The Autumn of the Body by W.B. Yeats

Our thoughts and emotions are often but spray flung up from hidden tides / that follow a moon no eye can see. I remember that when I first began to / write I desired to describe outward things as vividly as possible, and / took pleasure, in which there was, perhaps, a little discontent, in / picturesque and declamatory books. And then quite suddenly I lost the / desire of describing outward things, and found that I took little pleasure / in a book unless it was spiritual and unemphatic. I did not then / understand that the change was from beyond my own mind, but I understand / now that writers are struggling all over Europe, though not often with a / philosophic understanding of their struggle, against that picturesque and / declamatory way of writing, against that 'externality' which a time of / scientific and political thought has brought into literature. This / struggle has been going on for some years, but it has only just become / strong enough to draw within itself the little inner world which alone / seeks more than amusement in the arts. In France, where movements are more / marked, because the people are pre-eminently logical, _The Temptation of / S. Anthony_, the last great dramatic invention of the old romanticism, / contrasts very plainly with _Axel_, the first great dramatic invention of / the new; and Maeterlinck has followed Count Villiers de l'Isle Adam.

Flaubert wrote unforgettable descriptions of grotesque, bizarre, and / beautiful scenes and persons, as they show to the ear and to the eye, and / crowded them with historic and ethnographical details; but Count Villiers / de l'Isle Adam swept together, by what seemed a sudden energy, words / behind which glimmered a spiritual and passionate mood, as the flame / glimmers behind the dusky blue and red glass in an Eastern lamp; and / created persons from whom has fallen all even of personal characteristic / except a thirst for that hour when all things shall pass away like a / cloud, and a pride like that of the Magi following their star over many / mountains; while Maeterlinck has plucked away even this thirst and this / pride and set before us faint souls, naked and pathetic shadows already / half vapour and sighing to one another upon the border of the last abyss. / There has been, as I think, a like change in French painting, for one sees / everywhere, instead of the dramatic stories and picturesque moments of an / older school, frail and tremulous bodies unfitted for the labour of life, / and landscape where subtle rhythms of colour and of form have overcome the / clear outline of things as we see them in the labour of life.