1916





THE POETRY OF JAMES STEPHENS


For a generation the Irish bards have endeavored to live in a palace
of art, in chambers hung with the embroidered cloths and made dim
with pale lights and Druid twilights, and the melodies they most
sought for were half soundless. The art of an early age began
softly, to end its songs with a rhetorical blare of sound. The
melodies of the new school began close to the ear and died away in
distances of the soul. Even as the prophet of old was warned to
take off his shoes because the place he stood on was holy ground,
so it seemed for a while in Ireland as if no poet could be accepted
unless he left outside the demesnes of poetry that very useful animal,
the body, and lost all concern about its habits. He could not enter
unless he moved with the light and dreamy foot-fall of spirit. Mr.
Yeats was the chief of this eclectic school, and his poetry at its
best is the most beautiful in Irish literature. But there crowded
after him a whole horde of verse-writers, who seized the most obvious
symbols he used and standardized them, and in their writings one
wandered about, gasping for fresh air land sunlight, for the Celtic
soul seemed bound for ever pale lights of fairyland on the north
and by the by the darkness of forbidden passion on the south, and
on the east by the shadowiness of all things human, and on the west
by everything that was infinite, without form, and void.