Ideas of Good and EvilYeats, W. B. (William Butler)
Philosophy
Ideas of Good and Evil
Yeats, W. B. (William Butler)
Essays
spirits, and he was in his dotage. 'There is no man mowing a meadow but
sees them at one time or another,' said a man in a different district.
If I can unintentionally cast a glamour, an enchantment, over persons of
our own time who have lived for years in great cities, there is no reason
to doubt that men could cast intentionally a far stronger enchantment, a
far stronger glamour, over the more sensitive people of ancient times, or
that men can still do so where the old order of life remains unbroken. Why
should not the Scholar Gipsy cast his spell over his friends? Why should
not St. Patrick, or he of whom the story was first told, pass his enemies,
he and all his clerics, as a herd of deer? Why should not enchanters like
him in the _Morte d'Arthur_ make troops of horse seem but grey stones? Why
should not the Roman soldiers, though they came of a civilization which
was ceasing to be sensitive to these things, have trembled for a moment
before the enchantments of the Druids of Mona? Why should not the Jesuit
father, or the Count Saint Germain, or whoever the tale was first told of,
have really seemed to leave the city in a coach and four by all the Twelve
Gates at once? Why should not Moses and the enchanters of Pharaoh have
made their staffs as the medicine men of many primitive peoples make their
pieces of old rope seem like devouring serpents? Why should not that
mediæval enchanter have made summer and all its blossoms seem to break
forth in middle winter?
May we not learn some day to rewrite our histories, when they touch upon
these things too?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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