he more than Nietzschean supermanliness of his supermen and superwomen.
More significant than these, however, was the symbolism of what we call
the Celtic school of poets in Ireland. For here both their artistic
impressionism and their mystic spirituality found a congenial soil. The
principal mediating force was Mr. Arthur Symons, friend of Verlaine and
of Yeats, and himself the most penetrating interpreter of Symbolism,
both as critic and as poet.[14] And to the French influence was added
that of Blake, a poet too great to be included in any school, but allied
to symbolism by his scorn for 'intellect' and for rhetoric, and by his
audacities of figured speech. But Mr. Yeats and 'A.E.', the leaders of
the 'Celtic' group, are in no sense derivation voices. They had the
great advantage over the French of a living native folklore and faery
lore. Hence their symbolism, no less subtle, and no less steeped in
poetic imagining, has not the same air of literary artifice, of studio
fabrication, of cultured Bohemianism; it breathes of the old Irish
hills, holy with old-world rites, and the haunted woods, and the magical
twilight and dewy dawns. And beneath all the folklore, and animating it,
is the passion for Ireland herself, the mother, deathless and ever
young, whom neither the desolation of the time nor the decay of hope can
touch:

'Out-worn heart in a time out-worn
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight;
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

Your mother Eire is always young,
Dew ever shining and twilight grey;
Tho' hope fall from you and love decay
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.

Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill;
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will.'

For that, the French had only the Fauns of a literary neo-classicism.
The passion for France was yet indeed to find a voice in poetry. But
this was reserved for the more trumpet-tongued tones of the contemporary
phase to which I now turn.

III. 'CREATIVE EVOLUTION'

1. _Philosophic Analogies_

Nothing is more symptomatic of the incipient twentieth century than the
drawing together of currents of thought and action before remote or
hostile. The Parnassians were an exclusive sect, the symbolists an
eccentric and often disreputable coterie; Claudel, D'Annunzio, Rudyard
Kipli