Chapter 18. Mr. W.B. Yeats

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_ CHAPTER XVIII. MR. W.B. YEATS

1. HIS OWN ACCOUNT OF HIMSELF

Mr. W.B. Yeats has created, if not a new world, a new star. He is not a reporter of life as it is, to the extent that Shakespeare or Browning is. One is not quite certain that his kingdom is of the green earth. He is like a man who has seen the earth not directly but in a crystal. He has a vision of real things, but in unreal circumstances. His poetry repels many people at first because it is unlike any other poetry. They are suspicious of it as of a new sect in religion. They have been accustomed to bow in other temples. They resent the ritual, the incantations, the unearthly light and colour of the temple of this innovating high priest.

They resent, most of all, the self-consciousness of the priest himself. For Mr. Yeats's is not a genius with natural readiness of speech. His sentences do not pour from him in stormy floods. It is as though he had to pursue and capture them one by one, like butterflies. Or, perhaps, it is that he has not been content with the simple utterance of his vision. He has reshaped and embroidered it, and has sung of passion in a mask. There are many who see in his poetry only the mask, and who are apparently blind to the passion of sorrowful ecstasy that sets _The Wind Among the Reeds_ apart from every other book that has ever been written in English. They imagine that the book amounts to little more than the attitude of a stylist, a trifler with Celtic nomenclature and fairy legend.

One may agree that some of the less-inspired poems are works of intellectual craftsmanship rather than of immediate genius, and that here and there the originality of the poet's vision is clouded by reminiscences of the aesthetic painters. But the greatest poems in the book are a new thing in literature, a "rapturous music" not heard before. One is not surprised to learn from Mr. Yeats's autobiographical volume, _Reveries over Childhood and Youth_, that, when he began to write poetry as a boy, "my lines but seldom scanned, for I could not understand the prosody in the books, although there were many lines that, taken by themselves, had music." His genius, as a matter of fact, was unconsciously seeking after new forms. Those who have read the first draft of _Innisfree_ will remember how it gives one the impression of a new imagination stumbling into utterance. Mr. Yeats has laboured his verse into perfect music with a deliberateness like that of Flaubert in writing prose.

_Reveries_ is the beautiful and fascinating story of his childhood and youth, and the development of his genius. "I remember," he tells us, "little of childhood but its pain. I have grown happier with every year of life, as though gradually conquering something in myself." But there is not much of the shadow of pain on these pages. They are full of the portraits of fantastically remembered relations and of stories of home and school related with fantastic humour. It is difficult to believe that Mr. Yeats as a schoolboy "followed the career of a certain professional runner for months, buying papers that would tell me if he had won or lost," but here we see him even in the thick of a fight like a boy in a school story. His father, however, seems to have had infinitely more influence over him than his school environment.

It was his father who grew so angry when the infant poet was taught at school to sing "Little drops of water," and who indignantly forbade him to write a school essay on the subject of the capacity of men to rise on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things. Mr. Yeats's upbringing in the home of an artist anti-Victorian to the finger-tips was obviously such as would lead a boy to live self-consciously, and Mr. Yeats tells us that when he was a boy at school he used to feel "as proud of myself as a March cock when it crows to its first sunrise." He remembers how one day he looked at his schoolfellows on the playing-field and said to himself, "If when I grow up I am as clever among grown-up men as I am among these boys, I shall be a famous man." Another sentence about these days suggests what a difficult inarticulate genius was his. "My thoughts," he says, "were a great excitement, but when I tried to do anything with them, it was like trying to pack a balloon into a shed in a high wind."

Though he was always near the bottom of his class, and was useless at games--"I cannot," he writes, "remember that I ever kicked a goal or made a run"--he showed some promise as a naturalist, and used to look for butterflies, moths, and beetles in Richmond Park. Later, when living on the Dublin coast, he "planned some day to write a book about the changes through a twelvemonth among the creatures of some hole in the rock."

These passages in his autobiography are specially interesting as evidence to refute the absurd theory that Mr. Yeats is a mere vague day-dreamer among poets. The truth is, Mr. Yeats's early poems show that he was a boy of eager curiosity and observation--a boy with a remarkable intellectual machine, as well as a visionary who was one day to build a new altar to beauty. He has never been entirely aloof from the common world. Though at times he has conceived it to be the calling of a man of letters to live apart like a monk, he has mingled with human interests to a far greater extent than most people realize. He has nearly always been a politician and always a fighter.

At the same time, we need not read far in his autobiography to discover why people who hate self-consciousness in artists are so hostile to him.

_Reveries Over Childhood and Youth_ is the autobiography of one who was always more self-conscious than his fellows. Mr. Yeats describes himself as a youth in Dublin:--

sometimes walking with an artificial stride in memory of Hamlet, and stopping at shop windows to look at my tie, gathered into a loose sailor-knot, and to regret that it could not be always blown out by the wind like Byron's tie in the picture.

Even the fits of abstraction of the young poet must often have been regarded as self-conscious attitudinizing by his neighbours--especially by the "stupid stout woman" who lived in the villa next to his father's, and who, as he amusingly relates, mocked him aloud:--

I had a study with a window opposite some window of hers, and one night when I was writing, I heard voices full of derision, and saw the stout woman and her family standing at the window. I have a way of acting what I write, and speaking it aloud without knowing what I am doing. Perhaps I was on my hands and knees, or looking down over the back of a chair, talking into what I imagined an abyss.

It will be seen that Mr. Yeats is as interesting a figure to himself as he is to Mr. George Moore. If he were not he would not have troubled to write his autobiography. And that would have been a loss to literature. _Reveries Over Childhood and Youth_ is a book of extraordinary freshness. It does not, like Wordsworth's _Prelude_, set forth the full account of the great influences that shaped a poet's career. But it is a delightful study of early influences, and depicts a dedicated poet in his boyhood as this has never been done before in English prose.

Of all the influences that have shaped his career, none was more important than the Irish atmosphere to which he early returned from London. He is distinctively an Irish poet, though we find him in his youth writing plays and poems in imitation of Shelley and Spenser. Irish places have done more to influence his imagination even than the masterpieces of English literature.

It was apparently while he was living in Sligo, not far from the lakes, that he conceived the longing which he afterwards expressed with such originality of charm in _The Lake Isle of Innisfree_:--

My father had read to me some passage out of _Walden_, and I planned to live some day in a cottage on a little island called Innisfree....

I thought that, having conquered bodily desire and the inclination of my mind towards women and love, I should live as Thoreau lived, seeking wisdom.

It is the little world of Sligo, indeed, that provides all the spacious and twilit landscape in Mr. Yeats's verse. Here were those fishermen and raths and mountains of the Sidhe and desolate lakes which repeat themselves as images through his work. Here, too, he had relatives eccentric and adventurous to excite his imagination, such as the

Merchant skipper that leaped overboard
After a ragged hat in Biscay Bay.

Mr. Yeats's relations seem in his autobiography as real as the characters in fiction. Each of them is magnificently stamped with romance or comedy--the hypochondriac uncle, for example, who--

passed from winter to summer through a series of woollens that had always to be weighed; for in April or May, or whatever the date was, he had to be sure that he carried the exact number of ounces he had carried upon that date since boyhood.

For a time Mr. Yeats thought of following his father's example and becoming a painter. It was while attending an art school in Dublin that he first met A.E. He gives us a curious description of A.E. as he was then:--

He did not paint the model as we tried to, for some other image rose always before his eyes (a St. John in the Desert I remember), and already he spoke to us of his visions. His conversation, so lucid and vehement to-day, was all but incomprehensible, though now and again some phrase could be understood and repeated. One day he announced that he was leaving the Art Schools because his will was weak, and the arts or any other emotional pursuit would but weaken it further.

Mr. Yeats's memoirs, however, are not confined to prose. His volume of verse called _Responsibilities_ is almost equally autobiographical. Much of it is a record of quarrels with contemporaries--quarrels about Synge, about Hugh Lane and his pictures, about all sorts of things. He aims barbed epigrams at his adversaries. Very Yeatsian is an epigram "to a poet, who would have me praise certain bad poets, imitators of his and mine":--

You say, as I have often given tongue
In praise of what another's said or sung,
'Twere politic to do the like by these;
But have you known a dog to praise his fleas?

In an earlier version, the last line was still more arrogant:--

But where's the wild dog that has praised his fleas?

There is a noble arrogance again in the lines called _A Coat_:--

I made my song a coat,
Covered with embroideries,
Out of old mythologies,
From heel to throat.
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eye,
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there's more enterprise
In walking naked.

Mr. Yeats still gives some of his songs the old embroidered vesture. But his work is now more frankly personal than it used to be--at once harsher and simpler. One would not give _Responsibilities_ to a reader who knew nothing of Mr. Yeats's previous work. There is too much raging at the world in it, too little of the perfected beauty of _The Wind Among the Reeds_. One finds ugly words like "wive" and "thigh" inopportunely used, and the retort to Mr. George Moore's _Hail and Farewell_, though legitimately offensive, is obscure in statement. Still, there is enough beauty in the book to make it precious to the lover of literature. An Elizabethan might have made the music of the first verse of _A Woman Homer Sung_.

And what splendour of praise and censure Mr. Yeats gives us in _The Second Troy_:--

Why should I blame her, that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways.
Or hurled the little streets against the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary, and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

It is curious to note in how much of his verse Mr. Yeats repeats his protest against the political passion of Ireland which once meant so much to him. _All Things can Tempt Me_ expresses this artistic mood of revolt with its fierce beginning:--

All things can tempt me from this craft of verse;
One time it was a woman's face, or worse,
The seeming needs of my fool-driven land.

Some of the most excellent pages of _Reveries_, however, are those which recall certain famous figures in Irish Nationalism like John O'Leary and J.F. Taylor, the orator whose temper so stood in his way.

Mr. Yeats recalls a wonderful speech Taylor once made at a meeting in Dublin at which a Lord Chancellor had apparently referred in a belittling way to Irish nationality and the Irish language:

Taylor began hesitating and stopping for words, but after speaking very badly for a little, straightened his figure and spoke as out of a dream: "I am carried to another age, a nobler court, and another Lord Chancellor is speaking. I am at the court of the first Pharaoh." Thereupon he put into the mouth of that Egyptian all his audience had listened to, but now it was spoken to the children of Israel. "If you have any spirituality as you boast, why not use our great empire to spread it through the world, why still cling to that beggarly nationality of yours? what are its history and its works weighed with those of Egypt?" Then his voice changed and sank: "I see a man at the edge of the crowd; he is standing listening there, but he will not obey"; and then, with his voice rising to a cry, "had he obeyed he would never have come down the mountain carrying in his arms the tables of the Law in the language of the outlaw."

That Mr. Yeats, in spite of his secession from politics, loves the old passionate Ireland, is clear from the poem called _September, 1913_, with its refrain:--

Romantic Ireland's dead and gone
And with O'Leary in the grave.

And to this Mr. Yeats has since added a significant note:--

"Romantic Ireland's dead and gone" sounds old-fashioned
now. It seemed true in 1913, but I did not foresee 1916. The
late Dublin Rebellion, whatever one may say of its wisdom, will
long be remembered for its heroism. "They weighed so lightly
what they gave," and gave, too, in some cases without hope of
success.

Mr. Yeats is by nature a poet of the heroic world--a hater of the burgess and of the till. He boasts in _Responsibilities_ of ancestors who left him

blood
That has not passed through any huckster's loin.

There may be a good deal of vanity and gesticulation in all this, but it is the vanity and gesticulation of a man of genius. As we cannot have the genius of Mr. Yeats without the gestures, we may as well take the gestures in good part.

2. HIS POETRY

It is distinctly surprising to find Mr. Yeats compared to Milton and Jeremy Taylor, and Mr. Forrest Reid, who makes the comparison, does not ask us to apply it at all points. There is a remoteness about Milton's genius, however, an austere and rarefied beauty, to which Mr. Reid discovers certain likenesses in the work of Mr. Yeats. Mr. Yeats is certainly a little remote. He is so remote that some people regard his work with mixed feelings, as a rather uncanny thing. The reason may partly be that Mr. Yeats is not a singer in the ordinary tradition of poets. His poems are incantations rather than songs. They seem to call for an order of priests and priestesses to chant them. There are one or two of his early poems, like _Down by the Sally Garden_, that might conceivably be sung at a fair or even at a ballad-concert. But, as Mr. Yeats has grown older, he has become more and more determinedly the magician in his robes. Even in his prose he does not lay aside his robes; it is written in the tones of the sanctuary: it is prose for worshippers. To such an extent is this so that many who do not realize that Mr. Yeats is a great artist cannot read much of his prose without convincing themselves that he is a great humbug. It is easy to understand how readers accustomed to the rationalism of the end of the century refused to take seriously a poet who wrote "spooky" explanations of his poems, such as Mr. Yeats wrote in his notes to _The Wind Among the Reeds_, the most entirely good of his books. Consider, for example, the note which he wrote on that charming if somewhat perplexing poem, _The Jester_. "I dreamed," writes Mr. Yeats:--

I dreamed this story exactly as I have written it, and dreamed another long dream after it, trying to make out its meaning, and whether I was to write it in prose or verse. The first dream was more a vision than a dream, for it was beautiful and coherent, and gave me a sense of illumination and exaltation that one gets from visions, while the second dream was confused and meaningless. The poem has always meant a great deal to me, though, as is the way with symbolic poems, it has not always meant quite the same thing. Blake would have said, "The authors are in eternity"; and I am quite sure they can only be questioned in dreams.

Why, even those of us who count Mr. Yeats one of the immortals while he is still alive, are inclined to shy at a claim at once so solemn and so irrational as this. It reads almost like a confession of witchcraft.

Luckily, Mr. Yeats's commerce with dreams and fairies and other spirits has not all been of this evidential and disputable kind. His confessions do not convince us of his magical experiences, but his poems do. Here we have the true narrative of fairyland, the initiation into other-worldly beauty. Here we have the magician crying out against

All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,

and attempting to invoke a new--or an old--and more beautiful world into being.

The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told,

he cries, and over against the unshapely earth he sets up the "happy townland" of which he sings in one of his later and most lovely poems. It would not be easy to write a prose paraphrase of _The Happy Townland_, but who is there who can permanently resist the spell of this poem, especially of the first verse and its refrain?--

There's many a strong farmer
Whose heart would break in two,
If he could see the townland
That we are riding to;
Boughs have their fruit and blossom
At all times of the year;
Rivers are running over
With red beer and brown beer.
An old man plays the bagpipes
In a golden and silver wood;
Queens, their eyes blue like the ice,
Are dancing in a crowd.

The little fox he murmured,
"O what of the world's bane?"
The sun was laughing sweetly,
The moon plucked at my rein;
But the little red fox murmured,
"O, do not pluck at his rein,
He is riding to the townland
That is the world's bane."

You may interpret the little red fox and the sun and the moon as you please, but is it not all as beautiful as the ringing of bells?

But Mr. Yeats, in his desire for this other world of colour and music, is no scorner of the everyday earth. His early poems especially, as Mr. Reid points out, give evidence of a wondering observation of Nature almost Wordsworthian. In _The Stolen Child_, which tells of a human child that is enticed away by the fairies, the magic of the earth the child is leaving is the means by which Mr. Yeats suggests to us the magic of the world into which it is going, as in the last verse of the poem:--

Away with us he's going,
The solemn eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside;
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal-chest.
_For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
From a world more full of weeping than he can understand._

There is no painting here, no adjective-work. But no painting or adjectives could better suggest all that the world and the loss of the world mean to an imaginative child than this brief collection of simple things. To read _The Stolen Child_ is to realize both that Mr. Yeats brought a new and delicate music into literature and that his genius had its birth in a sense of the beauty of common things. Even when in his early poems the adjectives seem to be chosen with the too delicate care of an artist, as when he notes how--

in autumnal solitudes
Arise the leopard-coloured trees,

his observation of the world about him is but proved the more conclusively. The trees in autumn _are_ leopard-coloured, though a poet cannot say so without becoming dangerously ornamental.

What I have written so far, however, might convey the impression that in Mr. Yeats's poetry we have a child's rather than a man's vision at work. One might even gather that he was a passionless singer with his head in the moon. This is exactly the misunderstanding which has led many people to think of him as a minor poet.

The truth is Mr. Yeats is too original and, as it were, secret a poet to capture all at once the imagination that has already fixed the outlines of its kingdom amid the masterpieces of literature. His is a genius outside the landmarks. There is no prototype in Shelley or Keats, any more than there is in Shakespeare, for such a poem as that which was at first called _Breasal the Fisherman_, but is now called simply _The Fisherman_:

Although you hide in the ebb and flow
Of the pale tide when the moon has set,
The people of coming days will know
About the casting out of my net,
And how you have leaped times out of mind
Over the little silver cords.
And think that you were hard and unkind,
And blame you with many bitter words.

There, in music as simple as a fable of Aesop, Mr. Yeats has figured the pride of genius and the passion of defeated love in words that are beautiful in themselves, but trebly beautiful in their significances.

Beautifully new, again, is the poem beginning, "I wander by the edge," which expresses the desolation of love as it is expressed in few modern poems:

I wander by the edge
Of this desolate lake
Where wind cries in the sedge:
_Until the axle break
That keeps the stars in their round
And hands hurl in the deep
The banners of East and West
And the girdle of light is unbound,
Your breast will not lie by the breast
Of your beloved in sleep._

Rhythms like these did not exist in the English language until Mr. Yeats invented them, and their very novelty concealed for a time the passion that is immortal in them. It is by now a threadbare saying of Wordsworth that every great artist has himself to create the taste by which he is enjoyed, but it is worth quoting once more because it is especially relevant to a discussion of the genius of Mr. Yeats. What previous artist, for example, had created the taste which would be prepared to respond imaginatively to such a revelation of a lover's triumph in the nonpareil beauty of his mistress as we have in the poem that ends:--

I cried in my dream, "_O women bid the young men lay
Their heads on your knees, and drown their eyes with your hair,
Or remembering hers they will find no other face fair
Till all the valleys of the world have been withered away_,"

One may doubt at times whether Mr. Yeats does not too consciously show himself an artist of the aesthetic school in some of his epithets, such as "cloud-pale" and "dream-dimmed." His too frequent repetition of similar epithets makes woman stand out of his poems at times like a decoration, as in the pictures of Rossetti and Burne-Jones, rather than in the vehement beauty of life. It is as if the passion in his verse were again and again entangled in the devices of art. If we take his love-poems as a whole, however, the passion in them is at once vehement and beautiful.

The world has not yet sufficiently realized how deep is the passion that has given shape to Mr. Yeats's verse. _The Wind Among the Reeds_ is a book of love-poetry quite unlike all other books of love-poetry. It utters the same moods of triumph in the beloved's beauty, of despair, of desire, of boastfulness of the poet's immortality, that we find in the love-poetry of other ages. But here are new images, almost a new language. Sometimes we have an image which fills the mind like the image in some little Chinese lyric, as in the poem _He Reproves the Curlew_:--

O, curlew, cry no more in the air,
Or only to the waters of the West;
Because your crying brings to my mind
Passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair
That was shaken out over my breast:
There is enough evil in the crying of the wind.

This passion of loss, this sense of the beloved as of something secret and far and scarcely to be attained, like the Holy Grail, is the dominant theme of the poems, even in _The Song of Wandering Aengus_, that poem of almost playful beauty, which tells of the "little silver trout" that became

--a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair,
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

What a sense of long pursuit, of a life's quest, we get in the exquisite last verse--a verse which must be among the best-known of Mr. Yeats's writings after _The Lake Isle of Innisfree_ and _Had I the Heaven's Embroidered Cloths_:--

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

This is the magic of fairyland again. It seems a little distant from human passions. It is a wonderful example, however, of Mr. Yeats's genius for transforming passion into elfin dreams. The emotion is at once deeper and nearer human experience in the later poem called _The Folly of Being Comforted_. I have known readers who professed to find this poem obscure. To me it seems a miracle of phrasing and portraiture. I know no better example of the nobleness of Mr. Yeats's verse and his incomparable music. _

Read next: Chapter 19. Tchehov: The Perfect Story-Teller

Read previous: Chapter 17. Mr. Masefield's Secret

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