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WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

It is easy, or so it seems to me, to make too much of the influence of race upon literature. On the one hand, he would be a bold man who should postulate absolute purity of race for any mother's son in this mingle-mangle of a Western world. "It's a wise child who knows his own great-great-great-great-grandfathers." On the other hand, I would engage to take a child of guaranteed Saxon ancestry and make him a Kelt of the Kelts by bringing him up in Keltic country and under exclusively Keltic influences. I know at this moment a boy of ten, born of English parents his mother of a good Yorkshire stock, his father hailing from the south of England-whom the influence of sheer environment has made a typical Parisian. Were he older, one might suspect a certain affectation in his ultraGallicism. As it is, there can be no room for any such suspicion. The race-characteristics (one would say) of the Parisian child have developed in him spontaneously, irrepressibly; and although English influences are absent from his environment, their effect is absolutely superficial, leaving him fundamentally French. I am not disputing, be it observed, the existence of marked and potent race-characteristics. On the contrary, I assert their existence and their strength, but suggest that they are transmitted rather in the atmosphere than in the blood, and are at least as much a matter of tradition as of heredity.

This by way of proviso, lest I should seem to mean too much or too little in describing Mr. W. B. Yeats as the incarnation of the Irish Kelt. Incarnation, indeed, is scarcely the right word; he is rather the quintessentiated spirit of Keltic eld. His name does not imply an exclusively Irish ancestry, and his physique is so ultra-Keltic as almost to suggest a Southern admixture. There has been a good deal of Spanish blood in Ireland since 1588 or earlier; does any of it flow in Mr. Yeats's veins? Or shall we try further back, perhaps, to the Phoenicians? For aught I know, Mr. Yeats's family-tree may disprove all these speculations, and trace his ancestry in a direct line to Brian Borhoime. The matter is really unimportant according to my theory, which is that a Yorkshireman, a Scandinavian, or even a Scot, if caught young enough, might have become equally impregnated with the melancholy, the mystery, the supersensual grace and beauty of the Keltic imagination and its treasure of myth and folklore. I know one Scotchman, at any rate, unconscious of any but Sassenach blood in his composition, who feels the beauty of Deirdre and Grania scarcely less intimately than Mr. Yeats himself.

It is with Mr. Yeats that, so far as I know, the genuine spirit of Irish antiquity and Irish folk-lore makes its first entrance into English verse. Irish poets before him have either been absorbed in love, potheen, and politics-as Mr. Yeats himself puts it, they have "sung their loudest when a company of rebels or revellers has been at hand to applaud "—or (like Goldsmith and Moore) they have become to all intents and purposes Anglicised. Even William Allingham's fairies, pleasant little people though they be, are rather Anglo-Saxon Brownies than Keltic Sheogues. In Mr. Yeats we have an astonishing union of primitive imagination and feeling with cultivated and consciously artistic expression. He does not manipulate

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