In the preface to this book Mr. W. B. Yeats speaks of 'the phantasmagoria through which alone I can express my convictions about the world.' The challenge could hardly be more direct. At the threshold we are confronted with a legend upon the door-post which gives us the essential plan of all that we shall find in the house if we enter in. There are, it is true, a few things capable of common use, verses written in the seeming-strong vernacular of literary Dublin, as it were a hospitable bench placed outside the door. They are indeed inside the house, but by accident or for temporary shelter. They do not, as the phrase goes, belong to the scheme, for they are direct transcriptions of the common reality, whether found in the sensible world or the emotion of the mind.

*The Wild Swans at Coole. By W. B. Yeats. Macmillan, 5s net.

They are, from Mr. Yeats's angle of vision (as indeed from our own), essentially vers d'occasion.

The poet's high and passionate. argument must be sought elsewhere, and precisely in his expression of his convictions about the world. And here, on the poet's word and the evidence of our search, we shall find phantasmagoria, ghostly symbols of a truth which cannot be otherwise conveyed, at least by Mr. Yeats. To this, in itself, we make no demur. The poet, if he is a great poet, is driven to approach the highest reality he can apprehend. He cannot transcribe it simply because he does not possess the necessary apparatus of knowledge, and because if he did possess it his passion would flag. It is not often that Spinoza can disengage himself to write as he does at the beginning of the third Book of the Ethics, nor could

Lucretius often kindle so great a fire in his soul as that which made his material incandescent in AEneadum genetrix. Therefore, the poet turns to myth as a foundation upon which he can explicate his imagination. He may take his myth from legend or familiar history, or he may create one for himself anew; but the function it fulfills is always the same. It supplies the elements with which he can build the structure of his parable, upon which he can make it elaborate enough to convey the multitudinous reactions of his soul to the world.

.'

But between myths and phantasmagoria there is a great gulf. The structural possibilities of the myth depend upon its intelligibility. The child knows upon what drama, played in what world, the curtain will rise when he hears the trumpet-note: 'Of man's first disobedience. . . . And, even when the poet turns from legend and history to create his own myth, he must make one whose validity is visible, if he is not to be condemned to the sterility of a coterie. The lawless and fantastic shapes of his own imagination need, even for their own perfect embodiment, the discipline of the common perception. The phantoms of the individual brain, left to their own waywardness, lose all solidity and become like primary forms of life, instead of the penultimate forms they should be. For the poet himself must move securely among his visions; they must be not less certain and steadfast than men are. To anchor them he needs intelligible myth. Nothing less than a supremely great genius can save him if he ventures into the vast without a landmark visible to other eyes than his own. Blake had a supremely great genius and was saved in part. The masculine vigor of his passion gave stability to the figures

of his imagination. They are heroes because they are made to speak like heroes. Even in Blake's most recondite work there is always the moment when the clouds are parted and we recognize the austere and awful countenances of gods. The phantasmagorias of the dreamer have been mastered by the sheer creative will of the poet. Like Jacob, he wrestled until the going down of the sun with his angel and would not let him go.

The effort which such momentary victories demand is almost superhuman; yet to possess the power to exert it is the sole condition upon which a poet may plunge into the world of phantasms. Mr. Yeats has too little of the power to vindicate himself from the charge of idle dreaming. He knows the problem; perhaps he has also known the struggle. But the very terms in which he suggests it to us subtly convey a sense of impotence: Hands, do what you're bid; Bring the balloon of the mind

That bellies and drags in the wind
Into its narrow shed.

The languor and ineffectuality of the image tell us clearly how the poet has failed in his larger task; its exactness, its precise expression of an ineffectuality made conscious and condoned, bears equal witness to the poet's minor probity. He remains an artist by determination, even though he returns downcast and defeated from the great quest of poetry. We were inclined at first, seeing those four lines enthroned in majestic isolation on a page, to find in them evidence of an untoward conceit. Subsequently, they have seemed to reveal a splendid honesty. Although it has little mysterious and haunting beauty, The Wild Swans at Coole is indeed a swan song. It is eloquent of final defeat; the following of a lonely path has ended in the poet's sinking exhausted in a wilderness of

I am worn out with dreams,

A weather-worn, marble triton
Among the streams;

And all day long I look
Upon this lady's beauty

As though I had found in book

A pictured beauty,

Pleased to have filled the eyes
Or the discerning ears,
Delighted to be but wise,
For men improve with the years;
And yet, and yet

Is this my dream, or the truth?
O would that we had met
When I had my burning youth;
But I grow old among dreams,
A weather-worn, marble triton
Among the streams.

It is pitiful because, even now in spite of all his honesty, the poet mistakes the cause of his sorrow. He is worn out not with dreams, but with the vain effort to master them and submit them to his own creative energy. He has not subdued them nor built a new world from them; he has merely followed them like will-o'-thewisps away from the world he knew. Now, possessing neither world, he sits by the edge of a barren road that vanishes into a no-man's land, where is no future, and whence there is no way back to the past.

My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor;
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.

It may be that Mr. Yeats has succumbed to the malady of a nation. We do not know whether such things are possible; we must consider him only in and for himself. From this angle we can regard him only as a poet whose creative vigor has failed him when he had to make the highest demands upon it. His sojourn in the world of the imagination, far from enriching his vision, has made it infinitely tenuous. Of this impoverish

At the old bitter world where they marry in churches,

And laugh over the untroubled water
At all who marry in churches,
Through the white thin bone of a hare.

Nothing there remains of the old bitter world which for all its bitterness is a full world also; but nothing remains of the sweet world of imagination. Mr. Yeats has made the tragic mistake of thinking that to contemplate it was sufficient. Had he been a great poet he would have made it his own, by forcing it into the fetters of speech. By re-creating it, he would have made it permanent; he would have built landmarks to guide him always back to where the effort of his last discovery had ended. But now there remains nothing but a handful of the symbols with which he was content:

A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw,
A Buddha, hand at rest,
Hand lifted up that blest;
And right between these two a girl at play.

These are no more than the dry bones in the valley of Ezekiel, and, alas! there is no prophetic fervor to make them live.

Whether Mr. Yeats, by some grim fatality, mistook his phantasmagoria for the product of the creative imagination, or whether (as we would 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 for

IN 1913 the late Lady Ritchie published her last book, From the Porch an interesting volume of 'divagations, monographs, reminiscences.' It contains a 'Discourse on Modern Sybils,' among whom Charlotte Brontë is accorded a prominent place. I have just returned to the volume, and I find there a note I do not remember to have seen until now: August, 1913. Some letters from Miss Brontë to M. Heger recently published. . . . It would have been more to the recipient's credit if he had answered them and honorably burnt them, instead of not answering and leaving them to be printed in the Times.'

This refers, of course, to the publication in that journal of the four important letters, and the notes accompanying them, given forth to the world with the primary intention of silencing the gossip which for years had been bandied about among biographers and critics of Charlotte Brontë, and dispelling the implied aspersions cast on the fair fame of both writer and recipient.

It is true that these aspersions received little, if any, credit in this country; but it was otherwise abroad - indeed, in France a biographical work was published, plainly imputing relations between master and pupil for which there was not the shadow of justification. The publication constituted a literary sensation of real significance, not merely because it swept into limbo the current tittle-tattle of which in no other way could there have been any authoritative disproof, but because it provided a key to the clear understanding of the whole of Charlotte Brontë's literary creation.

Lady Ritchie

- but one of several*

being unaware of all the facts, was innocently betrayed into accepting a view which the circumstances did not warrant; and her 'note,' which is here quoted, became itself a disparagement, and in its effect a cruel injustice to the very man whom, in part, it was the

E.g., Mrs. Ellis H. Chadwick, who makes a similar error: 'He kept them [the letters] for the same reason that In the Footsteps of Charlotte Brontë.

object of the Times' disclosures to clear. Such being the case, it obviously becomes the duty of one to whom all the facts were long ago confided, with the permission, and the request, to make them known when the time should arrive for doing so, to set forth the full history of these famous letters previous to the publication of them six years ago.

On October 6, 1913, I was paying a visit to Mademoiselle Louise Heger -one of the two survivors of the real characters whom Charlotte Brontë introduced into Villette; she was the delightful child, Georgette, of whom also Miss Brontë speaks in one of her letters to M. Heger.* The conversation turned once more upon the letters -the 'love-letters,' as they have been inaccurately termed. There ensued a moment or two of silence, during which Mlle. Heger was coming, apparently, to a difficult and rather painful decision. Then, notifying me that I might wish to make some notes of what she was about to recount, she said that she would impart to me the whole curious story of the documents. These notes I now transcribe as I took them down.

Her father, she said, tore up the letters as he received (and read) them. and threw them all into the wastepaper basket-one only escaping destruction. [This was plainly stated at the time of their publication and should have absolved the Professor of all blame.] But her mother, a woman prudent and worldly-wise, saved them, all but the first, and pieced them together with cotton or with gum. She was the more careful so to do because of her experience of exaltées girls and her knowledge of the developments which occasionally ensue

*I fear that Marie, Louise, Claire may already have forgotten me. I remember well all five of them. especially Louise she had so much character so much naïreté in her little face.'

in hysterical subjects, and because she considered the affection expressed by the pupil for the teacher un peu exagérée, and, moreover, because one or more of these letters had been addressed to M. Heger, not to the schoolhouse in the Rue d'Isabelle, but to the Athénée Royale - which at that time stood close by, almost where the Université Libre building was afterwards erected.

Now, she had herself as she explained later on to her daughter, Mlle. Louise Heger-written Professor Heger's replies to Charlotte Brontë's letters at his dictation; for he scarcely ever wrote with his own hand, and she was his amanuensis.* (In later years the daughter succeeded to the secretarial post.) That is why in one of her letters Charlotte Brontë pleads for the sight of his own handwriting, and also why she addressed him at the Athénée: for no other

reason.

Had Madame Heger known only of these passionate letters and recognized in Miss Brontë an exaltée, such as she had had knowledge of, she would not have been disturbed; but English girls, of whom she had little experience, presented her with a problem of the unknown. Perhaps she feared their insistence of character and strength of purpose. Certainly (as Charlotte herself declares) she did not understand this young Englishwoman, whom she knew only as a poor Yorkshire girl, of curious independence and extraordinary originality, who voluntarily practised self-isolation,† and who was of extreme nervous excitability and possessed of vivid imagination, amazing and brilliant. Conceivably, thought

*Compare Villette (chap. 15) where, in the character of Paul Emanuel, Professor Heger is made to say: I could not write that down, [a story he had told her]. I hate mechanical labor; I could dictate it, though, with pleasure to an amanuensis who suited me.'

Op. cit. (chap. 14): 'I might have had companions, and I chose solitude,' says Lucy Snowe.