her 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 one