<SPAN name="XVIII"></SPAN>
<h2>XVIII</h2>
<h2><b>MR. W.B. YEATS</b></h2>
<br/>
<h3><b><SPAN name="1._His_Own_Account_of_Himself"></SPAN>1. His Own Account of Himself</b></h3>
<br/>
<p>Mr. W.B. Yeats has created, if not a new world, a new star. He is
not a
reporter of life as it is, to the extent that Shakespeare or Browning
is. One is not quite certain that his kingdom is of the green earth. He
is like a man who has seen the earth not directly but in a crystal. He
has a vision of real things, but in unreal circumstances. His poetry
repels many people at first because it is unlike any other poetry. They
are suspicious of it as of a new sect in religion. They have been
accustomed to bow in other temples. They resent the ritual, the
incantations, the unearthly light and colour of the temple of this
innovating high priest.</p>
<p>They resent, most of all, the self-consciousness of the priest
himself.
For Mr. Yeats's is not a genius with natural readiness of speech. His
sentences do not pour from him in stormy floods. It is as though he had
to pursue and capture them one by one, like butterflies. Or, perhaps,
it
is that he has not been content with the simple utterance of his
vision.
He has reshaped and embroidered it, and has sung of passion in a mask.
There are many who see in his poetry only the mask, and who are
apparently blind to the passion of sorrowful ecstasy that sets <i>The
Wind
Among the Reeds</i> apart from every other book that has ever been
written
in English. They imagine that the book amounts to little more than the
attitude of a stylist, a trifler with Celtic nomenclature and fairy
legend.</p>
<p>One may agree that some of the less-inspired poems are works of
intellectual craftsmanship rather than of immediate genius, and that
here and there the originality of the poet's vision is clouded by
reminiscences of the aesthetic painters. But the greatest poems in the
book are a new thing in literature, a "rapturous music" not heard
before. One is not surprised to learn from Mr. Yeats's autobiographical
volume, <i>Reveries over Childhood and Youth</i>, that, when he began
to
write poetry as a boy, "my lines but seldom scanned, for I could not
understand the prosody in the books, although there were many lines
that, taken by themselves, had music." His genius, as a matter of fact,
was unconsciously seeking after new forms. Those who have read the
first
draft of <i>Innisfree</i> will remember how it gives one the
impression of a
new imagination stumbling into utterance. Mr. Yeats has laboured his
verse into perfect music with a deliberateness like that of Flaubert in
writing prose.</p>
<p><i>Reveries</i> is the beautiful and fascinating story of his
childhood and
youth, and the development of his genius. "I remember," he tells us,
"little of childhood but its pain. I have grown happier with every year
of life, as though gradually conquering something in myself." But there
is not much of the shadow of pain on these pages. They are full of the
portraits of fantastically remembered relations and of stories of home
and school related with fantastic humour. It is difficult to believe
that Mr. Yeats as a schoolboy "followed the career of a certain
professional runner for months, buying papers that would tell me if he
had won or lost," but here we see him even in the thick of a fight like
a boy in a school story. His father, however, seems to have had
infinitely more influence over him than his school environment.</p>
<p>It was his father who grew so angry when the infant poet was taught
at
school to sing "Little drops of water," and who indignantly forbade him
to write a school essay on the subject of the capacity of men to rise
on
stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things. Mr. Yeats's
upbringing in the home of an artist anti-Victorian to the finger-tips
was obviously such as would lead a boy to live self-consciously, and
Mr.
Yeats tells us that when he was a boy at school he used to feel "as
proud of myself as a March cock when it crows to its first sunrise." He
remembers how one day he looked at his schoolfellows on the
playing-field and said to himself, "If when I grow up I am as clever
among grown-up men as I am among these boys, I shall be a famous man."
Another sentence about these days suggests what a difficult
inarticulate
genius was his. "My thoughts," he says, "were a great excitement, but
when I tried to do anything with them, it was like trying to pack a
balloon into a shed in a high wind."</p>
<p>Though he was always near the bottom of his class, and was useless
at
games—"I cannot," he writes, "remember that I ever kicked a goal or
made a run"—he showed some promise as a naturalist, and used to look
for butterflies, moths, and beetles in Richmond Park. Later, when
living
on the Dublin coast, he "planned some day to write a book about the
changes through a twelvemonth among the creatures of some hole in the
rock."</p>
<p>These passages in his autobiography are specially interesting as
evidence to refute the absurd theory that Mr. Yeats is a mere vague
day-dreamer among poets. The truth is, Mr. Yeats's early poems show
that
he was a boy of eager curiosity and observation—a boy with a remarkable
intellectual machine, as well as a visionary who was one day to build a
new altar to beauty. He has never been entirely aloof from the common
world. Though at times he has conceived it to be the calling of a man
of
letters to live apart like a monk, he has mingled with human interests
to a far greater extent than most people realize. He has nearly always
been a politician and always a fighter.</p>
<p>At the same time, we need not read far in his autobiography to
discover
why people who hate self-consciousness in artists are so hostile to him.</p>
<p><i>Reveries Over Childhood and Youth</i> is the autobiography of one
who was
always more self-conscious than his fellows. Mr. Yeats describes
himself
as a youth in Dublin:—</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>sometimes walking with an artificial stride in memory of Hamlet, and
stopping at shop windows to look at my tie, gathered into a loose
sailor-knot, and to regret that it could not be always blown out by the
wind like Byron's tie in the picture.</p>
</div>
<p>Even the fits of abstraction of the young poet must often have been
regarded as self-conscious attitudinizing by his neighbours—especially
by the "stupid stout woman" who lived in the villa next to his
father's,
and who, as he amusingly relates, mocked him aloud:—</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>I had a study with a window opposite some window of hers, and one
night when I was writing, I heard voices full of derision, and saw the
stout woman and her family standing at the window. I have a way of
acting what I write, and speaking it aloud without knowing what I am
doing. Perhaps I was on my hands and knees, or looking down over the
back of a chair, talking into what I imagined an abyss.</p>
</div>
<p>It will be seen that Mr. Yeats is as interesting a figure to himself
as
he is to Mr. George Moore. If he were not he would not have troubled to
write his autobiography. And that would have been a loss to literature.
<i>Reveries Over Childhood and Youth</i> is a book of extraordinary
freshness. It does not, like Wordsworth's <i>Prelude</i>, set forth
the full
account of the great influences that shaped a poet's career. But it is
a
delightful study of early influences, and depicts a dedicated poet in
his boyhood as this has never been done before in English prose.</p>
<p>Of all the influences that have shaped his career, none was more
important than the Irish atmosphere to which he early returned from
London. He is distinctively an Irish poet, though we find him in his
youth writing plays and poems in imitation of Shelley and Spenser.
Irish places have done more to influence his imagination even than the
masterpieces of English literature.</p>
<p>It was apparently while he was living in Sligo, not far from the
lakes,
that he conceived the longing which he afterwards expressed with such
originality of charm in <i>The Lake Isle of Innisfree</i>:—</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>My father had read to me some passage out of <i>Walden</i>, and I
planned to live some day in a cottage on a little island called
Innisfree....</p>
<p> I thought that, having conquered bodily desire and the inclination
of my mind towards women and love, I should live as Thoreau lived,
seeking wisdom.</p>
</div>
<p>It is the little world of Sligo, indeed, that provides all the
spacious
and twilit landscape in Mr. Yeats's verse. Here were those fishermen
and
raths and mountains of the Sidhe and desolate lakes which repeat
themselves as images through his work. Here, too, he had relatives
eccentric and adventurous to excite his imagination, such as the</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza"><span>Merchant skipper that leaped overboard<br/>
</span><span>After a ragged hat in Biscay Bay.<br/>
</span></div>
</div>
<p>Mr. Yeats's relations seem in his autobiography as real as the
characters in fiction. Each of them is magnificently stamped with
romance or comedy—the hypochondriac uncle, for example, who—</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>passed from winter to summer through a series of woollens that had
always to be weighed; for in April or May, or whatever the date was, he
had to be sure that he carried the exact number of ounces he had
carried upon that date since boyhood.</p>
</div>
<p>For a time Mr. Yeats thought of following his father's example and
becoming a painter. It was while attending an art school in Dublin that
he first met A.E. He gives us a curious description of A.E. as he was
then:—</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>He did not paint the model as we tried to, for some other image rose
always before his eyes (a St. John in the Desert I remember), and
already he spoke to us of his visions. His conversation, so lucid and
vehement to-day, was all but incomprehensible, though now and again
some phrase could be understood and repeated. One day he announced that
he was leaving the Art Schools because his will was weak, and the arts
or any other emotional pursuit would but weaken it further.</p>
</div>
<p>Mr. Yeats's memoirs, however, are not confined to prose. His volume
of
verse called <i>Responsibilities</i> is almost equally
autobiographical. Much
of it is a record of quarrels with contemporaries—quarrels about Synge,
about Hugh Lane and his pictures, about all sorts of things. He aims
barbed epigrams at his adversaries. Very Yeatsian is an epigram "to a
poet, who would have me praise certain bad poets, imitators of his and
mine":—</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza"><span>You say, as I have often given tongue<br/>
</span><span>In praise of what another's said or sung,<br/>
</span><span>'Twere politic to do the like by these;<br/>
</span><span>But have you known a dog to praise his fleas?<br/>
</span></div>
</div>
<p>In an earlier version, the last line was still more arrogant:—</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza"><span>But where's the wild dog that has praised his
fleas?<br/>
</span></div>
</div>
<p>There is a noble arrogance again in the lines called <i>A Coat</i>:—</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza"><span>I made my song a coat,<br/>
</span><span>Covered with embroideries,<br/>
</span><span>Out of old mythologies,<br/>
</span><span>From heel to throat.<br/>
</span><span>But the fools caught it,<br/>
</span><span>Wore it in the world's eye,<br/>
</span><span>As though they'd wrought it.<br/>
</span><span>Song, let them take it,<br/>
</span><span>For there's more enterprise<br/>
</span><span>In walking naked.<br/>
</span></div>
</div>
<p>Mr. Yeats still gives some of his songs the old embroidered vesture.
But
his work is now more frankly personal than it used to be—at once
harsher and simpler. One would not give <i>Responsibilities</i> to a
reader
who knew nothing of Mr. Yeats's previous work. There is too much raging
at the world in it, too little of the perfected beauty of <i>The Wind
Among the Reeds</i>. One finds ugly words like "wive" and "thigh"
inopportunely used, and the retort to Mr. George Moore's <i>Hail and
Farewell</i>, though legitimately offensive, is obscure in statement.
Still, there is enough beauty in the book to make it precious to the
lover of literature. An Elizabethan might have made the music of the
first verse of <i>A Woman Homer Sung</i>.</p>
<p>And what splendour of praise and censure Mr. Yeats gives us in <i>The
Second Troy</i>:—</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza"><span>Why should I blame her, that she filled my
days<br/>
</span><span class="i2">With misery, or that she would of late<br/>
</span><span>Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways.<br/>
</span><span class="i2">Or hurled the little streets against the great,<br/>
</span><span>Had they but courage equal to desire?<br/>
</span><span class="i2">What could have made her peaceful with a mind<br/>
</span><span>That nobleness made simple as a fire,<br/>
</span><span class="i2">With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind<br/>
</span><span>That is not natural in an age like this,<br/>
</span><span class="i2">Being high and solitary, and most stern?<br/>
</span><span>Why, what could she have done, being what she is?<br/>
</span><span class="i2">Was there another Troy for her to burn?<br/>
</span></div>
</div>
<p>It is curious to note in how much of his verse Mr. Yeats repeats his
protest against the political passion of Ireland which once meant so
much to him. <i>All Things can Tempt Me</i> expresses this artistic
mood of
revolt with its fierce beginning:—</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza"><span>All things can tempt me from this craft of
verse;<br/>
</span><span>One time it was a woman's face, or worse,<br/>
</span><span>The seeming needs of my fool-driven land.<br/>
</span></div>
</div>
<p>Some of the most excellent pages of <i>Reveries</i>, however, are
those which
recall certain famous figures in Irish Nationalism like John O'Leary
and
J.F. Taylor, the orator whose temper so stood in his way.</p>
<p>Mr. Yeats recalls a wonderful speech Taylor once made at a meeting
in
Dublin at which a Lord Chancellor had apparently referred in a
belittling way to Irish nationality and the Irish language:</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>Taylor began hesitating and stopping for words, but after speaking
very badly for a little, straightened his figure and spoke as out of a
dream: "I am carried to another age, a nobler court, and another Lord
Chancellor is speaking. I am at the court of the first Pharaoh."
Thereupon he put into the mouth of that Egyptian all his audience had
listened to, but now it was spoken to the children of Israel. "If you
have any spirituality as you boast, why not use our great empire to
spread it through the world, why still cling to that beggarly
nationality of yours? what are its history and its works weighed with
those of Egypt?" Then his voice changed and sank: "I see a man at the
edge of the crowd; he is standing listening there, but he will not
obey"; and then, with his voice rising to a cry, "had he obeyed he
would never have come down the mountain carrying in his arms the tables
of the Law in the language of the outlaw."</p>
</div>
<p>That Mr. Yeats, in spite of his secession from politics, loves the
old
passionate Ireland, is clear from the poem called <i>September, 1913</i>,
with its refrain:—</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza"><span>Romantic Ireland's dead and gone<br/>
</span><span>And with O'Leary in the grave.<br/>
</span></div>
</div>
<p>And to this Mr. Yeats has since added a significant note:—</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza"><span>"Romantic Ireland's dead and gone" sounds
old-fashioned<br/>
</span><span>now. It seemed true in 1913, but I did not foresee 1916.
The<br/>
</span><span>late Dublin Rebellion, whatever one may say of its wisdom,
will<br/>
</span><span>long be remembered for its heroism. "They weighed so
lightly<br/>
</span><span>what they gave," and gave, too, in some cases without hope
of<br/>
</span><span>success.<br/>
</span></div>
</div>
<p>Mr. Yeats is by nature a poet of the heroic world—a hater of the
burgess and of the till. He boasts in <i>Responsibilities</i> of
ancestors
who left him</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza"><span class="i34">blood<br/>
</span><span>That has not passed through any huckster's loin.<br/>
</span></div>
</div>
<p>There may be a good deal of vanity and gesticulation in all this,
but
it is the vanity and gesticulation of a man of genius. As we cannot
have
the genius of Mr. Yeats without the gestures, we may as well take the
gestures in good part.</p>
<br/>
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