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.
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 _The Wind
Among the Reeds_ 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.
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, _Reveries over Childhood and Youth_, 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 _Innisfree_ 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.
_Reveries_ 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.
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."
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."
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.
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.
_Reveries Over Childhood and Youth_ is the autobiography of one who was
always more self-conscious than his fellows. Mr. Yeats describes himself
as a youth in Dublin:--
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.
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:--
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.
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.
_Reveries Over Childhood and Youth_ is a book of extraordinary
freshness. It does not, like Wordsworth's _Prelude_, 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.
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.
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 _The Lake Isle of Innisfree_:--
My father had read to me some passage out of _Walden_, and I
planned to live some day in a cottage on a little island called
Innisfree....
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.
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
Merchant skipper that leaped overboard
After a ragged hat in Biscay Bay.
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--
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.
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:--
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.
Mr. Yeats's memoirs, however, are not confined to prose. His volume of
verse called _Responsibilities_ 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":--
You say, as I have often given tongue
In praise of what another's said or sung,
'Twere politic to do the like by these;
But have you known a dog to praise his fleas?