Philosophy Between Poets
W. B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore, Their Correspondence, 1901-1997. Edited by Ursula Bridge. (Routledge & Kegan Paul. 20s.)
IT is a pity that Yeats's letters are being published in instalments, for the ones in this batch are almost as imperSOnal as letters between poets could be. What they really record is a period—one which had Bertrand Russell and Wyndham Lewis among its thinkers, included Yeats's dramatic experiments, and stretched, in all, from post-Yellow Book to Hitler (who gains an enthusiastic passing men- tion from Moore). They include many pleasing incidentals, among them Yeats's Abbey Theatre struggles, his impeachment of the "inorganic" drama of Shaw and Wilde, and this comment which must surely win special applause:
"We shall do nothing till we have created a criticism which will insist on the dramatic poet 's right, to educate his audience as a musical composer does his."
But these are incidentals. The core of this book is a dispute in philosqphy, which began when Yeats visited Moore at Petersfield in 1925.'The Yeats we have here is a mind nourished on myths and visions, not logic, contending with a philosopher's—G. E. Moore's- brother; and meeting the rebuke, "Many philosophers and most amateurs are only interested in the imaginative aspects of speculation; the search for truth bores them stiff." Yeats was certainly an amateur in philosophy, but the interesting point about thts group of letters is to see, not how Moore could argue, but how Yeats plumbed the depths for what he could use. When The Tower appeared, however, Moore, overcome, made this generous and healing admission: "Your poems in The Tower have a more ample humanity than any of these philosophers could compass, each line appears to you in relation to more kinds of excellence than they ever dreamed of relating their systems to."
The subject they argued about was sense data, and Ruskin's cat. Frank Harris had reported Ruskin spying this animal, which no one else could see, at room's length distance, whereupon he picked it up and threw it out of the window. This insubstantial cat became the focus for a debate, Yeats maintaining that Ruskin's cat and any ordinary cat were equally real, Moore pointing the difference between Ruskin's cat, and the house cat which anyone could see. It must be said that argument did nothing to shift either man's position. Though Moore seems to have been responsible for introducing Yeats to some new thought, it was all the same to him.
This volume is illustrated with jacket designs which Moore did for many of Yeats's books. It may now seem strange that Yeats liked them, though tlie'y confirm that both men began as Pre-Raphael- ites, a stage which in poetry Yeats but not Moore outgrew.
CLIFFORD COLLINS
Previous page
