Ideas of

Good and
Evil.

and it would be much less trouble and much
pleasanter if we could all listen, friend by
friend, lover by beloved. Images used to
rise up before me, as I am sure they have
arisen before nearly everybody else who
cares for poetry, of wild-eyed men speaking
harmoniously to murmuring wires while
audiences in many-coloured robes listened,
hushed and excited. Whenever I spoke of

my desire to anybody they said I should
write for music, but when I heard anything
sung I did not hear the words, or if I did
their natural pronunciation was altered and
their natural music was altered, or it was
drowned in another music which I did not
understand. What was the good of writ-
ing a love-song if the singer pronounced
love, 'lo-0-0-0-0-ve,' or even if he said
'love,' but did not give it its exact place
and weight in the rhythm? Like every
other poet, I spoke verses in a kind of
chant when I was making them, and some-
times, when I was alone on a country road,
I would speak them in a loud chanting

voice, and feel that if I dared I would speak them in that way to other people. One day I was walking through a Dublin street with the Visionary I have written about in The Celtic Twilight, and he began speaking his verses out aloud with the confidence of those who have the inner light. He did not mind that people stopped and looked after him even on the far side of the road, but went on through poem after poem. Like myself, he knew nothing of music, but was certain that he had written them to a manner of music, and he had once asked somebody who played on a wind instrument of some kind, and then a violinist, to write out the music and play it. The violinist had played it, or something like it, but had not written. it down; but the man with the wind instrument said it could not be played because it contained quarter-tones and would be out of tune. We were not at all convinced by this, and one day, when we were staying with a Galway friend who is a learned.

Speaking to the

Psaltery.

Ideas of Good and Evil.

musician, I asked him to listen to our

verses, and to the way we spoke them.
The Visionary found to his surprise
that he did not make every poem to a
different tune, and to the surprise of the
musician that he did make them all to two
quite definite tunes, which are, it seems,
like very simple Arabic music.
It was,
perhaps, to some such music, I thought,
that Blake sang his Songs of Innocence
in Mrs. Williams' drawing-room, and per-
haps he, too, spoke rather than sang. I,
on the other hand, did not often compose
to a tune, though I sometimes did, yet
always to notes that could be written down
and played on my friend's organ, or turned
into something like a Gregorian hymn if
one sang them in the ordinary way. I
varied more than the Visionary, who
never forgot his two tunes, one for long
and one for short lines, and could not
always speak a poem in the same way,
but always felt that certain ways were
right, and that I would know one of them

if I remembered the way I first spoke the poem. When I got to London I gave the notation, as it had been played on the organ, to the friend who has just gone out, and she spoke it to me, giving my words a new quality by the beauty of her voice.

Speaking

to the Psaltery.

III

Then we began to wander through the wood of error; we tried speaking through music in the ordinary way under I know not whose evil influence, until we got to hate the two competing tunes and rhythms that were so often at discord with one another, the tune and rhythm of the verse and the tune and rhythm of the music. Then we tried, persuaded by somebody who thought quarter-tones and less intervals the especial mark of speech as distinct from singing, to write out what we did in wavy lines. On finding something like these lines in Tibetan music, we became so confident that we covered a large piece of pasteboard, which now blows up my fire in

Ideas of Good and

Evil.

the morning, with a notation in wavy lines
as a demonstration for a lecture; but at
last Mr. Dolmetsch put us back to our first
thought. He made us a beautiful instru-
ment half psaltery half lyre which contains,
I understand, all the chromatic intervals
within the range of the speaking voice;
and he taught us to regulate our speech by
the ordinary musical notes.

Some of the notations he taught us-
those in which there is no lilt, no recurring
pattern of sounds—are like this notation for
a song out of the first Act of The Countess
Cathleen.

It is written in the old C clef, which is, I am told, the most reasonable way to write it, for it would be below the stave on the treble clef or above it on the bass clef. The central line of the stave corresponds to the middle C of the piano; the first note of the poem is therefore D. The marks of long and short over the syllables are not marks of scansion, but show the syllables one makes the voice hurry or linger over.