Pamela Colman Smith, The Green Sheaf, and "Dream of the World's End"

Pamela Colman Smith (1878–1951) was the creator, editor, and publisher of The Green Sheaf. A magazine of poetry and art, it came out for a year between 1903 and 1904. There were to be thirteen issues in a year, and each issue cost 13 pence, while a subscription cost 13 shillings, and the thirteenth number declared that it was the last. It included contributions from Cecil French, John Todhunter, Lady Gregory, J. M. Synge, A.E., John Masefield, W. T. Horton, J. B. Yeats, W. B. Yeats, and herself. It was printed on hand-made paper, with hand-coloured illustrations, and has something in common with the hand-printed books of the Susan Mary and Elizabeth Yeats's Cuala Press (they are better known to readers of Yeats as Lily and Lolly).

Cecil French, "The Fountain of Faithful Lovers", The Green Sheaf, no. 4

 

Dreams featured heavily in all numbers of the magazine, but never more so than in the second issue, with "A Prayer to the Lords of Dream" by French, an untitled dream by Colman Smith, "Dream of the World's End" by Yeats,  "A Dream on Inishmaan" by Synge, and "Jan A Dreams" by Masefield.

For some reason, Yeats's "Dream of the World's End" is not collected in any of the volumes of "Uncollected" prose, so tends to be little known. Fortunately the availability of the whole series of The Green Sheaf at archive.org means that it is now readily accessible, though you have to know to go and look.

W. B. Yeats, "Dream of the World's End", The Green Sheaf, no. 2.

DREAM OF THE WORLD’S END

I have a way of giving myself long meaning dreams, by meditating on a symbol when I go to sleep. Sometimes I use traditional symbols, and sometimes I meditate upon some image which is only a symbol to myself. A while ago I came to think of apple-blossom as an image of the East and breaking day, and one night it brought me, not as I expected a charming dream full of the mythology of sun-rise, but this grotesque dream about the breaking of an eternal day.
     I was going through a great city, it had some likeness to Paris about Auteuil. It was night, but I saw a wild windy light in the sky, and knew that dawn was coming in the middle of the night, and that it was the Last Day. People were passing in a hurry, and going away from the light. I was in a brake with other people, and presently the horses ran away. They ran towards the light. We passed a workman who was making a wall in his best clothes, and I knew that he was doing this because he thought the Judge would look at him with more favourable eyes if he were found busy. Then we saw two or three workmen with white faces watching the sky by their unfinished work. Everybody now was a workman, for it seemed to be a workman’s quarter, and there were not many people running past us. Then I saw young workmen eating their breakfast at a long table in a yard. They were eating raw bacon. I understood somehow that they had thought “we may as well eat our breakfast even though this is the Last Day”; but, that when they began to cook it, they had thought, “it is not worth while to trouble about cooking it.” All they needed was food, that they might live through the Last Day calmly.
     After that, and now we seemed to have left the brake, though I did not remember our leaving it, we came to a bridge over a wide river, and the sky was very wild and bright, though I could not see any sun. All in a moment I saw a number of parachutes descending, and a man in a seedy black frock-coat came out of one of them, and began distributing circulars. At the head of them was the name of a seller of patent medicines, and we all understood the moment we saw the name, that he was one of the most wicked of men, for he had put up great posters that had spoiled many beautiful views. Each circular had printed upon it a curse against this man, and a statement that a curse given at the end of the world must of necessity weigh heavily with the Eternal Judge. These curses called for the damnation of the patent medicine seller, and you were asked to sign them at the bottom, undertaking at the same time to pay the sum of one pound to the medicine seller if the end of the world had not really come. I remember that the circular spoke of this “solemn occasion,” but I do not recollect any other of the exact words. I awoke, and was for some time in great terror, for it seemed to me that an armed thief was hidden somewhere in the darkness of my room. Was this some echo of what the Bible has said about “one who shall come as a thief in the night?”

W. B. Yeats

W. B. Yeats, "The Lake at Coole", The Green Sheaf, no. 4.

This is evidently based on a real dream, and Yeats notes his use of plants to evoke dreams in Per Amica Silentia Lunae:

I had found that after evocation my sleep became at moments full of light and form, all that I had failed to find while awake; and I elaborated a symbolism of natural objects that I might give myself dreams during sleep, or rather visions, for they had none of the confusion of dreams, by laying upon my pillow or beside my bed certain flowers or leaves. Even to-day, after twenty years, the exaltations and the messages that came to me from bits of hawthorn or some other plant seem of all moments of my life the happiest and the wisest. (CW5 17–18; Myth 345)

His plant symbolism was probably related to elements of the Celtic Mysteries that he was working on at this time—in 1898 Maud Gonne had a vision "to get the trees of the cardinal points", of which the only one Yeats remembered certainly was "an apple bough in the East" ("Visions of Old Irish mythology" [NLI 36,261/1], see Yeats, Philosophy, and the Occult 121 and 160n29). Other trees mentioned are oak, hazel, quicken (rowan), and hawthorn, foreshadowing Robert Graves's use of the tree alphabet in The White Goddess. Yeats, however, also associated apple-blossom and its scent with Maud Gonne, so it is perhaps understandable that the symbol had unpredictable results and evoked a city where Yeats had visited her often.

A.E. (George Russell), "A Million Years Hence", The Green Sheaf, no. 2.

A.E. (George Russell) had an engraving in the same issue that was enigmatic and apocalyptic in a rather different way, perhaps more reminiscent of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (or even Planet of the Apes). Human(oid?) figures surround a huge skull, with one perched on top of it, entitled "A Million Years Hence". Is the skull human and the figures minuscule? or are the figures the descendants of humans with a giant's skull?

Pamela Colman Smith, "Once, in a dream...", The Green Sheaf, no. 2.

Did Yeats Say That? Quotable Yeats and Misattributions

I was reading a review of a new book on Pamela Colman Smith—Pamela Colman Smith: The Untold Story, by Kaplan, Greer, O'Connor, and Parsons (2018)—which comments that: “W. B. Yeats, for instance, wrote that she looked 'exactly like a Japanese. Nannie says this Japanese appearance comes from constantly drinking iced water.' ” 

Maybe because I remembered reading it before or because the name Nannie struck me as strange, I went to check. Checking online only repeats the same attribution in the majority of cases, but the odd online source does give the correct source of a letter to W. B. Yeats from his father, J. B. Yeats, as do most of the book sources. But it reminded me of how easily attributions can drift or be misremembered either by proximity or just the jumbling of memory. And how these jumblings are all too easily propagated across the web.

For many years witty quotations have been attributed to Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde to give them some parentage when we are unsure, but careless attribution is becoming more and more common as attributions are simply copied and pasted. Quite a few of the quotations attributed to W. B. Yeats are not really his—sadly, perhaps, because they are among the most widely quoted of his supposed formulations. For instance, out of a supposed Top Ten Quotes published this year for Yeats's birthday, I think only four are authentic:

1. X “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” (see below)
2. X “Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.” (see below)
3. X “There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven't yet met.” (see below)
4. √ “Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.” (“He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”)
5. √ “How far away the stars seem, and how far is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart.” ("Ephemera")
6. √ “Think where man’s glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.” (“The Municipal Gallery Revisited”)
7. ?X “Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.” (source uncertain, but not Yeats)
8. √ “Come away, O human child: To the waters and the wild with a fairy, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.” (“The Stolen Child”)
9. X “People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.” (John Butler Yeats to his son, W. B. Yeats, in 1906)
10. X “Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth, We are happy when we are growing.” (John Butler Yeats, again; this time writing to Miss Grierson in 1909, slightly adapted: “And happiness . . . what is it? I say it is neither virtue...” etc.).

The first example—“Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire” or sometimes “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire”—seems to derive from someone reading a passage which gave two quotations together—one by Yeats and one by Plutarch—and somehow eliding the name associated with the second one:

In other words, the key to a lively and a vital appreciation of the arts in the fields of collecting and criticism is the willingness to keep doors open, an eagerness to venture into new fields for the sake of the enjoyment which a work of art can bring.
William Butler Yeats has expressed the heart of this viewpoint in his statement, “Culture does not consist in acquiring opinions but in getting rid of them” and Plutarch in “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” (Vision and Image: A Way of Seeing, James Johnson Sweeney, 1968)

Sweeney was in fact reformulating the traditional translation of Plutarch's Greek, making it a little more pithy: “The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but wood that needs igniting” or in the translation of Philemon Holland, which Yeats read: “For that the minde and understanding of man is not of the nature of a vessell that requireth to be filled up: but it hath neede onely of some match (if I may so say) to kindle and set it on fire” (Plutarch, “Of Hearing”, Moralia). The full story is set out in The Quote Investigator and is also examined in an article from the Irish Times.

The Quote Investigator also tackles a few more Yeats attributions:–

“Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking” is slippery in terms of precise wording, but a similar phrase seems to come first from the pen of Benjamin Franklin in 1782. 

“There are no strangers here, only friends you haven't met” appears to have its origin in the words of the popular American poet Edgar A. Guest, who published a poem titled “Faith" in 1915, which includes the lines: “I believe in the purpose of everything living, / That taking is but the forerunner of giving; / That strangers are friends that we some day may meet..."

Changing the author can change the meaning, and the fuller context often sheds a slightly different light on the words. Looking at the Yeats quotations investigated, there is one that I remember first seeing as part of an informational film at a National Park: “The world is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper”. Attributed to Yeats, it hints at “nature's finer forces” and devas or nature spirits, which we may perhaps discern if we subtilize our natures and refine our perceptions through spiritual practice. Yet the quotation (or its original version) comes from the playwright and essayist Eden Phillpotts and actually refers to the use of scientific instruments such as telescope and microscope:

The fimbriated flowers [of the buckbean] are a miracle of workmanship and every blossom exhibits an exquisite disorder of ragged petals finer than lace. But one needs a lens to judge of their beauty: it lies hidden from the power of our eyes, and menyanthes must have bloomed and passed a million times before there came any to perceive and salute her loveliness. The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.  (A Shadow Passes, 1919).

It becomes therefore a paean to scientific observation and the senses' need for technology to sharpen them.

Of course, given the frequency with which one or other line of “The Second Coming” is quoted nowadays, two or three of the authentic Top Ten list would probably come from that poem: perhaps “The centre cannot hold,” “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity,” “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”.

What else should make that genuine Top Ten?