Books of the Week
Yeats in his Youth
By REX WARNER NEARLY all the letters from Yeats to Katherine Tynan* were written between the years 1887 and 1892, and nearly all of them were ,written from London. In 11887 Yeats was twenty-two years old. He had just finished The Wanderings of Oisin, which was to be published two years later. He first met Maud Gonne in 1889, and for much of the period of the letters to Katherine Tynan he was busy with, among other things, his researches into the prophetic books of Blake. He was finding his way about in the literary worlds both of England and of Ireland. He was developing his own style, beginning to think of writing for the theatre, showing a keen interest in occultism. He started .a novel. He grew a beard (and later shaved it off, despite the protests of Mme Blavatsky, who predicted disaster to his health through " loss of magnetism "). Clearly this-is a most important period in the poet's life and any documentation of it must be interesting. Parts of these letters have already appeared in Katherine Tynan's own reminiscences. The complete collection was sold by her in 1920 to an American dealer, and is now edited, with excellent notes, by Roger McHugh. The editor claims that " the only alterations made in the text are those which any editor of Yeats must make in adjusting his paragraphing, punctuation and spelling." It seems to me a great pity that such " adjustments ' should have been made at all, and there is no means of telling how extensive they have been. However, the letters are there, admirably annotated and, one hopes, not very much " adjusted." In reading them one is impressed by the friendliness, the common sense (which indeed amounts to shrewdness), the lack of affectation, the inner strength of the young man who was to become one of the greatest writers of poetry in the English language. It is true that Katherine Tynan can recall various eccentricities of her friend—hypnotising hens at Clondalkin or, to quote from Roger McHugh's introduction, " holding an umbrella at the wrong angle over her in a driving rain while he enthusiastically recited ' The Sensitive Plant' into her ear "; but what is most striking about these letters is their sanity and their balance.
* W. B. Yeats. Letters to Katherine Tynan. Edited by Roger McHugh. (Clonmore and Reynolds. 18s.) It was a critical time in the young man's life, and at such times many young men of talent will indulge in brilliant and destructive epigrams, in recriminations against their parents or the world in general; they will be " converted " to one cause or another; they will be miserable or over-excited. Yeats, however, shows none of these characteristics of adolescence. His family appears to be happy and united. What opposition the young man gets from his father (whose own letters, inci- dentally, are very well worth reading) is of a rather surprising kind. To me," Yeats writes, " the hope of regular work is a great thing, for it would mean more peace of mind than I have had lately, but Papa sees all kinds of injury to me in it. It makes him quite sad." As it was, Yeats was working extremely hard—over-working, indeed. He gives the impres- sion of being severely practical in all his dealings with publishers and editors and reviewers. And, more important, he knows the direction in which he wants to go. He is going to cling to himself and to develop that self, to describe nothing fanciful, but the landscapes which he knows and loves. There is a significant remark which he makes about journalists : " I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering, jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. That is, they have ceased to be self-centred, have given up their individuality." And it is interesting to find him writing, long before the time of Responsibilities, such words as these: " The want of your poetry is, I think, the want also of my own. We both of us need to .substitute more and more the landscapes of nature for the landscapes of art. I myself have another and kindred need—to substitute the feelings and longings of nature for those of art. The other change—a less important one—you perhaps need most. It is curious—do forgive me all this—that your other fault, that of sometimes a little overstating the emotion, is only present when your landscapes are those, of art. We should make poems on the familiar landscapes we love, not the strange and rare and glittering scenes we wonder at." In the end Yeats would be able to do both; he was to write not only The Tower but the Byzantium poems. 'Yet he seems to have found his power and his style in this inner determination to insist above all things upon " nature."
At this time, moving as some of his poetry is and most original in its rhythms, he is still groping towards his mature style. In one of the letters occurs, for instance, his first version of a famous poem, the first verse of which is as follows: " I will arise and go now and go to the island of Innisfree
And live in a dwelling of wattles, of woven wattles and woodwork made. Nine bean-rows will I have there, a yellow hive for the honey-bee, And this old care shall fade."
His literary judgements at this period are personal and, whether one agrees with them or not, acute. He greatly admires Meredith's poems, ,but with regard to his novels he writes : " He makes the mistake of making the reader think too much. . . . The really great writers of fiction make their readers' minds like sponges." As for Tolstoy, " I have been reading Tolstoi—great and joyless. The only joyless man in literature, so different from Turgenev." And Shaw : " Last night at Morris's I met Bernard Shaw, who is certainly very witty. But, like most people who have wit rather than humour, his mind is maybe somewhat wanting in depth. However, his stories are good, they say."
With regard to his personal life the young man is reticent, indeed, he is positively misleading. For example : " Who told you that I am `taken up with Miss Gonne '? I think she is very good-looking and that is all I think about her. What you say of her fondness for sensation is probably true." But on literature, on his own work, and on ordinary day-to-day experiences he writes always with freedom, sincerity and charm.
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