cardinals from little places in Italy, and but one to represent the United States and one to represent England. The Pope certainly would not run the risk of leaving the Italian cardinals without a working majority, but that body should be composed of the most virtuous, dignified, able, and intellectual priests in the whole Church. The appointments to the cardinalate of Lavigerie in France, of Manning in England, of Gibbons in the United States, were equal to great victories for the Church. A resolute pontiff could make the politics of the Vatican of consequence to every government in the world by the appointment of the proper cardinals.

The Pope has the right to invest bishops, and though he appoints, by agreement or by custom, candidates nominated to him, nevertheless directly or indirectly he has immense power over the hierarchy, and can make the Church a career for virtue and talents. That the standard of the bishops should be raised, at least in certain portions of the world, can hardly be doubted; for if the bishops were what they might be, the priests would be on the average of somewhat higher type. One may well regard with admiration the general faithfulness to their trust displayed by an immense multitude of priests, and feel sure that a Father Damien is no rare exception, and yet one may also think that the standard of intelligence among the priesthood in various corners of the world might be raised, and that more priests might have a deep sense of the tremendous responsibility that accompanies their power. It may be added that a little knowledge of hygiene would not diminish any priest's influence for good. The parish priest is the material out of which the Roman Church is made; by him, and not by pope and cardinals, is the Church to be judged. He need not be much better or wiser than his flock in order to be qualified to lead them and help them, but he must be a little better, a little wiser. His life is

hard, his opportunities are great; in his hands lies the future of the Church of Rome. One cannot hope that educated men will be ready to sacrifice their lives and live among peasants, but a little broader education, an education that would bring them into contact with the earth beneath as well as with the heaven above, might be required. It surely would be possible to diminish ignorance in the priesthood, and to check an extreme readiness to call upon the special interposition of Providence to the exclusion of those instruments of grace specially sanctioned by Providence, intelligence and knowledge. Priests might be better instructed than, when a fire breaks out in a village and threatens every house, to walk up and down in front of the conflagration with litanies and censers and get in the way of the water-buckets.

The pontiff has a great opportunity for immense service in raising the character and the education of the priesthood. The priests, however, are the Church's hands to succor and uplift, to encourage and strengthen, to carry spiritual life to the people, and the best instruction they can receive must remain the Christian doctrines. The gospel of Christ was to bring peace on earth, to turn men away from the individual struggle for existence, and persuade them to union, that side by side they should subdue nature and struggle against the brutal inheritances which bar the way to the Kingdom of God. The Church has not always preached peace, but under Leo XIII. she walked in the true way. He strove to the best of his power to prevent war between nations, and also to prevent as well as to soften that civil struggle between masters and laborers, which resembles war in brutality, knavery, lies, and hypocrisy. Here the Church has declared herself for reason and conciliation. Used to old ways, accustomed to the old order, she was naturally inclined to take the side of the masters, but under the generous-hearted Leo she has pronounced her compassion for

the downtrodden and oppressed, and proclaimed herself the protector of the poor and unfortunate.

In the world's weary endeavor after peace, between nation and nation, between master and laborer, between man and man, the Church may do very much; as a cosmopolitan society, she can sympathize with American and Spaniard, with Englishman and Russian, with German and Frenchman; having children in every rank and condition of society, she can be indifferent between rich and poor; with

her great age, her far-away beliefs, her unworldly standards, she can be just between man and man. She can be the great peacemaker, and if Pius X. and his successors shall be able to increase her influence for peace and the brotherhood of men, as no doubt they will endeavor to do, they may be sure that after the empires of Austria, England, Germany, and Russia shall have passed away, the papacy will still remain, because she will have again proved that she serves mankind. H. D. Sedgwick, Jr.

"IN London the first man one meets will put any high dream out of one's head, for he will talk to one of something at once vapid and exciting, some one of those many subjects of thought that build up our social unity." It is significant of Mr. Yeats's power that when we come upon this sentence in his recent volume of essays,1 we straightway begin to wonder what it all amounts to, this civil habit of life toward which we have been given to understand that the whole creation has thus far moved. It suddenly seems ridiculous that vapid subjects of thought should be allowed to excite us simply because they concern the practical comfort of the majority. We cannot help admitting, in mere candor, that our common interests are both tame and absorbing, and that we are lucky to escape them for the moment, now and then, by contact with some individuai interest.

I.

Mr. Yeats himself is well able to afford us such an interest. He really 1 Ideas of Good and Evil. By W. B. YEATS. New York: The Macmillan Co. 1903.

We

possesses, what the world is always looking for among the younger generation of writers, individuality and distinction. There is, perhaps, no individuality in current literature which imposes itself so directly and ungrudgingly upon the reader. "Reader" seems hardly the word to use, so strong is the sense of personal contact; in his later work, especially, there is a vocal quality which a mere writer could not compass. find ourselves listening for the next sentence, not looking for it; and when here and there the eloquence or the point of view of the speaker is beyond us, we feel, maybe, a little embarrassment: we are afraid he will notice our dullness or remoteness and be disconcerted by it, and so we shall lose the rest of the music. This is only one of the evidences that Mr. Yeats may yet recapture an audience almost lost to men of letters; an audience which can only be attracted by some writer with the heart and fancy of a child and the subtle skill of an artist. To be childlike and accomplished, to keep perfect balance, not to be either childish or sophisticated, this is the great

thing in lyrical writing; we note with some anxiety that Mr. Yeats possesses theories, and we pray that he may never be possessed by them.

These theories are two: that the middle classes have been the death of good literature, and that symbolism is to be its new birth. His exposition of the former theory is extremely interesting:

"What we call popular poetry never came from the people at all. Longfellow, and Campbell, and Mrs. Hemans, and Macaulay in his Lays, and Scott in his longer poems, are the poets of the middle class, of people who have unlearned the unwritten tradition which binds the unlettered, so long as they are masters of themselves, to the beginning of time and to the foundation of the world, and who have not learned the written tradition which has been established upon the unwritten. I became certain that Burns, whose greatness has been used to justify the littleness of others, was in part a poet of the middle class, because though the farmers he sprang from and lived among had been able to create a little tradition of their own, less a tradition of ideas than of speech, they had been divided by religious and political changes from the images and emotions which had once carried their memories backward thousands of years. Despite his expressive speech, which sets him above all other popular poets, he has the triviality of emotion, the poverty of ideas, the imperfect sense of beauty, of a poetry whose most typical expression is in Longfellow."

...

"There is only one kind of good poetry, for the poetry of the coteries, which presupposes the written tradition, does not differ in kind from the true poetry of the people, which presupposes the unwritten tradition. Both are alike strange and obscure, and unreal to all who have not understanding, and both . . . glimmer with thoughts and images whose 'ancestors were stout and wise,' 'anigh to Paradise,''ere yet men knew the gift of corn." "

Then came a season of London life, of experiences" vapid and exciting," which, as he presently found, diverted him from his true field and vein. He had, thereupon, the extraordinary good fortune to realize his mistake, to return to his Irish folk, and to renew and deepen his acquaintance with the Irish atmosphere and lore. The first-fruits of this renewal are several essays of exceptional power, and a play written for an Irish theatre which the author and others of his acknowledged coterie have proposed to establish in Dublin. He tells us plainly what he expects of this theatre and of the plays that are to be produced in it:

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Why should we thrust our works, which we have written with imaginative sincerity and filled with spiritual desire, before those quite excellent people who think that Rossetti's women are 'guys,' that Rodin's women are 'ugly,' and that Ibsen is 'immoral,' and who only want to be left at peace to enjoy the works so many clever men have made especially to suit them? We must make a theatre for ourselves and our friends, and for a few simple people who understand from sheer simplicity what we understand from scholarship and thought. We have planned the Irish Literary Theatre with this hospitable emotion, and, that the right people may find out about us, we hope to act a play or two in the spring of every year; and that the right people may escape the stupefying memory of the theatre of commerce which clings even to them, our plays will be for the most part remote, spiritual, and ideal."

It is probably fortunate that this experiment is being made in Ireland, where there is still a response to the remote and the ideal, even apparently as they are interpreted by the forms of symbolism: "All folk literature, and all literature that keeps the folk tradition, delights in unbounded and immortal things. . . . Cuchullan in the Irish folk tale had the passion of victory, and he overcame all men, and died warring upon the waves,

because they alone had strength to overcome him. . . . Oisin, new come from his three hundred years of faeryland, and of the love that is in faeryland, bids St. Patrick cease his prayers awhile and listen to the blackbird, because it is the blackbird of Derrycarn that Finn brought from Norway, three hundred years before, and set its nest upon the oak tree with his own hands. Surely if one goes far enough into the woods, one will find there all that he is seeking? Who knows how many centuries the birds of the woods have been singing?"

II.

Mr. Yeats does not hesitate to range himself frankly with those whom we commonly call the superstitious: "I often entangle myself in arguments more complicated than even those paths of Inchy as to what is the true nature of apparitions, but at other times I say, as Socrates said when they told him a learned opinion about the nymph of the Ilissus, 'The common opinion is enough for me.' I believe when I am in the mood that all nature is full of people whom we cannot see, and that some of these are ugly and grotesque, and some wicked or foolish, but very many beautiful beyond any one we have ever seen, and that these are not far away when we are walking in pleasant and quiet places. Even when I was a boy I could never walk in a wood without feeling that at any moment I might find before me somebody or something I had long looked for without knowing what I looked for. And now I will at times explore every little nook of some poor coppice with almost anxious footsteps, so deep a hold has this imagination upon me."

It is evidently impossible to consider the work of so credulous, fanciful, and ingenuous a spirit as we consider the work of an ordinary man of letters, or even an ordinary poet. And we can see why symbolism should be the natural resource for the higher expression of an intelligence

to which figures of speech are hardly more than literal statements of truth. Mr. Yeats has, however, not only an instinct for symbolism, but a theory of it; he is a scholar as well as a child and a seer. He has a good deal to say of the emotional symbol and the intellectual symbol. He chooses to call what is commonly termed the decadence" by the much more poetic title, "the autumn of the body; and considers that it really represents a first step upward toward a lost estate: "We are, it may be, at a crowning crisis of the world, at the moment when man is about to ascend, with the wealth he has been so long gathering upon his shoulders, the stairway he has been descending from the first days. The first poets, if we may find their images in the Kalevala, had not Homer's preoccupation with things, and he was not so full of their excitement as Virgil. Dante added to poetry a dialectic which, although he made it serve his laborious ecstasy, was the invention of minds trained by the labor of life, by a traffic among many things, and not a spontaneous expression of an interior life; while Shakespeare shattered the symmetry of verse and of drama that he might file them with things and their accidental relations to one another."

Follows upon this double belief in folk poetry and coterie poetry that Mr. Yeats's early prose mainly consisted in a simple and unmoralized record of certain legends and superstitions which he had from the mouths of Irish peasants, and his early verse and drama contained unmistakable reminders of Mallarmé and Maeterlinck. His new prose play,' a first experiment in writing plays for the proposed Irish Theatre, is in many respects unlike his former work. There is no faëry-lore or magic in it, and its simple, almost bald style precludes lavishness in the use of verbal symbols. It has no distinctly drawn human characters, but probably

1 Where There is Nothing. By W. B. YEATS. New York: The Macmillan Co. 1903.

the author did not mean to make any. Maeterlinck," he says in the paper called The Autumn of the Body, "has set before us faint souls, naked and pathetic shadows already half vapor and sighing to one another upon the borders of the last abyss." The central figure in Where There is Nothing is less filmy and unhuman than all that, but it is not quite a person. It is a symbol, perhaps, an embodied situation, a Hamlet, let us say, without personality and without bowels. As for the play, as a whole, he may as well confess that he has not been able to get farther than the suspicion that the play means something. He is sure it is not an allegory, for Mr. Yeats has taken pains to explain that symbolism and allegory are very different things, and that allegory is a comparatively trivial thing. He is sure it is not a study of life, for, considered from that point of view, Paul Ruttledge must be owned a mere lunatic with a desire to have great iron claws, and to put them about the pillars, and to pull and pull till everything fell to pieces." He does in the end get pulled to pieces himself, and that reasonable fact, perhaps, has something to do with the meaning of the play. Even then the flightiness of the victim precludes the possibility of our considering his death a tragedy; it is a mere pathos; but probably Mr. Yeats would not care about that either. Before he had determined to set himself against the middle classes, with their middling intelligence excited by vapid subjects of thought, he had doubtless conceived a distaste for anything so coarse and obvious as tragedy; and it is much that we should have an interpreter in English even of the naked and pathetic futilities, the pale and disembodied shadows of emotion, which haunt the background of human consciousness.

But this is not quite all we wish to expect from so indubitable a genius as that of Mr. Yeats. He has, he says, learned from the people themselves “that they cannot separate the idea of an art