BOOKS

`1, The Poet .. .

By BRIAN INGLIS

..seea boy I was taken to the Abbey Theatre to ..see a Yeats masque-ballet based on the story of Cuchulain. By any standards, even the Abbey's, it was an embarrassing evening; not least when the waves, which mad Cuchulain fought under the illusion they were armed men, were represented by a comical corps de ballet, undulating. When Yeats took a curtain call one of our party, a veteran of the Connaught Rangers, audibly announced, 'It's all cod,' and so it seemed: a symptom of advanced senility. I was astonished to realise, years later, that it was in this .same period Yeats was producing the wonderful flowering of his old age-- 'Lapis Lazuli,"What Then?' and 'The O'Rahilly.' Although some of these, the ballads particularly, had an Irish flavour, they showed no trace either of 1nnisfree drooling or that tiresome preoccupa- tion with myth. Could it be, I wondered, that Ireland was really incidental; that where he dragged her in, it was cod—a symptom, perhaps, of retarded adolescence, brought on by his pro- tracted, futile love affair with Maud Gonne?

Had I seen Richard Ellmann's thesis at the time it would have made a convert. When the Yeats exhibition was formally opened in Man- chester recently, Ellmann took the Irish Ambas- sador to task for over-playing the importance of Ireland in Yeats's life and work; and this is the theme of his Yeats: The Man and the Masks,* now reprinted as a paperback. For example, Mr. Ellmann dismisses the 1916 rising in a para- graph; the chapter on the period is called 'All Changed, Changed Utterly,' but the change is attributed not, as it was by Yeats, to the impact on him of the news that Pearse, Connolly and the other rebel leaders had been shot, but to an event the following year. 'Had Yeats died instead of marrying in 1917,' Mr. Ellmann asserts, 'he would have been remembered as a remarkable minor poet who achieved a diction more power- ful than that of his contemporaries but who, except in a handful of poems, did not have much to say with it . . . marriage to Georgie Hyde Lees released his energies like a spring.' For Georgie, in addition to giving Yeats emotional stability and helping him to feel, as he told Tagore, 'more knitted into life,' provided him with the key to the occult—'automatic writing'— that Yeats had craved for so long: his dreams began to materialise on paper before his eyes. 'Here, in his own home, was miracle without qualification. The bush was burning at last.'

Mr. Ellmann's thesis -is so convincingly docu- mented and presented that it has tended to be- come the standard interpretation; and, curious to relate, it is not entirely unpopular in Ireland. Naturally the Irish do not want Yeats to be regarded as an English poet: as Shaw put it, when a foreigner fails to make this national dis- tinction 'we feel a certain disparagement in- volved.' But now that nobody—well, hardly anybody—disputes Yeats's greatness, too much

* Faber, 12s. 6d.

stress on his Irish background is unwelcome. The impact of his simple proud boast, '1, the poet William Yeats,' would obviously be diminished if the line were revised to read 'I, the Irish poet,' much as it would be by a newspaper reference to him as 'the well-known poet.' Still less do we want him to be regarded as Irish in the same sense that the unfortunate Burns is usually identified with his country, a thing of pipes and haggis. And hasn't Dr. Ellmann done a useful service by making all the psychic/magic/ symbolic side sound quite reasonable—sometimes silly, perhaps, but not disgraceful? Previously, though we knew about Yeats's interest in the occult, we hoped it would be dismissed as harmless eccentricity. Now it is possible to accept it freely without any risk of diminishing his stature.

For all that, it has been a little galling to feel that his genius grew not from his roots in his own country, but from esoteric ouija board manipulations; and there will be gratitude to Professor Stock for redressing the balance in her W. B. Yeats: His Poetry and Thought,t which opens with a fusillade of reminders of the im- portance to his work of his Irish environment. 'Ireland does not look or feel like England, and the difference goes deep.' By birth and tempera- ment, by the accidents of his upbringing and no less by deliberate and studied choice, he was the poet of the Irish tradition.' Though it may be reiterating a platitude, it is important if one wants to understand Yeats to keep on re- membering that Ireland is not England.'

This was Yeats's own view: 'My work,' he wrote to Joe Hone in 1916, 'has been done in every detail with a deliberate Irish aim'; and he recognised that this went deeper than mere political nationalism. He wanted his work to be, as an earlier patriot had expressed it, racy of the soil :

John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought

All that we did, all that we said or sang

Must come from contact with the soil, from that Contact everything Antams-like grew strong.

Yeats's interpretation of his motives is not necessarily a reliable guide—what counts in a poet's thought, as he himself insisted, is not the mind but the marrow-bone. His conscious groping for identification with his country is really irrelevant : what matters is the effect of his environment on his cast of thought—de- scribed by Henn in The Lonely Tower as 'a certain bitterness of insight, a continuous wrenching back of all that might become senti- mental.' It is this, far more than the communion with the spirit world Georgie brought him, that makes for his finest work.

Yeats's Byzantine period, therefore, is in need of critical re-examination. He had arrived at his devotion to the arcane by a curious route: it, too, arose out of his desire to be close to the soil —to achieve that identification with the super- t 27s. 6d. natural which, he knew, was the Irish peasant heritage. And just as in his youth he had believed in fairies as 'dramatisations of our moods,' so he hoped that spirit writing would render up some of the missing secrets of the collective un- conscious of the universe. But first, he needed to learn the language of mysticism; and this nearly proved disastrous, just as his father had warned him it might : You will remind me that Blake was a mystic. I know that Blake's poetry is not intelligible without knowledge of Blake's mystical doc- trines. . . . Yet the mysticism was never the substance of his poetry, only its machinery . . . his mysticism was a make-believe, a sort of working hypothesis, as good as another.

In defence of Yeats it is urged that he, too, ab- sorbed the symbols and exploited them; that after a struggle with the machinery and the jargon—man and daemon, the antithetical tincture and the primary tincture, the twenty-eight phaSes in a series of incarnations, the Body of Fate, the interpenetrating cones symbolising activity and so on—he emerged with his powers heightened and his imagery loosened. But he must be con- sidered lucky to have emerged at all; a man so involved will often pern and porn in a gyre in ever-decreasing circles until he disappears after the manner of the Oozlem bird, so beloved of officers' mess story-tellers. And Yeats nearly did. But one of his daemons happened to be what Chesterton called that little worm of laughter that eats the Irish heart.

Not humorous laughter : as Henn noted, it can be arrogant, bitter, self-dramatising, and sometimes all three at once; the harsh laughter of Swift. But it kept him from losing himself in his new world of the arcane, dragging him back to perform his last noble services to the old.

To Ellmann, Yeats's masterpiece is that 'great hymn to the human imagination,' Byzantium': 'never had he realised so completely the awesome drama of the creative act.' I can never read 'Byzantium,' compulsively shoutable though it is:

Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood The golden smithies of the Emperor I

without a sneaking backward glance to Casimir Lypiatt:

Look down, Conquistador.

There on the valley's broad green floor There lies the lake, the jewelled cities gleam . . Look down on Mexico, Conquistador, Land of your golden dream.

'Byzantium,' Professor Stock says, is powerful before it is intelligible; she might have added that the efforts to make it more intelligible, which almost qualify for the PhD industry in theM- selves, have only succeeded in making it less powerful; and some of them have made it look a little silly.

Undoubtedly Yeats needed his pursuit of the spirit world as a stimulus; but what he needed more was the strength of character to sail past Byzantium just as he had earlier sailed past the sirens of Innisfree. And in this, the blow of Easter Week was decisive. Ellmann's estimate of what Yeats's reputation would be now if he had died in 1917 is just; but the date must be brought forward. 'Easter 1916' Miss Stock regards as 'perhaps the most remarkable poem of our time upon a public event,' but it is much more than that: it is the first intimation that Yeats's pro- longed self-absorption has been shattered. Now his wars on God begin.