I
I have been acquainted with Mr. Yeats for a longer time than I have
with any other man named in this book, but I seem to myself to know
very little about him, for he is extraordinarily aloof from life. His
aloofness is different from that of Mr. Galsworthy who is perturbed
about mankind. Mr. Yeats is totally unconcerned about problems of
any sort. He is more interested in the things men do than in men
themselves. He prefers the symbol to the thing symbolized. The
harshest condemnation I ever heard him utter was delivered on "A. E."
of whom he said that he had ceased to be a poet in order to become a
philanthropist! I met him last in Chicago, and I felt when we parted
that I knew no more of him then than I knew when I first met him ten
years earlier. Our meeting followed on the fact that I had sent a
one-act play, entitled "The Magnanimous Lover," to him. It seems to
me now to be a crudely-contrived, ill-written and violent piece, but
when I sent it to Mr. Yeats I thought it was a remarkable work. It was
performed after the production of Stanley Houghton's "Hindle Wakes"
and Mr. Galsworthy's "The Eldest Son," which have similar themes, but
was written several years before they were performed. One evening, a
few weeks after I had sent the manuscript of "The Magnanimous Lover"
to him, I received a letter from Mr. Yeats, written in that queer,
illegible, thick style which is so difficult to read. Many of the words
were incomplete: all of them were badly-formed. The contrast between
the handwriting of Mr. Shaw and Mr. Yeats is remarkable. Mr. Shaw's
is very clear and neat and most beautifully-shaped, as delicate as a
spider's web, but Mr. Yeats's writing is obscure, untidy, sprawling
and hard to decipher, looking as if it had been done with a blunt
pen. Mr. Wells writes in a small, clean, but not very clear hand,
a deceptive fist, for it seems easier to read than it is. There is
some oddness in the fact that the handwriting of the poet should be
so coarse and ungainly, while the handwriting of the dramatist, with
so little of poetic emotion in him, is fine and shapely. The letter
from Mr. Yeats was to say that he liked my play, but could not make a
definite decision about it until he had consulted his co-director at
the Abbey Theatre, Lady Gregory. It had the formal, distant tone which
is characteristic of his speech and writing, but it had a postscript
which gave me great pleasure. In this postscript, he said that my
play was the only example of "wayward realism" that he had ever read.
I did not quite understand what he meant by the phrase, but it was a
compliment from a distinguished man and compliments from distinguished
men had never come my way before. I have had many praising letters from
him since then about my work, but none that ever raised me to such a
state of dizzy delight as that first letter did. He told me, in another
postscript, that he found in my "dialogue a quality of temperament,
as distinguished from the usual impersonal logic. You have more than
construction, and it is growing rare to have more." He thought highly
of "John Ferguson"--so did Mr. Shaw and "A.E."--and when I was attacked
in Dublin because of this play, I comforted myself with the thought
that my betters liked what was denounced by my inferiors. Mr. Yeats
wrote to me that "John Ferguson" was "a fragment of life, fully
expounded and without conventionality or confusion. I think it is the
best play you have done, though not likely to be the most popular."
His criticism is especially valuable when it is adverse. I had written
a play called "Mrs. Martin's Man" which I now know to have been a
dreadful mess of motives. I sent it to Mr. Yeats in the hope that he
would permit it to be done at the Abbey. He wrote lengthily to me about
it, and when I had read his letter I put my play in the fire, though
afterwards I used the theme, purged of the faults he had found in it,
for a novel with the same title. "I believe," he wrote,
"I believe that the play is an error. I am very sorry indeed to
say this, for I know what a blow it is to any dramatist to be
told that about work which must have taken many weeks. Shaw has
driven you off your balance, and instead of giving a vision of
life, which is your gift and a most remarkable gift to have, you
have begun to be topical, to play with ideas, to construct outside
of life. Shaw has a very unique mind, a mind that is a part of a
logical process going on all over Europe but which has found in
him alone its efficient expression in English. He has no vision of
life. He is a figure of international argument. There is an old
saying, 'No angel can carry two messages. You have the greater
gift of seeing life itself....'"
I print that extract from his letter, partly as a corrective to my own
pride, but chiefly because of its commentary on Mr. Shaw. Later, in
this chapter I will make specific reference to Mr. Yeats's relationship
to Mr. Shaw's work, but here I may say that, in spite of his sincere
regard and admiration for Mr. Shaw, Mr. Yeats seems to be totally
incapable of comprehending his work. He is able to communicate with
ghosts, but he cannot communicate with Mr. Shaw. He can understand
astrologers and necromancers and spiritualists and thimble-riggers of
all sorts and conditions, but he cannot understand Mr. Shaw. He told
me on one occasion of an experience he had with a medium, a young girl
who differed from all other mediums known to him in being a member
of the upper class. The spirits, seemingly, prefer to communicate
their messages through the lower orders. This girl's family were
ashamed of her cataleptic powers and tried to conceal them from their
neighbours, but they were persuaded to permit Mr. Yeats to see her in
a trance. "While she was in the trance," he said to me, "her fingers
closed on her palm. Then they opened again, and I saw a small green
pebble in the centre of her palm!" That was all! Immortal souls had
disturbed the harmony of the universe and thrown a young girl of the
upper class into a trance in order that they might place a small
green pebble in the centre of her palm! And Mr. Yeats saw something
wonderful and significant in that performance, but is unable to see
anything significant in the work of Mr. Shaw. That to me is a thing
so incomprehensible that I have abandoned all attempts to understand
it. But all of this is digression and anticipation. Soon after I
had received the letter in which he praised my "wayward realism,"
I heard from Mr. Yeats again. He invited me to call on him on the
following Sunday evening at his rooms in Woburn Buildings, behind the
Euston Road, in London; and thither, in a state of some excitement, I
repaired. I had no trouble in finding the house, for Mr. Yeats, who, in
some ways, is much more precise and clear-minded than people imagine or
his handwriting indicates, had given me very explicit directions how
to get to it, and had even drawn a rough sketch of the neighbourhood
so that I should not fail to find him. Woburn Buildings consists of
a number of tall houses in a narrow passage off Southampton Row, and
running parallel with the Euston Road. It is a dingy, dark place,
with an air of furtive poverty about it, and on Sunday nights it is
depressing enough to fill a man's mind with plots for drab dramas.
I have heard that H. G. Wells thought of the plot of that clever,
devilish story of his, "The Island of Dr. Moreau," in the Tottenham
Court Road on a Bank Holiday when he was in a mood of discontent. I
believe that the whole of the "drab drama" was first conceived on Mr.
Yeats's doorstep!
Shops form the ground floor of these houses, little, huckstering shops
that just contrive to support their proprietors, and Mr. Yeats's rooms
were on the third and fourth floors of a house which had a cobbler's
shop on the ground floor. The cobbler was a pleasant, bearded man,
wearing spectacles who had some share in the management of his affairs;
for when one, unable to obtain admission to the poet's rooms, required
information about him, the cobbler invariably supplied it. He could
tell whether Mr. Yeats had gone to Ireland or was merely taking the
air, and when he was likely to return, and he would offer, with great
courtesy, to take a message from you to be faithfully delivered to him
on his arrival.
Mr. Yeats has poor and failing sight, and in the dusk of the Sunday
evening on which I called on him, he could barely discern me. He stood
in the hall, holding the door, looking very tall and dark, and said in
that peculiar, tired and plaintive voice of his, "Who is it?" and I
answered "St. John Ervine." There is always something conspiratorial
about the manner in which he admits you to his rooms. You felt that you
want to give the countersign.
"Oh, yes!" he said, without any interest, and bade me enter.
In one of his books, he writes that life seems to him to be a
preparation for something that never happens; and the quality of his
voice suggests that thwarted desire which is expressed in so much of
his work. He is, in poetry, what Mr. Galsworthy is, in fiction: he
surrenders to life. I do not know of any one who can speak verse so
beautifully and yet so depressingly as he can. The very great beauty
that is in all his work does not stir you: it saddens you. There is no
sunrise in his writing: there is only sunset. In his lyrics, there
is the cadence of fatigue and of the lethargy that comes partly from
disappointment, partly from loneliness, partly from doubt, and partly
from inertia. "Innisfree," the beauty of which has not been diminished
by familiarity, does not sound glad: it sounds tired. The poets wish to
return to the lake island is not due to any pleasurable emotion, but
to weariness and exhaustion: he dreams of the island, not as a place
in which to work and to achieve, but in which to retire from work and
achievement that has not brought with it the gratification for which
he hoped; and the final impression left on the mind of the reader is
that the poet is too tired and disappointed to do more than wish that
he might go to Innisfree. One reads the beautiful poem in the sure and
certain belief that Mr. Yeats will not "arise and go now, and go to
Innisfree," but that he will remain where he is. There is no impulse
or movement in the poem: there is only a passive wish and a plaintive
resignation.
And all that inertia and negation and inactive desire is sounded in his
voice. It is very palpable in his manner.
He warned me not to make a noise as I ascended the uncarpeted
stairs: the people on the second floor might be disturbed. They were
working-people, I understood, and either there was a fretful baby
asleep or the people retired early because they had to rise early,
and he did not wish to break their rest. Yeats can be very harsh and
inconsiderate with his associates, but his bearing to poor men and
women, in my experience, is very courteous and very considerate.
He could not have been more gracious to a duchess--he probably was
sometimes less gracious to a duchess--than he was to the middle-aged
woman who cooked his meals and kept his rooms clean. I have seen
distinguished men being gracious to poor, unlettered men, but most
of them had an air of ... not exactly condescension in doing so, but
of altering their attitude slightly, of relaxing and unbending, of
modifying their style, as it were, and making it simpler. I did not
observe any effort at condescension in his manner towards that plain
and simple woman. He spoke to her in the same way that he would speak
to "A. E." or to Lady Gregory. I suppose that Queen Victoria was the
only woman in the world to whom Yeats ever spoke in a condescending
fashion.