A STUDY OF MR. YEATS'S POETRY.'

AT a moment when Miss Marie Coral is lamenting that the war has not given us a Byron, the appearance of a critical study of Mr. Yeats is an illuminating example of the abiding Law of Contrasts. For Mr. Yeats, to borrow the opening sentence of Bagehot's article on Hartley Coleridge, is not like the Duke of Wellington. He ranks soldiers, together with bankers, schoolmasters, and Bishops, among the " noisy set . . the martyrs call the world." According to Mr. Forrest Reid, who certainly does not err in underestimating his genius, " with humanity in the rough, quite indifferent to art, rather stupid perhaps, simple and instinctive, he does not seem to have any sympathy at all." But, as Mr. Forrest Reid very justly observes, " it is the poet, the man of genius, who is the exception ; the soldiers, lawyers, bankers, schoolmasters, clergymen, &c., who are the staff of which humanity is composed, and precisely the stuff upon ' which the dramatist has to work. He must take human beings as they are. That habit of mind which would dismiss whole sections of the community as uninteresting, if not positively beneath notice, is the worst possible equipment for the novelist or dramatist, no matter upon what plane he works. One cannot help concluding that the spectacle of life does not greatly move Mr. Yeats. There are certain manifestations of life that interest him—particularly when seen through the veil of artistic treat- ment—but life as a whole—no. In his lyrical work, largely subjective as it is, one is rarely conscious of this limitation; but in his dramatic work it leaps at once to the surface. . . Seldom in Mr. Yeats's dramas is there an indication of any direct contact with life."

Mr. Forrest Reid's excellent criticism reminds one of another passage in Bagehot ; that in his famous essay on "Shake- speare—the Man " where he illustrates Shakespeare's acute perception of and sympathy with the mental processes of stupid, ordinary, illogical people. One cannot imagine an essay being written on "Mr. Yeats—the Man," simply because of his habitual and ingrained detachment from average humanity. For, as Mr. Forrest Reid puts it, he is one "for whom the invisible world exists." In another happy phrase Mr. Forrest Reid compares Mr. Yeats's treatment of Nature with that of Wordsworth. " Wordsworth's landscapes have the coolness and freshness of water-colour, the sweetness of a common dawn '; Mr. Yeats's are richer and darker, not more spiritual, but more haunted." And he further illustrates this quality by a " curiously characteristic " anecdote which he beard from "A. E." Some years ago "A. E." was teaching Mr. Yeats bow to do pastels, and coming out one day he found the poet at work on a woodland sketch from Nature. "It was in the full strength and heat of a July noon, and Mr. Yeats, while copying what lay before him, was turning it into a moonlight scene." The limitations and waywardness of Mr. Yeats's genius could not be better expressed than in this anecdote. It is an allegory of Mr. Yeats's entire literary career. But these deductions and reservations do not exhaust Mr. Forrest Reid's list. He' denies Mr. Yeats universality and, as we have seen, a broad interest in humanity. He laments his increasing addiction to theory, as the result of which a certain aridity has crept into some of his later pieces. And while be finds in all his work the flame

" W. D. Yeats: a Critical Study. By Forrest Beid, Loudon: Martin Seeker. [7s. Gd. net.]

of spiritual ardour and imaginative ecstasy, he notes a great countervailing drawback "One is carried away by its power and beauty, by the unfailing felicity of its expression, its splendid poetry, its magnificent imagery; and it is only gradually that one becomes aware of something that is lacking in it. That something, I am inclined to think, is largely ethical, In all these high passions one misses just the one thing upon which the whole quality of our spiritual vision depends. For, as his heroes seem to fail to realize, there must be a choice. The spirits of good increase the power of life, but the spirits of evil war upon the soul and, in the end, slay it. The human mind is like a pool that may become foul and stagnant, until nothing lives there but an evil his of corruption which swarms below the dark, dulled surface. The mystic ethic holds that the soul and the mind aro separate, and that the soul may remain pure while the mind is fouled and maddened. No doctrine could be more dangerous, and no doctrine was ever less proved, though, again, it seems to contain a sort of half-truth. 'Go put off holiness and put on intellect,' cries Blake, and Owen Aherne and Michael Robartes echo that cry, though in other moods Mr. Yeats may make a paradox about the wisdom of fools. What I seem to miss, then, in this spirituality, is, somehow, the highest spiritual beauty of all; the last fine charm* and delicate bloom that I possibly fail to give any idea of when I describe it, for want of a better definition, as a kind of moral fragrance. The difficulty is that when one speaks of morality in art, people at once think of something didactic and aggressive. Yet a moral sense is as necessary to the artist as a. sense of colour. To put it in another way, all poetry should, I think, be inspired by a spirit of love : and when I say love, I moan not only human love, but a love for all living creatures. There are a number of Mr. Yeats's lyrics that come under this category—The Stolen Child, The Pity of Love, When You are Old, The Folly of being Comforted, occur to the memory at once—but much of his work certainly does not."

But on a balance Mr. Forrest Reid's admiration easily out- weighs his fault-finding. He pronounces Mr. Yeats to be not merely the only great poet that Ireland has produced, but in sheer poetic power and scrupulous care for perfection greater than Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, Shelley, and Rossetti. Re finds nothing in Ronsard's famous sonnet, "Quand Tons serez Bien vieille," to equal the depth and gravity' of Mr. Yeats's handling of a similar theme in one of his early poems. He rightly praises Mr, Yeats's elimination of all rhetorical ornament, and his successful realization of Wordsworth's dictum that the language of poetry must be "the language really used by men who feel vividly and see clearly." "In Mr. Yeats's work," he observes, " what we get is poetry, and almost nothing but poetry. From beginning to end there is not even a momentary concession to those who demand any- thing else."

These are large claims, and it will be found that they are based to a great extent on Mr. Yeats's earlier poems, before he fell under the sway of symbolism. Moreover, it is bard to reconcile them with the admissions already referred to unless one adopts a somewhat peculiar view of the essence of poetry. But that in the domain of the lyric Mr. Yeats has achieved the highest distinction most critics will cordially agree, and we share the admiration of Mr. Forrest Reid for " The Stolen Child," which was published twenty-six years ago:— "Where clips the rocky highland

Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,

There lies a leafy island Where flapping herons wake

The drowsy water rate; There we've hid our faery vats Full of berries, And of reddest stolen cherries.

Come away, 0 human child /

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses The dim grey sands with light, Far off by furthest Rosses

We foot it all the night,

Weaving olden dances, Mingling hands and mingling glances Till the moon has taken flight; To and fro we leap And chase the frothy bubbles, While the world is full of troubles And is anxious in its sleep.

Come away, 0 human child

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes From the hills above Glen-Car, In pools among the rushes That scarce could bathe a star,

We seek for slumbering, trout,

And whispering in their ears Give them unquiet dreams ; Leaning softly out From ferns that drop their tears Over the young gremlins.

Come away, 0 human child

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he's going, The solemn-eyed : He'll hear no more the lowing Of the calves on the warm hillside

Or the kettle on the bob

Sing peace into his breast, Or see the brown mice bob

Round and round the oatmeal chest.

For he comes, the human child,

To the waters and the wild With a faory, hand in hand, From a world more full of weeping than he can understand."

This beautiful fantasy appeared in the volume called The Wanderings of Oisin after a long narrative poem which William Morris, of whom Mr. Yeats saw a good deal in the late "eighties," praised as "his kind of poetry ":—

" He would have said more, Mr. Yeats tells us, if his attention had not been diverted by the sight of a decorative lamp-post (the kind of thing which evidently had power to move him in much the same way as Miss Betsey Trotwood was moved by the sudden apparition of a donkey in her garden), 'and waving his umbrella at the post, he raged at the Corporation."

There is not much humour in Mr. Yeats's poetry, but no one without a sense of humour could have remembered such an incident. For these and many other characteristic anecdotes we have to thank Mr. Forrest Reid, who is a most sympathetic as well as honest critic.