William Butler Yeats

“ I doubt if one could select from any Irish writer of the last hundred and fifty years until the present generation, a solitary sentence that might be included in a reputable anthology of religious thought. Ireland has produced but two men of religious genius: Johannes Scotus Erigena, who lived a long time ago, and Bishop Berkeley, who kept his Plato by his Bible, and Ireland has forgotten both; and its moral system being founded upon habit, not intellectual conviction, has shown of late that it cannot resist the onset of modern life. We are quick to hate and slow to love ”

“ Her remarkable intellectual powers have nothing to do with common sense—masses of roses can be gathered at Christmas for instance, and the characters in one book need bear no resemblance to their namesakes in another. Nor is she much occupied in presenting clever men and women. What thrills her—for it starts as a thrill—is the actual working of a brain, especially of a youthful brain, and there are passages in Jacob’s Room where the process becomes as physical as the raising of a hand. ”

“ To some extent Ireland but shows in an acute form the European problem, and must seek a remedy where the best minds of Europe seek it—in audacity of speculation and creation. We must consider anew the foundations of existence, bring to the discussion—diplomacies and prudences put away—all relevant thought. Christianity must meet to-day not the criticism as its ecclesiastics seem to imagine of the School of Voltaire, but of that out of which Christianity itself in part arose, the School of Plato, and there is less occasion for passion. ”

“ The English and Irish countrymen are devout because ignorant of these thoughts; but we, till we have passed our grain through the sieve, are atheists. I do not believe in the Incarnation in the Church's sense of that word, and I know that I do not, and yet, seeing that like most men of my kind these fifty years I desire belief, the old Carol and all similar Art delights me. But the Christian Brothers think that they believe, and suddenly confronted with the reality of their own thought cover up their eyes. ”

“ Here Cambridge, with all its dons, is raised into the upper air and becomes a light for ships at sea, and Rachel, playing Bach upon a hotel piano, builds a momentary palace for the human mind.
But what of the subject that she regards as of the highest importance: human beings as a whole and as wholes? She tells us (in her essays) that human beings are the permanent material of fiction, that it is only the method of presenting them which changes and ought to change, that to capture their inner life presents a different problem to each generation of novelists ”

“ In Kew Gardens she sees men, sometimes looking at flowers, and flowers never looking at men. And, in either case, she reports her vision impartially; she strays forward, murmuring, wandering, falling asleep. ”

“ Stone lies solid over the British Museum, as bone lies cool over the visions and heats of the brain. Only here the brain is Plato’s brain and Shakespeare’s; the brain has made pots and statues, great bulls and little jewels, and crossed the river of death this way and that incessantly, seeking some landing, now wrapping the body well for its long sleep; now laying a penny piece on the eyes; now turning the toes scrupulously to the East. Meanwhile Plato continues his dialogue ”

“ This story roused as much horror as the Cherry Tree Carol. Yet countless obscure mothers have so dreamed, have been so deceived; some of them born in Protestant communities have become Johanna Southcotts and lost our sympathy; but if we imagine such a mother as a simple country girl living amongst settled opinions, the theme grows emotional and philosophical. ”

“ Lennox Robinson gave to a paper edited by young poets a story written in his youth. A religious young girl in the West of Ireland, her meditations stirred perhaps by her own name of Mary, begins to wonder what would happen if Christ's Second Coming were in her own village. She thinks first that the people are so wicked they would reject him, and then that they might accept him and grow good. She is pursued by a tramp, becomes unconscious, is ravished and returns to consciousness in ignorance of what has happened. ”

“ There seems a slight change here, an approach towards character construction in the Tolstoyan sense; Sir William Bradshaw, for instance, is uninterruptedly and embracingly evil. Any approach is significant, for it suggests that in future books she may solve the problem as a whole. She herself believes it can be done, and, with the exception of Joyce, she is the only writer of genius who is trying. All the other so-called innovators are (if not pretentious bunglers) , merely innovators in subject matter and the praise we give them is of the kind we should accord to scientists. ”

“ Rachel, an undeveloped girl, answers it. The uneasiness of society and its occasional panics take hold of her, and nothing can exorcise them, because it is her own desire to face the truth; nothing, not even love. ”

“ If we dared not overstress ‘South America’ in The Voyage Out, still lighter must fall our touch on London here, still more disastrous would be the application to its shimmering fabric of mysticism, unity beneath multiplicity, twin souls. ”

“ Septimus is ungrateful and throws himself out of the window. ‘Coward’, cries the doctor, but is too late. News of which comes to Clarissa as she is giving an evening party. Does she likewise commit suicide? I thought she did the first time I read the book; not at my second reading, nor is the physical act important, for she is certainly left with the full knowledge—inside knowledge—of what suicide is. The societified lady and the obscure maniac are in a sense the same person. His foot has slipped through the gay surface on which she still stands—that is all the difference between them. ”

“ The pictures and the windows are infinite in number, so that every variety of experience seems assured, and yet there is one factor that never varies: namely the gallery itself; the gallery is always the same, and the reader always has the feeling that he is pacing along it, under the conditions of time and space that regulate his daily life. Virginia Woolf would do away with the sense of pacing. The pictures and windows may remain if they can—indeed the portraits must remain—but she wants to destroy the gallery in which they are embedded and in its place build—build what? ”

“ There is the whole mystery—God, in the indignity of human birth, all that seemed impossible, blasphemous even, to many early heretical sects and all set forth in an old 'sing-song' that has yet a mathematical logic. ”

“ They do good work, because everything is subject matter for the novel, nothing ought to be ruled out on the ground that it is remote or indecent. But they do not advance the novelist’s art. Virginia Woolf has already done that a little, and if she succeeds in her problem of rendering character, she will advance it enormously.
For English fiction, despite the variety of its content, has made little innovation in form between the days of Fielding and those of Arnold Bennett. ”

“ Presently she finds herself with child and believes and persuades her parents that a miracle has taken place, and gradually the neighbours believe also and turn good. At last she dies bringing forth a girl-child ”