274
The sentimentalist himself; while art
Is but a vision of reality.
PARTISAN REVIEW
What portion in the world can the artist have
Who has awakened from the conUl10n dream
But dissipation and despair... ?
The common dream is the vulgar acceptance of reality in the terms
officially prescribed for it, terms insistently positivist, scientific, worldly.
Yeats's poem corresponds to the section of "The Tragic Generation" in
which he reaches for yet another explanation. Still thinking of his friends
and their several tragedies, Yeats divides nineteenth century English poet–
ry into two modes: one of these consists of poets who held to "some
propaganda or traditional doctrine to give companionship with their fel–
lows." Browning had his "psychological curiosity," Arnold "his faith in
what he described as the best thought of his generation," Tennyson "moral
values that were not aesthetic values." But there was another tradition, an
antinomian one:
Coleridge of "The Rime of Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan,"
and Rossetti in all his wri tings, made what Arnold has called that
"morbid effort," that search for "perfection of thought and feeling,
and to unite this to perfection of form," sought this new, pure beau–
ty, and suffered in their lives because of it.
Yeats thought that he and his colleagues in the nineties had more and
more "separated certain images and regions of the mind, and that these
images grow in beauty as they grow in sterility." And he offered in evi–
dence a few stanzas of Lionel Johnson's poem "The Dark Angel," one of
Johnson's acknowledgments of a second self, prince of darkness, the enemy
within:
Dark Angel, with thine aching lust
To rid the world of peni tence:
Malicious Angel, who still dost
My soul such subtle violence.
It may be a prejudice on my part to think that if Wilde was the rep–
resentative figure of the English nineties, Yeats was its most complete
witness and critic. "The Tragic Generation" ends with his account of
