on of A.E. as he was
then:--

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 Tro