America has been impure in motive--a propagandist for Pollyanna in the face of Euripides, a propagandist for “just folks” in the face of Swift, a propagandist for niceness in the face of Rabelais--that he has failed miserably as an artist, and has left our communities to stew so completely in their own savorless juice. 9 For examples of what the artist might be, and what his proper relation to the community might be when he was mature enough to recognize it and discipline himself to it, let us look at Mr. William Butler Yeats or A. E. There are doubtless a good many other examples that might be offered in Europe; but these are particularly good; for the reason that with A. E. one can see in his The National Being how the conceptions of art enter into the tissues of all his plans for renovating life in the Irish Countryside. In the work of these artists and their fellows we have a clue to one of the most promising attempts to establish a concrete eutopia which shall rise out of the real facts of the everyday environment and, at the same time, turn upon them and mold them creatively a little nearer the heart’s desire. In the account of Four Years which Mr. Yeats published in The Dial he explains his attitude towards the literature and social life of Ireland; and I recommend that account to all the forlorn revolutionaries and reformers who wonder why the dry bones of their doctrines remain dry bones, instead of knitting themselves together and becoming alive. This passage in particular, defines the relation of the artist both to the tradition of his art and to the community in which he must find a root: “The Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, Bastien-Lepage coven, asserted that an artist or a poet must paint or write in the style of his own day, and this with the Fairy Queen and the Lyrical Ballads and Blake’s early poems in its ears, and plain to the eyes, in book and gallery, those great masterpieces of later Egypt, founded upon that work of the ancient kingdom already further in time from Later Egypt than Later Egypt is from us.” He dismisses this claim with the just assertion that the artist is free to choose any style that suits his mood and subject; for in the world of art time and space are irrelevant; and he goes on to say, “We had in Ireland imaginative stories, which the uneducated classes knew and even sang, and might we not make those stories current among the educated classes, rediscovering, for the work’s sake, what I have called ‘the applied arts of literature,’ the association of literature, that is, with music, speech, and dance; and at last, it might be, so deepen the political passion of the nation that all, artist and poet, craftsman and day laborer, would accept a common design. Perhaps even these images, once created and associated with river and mountain, might move of themselves and with some powerful, even turbulent life, like those painted horses that trample the rice-fields of Japan.”