The Praise of Old Wives' Tales by W.B. Yeats

An art may become impersonal because it has too much circumstance or too / little, because the world is too little or too much with it, because it / is too near the ground or too far up among the branches. I met an old / man out fishing a year ago who said to me 'Don Quixote and Odysseus are / always near to me; ' that is true for me also, for even Hamlet and Lear / and OEdipus are more cloudy. No playwright ever has made or ever will / make a character that will follow us out of the theatre as Don Quixote / follows us out of the book, for no playwright can be wholly episodical, / and when one constructs, bringing one's characters into complicated / relations with one another, something impersonal comes into the story. / Society, fate, 'tendency,' something not quite human begins to arrange / the characters and to excite into action only so much of their humanity / as they find it necessary to show to one another. The common heart will / always love better the tales that have something of an old wives' tale / and that look upon their hero from every side as if he alone were / wonderful, as a child does with a new penny. In plays of a comedy too / extravagant to photograph life, or written in verse, the construction is / of a necessity woven out of naked motives and passions, but when an / atmosphere of modern reality has to be built up as well, and the / tendency, or fate, or society has to be shown as it is about ourselves / the characters grow fainter and we have to read the book many times or / see the play many times before we can remember them. Even then they are / only possible in a certain drawing-room and among such and such people, / and we must carry all that lumber in our heads. I thought Tolstoi's 'War / and Peace' the greatest story I had ever read, and yet it has gone from / me; even Lancelot, ever a shadow, is more visible in my memory than all / its substance.