No More Learning

To be too headstrong and too open, that is the beginning of trouble. To
keep to yourself the thing that you know, and to do in quiet the thing
you want to do. There would be no disturbance at all in the world, all
people to bear that in mind!




APPENDIX.




_THE COUNTESS CATHLEEN. _

PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION.


THE present version of _The Countess Cathleen_ is not quite the version
adopted by the Irish Literary Theatre a couple of years ago, for our
stage and scenery were capable of little; and it may differ still more
from any stage version I make in future, for it seems that my people
of the waters and my unhappy dead, in the third act, cannot keep their
supernatural essence, but must put on too much of our mortality, in
any ordinary theatre. I am told that I must abandon a meaning or two
and make my merchants carry away the treasure themselves. The act was
written long ago, when I had seen so few plays that I took pleasure
in stage effects. Indeed, I am not yet certain that a wealthy theatre
could not shape it to an impressive pageantry, or that a theatre
without any wealth could not lift it out of pageantry into the mind,
with a dim curtain, and some dimly robed actors, and the beautiful
voices that should be as important in poetical as in musical drama. The
Elizabethan stage was so little imprisoned in material circumstance
that the Elizabethan imagination was not strained by god or spirit, nor
even by Echo herself--no, not even when she answered, as in _The Duchess
of Malfi_, in clear, loud words which were not the words that had been
spoken to her. We have made a prison-house of paint and canvas, where
we have as little freedom as under our own roofs, for there is no
freedom in a house that has been made with hands. All art moves in the
cave of the Chimaera, or in the garden of the Hesperides, or in the more
silent house of the gods, and neither cave, nor garden, nor house can
show itself clearly but to the mind's eye.

Besides re-writing a lyric or two, I have much enlarged the note on
_The Countess Cathleen_, as there has been some discussion in Ireland
about the origin of the story, but the other notes[A] are as they have
always been. They are short enough, but I do not think that anybody who
knows modern poetry will find obscurities in this book.
In any case, I
must leave my myths and symbols to explain themselves as the years go
by and one poem lights up another, and the stories that friends, and
one friend in particular, have gathered for me, or that I have gathered
myself in many cottages, find their way into the light. I would, if I
could, add to that great and complicated inheritance of images which
written literature has substituted for the greater and more complex
inheritance of spoken tradition, to that majestic heraldry of the poets
some new heraldic images gathered from the lips of the common people.
Christianity and the old nature faith have lain down side by side in
the cottages, and I would proclaim that peace as loudly as I can among
the kingdoms of poetry, where there is no peace that is not joyous,
no battle that does not give life instead of death; I may even try to
persuade others, in more sober prose, that there can be no language
more worthy of poetry and of the meditation of the soul than that which
has been made, or can be made, out of a subtlety of desire, an emotion
of sacrifice, a delight in order, that are perhaps Christian, and myths
and images that mirror the energies of woods and streams, and of their
wild creatures. Has any part of that majestic heraldry of the poets
had a very different fountain? Is it not the ritual of the marriage of
heaven and earth?

These details may seem to many unnecessary; but after all one writes
poetry for a few careful readers and for a few friends, who will not
consider such details very unnecessary. When Cimabue had the cry it
was, it seems, worth thinking of those that run; but to-day, when they
can write as well as read, one can sit with one's companions under the
hedgerow contentedly. If one writes well and has the patience, somebody
will come from among the runners and read what one has written quickly,
and go away quickly, and write out as much as he can remember in the
language of the highway.

W. B. YEATS.

_January, 1901. _

FOOTNOTE:

[A] I have left them out of this edition as Lady Gregory's _Cuchulain
of Muirthemne_ and _Gods and Fighting Men_ have made them unnecessary.
When I began to write, the names of the Irish heroes were almost
unknown even in Ireland.




NOTES


_The Countess Cathleen. _--I found the story of the Countess Cathleen
in what professed to be a collection of Irish folklore in an Irish
newspaper some years ago.