BOOKS

The Spider and the Bee

By FRANK KERM ODE

N7E/as's prose is perhaps not often read for its own sake; it is thought of as affected and obsolete, even in the Autobiographies (surely among the great works of that kind), and most of it has remained long out of print and difficult of access. But the verse maintains its prestige, and the prose is being re-issued, presumably because of its auxiliary value. Mythologies, which appeared in 1959, made available the contents of four early books and of Per Amica Silentia Lunar, which contains the first steps towards A Vision; and now there is a volume* containing Ideas of Good and Evil (published in 1903 but containing work of the Nineties) and The Cutting of an Agate, of 1912, together with a number of mostly late introductory essays, including three Yeats wrote in 1937 for an abortive collected edition of his works. These late pieces are partly written in the strange manner we know from On the Boiler and the angry speech of the Old Man in The Death of Cuchulain. He never abandoned completely 'that extravagant style He had learnt from Pater,' but as it issues through the mask of the angry heroic old man it is stretched to accommodate uncharacteristic qualities: roughness, syntactical laxities, even obscurity. Whereas in verse Yeats continually sought `a powerful and passionate syntax,' in prose he was provoked by the hateful 'hetero- geneity' of the world to some degree of imitation of it. For example, arguing that tragedy must bring joy not pain, he says the heroine

must be lifted out of history with timeless pattern, she is one of the four Maria, the rhythm is old and familiar, imagination must dance, must be carried beyond feeling into the aboriginal ice.

This is the language of his 'sixteenth-phase' hero, who cultivates wantonness and rage, worshipping Michelangelo, Nietzsche and Blake—the mask of the wild old man. He found prose at this stage 'a great toil,' but his power of assimilating dis- parate knowledge and experience remained what it had always been; the essays on Berkeley, the Upanishads, Louis Lambert, all late, stitch their subjects firmly into the fabric of his thought. Taking nothing he cannot use, or that does not match what is already there, he assimilates Berkeley and Swift, Tagore and Shri Purohit Swami, converting them to the same mytholo- gical substance as Parnell or Lady Gregory or Synge, to whom in this volume as elsewhere he devotes so many patient, selfish pages.

Re-reading the earlier material after a gap of some years, I have been struck by two things. First, Yeats has never had justice as a critic, and these volumes are central to his critical achieve- ment. Secondly, there is a positive pleasure to be tad from the evidence they provide of the slow formation and growth of images and ideas; Yeats's poetry is to a remarkable degree 'self- begotten,' and time and again one comes upon a phrase or an image that, perhaps thirty years later, flowered in some memorable poem. I

* ESSAYS AND INTRODUCTIONS. (Macmillan, 36s )

suppose it is now accepted that the old way of dividing him up into sharply defined periods was bad, and that Yeats is a writer of quite extra- ordinary homogeneity; if it is not, the republica- tion of his prose must surely help to establish the fact.

To speak first of the criticism: Yeats was not one of those poets who despise it, sensibly arguing that 'all writers . . . in so far as they have been deliberate artists at all, have had some philosophy, some criticism of their art'—for 'why should a man cease to be a scholar . . . before he begins to paint or rhyme?' It must of course be admitted that as a critic he was as usual chiefly concerned with his own needs, and the books he liked tended therefore to become `sacred books' while the others dropped out of view. In this way he emulated Swift's bee, con- verting all to his own sweetness and light, rejecting the spider who depended on his own grey guts. His sacred books, which included for instance Prometheus Unbound, Axel and Sdraphita, do not, at first glance, seem close to our twentieth-century interests; yet for all that, and for all his egotism and his hieratic manner, Yeats was never far from the centre. 'It happens now and then,' as Mr. Eliot once said, that a poet by some strange accident ex- presses the mood of his generation at the same time that he is expressing a mood of his own which is quite remote from that of his generation.

For whatever reason, Yeats has a way of being modern; sometimes he was prophetic. The essays on Shelley—in which he confesses that Shelley ultimately meant more to him than Blake—ob- viously anticipate the latest modes of inquiry; no one has written with a keener sense of the modern import of that 'realist of the imagination' Blake; and it is probable that any modern revival of Morris would follow the lines drawn by Yeats. In the essay on Spenser, of which he was particularly fond, and which first appeared in 1902, he anticipates the historical mythology of a whole generation of critics, finding in Spenser the Fall of poetry, its emergence from the condition of 'passionate reverie'—for Spenser converted energy into guilt, and denied 'heroical, passionate will' in order to provide citizens with `innumerable blameless /Eneases.'

As for the 'philosophy' which underlies these judgments in Yeats, it is almost pure Symbolism, and the basic essays in this book are those on Magic and on Symbolism in Poetry and Painting. For Yeats, art is a modern magic, using like its predecessor the symbols which wake in the Great Memory; it is a substitute for the older power, made necessary by the 'slow perishing' of certain qualities of mind formerly universal. Axel, and all those young men in Paris who talked only of magic, seemed to him to be restoring a tradition older than the Church. It is obviously important that for Yeats magic and art were the same thing, and that art was the dominant modern form of this thing.. He studied magic to provide proofs of the supremacy of imagination, 'of the power of many minds to become one.' In an older world, the modern artist would have been, a magician, influencing his audience more directly, just as even today barbaric peoples are influenced; for 'savages live always on the edge of vision.'

But between the savage and us there is that great gap; on our side of it there is no 'Unity of Being,' no 'perfect accord between intellect and blood,' save in art. And this art is symbol, 'the only possible expression of some invisible essence.' Symbols are the means by which imagination remakes the world which Reason destroys; not only the fixed symbols of magic, or the conven- tional symbols of rose or cross, but landscapes and persons can work to restore the lost unity, and the old 'flow of flesh under the impulse of passionate thought.'

There is, of course, little substantial originality in all this; most of the poets and painters of Yeats's time had some 'magical' contacts or ex- periences and Yeats explicitly associated his views with the European movement of Symbolism, the revolt against scientific 'externa- lity,' as he called it in 1897. At that moment he believed the world was approaching its 'crowning crisis,' after which art would be more completely reborn. His opinions changed, but not radically; he lost this relatively facile optimism, and came to expect a horrible triumph of 'objectivity' before rebirth. But considered as a whole Yeats's critical theory, with its desperate nostalgia for the primi- tive, its dependence on shared subliminal symbolisms, its hatred of logic, and its basic historical myth, is not only self-consistent but, in various alternative forms, perfectly familiar. To provide a specific example of his critical 'centra- lity': he very early defended 'impersonality' and the liberty of interpreting, attacking thoge who claimed that Botticelli and Blake misrepresented Dante in their illustrations—

as if the noblest achievemek of art was not when the artist enfolds himself in darkness, while he casts over his readers a light as,of a wild and terrible dawn.

The second kind of pleasure to be got from this collection of prose is that of sometimes seeing Yeats's later poems in a seminal state. I believe that Yeats, more often than might be thought, made poems out of late re-readings of his own work, as when he wrote, at Euston Station, the little poem called 'The Wheel,' which came directly from his revision of an old story called The Tables of the Law.' The fine essay 'Certain Noble Plays of Japan' contains phrases later caught up into 'Michael Robartes and the Dancer' and, much more remarkably, into the very late 'Lapis Lazuli' and 'The Statues.' The object of Professor Melchiori's bookt is pre- cisely to detect developing patterns of thought and image in the body of Yeats's work. That thi, is a possibly dangerous undertaking there has re- cently been abundant evidence; but Melchiori is aware of the delicacy of his task, and is clear that Yeats meant what he said about the 'instructors' giving him 'metaphors for poetry.' In short, he holds the sane view authoritatively expressed by R. P. Blackmur, that the occult interests of Yeats were 'heuristic,' that they enabled him to 'perform new feats which could not have been anticipated without them.' He says expressly that 'though convinced he was looking for—and finding—• a new philosophy and a new religion, [Yeats's] search was always a search not for thought but for art.' Fascinated though he is by the sheer complexity of the sources, literary, occult, visual, he never abandons this caution; for example. he explains the Great Memory as having meaning t THE. WHOLE MYSTERY OF ART. By Giorgio Melchiori. (Routledge, 40s.)

only in relation to the way Yeats went about writing poems. And being as thorough and per- ceptive as he is sensible, Melchiori has written one of the most ingenious and informative of all the books on Yeats.

Observing that the old man 'remained faithful to the images that struck him in his youth,' Melchiori enlarges on the significance of some central images by re-creating their full contexts in Yeats's mind. First, the brazen beast of 'The Second Coming,' and the antithetical Unicorn; then a long study of Leda, which shows how Leda partly replaced Helen in a pattern of thought about cyclical movements in history that was already in existence by 1896, and found her place in the cardinal sonnet with the unconscious help of Gogarty. The study of the Leda sonnet begets study of related images. Having itself sources which include Michelangelo, the Hypneroiontachia, Spenser, Shelley, Pater, Moreau, Blake and the Theosophists, it points forward to further poetry, further complex images, notably the Mundane Egg, and various occult figures that haunted Yeats and turned up in the gyres of the system as well as in poems and plays. 1 liked least the section on the Dome; but one can have nothing but admiration for the knowledge and skill with which all these inquiries have been carried out, for the reader's benefit and without harm to the poet. Of the greatness of Yeats there is nowadays small doubt, and no one can with impunity charge him with silliness; yet, as Blackmur puts it, ours is a world that drives its Poets into magic, and this puts upon us the neces- sity of following them. It is a delicate pursuit; as Yeats said of Housman, one step too far and all were marsh. Melchiori has undertaken the quest, and returned dry-shod.

Elizabeth Coxhead has written the first life of Lady Gregory.* What she thinks of Yeats's poetry one doesn't discover, for she says very little about it, but that she is not attracted by his personality is all too clear. A life of Lady Gregory was certainly wanted, and Miss Cox- head seems to.have conducted her inquiries as if for a considerable work. The best things are the account of Lady Gregory's childhood and the descriptive survey of her plays. But for the rest Miss Coxhead seems to have developed an un- critical adulation for her subject. Wherever Lady Gregory's conduct seems open to criticism she provides an entirely favourable explanation; and although this is amiable, and though such a woman would certainly have to put up with mali- cious detractors, in the long run this defensive tactic reduces her stature. She was a formidable figure, after all, and here she is too much of the sweet old lady. Miss Coxhead also seems to feel that to elevate Lady Gregory she must de- press Yeats, of whom she writes with a consistent lack of charity and understanding.