Part 13 (1/2)

XVIII

MR. W.B. YEATS

1. HIS OWN ACCOUNT OF HIMSELF

Mr. W.B. Yeats has created, if not a new world, a new star. He is not a reporter of life as it is, to the extent that Shakespeare or Browning is. One is not quite certain that his kingdom is of the green earth. He is like a man who has seen the earth not directly but in a crystal. He has a vision of real things, but in unreal circ.u.mstances. His poetry repels many people at first because it is unlike any other poetry. They are suspicious of it as of a new sect in religion. They have been accustomed to bow in other temples. They resent the ritual, the incantations, the unearthly light and colour of the temple of this innovating high priest.

They resent, most of all, the self-consciousness of the priest himself.

For Mr. Yeats's is not a genius with natural readiness of speech. His sentences do not pour from him in stormy floods. It is as though he had to pursue and capture them one by one, like b.u.t.terflies. Or, perhaps, it is that he has not been content with the simple utterance of his vision.

He has reshaped and embroidered it, and has sung of pa.s.sion in a mask.

There are many who see in his poetry only the mask, and who are apparently blind to the pa.s.sion of sorrowful ecstasy that sets _The Wind Among the Reeds_ apart from every other book that has ever been written in English. They imagine that the book amounts to little more than the att.i.tude of a stylist, a trifler with Celtic nomenclature and fairy legend.

One may agree that some of the less-inspired poems are works of intellectual craftsmans.h.i.+p rather than of immediate genius, and that here and there the originality of the poet's vision is clouded by reminiscences of the aesthetic painters. But the greatest poems in the book are a new thing in literature, a ”rapturous music” not heard before. One is not surprised to learn from Mr. Yeats's autobiographical volume, _Reveries over Childhood and Youth_, that, when he began to write poetry as a boy, ”my lines but seldom scanned, for I could not understand the prosody in the books, although there were many lines that, taken by themselves, had music.” His genius, as a matter of fact, was unconsciously seeking after new forms. Those who have read the first draft of _Innisfree_ will remember how it gives one the impression of a new imagination stumbling into utterance. Mr. Yeats has laboured his verse into perfect music with a deliberateness like that of Flaubert in writing prose.

_Reveries_ is the beautiful and fascinating story of his childhood and youth, and the development of his genius. ”I remember,” he tells us, ”little of childhood but its pain. I have grown happier with every year of life, as though gradually conquering something in myself.” But there is not much of the shadow of pain on these pages. They are full of the portraits of fantastically remembered relations and of stories of home and school related with fantastic humour. It is difficult to believe that Mr. Yeats as a schoolboy ”followed the career of a certain professional runner for months, buying papers that would tell me if he had won or lost,” but here we see him even in the thick of a fight like a boy in a school story. His father, however, seems to have had infinitely more influence over him than his school environment.

It was his father who grew so angry when the infant poet was taught at school to sing ”Little drops of water,” and who indignantly forbade him to write a school essay on the subject of the capacity of men to rise on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things. Mr. Yeats's upbringing in the home of an artist anti-Victorian to the finger-tips was obviously such as would lead a boy to live self-consciously, and Mr.

Yeats tells us that when he was a boy at school he used to feel ”as proud of myself as a March c.o.c.k when it crows to its first sunrise.” He remembers how one day he looked at his schoolfellows on the playing-field and said to himself, ”If when I grow up I am as clever among grown-up men as I am among these boys, I shall be a famous man.”

Another sentence about these days suggests what a difficult inarticulate genius was his. ”My thoughts,” he says, ”were a great excitement, but when I tried to do anything with them, it was like trying to pack a balloon into a shed in a high wind.”

Though he was always near the bottom of his cla.s.s, and was useless at games--”I cannot,” he writes, ”remember that I ever kicked a goal or made a run”--he showed some promise as a naturalist, and used to look for b.u.t.terflies, moths, and beetles in Richmond Park. Later, when living on the Dublin coast, he ”planned some day to write a book about the changes through a twelvemonth among the creatures of some hole in the rock.”

These pa.s.sages in his autobiography are specially interesting as evidence to refute the absurd theory that Mr. Yeats is a mere vague day-dreamer among poets. The truth is, Mr. Yeats's early poems show that he was a boy of eager curiosity and observation--a boy with a remarkable intellectual machine, as well as a visionary who was one day to build a new altar to beauty. He has never been entirely aloof from the common world. Though at times he has conceived it to be the calling of a man of letters to live apart like a monk, he has mingled with human interests to a far greater extent than most people realize. He has nearly always been a politician and always a fighter.

At the same time, we need not read far in his autobiography to discover why people who hate self-consciousness in artists are so hostile to him.

_Reveries Over Childhood and Youth_ is the autobiography of one who was always more self-conscious than his fellows. Mr. Yeats describes himself as a youth in Dublin:--

sometimes walking with an artificial stride in memory of Hamlet, and stopping at shop windows to look at my tie, gathered into a loose sailor-knot, and to regret that it could not be always blown out by the wind like Byron's tie in the picture.

Even the fits of abstraction of the young poet must often have been regarded as self-conscious att.i.tudinizing by his neighbours--especially by the ”stupid stout woman” who lived in the villa next to his father's, and who, as he amusingly relates, mocked him aloud:--

I had a study with a window opposite some window of hers, and one night when I was writing, I heard voices full of derision, and saw the stout woman and her family standing at the window. I have a way of acting what I write, and speaking it aloud without knowing what I am doing. Perhaps I was on my hands and knees, or looking down over the back of a chair, talking into what I imagined an abyss.

It will be seen that Mr. Yeats is as interesting a figure to himself as he is to Mr. George Moore. If he were not he would not have troubled to write his autobiography. And that would have been a loss to literature.

_Reveries Over Childhood and Youth_ is a book of extraordinary freshness. It does not, like Wordsworth's _Prelude_, set forth the full account of the great influences that shaped a poet's career. But it is a delightful study of early influences, and depicts a dedicated poet in his boyhood as this has never been done before in English prose.

Of all the influences that have shaped his career, none was more important than the Irish atmosphere to which he early returned from London. He is distinctively an Irish poet, though we find him in his youth writing plays and poems in imitation of Sh.e.l.ley and Spenser.

Irish places have done more to influence his imagination even than the masterpieces of English literature.

It was apparently while he was living in Sligo, not far from the lakes, that he conceived the longing which he afterwards expressed with such originality of charm in _The Lake Isle of Innisfree_:--

My father had read to me some pa.s.sage out of _Walden_, and I planned to live some day in a cottage on a little island called Innisfree....

I thought that, having conquered bodily desire and the inclination of my mind towards women and love, I should live as Th.o.r.eau lived, seeking wisdom.

It is the little world of Sligo, indeed, that provides all the s.p.a.cious and twilit landscape in Mr. Yeats's verse. Here were those fishermen and raths and mountains of the Sidhe and desolate lakes which repeat themselves as images through his work. Here, too, he had relatives eccentric and adventurous to excite his imagination, such as the

Merchant skipper that leaped overboard After a ragged hat in Biscay Bay.