Gwyllim, my devil has yours by the throat; They tussle up and down. Shall's wager on them? Yet will I back my pup-he bears a name, A dreadful name, whose echoes roar of blood The dialogue throughout is, like this passage, with its "shall's" and its echoes from King Lear, unequivocally Shakespearean. The point is driven home, in fact, by Owain's quotations from Shakespeare; it is evidently suggested that, in his imprisonment, he has pastured his soul on the Elizabethans. Mrs. Woods, in a word, has consciously and not unsuccessfully done what most blank-verse dramatists feebly and half-unconsciously attempt. She has not merely mimicked the limbs and outward flourishes of Shakespearean diction, but has here and there reproduced something of its essential quality. GAUDEAMUS IGITUR. Come, no more of grief and dying! Youth's in flower; Give me roses to remember Fie on steeds with leaden paces! Wind, my steed, Beat the lightning for your master, Give me music, give me rapture, Youth that's fled can none recapture: Wisdom's bought, Out on pride and scorn and sadness! Sweetest Earth, I love and love thee, Hues and forms Of the clouds with floating shadows On thy mountains and thy meadows. Earth, there's none that can enslave thee, Not thy lords it is that have thee: Not for gold Art thou sold, But thy lovers at their pleasure Take thy beauty and thy treasure. WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS It is easy, or so it seems to me, to make too much of the influence of race upon literature. On the one hand, he would be a bold man who should postulate absolute purity of race for any mother's son in this mingle-mangle of a Western world. "It's a wise child who knows his own great-great-great-great-grandfathers." On the other hand, I would engage to take a child of guaranteed Saxon ancestry and make him a Kelt of the Kelts by bringing him up in Keltic country and under exclusively Keltic influences. I know at this moment a boy of ten, born of English parents-his mother of a good Yorkshire stock, his father hailing from the south of England-whom the influence of sheer environment has made a typical Parisian. Were he older, one might suspect a certain affectation in his ultraGallicism. As it is, there can be no room for any such suspicion. The race-characteristics (one would say) of the Parisian child have developed in him spontaneously, irrepressibly; and although English influences are not absent from his environment, their effect is absolutely superficial, leaving him fundamentally French. I am not disputing, be it observed, the existence of marked and potent race-characteristics. On the contrary, I assert their existence and their strength, but suggest that they are transmitted rather in the atmosphere than in the blood, and are at least as much a matter of tradition as of heredity. This by way of proviso, lest I should seem to mean too much or too little in describing Mr. W. B. Yeats as the incarnation of the Irish Kelt. Incarnation, indeed, is scarcely the right word; he is rather the quintessentiated spirit of Keltic eld. His name does not imply an exclusively Irish ancestry, and his physique is so ultra-Keltic as almost to suggest a Southern admixture. There has been a good deal of Spanish blood in Ireland since 1588 or earlier; does any of it flow in Mr. Yeats's veins? Or shall we try further back, perhaps, to the Phoenicians? For aught I know, Mr. Yeats's family-tree may disprove all these speculations, and trace his ancestry in a direct line to Brian Borhoime. The matter is really unimportant according to my theory, which is that a Yorkshireman, a Scandinavian, or even a Scot, if caught young enough, might have become equally impregnated with the melancholy, the mystery, the supersensual grace and beauty of the Keltic imagination and its treasure of myth and folklore. I know one Scotchman, at any rate, unconscious of any but Sassenach blood in his composition, who feels the beauty of Deirdre and Grania scarcely less intimately than Mr. Yeats himself. 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 |