The novel is "finished" in the sense that its plot reaches an ending, but Yeats did not complete the extensive refining and revising which would have been obligatory to bring the speckled bird up to his literary merits.
[2] Given that perspective and Yeats's point of view that elaborated surface realism was essential in writing novels, it was almost unavoidable that The Speckled Bird's 744 manuscript pages would include a very large portion of biographical matter.
Broadly speaking, Yeats refers to his occult involvement among the ranks of the mystical order of the Golden Dawn, during this period (the end of the 1890s), as the background for writing the novel.
This term is taken from a hand-written text, a Cabbalistic one, shown to Yeats, by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, which includes a coloured diagram of the ten Cabalistic sephiroth and their interconnecting lines (or "paths").
The setting for the 1900 version is still on a remote estate in the west of Ireland, but the father is now only a minor character who, after spending his youth in art schools and womanizing on the Continent, is an irreligious recluse.
The remainder of the 1900 version takes the hero to London where he and an occultist, who is closely modeled on MacGregor Mathers, begin to plan a mystical order.
News that the heroine has married someone else overwhelms the hero, and, at the suggestion of the occultist, he goes to Paris to copy occult manuscripts, hoping that the change of scene will comfort him.
Soon afterwards he receives alarming reports that the occultist has usurped control of their mystical order and has altered the rituals so that they no longer reflect the hero's artistic ideals.
The 1900 version breaks off after the hero visits a bizarre old occultist who sunbathes nude in a coffin and rants about a supposed plot by Jesuits to subvert the mystical order.
Later in London he attempts to found a mystical order which would unite religious, artistic, and natural emotions, or, to use the Platonic terms, truth, beauty, and love.