Of this, however, we are certain, that
somehow, somewhere, there has been disaster. He is empty, now. He has
the apparatus of enchantment, but no potency in his soul. He is forced
to fall back upon the artistic honesty which has never forsaken him.
That it is an insufficient reserve let this passage show:--
'For those that love the world serve it in action,
Grow rich, popular, and full of influence,
And should they paint or write still it is action:
The struggle of the fly in marmalade.
The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours,
The sentimentalist himself; while art
Is but a vision of reality....'
Mr Yeats is neither rhetorician nor sentimentalist. He is by structure
and impulse an artist. But structure and impulse are not enough.
Passionate apprehension must be added to them. Because this is lacking
in Mr Yeats those lines, concerned though they are with things he holds
most dear, are prose and not poetry.
[APRIL, 1919.
_The Wisdom of Anatole France_
How few are the wise writers who remain to us? They are so few that it
seems, at moments, that wisdom, like justice of old, is withdrawing from
the world, and that when their fullness of years is accomplished, as,
alas! it soon must be, the wise men who will leave us will have been the
last of their kind.
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