CORRESPONDENCE.

THE CELTIC INSPIRATION.

[To THE EDITOR OP THE "SPECTATOR."] SIR,—So much sheer nonsense has been talked about the Celtic influence in literature—as, for instance, when L.taliespeare, born and bred in the Midland counties, was set down for a Celt—that a good many people in simple irritation were inclined to deny any reality to the force. However, if there be any incredulous, he has merely to read this last poem of Mr. Yeats*—by far the best which Mr. Yeats has produced —and he will find a piece of the most exquisite beauty alike in style and thought, which neither in style nor in thought owns kinship with any English creation. Take the central motive—that longing, like a physical passion, for the un- earthly beauty, the unattainable, the disembodied soul of love : there is a thought which Mr. Yeats has often concentrated in a lyric, and it is characteristic of the Gaelic mind, but almost without example in English literature,—save perhaps in Shelley, the only English poet with whom Mr. Yeats has some far-off kinship. There are not so many things in Shelley more beautiful than this strange symbolical drama, whose actors are not so much living men and women, as incarnate dreams,—or persons in a dream where anything may happen, but the human motives persist. Forgael, the hero, is a rover born, enchanted by the gods into a dreamer. He sailed north from Ireland to make war among the endless seas, and with his praises of this wild war he drew after him Aibric, a chief rich with "gold and silver and enough of pasture-land and plough-land among the hills." And they "rowed north singing above the oars," and sacked and burnt in Scotland, and north again in Lochlann, till at last they came to an island where a fool out of the wood, wise, as in Celtic belief all fools are, with the wisdom of the gods, played on a magic harp and put into Forgael's heart the desire for unearthly things. Then he gave the harp to Forgael and bade him seek for his desire by the streams at the world's end, following for pilots the flitting souls of men, that upon death "are changed and as grey birds fly out to sea."

But the heart of the dreamer is not the heart of his crew. They would slay him, but that the magic harp protects the friend of the gods. Even Aibric is weary of the quest and would turn Forgael back to the known delights, the old war and the old love. And in a passage that recurs like a refrain

• The Shadowy Waters. By W. B. Yeats. London : Hodder and Stougbton. Vs. 6,1.]

throughout the play, the dreamer and his follower put their ideals into words :—

"Forgael. When I hold A woman in my arms, she melts away As though the waters had flowed up between: And yet there is a love that the gods give, When Engus and his Edaine wake from sleep And gaze on one another through our eyes, And turn brief longing and deceiving hope And bodily tenderness to the soft fire That shall burn time when times have ebbed away. The fool foretold me I would find this love Among those streams, or on their cloudy edge.

Aibric. No man nor woman has loved otherwise Than in brief longing and deceiving hope And bodily tenderness; and he who longs For happier love but finds unhappiness, And falls among the dreams the drowsy gods Breathe on the burnished mirror of the world And then smoothe out with ivory hands and sigh. Forgael, seek out content, where other men Have found delight, in the resounding oars, In day-outliving battle, on the breast Of some mild woman, or in children's ways."

As they debate thus, suddenly through the mist a sail is espied,—a stray Lochlann galley. And while Forgael's men board her, slay and seize, Forgael stands by his helm on his own galley waiting for the sign of the grey birds. Soon, as the stabbers get to work, the bird-souls rise, hover

above the mast a moment, and then all together fly away. And Forgael watching, cries :— "We are nearly

A quarter of the heavens from our right way."

He will scarcely wait while men bring aboard the spoil from the Lochlann galley ; and when they tell him of a Queen taken in the ship, who offers great rewards if they turn east and bring her to her kingdom and her people, he answers still unknowing :—

" Ary way is west. She seems both young and shapely. Give her to Aibric, if he will. I wait For an immortal woman as I think."

But as he speaks he goes nearer and gazes at Dectora. And the old sailor speaks again :—

" I left her living, thinking I had found Your heart's desire and the end of all trouble, But now I will kill her."

But Forgael motions him away and speaks in rapture :— "All comes to an end, The harvest's in,—the granary doors are shut; The topmost blossom on the boughs of Time Has blossomed and I grow as old as Time, For I have all his garden wisdom-0 speak ! I await your words as the blind grass awaits The falling blossoms and the d sad the living."

Dectora disregards him, renewing her offers to the crew till she persuades them to attack their leader. But Forgael takes his harp, and in the eyes of each man beat the wings of white birds. For Angus, the God of Love, loved Edaine, and their kisses, changed into white birds, watch over faithful lovers. But Edaine, in punishment for her love, was changed to a fly, and the constraint upon Forgael is the spell of zEngus, who can only renew his love in hum an bosoms, and so would see the eyes of Edaine look from under Dectora's eyelids. And as Forgael plays, forgetfulness comes over them all, and the men go back to their ale in the captured galley, and Dectora to dreams of her first love ; and as she wakens she wakens to love :—

"I know you now, beseeching hands and eyes, I have been waiting you."

But as they stand together, embraced, she sees strange creatures that in Celtic mythology or in Mr. Yeats's private mythology signify, as he has before told us, desire of man for woman, desire of woman for the desire of man. And as they vanish in the mist Forgael goes to the helm again to set the vessel's head by their leading for the streams where the world ends. But further, magic will not avail him. It has availed him to make Dectora forget her lord slain by her side in the Lochlann galley ; her own nature remains, and she cries out against such love:— "Dectora. The love I know is hidden in these hands That I would mix with yours and in this hair That I would shed like twilight over you. Foryaal. The love of all under the light of the sun Is but brief longing and deoeizing hope And bodily tenderness; but love is made Imperishable fire under the boughs Of ehrysoteryl and beeyl and chrysolite And ohrysoprase and ruby and sardonyx" And as the conflict of the drama, first lifted by magic into a bewildering strangeness, then lifted beyond magic into a bewildering reality, proceeds between, the two, she remembers more and more her ow-n self and how she has commanded men; and she calls him not merely to earthly love, but to love and power.—to "rule together under a canopy." But when he cannot persuade her nor she him, he bids her farewell:— "Seek Aibric on the Lochlann galley and tell him That Pommel has followed the grey birds alone, And bid him to your country.'

Then, at the last, she eiies, "I will follow you." and cuts the rope binding the two galleys ; and together the two lovers drive on toward the west while the magic harp already begins to murmur, crying out to the eagles that the gods send to snatch true lovers out of the rushing streams.

Enough has been quoted to give some notion of the verse. There are no purple patches, the whole poem, through its six or seven hundred lines, is all rich in beauty as a gorgeous tapestry. And I have tried to explain how, while adhering to the Gaelic habit of introducing magical powers, Mr. Yeats keeps to an essentially human theme, into which the magic enters only by a convention as justifiable as the epic con- vention of prolonged and courteous combats between leading chiefs in a pitched battle. It will appear, moreover, that. unless omens are misleading, the reader of poetry will have to enlarge his knowledge by some study of a mythology not to be fousid in Lempriere. Mr. Yeats alone will do much to make it as natural and necessary fora cultivated man to know the fate of Edaine as that of Daphne or Syrinx ; and there is every evidence that Mr. Yeats is not alone. The recently published "Treasury of Irish Poetry" is there to prove that ;

and for furtber confirmation here is a new poet, and a poet of real talent, Mr. Herbert Trench, with a new version of Deirdre's story.* Or rather be has simply taken the inspiration of the legend, the traditional figure of Deirdre. the Irish Helen, the woman of fatal beauty, at whose birth the Druid, her father, prophesied of the ruin that her shining face should work,—and upon it he has embroidered an episode not found in the Gaelic legends, of Deirdre's flight with Naisi, or, as Mr. Trench writes the name. Naois. So might a poet make a poem of the wooing of Helen, and close it when the ship of Paris touched the shores of Troy. The technical procedure is unusual. Mr. Trench imagines the story as told in a company of the dead singers by three bards, one from the first century, une from an older age, and one from the sixth, each using a dilferent measure and manner. Of the three voices we prefer the voice of Cir. the oldest bard, who tells of the actual (tight; and we like least Firma.n, the epic poet of the first century, who narrates in blank verse Na.isi's return from the foray to Emania, and Deirdre's first sight of him. But in all three parts there is continually beauty of thought, beauty of image, and frequently beauty of phrase. There is also continually a defect of music—never a continued melody—and there is not infrequently a great obscurity of language. Two opening stanzas, when the voice of Oir takes up the story, should illustrate these qualities and defects :—

" As a horseman breaks on a sea-gulf enwomb'd in the amber

woods

When tide is at ebb, and out on the airy brim

Ellass'd upon cloud and azure stand multitudes

Of the game-white people of gulls—to the skyline dim, All breast to the sun, –and his hoofs expand the desolate strait • Into fevers of sn ws and ocedn-wandering cries; Even so, chanters divine, in some woman's fate Al coming of him to be loved do her dreams arise."

"Deirdre" is not the only poem in Mr. Trench's book, but it is the best. "The Nutter" is a wonderfully complete imitation of Keats, and the " Rock of Cloud" owes all to the "Ancient Mariner." Mr. Trench has learnt elsewhere than

in Ireland. But far better than these essays in discipleship are, among his lyrics, "The Night" and " Maurya," which exhibit, like. " Deirdre " and "The Shadowy Waters," that Celtic inspiration of which I set out to speak.—I am, Sir, &C.,

STEPHEN GWYNN.

• &Iran. Wed, and other Poems. By Herbert Trench. London: Methuen sa4 Go. tai.3