Someone had slipped and dragged another with him, and he had the weight of two men hanging from the rope---but he felt a great being descending into him and strengthening him. Even when the danger was over he felt no loss of nerve as he looked back on the danger. He had been filled with life. On the way back E--- said, ‘There is so little life now. Look at the modern soldier---he is nothing---and the ancient soldier was something---he had to be strong and skilful, they fought man to man.’ I said, ‘There are some books like that — ideas as wonderful as a campaign by Moltke, but no man. The plan of campaign was not so impressive in the old books, but all was human!’ He answered, ‘When races cease to believe in Christ, God takes the life out of them, at last they cease to procreate’. E--- himself, all muscular force and ardour, makes me think of that line written, as one believes, of Shakespeare by Ben Jonson ---’So rammed with life that he can but grow in life with being’. The irregular line of his thought which makes him obscure is itself a sign of this. He is as full of twists and turns as a tree.
XXXI
The other day when I was speaking at the Arts Club someone asked me what life I would recommend to young Irishmen, the thought my whole speech if it were logical should have led up to. I was glad to be able to reply, ‘I do not know, though I have thought much about it’. Who does not distrust complete ideas?
XXXII
There is an astrological sense in which a man’s wife or sweetheart is always an Eve made from a rib of his body. She is drawn to him because she represents a group of stellar influences in the radical horoscope. These influences also create an element in his character, and his destiny, in things apart from love or marriage. Whether this element be good or evil she is therefore its external expression. The happiest have such horoscopes that they find what they have of good in their wives, others must find what they have of evil, or a man may have both affinities. Sometimes a man may find the evil of his horoscope in a woman, and in rescuing her from her own self may conquer his own evil, as with Simon Magus who married a harlot. Others may find in a woman the good that conquers them and shapes them. All external events of life are of course an externalization of character in the same way, but not to the same degree as the wife, who may represent the gathering up of an entire web of influences. A friend represented by a powerful star in the eleventh house may be the same, especially if the sun apply to the star. We are mirrors of the stellar light and we cast this light outward as incidents, magnetic attractions, characterizations, desires. This casting outward of the light is that fall into the circumference the mystics talk of.
XXXIII
By implication the philosophy of Irish faery lore declares that all power is from the body, all intelligence from the spirit. Western civilization, religion and magic insist on power and therefore on body, and hence these three doctrines---efficient rule---the Incarnation---thaumaturgy. Eastern thoughts answer to these with indifference to rule, scorn of the flesh, contemplation of the formless. Western minds who follow the Eastern way become weak and vapoury, because unfit for the work forced upon them by Western life. Every symbol is an invocation which produces its equivalent expression in all worlds. The Incarnation invoked modern science and modern efficiency, and individualized emotion. It produced a solidification of all those things that grow from individual will. The historical truth of the Incarnation is indifferent, though the belief in that truth was essential to the power of the invocation. All civilization is held together by the suggestions of an invisible hypnotist---by artificially created illusions. The knowledge of reality is always in some measure a secret knowledge. It is a kind of death.
XXXIV
While Lady Gregory has brought herself to death’s door with overwork, to give us, while neglecting no other duty, enough plays, translated or original, to keep the Theatre alive, our base half-men of letters, or rather half-journalists, that coterie of patriots who have never been bought because no one ever thought them worth a price, have been whispering everywhere t
hat she takes advantage of her position as director to put her own plays upon the stage. When I think, too, of Synge dying at this moment of their bitterness and ignorance, as I believe, I wonder if I have been right to shape my style to sweetness and serenity, and there comes into my mind that verse that Fergus spoke, ‘No man seeks my help because I be not of the things I dream’. On the night of the ‘Playboy debate’ they were all there, silent and craven, but not in the stalls for fear they might be asked to speak and face the mob. A--- D--- even refused by a subterfuge and joined the others in the gallery. No man of all literary Dublin dared show his face but my own father, who spoke to, or rather in the presence of, that howling mob with sweetness and simplicity. I fought them, he did a finer thing---forgot them.
XXXV
Those who accuse Synge of some base motive are the greatgrandchildren of those Dublin men who accused Smith O’Brien of being paid by the Government to fail. It is of such as these Goethe thought when he said, ‘The Irish always seem to me like a pack of hounds dragging down some noble stag’.
XXXVI
Last night, Miss Allgood, who has been bad hitherto, gave a good performance in Kincora. This play in its new form gives me the greatest joy---colour, speech, all has its music, and the scenes with the servants make one feel intimate and friendly with those great people who otherwise would be far off---mere figures of speech. The joy that this play gives makes me understand how much I dislike plays like --- and --- and ---.If at all possible I will now keep at the Theatre till I have seen produced a mass of fine work. If we can create a taste for translated work---which we have not yet done---we can carry on the Theatre without vulgarity. If not, the mere growth of the audience will make all useless, for the Irish town mind will by many channels, public and private, press its vulgarity upon us. If we should feel that happening, if the Theatre is not to continue as we have shaped it, it must, for the sake of our future influence, for the sake of our example, be allowed to pass out of our hands, or cease. We must not be responsible for a compromise.
XXXVII
Last night I read E--- a passage in which Coventry Patmore says we cannot teach another religious truth; we can only point out to him a way whereby he may find it for himself. E--- said, ‘If one could show another religious experience, which is of the whole being, one would have to give one’s whole being, one would be Christ. He alone can give Himself.’
XXXVIII
I often wonder if my talent will ever recover from the heterogeneous labour of these last few years. The younger Hallam says that vice does not destroy genius but that the heterogeneous does. I cry out vainly for liberty and have ever less and less inner life. Evil comes to us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues. I have certainly known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots. L--- E--- at the Rhymers’ Club used to say that he meant to have a butler and that he thought it his duty to his wife to keep a house on that scale. Harlots in his case finished what the virtues began, but it was the virtues and not the harlots that killed his knack of verse. I thought myself loving neither vice nor virtue; but virtue has come upon me and given me a nation instead of a home. Has it left me any lyrical faculty? Whatever happens I must go on that there may be a man behind the lines already written; I cast the die long ago and must be true to the cast.
XXXIX
Two hours’ idleness---because I have no excuse but to begin creative work, an intolerable toil. Little D--- F--- of Hyderabad told me that in her father’s garden one met an opium-eater who made poems in his dreams and wrote the title-pages when he awoke but forgot the rest. He was the only happy poet.
XL
A couple of days ago I went to see Dr. F--- F---. He spoke of the attacks on both him and myself in Sinn Fein and of their untruthfulness. He said, ‘I congratulated Edward Martyn some time ago on being leader of an important political party, and he answered, “I don’t want to be, I want to do my own work”. Says I, “I want to do my own work also”, and then says he, “The worst of it is that those fellows would not leave either of us there for five minutes if they thought we liked it”.’
XLI
The root of it all is that the political class in Ireland — the lower- middle class from whom the patriotic associations have drawn their journalists and their leaders for the last ten years — have suffered through the cultivation of hatred as the one energy of their movement, a deprivation which is the intellectual equivalent to a certain surgical operation. Hence the shrillness of their voices. They contemplate all creative power as the eunuchs contemplate Don Juan as he passes through Hell on the white horse.
XLII
To-night G--- said that he has always thought that the bad luck of Ireland comes from hatred being the foundation of our politics. It is possible that emotion is an evocation and in ways beyond the senses alters events---creating good and evil luck. Certain individuals who hate much seem to be followed by violent events outside their control. B--- G--- has been so followed always. It is possible to explain it by saying that hatred awakens hatred in others and in oneself a tendency to violent action; but there are times when there seems more than this---an actual stream of ill- luck. Certainly evocation with symbol has taught me that much that we think limited to certain obvious effects influences the whole being. A meditation on sunlight, for instance, affects the nature throughout, producing all the effects which follow from the symbolical nature of the sun. Hate must, in the same way, create sterility, producing many effects which would follow from meditation on a symbol. Such a symbol would produce not merely hate but associated effects. An emotion produces a symbol- --sensual emotion dreams of water, for instance---just as a symbol produces emotion. The symbol without emotion is more precise and, perhaps, more powerful than an emotion without symbol.
Hatred as a basis of imagination, in ways which one could explain even without magic, helps to dry up the nature and make the sexual abstinence, so common among young men and women in Ireland, possible. This abstinence reacts in its turn on the imagination, so that we get at last that strange eunuch-like tone and temper. For the last ten or twenty years there has been a perpetual drying of the Irish mind with the resultant dust-cloud.
XLIII
I saw Synge to-day and asked how much of his Deirdre was done. He said the third act was right, that he had put a grotesque character, a new character, into the second act and intended to weave him into Act One. He was to come in with Conchubar, carrying some of his belongings, and afterwards at the end of the act to return for a forgotten knife---just enough to make it possible to use him in Act Two. He spoke of his work this winter doubtfully, thought it not very good, seemed only certain of the third act. I did not like to ask more questions lest he should understand that I wished to know if another could complete the work if he died. He is certainly too ill to work himself, and will be for a long time.
XLIV
Met MacDonagh [Note: Executed in 1916.] yesterday---a man with some literary faculty which will probably come to nothing through lack of culture and encouragement. He had just written an article for the Leader, and spoke much as I do myself of the destructiveness of journalism here in Ireland, and was apologetic about his article. He is managing a school on Irish and Gaelic League principles but says he is losing faith in the League. Its writers are infecting Irish not only with the English idiom but with the habits of thought of current Irish journalism, a most un-Celtic thing. ‘The League’, he said, ‘is killing Celtic civilization.’ I told him that Synge about ten years ago foretold this in an article in the Academy. He thought the National Movement practically dead, that the language would be revived but without all that he loved it for. In England this man would have become remarkable in some way, here he is being crushed by the mechanical logic and commonplace eloquence which give power to the most empty mind, because, being ‘something other than human life’, they have no use for distinguished feeling or individual though
t. I mean that within his own mind this mechanical thought is crushing as with an iron roller all that is organic.
XLV
The soul of Ireland has become a vapour and her body a stone.
XLVI
Ireland has grown sterile, because power has passed to men who lack the training which requires a certain amount of wealth to ensure continuity from generation to generation, and to free the mind in part from other tasks. A gentleman is a man whose principal ideas are not connected with his personal needs and his personal success. In old days he was a clerk or a noble, that is to say, he had freedom because of inherited wealth and position, or because of a personal renunciation. The names are different to-day, and I would put the artist and the scholar in the category of the clerk, yet personal renunciation is not now sufficient or the hysterica passio of Ireland would be inspiration, or perhaps it is sufficient but is impossible without inherited culture. For without culture or holiness, which are always the gift of a very few, a man may renounce wealth or any other external thing, but he cannot renounce hatred, envy, jealousy, revenge. Culture is the sanctity of the intellect.