Taylor began hesitating and stopping for words, but after speaking very badly for a little, straightened his figure and spoke as out of a dream:  “I am carried to another age, a nobler court, and another Lord Chancellor is speaking.  I am at the court of the first Pharaoh.”  Thereupon he put into the mouth of that Egyptian all his audience had listened to, but now it was spoken to the children of Israel.  “If you have any spirituality as you boast, why not use our great empire to spread it through the world, why still cling to that beggarly nationality of yours? what are its history and its works weighed with those of Egypt?” Then his voice changed and sank:  “I see a man at the edge of the crowd; he is standing listening there, but he will not obey”; and then, with his voice rising to a cry, “had he obeyed he would never have come down the mountain carrying in his arms the tables of the Law in the language of the outlaw.”

That Mr. Yeats, in spite of his secession from politics, loves the old passionate Ireland, is clear from the poem called September, 1913, with its refrain:—­

    Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone
    And with O’Leary in the grave.

And to this Mr. Yeats has since added a significant note:—­

“Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone” sounds old-fashioned now.  It seemed true in 1913, but I did not foresee 1916.  The late Dublin Rebellion, whatever one may say of its wisdom, will long be remembered for its heroism.  “They weighed so lightly what they gave,” and gave, too, in some cases without hope of success.

Mr. Yeats is by nature a poet of the heroic world—­a hater of the burgess and of the till.  He boasts in Responsibilities of ancestors who left him

                                      blood
    That has not passed through any huckster’s loin.

There may be a good deal of vanity and gesticulation in all this, but it is the vanity and gesticulation of a man of genius.  As we cannot have the genius of Mr. Yeats without the gestures, we may as well take the gestures in good part.

2.  HIS POETRY

It is distinctly surprising to find Mr. Yeats compared to Milton and Jeremy Taylor, and Mr. Forrest Reid, who makes the comparison, does not ask us to apply it at all points.  There is a remoteness about Milton’s genius, however, an austere and rarefied beauty, to which Mr. Reid discovers certain likenesses in the work of Mr. Yeats.  Mr. Yeats is certainly a little remote.  He is so remote that some people regard his work with mixed feelings, as a rather uncanny thing.  The reason may partly be that Mr. Yeats is not a singer in the ordinary tradition of poets.  His poems are incantations rather than songs.  They seem to call for an order of priests and priestesses to chant them.  There are one or two of his early poems, like Down by the Sally Garden, that might conceivably be sung at a fair or even at a ballad-concert.