crowd's applause or sit above measuring it out unpersuadable
justice, became to me, now or later, images of an unpremeditated
joyous energy, that neither I nor any other man, racked by doubt and
enquiry, can achieve; and that yet, if once achieved, might seem to
men and women of Connemara or of Galway their very soul. In our
study of that ruined tomb, raised by a queen to her dead lover, and
finished by the unpaid labour of great sculptors after her death
from grief, or so runs the tale, we cannot distinguish the
handiworks of Scopas and Praxiteles; and I wanted to create once
more an art, where the artist's handiwork would hide as under those
half anonymous chisels, or as we find it in some old Scots ballads
or in some twelfth or thirteenth century Arthurian romance. That
handiwork assured, I had martyred no man for modelling his own image
upon Pallas Athena's buckler; for I took great pleasure in certain
allusions to the singer's life one finds in old romances and
ballads, and thought his presence there all the 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