CHAPTER XVI

W. B. YEATS AND HIS PART IN THE CELTIC REVIVAL

The prize of 1923 has been awarded:

Yeats, William Butler, born 1865: “for his consistently emotional poetry, which in the strictest artistic form expresses a people’s spirit.”[158]

In the book, _Ideals in Ireland_, edited by Lady Gregory (London and New York, 1901), the editor speaks of the various contributors to this revival of letters including George Moore, Æ (George Russell), Douglas Hyde and W. B. Yeats as “candle-stick makers.” Unlike the “butcher and the baker,” who have their daily newspaper and appointed tasks that are appreciated, this type of worker, who makes and holds the candle, is not so well served. He is the _idealist_ who finds himself, too often, ignored or maligned; he searches out the “dark places of the earth”; he is the seer, seeking for truth, aspiration, idealism. This analogy holds good for many of the winners of the Nobel prizes--Björnson, Mistral, Tagore, Maeterlinck, Selma Lagerlöf, Heidenstam, Rolland. By universal consent of readers the name of W. B. Yeats would be added to this list, the winner of 1923. With delicate imagery Lady Gregory has expressed the subtle gift of this Irish poet-dramatist, his ability to catch “the will o’ the wisp fire, miscalled evanescent,” which is the mark of universal idealism. In his paper, contributed to this book, _Ideals in Ireland_, Mr. Yeats writes a brief “History of the Literary Movement” in his country and asks whether this revival of folklore and poetry of the soil, which is called the Celtic revival, will become a part of the intellectual and social development of Ireland. These words were written in 1899; the quarter century since then has answered the question in the affirmative and has accorded to Mr. Yeats a large share in this appreciation of simple beauty, love, and chivalry. The names of Donn Byrne and Padraic Colum, James Stephens and Winifred Letts, Lord Dunsany and St. John Ervine, suggest some of the poets and playwrights, “the candle-holders,” who have followed the inspiring leadership of Lady Gregory, John Synge, Dr. Douglas Hyde, and W. B. Yeats, weaving their romances and poems about old ballads and folklore of the “sage-cycles” of Irish literary history. In this Gaelic literature are songs of battles and of love, legends of saints and heroes, that have the simplicity and musical vigor of old Greek odes and plays.

[Illustration:

_Photograph by Bain News Service_

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS]

As dramatist, certain critics will aver, with reason, that Synge was greater than Mr. Yeats; as researcher among the peasantry for folk tales and forgotten poetry, Lady Gregory and Dr. Douglas Hyde may deserve higher rank. In the writings of Mr. Yeats, however--lyrics, ballads, and plays--there are three distinctive qualities: lyrical beauty, mystical strains, blended wistfulness, and merriment. These poetic distinctions are found in many of his ballads, notably in “The Host of the Air,” “The Stolen Child,” and “The Fiddler of Dooney”; they form the literary warp of such plays as _The Land of Heart’s Desire_, _The Hour-Glass_, and _On Baile’s Strand_. In every edition of his plays Mr. Yeats has emphasized his indebtedness to Lady Gregory for assistance as well as inspiration. In his Notes to _Plays in Prose and Verse_ (New York, 1924) he acknowledges the sources of “the greater number of his stories,” as those found in Lady Gregory’s _Gods and Fighting Men_ and _Cuchulain of Muirthemne_. He affirms that these two books have made the legendary tales of Ireland as familiar as are the stories of Sir Arthur and his Knights. Again, he records his gratitude to Lady Gregory for introducing him to firesides where he might get “the true countenance of country life.” A third form of helpfulness was the skill of this friend in her mastery of dialect and her generous work in revising the lines of Mr. Yeats in this detail of form. His own ability to evoke music and poetry from dreams and traditions, and to portray the simple, domestic incidents of peasant life, was coördinated with Lady Gregory’s aspiration and background of folklore.

The father of William Butler Yeats was a well-known artist, John Butler Yeats, R.H.A. The son, named for his paternal grandfather, was born at Sandymount, Dublin, June 15, 1865. His father’s family had been identified with the church; the grandfather of the poet was Rector of Tullylish Down. His mother’s father was a merchant and shipowner at Sligo. The boy passed much time with these grandparents in the old town by the sea. When he was of school age, he was living with his parents in London and went to the Godolphin School, Hammersmith. At fifteen he returned to Dublin, attending the Erasmus Smith School and living with his relatives at Sligo. Memories of these early days are interwoven with legends and fancies in _The Celtic Twilight_, and the novel of autobiographical trend, _John Sherman_, which appeared under the pseudonym of “Gauconagh.” Like his hero of this tale, Yeats was homesick in London and longed to return to the environment of Sligo (or Ballah), to the familiar streets, the rows of tumble-down cottages with thatched roofs, the wharves covered with grass and the walls of the garden where, it was said, the gardener used to see the ghost of the former owner in the form of a rabbit.[159] In his poems he recalled the waves dashing upon the cliffs, the island of Innisfree, and the distant hills at sunset.

His father hoped he would become an artist and so continue the family profession; the youth studied art for a brief time but he was restless and unproductive. He preferred to browse in libraries, reading translations--or making them--from Gaelic tales and poems. Even more he liked to sit by the turf fires in old Connaught and listen to the folk tales of the peasantry. The first poem in his collection of 1906, is addressed “To Some I Have Talked With By the Fire.” Here he saw again, in reverie, the ghostly companions and heard the weird tales of

the dark folk who lived in souls Of passionate men, like bats in the dead trees.

When he was nineteen his first poem, “The Island of Statues,” was published in the _Dublin University Review_. With other young men at the University he became interested in a Brahmin, who was in London; on their invitation he came to Dublin to teach his philosophy. This yearning towards the occult was natural for a temperament like that of Yeats. He recalled that they fed the Brahmin a plate of rice or an apple every day and listened to his expositions.

Mrs. Katherine Tynan Hinkson, a friend of Yeats in young manhood and later life, in her _Twenty-Five Years; Reminiscences_ has given interesting stories of his zest in reciting his poems, even in the middle of the night and of his dreamy, gentle nature. In 1889, _The Wanderings of Oison_ established the fame of the young Irish lyrist. Besides the title-poem here were “The Stolen Child” and “The Madness of King Goll.” Influences of Tom Moore were traceable in a poem, with lilting rhymes, like “Down by the Salley Gardens,” pictorial and sentimental. In London, after the poems were published, Yeats was still homesick, although he made congenial friends at the Cheshire Cheese--Arthur Symons, Lionel Johnson, and W. E. Henley, who obtained for him a commission to write some topics about Ireland for Chambers’ _Encyclopedia_. His interest was strong in varied “cults” and forms of symbolism which he revealed in his poems, _The Wind Among the Reeds_, and the essays, _Ideas of Good and Evil_.

Mr. Yeats is both lyrist and playwright; to the latter type of writing he owes his recognition by students of the drama in every country; the two qualities are interwoven in his plays. George Moore, Lady Gregory, Forrest Reid, his critic and biographer, and others have stressed his large part in the success, as well as the inception, of the Abbey Theatre, “a gift of immense and national importance upon Ireland.”[160] One would not minimize the work of Lady Gregory and Douglas Hyde, of William Fay and Florence Farr and Miss Horniman, who contributed as actors, playwrights, and financial supporters. The assurance of this theater for performance of his plays gave incentive to the dramatic impulse of Yeats. He created new plots and utilized folk tales interwoven with fantasy and poetry. With the aid of Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn, he won success with plays like _The Pot of Broth_, _Cathleen ni Hoolihan_, _The King’s Threshold_, _The Land of Heart’s Desire_, _Deirdre_ and _The Hour-Glass_. This last play, first in prose, later in verse, is a masterpiece of the morality-play; the Wise Man, faced with death within an hour, goes desperately in search for “one person who believes in God and Heaven,” so that he may go to Paradise. Only in Teague, the fool, who has learned his lessons, _not_ in the schools of the Wise Men but in the _woods_, can he find such assurance. In later versions of this play the author introduced a strange Gaelic ballad.

In his Notes to the volume of _Plays in Prose and Verse_, recently reissued (New York, 1924), Mr. Yeats gives credit for the first use of correct dialect to Synge’s _Riders to the Sea_ and Lady Gregory’s _Spreading the News_. In this same Note he declares that his words “never flow freely but when people speak in verse”: it need not be rhymed verse, for some of the finest lines in _Deirdre_ and _The King’s Threshold_ are _rhythmical_ but not in rhyme. In _The Land of Heart’s Desire_ the poet-playwright’s words all “flow freely.” This is a general favorite among his plays with professionals and amateurs upon the stage. Forrest Reid may be extreme in praise when he calls it “the most beautiful thing that has been done in our time,” for it invites comparison with _The Sunken Bell_, _Peter Pan_, and _The Blue Bird_ among poetic, fanciful plays. It lingers in memory, however, as pictorial and dramatic, simple and beautiful in May Eve legends and “fairy spell,” in the natural characters, well contrasted, of Maire Bruin and her husband, Shawn, of Father Hart and the old parents by the fireside. That is an exquisite couplet that Maire speaks to her sturdy husband, when the fairy calls,

O you are the great door-post of this house, And I the red nasturtium climbing up.[161]

_The Shadowy Waters_ is another symbolic play, with an undertone of idealism. Begun when Yeats was young, it changed form often before the poet was satisfied. Into this he has introduced varied types--the magic harpist, the sailors, and Dectora, the restless, craving woman. The king, Forgel, who cares not for gold or fame, voices some tenets of the author’s creed in the lines:

All would be well Could we but give us wholly to the dreams, And get into their world that to the sense Is shadow, and not linger wretchedly Among substantial things; for it is dreams That lift us to the flowing, changing world That the heart longs for.[162]

Mr. Yeats has ever been a dreamer-poet; he said once that, if our dreams could all come true, there might not be any poetry to be written; so we are told by his biographer, Forrest Reid. Many of his dreams are embodied in his lyrics, his plays, his short stories and sketches, and his essays, _Ideas of Good and Evil_. _The Celtic Twilight_ and _The Secret Rose_ contain some of his most fanciful, poetic tales; “The Binding of the Hair” is an example of his highest art in this form. Dreams of love and service are found in the volumes of poems, like _The Wind Among the Reeds_, _In the Seven Woods_, _The Wild Swans at Coole_, and _Responsibilities_. These separate collections are now appearing in the uniform edition of his _Works_ (Macmillan). Like Keats and William Blake, Mr. Yeats has been criticized for the lack of human contacts; he has been accused of more interest in and sympathy with waves and winds, with trees and fairy-lore than with deep human emotions. His absorption emotionally seems to be in lyrical and spiritual rhapsodies. In reading a love lyric, like “A Poet to His Beloved,” one feels that the dreams and the words are more ardent than the passion of love. One of the best interpretive essays ever written upon Shelley is found in _Ideas of Good and Evil_; these two poets were alike in many moods, in their delicate, elusive fancies. In the exquisite diction of some of his lines, and the fluctuating moods that affect his themes and modes of expression, Mr. Yeats seems to me comparable to Thomas Bailey Aldrich and such delicate lyrics, as “Nocturne” and “A Mood.”

In these later years Mr. Yeats has carried his ideals into more

## active life; he has undertaken _Responsibilities_ other than poetic

expression. He has been deeply concerned about the future of Ireland and has been a member of the Senate of the Irish Free State. He has become a leader in political and educational, as well as literary, movements. Through the _Daily Express of Dublin_, he entered the lists of combatants against Bernard Shaw and his adherents who maintained that “poetry is a criticism of life.” In expanded thought upon this idea, in _Literary Ideals in Ireland_, Mr. Yeats has prophesied that, as the years pass, the function of poetry as _criticism_ will be discarded; for it, will be substituted poetry as _revelation_ of life, sometimes in tangible forms, more often in idealistic spirit.

FOOTNOTES:

[158] Inscription with the Nobel Prize Award in Literature, 1923.

[159] John Sherman, pp. 88-90, and _W. B. Yeats: a Critical Study_ by Forrest Reid, New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1915.

[160] _Op. cit._, p. 151.

[161] _Land of Heart’s Desire_ by W. B. Yeats, copyright by W. B. Yeats, New York, 1911; also in _Plays and Controversies_, New York, 1925. By permission of the Macmillan Co.

[162] _Poems_ by W. B. Yeats, copyright by W. B. Yeats, New York, 1911, 1919, pp. 206, 207. By permission of the Macmillan Co.

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