He did not paint the model as we tried to, for some other image rose always before his eyes (a St. John in the Desert I remember), and already he spoke to us of his visions. His conversation, so lucid and vehement to-day, was all but incomprehensible, though now and again some phrase could be understood and repeated. One day he announced that he was leaving the Art Schools because his will was weak, and the arts or any other emotional pursuit would but weaken it further.
Mr. Yeats's memoirs, however, are not confined to prose. His volume of verse called Responsibilities is almost equally autobiographical. Much of it is a record of quarrels with contemporaries—quarrels about Synge, about Hugh Lane and his pictures, about all sorts of things. He aims barbed epigrams at his adversaries. Very Yeatsian is an epigram "to a poet, who would have me praise certain bad poets, imitators of his and mine":—
You say, as I have often given tongue
In praise of what another's said or sung,
'Twere politic to do the like by these;
But have you known a dog to praise his fleas?
In an earlier version, the last line was still more arrogant:—
But where's the wild dog that has praised his fleas?
There is a noble arrogance again in the lines called A Coat:—
I made my song a coat,
Covered with embroideries,
Out of old mythologies,
From heel to throat.
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eye,
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there's more enterprise
In walking naked.
Mr. Yeats still gives some of his songs the old embroidered vesture. But his work is now more frankly personal than it used to be—at once harsher and simpler. One would not give Responsibilities to a reader who knew nothing of Mr. Yeats's previous work. There is too much raging at the world in it, too little of the perfected beauty of The Wind Among the Reeds. One finds ugly words like "wive" and "thigh" inopportunely used, and the retort to Mr. George Moore's Hail and Farewell, though legitimately offensive, is obscure in statement. Still, there is enough beauty in the book to make it precious to the lover of literature. An Elizabethan might have made the music of the first verse of A Woman Homer Sung.
And what splendour of praise and censure Mr. Yeats gives us in The Second Troy:—
Why should I blame her, that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways.
Or hurled the little streets against the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary, and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?