His Mistress's Eyebrows by W.B. Yeats — Read

The preoccupation of our Art and Literature with knowledge, with the / surface of life, with the arbitrary, with mechanism, has arisen out of / the root. A careful, but not necessarily very subtle man could foretell / the history of any religion if he knew its first principle, and that it / would live long enough to fulfil itself. The mind can never do the same / thing twice over, and having exhausted simple beauty and meaning, it / passes to the strange and hidden, and at last must find its delight, / having outrun its harmonies in the emphatic and discordant. When I was a / boy at the art school I watched an older student late returned from / Paris, with a wonder that had no understanding in it. He was very / amorous, and every new love was the occasion of a new picture, and every / new picture was uglier than its forerunner. He was excited about his / mistress's eyebrows, as was fitting, but the interest of beauty had been / exhausted by the logical energies of Art, which destroys where it has / rummaged, and can but discover, whether it will or no. We cannot / discover our subject-matter by deliberate intellect, for when a / subject-matter ceases to move us we must go elsewhere, and when it moves / us, even though it be 'that old ballad material of Shakespeare' or even / 'the morbid terror of death,' we can laugh at reason. We must not ask is / the world interested in this or that, for nothing is in question but our / own interest, and we can understand no other. Our place in the Hierarchy / is settled for us by our choice of a subject-matter, and all good / criticism is hieratic, delighting in setting things above one another, / Epic and Drama above Lyric and so on, and not merely side by side.

But it is our instinct and not our intellect that chooses. We can / deliberately refashion our characters, but not our painting or our / poetry. If our characters also were not unconsciously refashioned so / completely by the unfolding of the logical energies of Art, that even / simple things have in the end a new aspect in our eyes, the Arts would / not be among those things that return for ever. The ballads that Bishop / Percy gathered returned in the Ancient Mariner, and the delight in the / world of old Greek sculptors sprang into a more delicate loveliness in / that archaistic head of the young athlete down the long corridor to your / left hand as you go into the British Museum. Civilisation too, will not / that also destroy where it has loved, until it shall bring the simple / and natural things again and a new Argo with all the gilding on her bows / sail out to find another fleece?