Ideas of Good and EvilYeats, W. B. (William Butler)
Philosophy
Ideas of Good and Evil
Yeats, W. B. (William Butler)
Essays
Wagner's dramas, Keats' odes, Blake's pictures and poems, Calvert's
pictures, Rossetti's pictures, Villiers De l'Isle Adam's plays, and the
black-and-white art of Mr. Beardsley and Mr. Ricketts, and the lithographs
of Mr. Shannon, and the pictures of Mr. Whistler, and the plays of M.
Maeterlinck, and the poetry of Verlaine, in our own day, but differ from
the religious art of Giotto and his disciples in having accepted all
symbolisms, the symbolism of the ancient shepherds and star-gazers, that
symbolism of bodily beauty which seemed a wicked thing to Fra Angelico,
the symbolism in day and night, and winter and summer, spring and autumn,
once so great a part of an older religion than Christianity; and in having
accepted all the Divine Intellect, its anger and its pity, its waking and
its sleep, its love and its lust, for the substance of their art. A Keats
or a Calvert is as much a symbolist as a Blake or a Wagner; but he is a
fragmentary symbolist, for while he evokes in his persons and his
landscapes an infinite emotion, a perfected emotion, a part of the Divine
Essence, he does not set his symbols in the great procession as Blake
would have him, 'in a certain order, suited' to his 'imaginative energy.'
If you paint a beautiful woman and fill her face, as Rossetti filled so
many faces, with an infinite love, a perfected love, 'one's eyes meet no
mortal thing when they meet the light of her peaceful eyes,' as Michael
Angelo said of Vittoria Colonna; but one's thoughts stray to mortal
things, and ask, maybe, 'Has her lover gone from her, or is he coming?' or
'What pre-destinated unhappiness has made the shadow in her eyes?' If you
paint the same face, and set a winged rose or a rose of gold somewhere
about her, one's thoughts are of her immortal sisters, Pity and Jealousy,
and of her mother, Ancestral Beauty, and of her high kinsmen, the Holy
Orders, whose swords make a continual music before her face. The
systematic mystic is not the greatest of artists, because his imagination
is too great to be bounded by a picture or a song, and because only
imperfection in a mirror of perfection, or perfection in a mirror of
imperfection, delight our frailty. There is indeed a systematic mystic in
every poet or painter who, like Rossetti, delights in a traditional
Symbolism, or, like Wagner, delights in a personal Symbolism; and such men
often fall into trances, or have waking dreams. Their thought wanders from
the woman who is Love herself, to her sisters and her forebears, and to
all the great procession; and so august a beauty moves before the mind,
that they forget the things which move before the eyes. William Blake, who
was the chanticleer of the new dawn, has written: 'If the spectator could
enter into one of these images of his imagination, approaching them on the
fiery chariot of his contemplative thought, if ... he could make a friend
and companion of one of these images of wonder, which always entreat him
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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