Truth . Embodied A ROCKET stands still for a time
above the ground, fizzing and sparking and seemingly getting nowhere with great fuss, but all the time gathering power for the sudden effortless acceleration into clear air and universal admiration. The bigger the rocket the longer that deceptive standstill, and whenever I think of Yeats's prolonged youth It is some such image that comes to mind. Fearful difficulty, unremitting labour. If ever a man succeeded in raising himself by his own bootstraps, it was he. His health was deplorable; his eyes were bad; he had no money; he composed with agonising slowness; he dragged his feet painfully in the sticky languors of the time; his love-life was the very perfect model of incompetence and frustration. If Yeats had not been as hard as nails, as we know him now to have been, how could he have survived those years? The man who knows about rockets watches with equanimity the first desperate battle against gravity, seeing in it the necessary prelude to the startling starburst in the zenith. And so can we, thanks to the hindsight given us by those who are devoting themselves to picking to bits his life and work, see in the early Yeats the recognisable embryo of the tough- witted, bloody-minded, marvellous old artificer who put the whole of his life under the hammer and made great poetry of it.
Mr. Wade's extraordinarily detailed knowledge of Yeats's life ensures that this weighty edition of the letters (it runs to over nine hundred pages) is impeccably edited and annotated. So long as one remembers that, through no fault of Mr. Wade's, there are important gaps—at Mts. Yeats's request, for example, no letter addressed to her is included, and the correspondence with Miss Horniman and other key figures is thinly represented—it can be read continuously as autobiography, from that moment when at the age of twenty-one or there abouthe sent a pale and wilting little poem to a girl with the warning: I am afraid you will not much care for it—not being used to peculiaritys which will never be done justice to until they have become classics and are set for examinations to the moment shortly before his death in 1939 when he told a correspondent: I am happy, and I think full of an energy, of an energy I had despaired of. It seems to me that I have found what I wantee. When I try to put all into a phrase I say, 'Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.'
By which time, of course, his embodiments of 'truth,' or whatevet else you may call his central theme, had indeed become classics and were being set, as he had jauntily prophesied, for examinations.
In his public prose Yeats usually tended to be aloof, elusive, hard to hold. But in his letters to friends he spoke his mind freelY and easily and without elaboration. There was no need in them to worry overmuch about 'style,' that bogey of the decadence. Katharine Tynan was the first of a line of women in whom Yeats confided, and the letters to her which make up the bulk of the first part of the book form a pretty full account of his early struggles in London, that 'horrid place.' Some of his published work might give the impression of a young man deceiving himself, but Yeats knew that he was only getting shadows on to paper. 'And I am like the people who dream some wonderful thing and get up in the middle of the night and write it and find next day only scribblin8 . on the paper.' But this did not discourage him, nor did the constant headaches and colds and indigestion and lack of money (references to his small debts tattle like a cheap alarm clock through his letters), and he had spirit enough to defend, against John O'Leary even, such a couplet as: Her hair was of a citron tincture And gathered in a silver cincture.
By the time he was thirty-one he had made the acquaintance of Olivia Shakespear, and not long after that Florence Farr and Lady Gregory were growing familiar with his scrawl. To them, as later to Dorothy Wellesley and Edith Shackleton Heald and Ethel Mannin, ha could speak without policy. One sees the letters beginning to reflect the quickening tempo of Yeats's life as he comes to grips with the world, and, in so doing, finds himself. He gets down oil. his stilts into political and literary nationalism and learns how quarrel, and while his interest in 'mysticism' is apparently no less genuine than ever, the true level of this interest may perhaps be assessed from this postscript to a letter to George Russell: How much a week could I live for in the country if I stayed a couple of weeks or so? Could 1 do it for 30s.? Please let me know about this soon. 1 have a lot to say about the mysticism but will write later on.
Writing to Lady Gregory he describes the row in the mystical society which was called the Golden Dawn when MacGregor Mathers was suspended and sent Aleister Crowley to take possession of the rooms and papers of the society. 'This person seized the rooms and on being ejected attempted to retake possession wearing a black mask and in full highland costume and with a gilt dagger by his side.' Poor Yeats had to put up with a lot in his hunt for metaphors. Crowley later made wax images of Yeats and his friends and stuck pins into them. Yeats's own methods of dealing with his enemies was simpler and more effective: I have written Fay a very severe letter about Cousins's play Sold in U.I. They talk of doing it at once. I have made no objec• tion to their doing it but I have told him that it is 'rubbish and vulgar rubbish.' 1 have wound up by saying that I did not mark the letter private—he might show it if he liked. Cousins is evidently hopeless and the sooner I have him as enemy the better.
Now Yeats came soaring into his fame. He was established as a poet; the Abbey flourished; he was awarded a pension on the Civil List (accepting it on the understanding that he was free to engage in a nationalist insurrection if he wished to); he won the Nobel Prize for literature; he became a senator. But fame, which hardens most men, made Yeats the more daring: the letters, like the poems, grow steadily better as the end comes nearer. They speak them- selves from the pages and the grand fantastic gestures form them- selves in the air. I started off to read this book with a notebook dutifully by my side and a pencil handy, but threw them aside in despair before I had reached page 500. How many aspects of Yeats there are, and this kaleidoscope of them is too blinding an entertain- ment for dull-doggery. But when the fun and games are over and the last page read, the question presents itself: what manner of man was this Yeats and what was truly significant in his life? Somebody sooner or later will have to try to fix him (for Mr. Hone's biography, admirable at the time, is now of necessity inadequate), but by the time a few more memoirs are written and a few more people hal died and a few more intimate letters have been unfolded into the cold light and a few score more scholars have been at work on the a!,' published manuscripts, the task facing the bold biographer will n' as heart-breaking as Cuchulain's fight with the waves.
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