MR. WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
There has never been a poet who used better the gifts his country gave
him than Mr. Yeats. The heroic legends of Ireland are in his poetry,
Irish folk-lore is there, and the look of the country; and a man moulded
as only Irish conditions, of old time and of to-day, could mould him,
Irish conditions spiritual, intellectual, and physical; a man with eyes
on a bare countryside in the gray of twilight, thinking of the stories
the peasants tell and of the old legends whose setting this is before
him. At this hour, with such surroundings, and in such thought, the
Other World is as near to all men as their natures will let it come, and
to Mr. Yeats it is very near. Waking dreams come to him at such hours,
and he puts them into his verse, waking dreams of his country's
legendary past and of its fairy present, and waking dreams born of books
of old magic he has read indoors. Now it will be one sort of dream is
present, now the other, and now the third, and often two or even all
three sorts of dream are intermingled. His volume of prose sketches,
"The Celtic Twilight" (1893), gives the title some of his countrymen
have fastened on his verse, and the verse of others that take his
attitude and use like material, "The Twilight School of Poetry." It is
not inapt as giving the quality of most of his writing; but some of his
verses have warm sunlight in them, which, strangely, since it is
sunlight as it visits Irish shore and mountain, he has deplored. The
explanation may be that Mr. Yeats is of those who do not live intensely
until the oncoming of night, and so holds out of harmony with his genius
the coloring of its moments of lesser energy.
Legends and folk-tales and landscapes and books of mysticism and magic
not only give Mr. Yeats the material of his poetry, but suggest its
images, its color, and in part its rhythms; but before he found the
"faint and nervous" rhythms best fitted to his poetry, and put in it the
gray-greens and browns and soft purples and bright whites of Irish
landscape, and the symbols from fairy-lore and mythology, he had paid
patient heed to certain of the great poets of his language, to Spenser
and Blake, to Shelley and William Morris. And in learning the art of
drama, which he began to study very carefully after his early plays were
tested in "The Irish Literary Theatre," Mr. Yeats has very evidently
pondered a good deal on the English morality and taken into account the
effects of Greek tragedy as he had before explored M. Maeterlinck and
the earlier Ibsen.
As a boy Mr. Yeats wrote in the "Dublin University Review" that the
"greatest of the earth" often owned but two aims, "two linked and
ardorous thoughts--fatherland and song." Twenty-six years have gone
since then and Mr. Yeats is still devoted to poetry and to his country,
for all that the Nationalists deplore that his greater interest is now
in his art. His art, indeed, he cherishes with an ardor that is akin to
the ardor of patriotism; to him, as to Spenser, the master of his
youth, poetry is a divine enthusiasm. At first eager to paint, as did
and does his father, Mr. J.B. Yeats, he studied in Dublin Arts Schools,
but as Nature "wanted a few verses" from him, she sent him "into a
library to read bad translations from the Irish, and at last down into
Connaught to sit by turf fires." He read, too, Sir Samuel Ferguson, the
poet who had done most with Irish legend, and Allingham, who wrote of
Irish fairies, and the patriotic poets of the young Ireland group, Davis
chief among them. His father, an admirer of Whitman, preached to him the
doctrine embodied in the text--
"Will you seek afar off? You surely come back at last,
In things best known to you finding the best."
Many influences thus conspired to make Mr. Yeats find his inspiration
in Ireland, overcoming, for the time, the denationalizing influences
that the art of the centre must always exert. Not only were the
national legends and folk-lore constantly with him in these years, but
the interest in magic and all things that are hidden. He was one of
the Hermetic Society, of which Mr. George W. Russell was the high
priest, as early as 1886, but this interest, which has dominated so
often in his later poetry, is not to the forefront in "The Wanderings
of Oisin" of 1889. The material of the title poem of this volume Mr.
Yeats found in the libraries. It recounts the Fenian poet's three
hundred years of "dalliance with a demon thing" oversea in three
wondrous lands, where were severally pleasure and fighting and
forgetfulness, and in each of which Oisin spent a century. It has a
half-dramatic framework of question and answer between St. Patrick,
who appears as upbraider, and the poet, who laments joys gone and the
Christian present of Ireland and his own feeble age. Although it is a
story Mr. Yeats is telling, the beauties of the poems are lyrical
beauties. In exuberance and richness of color it is Mr. Yeats's most
typically Irish poem based on legend, and nowhere do his lines go with
more lilt, or fall oftener into inevitability of phrase, or more fully
diffuse a glamour of otherworldliness. "The Wanderings of Oisin"
revealed poetry as unmistakably new to his day as was Poe's to the
earliest Victorian days. Beside the title poem another from legend had
this new quality, "The Madness of King Goll," with its refrain that
will not out of memory, "They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter
round me, the beech leaves old." "Down by the Salley Gardens" and "The
Meditation of the Old Fisherman" bear witness to talks before turf
fires, or in herring boats off Knocknarea, and other developments of
folk-song or tale have the place-names of his home county of Sligo;
but this distinctive quality is theirs in less measure, and few others
in the little volume have it at all.
In the years just before "The Wanderings of Oisin," Mr. Yeats had been
eager to unite the young writers of Ireland in a movement to give the
country a national literature in English. This project developed side
by side with Dr. Hyde's to give Ireland its own language again and a
modern literature in it. Neither leader was the first to advance
either idea, but each was the first to establish the movement in which
he was most interested; Mr. Yeats's "Wanderings of Oisin" (1889) is
the starting-point of the Celtic Renaissance, and Dr. Hyde's "Leabhar
Sgeuluigheachta" (1889), the starting-point of the Gaelic League,
though this was not organized until 1893. From that day to this these
two men and Mr. George W. Russell ("A.E.") have been the great forces
in the literature of the Renaissance. Mr. Yeats was busy in those
early days with editing fairy and folk-tales and short stories from
the Irish novelists, and in reading these it was but natural that he
should be led to write stories. First came "John Sherman" and "Dhoya"
in 1891, the one a condensed novel with the slightest of plots about a
slow-pulsed young man's troubles with love and laziness in Sligo and
London, and the other a sketch of Irish faery in old time. Some of the
sketches of "The Celtic Twilight" (1893) approach the tale, but such
narrations are not told for their own sake, but as illustrations of
fairy-lore, or they have too little body to win for themselves the
title of tale. In "The Secret Rose" (1897) there are true tales, some
out of Ireland's legendary past, some out of her fairy present, and,
akin to both, the Hanrahan series. These last Mr. Yeats so rewrote in
1904 as to be "nearer to the mind of the country places where Hanrahan
and his like wandered and are remembered." As they stand now they are
his best prose, rid almost entirely of preciousness, and simple and
full of mystery as the countryside they reflect. In "The Secret Rose"
are two "alchemical" tales and in "The Tables of the Law" (1904), two
others of like subject. To me, for all the qualities they share with
poetry of his of similar inspiration, they do not seem to be mastered
by him. Alone among his writings they are incomplete.
Mr. Yeats was unable until the last few years to give himself up to
the writing nearest his heart, drama. He continued to edit Irish
literature, to write on literature and fairy-lore for the magazines.
The articles about fairies he has published, and a great mass of
belief collected but as yet unprinted, he will gather some day into a
great book. Known now in the Irish countryside as a man with a power
to exorcise spirits, he will then no doubt attain a reputation that
will put him well above that of the Irish-American archbishop who was
his only rival in that practice in the belief of many Irish peasants.
Other of his magazine writing Mr. Yeats has gathered into "The Celtic
Twilight" and more of it into the later edition (1900) of this book.
Still other of these articles are to be found in "Ideas of Good and
Evil" (1903), some of them stating his philosophy, never too
definitely formulated. These two collections are very interesting in
themselves, but both, like his "Discoveries" (1907), are more
interesting as commentary on his powers. Mr. Yeats has used many notes
to explain obscure allusions in his poems, though the most obscure he,
perhaps with premeditation, fails to explain. Yet the reader
unacquainted with his use of symbols will find much interpretation in
these essays, especially those in "Ideas of Good and Evil."
Up to 1899, when Mr. Yeats's serious efforts to build up an Irish
national drama began with "The Irish Literary Theatre," he devoted his
happiest moments to lyric poetry, though the play of "The Countess
Cathleen" made half of his second volume of verse, and the third was
wholly given to the little play, "The Land of Heart's Desire." Since
1899, in which year "The Wind among the Reeds" appeared, Mr. Yeats has
published, of other than dramatic verse, only the little volume of "In
the Seven Woods," the little series on Flamel, and a few snatches, in
all about a thousand lines. Some of this verse Mr. Yeats wrote for the
psaltery, and in 1902 he was determined to write all his shorter poems
for recitation to this instrument and "all his longer poems for the
stage."
Mr. Yeats was thirty-four when he practically gave up lyrical poetry for
dramatic poetry. From the beginning he had written plays, but they were
lyrical plays, dramatic only in form, and they were, as soon as he had
mastered the technique of verse, great lyrical poems. In the plays he
has written since he has striven at that hardest of literary tasks, to
make true dramatic speech high poetry, he has written nothing more
beautiful than "The Countess Cathleen" and "The Land of Heart's Desire."
He has rewritten and rewritten these later plays, and in almost every
rewriting made them more dramatic, but sometimes the later versions have
lost as poetry, not in the mere decorative features and "lyrical
interbreathings," but in the accent of the play and in the sheer
poetical qualities. To me it seems a pity, inevitable though it be, that
the poet who has struck the most distinctly new note of all the English
poets since Swinburne should, at thirty-four, have changed from an art
he knew to an art he did not know. That is a ripe age for a poet to
begin to learn to write in a form barely essayed before. Unlike so many
of the English poets, who as public school boys were bred up to write
verse, Mr. Yeats had to teach himself to write verse. Overcoming
triumphantly this handicap, though losing by it years usually fullest of
impulse to write, Mr. Yeats greatly attained, and for the ten years from
1889 to 1899 devoted himself to the writing of lyrics. For the past
thirteen years he has been busiest with dramas, in none of which has he
more than approximated to a dramatic quality that is as great as the
quality of his lyrics. He has owned himself one reason of such
shortcoming, in the notes to "Deirdre."[2] "The principal difficulty
with the form of dramatic literature I have adopted is that, unlike the
loose Elizabethan form, it continually forces one by its rigour of logic
away from one's capacities, experiences, and desires, until, if one have
not patience to wait for the mood, or to rewrite again and again till it
comes, there is rhetoric and logic and dry circumstance where there
should be life."
It may be that Mr. Yeats will one day overcome the difficulties that he
alludes to here, but he is now forty-seven, and I, for one, doubt if, at
his age, he can overcome them. As they are, his plays are beautiful in
ideas and words, and striking in a lyric and decorative way, if not all
of them in a dramatic way, though in some he has in vain sacrificed
poetry to attain true dramatic speech attaining instead only "rhetoric
and logic and dry circumstance." One values the plays of Mr. Yeats
highest when one thinks of them as a new kind of drama, as a
redevelopment of epic and lyric poetry into drama, an epic and lyric
poetry illustrated by tableaux against backgrounds out of faery. Let us
not forget that there is one effect which is of "The Tempest," and
another effect which is of "Lear," and that it is after all something of
a convention to call the latter a success of drama and the former a
success of something other than drama. Yet it is just as necessary to
remember that drama does mean a definite sort of literature, and the
success of a new sort of drama, whether it be a "static" drama, as M.
Maeterlinck has called his early drama, or whether it be the kind of
drama that Mr. Yeats has created, is the success of something other than
what we conventionally term drama. It is curious that no matter how
great may be the success of an author in a form he has invented, he will
almost invariably attempt also the accepted form from which he has
diverged. Impelled by a desire to see his wife in a drama of his own but
of the old dramatic sort, M. Maeterlinck made "Monna Vanna" in accord
with the usual rules of the theatre, but to find it fall far short of
the strange new beauty of his earlier plays. As yet Mr. Yeats has not
compromised with the current taste in drama, but it may be that a desire
to see some such actress as Mrs. Patrick Campbell in a part of his may
lead to such compromise, as the thought of her acting his Deirdre
inspired him to rewrite that part for Mrs. Campbell.
Mr. Yeats has not yet passed beyond the danger of falling between two
stools. If it prove that he has really attained in a drama in which the
verse is true dramatic speech and not lyric ecstasy or decoration, the
success of such drama will be worth the sacrifice of the lyric poetry
that he has not written because of the absorption of all of his energy
in his dramatic writing. If it prove he has not so attained, we shall
have no adequate compensation for the lost lyrics that he is now too old
to write. I say no "adequate compensation," for compensation there is in
the lyrical passages that no play of his is without, lyrical passages
that arrest us as do his poems of the nineties; but, after all, these are
but passages, not poems with unity and finality of form.
Another question altogether, a question outside of the question of the
value as art of the writing of Mr. Yeats which is what I am considering,
is the question as to whether there would have been a dramatic movement
at all comparable to what has been, if Mr. Yeats had not devoted so
large a portion of his time to drama. I believe there would have been a
dramatic movement, but I am sure, from what I know of the other dramatic
organizations in Dublin, that they would not have amounted to much
unless some other great writer as loyal to art as Mr. Yeats had played
for them the beneficent tyrant. And other such great writers, as loyal
to art, and as devoted to drama, are far to seek in Ireland as in other
countries. It is not in Mr. Russell's nature so to act; it is not in Dr.
Hyde's plan of life to foster in others other than propagandist
literature; it is more than likely that had Mr. Martyn attempted it it
had come to the end to which he has come as playwright. Without Mr.
Yeats as moving power, Synge had not been, without Mr. Yeats to
interest her in the movement, Lady Gregory had not written her farces
and folk-histories; and without the Abbey Theatre's plays as standard,
the younger playwrights of Cork and Belfast would have written plays
very other than those they have written.
No wonder Mr. Yeats wants to see his dreams take on bodily reality upon
the stage, and to hear beautifully spoken the words in which he has
caught them. There can be no greater pleasures than these to a writer
when he is past the imaginative intensity of youth. In youth his
imaginings are so real to him he needs no objective embodiment to see
them, and the roll and sing of their lines are always sounding to his
inner ear, but as he passes "out of a red flare of dreams," such as is
youth's, "into a common light of common hours" in middle age, his
imaginative life grows less intense and needs the satisfaction of seeing
itself concretely represented.
Mr. Yeats leaves out of his collected poems the plays of his boyhood,
"The Island of Statues" (1885) and "Mosada" (1886). They were not of
Ireland, but the Arcady of the one and the mediæval Spain of the other
he could easily have paralleled in Irish legend, where anything
wonderful and tragic is possible. Nor is "The Countess Cathleen"
(1892-99), in its presentation of the drama of a woman that sells her
soul that the souls of her tenantry may be saved, essentially Irish. It
is curious that among English poets of Mr. Yeats's generation it should
be Mr. Kipling that has happened upon the same legend, which he adapts
to his ends in "The Sacrifice of Er-Heb." The background of "The
Countess Cathleen" in the earlier versions was not more essentially
Irish than the story. "The great castle in malevolent woods" and the
country about it is very like the part of fairyland that M. Maeterlinck
refound by following the charts of early discoverers in Arthurian
legend. In its later versions "The Countess Cathleen" is more Irish and
perhaps more dramatic, though its greatnesses, after that of atmosphere,
the great lines we may no more forget than those about "the angel
Israfel"
"Whose heart-strings are a lute";
or about
"magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn";
or about
"old, unhappy, far-off things
And battles long ago";
or about hearing
"the far-off curfew sound
Over some wide-watered shore
Swinging slow with sullen roar,"
were most of them in the earlier versions. There were those lines of
Maire's denouncement of the two demons and her prophecy to them:--
"You shall at last dry like dry leaves, and hang
Nailed like dead vermin to the doors of God";
and those wonderful lines of Cathleen dying:--
"Bend down your faces, Oona and Aleel:
I gaze upon them as the swallow gazes
Upon the nest under the eave, before
He wander the loud waters";
and those last lines of all, great as only the greatest lines are
great,--
"The years like great black oxen tread the world,
And God the herdsman goads them on behind,
And I am broken by their passing feet."
It was about this time, too, that Mr. Yeats wrote that most startling of
all his lines,--
"And God stands winding his lonely horn",
and "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," that so charmed Stevenson that he had
to write its author, and say it cast over him a spell like that of his
first reading of the "Poems and Ballads" of Swinburne and the "Love in
the Valley" of Meredith.
There is no greater lyric poetry anywhere in the writing of Mr. Yeats
than in "The Land of Heart's Desire" (1894), that little folk-play whose
constant boding and final tragedy cannot overcome, either while it is
playing or as you remember it, the sing and lilt that are in the lines.
It tells of the luring away by a fairy child of the soul of a newly
married bride on May-Eve, and of her death when her soul has passed to
the "Land of Heart's Desire"--
"Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise,
Where nobody gets old and godly and grave,
Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue,
And where kind tongues bring no captivity."
It is a story out of folk-lore, and so far back in time, and so far away
from the life that we know is it, that all that happens seems not only
possible but inevitable.
"The Land of Heart's Desire" was the first play of Mr. Yeats to be put
on the stage, being presented at the Avenue Theatre in London in 1894;
and it was also the first play of Mr. Yeats to be put on in America,
being presented with Miss Mabel Taliaferro in the fairy's rôle as the
curtain-raiser to Mrs. Le Moyne's production of "In a Balcony," in the
spring of 1901. Fragile as is its charm, it crossed the footlights and
made itself felt as a new beauty of the theatre. It was the lyrical
interbreathings that appealed most to me, but the strife of priest and
fairy for Maire Bruin's soul was very real drama. It was the fairy's
song, however, that haunted me after I left the theatre, as it could not
but be. It haunts me still, coming into my mind whenever I think of Mr.
Yeats, as inevitably as the last lines of "The Countess Cathleen," or as
"The Lake Isle of Innisfree," or "The Valley of the Black Pig," or "The
Rose of the World," or the ecstasies of Forgael and Dectora, or the song
in "Deirdre." "The lonely of heart is withered away" is its burden, a
burden that will not out of mind.
"The Land of Heart's Desire" has probably been most often played,
counting American performances as well as performances in Ireland and
England, being played as frequently by amateurs as by professionals in
this country, but the prose play "Cathleen ni Houlihan," because of its
national theme, has had more playings in Ireland. Its effect upon the
stage is very different from its effect in the study. Read, it seems
allegory too obvious to impress. The old woman, Cathleen ni Houlihan,
with "too many strangers in the house" and with her "four beautiful
green fields" taken from her, is so patently Ireland possessed by
England, all four provinces, that one fails to feel the deep humanity of
the sacrifices of Michael Gillane for her, his country, even though that
sacrifice be on his wedding eve. Seen and listened to, "Cathleen ni
Houlihan" brings tears to the eyes and chokes the throat with sobs, so
intimately physical is the appeal of its pathos. He is, indeed, dull of
understanding or hard of heart who can witness a performance of this
play and not feel that something noble has come his way. It seizes hold
of the Irishmen of the patriotic societies as does "The Wearing of the
Green," and even the outlander, little sympathetic to the cause of
Ireland and holding patriotism a provincial thing, is moved in some
strange way he does not understand. Performance brings out its
homeliness, its touches of humor, its wistfulness, its nobility. It is
with this thought of its nobility that every thought of "Cathleen ni
Houlihan" ends, that is every thought of it on the stage. Off the stage
it is, except to him to whom the cause is all, something that falls
short of nobility, to many little more than eloquent allegory. In the
autumn of 1904 Miss Margaret Wycherly played "The Land of Heart's
Desire" and "Cathleen ni Houlihan" a few times in America, and "The
Countess Cathleen"; and "The Hour-Glass" (1903) and "A Pot of Broth"
(1902), both plays in prose. "The Hour-Glass," a morality, was written
after "Everyman" had won Mr. Yeats, and "A Pot of Broth" was written,
perhaps, to prove that its author could do farce.
[Illustration]
"The Hour-Glass" is based on a story that Mr. Yeats found in Lady
Wilde's "Ancient Legends of Ireland" (1887), the story of a wise man
who is saved from eternal damnation by the faith of a child. Mr. Yeats
leaves the wise man the great scholar that he was in the old tale, a
scholar whose teaching had taken away the faith of a countryside, but he
changes the child who saved the scholar into Teig the Fool, and infuses
into the record of the frantic hour, in which the wise man knows his
life ebbing away as the sand falls, a spirit that is as reverent as the
spirit of the old religious drama.
"A Pot of Broth" is a variant of a widely spread folk-tale in which a
beggarman tricks a provident housewife out of a meal. He pretends a
stone that he has, and which he gives her after his meal, makes good
broth, but it is her chicken that has made the broth. It is a trifle,
amusing enough, but remarkable chiefly for its difference from other
work of Mr. Yeats. There is little doubt, I take it, in the mind of any
one that it is not chiefly Lady Gregory's, as it surely is in its
wording, and in its intimacy with the details of cottage life.
Prose also is "Diarmid and Grania," written in collaboration with Mr.
George Moore and played at the last year's performance (1901) of "The
Irish Literary Theatre." As this play as performed was in tone more like
the writings of Mr. Moore than of Mr. Yeats, I have considered it among
his plays rather than among the plays of Mr. Yeats.
His other prose play, "Where there is Nothing" (1903), is a statement of
revolt against "the despotism of fact" that is perhaps as characteristic
of the artist as of the Celt. The world would say that its hero, Paul
Ruttledge, was mad, but no one that reads can deny him a large share of
sympathy. This play was produced by the Stage Society in London in 1904.
Lady Gregory having had a share in its creation, Mr. Yeats has since
relinquished the theme to her; and now rewritten by her alone as "The
Unicorn from the Stars," it would hardly be recognized as the same play.
His Paul Ruttledge, gentleman, becomes her Martin Hearne, coach-builder.
Both are alike at the outset of their frenzy, in that they would be
destroyers of Church and Law, both use tinkers as their agents of
destruction, and both die despised of men. Both are "plunged in trance,"
but their trances differ. That of Lady Gregory's hero is cataleptic and
directly productive of his revolt, from a revelation, as he thinks it
is, that comes to him while he is "away." Paul Ruttledge, on the other
hand, deliberately gives up his conventional life, and that as largely
because of boredom as because of belief in its wrongness. One cannot, as
one reads "Where there is Nothing," fail to see in its hero much of Mr.
Yeats himself. He is not the professional agitator, literary or social,
as was Oscar Wilde and as is Mr. Shaw, but he here delights in turning
things topsy-turvy, just as they do, in a fashion that has been
distinctive of the Irishman for many generations. Mr. Yeats is himself,
often, like his hero, "plunged in trance," if one may call trance his
"possessed dream," such as that in which "Cap and Bells" or "Cathleen ni
Houlihan" came to him. The lyric came to him, he says, as a "vision,"
and so, too, the play. It is in the dedication to volumes I and II of
"Plays for an Irish Theatre," volumes containing "Where there is
Nothing," "The Hour-Glass," "Cathleen ni Houlihan," and "A Pot of
Broth," that he tells us of the latter vision, and of the beginnings of
that collaboration with Lady Gregory that taught her her art, and so
profoundly influenced his. So informing is it that I quote it in full.
MY DEAR LADY GREGORY:--
I dedicate to you two volumes of plays that are in part your own.
When I was a boy I used to wander about at Rosses Point and
Ballisodare listening to old songs and stories. I wrote down what I
heard and made poems out of the stories or put them into the little
chapters of the first edition of the "Celtic Twilight," and that is
how I began to write in the Irish way.
Then I went to London to make my living, and though I spent a part
of every year in Ireland and tried to keep the old life in my
memory by reading every country tale I could find in books or old
newspapers, I began to forget the true countenance of country life.
The old tales were still alive for me, indeed, but with a new,
strange, half-unreal life, as if in a wizard's glass until at last,
when I had finished "The Secret Rose," and was halfway through "The
Wind among the Reeds," a wise woman in her trance told me that my
inspiration was from the moon and that I should always live close
to water, for my work was getting too full of those little jewelled
thoughts that come from the sun and have no nation. I have no need
to turn to my books of astrology to know that the common people are
under the moon, or to Porphyry to remember the image-making power
of the waters. Nor did I doubt the entire truth of what she said to
me, for my head was full of fables that I had no longer the
knowledge and emotion to write. Then you brought me with you to see
your friends in the cottages, and to talk to old wise men on Slieve
Echtge, and we gathered together, or you gathered for me, a great
number of stories and traditional beliefs. You taught me to
understand again, and much more perfectly than before, the true
countenance of country life.
One night I had a dream, almost as distinct as a vision, of a
cottage where there was well-being and firelight and talk of a
marriage, and into the midst of that cottage there came an old
woman in a cloak. She was Ireland herself, that Cathleen ni
Houlihan for whom so many songs have been sung and about whom so
many stories have been told and for whose sake so many have gone to
their death. I thought if I could write this out as a little play I
could make others see my dream as I had seen it but I could not get
down out of that high window of dramatic verse, and in spite of all
you had done for me I had not the country speech. One has to live
among the people, like you, of whom an old man said in my hearing,
"She has been a serving-maid among us," before one can think the
thoughts of the people and speak with their tongue. We turned my
dream into the little play, "Cathleen ni Houlihan," and when we
gave it to the little theatre in Dublin and found that the
working-people liked it, you helped me to put my other dramatic
fables into speech. Some of these have already been acted, but some
may not be acted for a long time; but all seem to me, though they
were but part of a summer's work, to have more of that countenance
of country life than anything I have done since I was a boy.
I should like also to quote in full Mr. Yeats's account of how "Where
there is Nothing" passed into "The Unicorn from the Stars," as that
account throws much light on the methods of collaboration that have
added so greatly to the success of the dramatic movement, and that are
especially valuable to beginners, whose plays, without reshaping in
collaboration, might never win their way to the boards. But I have not
the space for it all, and I must content myself with that portion of it
in which Mr. Yeats confesses that belief of his in the _rapprochement_
of scholar and tinker that one notes so often in Irish life. Speaking
of Lady Gregory's rewriting of "Where there is Nothing" into "The
Unicorn from the Stars," he says:--
Her greatest difficulty was that I had given her for chief
character a man so plunged in trance that he could not be otherwise
than all but still and silent, though perhaps with the stillness
and the silence of a lamp; and the movement of the play as a whole,
if we were to listen to hear him, had to be without hurry or
violence. The strange characters, her handiwork, on whom he sheds
his light, delight me. She has enabled me to carry out an old
thought for which my own knowledge is insufficient and to commingle
the ancient phantasies of poetry with the rough, vivid,
ever-contemporaneous tumult of the roadside; to create for a moment
a form that otherwise I could but dream of, though I do that
always, an art that prophesies though with worn and failing voice
of the day when Quixote and Sancho Panza long estranged may once
again go out gaily into the bleak air. Ever since I began to write
I have awaited with impatience a linking, all Europe over, of the
hereditary knowledge of the countryside, now becoming known to us
through the work of wanderers and men of learning, with our old
lyricism so full of ancient frenzies and hereditary wisdom, a
yoking of antiquities, a marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Interesting, however, as these plays in prose are, and significant of
their author's desire to do work in a medium that was perhaps more
immediately acceptable to the audience of the National Dramatic Society
in its then culture, there is no doubt at all that the plays in verse
are nearer his heart. They are himself, and in all of the prose plays
there is a good deal of Lady Gregory. All this time that he was
collaborating in these prose plays he was still dreaming over "The
Shadowy Waters," retouching it, rearranging it, until it became in
detail a very different play from the play that was published under that
name in 1900. Its hero and heroine, Forgael and Dectora, are much as
they were then, their fateful meeting in misty northern seas remains the
central incident, and the climax is still their choice to be left alone
in the Viking ship at the world's end; but more than half the lines are
changed. "The Shadowy Waters" was staged in 1904, and with telling
weirdness, but like many another author's best-loved and most elaborated
work, it has not made the appeal of plays less favorite to him. Mr.
Yeats has written that he has been brooding over "The Shadowy Waters"
ever since he was a boy, and he told me, when I asked him once which
writing of his he cared most for, "That I was last working at, and then
'The Shadowy Waters.'" It is too much to say that it expresses the dream
of his life, but it is not too much to say that a dream that has haunted
all his life is told here, or half told, for dream such as this eludes
complete expression. "The Shadowy Waters" is a poem so long considered,
so often returned to, so loved and elaborated and worked over, so often
dreamed and redreamed, that one would expect to find in it its author's
_credo_, if its author is one who could hold to one confession of faith.
Few authors can, few authors should, and Mr. Yeats is not one of them
that can or should. He wrote once that he would be accounted
"True brother of that company
That sang to lighten Ireland's wrong,
Ballad and story, rann and song,"--
and Nationalist though he still is he has grown more and more
preoccupied with art. There was a time when a love of the occult
threatened his art, but from that the theatre has saved him, if it has
taken him from the writing lyrics, in which his powers are at their
highest. To old Irish legend, Mr. Yeats has, however, been true from the
start, and from the start, too, there has never been a time the two he
has not been preoccupied with dream. And if the two loves to which he
has been constant cannot be said with exactitude to be in the story of
Forgael and Dectora, because that story is not a reshaping of any one
legend out of old Irish legend, it is of the very spirit of the journeys
oversea in which that legend abounds, and it is steeped in dream. It
would be here, then, that one would look for an expression as like a
_credo_ as is possible to Mr. Yeats, and here we do find it on the lips
of Forgael, his hero, who, can we doubt? speaks also for the poet
himself:--
"All would be well
Could we but give us wholly to the dreams,
And get into their world that to the sense
Is shadow, and not linger wretchedly
Among substantial things; for it is dreams
That lift us to the flowing changing world
That the heart longs for. What is love itself,
Even though it be the lightest of light love,
But dreams that hurry from beyond the world,
To make low laughter more than meat and drink,
Though it but set us sighing?"
"On Baile's Strand" (1903) follows very closely the story of Cuchulain's
slaying of his own son as retold Lady Gregory in her "Cuchulain of
Muirthemne" (1902). Like Rustum he does not know who is the youth he is
fighting until he has given him his death wound. Its high tragedy rends
the more by the ironic setting of Blind Man and Fool, two wastrels, one
of whom might have prevented the tragedy, but would not because the
fight would give him and his fellow a chance to rob the larders in
houses whose owners were watching it. No one can doubt the high
intention of "On Baile's Strand," no one can deny that its story is
essentially dramatic, no one can pass by certain passages without
realization that here is great verse, blank verse that is true dramatic
speech. Men remember Cuchulain's description of Aoife as men remember
Maud Gonne.
"Ah! Conchubar, had you seen her
With that high, laughing, turbulent head of hers
Thrown backward, and the bowstring at her ear,
Or sitting at the fire with those grave eyes
Full of good counsel as it were with wine,
Or when love ran through all the lineaments
Of her wild body."
One remembers these things, but if one has not seen the play on the
stage, he does not bear with him memories of beauty such as one bears
always with him from even the reading of "The Countess Cathleen" or of
"The Land of Heart's Desire." Nor is one moved by "On Baile's Strand" as
one is moved by other tellings of the same world story, as one is moved
by the epic telling of it by Matthew Arnold in "Sohrab and Rustum," or
even by such a casual telling of it as is Mr. Neil Munro's in "Black
Murdo." If it were not for "Deirdre," in fact, one would have to say
that the verse plays of Mr. Yeats after "The Shadowy Waters" grow, play
by play, less in poetic beauty, and that their gain in dramatic
effectiveness does not compensate for such a loss.
"The King's Threshold" (1904) is as near a play with a purpose as Mr.
Yeats has written. It vindicates the right of the poet in Ireland's
Heroic Age to sit at the highest table of the King, and as it was
written and played in 1903, when its author was being accused of caring
more for his art than for his country, it looks very like a defense.
Seanchan, the poet, removed from his high seat at the request of
"Bishops, Soldiers, and Makers of the Law," takes his stand on the
King's threshold, with the intention of starving himself to death there,
as there is, as the King says,--
"a custom,
An old and foolish custom, that if a man
Be wronged, or think that he is wronged and starve
Upon another's threshold till he die,
The common people, for all time to come,
Will raise a heavy cry against that threshold,
Even though it be the King's."
It was at this time that the clamor against "In the Shadow of the Glen"
had stirred up a great deal of feeling against Mr. Yeats and the other
managers of the Irish National Theatre Society. And Mr. Yeats, it may
be, wrote the play not only to symbolize his contention that the poet is
as important to society as is the man of action, but also to assert that
poetry cultivated for its own sake, the sake of art, is as necessary to
a nation, to Ireland, as what Ireland calls patriotism. By the way, he
illustrated the fact that that kind of patriotism that assumes the King
can do no wrong,--that is, that the Irish people can do no wrong,--and
that whoever exposes their wrongdoing is no patriot, is a mistaken sort
of patriotism.
Late in 1906 his "Deirdre" was successfully produced at the Abbey
Theatre, Dublin. It presents only the last chapter of this, the saddest
tale of the three heart-burdening tales that are known as "The Three
Sorrows of Story-Telling," but it presents it so poignantly and with so
keen an emphasis on the quick-passing of all things sweet, that it takes
place, for all its slightness, with the world's greatest tragedies that
are tragedies because of the overthrow therein of "queens ... young and
fair." There are few Irish writers whose concern is with things Irish
who have not retold this, the greatest love story of Ireland, but none
of them, from Sir Samuel Ferguson down to our own day, have retold it so
nobly as Mr. Yeats, save only Synge, and his restatement of it, of the
whole story from Deirdre's girlhood to her death, has about it a
grandeur and triumphing beauty that make further retellings not to be
tolerated.
It is not lines, "purple patches," one remembers from "Deirdre," but the
whole play, its every situation, its setting. That setting so
quintessentializes, in the words Mr. Yeats used to describe it, the
romance of the old haunted woods where any adventure is possible, that I
must quote it in full:--
A Guest-house in a wood. It is a rough house of timber; through the
doors and some of the windows one can see the great spaces of the
wood, the sky dimming, night closing in. But a window to the left
shows the thick leaves of a coppice; the landscape suggests
silence and loneliness. There is a door to right and left, and
through the side windows one can see anybody who approaches either
door, a moment before he enters. In the centre, a part of the house
is curtained off; the curtains are drawn. There are unlighted
torches in brackets on the walls There is, at one side, a small
table with a chessboard and chessmen upon it, and a wine flagon and
loaf of bread. At the other side of the room there is a brazier
with a fire; two women, with musical instruments beside them,
crouch about the brazier: they are comely women of about forty.
Another woman, who carries a stringed instrument, enters hurriedly;
she speaks, at first standing in the doorway.
But if one does not carry in memory so many lines of "Deirdre" as one
does of the earlier less dramatic plays, there are passages in plenty
that arrest and exalt. One such is those lines of Fergus that so well
describe one phase of the imagination of Mr. Yeats--
"wild thought
Fed on extravagant poetry, and lit
By such a dazzle of old fabulous tales
That common things are lost, and all that's strange
Is true because 't were pity if it were not."
Another such is the song of the musicians, of Queen Edain's tower, "When
the Winds are Calling There"; and another such, the crying of a woman's
heart in Deirdre's offer to go with Conchubar that Naisi may be saved:--
"It's better to go with him.
Why should you die when one can bear it all?
My life is over; it's better to obey.
Why should you die? I will not live long, Naisi.
I'd not have you believe I'd long stay living;
Oh, no, no, no! You will go far away.
"You will forget me. Speak, speak, Naisi, speak,
And say that it is better that I go.
I will not ask it. Do not speak a word,
For I will take it all upon myself.
Conchubar, I will go."
This is true dramatic speech, this has the accent of high tragedy, and
weakly human as it is it does not take away at all from the queenliness
of Deirdre. There are other passages that have such a tendency, however,
true though they may be to the life they depict and to human nature of
all time when in such a frenzy of fear and sorrow. Longer even than this
heart's cry, however, I think I shall remember that line so near the
opening of the play--
"She put on womanhood and he lost peace."
Lines greater than that are far to seek in English drama.
"The Green Helmet" (1910), a rewriting in a form of verse alien to the
stage of the earlier prose "Golden Helmet" (1908), is hardly done out of
any high intention, and although it is not wanting in a kind of strange
and grotesque fascination, it is in result no higher than it was in
intention. In fact the past five years, years much of whose time has
been spent in forwarding the work of the Abbey Theatre, have not
inspired Mr. Yeats to much work of importance. Mr. Yeats promises us
more plays, but one cannot help wishing, if he must do verses other than
lyric, he would put his hand now to a great epic. His "Wanderings of
Oisin" is nearest this, near enough, for all the preponderance of lyric
in it, to show that he could do it, were we without such lines of "large
accent" as I have quoted from "The Countess Cathleen" to prove that
beyond doubt. There is no better material for epic as yet unused than
Irish legends, but there is none the old bard developed into epic
proportions. There would be here the largest scope for the shaping power
of the poet. Mr. Yeats must, of course, have thought of epic, but
preferred drama as more in harmony with our time. Lionel Johnson said
that Mr. Yeats took to drama because he liked to hear his lines finely
spoken, but, surely, if that were his greatest delight, he could invent
some way in which to bring story in verse to listeners. It were surely a
lesser task than that of stimulating Mr. Dolmetsch to make a psaltery to
which his lyrics may be musically spoken.
From the beginning, the verse of Mr. Yeats has had vocal quality, a
quality that is unfortunately often rarer in good poetry than in verse
that is good rhetoric. I cannot see that his interest in the psaltery,
that developed after 1900, has brought about any change in the quality
of his verse. There have been constant to it since "The Wanderings of
Oisin" all the qualities that distinguish it to-day,--its eloquence, its
symbols that open up unending vistas through mysteries, its eeriness as
of the bewildering light of late sunset over gray-green Irish bog and
lake and mountain, its lonely figures as great in their simplicity as
those of Homer, its plain statement of high passion that breaks free of
all that is occult and surprises with its clarity where so much is dim
with dream. First one and then another of these qualities has most
interested him. He has written in explanation of patriotic verse, of
folk-verse, of verse based on the old court romances, of symbolism, of
Rosicrucianism, of essences, of speaking to the psaltery, of dramatic
art; and all the time he has practiced poetry, the interest of the time
resulting in now the greater emphasis on one quality in the poetry, and
now on another quality. It would be superfluous to do more than point
out most of these qualities, but a word on his use of symbols may help
to a fuller understanding of his poetry. I am very sure that I read
wrong meanings from many of these symbols, as one who has not the
password must. They require definite knowledge of magical tradition, and
of the poet's interpretation of Celtic tradition, for a full
understanding. As the years go by, I think their exact meaning will
escape more and more readers until they will have no more significance
than Spenser's allegories have to us. Only to the student deeply read in
Elizabethan politics do these mean to-day what must have been patent to
the inner circle at Elizabeth's court. Those symbols of Mr. Yeats that
we may understand intuitively, as we may "The white owl in the belfry
sits," other generations also may understand, but hardly those that have
meanings known only to a coterie. But we may read Spenser with enjoyment
even if all the inner allegories are missed, and so, too, many read Mr.
Yeats to-day, neglectful of the images of a formal symbolism.
I do not know that I get more enjoyment from the poetry of the verses
entitled "The Valley of the Black Pig" because Mr. Yeats's note tells us
that it is the scene of Ireland's _Götterdämmerung_, though it is an
unquestionable gratification to the puzzle interest I have with my
kind, and I would at times be more comfortable were I sure that the
"Master of the Still Stars and of the Flaming Door" was he who keeps the
gates of the Other World, the real world we shall enter when death sets
us free of that dream men call life. Mr. Yeats is not so kind to the men
"in the highway" as the old Irish bards. When they wrote enigmas they
were apt to explain them fully, as does the poet of "The Wooing of Emer"
when he tell what was meant by the cryptic questions and answers
exchanged between that princess and Cuchulain. When the symbolism is of
the kind found in "Death's Summons" of Thomas Nash, which of all poems
Mr. Yeats quotes oftenest, all cultivated men may understand--
"Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died young and fair;
Dust hath closed Helen's eye."
The difference between the symbol Helen and each one of the several
symbols Mr. Yeats employs in "The Valley of the Black Pig" is the
difference between a symbol universally recognized throughout the world
and a symbol recognized by one people; but there is the further
difference that one is intimately associated with the thing symbolized,
is the name of a woman the context tells us is a queen and beautiful,
and the other is only the scene of a battle that symbolizes the ending
of the world. It is more natural to use a beautiful woman as a symbol of
all beauty than to use a black boar that shall root up all the light and
life of the world as a symbol of the ending of the world. But neither of
these is a symbol that would be understood intuitively, as the rose
used as a symbol of beauty or the wind as a symbol of instability.
Sometimes Mr. Yeats's symbols are very remote, but perhaps they were
remote in the old stories in which he found them. The details in
"the phantom hound
All pearly white, save one red ear,"
and "the hornless deer" which it chases, seem arbitrary. The hound, it
is true, is known of all men as the pursuer, and the deer as the
pursued; but does this knowledge suggest immediately "the desire of the
man which is for the woman, and the desire of the woman which is for the
desire of the man"? Mr. Yeats does not, as I take it, expect all his
symbols to be understood so definitely as this hound and deer, which, of
course, are not only symbols, but figures from the tapestry of
fairyland. It is often enough, perhaps, that we understand emotionally,
as in "Kubla Khan" or "The Owl." From some of his writing it would
appear he believed many symbols to be of very definite meaning and to be
understood by generation upon generation. In the note to "The Valley of
the Black Pig" he writes, "Once a symbol has possessed the imagination
of large numbers of men, it becomes, as I believe, an embodiment of
disembodied powers, and repeats itself in dreams and visions, age after
age."
This is but another phase of Mr. Yeats's belief that when a poem stirs
us as by magic, it is a real magic has been at work. The words have
loosened the seals that the flesh has fastened upon the universal memory
which is subconscious in all of us, until that memory possesses us and
we are one with all that has been since the beginning of time, and may
in such moments live over all that has been lived. He thinks that in
such moments the poet's magic brings before us the past and the unseen
as the past and the unseen were brought before our pagan ancestors by
the magical rites of their priests.
In his younger years Mr. Yeats held that poetry is "the words that have
gathered up the heart's desire of the world." His heart's desire was
simpler in those days than his heart's desire of after years. Then he
had a child's wistfulness for little things and put lines in his poems
of Blake-like innocence and freshness. "The brown mice" that
"bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest"
are out of memories of childhood, and many other of the similes of these
early poems are out of the ways of wild little things that appeal so to
children, perhaps because they are wild little things themselves. A
later mood of Mr. Yeats is to hold of less account the things of
out-of-doors, but still he uses as similes the ways of birds, as did the
old Irish bards whose stories have so informed his. He never did
describe nature for its own sake, but natural things gave him more
figures than they do now, although always there have been in his lines
many out of mythology. Summer days between Slieve Echtge and the western
sea are, however, bringing the plovers and curlews and peewits back to
his poetry. In the country of the Countess Cathleen, as everywhere in
Ireland, you may hear "wind cry and water cry and curlew cry," and
there, as all the world over,--
"Ill bodings are as native unto our hearts
As are their spots unto the woodpeckers."
It is from such knowledge of country things come the fine lines about
"The dark folk, who live in souls
Of passionate men like bats in the dead trees";--
and such lines are coming again into his verse, even into the blank
verse of his plays. The poems in which "the strong human call" is heard
are more than the many who read Mr. Yeats hurriedly will think, and to
those who know his story they reveal again and again a great and common
sorrow. Whole poems and plays are often symbols of the poet's life. So
may "The Countess Cathleen" be taken as well as "The King's Threshold."
"Ephemera," "The Dedication to a Book of Stories," "In the Seven Woods,"
"The Old Age of Queen Maeve," "The Folly of Being Comforted," "Old
Memory," "Adam's Curse," as well as the folk-poems of the first volumes,
are but little "dream-burdened," and passages elsewhere have the human
call. The feeling of Oisin nearing the coast of Ireland is, for
instance, the common joy on nearing the shore of the homeland at the end
of exile:--
"Remembrance, lifting her leanness, keened in the gates of my heart.
Till, fattening the winds of the morning, an odour of new-mown hay
Came, and my forehead fell low, and my tears like berries fell down;
later a sound came, half lost in the sound of a shore far away,
From the great grass-barnacle calling, and later the shore-weeds brown."
It is true, though, that the dream-drenched poems are those most
characteristic of the author, those that give a note entirely new to
English poetry. It is impossible to pick out one as more representative
than another where so many are representative and where all are of
highest achievement. Nowhere is his own individual note better
sustained, however, than in the Michael Robartes poems or in "The Rose
of Battle" or "Into the Twilight"; and the hold that dream has of him
and the hold that human things have, chief among them love of country,
are told with utmost distinction and inevitability of phrase in "To
Ireland in the Coming Times" and in "To the Rose upon the Rood of Time."
I sometimes wonder, is the reason for the poet's holding so devotedly to
spiritual things of his kind not the very same holding of his peasant
countryman to the folk-tales that take him to a world as rich and
gorgeous-hued as the Ireland about him is bare and gray, and to a church
that prepares him for a better world after death? A large part of all
poetry is the realization of the brevity of all beautiful things,--of
bloom, of youth, of life; but no poet has more often lamented "Fate and
Time and Change" than Mr. Yeats. It is, he says, "our narrow rooms, our
short lives, our soon ended passions and emotions put us out of conceit
with sooty and feeble reality." So the poet seeks refuge in his own
dream and in contemplation of the life from which he came and to which
he will return, and--one almost dare say--in communication with which he
now knows such joy. The poet's life is little because he has found out
the littleness of earthly things; the peasant holds life little because
his share of it has been so poor. If the peasant acquires riches by
chance or by emigration, he sees as the poet that all he can have is as
nothing, so short is the time he may hold it. Irish writers of the past
have made this peasant only the jarvey wit; but if you read the old
romances, or listen to the folk-tales still alive, you will learn that
Mr. Yeats is at one with his countryman in this basic likeness.
There is a side of Irish life, the side the world knows best, that Mr.
Yeats does not present, but that which he does present is true, though
the poet's personality is so dominant that we get more of this than of
Ireland in his poetry. So it should be, so it is with every artist. All
the world can ask of him is his interpretation of what he knows. Yet so
native is Mr. Yeats that the atmosphere of his poetry is the very
atmosphere of Ireland. The artist and the setting of his art are in an
unwonted harmony. No reader of Mr. Yeats who knows the brooding
landscape of West Ireland can escape that realization, but only he who
has met the poet amid the scenes that inspired his verse may know how
complete is their accord. Such a meeting was mine one lowering August
day, in whose late afternoon we walked in the Woods of Coole. Then I
knew at last what Mr. Yeats meant by "druid charm" and "druid light." I
felt the "druid charm" that was potent in gray skies over gray water and
gray rock and gray-green woods; the bewildering "druid light" flashed
out as the sun followed westward the trail to Hy Brasil, leaving in the
Atlantic skies wild after-glow of winter yellow.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] _Collected Works_. Stratford-on-Avon, 1908, vol. II, p. 251.