Per Amica Silentia Lunae Part 1

Per Amica Silentia Lunae.

by William Butler Yeats.

PROLOGUE

MY DEAR "MAURICE"--You will remember that afternoon in Calvados last summer when your black Persian "Minoulooshe," who had walked behind us for a good mile, heard a wing flutter in a bramble-bush? For a long time we called her endearing names in vain. She seemed resolute to spend her night among the brambles. She had interrupted a conversation, often interrupted before, upon certain thoughts so long habitual that I may be permitted to call them my convictions. When I came back to London my mind ran again and again to those conversations and I could not rest till I had written out in this little book all that I had said or would have said. Read it some day when "Minoulooshe" is asleep.

W. B. YEATS.

_May_ 11, 1917.

EGO DOMINUS TUUS

HIC

On the grey sand beside the shallow stream, Under your old wind-beaten tower, where still A lamp burns on above the open book That Michael Robartes left, you walk in the moon, And, though you have pa.s.sed the best of life, still trace, Enthralled by the unconquerable delusion, Magical shapes.

ILLE

By the help of an image I call to my own opposite, summon all That I have handled least, least looked upon.

HIC

And I would find myself and not an image.

ILLE

That is our modern hope, and by its light We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind And lost the old nonchalance of the hand; Whether we have chosen chisel, pen, or brush, We are but critics, or but half create, Timid, entangled, empty, and abashed, Lacking the countenance of our friends.

HIC

And yet, The chief imagination of Christendom, Dante Alighieri, so utterly found himself, That he has made that hollow face of his More plain to the mind's eye than any face But that of Christ.

ILLE

And did he find himself, Or was the hunger that had made it hollow A hunger for the apple on the bough Most out of reach? And is that spectral image The man that Lapo and that Guido knew?

I think he fashioned from his opposite An image that might have been a stony face, Staring upon a Beduin's horse-hair roof, From doored and windowed cliff, or half upturned Among the coa.r.s.e gra.s.s and the camel dung.

He set his chisel to the hardest stone; Being mocked by Guido for his lecherous life, Derided and deriding, driven out To climb that stair and eat that bitter bread, He found the unpersuadable justice, he found The most exalted lady loved by a man.

HIC

Yet surely there are men who have made their art Out of no tragic war; lovers of life, Impulsive men, that look for happiness, And sing when they have found it.

ILLE

No, not sing, For those that love the world serve it in action, Grow rich, popular, and full of influence; And should they paint or write still is it action, The struggle of the fly in marmalade.

The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours, The sentimentalist himself; while art Is but a vision of reality.

What portion in the world can the artist have, Who has awakened from the common dream, But dissipation and despair?

HIC

And yet, No one denies to Keats love of the world, Remember his deliberate happiness.

ILLE

His art is happy, but who knows his mind?

I see a schoolboy, when I think of him, With face and nose pressed to a sweetshop window, For certainly he sank into his grave, His senses and his heart unsatisfied; And made--being poor, ailing and ignorant, Shut out from all the luxury of the world, The ill-bred son of a livery stable keeper-- Luxuriant song.

HIC

Why should you leave the lamp Burning alone beside an open book, And trace these characters upon the sand?

A style is found by sedentary toil, And by the imitation of great masters.

ILLE

Because I seek an image, not a book; Those men that in their writings are most wise Own nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts.

I call to the mysterious one who yet Shall walk the wet sand by the water's edge, And look most like me, being indeed my double, And prove of all imaginable things The most unlike, being my anti-self, And, standing by these characters, disclose All that I seek; and whisper it as though He were afraid the birds, who cry aloud Their momentary cries before it is dawn, Would carry it away to blasphemous men.

_December_ 1915.

PER AMICA SILENTIA LUNAE

ANIMA HOMINIS

I

When I come home after meeting men who are strange to me, and sometimes even after talking to women, I go over all I have said in gloom and disappointment. Perhaps I have overstated everything from a desire to vex or startle, from hostility that is but fear; or all my natural thoughts have been drowned by an undisciplined sympathy. My fellow-diners have hardly seemed of mixed humanity, and how should I keep my head among images of good and evil, crude allegories.

But when I shut my door and light the candle, I invite a Marmorean Muse, an art, where no thought or emotion has come to mind because another man has thought or felt something different, for now there must be no reaction, action only, and the world must move my heart but to the heart's discovery of itself, and I begin to dream of eyelids that do not quiver before the bayonet: all my thoughts have ease and joy, I am all virtue and confidence. When I come to put in rhyme what I have found it will be a hard toil, but for a moment I believe I have found myself and not my anti-self. It is only the shrinking from toil perhaps that convinces me that I have been no more myself than is the cat the medicinal gra.s.s it is eating in the garden.

How could I have mistaken for myself an heroic condition that from early boyhood has made me superst.i.tious? That which comes as complete, as minutely organised, as are those elaborate, brightly lighted buildings and sceneries appearing in a moment, as I lie between sleeping and waking, must come from above me and beyond me. At times I remember that place in Dante where he sees in his chamber the "Lord of Terrible Aspect," and how, seeming "to rejoice inwardly that it was a marvel to see, speaking, he said, many things among the which I could understand but few, and of these this: ego dominus tuus"; or should the conditions come, not as it were in a gesture--as the image of a man--but in some fine landscape, it is of Boehme, maybe, that I think, and of that country where we "eternally solace ourselves in the excellent beautiful flourishing of all manner of flowers and forms, both trees and plants, and all kinds of fruit."

II

When I consider the minds of my friends, among artists and emotional writers, I discover a like contrast. I have sometimes told one close friend that her only fault is a habit of harsh judgment with those who have not her sympathy, and she has written comedies where the wickedest people seem but bold children. She does not know why she has created that world where no one is ever judged, a high celebration of indulgence, but to me it seems that her ideal of beauty is the compensating dream of a nature wearied out by over-much judgment. I know a famous actress who in private life is like the captain of some buccaneer ship holding his crew to good behaviour at the mouth of a blunderbuss, and upon the stage she excels in the representation of women who stir to pity and to desire because they need our protection, and is most adorable as one of those young queens imagined by Maeterlinck who have so little will, so little self, that they are like shadows sighing at the edge of the world. When I last saw her in her own house she lived in a torrent of words and movements, she could not listen, and all about her upon the walls were women drawn by Burne-Jones in his latest period. She had invited me in the hope that I would defend those women, who were always listening, and are as necessary to her as a contemplative Buddha to a j.a.panese Samurai, against a French critic who would persuade her to take into her heart in their stead a Post-Impressionist picture of a fat, ruddy, nude woman lying upon a Turkey carpet.