I wrote the most of these thoughts in my diary on the coast of Normandy, and as I finished came upon Mont Saint Michel, and thereupon doubted for a day the foundation of my school. Here I saw the places of assembly, those cloisters on the rocks summit, the church, the great halls where monks, or knights, or men at arms sat at meals, beautiful from or or proportion. I remembered ordinances of the Popes forbidding drinking? cups with stems of gold to these monks who had but a bare dormitory to sleep in. Even when imagining, the individual had taken more from his fellows and his fathers than he gave; one man finishing what another had begun; and all that majestitasy, seeming more of Egypt than of Christendom, spoke nothing to the solitary soul, but seemed to announce whether past or yet to e an heroic temper of social men, a bondage of adventure and of wisdom. Then I thought more patiently and I saw that what had made these but as one and given them for a thousand years the miracles of their shrine and temporal rule by land and sea, was not a dession to knave or dolt, an impoverishment of the on thought to make it serviceable and easy, but a dead language and a union in whatever, even to the greatest saint, is of incredible difficulty. Only by the substantiation of the soul I thought, whether in literature or in sanctity, we e upon those agreements, those separations from all else that fasteogether lastingly; for while a popular and picturesque Burns and Scott but create a province, and our Irish cries and grammars serve some passing need, Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe and all who travel in their road with however poor a stride, define races and create everlasting loyalties. Synge, like all of the great kin, sought for the raot through the eyes or in history, or even iure, but where those monks found God, in the depths of the mind, and in all art like his, although it does not and??indeed because it does not??may lie the roots of far?brang events. Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not persuade, which does not desd, which does not explain is irresistible. It is made by men who expressed themselves to the full, and it works through the best minds; whereas the external and picturesque and declamatory writers, that they may create kilts and bagpipes and neers and guide?books, leave the best miy, and in Ireland and Scotland England runs into the hole. It has no array uments and maxims, because the great and the simple (and the Muses have never known which of the two most pleases them) heir deliberate thought for the days work, a will do it worse if they have not grown into or found about them, most perhaps in the minds of women, the nobleness of emotion, associated with the sery as of their try, by those great poets, who have dreamed it in solitude, and who to this day in Europe are creating iructible spiritual races, like thion has created in the East.
W. B. Yeats.
September 14th. 1910.