Part 1 (1/2)

Discoveries

by William Butler Yeats

PROPHET, PRIEST AND KING

The little theatrical company I write ive a perfor enough I went there fro a little before the players, tried to open aMy hands were black with dirt in a lass and a part of thefra in this room was half in ruins, the rotten boards cracked under my feet, and our new proscenium and the new boards of the platform looked out of place, and yet the rooallery over the stage It had been built by soenerations ago, and was a memory of we knew not what unfinished scheme

From there I went to look for the players and called for infor priest, who had invited the of an audience He lived in a high house with other priests, and as I went in I noticed with a whiht over the door, for he had once told o quarrelled with the bishop, got drunk, and hurled a stone through the painted glass He was a clever man, who read Meredith and Ibsen, but sorate by his house-keeper, instead of the customary view of an Italian lake or the coloured tissue-paper The players, who had been giving a perfor town, had not yet co their costumes and properties at the hotel he had recoh the half-ruined town and to visit the convent schools and the cathedral, where, owing to his influence, two of our young Irish sculptors had been set to carve an altar and the heads of pillars I had only heard of this work, and I found its strangeness and simplicity--one of theet the meretriciousness of the architecture and the commercial commonplace of the inlaid pavements The new rowth, and the worst of the old & the best of the neere side by side without any sign of transition The convent school was, as other like places have been torooht to the iination and the eyes A new floor had been put into soreat mullioned , cut off at the ly happy children The nuns, who show in their own convents, where they can put what they like, a love of what is ulations compel them to do all with a few colours and a feers I think it was that day, but am not sure, that I had lunch at a convent and told fairy stories to a couple of nuns, and I hope it was not mere politeness that s

A good many of our audience, when the curtain went up in the old ball-rooreat deal of respect for my friend and there were other priests there Presently the e strayed off so two or three pence and asking to be let into the sixpenny seats I let them join the melancholy crowd The play professed to tell of the heroic life of ancient Ireland but was really full of sedentary refinement and the spirituality of cities Every eht be, and a love and pathos where passion had faded into sentiment, e h the shadows of death and battle I watched it with growing rage It was not my oork, but I have soehalf despair Why should weto say that was not better said in that work-house dormitory, where a feers and a few coloured counterpanes and the coloured walls had racious beauty? Presently the play was changed and our cole to wake into laughter an audience, out of whom the life had run as if it ater, I rejoiced, as I had over that broken -pane Here was soagging horribly, condescending to his audience, though not without conteovernment official who had come down from Dublin, partly out of interest in this attempt 'to educate the people,' and partly because it was his holiday and it was necessary to go somewhere, entertained us with little jokes Somebody, not I think a priest, talked of the spiritual destiny of our race and praised the night's work, for the play was refined and the people really very attentive, and he could not understand my discontent; but presently he was silenced by the patter of jokes

I had ot up in the ht and driven some ten miles to catch an early train to Dublin, and were already on their way to their shops and offices I had brought the visitor's book of the hotel to turn over its pages while waiting for es full of obscenities, scrawled there some two or three weeks before, by Dublin visitors it seemed, for a notorious Dublin street was ht it worth his while to tear out the page or block out the lines, and as I put the book away ih ht 'If we poets are to rate the hulish have driven away the kings, and turned the prophets into de a people if you have not prophet, priest and king'

PERSONALITY AND THE INTELLECTUAL ESSENCES

My work in Ireland has continually set this thought before orous and siiven to art but to a shop, or teaching in a National School, or dispensing medicine?' I had not wanted to 'elevate them' or 'educate them,' as these words are understood, but to e audience, certainly not what is called a national audience, but enough people for what is accidental and teland where there have been soactivities and so much systematic education one only escapes fro students, but here there is the right audience could one but get its ears I have always come to this certainty, what moves natural men in the arts is what moves them in life, and that is, intensity of personal life, intonations that show theth, the essentialin the o out of the theatre with the strength they live by strengthened with looking upon some passion that could, whatever its chosen way of life, strike down an eneirl's heart They have not h they have a little, or with the speculations of s will tire on the road if there is nothing in their hearts but vague senti to have an affectionate feeling about flowers, that will not pull the cart out of the ditch An exciting person, whether the hero of a play or the reatest voluy must seem to come out of the body as out of the ine a character, 'Have I given him the roots, as it were, of all faculties necessary for life?'

And only when one is certain of that ination with joy I even doubt if any play had ever a great popularity that did not use, or seeies of its principal actor to the full Villon the robber could have delighted these Irishs, if he and they had been born to the same traditions of word and symbol, but Shelley could not; and as men came to live in towns and to read printed books and to have many specialised activities, it has become more possible to produce Shelleys and less and less possible to produce Villons The last Villon dwindled into Robert Burns because the highest faculties had faded, taking the sense of beauty with theue heaven & left the lower to lumber where they best could In literature, partly from the lack of that spoken hich knits us to norht in the whole ether--but have found a new delight, in essences, in states of ination, in all that comes to us most easily in elaborate music There are tays before literature--upward into ever-growing subtlety, with Verhaeren, with Mallarreeives birth to a new passion, and what see the soul with us until all is siain That is the choice of choices--the way of the bird until common eyes have lost us, or to the oes with us, for the bird's song is beautiful, and the traditions ofalwaysup now a Shelley, noinburne, now a Wagner, are it ic hymn printed by the Abbe de Villars has called the Crown of Living and Melodious Diamonds If the carts have hit our fancy we rown so fond of a beauty accu time be impatient with our thirst for mere force, in to slip aeStar is better than Burns's beer house--surely it was beer not barleycorn--except at the day's weary end; and it is always better than that uncomfortable place where there is no beer, the machine shop of the realists

THE MUSICIAN AND THE ORATOR

Walter Pater says et noho, that oratory is their type You will side with the one or the other according to the nature of your energy, and I in e audience before hihter, tears, and but so s of words I would even avoid the conversation of the lovers of music, ould draw us into the impersonal land of sound and colour, and would have no one write with a sonata in hisadmitted that they will see before we do that melodious crown We may remind them that the housemaid does not respect the piano-tuner as she does the plu all poets Music is the s and words the most personal, and that is whytiest them, and when the words are so broken and softened and er, they s the on the banjo She is pretty and if I didn't listen to her I could have watched her, and if I didn't watch her I could have listened Her voice, the movements of her body, the expression of her face all said the sa A player of a different teht have been delightful in some other way A movement not of hted and I did not knohy until I thought 'that is the way my people, the people I see in the mind's eye, play music, and I like it because it is all personal, as personal as Villon's poetry' The little instruht and the player can ers and the ; and all the while her movements call up into the mind, so erect and natural she is, whatever is most beautiful in her daily life Nearly all the old instruan was once a little instruave it to God in the cathedrals where it befits Hi But if you sit at the piano it is the piano, theof you ers and your intellect

THE LOOKING-GLass

I have just been talking to a girl with a shrillShe is fresh froraphy 'whereby a soul can be discerned,' but what is the value of an education, or even in the long run of a science, that does not begin with the personality, the habitual self, and illustrate all by that? Soht her to speak for the most part on whatever note of her voice is , not singing, to so note after note and, as it were, caressing her words a little as if she loved the sound of theht her after this sorown a habit to live for eye and ear A wise theatreand beautiful life the fashi+on, teaching before all else the heroic discipline of the looking-glass, for is not beauty, even as lasting love, one of the most difficult of the arts?

THE TREE OF LIFE