I think of him as a very lonely, isolated, aloof man. He is, so far as
I am aware, the only English-speaking poet who did not write a poem
about the War, a fact which is at once significant of the restraint
he imposes upon himself and of his isolation from the common life of
his time. I have never met any one who seems so unaware of temporary
affairs as Mr. Yeats, and this unawareness is due, not to affectation,
but to sheer lack of interest. He probably would not have known of the
War at all had not the Germans dropped a bomb near his lodgings off the
Euston Road. When Macaulay's New Zealander comes to examine the ruins
of London, he will probably see Mr. Yeats, disembodied and unaware that
he is disembodied or that London is in ruins, sitting on a slab with a
planchette. He is younger than Mr. Shaw by ten years, but might be ten
years older. His verse and his speech and his manner are all elderly,
and his conversation is composed chiefly of reminiscences of men who
have been dead for many years, so that one imagines he has not had a
friend since 1890. There is absolutely no suggestion of youth in his
writings. In the poem entitled, "To a Child Dancing in the Wind," he
says:
I could have warned you, but you are young,
So we speak a different tongue
and again:
But I am old and you are young,
And I speak a barbarous tongue.
I do not know what age Mr. Yeats was when he wrote those lines, but
they are included in a collection of poems, dated "1912-1914," and at
most he could not have been fifty, for he was born in Dublin in 1865.
The sense of age seems to have oppressed his mind for many years,
perhaps for the whole of his creative life. He feels that he has
outlived his generation and is lost in a period of time peculiarly
alien to him.
When I was young,
I had not given a penny for a song
Did not the poet sing it with such airs
That one believed he had a sword upstairs:
Yet would be now, could I but have my wish,
Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish.
This coldness closing on his heart and congealing all his generous
emotions, causes him, at the end of a graceful book, "Reveries Over
Childhood and Youth" (in itself, significant of the age-obsession
which possesses his mind) to declare that "all life, weighed in the
scales of my own life, seems to me a preparation for something that
never happens," and leaves his readers wondering why a man who began
his life by singing songs with such airs "that one believed he had a
sword upstairs" should stumble into dismal prose towards the end of it,
pronouncing life to be a cheerless deceit.
His effect on young men is peculiar. His brilliant conversation is very
attractive to them, but his insensibility to the presence of human
beings repels them. "A. E." once told me that Mr. Arthur Griffith, the
founder of the Sinn Fein movement, drew young people to him by the
strength of his hatred, but finally repelled them by his complete lack
of charity and love. A nature compounded principally or exclusively
of hatred must be destructive. No man can construct anything unless
love and charity predominate in his heart. Mr. Griffith, throughout his
career, has never been notable for his power to make things. He could
not even make his own movement grow, for Sinn Fein became a popular
and appealing force only after Padraic Pearce and Thomas Macdonagh
and James Connolly had put a fire into the machinery of it on Easter
Monday, 1916. There is something terribly ironical in the fact that
James Connolly, to whom Mr. Griffith offered every possible opposition
in his lifetime, should by his death have helped to put Mr. Griffith
in a position of authority to which his own intellectual and spiritual
qualities could never have raised him. Mr. Yeats has something of the
unhumanity of Mr. Griffith. His talk is brilliant, indeed, but it is
not comradely talk. It never lapses from high quality to the easy
familiarities which humanize all relationships. He is more fastidious
about his speech than he is about his friends. It would shock him more
to use a bad word than to make a bad friend, because he is more aware
of bad words than of bad men; and he would be quicker to forgive a
crime than to forgive a vulgar phrase. I have never heard him use a
common expression. He once repeated an angry speech of William Morris
to me with an air almost apologetic for using profane language, not
because it was profane but because it was inelegant. He never says
"Damn!" or "Blast!" when he is angry.... He is one of the loneliest
men in the world, for he cannot express himself except in a crowd. Dr.
Stockman said that the strongest man in the world is the man who stands
absolutely alone--a feat which is surely impossible--and this specious
statement has supported many ineffective egoists in their belief that
neurosis is strength and misbehaviour a sign of individuality. But
the penalty of isolation is that the isolated cannot dispense with
an amenable crowd. The hermit must have a succession of respectful
pilgrims to his cave, each one murmuring, "There is but one God and
Thou art His Prophet!" until at last the hermit begins to believe
that _he_ is God and God is _his_ prophet. Hermits have followers,
or, perhaps one ought to say, curious visitors, but they have no
friends. Why should they have friends? They have not got the social
sense nor can they take part in the common labours of mankind. They
live in caves and desert places because they are not fit to live in
houses and places that are inhabited. But even the hermits, wrapped in
self-sufficiency, realize that no man is effective without his fellows,
and so, though they cannot make friends, they make disciples. This is a
truth which all the great lonely men from Adam to Robinson Crusoe have
discovered, that a man by himself is ineffective and without interest.
Life for Adam remained uneventful until the arrival of Eve: the island
of Juan Fernandez was livelier after Man Friday came to keep Crusoe
company. For fellowship is life, as Morris said, and lack of fellowship
is death.
There is no poet, not even Keats or Shelley, who has so much of pure
poetry in his work as Mr. Yeats has in his, and perhaps that is
enough; but there is no other poet, not even Mr. Kipling, who has so
little understanding of human kind. It is an odd commentary on his
relationship to his countrymen that while he was writing the bitter
poem, entitled "September, 1913," with the desolating refrain:
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone--
It's with O'Leary in the grave.
Thomas Macdonagh and Padraic Pearse and James Connolly were preparing
themselves for a romantic death.
John Davidson, in a book called "Sentences and Paragraphs," writes of
Keats that, "beginning and ending his intemperate period with the too
ample verge and room, the trailing fringe and sample-like embroidery of
'Endymion,' he was soon writing the most perfect odes in the language."
Mr. Yeats, in spite of some reluctant instructions into enthusiastic
movements, escaped "the intemperate period"; but he did so at the cost
of his youth and ardour. Like the Magi in his poem of that name, he,
"being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied," seeks "to find once more"
"the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor"; but it eludes him,
and will always elude him, because he thinks of its habitation as "a
bestial floor." It can only be found by a poet who, whatever happens,
still believes that the earth is a place where God may yet walk in
safety. Mr. Yeats is the greatest poet that Ireland has produced, but
he has meant very little to the people of Ireland, for he has forgotten
the ancient purpose of the bards, to urge men to a higher destiny
by reminding them of their high origin, and has lived, aloof and
disdainful, as far from human kind as he can conveniently get.
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|Obvious typographic errors have been corrected. |
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