It might reasonably be supposed that the last drop in Ireland’s cup of bitterness was Mr. William Butler Yeats. An emotional and misfortunate people with the tyrant’s heel on its neck, and poverty and disaster always in attendance upon it, may be excused if it does not altogether dance to the pipings of a pretty fellow like Mr. Yeats. In point of fact, however, Ireland fails to dance not because of her sadness, but because Mr. Yeats’s minstrelsy is to all intents and purposes utterly alien to her. In England, or more correctly speaking, in London, it is true, there has been and possibly is now, a small cult of what is commonly called the Keltic Muse. And the head and front of it, of course, is Mr. Yeats. He has found ardent,[118] if undiscriminating, support among the Irish reporters and reviewers on the daily papers; he enjoys the patronage of Mr. Clement Shorter, and he is received respectfully at the Irish Literary Club. Further I am told that there is a musically-minded elocutionist in London who goes about chanting his numbers to the three-stringed psaltery. That Mr. Yeats is a poet of some parts nobody in his senses will attempt to deny. That he is a vast, or potent, or as he himself would no doubt phrase it, a Druid poet, I am not disposed to admit. The strength of him is slight indeed; the thought of him prattles forever round the trivial. He has a still small voice with a wistfulness about it; and it is on this wistfulness that he has builded up his business. His contemporaries, the men among whom, whether he likes it or no, he will always have to range, are every one of them stronger men than he. They are ruder and more forceful, more gusty and less attenuated, if only by fits and starts. They[119] do their best to try to belong to the great British poetical tradition. They fail lamentably, but their work bears marks of aspiration. Mr. Yeats, on the other hand, has been particular to pose on a little hill of his own. He imagines that he has discovered a sort of private tradition, the which he calls Keltic. Out of Ireland he believes himself to have captured Druid music, and this he has put up for us in sundry lyrical pieces and sundry plays. His lyrical pieces are admired in all the drawing-rooms and all the sub-editors’ rooms, and his plays have been stamped with the heartfelt approval of the Chief Secretary for Ireland, and Mr. Max Beerbohm. The general opinion of him may be summed up in three words—How charmingly Keltic! It is an old contention of mine that Mr. Yeats’s qualities are not Keltic at all. I go further and say that as a fact there are no Keltic qualities which are not common in good English poetry. The best Kelt we ever had was Mr. Yeats’s own master, one William Blake,[120] who was sheer Cockney. Mr. Yeats is just Blake spun out, and overconscious.
“The moon, like a flower
In heaven’s high bower,
With silent delight,
Sits and smiles on the night.”
“I would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea!
We tire of the flame of the meteor, before it can fade and flee;
And the flame of the blue star of twilight, hung low on the rim of the sky,
Has awaked in our hearts, my beloved, a sadness that may not die.”
“Sweet babe, in thy face
Soft desires I can trace,
Secret joys and secret smiles,
Little pretty infant wiles.
…
As thy softest limbs I feel
Smiles as of the morning steal
O’er thy cheek, and o’er thy breast
Where thy little heart doth rest.”
“I told my love, I told my love,
I told her all my heart,
[121]
Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears.
Ah, she did depart!
…
Soon after she was gone from me,
A traveler came by,
Silently, invisibly:
He took her with a sigh.”
“Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,
The holy tree is growing there;
From joy the holy branches start,
And all the trembling flowers they bear.
The changing colors of its fruit
Have dowered the stars with merry light;
The surety of its hidden root
Has planted quiet in the night.”

Which is Blake, and which is Yeats? You may put the name of either under any of these stanzas, without being guilty of an unpardonable critical lapse. Mr. Yeats took Blake and imitated him as frankly, and it may be, as unconsciously, as many less sophisticated versifiers have imitated Tennyson, or Mr. Swinburne, or Rossetti. It is creditable to him that he should have had discernment enough to perceive in Blake an exceptional[122] and individual content; but why having got hold of that content, having saturated himself with it, as it were, and having found the exploitation of it easy and provocative of praise, Mr. Yeats should turn round and call it Keltic is something of a puzzle. Of course, one has to remember that among a people whose interests are material, rather than spiritual, the poet who would get a hearing is compelled to have resort to a certain amount of adventitiousness and empyricism.
“We poets in our youth begin in gladness;
But thereof come in the end despondency and madness,”

saith Wordsworth. We poets in our youth also begin in sincerity and with a single eye to the glory of the Muses. But too frequently, even while our youth is still with us, we begin to think about the glory of ourselves, and take steps accordingly. It is good for us, if we have any gift at all, to organize and advertise a school, with ourselves carefully elected by ourselves to the position of archpriest.[123] The critic who in an idle hour set down “Cockney School,” has a great deal to answer for. Somebody followed him hard with the “Lake School.” And in due course we had the “Fleshly School.” It is to be noted, however, that these epithets were bestowed by the critics upon the poets, and not by the poets upon the poets themselves. I venture to ............