W. B. YEATS
It might reasonably be supposed that the last drop in Ireland’s cup of
bitterness was Mr. William Butler Yeats. An emotional and misfortunate
people with the tyrant’s heel on its neck, and poverty and disaster
always in attendance upon it, may be excused if it does not altogether
dance to the pipings of a pretty fellow like Mr. Yeats. In point of fact,
however, Ireland fails to dance not because of her sadness, but because
Mr. Yeats’s minstrelsy is to all intents and purposes utterly alien to
her. In England, or more correctly speaking, in London, it is true, there
has been and possibly is now, a small cult of what is commonly called the
Keltic Muse. And the head and front of it, of course, is Mr. Yeats. He
has found ardent, if undiscriminating, support among the Irish reporters
and reviewers on the daily papers; he enjoys the patronage of Mr. Clement
Shorter, and he is received respectfully at the Irish Literary Club.
Further I am told that there is a musically-minded elocutionist in London
who goes about chanting his numbers to the three-stringed psaltery. That
Mr. Yeats is a poet of some parts nobody in his senses will attempt to
deny. That he is a vast, or potent, or as he himself would no doubt
phrase it, a Druid poet, I am not disposed to admit. The strength of him
is slight indeed; the thought of him prattles forever round the trivial.
He has a still small voice with a wistfulness about it; and it is on this
wistfulness that he has builded up his business. His contemporaries,
the men among whom, whether he likes it or no, he will always have
to range, are every one of them stronger men than he. They are ruder
and more forceful, more gusty and less attenuated, if only by fits
and starts. They do their best to try to belong to the great British
poetical tradition. They fail lamentably, but their work bears marks of
aspiration. Mr. Yeats, on the other hand, has been particular to pose on
a little hill of his own. He imagines that he has discovered a sort of
private tradition, the which he calls Keltic. Out of Ireland he believes
himself to have captured Druid music, and this he has put up for us in
sundry lyrical pieces and sundry plays. His lyrical pieces are admired
in all the drawing-rooms and all the sub-editors’ rooms, and his plays
have been stamped with the heartfelt approval of the Chief Secretary for
Ireland, and Mr. Max Beerbohm. The general opinion of him may be summed
up in three words—How charmingly Keltic! It is an old contention of mine
that Mr. Yeats’s qualities are not Keltic at all. I go further and say
that as a fact there are no Keltic qualities which are not common in good
English poetry. The best Kelt we ever had was Mr. Yeats’s own master, one
William Blake, who was sheer Cockney. Mr. Yeats is just Blake spun out,
and overconscious.
“The moon, like a flower
In heaven’s high bower,
With silent delight,
Sits and smiles on the night.”
“I would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea!
We tire of the flame of the meteor, before it can fade and flee;
And the flame of the blue star of twilight, hung low on the rim of the
sky,
Has awaked in our hearts, my beloved, a sadness that may not die.”
“Sweet babe, in thy face
Soft desires I can trace,
Secret joys and secret smiles,
Little pretty infant wiles.
…
As thy softest limbs I feel
Smiles as of the morning steal
O’er thy cheek, and o’er thy breast
Where thy little heart doth rest.”
“I told my love, I told my love,
I told her all my heart,
Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears.
Ah, she did depart!
…
Soon after she was gone from me,
A traveler came by,
Silently, invisibly:
He took her with a sigh.”
“Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,
The holy tree is growing there;
From joy the holy branches start,
And all the trembling flowers they bear.
The changing colors of its fruit
Have dowered the stars with merry light;
The surety of its hidden root
Has planted quiet in the night.”
Which is Blake, and which is Yeats? You may put the name of either under
any of these stanzas, without being guilty of an unpardonable critical
lapse. Mr. Yeats took Blake and imitated him as frankly, and it may be,
as unconsciously, as many less sophisticated versifiers have imitated
Tennyson, or Mr. Swinburne, or Rossetti. It is creditable to him that he
should have had discernment enough to perceive in Blake an exceptional
and individual content; but why having got hold of that content, having
saturated himself with it, as it were, and having found the exploitation
of it easy and provocative of praise, Mr. Yeats should turn round and
call it Keltic is something of a puzzle. Of course, one has to remember
that among a people whose interests are material, rather than spiritual,
the poet who would get a hearing is compelled to have resort to a certain
amount of adventitiousness and empyricism.
“We poets in our youth begin in gladness;
But thereof come in the end despondency and madness,”
saith Wordsworth. We poets in our youth also begin in sincerity and
with a single eye to the glory of the Muses. But too frequently, even
while our youth is still with us, we begin to think about the glory of
ourselves, and take steps accordingly. It is good for us, if we have any
gift at all, to organize and advertise a school, with ourselves carefully
elected by ourselves to the position of archpriest. The critic who in
an idle hour set down “Cockney School,” has a great deal to answer for.
Somebody followed him hard with the “Lake School.” And in due course we
had the “Fleshly School.” It is to be noted, however, that these epithets
were bestowed by the critics upon the poets, and not by the poets upon
the poets themselves. I venture to suggest that it has been slightly
different in the case of Mr. Yeats and his following. In Mr. Yeats’s
mind—perhaps without his being wholly alive to it—something like the
following has taken place: “To be of any account in this world a poet
must have a quality or cry of his own. There is a quality, or poignancy
of individualism, about Blake which has not yet become obvious to the
multitude. I admire it, and I can imitate it, and possibly improve upon
it; therefore let me adopt it for my own. And as I am an Irishman I
shall cause it to be known not as the spirit of Blake, but as the Keltic
quality. Selah!” I do not suggest for a moment that Mr. Yeats’s conduct
in this matter has been either wicked or unjustifiable. I do not even
suggest that Mr. Yeats has been quite aware of what he was doing; but
not to put too fine a point upon it, I do say that he has been “modern,”
and that it is a thousand pities. There is nothing in Ireland, and there
never has been anything in Ireland which will justify the appropriation
of Blake as a sort of exclusive Irish product; and Mr. Yeats has written
nothing which he could not have written just as well had he been a
Cockney, or a Hebrew, capable of appreciating the spiritual and technical
parts of Blake, and of perceiving the beauty of certain scraps of Irish
history and folk-lore. As an Irish poet, Mr. Yeats, in my opinion, fails
completely. It is as reasonable to call him an Irish poet as it would
be to call Milton a Hebrew poet because he wrote “Paradise Lost,” or
Mr. Swinburne a Greek poet because he wrote “Atalanta.” There is not an
Irishman, _qua_ Irishman, who wants Mr. Yeats; any more than there is an
Irishman, _qua_ Irishman, who wants Mr. Yeats’s Irish Literary Theater.
Mr. Yeats’s poetry and Mr. Yeats’s Irish Literary Theater are Blake’s
poetry and Blake’s Literary Theater. They belong to the Euston Road, and
not to Tara; they are cultivated, wary, wistful, minor English, and not
Irish at all. You have to be English, and a trifle subtle at that, to get
on with them. Blake’s laurels are very posthumous and recent because the
Englishmen of his time were busy with Pope and Crabbe, and had a sort of
suspicion that Wordsworth was a lunatic. Englishmen did not know even
Shakespeare in those days; at any rate not in the way that we know him
nowadays. To the Pope-suckled Englishman of culture, Shakespeare, if he
was anything at all, was a sort of robustious and flowery dramatist. They
played him in full-bottomed wigs and small clothes. To-day the tendencies
are all the other way. Shakespeare we shall tell you was no playwright,
but a poet, and the biggest of them. Our modern actors spoil him for
us, not by their cuts and modifications, but by their raree-shows and
mouthings. Who of them can say for you to your soul’s satisfaction:
… “O here,
Will I set up my everlasting rest
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-weary flesh?”
Shakespeare is for all time and more and more for the closet. Blake is a
greater poet than the critical are disposed to admit, even in this age of
tender enthusiasms. And Mr. Yeats is a poet, not because he is Irish or
Keltic, but in so far and precisely as far as he has had the good sense
to take Blake for his master. For Kelticism as it is understood by its
professors, Shakespeare abounds in it.
_1st Lady._ Come, my gracious lord,
Shall I be your playfellow?
_Mam._ No, I’ll none of you.
_1st Lady._ Why, my sweet lord?
_Mam._ You’ll kiss me hard, and speak to me as if
I were a baby still.—I love you better.
_2nd Lady._ And why so, my lord?
_Mam._ Not for because
Your brows are blacker; yet black brows, they say,
Become some women best, so that there be not
Too much hair there, but in a semi-circle
Or half-moon made with a pen.
_2nd Lady._ Who taught you this?
_Mam._ I learnt it out of women’s faces.—Pray now
What color are your eyebrows?
_1st Lady._ Blue, my lord.
_Mam._ Nay, there’s a mock. I have seen a lady’s nose
That has been blue, but not her eyebrows.
_2nd Lady._ Hark ye;
The queen your mother rounds apace; we shall
Present our service to a fine new prince
One of these days; and then you’d wanton with us,
If we would have you.
_1st Lady._ She is spread of late
Into a goodly bulk. Good time encounter her!
_Her._ What wisdom stirs amongst you?—Come, sir, now
I am for you again. Pray you, sit by us,
And tell’s a tale.
_Mam._ Merry or sad shall’t be?
_Her._ As merry as you will.
_Mam._ A sad tale’s best for winter:
I have one of sprites and goblins.
_Her._ Let’s have that, good sir,
Come on, sit down. Come on, and do your best,
To fright me with your sprites, you’re powerful at it.
_Mam._ There was a man—
_Her._ Nay, come sit down; then on.
_Mam._ Dwelt by a churchyard—I will tell it softly;
Yond crickets shall not hear it.
_Her._ Come on then,
And give’t in mine ear.
There is enough Keltic quality here, surely, to satisfy both Mr. Yeats
and Mr. Shorter. In fine, this tiny episode out of _A Winter’s Tale_ is
quite as good, and quite as Keltic, as anything the Blake School, to give
it its honest title, has managed hitherto to produce. What the average
Irishman would think about it is another story. It is a pity to take
from Ireland even a trifle over which she might, not improperly, plume
herself. But Mr. Yeats in the figure of Irish poet reminds us of nothing
so much as a peacock butterfly purchased in the chrysalis state out of
France by the careful entomologist, hidden in a plant-pot at his parlor
window, and slaughtered and labeled British so soon as it has had time to
spread its wistful wings.