Whether Mr Yeats, by some grim fatality, mistook his phantasmagoria for the product of the creative imagination, or whether (as we prefer to believe) he made an effort to discipline them to his poetic purpose and failed, we cannot certainly say.  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.  It is true that something akin to wisdom, or rather a quality whose outward resemblance to wisdom can deceive all but the elect, will emerge from the ruins of war; but true wisdom is not created out of the catastrophic shock of disillusionment.  An unexpected disaster is always held to be in some sort undeserved.  Yet the impulse to rail at destiny, be it never so human, is not wise.  Wisdom is not bitter; at worst it is bitter-sweet, and bitter-sweet is the most subtle and lingering savour of all.

Let us not say in our haste, that without wisdom we are lost.  Wisdom is, after all, but one attitude to life among many.  It happens to be the one which will stand the hardest wear, because it is prepared for all ill-usage.  But hard wear is not the only purpose which an attitude may serve.  We may demand of an attitude that it should enable us to exact the utmost from ourselves.  To refuse to accommodate oneself to the angularities of life or to make provision beforehand for its catastrophes is, indeed, folly; but it may be a divine folly.  It is, at all events, a folly to which poets incline.  But poets are not wise; indeed, the poetry of true wisdom is a creation which can, at the best, be but dimly imagined.  Perhaps, of them all, Lucretius had the largest inkling of what such poetry might be; but he disqualified himself by an aptitude for ecstasy, which made his poetry