AUTUMN BOOKS

Merlin in the Market-Place

By ICHEXI. MAC LIAMMOIR

LL lovers of the greatest of Irish poets must be grateful to his wife for the brilliantly

chosen selection she has made of his prose-

writings in this book,* and to many people there will be a good deal that is new. To me, who believed I had read everything he has written, the chapter called 'Swedenborg, Mediums and Desolate Places' and the accompanying 'If I were Four-and-Twenty' came with all the astonishment of discovery, and confirmed me in the idea, if confirmation were needed, that Yeats underrated himself as a writer of prose. This attitude one had gathered from a stray remark or two in his conversation, but he put his doubt into Print somewhere, saying, as far as I can remember, that he 'despaired of ever having a Prose-style that would amount to much.'

These essays, on a variety of subjects, have

been chronologically arranged by Mrs. Yeats; theY extend from 1901 to 1939, the year of his death; and although there is a sense of ripening, c't an ever-increasing conviction and authority as one reads on and on, it is somehow reassuring to find no backward movement, no self-con- tradiction, no shifting of ground or of Personality, and to remember Wilde's seemingly nonsensical defence of his own work : 'The artist never improves. The artist revolves in a cycle of masterpieces, not one of which is lesser or greater than the other.' , There is, in the earlier writings from Sainhain dramatic deal with the beginnings of the Irish '1.aniatic movement, a fresh and youthful joyousness, a sort of morning radiance, that the oheritors of no established tradition in the life of the nation or of the theatre can know. The

each in Paris, in London, in Vienna, begin day on their labours in an already created

structure sumptuous with memory, rich with handed-down treasure, but here for this one moment in Ireland the wind blows cool on the cheeks, the dew is thick on the grass, the strokes ur the hammer mingle with the cuckoo's voice, and all that is tradition is the ancient legend in may head. The moment has gone now; no hand eul,aY put back the needles of the clock; but these ds;aYs out of Samhain and the plays they 'f37eu..ss—plays by the poet himself and by Synge, Ila,,1-,adY Gregory and Douglas Hyde, by tn.:rate Colum and the rest—are its lasting thelluttlent, for the great players who helped butand the as the fate Abbey Theatreof to fame have left ind them, is players, 'nothing memories.'

Dishare all of the subjects that preoccupied his are touched upon in this book, from the Theatre to the introductions to Lady gre froirrY's translations of the Mythologies, and own soPernaEliot to varying aspects of Yeats's tural beliefs; and if for the most D LOR IONS. By W. B. Yeats. Selected by Mrs. Yeats. (Macmillan, 35s.) part they are lightly touched upon, this to my mind is no great fault. Certain profound and mysterious matters are the more vividly revealed by being seen at some passing moment from a new angle, as mountains or cities one had studied from the ground show new aspects when they are glimpsed from an aeroplane, and the poet, in prose no less than in verse, seems forever to be travelling in the sky. The Swedenborg chapter is to me more clear and impressive than many of those intricate mathematical pages that go to make up A Vision, and the Pages from a Diary written in 1930 are both rapid and penetrating in their throwing of light on an astonishing range of subjects, rising and falling like a tem- perature chart during fever, from Toyohiko Kagawa and Gandhi to that old Abbey shindy about the Silver Tassie.

Whether or not he was pleased with his explorations outside the composition of verse. he said and continued to say a multitude of things, for the most part full of wisdom, in a prose form that, like all the English prose forms of his generation, owed perhaps too heavy a debt to Walter Pater, but out of which he had made an austerely personal medium for ideas that one cannot imagine being very much better said in any other way, and his sudden attacks have the fascinating brevity of skill.

'Burke is only tolerable in his impassioned moments,' he coldly remarks, and although it crosses the mind that the criticism is also, perhaps, true of himself, it is only partly true. for there is no moment when Yeats is intolerable, though there are many when his lofty and laborious obscurity makes one rattle the pages more rapidly in order to find him once more at his real height.

This, I think undeniably, is when passion stirs him, when he is most filled with love or rage, for then he speaks in his own voice which is that of a lover, not of a scholar: indeed he is at his weak- est in those scholarly, curiously schoolboyish moods, when his insatiable ambition to be a 'cul- tivated man' sets him willowing about in dusty academic corridors, a skittishly inquisitive hawk in borrowed cap and gown. Then it is clear and the 'fascination of what's difficult' has indeed 'dried the sap' out of his bones; one can almost hear them cracking as he whisks about among the professor's, bobbing round and round the book- lined walls, peering at certain half-understood aspects of the theatre, racking his brains over books of ceremonial magic; and one waits for him to return, as he inevitably does at the end of the day, to the `woods and waters wild' and where the lake at Coole 'mirrors an autumn sky,' or where images ride 'out of Ben Bulben and Knocknarea.'

His preoccupation with the supernatural, far from being the 'pose' it is often suspected to be, was the most fundamental thing in his nature, if we except his strange, and for Ireland most fortunate, preoccupation with his own country, and the two passions went always hand in hand as he points out that all passions, all ideas, must be unified in order that a man or a nation may emerge. 'Preserve that which is living and help the two Irelands, Gaelic Ireland and Anglo- , Ireland, so to unite that neither shall shed their pride,' he urges, still, in his fierce late sixties, as emphatically a builder of the ruined Irish nation, still as untiring a propagandist as in his youth.

'Protestant Ireland,' he says in the same pages, 'should ask permission to bring back the body

of Grattan from Westminster Abbey to St. Patrick's' . . . and be goes on to explain most precisely why. And again: 'James Joyce . . . can isolate the human mind and its vices as if in eternity. So could Synge, so could O'Casey till he caught the London contagion and changed his mountain into a mouse.' On October 20 in the same diary he wrote: 'We have not an Irish Nation until all classes grant its right to take life according to the law, and until the threat of invasion, made by no matter who, would rouse all classes to arms.' His thought. con- tinually examining the thought of others,, of Shakespeare and Blake, of Balzac and Jacob Boehme, continually poring over the tragedies of Greece, the Noh plays of Japan, continually waiting for miracles among the seers of Connacht and the mediums of Soho and Montparnasse, continually adventuring among abstractions, returns again and again to the 'seeming needs of his fool-driven land,' and the sterner and less sentimental he becomes about Ireland the more unshaken his incurable, magni- ficent faithfulness.

The Insurrection of 1916 with its heroic echoes of his own imagery had inspired him, as sooner or later it was to inspire almost all men and women of Irish blood, with a sense of sacri- ficial fulfilment. The Civil War which followed six years later filled him with forebodings. causing him to change 'this wave-worn Eire' to 'this tragic Eire' and to make many new poems filled with a bitter taste never until then ex- pressed; and it was well for his happiness, it may be, that he died when he did. He had seen much and heard much more, and what could such a poet as he, who 'sang to sweeten Irelands wrong,' find to celebrate in the startling incar- nation of these raw, growing years of newly-won freedom? The sorrowing captive is gone, the Dark Rose he loved is no more, the music of her 'high and lonely melody' has given place to a busy cackle of laughter; she really, perhaps, should be wearing a hoop on those eager, prominent teeth: a terrible hoyden is born.

But he would never have turned away, no matter what guise the country chose to adopt for her latest fancy: he would have led or endeavoured to lead her taste, and he would have had his reward—if it was a reward—as he had it in his lifetime- in a purely esthetic form: in

the fact that whenever, in thought alone, he returned to the country he, more I think than any man, had helped to a recovery of her ancient dignity, he was gifted with intelligible communi- cation, not only with Ireland herself but with the world. That old trick he had learned, through a species of national intellectual loneliness, it may be, of throwing his readers' and one suspects at times his own mind into an impressive con- fusion, raises its head here, there and everywhere when he wanders abroad, as when he says about Blake: '. . . unlike him [Swedenborg] he could convey to others enlarged and numerous senses, and the mass of men know instinctively they are safer with an abstract and an index.'

I am one whose only lessons have been learned from a sister at home, from two art schools in London, from the Gaelic League. from much travel, and from the Theatre, and I realise, I think, the many waste places that exist in my mind where there should be cultivated fields, and perhaps it is this that makes it hard for me to follow such phrases; yet on the very next page. remembering Connacht for a moment or two, he says of the American spiritist Jackson Davis: 'In the middle of the night he heard a voice telling him to get up and dress himself and follow. He wandered for miles, now wondering at what seemed the unusual brightness of the stars and once passing a visionary shepherd and his flock of sheep, and then stumbling again in cold and darkness. ...'

And though any village dolt could understand such narrative enchantment, I like to think that

this is the prose Yeats at his best, as he seems at his best on less simple forms when he writes: `I think of Swift's own life, of the letter where he describes his love of that man or of that, and

his hatred of all classes and professions. I remember his epitaph and understand that the

liberty he served was that of intellect, not liberty for the masses but for those who could make it visible.'

Yeats pays dearly perhaps for the geographi- cal limitations he had placed upon his art. I could not now write about any country but Ireland, for my style has been shaped by the subjects 1 have worked on,' he had said, and indeed when he flies too far above any ground that is not known or loved he leaves us wander- ing through the streets of some cold columned Palladian city where no flower is seen, no voice of a child or a woman heard, and where there is no sound but that of liturgical abstraction.

Now and then as I read this book I am reminded, though I think he has never mentioned the matter, of Lady Gregory telling us how she went with him into certain Galway cottages in search of stories of the fairies, and of how many of the country people, because of his black clothes, had thought him to be a Protestant parson bent on proselytising, and it amuses me to think that, had they but known it, they had come face to face not with Canon Chasuble but with Merlin. For it was the quest of natural magic that drew this most singular man again and again 'to sit by turf fires' and it is as a magician he appears in all his verse and in much of his prose. He cast his spells over a whole generation. Was it not 'certain words' of his that quickened the blood of soldiers and political men who, but for him, had scarcely given a thought to poetry? Is not almost every- thing that stirs the modern Irish intellect, though he did not write in Ireland's older language, coloured somewhere by his imaginings?