A Bundle of Ideas
MR. WILSON has followed up his controversial Yeats and the Tradition with this study of five dance-plays and twelve related poems. The method he uses is similar to that of the earlier book, though this strikes one as a more cautious and less assertive study. Mr. Wilson claims, what nobody so far as I know has disputed, that 'what Yeats believed his plays and poems to mean is a valid field for scholarship,' and on the whole he confines himself to this inquiry. He has a familiarity with Yeats's sources and with the ways in which the poet went about his syncretist myth- making that few, I imagine, can rival; and he has broken the habit of claiming exclusive authority over the meanings of poems which made the first book so irritating and which is quite inconsistent with Yeats's own beliefs and practices. Occa- sionally there is a hint of the old discontent with a passage that is not what he calls 'fully sym- bolic,' meaning that it cannot be totally explained in terms of the 'subjective tradition.'
There is no question that Yeats put a lot of esoteric doctrine into these plays and poems, and none that Mr. Wilson has got a lot of it out again, more than anybody else has done. Thus: At the Hawk's Well uses a myth analogous to that of the Grail, a study of spiritual defeat in the Waste Land; The Only Jealousy of Direr is to be understood ultimately by reference to Gemis- thus Pletho, the philosophy of Samkara, and a multitude of other sources, Irish, Japanese, Italian; The Cat and the Moon is a `Vicoesque' play about 'the progress of a culture from prim- itivity to Unity of Being'; Calvary is a confronta- tion of Christ with representatives of 'objectivity'; and The Dreaming of the Bones draws heavily on the No play Ni.shikigi (this is not a new obser- vation) and on Dante and a great many others to present Yeats's image of purgatory. Occasionally there is a weird simplicity about Mr. Wilson's procedures (or Yeats's, if he is right), as when The Cat and the Moon is tackled as a straight- forward Bunyanesque allegory. But as a whole Mr. Wilson's task was impressively difficult, or so it must seem to anybody who, like myself, finds all the source material, sorted out into adjacent heaps, very tedious.
Mr. Wilson would probably agree that a method depending as heavily on source- identification as his does is liable to its own kind of errors. Thus he is willing to think of the pas- sage on Hamlet in Wilhelm Meister as a source of the tree figure in 'Among Schoolchildren,' and though we happen to know that Yeats read Goethe's book (in 1909 or so), this is really very improbable, for the idea was widely diffused. Again, the desire to have everything tidy has probably led him into a mistake about the 'mar- vellous empty sea-shell' of 'Meditations in Time of Civil War.' The sea-shell in Emer is the beauty of women, considered as a fragile product of immense forces. Yeats uses the same figure to celebrate the aristocratic beauty of a Swedish princess, 'impassive with a still intensity suggest- ing the final consummate strength which rounds the spiral of a shell.' But Mr. Wilson wants the 'Meditations' shell to stand for 'sterility and spiritual deadness.' Either this is wrong, or the sea-shell is an exception to Mr. Wilson's anyway dubious hypothesis of the immutability of Yeats's symbols. Occasionally, too, needing the stimulus of discovery, he seems to offer as new observa- tions with which one has long been familiar. However, I am in no position to challenge the general validity of his arguments.
This book sets the non-adept reader of Yeats a problem. He will need to bring to this book a conviction that Yeats is an important poet, and hang on to it through thick and thin. Yet if we call the analysis tedious, Mr. Wilson will remind us that Yeats himself read poetry in this way. It satisfied certain interests of his to do so; but who will claim that he thought it the only way to read? He loved occultism, his father thought too much: 'You would be a philosopher and are really a poet.' But he was not, as Mr. Wilson thinks, a didactic poet. A play, he said, starts off with 'a bundle of ideas . . . but gradually philosophy is eliminated.' He told Synge that 'dramatic action must burn up the author's opinions.' The bundle of ideas was for his use, and gave him metaphors for poetry. When he sought the drawing-rooms of the rich to escape the Abbey press and mob he did it not because the rich were adepts, but because they knew people who were genuinely, or for fashion's sake, well disposed towards the poetry of archetype and symbol, cultivated primitivists standing in for the peasants who were not available. And to them he communicated not ideas but images. Unlike the Neo-Platonic artists of the Renais- sance, he had no audience which could be expected to follow his 'programme' and break it down into its constituents; for their shared education Yeats substitutes the Great Memory. And that is why a scholar reconstructing the 'programme' of a Botticelli painting or a canto of Spenser is doing something of more funda- mental importance than Mr. Wilson in these books, and why his findings are more directly the concern of the layman.
There are admittedly places in Yeats which are unintelligible to any reader who disregards these bundles of ideas; and although these may be symptoms of the 'fully symbolic' and so please Mr. Wilson, to others they may seem to be blem- ishes on the poetry. But Yeats is so big a poet that this hardly counts, and there is small danger of his being mistaken by non-adepts for the crabbed monomaniac entirely devoted to his theories of everything. I am not suggesting that Mr. Wilson hasn't done his job well, but only that—as he admits—the profane may continue to enjoy these mysteries at their own level.
FRANK KERMODE
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