Old and New Masters Part 13

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 circ.u.mstances. 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 b.u.t.terflies. 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 pa.s.sion in a mask.

There are many who see in his poetry only the mask, and who are apparently blind to the pa.s.sion 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 att.i.tude 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 craftsmans.h.i.+p 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 c.o.c.k 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 cla.s.s, 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 b.u.t.terflies, 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 pa.s.sages 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 att.i.tudinizing 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 pa.s.sage 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 Th.o.r.eau lived, seeking wisdom.

It is the little world of Sligo, indeed, that provides all the s.p.a.cious 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--

pa.s.sed 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 n.o.ble 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 n.o.bleness 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 pa.s.sion 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 n.o.bler 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 pa.s.sionate Ireland, is clear from the poem called _September, 1913_, with its refrain:--