Page:Ideas of Good and Evil, Yeats, 1903.djvu/162

Ideas of Good and Evil. had his scenery been as simple as Mr. Gordon Craig's purple back cloth that made Dido and Æeas seem wandering on the edge of eternity, he would have found nothing absurd in pitching the tents of Richard and Richmond side by side. Goethe has said, 'Art is art, because it is not nature!' It brings us near to the archetypal ideas themselves, and away from nature, which is but their looking-glass.

III

In La Peau de Chagrin Balzac spends many pages in describing a coquette, who seems the image of heartlessness, and then invents an improbable incident that her chief victim may discover how beautifully she can sing. Nobody had ever heard her sing, and yet in her singing, and in her chatter with her maid, Balzac tells us, was her true self He would have us understand that 152