Lady Gregory, a fairy godmother, has given to Young Ireland the gift of her Cuchulain of Muirthemne, which should be henceforward the book of its dream. I do not doubt but there will be a great change in the next generation, for the character of many children will have grown to maturity brooding over the memories of heroes who were themselves half children, half demigods. Though the hero tales will have their greatest power over the young, no one mind could measure their depth. They seem simple and primitive, yet they draw us strangely aside from life, and the emotions they awaken are not simple but complex. Here are twenty tales, and they are so alike in imaginative character that they seem all to have poured from one mind; and to these twenty we could add a hundred others, all endlessly fertile in difference of incident, but all seeming to own the same imaginative creator. It was so for many centuries, and then the maker of the song seems to have grown weary, and distinct voices not overladen with the tradition of the ages were heard; and today every one wanders in a path of his own, finding or losing the way, the truth, and the life of art in the free play of his desires. There was something more to cause this later period of diverse utterance than the interruption of other races and the claims of the world upon us. Surely the ancient Egyptian met in Memphis or Thebes as many strangers as we did, but he wept on through many dynasties carving the same face of mystery and rarely altering the peculiar forms which were his inheritance from the craftsmen of a thousand years before. It was not the introduction of something new, but the loss of something which finally vexed the calm of the Sphinx and marred the Phidian beauty which in Greece was a long dream for many generations. It was not because the Dane or Norman came and dwelt among us that the signature of the Sidhe was withdrawn from the Gaelic mind. I do not know how to express this loss otherwise than by saying we appear to have fallen away from our archetype. We find in all the early stories the presence of one being who may be the genius of our land if that old idea of race divinities be a true one. A strange similitude unites all the characters. We infer an interior identity. The same spirit flashes out in hostile clans, and then Cuculain kisses Ferdiad. They all confidently appeal to; it in each other. Maeve flying after the great battle can ask a gift from her conqueror and obtains it. Fand and Emer dispute who shall make the last sacrifice of love and give the beloved to a rival. The conflicts seem half in play or in dream, and we do not know when an awakening of love will disarm the foes. In spite of the bloodshed the heroes seem like children who fight steadily through a mock battle, but the night will see these children at peace, and they will dream with arms around each other in the same cot. No literature ever had a more beautiful heart of childhood in it. The bards could hate no one consistently. If they took away the heroic chivalry from Conchobar in one tale they restored it to him in another. They have the confident trust—and expectation of goodness that children have, who may have suffered punishment, but who come later on and smile on the chastiser. It is this quality which gives the tales their extraordinary charm. I know no other literature which has it to the same degree. I do not like to speculate on the absence of this spirit in our later literature, which was written under other influences. It cannot be because there was a less spiritual life in the apostles than in the bards. We cannot compare Cuculain, the most complete ideal of Gaelic chivalry, with that supreme figure whose coming to the world was the effacement of whole pantheons of divinities, and yet it is true that since the thoughts of men were turned from the old ideals our literature has been filled with a less noble life. I think a due may be found in the withdrawal of thought from nature, the great mother who, is the giver of all life, and without whose life ideals become inoperative and listless dwellers in the heart. The eyes of the ancient Gael were fixed in wonder on the rocks and hills, and the waste places of the earth were piled with phantasmal palaces where the Sidhe sat on their thrones. Everywhere there was life, and as they saw so they felt. To conceive of nature in any way, as beautiful and living, as friendly or hostile, is to receive from her in like measure out of her fullness. With whatever face we approach the mirror a similar face approaches ours. "Let him approach it, saying, 'This is the Mighty,' he becomes mighty," says an ancient scripture, teaching us that as our aspiration is so will be our inspiration and power. Out of this comradeship with earth there came a commingling of natures, and we do not know when we read who are the Sidhe and who are human. The great energies are all in the heroes. They bound to themselves, like the Talkend, the strength of the fire, the brightness of the sun, and the swiftness of the wind. They seem truly the earth-born. The waves respond to their deeds; the elemental creatures respond and there are clashing echoes and allies innumerable, and armies in the air continuing their battles illimitably beyond: a proud race, who felt with bursting heart the heavens were watching them, who defied their gods and exiled them to have free play for their own deeds. A very different humanity indeed from those who have come to walk the earth with humility, who are afraid of heaven and its rulers, and whose dread is the greatest of all sins, for in it is a denial of their own divinity. Surely the sight heroes is more welcome to the King, in whose heaven are sworded seraphim, than the bowed knees and the spirits who make themselves as worms in His sight. In the symbolic expression of our spiritual life the eagle has become a dove brooding peace. Oh, that it might rebecome the eagle and take to the upper airs!
A generosity and greatness of spirit are in the heroes of the Red Branch, and out of their strength grows a bloom of beauty never fully revealed until Lady Gregory compiled these tales. As we read our eyes are dazzled by strange graces of color flowing over the pages: everywhere there is mystery and magnificence. Procession's pass by in Druid ritual, kings and queens, and harpers who look like kings. When the wind passes over them and stirs their garments a sweetness comes over the teller of the tale, who felt that delight in draperies blown over shapely forms which is the inspiration of the Winged Victory and many Greek marbles. The bards will not have the hands of those proud people touch anything which is not beautiful. "It was a beautiful chessboard they had, all of white bronze, and the chessmen of gold and silver, and a candlestick of precious stones lighting it." The wasting of time has spared us a few things to show that this rare and intricate metal work was not a myth, and we are forced by an inexorable logic to accept as mainly true the narration of the pride, the beauty, the generosity, and the large lovable character of the ancient heroes. We may come to realize that, losing their Druid vision of a more shining world mingling with this, we have lost the vision of that life into the likeness of which it is the true labor of the spirit to transform this life. For the Tirnanoge is that Garden where, in the mind of the Lord, the flowers and trees blossomed before they grew in the fields, where man lived in the Golden Age before the outer darkness of the earth was built and he was outcast from Paradise. There is no true art or literature which has not some image of the Golden Life lurking within it, and through the archaic rudeness of these legends the light shines as sunlight through the hoary branches of ancient oaks. Lady Gregory has done her work, as compiler with a judgment which could hardly be too much praised, and she has translated the stories into an idiom which is a reflection of the original Gaelic and is full of charm. We are indebted to her for this labor as much as to any of those who sang to sweeten Ireland's wrong.
When I was asked to write "anything" about Yeats, our Irish poet, my thoughts were like rambling flocks that have no shepherd, and without guidance my rambling thoughts have run anywhere.
I confess I have feared to enter or linger too long in the many-colored land of Druid twilights and tunes. A beauty not our own, more perfect than we can ourselves conceive, is a danger to the imagination. I am too often tempted to wander with Usheen in Timanoge and to forget my own heart and its more rarely accorded vision of truth. I know I like my own heart best, but I never look into the world of my friend without feeling that my region lies in the temperate zone and is near the Arctic circle; the flowers grow more rarely and are paler, and the struggle for existence is keener. Southward and in the warm west are the Happy Isles among the Shadowy Waters. The pearly phantoms are dancing there with blown hair amid cloud tail daffodils. They have known nothing but beauty, or at the most a beautiful unhappiness. Everything there moves in procession or according to ritual, and the agony of grief, it is felt, must be concealed. There are no faces blurred with tears there; some traditional gesture signifying sorrow is all that is allowed. I have looked with longing eyes into this world. It is Ildathach, the Many-Colored Land, but not the Land of the Living Heart. That island where the multitudinous beatings of many hearts became one is yet unvisited; but the isle of our poet is the more beautiful of all the isles the mystic voyagers have found during the thousands of years literature has recorded in Ireland. What wonder that many wish to follow him, and already other voices are singing amid its twilights.
They will make and unmake. They will discover new wonders; and will perhaps make commonplace some beauty which but for repetition would have seemed rare. I would that no one but the first discoverer should enter Ildathach, or at least report of it. No voyage to the new world, however memorable, will hold us like the voyage of Columbus. I sigh sometimes thinking on the light dominion dreams have over the heart. We cannot hold a dream for long, and that early joy of the poet in his new-found world has passed. It has seemed to him too luxuriant. He seeks for something more, and has tried to make its tropical tangle orthodox; and the glimmering waters and winds are no longer beautiful natural presences, but have become symbolic voices and preach obscurely some doctrine of their power to quench the light in the soul or to fan it to a brighter flame.
I like their old voiceless motion and their natural wandering best, and would rather roam in the bee-loud glade than under the boughs of beryl and chrysoberyl, where I am put to school to learn the significance of every jewel. I like that natural infinity which a prodigal beauty suggests more than that revealed in esoteric hieroglyphs, even though the writing be in precious stones. Sometimes I wonder whether that insatiable desire of the mind for something more than it has yet attained, which blows the perfume from every flower, and plucks the flower from every tree, and hews down every tree in the valley until it goes forth gnawing itself in a last hunger, does not threaten all the cloudy turrets of the Poet's soul. But whatever end or transformation, or unveiling may happen, that which creates beauty must have beauty in its essence, and the soul must cast off many vestures before it comes to itself. We, all of us, poets, artists, and musicians, who work in shadows, must sometime begin to work in substance, and why should we grieve if one labor ends and another begins? I am interested more in life than in the shadows of life, and as Ildathach grows fainter I await eagerly the revelation of the real nature of one who has built so many mansions in the heavens. The poet has concealed himself under the embroidered cloths and has moved in secretness, and only at rare times, as when he says, "A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love," do we find a love which is not the love of the Sidhe; and more rarely still do recognizable human figures, like the Old Pensioner or Moll Magee, meet us. All the rest are from another world and are survivals of the proud and golden races who move with the old stateliness and an added sorrow for the dark age which breaks in upon their loveliness. They do not war upon the new age, but build up about themselves in imagination the ancient beauty, and love with a love a little colored by the passion of the darkness from which they could not escape. They are the sole inheritors of many traditions, and have now come to the end of the ways, and so are unhappy. We know why they are unhappy, but not the cause of a strange merriment which sometimes they feel, unless it be that beauty within itself has a joy in its own rhythmic being. They are changing, too, as the winds and waters have changed. They are not like Usheen, seekers and romantic wanderers, but have each found some mood in themselves where all quest ceases; they utter oracles, and even in the swaying of a hand or the dropping of hair there is less suggestion of individual action than of a divinity living within them, shaping an elaborate beauty in dream for his own delight, and for no other end than the delight in his dream. Other poets have written of Wisdom overshadowing man and speaking through his lips, or a Will working within the human will, but I think in this poetry we find for the first time the revelation of the Spirit as the weaver of beauty. Hence it comes that little hitherto unnoticed motions are adored:
This woman is less the beloved than the priestess of beauty who reveals the divinity, not as the inspired prophetesses filled with the Holy Breath did in the ancient mysteries, but in casual gestures and in a waving of her white arms, in the stillness of her eyes, in her hair which trembles like a faery flood of unloosed shadowy light over pale breasts, and in many glimmering motions so beautiful that it is at once seen whose footfall it is we hear, and that the place where she stands is holy ground. This, it seems to me, is what is essential in this poetry, what is peculiar and individual in it—the revelation of great mysteries in unnoticed things; and as not a sparrow may fall unconsidered by Him, so even in the swaying of a human hand His sceptre may have dominion over the heart and His paradise be entered in the lifting of an eyelid.
When I was a boy I knew another who has since become famous and who has now written Reveries over Childhood and Youth. I searched the pages to meet the boy I knew and could not find him. He has told us what he saw and what he remembered of others, but from himself he seems to have passed away and remembers himself not. The boy I knew was darkly beautiful to look on, fiery yet playful and full of lovely and elfin fancies. He was swift of response, indeed over-generous to the fancies of others because a nature so charged with beauty could not but emit beauty at every challenge. Even so water, however ugly the object we cast upon it, can but break out in a foam of beauty and a bewilderment of lovely curves.
Our fancies were in reality nothing to him but the affinities which by the slightest similitude evoked out of the infinitely richer being the prodigality of beautiful images with which it was endowed and made itself conscious of itself. I have often thought how strange it is that artist and poet have never yet revealed themselves to us except in verse and painting, that there was among them no psychologist who could turn back upon himself to search for the law of his own being, who could tell us how his brain first became illuminated with images, and who tried to track the inspiration to its secret fount and the images to their ancestral beauty. Few of the psychologists who have written about imagination were endowed with it themselves: and here is a poet, the most imaginative of his generation, who has written about his youth and has told us only about external circumstances and nothing about himself, nothing about that flowering of strange beauty in poetry in him where the Gaelic imagination that had sunk underground when the Gaelic speech had died, rose up again transfiguring an alien language until that new poetry became like the record of another mystic voyager to the Heaven-world of our ancestors. But poet and artist are rarely self-conscious of the processes of their own minds. They deliver their message with exultation but they find nothing worth recording in the descent upon them of the fiery tongues. So our poet has told us little about himself but much about circumstance, and I recall in his pages the Dublin of thirty years ago, and note how faithful the memory of eye and ear are, and how forgetful the heart is of its own fancies. Is nature behind this distaste for intimate self-analysis in the poet? Are our own emanations poisonous to us if we do not rapidly clear ourselves of them? Is it best to forget ourselves and hurry away once the deed is done or the end is attained to some remoter valley in the Golden World and look for a new beauty if we would continue to create beauty?
I know how readily our poet forgets his own songs. I once quoted to him some early verses of his own as comment on something he had said. He asked eagerly "Who wrote that?" and when I said "Do you not remember?" he petulantly waved the poem aside for he had forsaken his past. Again at a later period he told me his early verses sometimes aroused him to a frenzy of dislike. Of the feelings which beset the young poet of genius little or nothing is revealed in this Reverie. Yet what would we not give for a book which would tell how beauty beset that youth in his walks about Dublin and Sligo; how the sensitive response to color, form, music and tradition began, how he came to recognize the moods which incarnated in him as immortal moods. Perhaps it is too much to expect from the creative imagination that it shall also be capable of exact and subtle analysis. In this work I walk down the streets of Dublin I walked with Yeats over thirty years ago. I mix with the people who then were living in the city, O'Leary, Taylor, Dowden, Hughes and the rest; but the poet himself does not walk with me. It is a new voice speaking of the past of others, pointing out the doorways entered by dead youth. The new voice has distinction and dignity of its own, and we are grateful for this history, others more so than myself, because most of what is written therein I knew already, and I wanted a secret which is not revealed. I wanted to know more about the working of the imagination which planted the little snow-white feet in the sally garden, and which heard the kettle on the hob sing peace into the breast, and was intimate with twilight and the creatures that move in the dusk and undergrowths, with weasel, heron, rabbit, hare, mouse and coney; which plucked the Flower of Immortality in the Island of Statues and wandered with Usheen in Timanogue. I wanted to know what all that magic-making meant to the magician, but he has kept his own secret, and I must be content and grateful to one who has revealed more of beauty than any other in his time.
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.
It was a great relief to me, personally, who had lived in the palace of Irish art for a time, and had even contributed a little to its dimness, to hear outside the walls a few years ago a sturdy voice blaspheming against all the formula, and violating the tenuous atmosphere with its "Insurrections." There are poets who cannot write with half their being, and who must write with their whole being, and they bring their poor relation, the body, with them wherever they go, and are not ashamed of it. They are not at warfare with the spirit, but have a kind of instinct that the clan of human powers ought to cling together as one family. With the best poets of this school, like Shakespeare and Whitman, one rarely can separate body and soul, for we feel the whole man is speaking. With Keats, Shelley, Swinburne, and our own Yeats, one feels that they have all sought shelter from disagreeable actualities in the world of imagination. James Stephens, as he chanted his Insurrections, sang with his whole being. Let no one say I am comparing him with Shakespeare. One may say the blackbird has wings as well as the eagle, without insisting that the bird in the hedgerows is peer of the winged creature beyond the mountain-tops. But how refreshing it was to find somebody who was a poet without a formula, who did not ransack dictionaries for dead words, as Rossetti did to get living speech, whose natural passions declared themselves without the least idea that they ought to be ashamed of themselves, or be thrice refined in the crucible by the careful alchemist before they could appear in the drawing-room. Nature has an art of its own, and the natural emotions in their natural and passionate expression have that kind of picturesque beauty which Marcus Aurelius, tired, perhaps, of the severe orthodoxies of Greek and Roman art, referred to when he spoke of the foam on the jaws of the wild boar and the mane of the lion.
There were evidences of such an art in Insurrections, the first book of James Stephens. In the poem called "Fossils," the girl who flies and the boy who hunts her are followed in flight and pursuit with a swift energy by the poet, and the lines pant and gasp, and the figures flare up and down the pages. The energy created a new form in verse, not an orthodox beauty, which the classic artists would have admitted, but such picturesque beauty as Marcus Aurelius found in the foam on the jaws of the wild boar.
I always want to find the fundamental emotion out of which a poet writes. It is easy to do this with some, with writers like Shelley and Wordsworth, for they talked much of abstract things, and a man never reveals himself so fully as when he does this, when he tries to interpret nature, when he has to fill darkness with light, and chaos with meaning. A man may speak about his own heart and may deceive himself and others, but ask him to fill empty space with significance, and what he projects on that screen will be himself, and you can know him even as hereafter he will be known. When a poet puts his ear to a shell, I know if he listens long enough he will hear his own destiny. I knew after reading "The Shell" that in James Stephens we were going to have no singer of the abstract. There was no human quality or stir in the blind elemental murmur, and the poet drops it with a sigh of relief:
From the tradition of the world too he breaks away, from the great murmuring shell which gives back to us our cries and questionings and protests soothed into soft, easeful things and smooth orthodox complacencies, for it was shaped by humanity to whisper back to it what it wished to hear. From all soft, easeful beliefs and silken complacencies the last Irish poet breaks away in a book of insurrections. He is doubtful even of love, the greatest orthodoxy of any, which so few have questioned, which has preceded all religions and will survive them all. When he writes of love in "The Red-haired Man's Wife" and "The Rebel" he is not sure that that old intoxication of self-surrender is not a wrong to the soul and a disloyalty to the highest in us. His "Dancer" revolts from the applauding crowd. The wind cries out against the inference that the beauty of nature points inevitably to an equal beauty of spirit within. His enemies revolt against their hate; his old man against his own grumblings, and the poet himself rebels against his own revolt in that quaint scrap of verse he prefixes to the volume:
He does not revolt against the abstract like so many because he is incapable of thinking. Indeed, he is one of the few Irish poets we have who is always thinking as he goes along. He does not rebel against love because he is not himself sweet at heart, for the best thing in the book is its unfeigned humanity. So we have a personal puzzle to solve with this perplexing writer which makes us all the more eager to hear him again. A man might be difficult to understand and the problem of his personality might not be worth solution, but it is not so with James Stephens. From a man who can write with such power as he shows in these two stanzas taken from "The Street behind Yours" we may expect high things. It is a vision seen with distended imagination as if by some child strayed from light:
There is nothing more grim and powerful than that in The City of Dreadful Night. It has all the vaporous horror of a Dore grotesque and will bear examination better. But our poet does not as a rule write with such unrelieved gloom. He keeps a stoical cheerfulness, and even when he faces terrible things we feel encouraged to take his hand and go with him, for he is master of his own soul, and you cannot get a whimper out of him. He likes the storm of things, and is out for it. He has a perfect craft in recording wild natural emotions. The verse in this first book has occasional faults, but as a rule the lines move, driven by that inner energy of emotion which will sometimes work more metrical wonders than the most conscious art. The words hiss at you sometimes, as in "The Dancer," and again will melt away with the delicacy of fairy bells as in "The Watcher," or will run like deep river water, as in "The Whisperer," which in some moods I think is the best poem in the book until I read "Fossils" or "What Tomas an Buile said in a Pub." They are too long to print, but I must give myself the pleasure of quoting the beautiful "Slan Leat," with which he concludes the book, bidding us, not farewell, but to accompany him on further adventure:
Our new Irish poet declared he was bound "out to the storm of things," and we all waited with interest for his next utterance. Would he wear the red cap as the poet of the social revolution, now long overdue in these islands, or would he sing the Marsellaise of womanhood, emerging in hordes from their underground kitchens to make a still greater revolution? He did neither. He forgot all about the storm of things, and delighted us with his story of Mary, the charwoman's daughter, a tale of Dublin life, so, kindly, so humane, so vivid, so wise, so witty, and so true, that it would not be exaggerating to say that natural humanity in Ireland found its first worthy chronicler in this tale.
We have a second volume of poetry from James Stephens, The Hill of Vision. He has climbed a hill, indeed, but has found cross roads there leading in many directions, and seems to be a little perplexed whether the storm of things was his destiny after all. When one is in a cave there is only one road which leads out, but when one stands in the sunlight there are endless roads. We enjoy his perplexity, for he has seated himself by his cross-roads, and has tried many tunes on his lute, obviously in doubt which sounds sweetest to his own ear. I am not at all in doubt as to what is best, and I hope he will go on like Whitman, carrying "the old delicious burdens, men and women," wherever he goes. For his references to Deity, Plato undoubtedly would have expelled him from his Republic; and justly so, for James Stephens treats his god very much as the African savage treats his fetish. Now it is supplicated, and the next minute the idol is buffeted for an unanswered prayer or a neglected duty, and then a little later our Irish African is crooning sweetly with his idol, arranging its domestic affairs and the marriage of Heaven and Earth. Sometimes our poet essays the pastoral, and in sheer gaiety: flies like any bird under the boughs, and up into the sunlight. There are in his company imps and grotesques, and fauns and satyrs, who come summoned by his piping. Sometimes, as in "Eve," the poem of the mystery of womanhood, he is purely beautiful, but I find myself going back to his men and women; and I hope he will not be angry with me when I say I prefer his tinker drunken to his Deity sober. None of our Irish poets has found God, at least a god any but themselves would not be ashamed to acknowledge. But our poet does know his men and his women. They are not the shadowy, Whistler-like decorative suggestions of humanity made by our poetic dramatists. They have entered like living creatures into his mind, and they break out there in an instant's unforgettable passion or agony, and the wild words fly up to the poet's brain to match their emotion. I do not know whether the verses entitled "The Brute" are poetry, but they have an amazing energy of expression.
But our poet can be beautiful when he wills, and sometimes, too, he has largeness and grandeur of vision and expression. Look at this picture of the earth, seen from mid-heaven:
I would like to quote the verses entitled "Shame." Never have I read anywhere such an anguished cowering before Conscience, a mighty creature full of eyes within and without, and pointing fingers and asped tongues, anticipating in secret the blazing condemnation of the world. And there is "Bessie Bobtail," staggering down the streets with her reiterated, inarticulate expression of grief, moving like one of those wretched whom Blake described in a marvelous phrase as "drunken with woe forgotten"; and there is "Satan," where the reconcilement of light and darkness in the twilights of time is perfectly and imaginatively expressed.
The Hill of Vision is a very unequal book. There are many verses full of power, which move with the free easy motion of the literary athlete. Others betray awkwardness, and stumble as if the writer had stepped too suddenly into the sunlight of his power, and was dazed and bewildered. There is some diffusion of his faculties in what I feel are byways of his mind, but the main current of his energies will, I am convinced, urge him on to his inevitable portrayal of humanity. With writers like Synge and Stephens the Celtic imagination is leaving its Timanoges, its Ildathachs, its Many Colored Lands and impersonal moods, and is coming down to earth intent on vigorous life and individual humanity. I can see that there are great tales to be told and great songs to be sung, and I watch the doings of the new-comers with sympathy, all the while feeling I am somewhat remote from their world, for I belong to an earlier day, and listen to these robust songs somewhat as a ghost who hears the cock crow, and knows his hours are over, and he and his tribe must disappear into tradition.
As I grow older I get more songless. I am now exiled irrevocably from the Country of the Young, but I hope I can listen without jealousy and even with delight to those who still make music in the enchanted land. I often searched in the "Poet's Corner" of the country papers with a wild surmise that there, amid reports of Boards of Guardians and Rural Councils, some poetic young kinsman may be taking council with the stars, watching more closely the Plough in the furrows of the heavens than the county instructor at his task of making farmers drive the plough straight in the fields. I found many years ago in a country paper a local poet making genuine music. I remember a line:
Earth has no steady beauty as the calm-eyed immortals have, but their image glimmers on the waves of time, and out of what instantly vanishes we can build up something within us which may yet grow into a calm-eyed immortality of loveliness, we becoming gradually what we dream of. I have heard people complain of the frailty of these verses of Seumas O'Sullivan. They want war songs, plough songs, to nerve the soul to fight or the hand to do its work. I will never make that complaint. I will only complain if the strife or the work ever blunt my senses so that I will pass by with an impatient disdain these delicate snatchings at a beauty which is ever fleeting. But I would ask him to remember that life never allures us twice with exactly the same enchantment. Never again will that tress drift like a woven wind made visible out of Paradise; never again will that lifted hand, foam-pale, seem like the springing up of beauty in the world; never a second time will that white brow remind him of the wonderful white towers of the city of the gods. To seek a second inspiration is to receive only a second-rate inspiration, and our poet is a little too fond of lingering in his verse round a few things, a face, the swaying poplars, or sighing reeds which had once piped an alluring music in his ears, and which he longs to hear again. He lives not in too frail a world, but in too narrow a world, and he should adventure out into new worlds in the old quest. He, has become a master of delicate and musical rhythms. I remember reading Seumas O'Sulivan's first manuscripts with mingled pleasure and horror, for his lines often ran anyhow, and scansion seemed to him an unknown art, but I feel humbly now that he can get a subtle quality into his music which I could not hope to acquire. I would like him to catch some new and rare birds with that subtle net of his, and to begin to invent more beauty of his own and to seek for it less. I believe he has got it in him to do well, to do better than he has done if he will now try to use his invention more. The poems with a slight narrative in them, like "The Portent" or the "Saint Anthony," seem to me the most perfect, and it is in this direction, I think, he will succeed best. He wants a story to keep him from beating musical and ineffective wings in the void. I have not said half what I want to say about Seumas O'Sullivan's verses, but I know the world will not listen long to the musings of one verse-writer on another. I only hope this note may send some readers to their bookseller for Seumas O'Sullivan's poems, and that it may help them to study with more understanding a mind that I love.
A LECTURE ON THE ART OF G. F. WATTS
After the publication of The Gentle Art of Making Enemies the writer who ventures to speak of art and literature in the same breath needs some courage. Since the death of Whistler, his opinions about the independence of art from the moral ideas with which literature is preoccupied have been generally accepted in the studios. The artist who is praised by a literary man would hardly be human if he was not pleased; but he listens with impatience to any criticism or suggestion about the substance of his art or the form it should take. I had a friend, an artist of genius, and when we were both young we argued together about art on equal terms. It had not then occurred to him that any intelligence I might have displayed in writing verse did not entitle me to an opinion about modeling; but one day I found him reading Mr. Whistler's Ten O'clock. The revolt of art against literature had reached Ireland. After that, while we were still good friends, he made me feel that I was an outsider, and when I ventured to plead for a national character in sculpture, his righteous anger—I might say his ferocity—forced me to talk of something else.
I was not convinced he was right, but years after I began to use the brush a little, and I remember painting a twilight from love of some strange colors and harmonious lines, and when one of my literary friends found that its interest depended on color and form, and that the idea in it could not readily be translated into words, and that it left him wishing that I would illustrate my poems or something that had a meaning, I veered round at once and understood Whistler, and how foolish I was to argue with John Hughes. I joined in the general insurrection of art against the domination of literature. But being a writer and much concerned with abstract ideas, I have never had the comfort and happiness of those who embrace this opinion with their whole being, and when I was asked to lecture, I thought that as I had no Irish Whistler to fear, I might speak of art in relation to these universal ideas which artists hold are for literature and not subject matter for art at all.
I must first say it was not my wish to speak. With a world of noble and immortal forms all about us, it seemed to me as unfitting that words without art or long labor in their making should be advertised as an attraction; that any one should be expected to sit here for an hour to listen to me or another upon a genius which speaks for itself. I was overruled by Mr. Lane. But it is all wrong, this desire to hear and hold opinions about art rather than to be moved by the art itself. I know twenty charlatans who will talk about art, but never lift their eyes to look at the pictures on the wall. I remember an Irish poet speaking about art a whole evening in a room hung round with pictures by Constable, Monet, and others, and he came into that room and went out of it without looking at those pictures. His interest in art was in the holding of opinions about it, and in hearing other opinions, which he could again talk about. I hope I have made some of you feel uncomfortable. This may, perhaps, seem malicious, but it is necessary to release artists from the dogmas of critics who are not artists.
I would not venture to speak here tonight if I thought that anything I said could be laid hold of and be turned into a formula, and used afterwards to torment some unfortunate artist. An artist will take with readiness advice or criticism from a fellow-artist, so far as his natural vanity permits; but he writhes under opinions derived from Ruskin or Tolstoi, the great theorists. You may ask indignantly, Can no one, then, speak about paintings or statues except painters or modelers? No; no one would condemn you to such painful silence and self-suppression. Artists would wish you to talk unceasingly about the emotions their pain of making pictures arouse in you; but, under lifelong enemies, do not suggest to artists the theories under which they should paint. That is hitting below the belt. The poor artist is as God made him; and no one, not even a Tolstoi, is competent to undertake his re-creation. His fellow-artists will pass on to him the tradition of using the brush. He may use it well or ill; but when you ask him to use his art to illustrate literary ideas, or ethical ideas, you are asking him to become a literary man or a preacher. The other arts have their obvious limitations. The literary man does not dare to demand of the musician that he shall be scientific or moral. The latter is safe in uttering every kind of profanity in sound so long as it is music. Musicians have their art to themselves. But the artist is tormented, and asked to reflect the thought of his time. Beauty is primarily what he is concerned with; and the only moral ideas which he can impart in a satisfactory way are the moral ideas naturally associated with beauty in its higher or lower forms. But I think, some of you are confuting me in your own minds at this moment. You say to yourselves: "But we have all about us the works of great artists whose inspiration not one will deny. He used his art to express great ethical ideas. He spoke again and again about these ideas. He was proud that his art was dedicated to their expression." I am sorry to say that he did say many things which would have endeared him to Tolstoi and Ruskin, and for which I respect him as a man, and which as an artist I deplore. I deplore his speaking of ethical ideas as the inspiration of his art, because I think they were only the inspiration of his life; and where he is weakest in his appeal as an artist is where he summons consciously to his aid ethical ideas which find their proper expression in religion or literature or life.
Watts wished to ennoble art by summoning to its aid the highest conceptions of literature; but in doing so he seems to me to imply that art needed such conceptions for its justification, that the pure artist mind, careless of these ideas, and only careful to make for itself a beautiful vision of things, was in a lower plane, and had a less spiritual message. Now that I deny. I deny absolutely that art needs to call to its aid, in order to justify or ennoble it, any abstract ideas about love or justice or mercy.
It may express none of these ideas, and yet express truths of its own as high and as essential to the being of man; and it is in spite of himself, in spite of his theories, that the work of Watts will have an enduring place in the history of art. You will ask then, "Can art express no moral ideas? Is it unmoral?" In the definite and restricted sense in which the words "ethical" and "moral" are generally used, art is, and must by its nature be unmoral. I do not mean "immoral," and let no one represent me as saying art must be immoral by its very nature. There are dear newspaper men to whom it would be a delight to attribute to me such a saying; and never to let me forget that I said it. When I say that art is essentially unmoral, I mean that the first impulse to paint comes from something seen, either beauty of color or form or tone. It may be light which attracts the artist, or it may be some dimming of natural forms, until they seem to have more of the loveliness of mind than of nature. But it is the aesthetic, not the moral or ethical, nature which is stirred. The picture may afterwards be called "Charity," or "Faith," or "Hope"—and any of these words may make an apt title. But what looms up before the vision of the artist first of all is an image, and that is accepted on account of its fitness for a picture; and an image which was not pictorial would be rejected at once by any true artist, whether it was an illustration of the noblest moral conception or not. Whether a picture is moral or immoral will depend upon the character of the artist, and not upon the subject. A man will communicate his character in everything he touches. He cannot escape communicating it. He must be content with that silent witness, and not try to let the virtues shout out from his pictures. The fact is, art is essentially a spiritual thing, and its vision is perpetually turned to Ultimates. It is indefinable as spirit is. It perceives in life and nature those indefinable relations of one thing to another which to the religious thinker suggest a master mind in nature—a magician of the beautiful at work from hour to hour, from moment to moment, in a never-ceasing and solemn chariot motion in the heavens, in the perpetual and marvelous breathing forth of winds, in the motion of waters, and in the unending evolution of gay and delicate forms of leaf and wing.
The artist may be no philosopher, no mystic; he may be with or without a moral sense, he may not believe in more than his eye can see; but in so far as he can shape clay into beautiful and moving forms he is imitating Deity; when his eye has caught with delight some subtle relation between color and color there is mysticism in his vision. I am not concerned here to prove that there is a spirit in nature or humanity; but for those who ask from art a serious message, here, I say, is a way of receiving from art an inspiration the most profound that man can receive. When you ask from the artist that he should teach you, be careful that you are not asking him to be obvious, to utter platitudes—that you are not asking him to debase his art to make things easy for you, who are too indolent to climb to the mountain, but want it brought to your feet. There are people who pass by a nocturne by Whistler, a misty twilight by Corot, and who whisper solemnly before a Noel Paton as if they were in a Cathedral. Is God, then, only present when His Name is uttered? When we call a figure Time or Death, does it add dignity to it? What is the real inspiration we derive from that noble design by Mr. Watts? Not the comprehension of Time, not the nature of Death, but a revelation human form can express of the heroic dignity. Is it not more to us to know that man or woman can look half-divine, that they can wear an aspect such as we imagine belongs to the immortals, and to feel that if man is made in the image of his Creator, his Creator is the archetype of no ignoble thing? There were immortal powers in Watts' mind when those figures surged up in it; but they were neither Time nor Death. He was rather near to his own archetype, and in that mood in which Emerson was when he said, "I the imperfect adore my own perfect." Touch by touch, as the picture was built up, he was becoming conscious of some interior majesty in his own nature, and it was for himself more than for us he worked. "The oration is to the orator," says Whitman, "and comes most back to him." The artist, too, as he creates a beautiful form outside himself, creates within himself, or admits to his being a nobler beauty than his eyes have seen. His inspiration is spiritual in its origin, and there is always in it some strange story of the glory of the King.
With man and his work we must take either a spiritual or a material point of view. All half-way beliefs are temporary and illogical. I prefer the spiritual with its admission of incalculable mystery and romance in nature, where we find the infinite folded in the atom, and feel how in the unconscious result and labor of man's hand the Eternal is working Its will. You may say that this belongs more to psychology than to art criticism, but I am trying to make clear to you and to myself the relation which the mind which is in literature may rightly bear to the vision which is art. Are literature and ethics to dictate to Art its subjects? Is it right to demand that the artist's work shall have an obviously intelligible message or meaning, which the intellect can abstract from it and relate to the conduct of life? My belief is that the most literature can do is to help to interpret art, and that art offers to it, as nature does, a vision of beauty, but of undefined significance.
No one asks or expects the clouds to shape themselves into ethical forms, or the sun to shine only on the just and not on the unjust also. It is vain to expect it, but there is something written about the heavens declaring the beauty of the Creator and the firmament showing His handiwork. If the artist can bring whatever of that vision has touched him into his work we should ask no more, and must not expect him to be more righteously minded than his Creator, or to add a finishing tag of moral to justify it all, to show that Deity is solemnly minded and no mere idle trifler with beauty like Whistler.
I have stated my belief that art is spiritual, that its genuine inspirations come from a higher plane of our being than the ethical or intellectual; and I think wherever literature or ethics have so dominated the mind of the artist that they change the form of his inspiration, his art loses its own peculiar power and gains nothing. We have here a picture of "Love steering the bark of Humanity." I may put it rather crudely when I say that pictures like this are supposed to exert a power on the man who, for example, would beat his wife, so that love will be his after inspiration. Anyhow, ethical pictures are painted with some such intention belief. Now, art has great influence, but I do not believe this or any other picture would stop a man beating his wife if he wanted to. Art does not call sinners to repentance; that is not one of its powers. It fulfils rather another saying: "Unto them that have much shall be given," bringing delight to those that are already sensitive to beauty. My own conviction is that ethical pictures are, if anything, immoral in their influence, as everything must be that forsakes the law of its own being, and that pictures like this only add to the vanity of people so righteously minded as to be aware of their own virtue. We will always have these concessions to passing phases of thought. We have had requests for the scientific painter—the man who will paint nature with geological accuracy, and man in accordance with evolutionary dogmas. He will find his eloquent literary defenders enchanted to find so much learning to point to in his work, but it will all pass. The true artist will still be instinctively spiritual.
Now I have used the word "spiritual" so often in connection with art that you may reasonably ask for some definition of my meaning. I am afraid it is easier to define spirituality in literature than in art. But a literary definition may help. Spirituality is the power certain minds have of apprehending formless spiritual essences, of seeing the eternal in the transitory, of relating the particular to the universal, the type to the archetype.
While I give this definition, I hope no artist will ever be insane enough to make it the guiding principle of his art. I shudder to think of any conscious attempt in a picture to relate the type to the archetype. It is a philosophical definition, solely intended for the spectator. I wish the artist only to paint his vision, and whether he paints this, or another world he imagines, if it is art it will be spiritual. I have given a definition of spirituality in literature, but how now relate it to art? How illustrate its presence? When Pater wrote his famous description of the Mona Lisa, that intense and enigmatic face had evoked a spiritual mood. When he saw in it the summed-up experience of many generations of humanity, he felt in the picture that relation of the particular to the universal I have spoken of. When we find human forms suggesting a superhuman dignity, as in Watts' figures of Time and Death, or in the Phidian marbles, the type is there melting into the archetype. When Millet paints a peasant figure of today with some gesture we imagine the first Sower must have used, it is the eternal in it which makes the transitory impressive. But these are obvious instances, you will say, chosen from artists whose pictures lend themselves to this kind of exposition. What about the art of the landscape painter? Undeniably a form of art, where is the spirituality?
I am afraid my intellect is not equal to talking up every picture that might be suggested and using it to illustrate my meaning, though I do not think I would despair of finally discovering the spiritual element in any picture I felt was art. However, I will go further. We have all felt some element of art lacking in the painter who goes to Killarney, Italy, or Switzerland, and brings us back a faithful representation of undeniably beautiful places. It is all there—the lofty mountains, the lakes, the local color; but what enchanted us in nature does not touch us in the picture. What we want is the spirit of the place evoked in us rather than the place itself. Art is neither pictured botany or geology. A great landscape is the expression of a mood of the human mind as definitely as music or poetry is. The artist is communicating his own emotions. There is some mystic significance in the color he employs; and then the doorways are opened, and we pass from sense into soul. We are looking into a soul when we are looking at a Turner, a Carot, or a Whistler, as surely as when in dream we find ourselves moving in strange countries which are yet within us, contained for all their seeming infinitudes in the little hollow of the brain. All this, I think, is undeniable; but perhaps not many of you will follow me, though you may understand me, if I go further and say, that in this, art is unconsciously also reaching out to archetypes, is lifting itself up to walk in that garden of the divine mind where, as the first Scripture says, it created "flowers before they were in the field and every herb before it grew." A man may sit in an armchair and travel farther than ever Columbus traveled; and no one can say how far Turner, in his search after light, had not journeyed into the lost Eden, and he himself may have been there most surely at the last when his pictures had become a blaze of incoherent light.
You may say now that I have objected to literature dominating the arts, and yet I have drawn from pictures a most complicated theory. I have felt a little, indeed, as if I was marching through subtleties to the dismemberment of my mind, but I do not think I have anywhere contradicted myself or suggested that an artist should work on these speculations. These may rightly arise in the mind of the onlooker who will regard a work of art with his whole nature, not merely with the aesthetic sense, and who will naturally pass from the first delight of vision into a psychological analysis. A profound nature will always awaken profound reflections. There are heads by Da Vinci as interesting in their humanity as Hamlet. When we see eyes that tempt and allure with lips virginal in their purity, we feel in the face a union of things which the dual nature of man is eternally desiring. It is the marriage of heaven and hell, the union of spirit and flesh, each with their uncurbed desires; and what is impossible in life is in his art, and is one of the secrets of its strange fascination. It may seem paradoxical to say of Watts—a man of genius, who was always preaching through his art—that it is very difficult to find what he really expresses. No one is ever for a moment in doubt about what is expressed by Rossetti, Turner, Millet, Corot, or many contemporary artists who never preached at all, but whose mood or vision peculiar to themselves is easily definable. With Watts the effort at analyses is confused: first by his own statement about the ethical significance of his works, which I think misleading, because while we may come away from his pictures with many feelings of majesty or beauty or mystery, the ethical spirit is not the predominant one. That rapturous winged spirit which he calls Love Triumphant might just as easily be called Music or Song, and another allegory be attached to it without our feeling any more special fitness or unfitness in the explanation. I see a beautiful exultant figure, but I do not feel love as the fundamental mood in the painter, as I feel the religious mood is fundamental in the Angelus of Millet. I do not need to look for a title to that or for the painting of The Shepherdess to feel how earth and her children have become one in the vision of the painter; that the shepherdess is not the subject, nor the sheep, nor the still evening, but altogether are one mood, one being, in which all things move in harmony and are guided by the Great Shepherd. Well, I do not feel that Love; or Charity, or Hope are expressed in this way in Watts, and that the ethical spirit is not fundamental with him as the religious spirit is with Millet. He has an intellectual conception of his moral idea, but is not emotionally obsessed by it, and the basis of a man's art is not to be found in his intellectual conceptions, which are light things, but in his character or rather in his temperament. We know, for all the poetical circumstances of Rossetti's pictures, what desire it is that shines out of those ardent faces, and how with Leighton "the form alone is eloquent," and that Tumer's God was light as surely as with any Persian worshipper of the sun. Here and there they may have been tempted otherwise, but they never strayed far from their temperamental way of expressing themselves in art. So that the first thing to be dismissed in trying to understand Watts is Watts' own view of his art and its inspiration. He is not the first distinguished man whose intellect has not proved equal to explaining rightly its sources of power. Our next difficulty in discovering the real Watts arises because he did not look at nature or life directly. He was overcome by great traditions. He almost persistently looks at nature through one or two veils. There is a Phidian veil and a Venetian or rather an Italian veil, and almost everything in life and nature which could not be expressed in terms of these traditions he ignored. I might say that no artist of equal genius ever painted pictures and brought so little fresh observation into his art except, perhaps, Burne-Jones. Both these artists seem to have a secret and refined sympathy with Fuseli's famous outburst, "Damn Nature, she always puts me out!" Even when the sitter came, Watts seems to have been uneasy unless he could turn him into a Venetian nobleman or person of the Middle Ages, or could disguise in some way the fact that Artist and Sitter belonged to the nineteenth century. He does not seem to be aware that people must breathe even in pictures. His skies rest solidly on the shoulders of his figures as if they were cut out to let the figures be inserted. If he were not a man of genius there would have been an end of him. But he was a man of genius, and we must try to understand the meaning of his acceptance of tradition. If we understand it in Watts we will understand a great deal of contemporary art and literature which is called derivative, art issuing out of art, and literature out of literature.
The fact is that this kind of art in which Watts and Burne-Jones were pioneers is an art which has not yet come to its culmination or to any perfect expression of itself. There is a genuinely individual impulse in it, and it is not derivative merely, although almost every phase of it can be related to earlier art. It has nothing in common with the so-called grand school of painting which produced worthless imitations of Michael Angelo and Raphael. It is feeling out for a new world, and it is trying to use the older tradition as a bridge. The older art held up a mirror to natural forms and brought them nearer to man. In the perfect culmination of this new art one feels how a complete change might take place and natural forms be used to express an internal nature or the soul of the artist. Colors and forms, like words after the lapse of centuries, enlarge their significance. The earliest art was probably simple and literal—there may have been the outline of a figure filled up with some flat color. Then as art became more complex, colors began to have an emotional meaning quite apart from their original relation to an object. The artist begins unconsciously to relate color more intimately to his own temperament than to external nature. At last, after the lapse of ages, some sensitive artist begins to imagine that he has discovered a complete language capable of expressing any mood of mind. The passing of centuries has enriched every color, and left it related to some new phase of the soul. Phidian or Michael Angelesque forms gather their own peculiar associations of divinity or power. In fact, this new art uses the forms of the old as symbols or hieroglyphs to express more complicated ideas than the older artists tried to depict.
Watts never attempted, for all his admiration of these men, to follow them in their efforts to realize perfectly the forms that they conceived. They had done this once and for all, and repetition may have seemed unnecessary. But the lofty temper awakened by those stupendous creations could be aroused by a suggestion of their peculiar characteristics. Association of ideas will in some subtle way bring us back to the Phidian demigods when we look at forms and draperies vaguely suggestive of the Parthenon. I do not say that Watt's did this consciously, but instinctively he felt compelled, with the gradual development of his own mind, to use the imaginative traditions created by other artists as a language through which he might find expression peculiar to himself. It is a highly intellectual art to which tradition was a necessity, as much as it is to the poet, who when he speaks of "beauty" draws upon a sentiment created by millions of long-dead lovers, or who, when he thinks of the "spirit," is, in his use of the word, the heir of countless generations who brooded upon the mysteries.
Just as in Millet, the painter of peasants, there was a religious spirit shaping all things into austere and elemental simplicities, so in Watts there was an intellectual spirit, seeking everywhere for the traces of mind trying to express the bodiless and abstract. With Whitman he seems to cry out, "The soul for ever and ever!" It is there in the astonishing head of Swinburne, whom he reveals, if I may use a vulgar phrase, as a poetic "bounder," but illuminated and etherealized by genius. It is in the head of Mill, the very symbol of the moral reasoning—mind. It is in the face of Tennyson, with its too self-conscious seership, and in all those vague faces of the imaginative paintings, into which, to use Pater's phrase, "the soul with all its maladies has passed." In his pictures he draws on the effects of earlier art, and throws his sitters back until they seem to belong to some nondescript mediaeval country, like the Bohemia of the dramatists; and he darkens and shuts out the light of day that this starlight of soul may be more clearly seen, and destroys, as far as he can, all traces of the century they live in, for the mind lives in all the ages, and he would show it as the pilgrim of eternity. Because Watts' art was necessarily so brooding and meditative, looking at life with half-closed eyes and then shutting them to be alone with memory and the interpreter, his painting, so beautiful and full of surety in early pictures like the Wounded Heron, grows to be often labored and muddy, and his drawing uncertain. That he could draw and paint with the greatest, he every now and then gave proof; but the surety of beautiful craftsmanship deserts those who have not always their eye fixed on an object of vision; and Watts was not, like Blake or Shelley, one of the proud seers whose visions are of "forms more real than living man." He seemed to feel what his effects should be rather than to see them, or else his vision was fleeting and his art was a laborious brooding to recapture the lost impression. In his color he always seems to me to be second-hand, as if the bloom and freshness of his paint had worn off through previous use by other artists. It seemed to be a necessity of his curiously intellectual art that only traditional colors and forms should be employed, and it is only rarely we get the shock of a new creation, and absolutely original design, as in Orpheus, where the passionate figure turns to hold what is already a vanishing shadow.
Watts' art was an effort to invest his own age, an age of reason, with the nobilities engendered in an age of faith. At the time Watts was at his prime his contemporaries were everywhere losing belief in the spiritual conceptions of earlier periods; they were analyzing everything, and were deciding that what was really true in religion, what gave it nobility, was its ethical teaching; retain that, and religion might go, illustrating the truth of the Chinese philosopher who said: "When the spirit is lost, men follow after charity and duty to one's neighbors." The unity of belief was broken up into diverse intellectual conceptions. Men talked about love and liberty, patriotism, duty, charity, and a whole host of abstractions moral and intellectual, which they had convinced themselves were the essence of religion and the real cause of its power over man. Whether Watts lost faith like his contemporaries I do not know, but their spirit infected his art. He set himself to paint these abstractions; and because we cannot imagine these abstractions with a form, we feel something fundamentally false in this side of his art. He who paints a man, an angelic being, or a divine being, paints something we feel may have life. But it is impossible to imagine Time with a body as it is to imagine a painting embodying Newton's law of gravitation. It is because such abstractions do not readily take shape that Watts drew so much on the imaginative tradition of his predecessors. Where these pictures are impressive is where the artist slipped by his conscious aim, and laid hold of the nobility peculiar to the men and women he used as symbols. It is not Time or Death which awes us in Watts' picture, but majestical images of humanity; and Watts is at his greatest as an inventor when humanity itself most occupies him when he depicts human life only, and lets it suggest its own natural infinity, as in those images of the lovers drifting through the Inferno, with whom every passion is burnt out and exhausted but the love through which they fell.