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WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, POET AND OCCULTIST.
TO understand the position of W. B. Yeats, the most prominent figure of the Irish Literary Revival, in the long and brilliant hierarchy of bards of the Western Celts, it is necessary to remember that while to Yeats was given the office of restoring to Irish poetry the joy of the-artist and craftsman (which was characteristic of the work of the bardic order many centuries ago) the actual headwaters of the stream of modern Irish poetry were somewhat farther back than Mr. Yeat's work. He has himself indicated them in the lines " To Ireland in the Coming Times."
Know that I would accounted be True brother of that company Who sang, to sweeten Ireland's wrong, Ballad and story, rann and song. Nor may I less be counted one With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson, Because, to him who ponders well, My rhymes more than their rhymings tell Of the dim wisdoms old and deep That God gives unto man in sleep.
The three poets with whom Yeats in these lines claims kinship in race and office, but with a difference of spirit, and an experience of the occult side of things that sets him in the company of the Druids,were born within a few years of one another. They sang for a while in chorus : but while Davis died in 1845 and Mangan in 1849(the first as founder of a school of national poets who sang of the political freedom of Ireland, the second a solitary figure without a mate, and both in the heyday of life), Ferguson lived and wrote for almost half a century longer. He saw the passing of the political ballad, and hailed the coming of the new school of artists in poetry. His own work, with its curious blend of archaeology and song fused by love of his country, became an important factor in the early inspiration of Yeats ; but the main operation of what the Bhagavad Gita calls the " qualities of nature," in calling out the genius of Yeats, came through the same historical circumstances as drove Davis to revolt in political ballads, though the circumstances, carried forward forty years, drove Yeats to revolt also against the political ballad itself.
For seven centuries the genius of the Irish races under the domination of an alien polity with which it had no spiritual affinity, had maintained a struggle for freedom in the things of the outer life, and flamed at last, in the movement led by Davis, into an emotion whose natural voice was the impassioned lyric. The death of Davis marked roughly the beginning of the era of parliamentary tactics which only ended in the extinction of the Irish Parliamentary Party in the General Election of December 19l8.The stirring adventure of frank revolt gave place to the furtive astuteness of the politician ; and the poets took the turning at the crossroads towards re-creating the veritable Ireland, while the politicians wandered into the slums of party intrigue. It was during this era that Sir Samuel Ferguson pursued his studies in Irish archaeology, and pointed the way for the re-creation of the ancient Irish world in poetry.
Then the herald of conflict appeared once more, not with the thunderings of social upheaval, not with the lightnings of inexpressible emotion, but with the calm and assurance of a self-realized spirit whose finger is on the secret of the power that makes and unmakes universes. Claiming for himself the fullest freedom of spirit, Yeats once again voiced the genius of revolt, this time with a deeper, subtler power. He spoke for the soul of man, and so for Ireland and for the world. He pondered, and laid aside, the popular form of poetry of half a century before; but the method which he ultimately perfected was the sublimation of the technique of the bardic schools of Ireland before the Norman conquest, with its eye for the significance of details in nature (a millenium before Wordsworth brought Nature into English poetry) and its ear for a music within the music; and the thought-stuff which he mixed into the incomparable lyrics of his early period was his ancestral heritage from his Druidical forefathers, with their insight into the laws of the inner life, and their recognition of the fundamental unity of Nature, Humanity and Divinity.
His poem from which I have already quoted his declaration of his literary ancestry discloses him as occultist in his knowledge of the finer forces and entities of nature, and as mystic in his interpretation of himself and the universe:
For the elemental beings go About my table to and fro, In flood and fire, and clay and wind. They huddle from man's pondering mind ; But he who treads in austere ways May surely meet their ancient gaze. ......From our birthday until we die Is but the winking of an eye ; And we, our singing and our love, The mariners of night above, And all the wizard things that go About my table to and fro, Are passing on to where may be, In Truth's consuming ecstasy, No room for love and dream at all, For God goes by with white foot-fall.
" The Man who Dreamed of Fairyland" is a beautiful rendering of the first stages of life after death. " The Old Age of Queen Maeve " tells of a Great One speaking through a king in trance.
It is this widening of knowledge and deepening of thought that sent Yeats far beyond the Davis era of Irish poetry. His acquaintance with the founder of the Theosopineal movement could not but make a profound impression on one whose natural bent towards the occult was reinforced by the knowledge and tradition of his race. It was quite natural for him to turn up at the foundation meeting of the Dublin Section of the Society for Psychical Research ; and in subsequent private investigations, in which I had the privilege of accompanying him, I have observed his immense knowledge of the whole range of theoretical and practical occultism. The fairies to Yeats are no figures of speech, useful to give a verse an Irish flavour, like the harp and shamrock ; they are realities, that is, living things of his imagination (whether objective actualities or not makes no matter,) not cold abstractions or conventions. They
......the embattled, flaming multitude, That rise, wing above wing, flame above flame, And like a storm cry the Ineffable name,
stratify his world beneath and above the earth's crust and its ponderable inhabitants; and they, and all they stand for, give a richness and complexity to the background of his thought that demands for its expression something more than a formula or a statement of fact, something organic and vital, something that is one with the universal Creative Energy. It was this necessity that drove the first poets of the dawn into myth, and drove Yeats into " The Wanderings of Usheen" with which he commenced his career in 1889. " Myth," he once said to me, " is vision in action ;" and the supreme end of the poet With vision is either the creation of myth that embodies his idea of the Divine Idea, or the reverent and joyful interpretation of God's Myth, the Universe.
To this august office Yeats has dedicated his life. Like his frugal and intensive contemporary in song, AE, he tunes his reed to beauty, and not so much to the celebration of beautiful things as to the disclosure of the ideal Beauty from which—as the Platonists and Emerson also declared—beautiful things take their quality. But while " the Beauty of all beauty " is to AE self-existent and now, it is to Yeats a process, fie sees
In all poor foolish things that live a day, Eternal Beauty wandering on her way,
and he endeavours to make his poetry a way for her feet. So AE says his say in great little poems that come as near being poetry; without language's Scriabine's Prelude in G comes near being music without sound; but Yeats is never satisfied, and is always willing to make alterations that may improve his poems. In his plays this habit of alteration has made many layers of memory in the minds of the actors. I remember glorying in certain lines at the very earliest rehearsals of "The Shadowy Waters," in which I had a small part; but the printed version is to me much the poorer because those lines do not appear.
The whole purpose and method of Yeats are expressed in these two verses:— All things uncomely and broken, all things worn and old. The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart. The heavy steps of the ploughman splashing the wintry mould, Are wronging your image, that blossoms, a rose in the deeps of my heart. The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told. I hunger to build them anew, and sit on a green knoll apart, With the earth and the sky and the water remade, like a casket of gold For my dream of your image, that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.
That is the cry of the artist who is something more than artist only ; it is one in spirit with the immortal " shattering" stanza of Omar. It shows the artist, also, deeply concerned with his work; he knows that he can only apprehend and impart the elusive Beauty by means of his own dream. The birds in the old Irish myth, that hovered about Angus the Young, were white, but they took the colour of whatsoever they lighted upon; and Yeats has spiritual wisdom to tell him that the white light of ultimate Truth must suffer the stain of his own genius, and in his effort to make that stain as fine as the exigencies of his art will permit, he has risen above the limitations of personality, and become in literature the type and supreme expression of -his race.
In the qualities by virtue of which he has taken his place in the front rank of singers in the English tongue—an exquisitely delicate music, intense imaginative conviction, intimacy with natural and supernatural manifestations Yeats is typically Irish. In the elements of intellectual virility, and of composition on the grand scale,—lacking which he just falls short of absolute greatness according to Western standards,—he is also typically Irish; for we look in vain through the literature of Ireland, Gaelic or Anglo-Irish, for any outstanding expression of that concrete mind whose power of objectivity, whose architectural grasp and appalling patience peopled the mediaeval mind with devils from the Hell of Dante, and strewed Europe with magnificent cathedrals to the man-made and. man-like Divinity of a lost revelation.
The genius of Ireland and of Yeats is vagrant and lyrical. In time it may acquire stability, and its earthly twin, solidity and extensiveness; though we may hold the faith that such gain might be at the expense of a quality of much higher spiritual value than mere bulk. To evolve an eternity of noble lines may be a mighty achievement of the mind; to put eternity into a single line, as Yeats has done, is the miracle of the spirit. |
