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PER AMICA SILENTIA LUNAE




  OTHER WORKS OF WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

  POEMS AND PLAYS, 2 volumes:

     I--Lyrics. $2.00.
    II--DRAMATIC POEMS. $2.00.

  THE CELTIC TWILIGHT. $1.50.

  IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL. $1.50.

  STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN. $1.25.

  REVERIES OVER CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH. Illustrated. $2.00.

  RESPONSIBILITIES AND OTHER POEMS. $1.25.

  THE TABLES OF THE LAW. $1.25.

  THE HOUR GLASS AND OTHER PLAYS. $1.25.

  THE GREEN HELMET AND OTHER POEMS. $1.25.

  THE CUTTING OF AN AGATE. $1.50.

  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.




PER AMICA SILENTIA LUNAE




_SPECIAL LIMITED EDITION_




  PER AMICA SILENTIA LUNAE


  BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS


  New York
  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
  1918
  _All rights reserved_




  COPYRIGHT, 1918,
  BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

  Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1918.


  Norwood Press
  J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
  Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.




PROLOGUE


MY DEAR "MAURICE"--You will remember that afternoon in Calvados last
summer when your black Persian "Minoulooshe," who had walked behind us for
a good mile, heard a wing flutter in a bramble-bush? For a long time we
called her endearing names in vain. She seemed resolute to spend her night
among the brambles. She had interrupted a conversation, often interrupted
before, upon certain thoughts so long habitual that I may be permitted to
call them my convictions. When I came back to London my mind ran again and
again to those conversations and I could not rest till I had written out
in this little book all that I had said or would have said. Read it some
day when "Minoulooshe" is asleep.

W. B. YEATS.

_May_ 11, 1917.




EGO DOMINUS TUUS


HIC

  On the grey sand beside the shallow stream,
  Under your old wind-beaten tower, where still
  A lamp burns on above the open book
  That Michael Robartes left, you walk in the moon,
  And, though you have passed the best of life, still trace,
  Enthralled by the unconquerable delusion,
  Magical shapes.

ILLE

                     By the help of an image
  I call to my own opposite, summon all
  That I have handled least, least looked upon.

HIC

  And I would find myself and not an image.

ILLE

  That is our modern hope, and by its light
  We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind
  And lost the old nonchalance of the hand;
  Whether we have chosen chisel, pen, or brush,
  We are but critics, or but half create,
  Timid, entangled, empty, and abashed,
  Lacking the countenance of our friends.

HIC

                                    And yet,
  The chief imagination of Christendom,
  Dante Alighieri, so utterly found himself,
  That he has made that hollow face of his
  More plain to the mind's eye than any face
  But that of Christ.

ILLE

                 And did he find himself,
  Or was the hunger that had made it hollow
  A hunger for the apple on the bough
  Most out of reach? And is that spectral image
  The man that Lapo and that Guido knew?
  I think he fashioned from his opposite
  An image that might have been a stony face,
  Staring upon a Beduin's horse-hair roof,
  From doored and windowed cliff, or half upturned
  Among the coarse grass and the camel dung.
  He set his chisel to the hardest stone;
  Being mocked by Guido for his lecherous life,
  Derided and deriding, driven out
  To climb that stair and eat that bitter bread,
  He found the unpersuadable justice, he found
  The most exalted lady loved by a man.

HIC

  Yet surely there are men who have made their art
  Out of no tragic war; lovers of life,
  Impulsive men, that look for happiness,
  And sing when they have found it.

ILLE

                              No, not sing,
  For those that love the world serve it in action,
  Grow rich, popular, and full of influence;
  And should they paint or write still is it 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.
  What portion in the world can the artist have,
  Who has awakened from the common dream,
  But dissipation and despair?

HIC

                                  And yet,
  No one denies to Keats love of the world,
  Remember his deliberate happiness.

ILLE

  His art is happy, but who knows his mind?
  I see a schoolboy, when I think of him,
  With face and nose pressed to a sweetshop window,
  For certainly he sank into his grave,
  His senses and his heart unsatisfied;
  And made--being poor, ailing and ignorant,
  Shut out from all the luxury of the world,
  The ill-bred son of a livery stable keeper--
  Luxuriant song.

HIC

              Why should you leave the lamp
  Burning alone beside an open book,
  And trace these characters upon the sand?
  A style is found by sedentary toil,
  And by the imitation of great masters.

ILLE

  Because I seek an image, not a book;
  Those men that in their writings are most wise
  Own nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts.
  I call to the mysterious one who yet
  Shall walk the wet sand by the water's edge,
  And look most like me, being indeed my double,
  And prove of all imaginable things
  The most unlike, being my anti-self,
  And, standing by these characters, disclose
  All that I seek; and whisper it as though
  He were afraid the birds, who cry aloud
  Their momentary cries before it is dawn,
  Would carry it away to blasphemous men.

_December_ 1915.




PER AMICA SILENTIA LUNAE




ANIMA HOMINIS


I

When I come home after meeting men who are strange to me, and sometimes
even after talking to women, I go over all I have said in gloom and
disappointment. Perhaps I have overstated everything from a desire to vex
or startle, from hostility that is but fear; or all my natural thoughts
have been drowned by an undisciplined sympathy. My fellow-diners have
hardly seemed of mixed humanity, and how should I keep my head among
images of good and evil, crude allegories.

But when I shut my door and light the candle, I invite a Marmorean Muse,
an art, where no thought or emotion has come to mind because another man
has thought or felt something different, for now there must be no
reaction, action only, and the world must move my heart but to the heart's
discovery of itself, and I begin to dream of eyelids that do not quiver
before the bayonet: all my thoughts have ease and joy, I am all virtue and
confidence. When I come to put in rhyme what I have found it will be a
hard toil, but for a moment I believe I have found myself and not my
anti-self. It is only the shrinking from toil perhaps that convinces me
that I have been no more myself than is the cat the medicinal grass it is
eating in the garden.

How could I have mistaken for myself an heroic condition that from early
boyhood has made me superstitious? That which comes as complete, as
minutely organised, as are those elaborate, brightly lighted buildings and
sceneries appearing in a moment, as I lie between sleeping and waking,
must come from above me and beyond me. At times I remember that place in
Dante where he sees in his chamber the "Lord of Terrible Aspect," and how,
seeming "to rejoice inwardly that it was a marvel to see, speaking, he
said, many things among the which I could understand but few, and of these
this: ego dominus tuus"; or should the conditions come, not as it were in
a gesture--as the image of a man--but in some fine landscape, it is of
Boehme, maybe, that I think, and of that country where we "eternally
solace ourselves in the excellent beautiful flourishing of all manner of
flowers and forms, both trees and plants, and all kinds of fruit."


II

When I consider the minds of my friends, among artists and emotional
writers, I discover a like contrast. I have sometimes told one close
friend that her only fault is a habit of harsh judgment with those who
have not her sympathy, and she has written comedies where the wickedest
people seem but bold children. She does not know why she has created that
world where no one is ever judged, a high celebration of indulgence, but
to me it seems that her ideal of beauty is the compensating dream of a
nature wearied out by over-much judgment. I know a famous actress who in
private life is like the captain of some buccaneer ship holding his crew
to good behaviour at the mouth of a blunderbuss, and upon the stage she
excels in the representation of women who stir to pity and to desire
because they need our protection, and is most adorable as one of those
young queens imagined by Maeterlinck who have so little will, so little
self, that they are like shadows sighing at the edge of the world. When I
last saw her in her own house she lived in a torrent of words and
movements, she could not listen, and all about her upon the walls were
women drawn by Burne-Jones in his latest period. She had invited me in the
hope that I would defend those women, who were always listening, and are
as necessary to her as a contemplative Buddha to a Japanese Samurai,
against a French critic who would persuade her to take into her heart in
their stead a Post-Impressionist picture of a fat, ruddy, nude woman lying
upon a Turkey carpet.

There are indeed certain men whose art is less an opposing virtue than a
compensation for some accident of health or circumstance. During the riots
over the first production of the _Playboy of the Western World_ Synge was
confused, without clear thought, and was soon ill--indeed the strain of
that week may perhaps have hastened his death--and he was, as is usual
with gentle and silent men, scrupulously accurate in all his statements.
In his art he made, to delight his ear and his mind's eye, voluble
daredevils who "go romancing through a romping lifetime... to the dawning
of the Judgment Day." At other moments this man, condemned to the life of
a monk by bad health, takes an amused pleasure in "great queens... making
themselves matches from the start to the end." Indeed, in all his
imagination he delights in fine physical life, in life where the moon
pulls up the tide. The last act of _Deirdre of the Sorrows_, where his art
is at its noblest, was written upon his death-bed. He was not sure of any
world to come, he was leaving his betrothed and his unwritten play--"Oh,
what a waste of time," he said to me; he hated to die, and in the last
speeches of Deirdre and in the middle act he accepted death and dismissed
life with a gracious gesture. He gave to Deirdre the emotion that seemed
to him most desirable, most difficult, most fitting, and maybe saw in
those delighted seven years, now dwindling from her, the fulfilment of his
own life.


III

When I think of any great poetical writer of the past (a realist is an
historian and obscures the cleavage by the record of his eyes) I
comprehend, if I know the lineaments of his life, that the work is the
man's flight from his entire horoscope, his blind struggle in the network
of the stars. William Morris, a happy, busy, most irascible man, described
dim colour and pensive emotion, following, beyond any man of his time, an
indolent muse; while Savage Landor topped us all in calm nobility when the
pen was in his hand, as in the daily violence of his passion when he had
laid it down. He had in his _Imaginary Conversations_ reminded us, as it
were, that the Venus de Milo is a stone, and yet he wrote when the copies
did not come from the printer as soon as he expected: "I have... had the
resolution to tear in pieces all my sketches and projects and to forswear
all future undertakings. I have tried to sleep away my time and pass
two-thirds of the twenty-four hours in bed. I may speak of myself as a
dead man." I imagine Keats to have been born with that thirst for luxury
common to many at the outsetting of the Romantic Movement, and not able,
like wealthy Beckford, to slake it with beautiful and strange objects. It
drove him to imaginary delights; ignorant, poor, and in poor health, and
not perfectly well-bred, he knew himself driven from tangible luxury;
meeting Shelley, he was resentful and suspicious because he, as Leigh Hunt
recalls, "being a little too sensitive on the score of his origin, felt
inclined to see in every man of birth his natural enemy."


IV

Some thirty years ago I read a prose allegory by Simeon Solomon, long out
of print and unprocurable, and remember or seem to remember a sentence, "a
hollow image of fulfilled desire." All happy art seems to me that hollow
image, but when its lineaments express also the poverty or the
exasperation that set its maker to the work, we call it tragic art. Keats
but gave us his dream of luxury; but while reading Dante we never long
escape the conflict, partly because the verses are at moments a mirror of
his history, and yet more because that history is so clear and simple that
it has the quality of art. I am no Dante scholar, and I but read him in
Shadwell or in Dante Rossetti, but I am always persuaded that he
celebrated the most pure lady poet ever sung and the Divine Justice, not
merely because death took that lady and Florence banished her singer, but
because he had to struggle in his own heart with his unjust anger and his
lust; while unlike those of the great poets, who are at peace with the
world and at war with themselves, he fought a double war. "Always," says
Boccaccio, "both in youth and maturity he found room among his virtues for
lechery"; or as Matthew Arnold preferred to change the phrase, "his
conduct was exceeding irregular." Guido Cavalcanti, as Rossetti translates
him, finds "too much baseness" in his friend:

  "And still thy speech of me, heartfelt and kind,
  Hath made me treasure up thy poetry;
  But now I dare not, for thy abject life,
  Make manifest that I approve thy rhymes."

And when Dante meets Beatrice in Eden, does she not reproach him because,
when she had taken her presence away, he followed in spite of warning
dreams, false images, and now, to save him in his own despite, she has
"visited... the Portals of the Dead," and chosen Virgil for his courier?
While Gino da Pistoia complains that in his _Commedia_ his "lovely
heresies... beat the right down and let the wrong go free":

  "Therefore his vain decrees, wherein he lied,
  Must be like empty nutshells flung aside;
  Yet through the rash false witness set to grow,
  French and Italian vengeance on such pride
  May fall like Anthony on Cicero."

Dante himself sings to Giovanni Guirino "at the approach of death";

  "The King, by whose rich grave his servants be
  With plenty beyond measure set to dwell,
  Ordains that I my bitter wrath dispel,
  And lift mine eyes to the great Consistory."


V

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with
ourselves, poetry. Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from
remembering the crowd they have won or may win, we sing amid our
uncertainty; and, smitten even in the presence of the most high beauty by
the knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm shudders. I think, too, that no
fine poet, no matter how disordered his life, has ever, even in his mere
life, had pleasure for his end. Johnson and Dowson, friends of my youth,
were dissipated men, the one a drunkard, the other a drunkard and mad
about women, and yet they had the gravity of men who had found life out
and were awakening from the dream; and both, one in life and art and one
in art and less in life, had a continual preoccupation with religion. Nor
has any poet I have read of or heard of or met with been a sentimentalist.
The other self, the anti-self or the antithetical self, as one may choose
to name it, comes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion
is reality. The sentimentalists are practical men who believe in money, in
position, in a marriage bell, and whose understanding of happiness is to
be so busy whether at work or at play, that all is forgotten but the
momentary aim. They find their pleasure in a cup that is filled from
Lethe's wharf, and for the awakening, for the vision, for the revelation
of reality, tradition offers us a different word--ecstasy. An old artist
wrote to me of his wanderings by the quays of New York, and how he found
there a woman nursing a sick child, and drew her story from her. She
spoke, too, of other children who had died: a long tragic story. "I
wanted to paint her," he wrote, "if I denied myself any of the pain I
could not believe in my own ecstasy." We must not make a false faith by
hiding from our thoughts the causes of doubt, for faith is the highest
achievement of the human intellect, the only gift man can make to God, and
therefore it must be offered in sincerity. Neither must we create, by
hiding ugliness, a false beauty as our offering to the world. He only can
create the greatest imaginable beauty who has endured all imaginable
pangs, for only when we have seen and foreseen what we dread shall we be
rewarded by that dazzling unforeseen wing-footed wanderer. We could not
find him if he were not in some sense of our being and yet of our being
but as water with fire, a noise with silence. He is of all things not
impossible the most difficult, for that only which comes easily can never
be a portion of our being, "Soon got, soon gone," as the proverb says. I
shall find the dark grow luminous, the void fruitful when I understand I
have nothing, that the ringers in the tower have appointed for the hymen
of the soul a passing bell.

The last knowledge has often come most quickly to turbulent men, and for a
season brought new turbulence. When life puts away her conjuring tricks
one by one, those that deceive us longest may well be the wine-cup and the
sensual kiss, for our Chambers of Commerce and of Commons have not the
divine architecture of the body, nor has their frenzy been ripened by the
sun. The poet, because he may not stand within the sacred house but lives
amid the whirlwinds that beset its threshold, may find his pardon.


VI

I think the Christian saint and hero, instead of being merely
dissatisfied, make deliberate sacrifice. I remember reading once an
autobiography of a man who had made a daring journey in disguise to
Russian exiles in Siberia, and his telling how, very timid as a child, he
schooled himself by wandering at night through dangerous streets. Saint
and hero cannot be content to pass at moments to that hollow image and
after become their heterogeneous selves, but would always, if they could,
resemble the antithetical self. There is a shadow of type on type, for in
all great poetical styles there is saint or hero, but when it is all over
Dante can return to his chambering and Shakespeare to his "pottle pot."
They sought no impossible perfection but when they handled paper or
parchment. So too will saint or hero, because he works in his own flesh
and blood and not in paper or parchment, have more deliberate
understanding of that other flesh and blood.

Some years ago I began to believe that our culture, with its doctrine of
sincerity and self-realisation, made us gentle and passive, and that the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance were right to found theirs upon the
imitation of Christ or of some classic hero. St. Francis and Caesar Borgia
made themselves over-mastering, creative persons by turning from the
mirror to meditation upon a mask. When I had this thought I could see
nothing else in life. I could not write the play I had planned, for all
became allegorical, and though I tore up hundreds of pages in my endeavour
to escape from allegory, my imagination became sterile for nearly five
years and I only escaped at last when I had mocked in a comedy my own
thought. I was always thinking of the element of imitation in style and in
life, and of the life beyond heroic imitation. I find in an old diary: "I
think all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other
life, on a re-birth as something not one's self, something created in a
moment and perpetually renewed; in playing a game like that of a child
where one loses the infinite pain of self-realisation, in a grotesque or
solemn painted face put on that one may hide from the terror of
judgment.... Perhaps all the sins and energies of the world are but the
world's flight from an infinite blinding beam"; and again at an earlier
date: "If we cannot imagine ourselves as different from what we are, and
try to assume that second self, we cannot impose a discipline upon
ourselves though we may accept one from others. Active virtue, as
distinguished from the passive acceptance of a code, is therefore
theatrical, consciously dramatic, the wearing of a mask.... Wordsworth,
great poet though he be, is so often flat and heavy partly because his
moral sense, being a discipline he had not created, a mere obedience, has
no theatrical element. This increases his popularity with the better kind
of journalists and politicians who have written books."


VII

I thought the hero found hanging upon some oak of Dodona an ancient mask,
where perhaps there lingered something of Egypt, and that he changed it to
his fancy, touching it a little here and there, gilding the eyebrows or
putting a gilt line where the cheekbone comes; that when at last he
looked out of its eyes he knew another's breath came and went within his
breath upon the carven lips, and that his eyes were upon the instant fixed
upon a visionary world: how else could the god have come to us in the
forest? The good, unlearned books say that He who keeps the distant stars
within His fold comes without intermediary, but Plutarch's precepts and
the experience of old women in Soho, ministering their witchcraft to
servant girls at a shilling apiece, will have it that a