Old and New Masters Part 14

Romantic Ireland's dead and gone And with O'Leary in the grave.

And to this Mr. Yeats has since added a significant note:--

"Romantic Ireland's dead and gone" sounds old-fashioned now. It seemed true in 1913, but I did not foresee 1916. The late Dublin Rebellion, whatever one may say of its wisdom, will long be remembered for its heroism. "They weighed so lightly what they gave," and gave, too, in some cases without hope of success.

Mr. Yeats is by nature a poet of the heroic world--a hater of the burgess and of the till. He boasts in _Responsibilities_ of ancestors who left him

blood That has not pa.s.sed through any huckster's loin.

There may be a good deal of vanity and gesticulation in all this, but it is the vanity and gesticulation of a man of genius. As we cannot have the genius of Mr. Yeats without the gestures, we may as well take the gestures in good part.

2. HIS POETRY

It is distinctly surprising to find Mr. Yeats compared to Milton and Jeremy Taylor, and Mr. Forrest Reid, who makes the comparison, does not ask us to apply it at all points. There is a remoteness about Milton's genius, however, an austere and rarefied beauty, to which Mr. Reid discovers certain likenesses in the work of Mr. Yeats. Mr. Yeats is certainly a little remote. He is so remote that some people regard his work with mixed feelings, as a rather uncanny thing. The reason may partly be that Mr. Yeats is not a singer in the ordinary tradition of poets. His poems are incantations rather than songs. They seem to call for an order of priests and priestesses to chant them. There are one or two of his early poems, like _Down by the Sally Garden_, that might conceivably be sung at a fair or even at a ballad-concert. But, as Mr.

Yeats has grown older, he has become more and more determinedly the magician in his robes. Even in his prose he does not lay aside his robes; it is written in the tones of the sanctuary: it is prose for worshippers. To such an extent is this so that many who do not realize that Mr. Yeats is a great artist cannot read much of his prose without convincing themselves that he is a great humbug. It is easy to understand how readers accustomed to the rationalism of the end of the century refused to take seriously a poet who wrote "spooky" explanations of his poems, such as Mr. Yeats wrote in his notes to _The Wind Among the Reeds_, the most entirely good of his books. Consider, for example, the note which he wrote on that charming if somewhat perplexing poem, _The Jester_. "I dreamed," writes Mr. Yeats:--

I dreamed this story exactly as I have written it, and dreamed another long dream after it, trying to make out its meaning, and whether I was to write it in prose or verse. The first dream was more a vision than a dream, for it was beautiful and coherent, and gave me a sense of illumination and exaltation that one gets from visions, while the second dream was confused and meaningless. The poem has always meant a great deal to me, though, as is the way with symbolic poems, it has not always meant quite the same thing.

Blake would have said, "The authors are in eternity"; and I am quite sure they can only be questioned in dreams.

Why, even those of us who count Mr. Yeats one of the immortals while he is still alive, are inclined to shy at a claim at once so solemn and so irrational as this. It reads almost like a confession of witchcraft.

Luckily, Mr. Yeats's commerce with dreams and fairies and other spirits has not all been of this evidential and disputable kind. His confessions do not convince us of his magical experiences, but his poems do. Here we have the true narrative of fairyland, the initiation into other-worldly beauty. Here we have the magician crying out against

All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,

and attempting to invoke a new--or an old--and more beautiful world into being.

The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told,

he cries, and over against the unshapely earth he sets up the "happy townland" of which he sings in one of his later and most lovely poems.

It would not be easy to write a prose paraphrase of _The Happy Townland_, but who is there who can permanently resist the spell of this poem, especially of the first verse and its refrain?--

There's many a strong farmer Whose heart would break in two, If he could see the townland That we are riding to; Boughs have their fruit and blossom At all times of the year; Rivers are running over With red beer and brown beer.

An old man plays the bagpipes In a golden and silver wood; Queens, their eyes blue like the ice, Are dancing in a crowd.

The little fox he murmured, "O what of the world's bane?"

The sun was laughing sweetly, The moon plucked at my rein; But the little red fox murmured, "O, do not pluck at his rein, He is riding to the townland That is the world's bane."

You may interpret the little red fox and the sun and the moon as you please, but is it not all as beautiful as the ringing of bells?

But Mr. Yeats, in his desire for this other world of colour and music, is no scorner of the everyday earth. His early poems especially, as Mr.

Reid points out, give evidence of a wondering observation of Nature almost Wordsworthian. In _The Stolen Child_, which tells of a human child that is enticed away by the fairies, the magic of the earth the child is leaving is the means by which Mr. Yeats suggests to us the magic of the world into which it is going, as in the last verse of the poem:--

Away with us he's going, The solemn eyed: He'll hear no more the lowing Of the calves on the warm hillside; Or the kettle on the hob Sing peace into his breast, Or see the brown mice bob Round and round the oatmeal-chest.

_For he comes, the human child, To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, From a world more full of weeping than he can understand._

There is no painting here, no adjective-work. But no painting or adjectives could better suggest all that the world and the loss of the world mean to an imaginative child than this brief collection of simple things. To read _The Stolen Child_ is to realize both that Mr. Yeats brought a new and delicate music into literature and that his genius had its birth in a sense of the beauty of common things. Even when in his early poems the adjectives seem to be chosen with the too delicate care of an artist, as when he notes how--

in autumnal solitudes Arise the leopard-coloured trees,

his observation of the world about him is but proved the more conclusively. The trees in autumn _are_ leopard-coloured, though a poet cannot say so without becoming dangerously ornamental.

What I have written so far, however, might convey the impression that in Mr. Yeats's poetry we have a child's rather than a man's vision at work.

One might even gather that he was a pa.s.sionless singer with his head in the moon. This is exactly the misunderstanding which has led many people to think of him as a minor poet.

The truth is Mr. Yeats is too original and, as it were, secret a poet to capture all at once the imagination that has already fixed the outlines of its kingdom amid the masterpieces of literature. His is a genius outside the landmarks. There is no prototype in Sh.e.l.ley or Keats, any more than there is in Shakespeare, for such a poem as that which was at first called _Breasal the Fisherman_, but is now called simply _The Fisherman_:

Although you hide in the ebb and flow Of the pale tide when the moon has set, The people of coming days will know About the casting out of my net, And how you have leaped times out of mind Over the little silver cords.

And think that you were hard and unkind, And blame you with many bitter words.

There, in music as simple as a fable of Aesop, Mr. Yeats has figured the pride of genius and the pa.s.sion of defeated love in words that are beautiful in themselves, but trebly beautiful in their significances.

Beautifully new, again, is the poem beginning, "I wander by the edge,"

which expresses the desolation of love as it is expressed in few modern poems:

I wander by the edge Of this desolate lake Where wind cries in the sedge: _Until the axle break That keeps the stars in their round And hands hurl in the deep The banners of East and West And the girdle of light is unbound, Your breast will not lie by the breast Of your beloved in sleep._

Rhythms like these did not exist in the English language until Mr. Yeats invented them, and their very novelty concealed for a time the pa.s.sion that is immortal in them. It is by now a threadbare saying of Wordsworth that every great artist has himself to create the taste by which he is enjoyed, but it is worth quoting once more because it is especially relevant to a discussion of the genius of Mr. Yeats. What previous artist, for example, had created the taste which would be prepared to respond imaginatively to such a revelation of a lover's triumph in the nonpareil beauty of his mistress as we have in the poem that ends:--

I cried in my dream, "_O women bid the young men lay Their heads on your knees, and drown their eyes with your hair, Or remembering hers they will find no other face fair Till all the valleys of the world have been withered away_,"

One may doubt at times whether Mr. Yeats does not too consciously show himself an artist of the aesthetic school in some of his epithets, such as "cloud-pale" and "dream-dimmed." His too frequent repet.i.tion of similar epithets makes woman stand out of his poems at times like a decoration, as in the pictures of Rossetti and Burne-Jones, rather than in the vehement beauty of life. It is as if the pa.s.sion in his verse were again and again entangled in the devices of art. If we take his love-poems as a whole, however, the pa.s.sion in them is at once vehement and beautiful.

The world has not yet sufficiently realized how deep is the pa.s.sion that has given shape to Mr. Yeats's verse. _The Wind Among the Reeds_ is a book of love-poetry quite unlike all other books of love-poetry. It utters the same moods of triumph in the beloved's beauty, of despair, of desire, of boastfulness of the poet's immortality, that we find in the love-poetry of other ages. But here are new images, almost a new language. Sometimes we have an image which fills the mind like the image in some little Chinese lyric, as in the poem _He Reproves the Curlew_:--

O, curlew, cry no more in the air, Or only to the waters of the West; Because your crying brings to my mind Pa.s.sion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair That was shaken out over my breast: There is enough evil in the crying of the wind.

This pa.s.sion of loss, this sense of the beloved as of something secret and far and scarcely to be attained, like the Holy Grail, is the dominant theme of the poems, even in _The Song of Wandering Aengus_, that poem of almost playful beauty, which tells of the "little silver trout" that became

--a glimmering girl With apple blossom in her hair, Who called me by my name and ran And faded through the brightening air.

What a sense of long pursuit, of a life's quest, we get in the exquisite last verse--a verse which must be among the best-known of Mr.

Yeats's writings after _The Lake Isle of Innisfree_ and _Had I the Heaven's Embroidered Cloths_:--

Though I am old with wandering Through hollow lands and hilly lands, I will find out where she has gone, And kiss her lips and take her hands; And walk among long dappled gra.s.s, And pluck till time and times are done The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun.

This is the magic of fairyland again. It seems a little distant from human pa.s.sions. It is a wonderful example, however, of Mr. Yeats's genius for transforming pa.s.sion into elfin dreams. The emotion is at once deeper and nearer human experience in the later poem called _The Folly of Being Comforted_. I have known readers who professed to find this poem obscure. To me it seems a miracle of phrasing and portraiture.

I know no better example of the n.o.bleness of Mr. Yeats's verse and his incomparable music.

XIX

TCHEHOV: THE PERFECT STORY-TELLER