Delphi Complete Poetry and Plays of W. B. Yeats (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series)

by W. B. Yeats

  X

  I invited Florence Farr to find players for my Countess Cathleen. I do not remember whether it was Florence Farr or I or Edward Martyn who asked a Dublin amateur actor to play a principal part in both plays, but it was certainly Edward Martyn who invited George Moore to a rehearsal of The Heather Field. I wrote to Lady Gregory in March or April 1899: ‘Moore first got rid of practically the whole cast’, putting X (the Dublin amateur actor) out of the part of Usher. ‘He ran at the chairs, kicked them and called Moore names, upon which the prompter threatened him with personal violence if he used such language in the presence of ladies.’

  Then Moore descended upon my rehearsals. I was relieved, for I was rehearsing in the part of Countess Cathleen a young girl who had made a great success some years before as the Faery Child in my Land of Hearths Desire. She had a beautiful speaking voice but lacked experience. I describe the result: ‘Moore has put a Miss Whitty to act Countess Cathleen. She acts admirably, and has no sense of rhythm whatever.... She enrages me every moment, but will make the part a success. I am getting the others to speak with a little, a very little music. Mrs. Emery (Florence Farr) alone satisfies my ear.’ Perhaps I should have insisted upon the young girl, for after Miss Whitty’s dress rehearsal somebody said: ‘Miss Whitty brought tears into my eyes because she had them in her voice, but that young girl brought them into my eyes with beauty’.

  When ‘The Antient Concert Rooms’ had been taken, the rehearsals almost begun, Edward Martyn wrote to Lady Gregory and myself withdrawing financial support. Some monk, I never learned the name, had called The Countess Cathleen heretical. She sells her soul to certain demons for money that the people may not be compelled by starvation to sell theirs. She dies. The demons had deceived themselves, had trusted to bond and signature, but God sees ‘the motive, not the deed’. My error was doubly dangerous, for I had put the thought into the mouth of an angel. A political enemy wrote a pamphlet against the play, quoting the opinions of the demons as if they were the author’s, sold it in the shops, in the streets, dropped copies into every doctor’s letter-box, but Edward Martyn was not disturbed. No popular agitation disturbed him. Somebody had read or shown the pamphlet to old Cardinal Logue, and he had written to the newspapers that if the play was as represented, no Catholic should go to it. And that, too, did not disturb him, because Cardinal Logue had not seen the play. Lady Gregory and I thought that two ecclesiastics might be got to outvote one; Martyn agreed to accept the verdict, and Lady Gregory made Moore promise silence for a fortnight. I have lost Father Finlay’s letter, it approved the play, but I have Father Barry’s. He was the author of The New Antigone, a famous book in those days, and what is more, a learned, accomplished man. ‘From the literal point of view’, he wrote, ‘theologians, Catholic or other, could object that no one is free to sell his soul in order to buy bread even for the starving, but Saint Paul says: “I wish to be anathema for my people”, which is another way for expressing what you have put into the story. I would give the play and the explanation afterwards.’ Edward Martyn was quite content, but not Moore. ‘Martyn’, I wrote to Lady Gregory, ‘is in excellent spirits, but says that if any person in authority were to speak, he would withdraw again.’ (The votes would be equal.) Moore, upon the other hand, lamented his lost row. He had meant to write an article called ‘Edward Martyn and his Soul’. He said: ‘It was the best opportunity I ever had. What a sensation it would have made!

  Nobody has ever written that way about his most intimate friend. What a chance! It would have been heard of everywhere.’ As Florence Farr and I sat at breakfast in a Dublin hotel, having just arrived by the mail-boat to make some final arrangements, Martyn came wiping the perspiration from his face in great excitement. His first sentence was: ‘I withdraw again’. He had just received by post ‘Edward Martyn and his Soul’ in the form of a letter. We comforted him all we could, and before twelve o’clock all was well. Before the first performance, to the charge of heresy was added that of representing Irish men and women as selling their souls, whereas ‘their refusal to change their religion, even when starving, proved that they would not’. On the night of the performance, there was a friendly house drawn from the general public, but many interrupters in the gallery. I had asked for police protection and found twenty or thirty police awaiting my arrival. A sergeant explained that they could not act unless called upon. I turned to a friend, once Secretary to the Land League, and said: ‘Stay with me, I have no experience’. All the police smiled, and I remembered a lying rumour that I had organized the Jubilee riots; people had even told each other what sum I paid for every rioter. The selling of the souls; the lines---

  The Light of Lights

  Looks always on the motive, not the deed; and

  Sign with this quill.

  It was a feather growing on the cock

  That crowed when Peter dared deny his Master,

  And all who use it have great honour in Hell;

  the last four considered an attack on the Pope, caused disturbances.

  Every disturbance was drowned by cheers. Arthur Griffith, afterwards slanderer of Lane and Synge, founder of the Sinn Fein Movement, first President of the Irish Free State, and at that time an enthusiastic anti-cleric, claimed to have brought ‘a lot of men from the Quays and told them to applaud everything the Church would not like’. I did not want my play turned into an anti-clerical demonstration, and decided from the general feeling of discomfort when an evil peasant in my first act trampled upon a Catholic shrine that the disturbances were in part my own fault. In using what I considered traditional symbols I forgot that in Ireland they are not symbols but realities. But the attacks in the main, like those upon Synge and O’Casey, came from the public ignorance of literary method. The play itself was ill-constructed, the dialogue turning aside at the lure of word or metaphor, very different, I hope, from the play as it is to-day after many alterations, every alteration tested by performance. It was not, nor is it now, more than a piece of tapestry. The Countess sells her soul, but she is not transformed. If I were to think out that scene today, she would, the moment her hand has signed, burst into loud laughter, mock at all she has held holy, horrify the peasants in the midst of their temptations. Nothing satisfied me but Florence Farr’s performance in the part of Aleel. Dublin talked of it for years, and after five-and-thirty years I keep among my unforgettable memories the sense of coming disaster she put into the words:

  ... but now Two grey horned owls hooted above our heads. I telegraphed to Moore: ‘Play a success’; he arrived in time for The Heather Field. He says in Ave that Martyn telegraphed: ‘The sceptre of intellect has passed from England to Ireland’, but that sounds more like Moore than the economical, tongue-tied Martyn, and suggests the state of exaltation he arrived in. The Heather Field was a much greater success than The Countess Cathleen, being in the manner of Ibsen, the manner of the moment. The construction seemed masterly. I tried to believe that a great new dramatist had appeared. Miss Whitty, who in The Countess Cathleen had been effective and commonplace, moving us to tears by the tears in her own voice, was now acrid, powerful, original; an actor who played the hero driven to madness by his too practical wife (Mrs. Martyn’s attempts to find a wife for her son came into my head) was perhaps even better. At the end of the performance, Moore forced his way through the crowded lobby triumphant (I did not know until months afterwards that the masterly construction had been his), and catching sight of a tall friend near the street door shouted: ‘I see by the morning paper that... has provided Lord... with an heir’, thereby starting a scandal that ran for months from village to village, disturbing several circles, private and official.

  XI

  A couple of years before, it had seemed for a few months that the old political groupings were about to break up, everywhere people had looked forward, expecting, speculating. A Royal Commission, its members drawn from all parties, appointed by a Conservative Government, presided over by Gladstone’s Lord Chancellor, had repor
ted that the over-taxation of Ireland for the last fifty years amounted to some three hundred millions. The Irish Landlord Party, which based its politics upon the conviction that Ireland had gained by the Union, had a revulsion of conscience. Lord Castletown made a famous speech declaring that Ireland must imitate the colonists who flung the tea into Boston Harbour. Landlord committees were appointed in every county. Then Lord Salisbury appointed a second Royal Commission to consider the wrongs of landlords, and not one of those committees met again. There was deep disappointment. Protestant Ireland had immense prestige, Burke, Swift, Grattan, Emmet, Fitzgerald, Parnell, almost every name sung in modern song, had been Protestant; Dublin’s dignity depended upon the gaunt magnificence of buildings founded under the old Parliament; but wherever it attempted some corporate action, wherein Ireland stood against England, the show, however gallant it seemed, was soon over. It sold its Parliament for solid money, and now it sold this cause for a phantom. Nobody was the better or worse for Lord Salisbury’s new Commission. Protestant Ireland could not have done otherwise; it lacked hereditary passion. Parnell, its last great figure, finding that this lack had made the party of my father’s old friend Isaac Butt powerless, called in the peasants’ tenacity and violence, but for months now the peasants had stood aside and waited, hoping that their old masters might take the leadership again. Standish O’Grady, a man past middle life, was now principal leader-writer of the Daily Express, the most uncompromising of the Dublin Unionist newspapers. He was of landlord stock, based all his hopes for Ireland upon that stock. He resigned his position in despair, bought a provincial newspaper, hoped, having made it a success, to buy up other provincial newspapers till he had all the provincial newspapers in Ireland. They would keep their local news, but all would contain his articles, all would rouse the gentry to their duty. He wrote pamphlets, published a weekly review, the same theme recurring. A famous passage described the downfall and flight of the Catholic aristocracy, lamented by the poor, sung by poets, but their successors, he cried out, would pass unlamented, unsung. In another, fixing his thought upon the poorer gentry, he compared them to the lean hounds that are the best hunters: ‘O, lean hounds, when will you begin to hunt?’ His plans brought him misfortune. A certain man had, in his opinion, wronged and slandered a county family. He denounced him, and because the county took no notice wrote lofty essays upon its lack of public spirit. He wrote for his equals, wrote as Grattan spoke, not for the mob that he scorned. Hearing a great noise under his window, he looked out; men were marching to take ship for South Africa, cheering for Kruger, at their head the man he had denounced. His words had destroyed that man’s influence among those O’Grady scorned without affecting it anywhere else. He lost his head and in fierce melancholy wrote that he no longer condemned ‘the poor wretch himself, but the three bad men who supported him’, naming the Master of the Foxhounds, the Bishop and the principal nobleman of that district. After that an action for libel and financial disaster. The Bishop---or was it the Master of Foxhounds?---never heard of the essays, never knew that there was a charge against ‘the poor wretch himself’, and as O’Grady was unable to prove the contrary, friends arranged for his apology and mitigated his bankruptcy. All that, however, was yet to come.

  Horace Plunkett had bought the Daily Express. Under T. P. Gill, an ex-Parnellite Member and London journalist, it expounded Plunkett’s agricultural policy, avoiding all that might excite passion. Gill had spent his life manipulating incompatibles; at the Parnellite split he took neither side. I think of him as making toy houses with little bits of pasteboard, gummed together with stamp-paper. ‘So-and-so is flat-footed’, he would say, characterizing some person whose heavy step might shake the table, and the flat-footed abounded at the moment. The relations of England and France were disturbed, a French officer, batoned in the Dublin streets, reported to the French War Office that Ireland was ready for insurrection. Maud Gonne had persuaded that Office to take from a pigeon-hole a scheme for an invasion of Ireland. A man I met in Sligo dreamed that he was entrenched in a swamp, fighting against invaders. ‘What will you do’, somebody asked the Express Editor, ‘if the French land at Killala?”I will write the best article of my life’, was the answer. ‘I will call upon my readers to remember their great traditions, to remember their own ancestors, to make up their minds with the utmost resolution, without a moment’s hesitation, which side they are going to take.’

  The Daily Express was almost as unsuccessful financially as Standish O’Grady’s paper. When it wrote of a Protestant and of a Catholic Archbishop, old subscribers withdrew because the first, being the only true Archbishop, required no prefix. New subscribers bought little but the Friday number, which reviewed books, avoided contemporary politics, but contained articles that made people say: ‘Something is going to happen’. In its correspondence column, controversies were fought out that are still remembered.

  Then Horace Plunkett told Gill to give a public dinner to Edward Martyn and myself. I do not remember who took the chair, or the names of more than half a dozen of the guests. Moore has described it in Ave, but our memories differ. I doubt even his first sentence: ‘Not an opera hat amongst them, and no one should be seen without one... perhaps they have not even changed their socks’. He was thinking of taking up politics, wanted to go into Parliament as an Irish patriot, had suggested, with that ingenuous way of his, that I should do the same, he would even accept me as his leader, and when I would not, wrote---or did that come later?--- to John Redmond, then in control of the reunited Party, and offered himself as a candidate. He came to the dinner carrying in his hand the only political speech he was ever to deliver, an attack on William O’Brien, then about to return to public life at the head of his Mayo peasants. A little before he stood up, J. F. Taylor came, late for the dinner, but in time for his main interest, the speeches. He was Moore’s opposite, a great orator, the greatest I have heard, doomed by the violence of his temper to speak before Law Students’ Debating Societies, obscure Young Ireland Societies, Workmen’s Clubs. His body was angular, often rigid with suppressed rage, his gaze fixed upon some object, his clothes badly made, his erect attitude suggesting a firm base. Moore’s body was insinuating, upflowing, circulative, curvicular, pop-eyed. What brought Taylor, I do not know. He hated me, partly because his mind, trained in Catholic schools, where formal logic had importance, was dry and abstract, except in the great flights of his rhetoric, mine romantic, but mainly because jealous of my influence with the old Fenian John O’Leary. O’Leary used to say: ‘I have three followers---Taylor, Yeats, and Rolleston’. But now that Rolleston had taken office under the Crown, he had but Taylor and me. He came perhaps because The Heather Field}s lack of sensuous form, or its logical structure, attracted him. Moore seemed timid, and was certainly all but inaudible. Taylor alone seemed to listen, but he listened stiffening. William O’Brien was his special private butt, he had denounced him for ten years as the type of an unscrupulous, reckless demagogue. How dared anybody touch his pheasant, his partridge, his snipe? What Moore said, I do not remember. I remember Taylor, though lacking the crowd of young men, the instrument on which he had learned to play, he was not at his best. ‘When William O’Brien was making the sacrifice of Mr. Yeats’ Countess Cathleen, damning his soul for his country, where was Mr. Moore? In London, in Paris?’ Thereon he described Moore’s life, in phrases that were perhaps influenced by Carlyle’s description at the opening of his French Revolution, of the ‘Scarlet Woman’ Dubarry. Moore has written that I tried to make him answer, but I was at the other side of the table, and had learnt from defeats of my own not to rouse that formidable man. Moore with Esther Waters and A Mummefs Wife to his account, one or other in the mind of every man there, had no need to answer. Towards the end of the evening, when everybody was more or less drunk, O’Grady spoke. He was very drunk, but neither his voice nor his manner showed it. I had never heard him speak, and at first he reminded me of Cardinal Manning. There was the same simplicity, the same gentlenes
s. He stood between two tables, touching one or the other for support, and said in a low penetrating voice: ‘We have now a literary movement, it is not very important; it will be followed by a political movement, that will not be very important; then must come a military movement, that will be important indeed’. Tyrrell, Professor of Greek in Trinity College, known to scholars for his share in the Tyrrell-Purser edition of Cicero’s Letters, a Unionist, but very drunk, led the applause. Then O’Grady described the Boy Scout Act, which had just passed, urged the landlords of Ireland to avail themselves of that Act and drill the sons of their tenants---’paying but little attention to the age limit’---then, pointing to where he supposed England to be, they must bid them ‘march to the conquest of that decadent nation’. I knew what was in his mind. England was decadent because, democratic and so without fixed principles, it had used Irish landlords, his own ancestors or living relatives, as its garrison, and later left them deserted among their enemies. Tyrrell, understanding nothing but the sweetness of that voice, the nobility of that gesture, continued to lead the applause. Moore for all his toil had never style. Taylor had it in flights of oratorical frenzy, but drunk or sober, idle or toiling, this man had it; their torch smoked, their wine had dregs, his element burned or ran pure. When in later years compelled to answer some bitter personal attack, he showed that alone among our public men he could rise above bitterness, use words that, for all their convincing logic, made his reader murmur: