Compton Mackenzie
IN June, 1802, William Wordsworth was writing to his sister Dorothy, ' Partly from some constitutional infirmities and partly from certain habits of mind, I do not write any letters unless upon business, not even to my dearest friends. Except during absence from my own family I have not written five letters of friendship during the last five years.'
And Tom Moore records a conversation in August, 1837, a pro pos of Southey's profuse letter-writing, in which Words- worth said that, for his own part, such was his horror of having his letters preserved, that In order to guard against it, he always took pains to make them as bad and dull as possible. W. B. Yeats was as profuse a letter-writer as Southey, and the selection from his correspondence between 1887 and the year of his death in 1939 which Mr. Allan Wade has gathered together fills a volume of nearly a thousand pages.* I once heard Yeats observe that it was the custom of Celtic bards to compose lying on the back with a heavy stone upon the chest. I feel like a Celtic bard in the throes of composition at this moment, for I am writing this ' Sidelight ' in bed with the letters of W. B. Yeats on my chest, and also a very bad cold. After reading every page of this heavy volume I am left with the conviction that Yeats was an even greater man than I thought he was and that he was also a man of genuine sim- plicity, which I had always been inclined to doubt. Moreover, I have been much encouraged to find that his literary judge- ments, except in the case of one writer, always coincide with Illy own.
I realise now why with all my admiration of the novel I cannot read Anna Karenina with any warmth of pleasure. In 1888 Yeats was writing to Katharine Tynan : ' I am reading Tolstoi—great and joyless. The only joyless man in literature, so different from Turgeniev. He seems to describe all things, whether beautiful or ugly, painful or Pleasant, with the same impartial, indifferent joylessness.' And on George Eliot : ` She is too reasonable. I hate reasonable people, the activity of their brains sucks up all the blood out of their hearts. ' I was once afraid of turning out reasonable myself. The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.'
It was good to read his opinion of Sir Ian Hamilton. Writing to his father in 1909, Yeats said : ' I've also been meeting lately General Ian Hamilton, a man of the really finest culture as fine as that of anybody I've ever met. A very gentle person, and his friends say of him that he is the greatest soldier in the English Army.' Mr. `Allan Wade has carried through his editorial task with such accuracy and such consideration for readers that he will not mind my pointing out an obvious mistake. The letter to I. B. Yeats dated Sept. 12 [1914] should clearly be [1915]. Just after Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923 Edmund Gosse in that mood of conventional patriotism which be thought he owed to his Librarianship at the House of Lords pointed at the poet an accusing finger, rather like a feline claw on such occasions, in the drawing-room of the old Savile Club. ' I hope, Yeats, you don't imagine that you have been given the Nobel Prize for your services to literature,' he fizzed. Yeats backed away from the sudden attack, looking, as George Moore once described him, like a rook backing in a south-west gale. ' Oh, no, Yeats,' Gosse persisted. ' You have been given the Nobel Prize on account of your hatred of us.' No doubt Gosse was thinking of that Civil List Pension of £150 which he had been chiefly instrumental in obtaining fog' Yeats in 1910, though in justice to the poet he had stipulated that its acceptance must not prejudice his liberty to express his opinions on the state of. Ireland. To Yeats's rescue came Ray Lankester, the rockbound materialist, with his burly form and big square head, Why can't you leave the poor wild Irishman alone, Gosse ? ' he protested. Gosse must have thought better of it later, and written to Yeats, for there is a letter from him to Gosse from Dublin with the date of November 23, 1923 : Of course I know quite well that this honour is not given to me as an individual but as a representative of a literary movement and of a nation, and I am glad to have it so. People are grateful to me for having won them this recognition and life is pleasant.' This collections of letters shows clearly how hardly and how long Yeats was harassed and oppressed by financial worries, and yet in not one letter is there a word of complaint. The figure of this great poet sets a noble example to all artists. I quoted just now a simile George Moore found for Yeats. Here is one that Yeats heard for George Moore: ' I dined with Lady Gregory last night. Moore was there, looking, as some friend of Miss Farr's said, like a boiled ghost.'
The other night James Bone said to me that George Moore looked like a poached egg. They are both perfect similes. There is an enchanting letter to Lady Gregory in 1912 about a committee meeting of the newly formed British Academy : I never look at old Prothero for five minutes without a desire to cut his throat; he frequently takes the chair and is a very bad chairman. W are getting up a Browning celebra- tion, he will probably deliver the oration. In the middle of his last Maurice Hewlett said to Henry James : " This is dull," to which Henry James sternly replied, " Hewlett, we are not here to enjoy ourselves."' Does the British Academy still exist ?
was hoping to find some letters about the Tailteann Games In Dublin in August, 1924, when with G. K. Chesterton, Edwin Lutyens, Augustus John and others I was a guest of the nation, but there is only one. No doubt Yeats was too busy in his position as a Senator to write letters. He was an impressive figure dressed in formal black clothes and playing the part of a Senator to perfection. I recall meeting .him in the lobby of the Theatre Royal as we emerged together from a concert of John McCormack's before it was over, to go on to some function.
A wonderful concert and a wonderful house,' I observed.
Wonderful, wonderful,' Yeats replied in the voice of one who has just been initiated at Eleusis. But oh, the clarity of the words,' he almost moaned. The damnable clarity of the words 1 ' My last memory of him is of his picking up from a table in the Savile morning room a copy of Professor Hogben's Mathematics for the Million. Ah: he murmured, with a kind of Druidical disapproval, more religion for the suburbs.' Mr. Allan Wade and his publishers have put us under a cebt with this collection of a great poet's letter, and it is lucky for us that W. B. Yeats did not share Wordsworth's dislike of correspondence.
Previous page
