Mr. Yeats as Dramatist
By DENIS JOHNSTON
A FEW years ago, it is told of Mr. Yeats that he was deputed by his- fellow Directors to explain to one of Dublin's many garret dramatists what was wrong with a play that had had to be rejected by the Abbey Theatre. He did it in this way. " We liked your play," he said, "but it has one or two faults. The first is that the scenes are too long." He
considered deeply for a while before continuing. Then, there are too many scenes," he concluded. This shattering criticism is so succinct and yet so comprehensive that it is worthy of being preserved to the honour of Mr. Yeats.
In the dedication of the present volume and in the several prefaces to the individual plays, Mr. Yeats throws out yet another challenge to the garrets and cellars of his home town in a couplet from which the book derives its cryptic title : " To Garret or Cellar a wheel I send, But every butterfly to a friend."
Such a prefix is both apt and fitting for a collection of plays: most of which, he is careful to tell us, have been specifically written for performance on the first floor only, or, in other words, in the drawing rooms of large country houses. For- tunately, indeed, these Noh Plays of Mr. Yeats have not been so confined in their presentation, and each has been successfully performed in the theatre, to which they are all eminently suited.
Mr. Yeats has a characteristic capacity for appearing to take us into his confidence. He allows us the privilege of hearing him think aloud, whether in prose or in verse, and in turning over the pages of his book we come across in turn most of the loves of his more recent years—Dean Swift, the Classical Stage of Japan, Celtic mythology, psychical research, and just a touch of politics.' For notwithstanding his admonition from the witness box to Mr. Peadar O'Do•inell to " stick to literature and keep politics as a recreation for his old age," it is well recognized that Mr. Yeats, when he chooses, is one of the ablest politicians in Irelandand has on more than one occasion beaten the professionals to the ropes.
The Words Upon the Window Pane is an interesting addition to the growing mass of Swift literature. Mr. Yeats is right when he says that Swift haunts. Whether he is as right in his prefatory speculations is, like everything else connected with the terrible Dean, a matter for argument. It is a common practice these days to enlist Swift in the ranks of the great Irish- patriots as the inventor of those shopkeepers' slogans that pass for national economics today. But Swift's love for Erin is more problematical than his hatred of the Whigs. After all, he was only the first generation of his family to belong to the Middle Nation, that gay race of conquering freebooters whose mild-mannered descendants seem nowadays to be born only to be lectured. What was the liberty for which Swift fought and for the vindication of which he so eloquently congratulates himself in his own epitaph ? Mr. Yeats sug- gests that it was Vox Populi, or the Nattimal Bent or Current. Possibly this is the same thing that Mr. De Valera refers to when he says, " When I wish to know what the Irish people' want I look into my own heart."
The play itself, like the Seance which it portrays, is only haunted by Swift, his extraordinary mistress and still more extraordinary wife, and it provides what must be one of the most difficult playing parts ever written for a woman. As in Lord Longford's Yahoo, the author attempts to invent an imaginary conversation between the Dean and Vanessa on the occasion of his ferocious final visit to Celbridge—a. conversation which of its very nature can never surpass the Wheels and Butterflies. Now Plays. By W. B. Yeats. (Mac- millan. Os.) actual reported facts —the arrival, the letter flung down, and the silent departure. With Stella he is on firmer ground. It is one of her verses, written to the Dean in honour of a birth- day, that forms the words from which the play derives its title, and Mr. Yeats goes so far in his admiration of these as to call her a better poet than her friend. He is not one of those to give countenance to the ungallant, and characteristic- ally Dublin suggestion that she had the benefit of the assistance of Dr. Delany.
It appears that a Japanese friend during one of his visits to this part of the world presented Mr. Yeats with a sword. How this was received does not appear, or to what purpose it has been turned, and it is interesting to speculate what Mr. Yeats may have done with a sword. However, as this may be, Mr. Yeats, in return for this rather unusual gift, wrote a play of impeccable orthodoxy about the Resurrection and dedicated it to his Oriental friend, almost as effective and entertaining a response as the original gesture. This play is the least interesting part of his book. The discussions of Ebionite and Sabellian are on a well-worn battleground and the dialogue is not particularly revealing. In its spoken sentiments this play is stainless. In the implications to be drawn from the Dionysian goings-on in the street outside, the play is one over which the late J. W. Robertson would have chuckled and rubbed his hands. Luckily, theatre audiences do not usually exert themselves to the extent of considering implications, which probably explains why this play, if not receiving the advisable Imprimatur from Gardiner Street, has, at any rate, escaped pious violence. Nobody can ever doubt or deny Mr. Yeats' courage, and perhaps a sword was not so bad a present after all. Has not Mr. Yeats himself, whether intentionally or not, given one to his country in his time ?—a sword that has been heard rattling ever since, for good or ill.
Fighting the Waves—once known by the excellent title of The Only Jealousy of Finer—and The Cat and the Moon are first-rite examples of Mr. Yeats' later vein in the Theatre and of the surprising fact that the classic Irish drama is taking its technique from Japan. Both plays suffer to some extent from this Noh influence. The Prologues and Epilogues, chanted by black-clad figures, their faces lined to represent masks and dressed in costumes that must inevitably evoke a smile from any ordinary playgoer, the "difficult and irrelevant words," to quote his own criticism, and his insistence upon the use of such infantile musical instruments as drums, rattles and whistles, must inevitably create a barrier between the audience and a proper enjoy- ment of the real core of Mr. Yeats' work. These things might be introduced to divert attention from the jejune material of intellectual young men who write for experi- mental theatres. But both these plays are good in them- selves. In conception, imagination and treatment they are not only superb pieces of writing, but very excellent stories, consummately expressed in terms of the stage. The Antheil music for Fighting the Waves, originally scored for
a full orchestra, is here added as an appendix rescored for piano alone. It is an exciting and fascinating piece of
work. At the first rehearsal it is said that Dr. Lareliet's orchestra, unacquainted with the work of this young American protégé of Ezra Pound, involuntarily stopped after the
first few bars, full of profuse apologies for having, as they thought, got the parts mixed up. Such, however, was not the case, and they were eventually persuaded to resume. On better acquaintance it proves to be a fitting accontpani- merit for the discordant grandeur of this tale of Fand and Cuchulain.
Previous page
