It might reasonably be supposed that the last drop in Ireland’s cup of bitterness was Mr. William Butler Yeats. An emotional and misfortunate people with the tyrant’s heel on its neck, and poverty and disaster always in attendance upon it, may be excused if it does not altogether dance to the pipings of a pretty fellow like Mr. Yeats. In point of fact, however, Ireland fails to dance not because of her sadness, but because Mr. Yeats’s minstrelsy is to all intents and purposes utterly alien to her. In England, or more correctly speaking, in London, it is true, there has been and possibly is now, a small cult of what is commonly called the Keltic Muse. And the head and front of it, of course, is Mr. Yeats. He has found ardent, if undiscriminating, support among the Irish reporters and reviewers on the daily papers; he enjoys the patronage of Mr. Clement Shorter, and he is received respectfully at the Irish Literary Club. Further I am told that there is a musically-minded elocutionist in London who goes about chanting his numbers to the three-stringed psaltery. That Mr. Yeats is a poet of some parts nobody in his senses will attempt to deny. That he is a vast, or potent, or as he himself would no doubt phrase it, a Druid poet, I am not disposed to admit. The strength of him is slight indeed; the thought of him prattles forever round the trivial. He has a still small voice with a wistfulness about it; and it is on this wistfulness that he has builded up his business. His contemporaries, the men among whom, whether he likes it or no, he will always have to range, are every one of them stronger men than he. They are ruder and more forceful, more gusty and less attenuated, if only by fits and starts. They do their best to try to belong to the great British poetical tradition. They fail lamentably, but their work bears marks of aspiration. Mr. Yeats, on the other hand, has been particular to pose on a little hill of his own. He imagines that he has discovered a sort of private tradition, the which he calls Keltic. Out of Ireland he believes himself to have captured Druid music, and this he has put up for us in sundry lyrical pieces and sundry plays. His lyrical pieces are admired in all the drawing-rooms and all the sub-editors’ rooms, and his plays have been stamped with the heartfelt approval of the Chief Secretary for Ireland, and Mr. Max Beerbohm. The general opinion of him may be summed up in three words—How charmingly Keltic! It is an old contention of mine that Mr. Yeats’s qualities are not Keltic at all. I go further and say that as a fact there are no Keltic qualities which are not common in good English poetry. The best Kelt we ever had was Mr. Yeats’s own master, one William Blake, who was sheer Cockney. Mr. Yeats is just Blake spun out, and overconscious. “The moon, like a flower In heaven’s high bower, With silent delight, Sits and smiles on the night.”