ed by
doubt and inquiry, can achieve; and that yet, if once achieved, might seem
to men and women of Connemara or of Galway their very soul. In our study
of that ruined tomb raised by a queen to her dead lover, and finished by
the unpaid labour of great sculptors, after her death from grief, or so
runs the tale, we cannot distinguish the handiworks of Scopas and
Praxiteles; and I wanted to create once more an art where the artist's
handiwork would hide as under those half anonymous chisels, or as we find
it in some old Scots ballads, or in some twelfth or thirteenth century
Arthurian Romance. That handiwork assured, I had martyred no man for
modelling his own image upon Pallas Athena's buckler; for I took great
pleasure in certain allusions to the singer's life, one finds in old
romances and ballads, and thought his presence there all the more poignant
because we discover it half lost, like portly Chaucer, behind his own
maunciple and pardoner upon the Canterbury roads. Wolfram von Eschenbach,
singing his German Parsifal, broke off some description of a famished city
to remember that in his own house at home the very mice lacked food, and
what old ballad singer was it who claimed to have fought by day in the
very battle he sang by night? So masterful indeed was that instinct that
when the minstrel knew not who his poet was, he must needs make up a man:
"When any stranger asks who is the sweetest of singers, answer with one
voice: 'a blind man; he dwells upon rocky Chios; his songs shall be the
most beautiful for ever.'" Elaborate modern psychology sounds egotistical,
I thought, when it speaks in the first person, but not those simple
emotions which resemble the more, the more powerful they are, everybody's
emotion, and I was soon to write many poems where an always personal
emotion was woven into a general pattern of myth and symbol. When the
Fenian poet says that his heart has grown cold and callous--"For thy
hapless fate, dear Ireland, and sorrows of my own"--he but follows
tradition and if he does not move us deeply, it is because he has no
sensuous musical vocabulary that comes at need, without compelling him to
sedentary toil and so driving him out from his fellows. I thought to
create that sensuous, musical vocabulary, and not for myself only, but
that I might leave it to later Irish poets, much as a mediaeval Japanese
painter left his style as an inheritance to his family, and was careful to
use a traditional manne