Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot

by Frank Kermode

  must have been tremendous. The Yeats of the Celtic twilight -

  who seems to me to have been more the Yeats of the pre­

  Raphaelite twilight - uses Celtic folklore almost as William Morris

  uses Scandinavian folklore. His longer narrative poems bear the

  mark of Morris. Indeed, in the pre-Raphaelite phase, Yeats is by

  no means the least of the pre-Raphaelites. I may be mistaken, but

  the play, The Shadowy Waters, seems to me one of the most

  perfect expressions of the vague enchanted beauty of that school :

  yet it strikes me - this may be an impertinence on my part - as the

  western seas descried through the back window of a house in

  Kensington, an Irish myth for the Kelmscott Press ; and when I

  try to visualize the speakers in the play, they have the great dim,

  dreamy eyes of the knights and ladies of Burne-Jones. I think that

  the phase in which he treated Irish legend in the manner of

  Rossetti or Morris is a phase of confusion. He did not master this

  legend until he made it a vehicle for his own creation of character

  - not, really, until he began to write the Plays for Dancers. The

  point is, that in becoming more Irish, not in subject-matter but

  in expression, he became at the same time universal.

  The points that I particularly wish to make about Yeats's

  development are two. The first, on which I have already touched,

  is that to have accomplished what Yeats did in the middle and

  later years is a great and permanent example - which poets-tocome should study with reverence - of what I have called Character of the Artist : a kind of moral, as well as intellectual, excellence.

  The second point, which follows naturally after what I have said

  in criticism of the lack of complete emotional expression in his

  early work, is that Yeats is pre-eminently the poet of middle age.

  By this I am far from meaning that he is a poet only for middleaged readers : the attitude towards him of younger poets who write in English, the world over, is enough evidence to the contrary.

  Now, in theory, there is no reason why a poet's inspiration or

  material should fail, in middle age or at any time before senility.

  For a man who is capable of experience finds himself in a different

  world in every decade of his life ; as he sees it with different eyes,

  the material of his art is continually renewed. But in fact, very

  few poets have shown this capacity of adaptation to the years. It

  requires, indeed, an exceptional honesty and courage to face the

  252

  YEATS

  change. Most men either cling to the experiences of youth, so that

  their writing becomes an insincere mimicry of their earlier work,

  or they leave their passion behind, and write only from the head,

  with a hollow and wasted virtuosity. There is another and even

  worse temptation : that of becoming dignified, of becoming public

  figures with only a public existence - coat-racks hung with decorations and distinctions, doing, saying, and even thinking and feeling only what they believe the public expects of them. Yeats was not that kind of poet : and it is, perhaps, a reason why young men

  should find his later poetry more acceptable than older men easilv

  can. For the young can see him as a poet who in his work remained

  in the best sense always young, who even in one sense became

  young as he aged. But the old, unless they are stirred to something

  of the honesty with oneself expressed in the poetry, will be

  shocked by such a revelation of what a man really is and remains.

  They will refuse to believe that they are like that.

  You think it horrible that lust and rage

  Should dance attendance upon my old age;

  They were not such a plague when I was young:

  What else have I to spur me into song ?

  These lines are very impressive and not very pleasant, and the

  sentiment has recently been criticized by an English critic whom I

  generally respect. But I think he misread them. I do not read them

  as a personal confession of a man who differed from other men,

  but of a man who was essentially the same as most other men ; the

  only difference is in the greater clarity, honesty and vigour. To

  what honest man, old enough, can these sentiments be entirely

  alien ? They can be subdued and disciplined by religion, but who

  can say that they are dead ? Only those to whom the maxim of La

  Rochefoucauld applies : 'Quand les vices no us quittent, nous nous

  flattons de Ia creance que c'est nous qui les quittons.' The tragedy

  of Yeats's epigram is all in the last line.

  Similarly, the play Purgatory is not very pleasant either. There

  are aspects of it which I do not like myself. I wish he had not

  given it this title, because I cannot accept a purgatory in which

  there is no hint, or at least no emphasis upon Purgation. But,

  apart from the extraordinary theatrical skill with which he has put

  so much action within the compass of a very short scene of but

  little movement, the play gives a masterly exposition of the

  emotions of an old man. I think that the epigram I have just

  quoted seems to me just as much to be taken in a dramatic sense

  as the play Purgatory. The lyric poet - and Yeats was always lyric,

  even when dramatic - can speak for every man, or for men very

  253

  APPREC I A T I ONS OF I N D I V I DU A L AUTHORS · I g 3 o- I g 6 s

  different from himself; but to do this he must for the moment be

  able to identify himself with every man or other men ; and it is

  only his imaginative power of beco'ming this that deceives some

  readers into thinking that he is speaking for and of himself alone especially when they prefer not to be implicated.

  I do not wish to emphasize this aspect only of Yeats's poetry of

  age. I would call attention to the beautiful poem in The Winding

  Stair, in memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz, in

  which the picture at the beginning, of:

  Two girls in silk kimonos, both

  Beautiful, one a gazelle,

  gets great intensity from the shock of the later line ;

  When withered, old and skeleton gaunt,

  and also to Coole Park, beginning

  I meditate upon a swallow's flight,

  Upon an aged woman and her house.

  In such poems one feels that the most lively and desirable emotions of youth have been preserved to receive their full and due expression in retrospect. For the interesting feelings of age are not

  just different feelings ; they are feelings into which the feelings of

  youth are integrated.

  Yeats's development in his dramatic poetry is as interesting as

  that in his lyrical poetry. I have spoken of him as having been a

  lyric poet - in a sense in which I should not think of myself, for

  instance, as lyric ; and by this I mean rather a certain kind of

  selection of emotion rather than particular metrical forms. But

  there is no reason why a lyric poet should not also be a dramatic

  poet ; and to me Yeats is the type of lyrical dramatist. It took him

  many years to evolve the dramatic form suited to his genius. When

  he first began to write plays, poetic drama meant plays written in

  blank verse. Now, blank verse has been a dead metre for a long

  time. It would be
outside of my frame to go into all the reasons for

  that now : but it is obvious that a form which was handled so

  supremely well by Shakespeare has its disadvantages. If you are

  writing a play of the same type as Shakespeare's, the reminiscence

  is oppressive ; if you are writing a play of a different type, it is distracting. Furthermore, as Shakespeare is so much greater than any dramatist who has followed him, blank verse can hardly be dissociated from the life of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries : 25f

  YEATS

  it can hardly catch the rhythms with which English is spoken

  nowadays. I think that if anything like regular blank verse is ever

  to be re-established, it can [only] be after a long departure from it,

  during the course of which it will have liberated itself from period

  associations. At the time of Yeats's early plays it was not possible

  to use anything else for a poetry play : that is not a criticism of

  Yeats himself, but an assertion that changes in verse forms come

  at one moment and not at another. His early verse-plays, including

  the Green Helmet, which is written in a kind of irregular rhymed

  fourteener, have a good deal of beauty in them, and, at least, they

  are the best verse-plays written in their time. And even in these

  one notices some development of irregularity in the metric. Yeats

  did not quite invent a new metre, but the blank verse of his later

  plays shows a great advance towards one ; and what is most astonishing is the virtual abandonment of blank verse metre in Purgatory. One device used with great success in some of the later plays is the lyrical choral interlude. But another, and important, cause

  of improvement is the gradual purging out of poetical ornament.

  This, perhaps, is the most painful part of the labour, so far as the

  versification goes, of the modern poet who tries to write a play in

  verse. The course of improvement is towards a greater and greater

  starkness. The beautiful line for its own sake is a luxury dangerous

  even for the poet who has made himself a virtuoso of the technique

  of the theatre. What is necessary is a beauty which shall not be in

  the line or the isolable passage, but woven into the dramatic texture itself; so that you can hardly say whether the lines give grandeur to the drama, or whether it is the drama which turns the

  words into poetry. (One of the most thrilling lines in King Lear is

  the simple :

  Never, never, never, never, never

  but, apart from a knowledge of the context, how can you say that

  it is poetry, or even competent verse ?) Yeats's purification of his

  verse becomes much more evident in the four Pla_)'S for Dancers

  and in the two in the posthumous volume : those, in fact, in which

  he had found his right and final dramatic form.

  It is in the first three of the P/(qs for Dancers, also, that he

  shows the internal, as contrasted with the external, way of handling Irish myth of which I have spoken earlier. In the earlier plays, as in the earlier poems, about legendary heroes and heroines, I

  feel that the characters are treated, with the respect that we pay

  to legend, as creatures of a different world from ours. In the later

  plays they are universal men and women. I should, perhaps, not

  include The Dreaming of the Bones quite in this category, because

  2 5 5

  APPREC I ATI ONS OF I N D I � I DUAL AUTHORS

  1 9 3 0- 1 9 6 5

  •

  Dermot and Devorgilla are characters from modern history, not

  figures of pre-history ; but I wo1:1ld remark in support of what I

  have been saying that in this play these two lovers have something

  of the universality of Dante's Paolo and Francesca, and this the

  younger Yeats could not have given them. So with the Cuchulain

  of The Hawk's Well, the Cuchulain, Emer and Eithne of The Only

  Jealousy of Emer ; the myth is not presented for its own sake, but

  as a vehicle for a situation of universal meaning.

  I see at this point that I may have given the impression, contrary to my desire and my belief, that the poetry and the plays of Yeats's earlier period can be ignored in favour of his later work.

  You cannot divide the work of a great poet so sharply as that.

  Where there is the continuity of such a positive personality and

  such a single purpose, the later work cannot be understood, or

  properly enjoyed, without a study and appreciation of the earlier ;

  and the later work again reflects light upon the earlier, and shows

  us beauty and significance not before perceived. We have also to

  take account of the historical conditions. As I have said above,

  Yeats was born into the end of a literary movement, and an

  English movement at that : only those who have toiled with

  language know the labour and constancy required to free oneself

  from such influences - yet, on the other hand, once we are familiar

  with the older voice, we can hear its individual tones even in his

  earliest published verse. In my own time of youth there seemed to

  be no immediate great powers of poetry either to help or to hinder,

  either to learn from or to rebel against, yet I can understand the

  difficulty of the other situation, and the magnitude of the task.

  With the verse-play, on the other hand, the situation is reversed,

  because Yeats had nothing, and we have had Yeats. He started

  writing plays at a time when the prose-play of contemporary life

  seemed triumphant, with an indefinite future stretching before it ;

  when the comedy of light farce dealt only with certain privileged

  strata of metropolitan life ; and when the serious play _tended to

  be an ephemeral tract on some transient social problem. We can

  begin to see now that even the imperfect early attempts he made

  are probably more permanent literature than the plays of Shaw ;

  and that his dramatic work as a whole may prove a stronger

  defence against the successful urban Shaftesbury Avenue vulgarity which he opposed as stoutly as they. Just a�, from the beginning, he made and thought his poetry in terms of speech and

  not in terms of print, so in the drama he always meant to write

  plays to be played and not merely to be read. He cared, I think,

  more for the theatre as an organ for the expression of the consciousness of a people, than as a means to his own fame or achievement ; and I am convinced that it is only if you serve it in this spirit that

  256

  YEATS

  you can hope to accomplish anything worth doing with it. Of

  course, he had some great advantages, the recital of which does

  not rob him of any of his glory : his colleagues, a people with a

  natural and unspoilt gift for speech and for acting. It is impossible

  to disentangle what he did for the Irish theatre from what the

  Irish theatre did for him. From this point of advantage, the idea

  of the poetic drama was kept alive when everywhere else it had

  been driven underground. I do not know where our debt to him as

  a dramatist ends - and in time, it will not end until that drama

  itself ends. In his occasional writings on dramatic topics he has

  asserted certain principles to which we must hold fast : such as the

  primacy of the poet over the actor, and of the actor over the scenepainter ; and the principle that the theatre, while it need not be concerned only with 't
he people' in the narrow Russian sense,

  must be for the people ; that to be permanent it must concern itself

  with fundamental situations. Born into a world in which the doctrine of 'Art for Art's sake' was generally accepted, and living on into one in which art has been asked to be instrumental to social

  purposes, he held firmly to the right view which is between these,

  though not in any way a compromise between them, and showed

  that an artist, by serving his art with entire integrity, is at the

  same time rendering the greatest service he can to his own nation

  and to the whole world.

  To be able to praise, it is not necessary to feel complete agreement ; and I do not dissimulate the fact that there are aspects of Yeats's thought and feeling which to myself are unsympathetic. I

  say this only to indicate the limits which I have set to my criticism.

  The questions of difference, objection and protest arise in the

  field of doctrine, and these are vital questions. I have been concerned only with the poet and dramatist, so far as these can be isolated. In the long run they cannot be wholly isolated. A full

  and elaborate examination of the total work of Yeats must some

  day be undertaken ; perhaps it will need a longer perspective.

  There are some poets whose poetry can be considered more or less

  in isolation, for experience and delight. There are others whose

  poetry, though giving equally experience and delight, has a larger

  historical importance. Yeats was one of the latter : he was one of

  those few whose history is the history of their own time, who arc a

  part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood

  without them. This is a very high position to assign to him : but I

  believe that it is one which is secure.

  257

  M I LTON P

  While it must be admitted that Milton is a very great poet

  indeed, it is something of a puzzle to decide in what his greatness

  consists. On analysis, the marks against him appear both more

  numerous and more significant than the marks to his credit. As a

  man, he is antipathetic. Either from the moralists' point of view,

  or from the theologian's point of view, or from the psychologist's

  point of view, or from that of the political philosopher, or judging

  by the ordinary standards of likeableness in human beings,