BOOKS OF THE WEEK
All Metaphor
CIAIN HAMILTON • THE poetry of Yeats continues to assume authority. As the years pass and the critics, in growing numbers, get on with the business of teasing out the separate strands which a lifetime of hard labour twisted into unity, we begin to sense the endlessness of the process. There will soon be Professors of Yeats in the United States and elsewhere, if they do not exist already, but they will have their work cut out to keep control of their subject, for he is elusive and will not be pinned down in any one aspect. The more a man learns, the more poignant is, or should be, his awareness of his vaster ignorance; and it must be very much like this with professional Students of Yeats who find themselves obliged to lift their eyes from the text every minute or so to peer into the expanding universe that lies behind it. We can be sure already, only a few years after his death, that the poet has taken his place beside the few other great artificers who hammered their worlds into unity with the tools of their own imperfectioris and set up the bridges of imagination by which others can join them in crossing the bad lands of dichotomy and contradiction. Only a few years ago it seemed not unreasonable to distinguish sharply between Yeats's early and his later poetry, or between his poetry and the complicated apparatus of 'belief ' which was its framework. But such distinctions are harder to main- tain in the light of increasing knowledge. Yeats brought him- self as close to the condition of ' whole man' as any artist since the Renaissance, and we must at all costs try to see him whole, even if it is only for a second and out of the corner of the eye: Mr. Richard Ellmann, who was made free by Mrs: Yeats of fifty thousand pages of unpublished manuscript, announced a few years ago in his biographical study, Yeats, The Man and the Masks (Macmillan), that his ambition was to delve beneath the confusion of contradictory accounts (critical; biographical, and autobiographical—for Yeats in his own prose often took pains to cover up his tracks) and represent the development of the poet's mind. ` We shall ask,' he wrote in his introduction, ' how he became a symbolist poet and 'why he adopted an Irish subject-matter; we shall try to determine what lay behind his interests in occultism and in nationalism, and how these interests affected his work. The notion is sometimes advanced. nowadays that a poet's development can be traced in terms of the literary tradition alone; but whether we would or not, we shall be driven to answer many questions which seem at first to be beyond the literary pale : What Was his family like? where was he reared and educated? why did he form certain friendships and not others? what effect did his long, frustrated love affair have upon him? how did his marriage alter his work? ' The result of Mr. Ellmann's curiosity was a valuable study which drew together various aspects of Yeats's person- ality and pointed to the indivisible unity of his life and his work; also, it clarified considerably the nature of the contra- dictions from whose perpetual struggle Yeats created his trans- cendent harmonies. His second study* is a continuation of the process, on a more closely critical level, and Yeats emerges from it more magnificently than ever as one content to follow to its source Every event in action or in thought; Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot I but also as one, whose final affirmative power, unequalled by any modern poet, derived from a truly heroic willingness to shirk no internal struggle.
Any serious critic of Yeats who is to have anything of value to add to the growing sum must be something of a war corre-
• The Identity of Yeats. By Richard Ellmann. (Macmillan. 258.)
spondent in the first place : Mr. Ellmann proves his fitness for the job by moving nimbly about the Heraclitean battlefield through which the poet struggled towards unity. If there is a certain note of incoherence in the design of the first part of the book, it might be fair to blame not Mr. Ellmann but Yeats himself, for the intensity with which he lived on so many different planes at once cannot fail to be confusing to the most level-headed observer. Everything is qualified; no sooner has a statement been made than a caveat is entered against it; he slips out of the grasp like an oiled wrestler. Who can hold him still long enough to give us a good look? Mr. Ellmann does as well as any and better than most. His anatomy of Yeats's early symbolism, by which the poet drew the first limits for his art and which culminated in the dense tapestry of The Shadowy Waters, shows it not as a systematisation which was abandoned as the poet grew more mature, but rather as a permanent scaffolding which was constantly being enlarged and modified for the creation of work of greater scope, complexity, and significance. The elemental emphasis, to take one example, is constant, and Mr. Ellmann points out how the splendid ' Byzantium' poems rest in large part on the:same foundations as the pale and wavering verses of The Wind Among the Reeds. To the average reader of today (except the diehards who will not set foot beyond ` The Lake Isle of Innisfree ') most of Yeats's early verse is unsatisfactory; but it acquires much fresh interest when we see it not in isolation but in clear relationship to the later work which speaks so clearly to the generations of the present.
It is fascinating also to compare the hard-headed shrewdness of Yeats as theorist and commentator with his initial languor as poet. Unity of being was the ideal towards which he was driving, sometimes by tortuous paths, from the beginning. Unity is the keyword always. It was no access of sentimental patriotism which made him turn away in the Eighties from Arcadia and a romanticised Orient to the country which his bones knew. Nothing,' he wrote then, ' is an isolated artistic moment; there is a unity everywhere; everything fulfils a pur- pose that is not its own; the hailstone is a journeyman of Gods the grassblade carries the universe upon its point. But to this universalism, this seeing of unity everywhere, you can only, attain through what is near you, your nation, or, if you be no traveller, your village and the cobwebs on your walls.' His desire for clear edges was sharper than the reader might gather from his poetry of the period. From the start, Yeats's keen and unorthodox intellect told him that the myth was useless if it could not establish clear correspondence between the present and the past. I am not,' he wrote to Katharine Tynan, very fond of retrospective art. I do not think that pleasure we get from old methods of looking at things—methods we have long given up ourselves—belongs to the best literature . . . . I do not mean that we should not go to the old ballads and poems for inspiration, but we should search them for new methods of expressing ourselves.' Myths should stand out clearly, as something objective, as something well born and independent.' They Should have an independent life' and not seem sub- jective, an inner way of looking at things assumed by a single mind.'
Yeats's notes, diary entries, and letters usually strike a much more convincing note than most of his published prose, which too often seems intended to justify the blurred results and obscure the clear-eyed intentions. By keeping his eye, and ours, on them, Mr. Ellmann makes sure that he does not lose sight of the main line of development, which was towards the ' cheerful acceptance of whatever arises out of the logic of events, and for clear outline, instead of those outlines of lyric poetry that are blurred with desire and vague regret' As to Yeats's occult and magical predilections, there is more than enough evidence to prove that he did no more than exer- cise the poet's right to find his symbols as best, and wherever, he can. He was always on top of his ' system '—the authors of which announced engagingly through the mediumship of Mrs. Yeats that they had come ` to give you metaphors for poetry' —and if A Vision is judged by its results, rather than by the flowery prose in which it is set out, then its adequacy must be conceded. In his earlier volume Mr. Ellmann quoted the note in which Yeats anticipated the objections of those who would not be able to see through the scaffolding to the poetry : ` Some will ask if I believe all that this book contains, and I will not know how to answer. Does the word belief, used as they will use it, belong to our age, can I think of the world as there and I here judging it ? ' In his new work Mr. Ellmann goes deeper into the question of belief in Yeats's poetry and shows the adroitness with which the poet always avoided the service of any dogma, even in poems where he rails against disbelief most vehemently himself. He used ideas pragmatically, sub- ordinating them to the greater purposes of poetry which was to be the total expression of a total life—and by that token a great deal else besides. By 1900 he was arguing heatedly with George Russell that there could be no fundamental contradic- tion between poetic expression and the poet's philosophy. Seven years before that he wrote that ` the belief of the typical literary man of the time, that you can separate poetry from philosophy and from belief, is but the phantasy of an empty day.' Yeats won and retained his mythopoeic freedom by learning how to use ideas as, in Mr. Ellmann's words, ` perches, or habitual surroundings, or, like the elements, symbolic counters.' In the various chapters in which this and related questions are dealt with, Mr. Ellmann finds much that is illu- minating in Yeats's journals.
As in his first book he makes good use of unpublished material to throw new light on the development of Yeats's thought and on the unending labour of the creative act. Once again he illustrates Yeats's practice of revision and gives us a glimpse of the stages by which a flat and prosy draft could be beaten into a poem of dazzling facets and a multiplicity of meanings.' There is little in literature more astonishing than the laborious alchemy by which this poet avoids eccentricity and fuses his personal utterance into a statement of universal significance. Mr. Ellmann also includes a few hitherto unpub- lished poems (one of them, originally intended for the ' Crazy Jane ' series, with the refrain : ` May the devil take King George '; another, full of bitterness against the Black-and-Tans, in memory of Robert Grego-y) and some excerpts from a highly interesting dialogue on the nature of art. For all this one is duly grateful, but one wonders when these fifty thousand pages of unpublished manuscript will be allowed to speak for them- selves.
An interesting sidelight here is Yeats's own account in full of his first meeting with the young James Joyce. The inter- view did not go at all as Yeats expected. Joyce attacked him fiercely for his interest in folk lore and politics and for cuch propositions as this : When the idea which comes from indi- vidual life marries the image that is born from the people, one gets great art, the art of Homer, and of Shakespeare, and of Chartres Cathedral.' (And of Ulysses, Yeats could have added if the spirits had given him that day the gift of prophecy.) But Joyce thought it all wind. ` Presently he got up to go, and, as he was going out, he said, " I am twenty. How old are you? " I told him, but I am afraid I said I was a year younger than I am. He said with a sigh, " I thought as much, I have met you too late. You are too old."'
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