Chapter 12 - Page 2

more poignant
because we discover it half lost, like portly Chaucer riding behind
his Maunciple and his Pardoner. Wolfram von Eschenbach, singing his
German Parsival, broke off some description of a famished city to
remember that in his own house at home the very mice lacked food,
and what old ballad singer was it who claimed to have fought by day
in the very battle he sang by night? So masterful indeed was that
instinct that when the minstrel knew not who his poet was he must
needs make up a man: 'When any stranger asks who is the sweetest of
singers, answer with one voice: "A blind man; he dwells upon rocky
Chios; his songs shall be the most beautiful for ever."' Elaborate
modern psychology sounds egotistical, I thought, when it speaks in
the first person, but not those simple emotions which resemble the
more, the more powerful they are, everybody's emotion, and I was
soon to write many poems where an always personal emotion was woven
into a general pattern of myth and symbol. When the Fenian poet says
that his heart has grown cold and callous, 'For thy hapless fate,
dear Ireland, and sorrows of my own,' he but follows tradition, and
if he does not move us deeply, it is because he has no sensuous
musical vocabulary that comes at need, without compelling him to
sedentary toil and so driving him out from his fellows. I thought to
create that sensuous, musical vocabulary, and not for myself only
but that I might leave it to later Irish poets, much as a mediaeval
Japanese painter left his style as an inheritance to his family, and
was careful to use a traditional manner and matter; yet did
something altogether different, changed by that toil, impelled by my
share in Cain's curse, by all that sterile modern complication, by
my 'originality' as the newspapers call it. Morris set out to make a
revolution that the persons of his 'Well at the World's End' or his
'Waters of the Wondrous Isles,' always, to my mind, in the likeness
of Artemisia and her man, might walk his native scenery; and I, that
my native scenery might find imaginary inhabitants, half planned a
new method and a new culture. My mind began drifting vaguely towards
that doctrine of 'the mask' which has convinced me that every
passionate man (I have nothing to do with mechanist, or
philanthropist, or man whose eyes have no preference) is, as it
were, linked with another age, historical or imaginary, where alone
he finds images that rouse his energy. Napoleon was never of his own
time, as the naturalistic writers and painters bid all men be, but
had some Roman Emperor's image in his head and some condottiere's
blood in his heart; and when he crowned that head at Rome with his
own hands, he had covered, as may be seen from David's painting,