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

by W. B. Yeats

  Some work connected with our theatrical project brought Lady Gregory to Dublin. Bullen asked to be introduced, and until we arrived at her hotel I did not notice how drunk he was. When he sat down he was on the verge of tears. ‘Yeats is an astrologer. He knows the moment of my death. No, no, it is no use denying it, he knows the moment of my death.’ Presently I wrote from Sligo that my uncle, the High Sheriff, had been warned that I must keep away from a certain Club. Moore was constantly attacked in the English Press, and every attack reached Dublin. I found that certain of our enemies were passing round some article in a monthly review, pointing out the plagiarisms in his Modern Painting, and I, not knowing how well-founded the attack was, had suggested a reply. ‘The man I object to’, said Moore, ‘is the man who plagiarizes without knowing it; I always know; I took ten pages.’ To Lady Gregory he said, ‘We both quote well, but you always put inverted commas, I never do’.

  XXI

  I saw William Fay’s amateur company play Miss Milligan’s Red Hugh, an historical play in two scenes in the style of Walter Scott. ‘Yonder battlements’, all the old rattle-traps acquired modernity, reality, spoken by those voices. I came away with my head on fire. I wanted to hear my own unfinished On Bailees Strand, to hear Greek tragedy, spoken with a Dublin accent. After consulting with Lady Gregory I gave William Fay my Cathleen ni Houlihan, the first play where dialect was not used with an exclusively comic intention, to be produced in April 1902, in a hall attached to a church in a back street. A. E. gave his Deirdre, a protest against Diarmuid and Grania because the play had made mere men out of heroes. It was well constructed (A. E. in later years gave plots, or incidents that suggested plots, to several dramatists), but all its male characters resembled Lord Tennyson’s King Arthur. Five or six years earlier he had published his lovely Homeward; Songs by the Way, and because of those poems and what he was in himself, writers or would-be writers, among them James Stephens, who has all my admiration to-day, gathered at his house upon Sunday nights, making it a chief centre of literary life in Dublin. I was not friendly with that centre, considering it made up for the most part of ‘barren rascals’---critics as Balzac saw critics. For the next few years it seemed to lead the opposition, not the violent attacks, but the sapping and mining. A. E. himself, then as always, I loved and hated, and when I read or saw his play, I distrusted my judgment, fearing it mere jealousy, or some sort of party dislike. It was admired by everybody, hurt no national susceptibility, but in a few years A. E. himself abandoned it as Moore and I abandoned Diarmuid and Grania. I wrote to Lady Gregory, who was then in Italy: ‘They took to Deirdre from the first. The hall was crowded and great numbers could not get in. I hated Deirdre. In fact I did not remain in the theatre because I was nervous about it. I still hate it, but I suppose Moore is the only person who shares my opinion. When I saw it in rehearsal I thought it superficial and sentimental as I thought when it came out in the All Ireland Review. Cathleen ni Houlihan was also enthusiastically received. The one defect was that the mild humour of the part before Cathleen came in kept them in such delighted laughter that it took them some little while to realize the tragic meaning of Cathleen’s part though Maud Gonne played it magnificently and with weird power. I should have struck a tragic note at the start.’ Then two days later: ‘The plays are over. Last night was the most enthusiastic of all. The audience now understands Cathleen ni Houlihan and there is no difficulty in getting from humour to tragedy. There is continual applause, and strange to say I like Deirdre. The absence of character is like the absence of individual expression in wall decoration. It was acted with great simplicity; the actors kept very quiet, often merely posing and speaking. The result was curiously dream-like and gentle. Russell is planning a play on the Children of Tuireann and will, I imagine, do quite a number of plays. The costumes and scenery from designs of his were beautiful; there was a thin gauze veil in front. It was really a wonderful sight to see crowds of people standing up at the back of the hall where they could hardly see because there were people in front, yet patient, and enthusiastic.’ I gave Fay a little farce, The Pot of Broth, written with Lady Gregory’s help but showing that neither Lady Gregory nor I could yet distinguish between the swift-moving town dialect- --the dialect of the Irish novelists no matter what part of Ireland they wrote of---and the slow-moving country dialect. In Cathleen ni Houlihan, written too with Lady Gregory’s help, the dialect is as it were neutral, neither predominantly town nor country; my stage technique, swifter than Lady Gregory’s when a tragic crisis is the theme, had pared it to the bone. It was, I think, this spareness, or barrenness, that made Arthur Symons tell me after he had seen Synge’s first play to write no more peasant plays.

  I had joined Fay’s dramatic society but had as yet no authority. I wrote to Lady Gregory that I had not marked my scornful analysis of one of Fay’s dramatists ‘private’ because ‘the sooner I have that man for an enemy the better’. When The Pot of Broth was played in the Antient Concert Rooms in October, that trivial, unambitious retelling of an old folk-tale showed William Fay for the first time as a most lovable comedian. He could play dirty tramp, stupid countryman, legendary fool, insist on dirt and imbecility, yet play---paradox of the stage---with indescribable personal distinction.

  XXII

  In the early autumn Zola died, asphyxiated by a charcoal stove.

  Innumerable paragraphs and leading articles made Moore jealous and angry; he hated his own past in Zola. He talked much to his friends on Saturday nights. ‘Anybody can get himself asphyxiated.’ Then after some six weeks announced that he himself had awakened that very morning to smell gas, a few minutes more and he would have been dead; the obsession was over. But there had been another torture earlier in the year. A brother of his, Augustus Moore, a London journalist, had taken an action about a scenario, whether against an actor, a writer or a manager, I cannot remember; he would appear in the witness-box, be examined, cross-examined, re-examined, and would not, could not, rise to the occasion, whereas he, George Moore, could have been amusing, profound, all the world looking on. When it seemed likely that Benson, or some company brought together by Martyn, would continue the Irish Literary Theatre, I had told Moore a fantastic plot for a play, suggested collaboration, and for twenty minutes or half an hour walked up and down a path in his garden discussing it. He proposed that my hero’s brother should seduce the housemaid. When I had decided to work with Fay, Moore had withdrawn from the movement. I had written him regretting that I must write that play without his help. He did not answer, the letter required no answer. Weeks or months passed, then at some Gaelic festival in the town of Galway we met. I saw that he had something on his mind, he was gloomy and silent. I pointed out the number of young women with Douglas Hyde’s pseudonym in gilt letters round their hats: ‘No woman, Moore, has ever done that for you’, I said. He took my banter well, threw off his gloom; had I not started his favourite theme? But on his return to Dublin he telegraphed: ‘I have written a novel on that scenario we composed together. Will get an injunction if you use it.’ Had I known about his brother’s law-case I would have known that Moore had not written a line and that his telegram was drama; knowing nothing, I wrote or telegraphed that I would use nothing of his but would certainly use my own plot. I went to Coole, asked the assistance of Lady Gregory and of a certain cautious friend, whose name must be left out of this narrative, and in a fortnight they and I dictated or wrote a five-act tragedy. I called it Where there is Nothing and published it as a supplement to United Ireland, afterwards the organ of the Sinn Fein movement. Moore had been talking and his talk had reached me, he was expecting a London trial, and this was checkmate. Boys were shouting the supplement in the streets as he came out of the Antient Concert Rooms, where he had seen Fay’s company. He bought a copy, spoke to nobody about it, always declared that he never read it, nor any other edition of the play. ‘Has Yeats’ hero got a brother?’ he said to somebody. ‘Yes.”Then Yeats has stolen the spoons.’ But my hero’s brother was in
a monastery. Some months later an American friend, John Quinn, a strong supporter and helper of our movement, brought us together, but we were never cordial again; on my side distrust remained, on his disgust. I look back with some remorse. ‘Yeats,’ Moore had said, ‘a man can only have one conscience, mine is artistic.’ Had I abandoned my plot and made him write the novel, he might have put beside Muslin and The Lake a third masterpiece, but I was young, vain, self-righteous, and bent on proving myself a man of action. Where there is Nothing is a bad play; I had caught sight of Tolstoy’s essay about the Sermon on the Mount lying on a chair and made the most important act pivot upon pacificist commonplace. I soon came to my senses, refused a distinguished Frenchman permission to translate it, and in later years with Lady Gregory’s help turned it into The Unicorn from the Stars. For the moment it was successful; it could not be played in Ireland for religious reasons, but the Stage Society found an approving audience and it set the tinkers of Mayo rioting. My anonymous collaborator, when asked to name a tinker in the play, had named him after a real tinker. A farmer who had read the United Ireland supplement reproached that tinker for letting his daughter marry a man with no visible means of subsistence and permitting her to solemnize the marriage by jumping over a bucket. The angry parent called God to witness that he had done no such thing, other farmers and tinkers joined what grew into a considerable fight, and all were brought up before the magistrate.

  XXIII

  During these first years Lady Gregory was friend and hostess, a centre of peace, an adviser who never overestimated or underestimated trouble, but neither she nor we thought her a possible creator. And now all in a moment, as it seemed, she became the founder of modern Irish dialect literature. When her husband died she had sold her London house, hiring instead a small flat in Queen Anne’s Mansions, lived most of the year at Coole, cutting down expenses that her son might inherit an unencumbered estate. In early life she had written two or three articles, such as many clever fashionable women write, more recently had edited her husband, Sir William Gregory’s, Autobiography and Mr. Gregory’s Letter-Box, a volume of letters to Richard Gregory, Irish Under-Secretary at the beginning of the nineteenth century, from Palmerston, Wellesley, many famous men, drawn from the Coole archives. Some slight desire to create had been put aside until her son reached manhood; but now he had left the university and she was fifty. I told her that Alfred Nutt had offered to supply me with translations of the Irish heroic cycles if I would pick the best versions and put my English upon them, attempting what Malory had done for the old French narratives. I told her that I was too busy with my own work. Some days later she asked if I would object to her attempting it, making or finding the translations herself. An eminent Trinity College professor had described ancient Irish literature as ‘silly, religious, or indecent’, and she thought such work necessary for the dignity of Ireland. ‘We work to add dignity to Ireland’ was a favourite phrase of hers. I hesitated, I saw nothing in her past to fit her for that work; but in a week or two she brought a translation of some heroic tale, what tale I cannot now remember, in the dialect of the neighbourhood, where one discovers the unemphatic cadence, the occasional poignancy of Tudor English. Looking back, Cuchulain of Muirthemne and Gods and Fighting Men at my side, I can see that they were made possible by her past; semi-feudal Roxborough, her inherited sense of caste, her knowledge of that top of the world where men and women are valued for their manhood and their charm, not for their opinions, her long study of Scottish Ballads, of Percy’s Reliques, of the Morte d’Arthur. If she had not found those tales, or finding them had not found the dialect of Kiltartan, that past could not, as it were, have drawn itself together, come to birth as present personality. Sometimes in her letters, in her books when she wrote ordinary English, she was the late-Victorian woman turning aside from reality to what seems pleasing, or to a slightly sentimental persiflage as a form of politeness---in society, to discover ‘eternity glaring’, as Carlyle did when he met Charles Lamb for the first time, is scarcely in good taste---but in her last years, when speaking in her own character, she seemed always her greater self. A writer must die every day he lives, be reborn, as it is said in the Burial Service, an incorruptible self, that self opposite of all that he has named ‘himself’. George Moore, dreading the annihilation of an impersonal bleak realism, used life like a mediaeval ghost making a body for itself out of drifting dust and vapour; and have I not sung in describing guests at Coole--- ‘There one that ruffled in a manly pose, For all his timid heart’--- that one myself? Synge was a sick man picturing energy, a doomed man picturing gaiety; Lady Gregory, in her life much artifice, in her nature much pride, was born to see the glory of the world in a peasant mirror. ‘I saw the household of Finn; it was not the household of a soft race; I had a vision of that man yesterday.... A King of heavy blows; my law; my adviser, my sense and my wisdom, prince and poet, braver than kings, King of the Fianna, brave in all countries; golden salmon of the sea, clean hawk of the air... a high messenger in bravery and in music. His skin lime- white, his hair golden; ready to work, gentle to women. His great green vessels full of rough sharp wine, it is rich the king was, the head of his people.’ And then Grania’s song over the sleeping Diarmuid: —

  ‘“Sleep a little, sleep a little, for there is nothing at all to fear, Diarmuid, grandson of Duibhne; sleep here soundly, soundly, Diarmuid, to whom I have given my love. It is I will keep watch for you, grandchild of shapely Duibhne; sleep a little, a blessing on you, beside the well of the strong field; my lamb from above the lake, from the banks of the strong streams. Let your sleep be like the sleep in the North of fair comely Fionnchadh of Ess Ruadh, the time he took Slaine with bravery as we think, in spite of Failbhe of the Hard Head.

  “Let your sleep be like the sleep in the West of Aine, daughter of Gailian, the time she went on a journey in the night with Dubhthach from Dorinis, by the light of torches.

  “Let your sleep be like the sleep in the East of Deaghadh the proud, the brave fighter, the time he took Coincheann, daughter of Binn, in spite of fierce Decheall of Duibhreann.

  “O heart of the valour of the world to the west of Greece, my heart will go near to breaking if I do not see you every day. The parting of us two will be the parting of two children of the one house; it will be the parting of life from the body.”

  ‘And then to rouse him she would make another song, and it is what she would say: “Caoinche will be loosed on your track; it is not slow the running of Caoilte will be; do not let death reach to you, do not give yourself to sleep forever.

  “The stag to the East is not asleep, he does not cease from bellowing; the bog lark is not asleep to-night on the high stormy bogs; the sound of her clear voice is sweet; she is not sleeping between the streams.”‘

  THE END

  ESTRANGEMENT EXTRACTS FROM A DIARY KEPT IN 1909

  I

  To keep these notes natural and useful to me I must keep one note from leading on to another, that I may not surrender myself to literature. Every note must come as a casual thought, then it will be my life. Neither Christ nor Buddha nor Socrates wrote a book, for to do that is to exchange life for a logical process.

  II

  Last night there was a debate in the Arts Club on a political question. I was for a moment tempted to use arguments merely to answer something said, but did not do so, and noticed that every argument I had been tempted to use was used by somebody or other. Logic is a machine, one can leave it to itself; unhelped it will force those present to exhaust the subject, the fool is as likely as the sage to speak the appropriate answer to any statement, and if an answer is forgotten somebody will go home miserable. You throw your money on the table and you receive so much change.

  Style, personality — deliberately adopted and therefore a mask---is the only escape from the hot-faced bargainers and the moneychangers.

  III

  I have been talking to a man typical of a class common elsewhere but new in Ireland: often not ill-bre
d in manner and therefore the more manifestly with the ill-breeding of the mind, every thought made in some manufactory and with the mark upon it of its wholesale origin---thoughts never really thought out in their current form in any individual mind, but the creation of impersonal mechanism---of schools, of text-books, of newspapers, these above all. He had that confidence which the first thinker of anything never has, for all thinkers are alike in that they approach the truth full of hesitation and doubt. Confidence comes from repetition, from the breath of many mouths. This ill-breeding of the mind is a far worse thing than the mere bad manners that spit on the floor. Is not all charm inherited, whether of the intellect, of the manners, of the character, or of literature? A great lady is as simple as a good poet. Neither possesses anything that is not ancient and their own, and both are full of uncertainty about everything but themselves, about everything that can be changed, about all that they merely think. They assume convictions as if they were a fashion in clothes and re-mould all slightly.

  IV

  The articles upon The Miser in to-day’s paper show the old dislike of farce and dialect; written by men who are essentially parvenus in intellectual things, they shudder at all that is not obviously and notoriously refined ---the objection to the word ‘shift’ over again. Our Abbey secretary has a deep hatred of Moliere. None of these people can get it out of their heads that we are exaggerating the farce of Moliere. We reduce it. Years ago Dr. Sigerson said of the last verse of my Moll Magee, ‘Why candles? Surely tapers?’

  V

  To oppose the new ill-breeding of Ireland, which may in a few years destroy all that has given Ireland a distinguished name in the world---’Mother of the bravest soldiers and the most beautiful women’, cried Borrow, or some such words, remembering the hospitality shown to him, a distributor of Bibles, by the Irish Monks of Spain---I can only set up a secondary or interior personality created out of the tradition of myself, and this personality (alas, only possible to me in my writings) must be always gracious and simple. It must have that slight separation from interests which makes charm possible, while remaining near enough for passion. Is not charm what it is because an escape from mechanism? So much of the world as is dominated by the contest of interests is a mechanism. The newspaper is the roar of the machine. Argument, the moment acknowledged victory is sought, becomes a clash of interests. One should not---above all in books, which sigh for immortality---argue at all if not ready to leave to another apparent victory. In daily life one becomes rude the moment one grudges to the clown his perpetual triumph.