It is with Mr. Yeats that, so far as I know, the genuine spirit of Irish antiquity and Irish folk-lore makes its first entrance into English verse. Irish poets before him have either been absorbed in love, potheen, and politics—as Mr. Yeats himself puts it, they have "sung their loudest when a company of rebels or revellers has been at hand to applaud"—or (like Goldsmith and Moore) they have become to all intents and purposes Anglicised. Even William Allingham's fairies, pleasant little people though they be, are rather Anglo-Saxon Brownies than Keltic Sheogues. In Mr. Yeats we have an astonishing union of primitive imagination and feeling with cultivated and consciously artistic expression. He does not manipulate from outside a dead and conventionalised mythological machinery. The very spirit of the myth-makers and myth-believers is in him. His imaginative life finds its spontaneous, natural utterance in the language of the "Keltic twilight." This is no literary jargon to him, but his veritable mother-tongue. When he deals with Catholicism, you see in his mental processes a living repetition of what occurred when the first missionaries evangelised Hibernia. You see the primitive pagan assimilating the Catholic mythology to his own spiritual habits and needs, and attaching purely pagan concepts to Christian names and terms. His moral ideas are enlarged, no doubt; his metaphysics are practically unaffected. Christianity, in Mr. Yeats's poems, is not a creed, but a system of folk-lore. You do not trouble about its historical basis, you neither accept nor reject its dogmas. It is part and parcel of the innumerable host of spiritual entitites and influences which beleaguers humanity from the cradle to the grave. Belief in these entities and influences is no more a matter of intellectual determination, of voluntary assent, than belief in the air we breathe. It is part of our constitution: innate, inevitable. Mr. Yeats's religion (I speak, of course, of Mr. Yeats the poet, not of the theoretical mystic and editor of Blake) is not "morality touched with emotion," but rather superstition touched with morality. It is "older than any historythat is written in any book…."

[L]et us glance at Mr. Yeats's epic, The Wanderings of Oisin. And here it must be said that the curious crispness, delicacy, and artful simplicity of his style is the result of patient effort and slow development. His verse has now a peculiar, indefinable distinction, as of one tiptoeing exquisitely through a fairy minuet; whereas ten years ago its movement was often flat-footed and conventional enough. The Wanderings of Oisin, as it now stands, is very different from the poem originally published under that title.

[In its original form, the poem] is pretty, indeed, and fancifully decorative, with unmistakable foretastes of the poet's maturer quality; but it is nerveless, diffuse, and now and then commonplace. Everything of value is retained in the later version; some exquisite touches are added….

[Every] change tends to heighten the racial colour of the passage (if I may call it so) and make it more characteristically Keltic. The first form might have been the work of an Englishman cleverly applying the method of Christabel to an Irish subject; the second form is Irish to its inmost fibre…. Magical and mysterious though the subject be, the design is perfectly definite, and is picked out, so to speak, in washes of brilliant, translucent, almost unharmonised colours. The picture is illuminated rather than painted, like the border of an ancient manuscript. It is characteristic of the Keltic imagination, though it may dwell by preference in the mist, to emerge at times into a scintillant blaze of light and colour.

[The Wanderings of Oisin is] a singularly beautiful and moving poem, in which the high-hearted bravery and the wistful beauty of the old Irish myth-cycle find the most sympathetic of interpreters….

Mr. Yeats draws his true strength from his native soil. In these early experiments the conventionality of the verse was particularly noticeable. It showed scarcely a trace of individual accent, and was not to be distinguished from the blank verse of the scores of stillborn "poetic dramas" which every year brings forth. No sooner had Mr. Yeats returned to Ireland and chosen a dramatic motive from Irish folk-lore, than his individuality asserted itself not only in the idea and structure of his work but in its rhythms as well. The Countess Cathleen has undergone stringent revision since its first appearance; and here, as in The Wanderings of Oisin, the changes—and especially the rounding-off of metrically defective lines—have all been for the better. But even in its original form the poem was full of a weird impressiveness which was then new to dramatic literature.

A melancholy theme indeed is that of The Countess Cathleen. It can be told in a few words: The land is famine-stricken; Satan sends two demons in the guise of merchants to buy the souls of the starving peasants; the Countess Cathleen will sacrifice all her vast wealth, her "gold and green forests," to save the people; but the emissaries of hell (the heavenly powers being apparently asleep) steal her treasure, becalm her ships, delay the passage of her flocks and herds; so that at last there is nothing for her to do but to sell her own soul and feed the people with the proceeds. The absolute impotence, the practical non-existence, of the powers of good, and the perfect ease with which the powers of evil execute their plots, render the play depressing almost to the point of exasperation. It is true that at the end an Angel intervenes, and gives us to understand that Cathleen's soul is safe, because

But this is a tardy consolation to the reader, who feels, moreover, that Satan is not quite fairly dealt with, being baulked by a quibble, not openly encountered and vanquished. Oppressive melancholy, however, is the note of the folklore from which Mr. Yeats draws his inspiration; though in his delightful little book of prose, The Celtic Twilight, he seems inclined to contest the fact. Be this as it may, The Countess Cathleen (especially in its revised form) is as beautiful as it is sad. The blank verse has a monotonous, insinuating melody which is all its own, arising not only from the dainty simplicity of the diction, but from the preponderance of final monosyllables and of what the professors of Shakespearometry call "endstopped" lines. Mr. Yeats eschews all attempt to get dramatic force and variety into his verse by aid of the wellknown tricks of frequent elisions, feminine endings, periodic structure, and all the rest of it. And herein he does well. No rush and tumult of versification could suit his mournful fantasies so perfectly as this crooning rhythm, this limpid melody, which seems, as Cyrano de Bergerac would say, to have a touch of the brogue in it….

In [The Wind Among the Reeds and The Shadowy Waters, Mr. Yeats's] peculiar gifts of imagination and of utterance are seen at their best. He extracts from a simple and rather limited vocabulary effects of the rarest delicacy and distinction. There is a certain appearance of mannerism, no doubt, in Mr. Yeats's individuality. One can scarcely turn a page of these books without coming upon the epithets "dim," "glimmering," "wandering," "pearlpale," "dove-grey," "dew-dropping," and the like. His imagery is built up out of a very few simple elements, which he combines and re-combines unweariedly. The materials he employs, in short, are those of primitive folkpoetry; but he touches them to new and often marvellous beauty. What in our haste we take for mannerism may be more justly denominated style, the inevitable accent of his genius.

One other word, and I have done. It appears from the notes to The Wind Among the Reeds, rather than from the poems themselves, that Mr. Yeats is becoming more and more addicted to a petrified, fossilised symbolism, a system of hieroglyphs which may have had some inherent significance for their inventors, but which have now become matters of research, of speculation, of convention. I cannot but regard this tendency as ominous. His art cannot gain and may very easily lose by it. A conventional symbol may be of the greatest interest to the anthropologist or the antiquary; for the poet it can have no value. If a symbol does not spring spontaneously from his own imagination and express an analogy borne in upon his own spiritual perception, he may treasure it in his mental museum, but he ought not to let such a piece of inert matter cumber the seed-plot of his poetry.