by George Moore
We have sacrificed our lives for Art; but you, what have you done?
What sacrifices have you made? he asked, and everybody began to search his memory for the sacrifices that Yeats had made, asking himself in what prison Yeats had languished, what rags he had worn, what broken victuals he had eaten. As far as anybody could remember, he had always lived very comfortably, sitting down invariably to regular meals, and the old green cloak that was in keeping with his profession of romantic poet he had exchanged for the magnificent fur coat which distracted our attention from what he was saying, so opulently did it cover the back of the chair out of which he had risen. But, quite forgetful of the coat behind him, he continued to denounce the middle classes, throwing his arms into the air, shouting at us, and we thinking not at all of what he was saying, but of a story that had been floating about Dublin for some time. A visitor had come back from Coole telling how he had discovered the poet lying on a sofa in a shady corner, a plate of strawberries on his knee, and three or four adoring ladies serving him with cream and sugar, and how the poet, after wiping his hands on a napkin, had consented to recite some verses, and the verses he recited were these:
I said, A line will take us hours maybe,
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters and clergymen,
The martyrs call the world.
The poet advanced a step or two nearer to the edge of the platform, and stamping his foot he asked again what the middle classes had done for Art, and in a towering rage (the phrase is no mere figure of speech, for he raised himself up to tremendous height) he called upon the ladies and gentlemen that had come to hear my lecture to put their hands in their pockets and give guineas to the stewards who were waiting at the doors to receive them, or, better still, to write large cheques. By virtue of our subscriptions we should cease to belong to the middle classes, and having held out this hope to us he retired to his chair and fell back overcome into the middle of the great fur coat, and remained silent until the end of the debate.
As soon as it was over criticism began, not of my lecture, but of Yeats’s speech, and on Saturday night all my friends turned in to discuss his contention that the middle classes had never done anything for Art. AE pointed out that the aristocracy had given England no great poet except Byron, whom many people did not look upon as a poet at all, and though Shelley’s poetry was unquestionable, he could hardly be considered as belonging to the aristocracy, his father being no more than a Sussex baronet. All the other poets, it was urged, came from the middle classes, not only the poets, but the painters, the musicians, and the sculptors. Yeats’s attack upon the middle classes, somebody cried, is the most absurd that was ever made; the aristocracy have Byron, and the peasants have Burns, all the others belong to us. Somebody chimed in: Not even the landowners have produced a poet, and he was answered that Landor was a considerable landed proprietor. But he was the only one. Not a single painter came out of the aristocracy. Lord Carlyle’s name was mentioned; everybody laughed, and I said that the distinction of the classes was purely an arbitrary one. It was agreed that if riches can poison inspiration, poverty is a stimulant, and then leaning out of his corner AE remarked that Willie Yeats’s best poems were written when he was a poor boy in Sligo, a remark that fanned the flame of discussion, and the difficult question was broached why Yeats had ceased to write poetry. All his best poems, AE said, were written before he went to London. Apart from the genius which he brought into the world, it was Sligo that had given his poetry a turn of its own. Everybody knew some of his verses by heart, and we took pleasure in listening to them again. The calves basking on the hillside were mentioned, the colleen going to church. But, somebody cried out suddenly, he took his colleen to London and put paint upon her cheeks and dye upon her hair, and sent her up Piccadilly. Another critic added that the last time he saw her she was wearing a fine hat and feathers. Supplied by Arthur Symons, cried another. As sterile a little wanton as ever I set eyes upon, who lives in remembrance of her beauty, saying nothing, exclaimed still another critic. And the silences that Yeats’s colleen had observed these many years were regretted, somewhat hypocritically I think, for, as AE says, a literary movement consists of five or six people who live in the same town and hate each other cordially. But, if we were not really sorry that Yeats’s inspiration was declining, we were quite genuinely interested to discover the cause of it. AE was certain that he would have written volume after volume if he had never sought a style, if he had been content to write simply; and all his utterances on the subject of style were repeated.
He came this afternoon into the National Library, John Eglinton said, breaking silence, and he told me he was collecting his writings for a complete edition, a library edition in ten or twelve volumes.
But he is only thirty-seven.
He said his day was over, John Eglinton answered ... and in speaking of the style of his last essay, he said: Ah, that style! I made it myself. And then another, Longworth I think it was, said that he failed to understand how anybody could speak of a style apart from some definite work already written by him in that style. A style does not exist in one’s head, it exists upon paper, and Yeats has no style, neither bad nor good, for he writes no more. AE thought that Yeats had discovered a style, and a very fine style indeed, and compared it to a suit of livery which a man buys before he engages a servant; the livery is made of the best cloth, the gold lace is the very finest, the cockade can be seen from one side of the street to the other, but when the footman comes he is always too tall or too thin or too fat, so the livery is never worn.
Excellent! cried Gogarty, and the livery hangs in a press upstairs, becoming gradually moth-eaten.
AE regretted the variants: he knew them all and preferred the earlier text in every case, and when literary criticism was over we turned to the poet’s own life to discover why it was that he sang no more songs for us. We had often heard him say that his poems had arisen out of one great passion, and this interesting avowal raised the no less interesting question — which produces the finer fruit, the gratified or the ungratified passion. It was clearly my turn to speak, and I told how Wesendonck had built a pavilion at the end of his garden so that Wagner might compose the Valkyrie, and how at the end of every day when Wagner had finished his work, Mathilde’s wont was to visit him, her visits inspiring by degrees a great passion, which, out of loyalty to Wesendonck, they resisted until the fatal day when he read her the poem of Tristan and Isolde. After the reading they had stood looking at each other, as Tristan and Isolde stand looking at each other in the opera. Later Minna, Wagner’s wife, intercepted a letter which she took to Madame Wesendonck, and the interview between the two women was so violent that Wagner had to send his wife to Dresden. The first letter of the many that he wrote to Mathilde Wesendonck tells the miserable dawning of the day he withdrew from Switzerland to meditate on suicide and his setting of some verses of the well beloved. Regret nothing, he writes from Venice, I beseech you, regret nothing. Your kisses were the crown of my life, my recompense for many years of suffering. Regret nothing, I beseech you, regret nothing. Minna had no doubt as to Richard’s guilt nor have we, but the translator of the letters, Mr Ashton Ellis, and others, have preferred to regard this passion as ungratified, and it is evident that they think that the truth is not worth seeking since the drama and the music and the letters cannot now be affected thereby. For better or worse you have the music, you have the drama, you have the correspondence. What can it matter whether an act purely physical happened, or failed to happen? Everything, I answer, for thereof I learn whether Wagne
r wrote out of a realised or an unrealised desire. As we sat round the fire I broke silence. Love, I said, that has not been born again in the flesh crumbles like peat ash. Yeats’s love for Maud Gonne, said AE, has lasted for many years and will continue, and I know that it has always been a pure love.
A detestable phrase, AE, for it implies that every gratified love must be impure. And from that day onward I continued to meditate the main secret of Yeats’s life, until one day we happened to meet at Broadstone Station. We were going to the West; we breakfasted together in the train, and after breakfast the conversation took many turns, and we talked of her whom he had loved always, the passionate ideal of his life, and why this ideal had never become a reality to him as Mathilde had become to Richard. Was it really so? was my pressing question, and he answered me:
I was very young at the time and was satisfied with.... My memory fails me, or perhaps the phrase was never finished. The words I supply the spirit of sense, are merely conjectural.
Yes, I understand, the common mistake of a boy; and I was sorry for Yeats and for his inspiration which did not seem to have survived his youth, because it had arisen out of an ungratified desire; and I fell to thinking that hyacinths grown in a vase only bloom for a season. But if it had been otherwise? On such questions one may meditate a long while, and it was not until the train ran into Westport that I remembered my prediction when Symons had shown me Rosa Alchemica. His inspiration, I had said, is at an end, for he talks about how he is going to write, and I told Symons that I had noticed all through my life that a man may tell the subject of his poem and write it, but if he tells how he is going to write his poem he will never write it. Mallarmé projected hundreds of poems, and, like Yeats, Mallarmé was always talking about style. The word style never came into Mallarmé’s conversation, but, like Yeats, his belief was that the poet should have a language of his own. Every other art, I remember him saying, has a special language — sculpture, music, painting; why shouldn’t the poet have his? He set himself to the task of inventing a language, but it was such a difficult one that it left him very little time for writing; and so we have but twenty sonnets and L’Après-midi d’un Faune written in it. Son oeuvre calls to mind a bibelot, a carven nick-nack, wrought ivory, or jade, or bronze, and like bronze it will acquire a patina. His phrases will never grow old, for they tell us nothing; the secret meaning is so deeply embedded that generations will try to puzzle through them; and in the volume entitled The Wind among the Reeds Yeats has written poems so difficult that even the adepts could not disentangle the sense; and since The Wind among the Reeds he has written a sonnet that clearly referred to a house. But to what house? AE inclined to the opinion that it referred to the House of Lords, but the poet, being written to from Ely Place, replied that the subject of his sonnet was Coole Park. Mallarmé could not be darker than this. But whereas to write a language apart was Mallarmé’s sole aestheticism and one which he never abandoned after the publication of L’Après-midi d’un Faune, Yeats advocated two languages, one which he employs himself, another which he would use if he could, but being unable to use it he counsels its use to others, and has put up a sign-post: This way to Parnassus. It is amusing to think of Mallarmé and Yeats together; they would have got on famously until Yeats began to tell Mallarmé that the poet would learn the language he required in Le Berry. Mallarmé was a subtle mind, and he would have thought the idea ingenious that a language is like a spring which rises in the highlands, trickles into a rivulet and flows into a river, and needs no filter until the river has passed through a town; he would have listened to these theories with interest, but Yeats would not have been able to persuade him to set out for Le Berry, and the journey would have been useless if he had, for Mallarmé had no ear for folk, less than Yeats himself, who has only half an ear; an exquisite ear for the beauty of folk imagination, and very little for folk idiom. Are not the ways of Nature strange? for he loves folk idiom as none has ever loved it, and few have had better opportunities of learning it than he along his uncle’s wharves in Sligo Town and among the slopes of Ben Bulben, whither he went daily, interested in birds and beasts and the stories that the folk tell. As pretty a nosegay as ever was gathered he tied on those slopes; there is no prettier book of literature than Celtic Twilight, and one of the tales, The Last Gleeman, must have put into Yeats’s mind the idea that he has followed ever since, that the Irish people write very well when they are not trying to write that worn-out and defaced idiom which educated people speak and write, and which is known as English. And it is Yeats’s belief that those among us who refuse to write it are forced back upon artificial speech which they create, and which is often very beautiful; the beauty of Pater’s or Morris’s cannot be denied, but their speech, Yeats would say, lacks naturalness; it is not living speech, that is how he would phrase it, and his thoughts would go back to Michael Moran, the last of the Gleemen, who, he thinks, was more fortunate than the two great writers mentioned, for Michael wrote (it would be more correct to say he composed, for it is doubtful if he knew how to write) living speech — i.e. a speech that has never been printed. Yeats’ whole aestheticism is expressed in these words: A speech that has never been printed. Yeats’s whole aestheticism is expressed in these words: A speech that has never been printed, and the peasant is the only one who can give us speech that has not appeared in print. But peasant speech limits the range of our ideas. A pure benefit, Yeats would say; we must purify ourselves in ignorance. But peasant speech is only adapted to dialogue. To this objection he might answer with Landor that Shakespeare and the best parts of Homer were written in dialogue, and it would be heartless to reply: But not the best part of your own works, Yeats. Your mind is as subtle as a Brahmin’s, woven along and across with ideas, and you cannot catch the idiom as it flows off the lips. You are like Moses, who may not enter the Promised Land. He would not care to answer: Even if what you say be true, you must admit that I have led some others thither. I beg pardon, there; and he would fold himself up like a pelican and dream of his disciples. His dream was always of disciples; even when I met him in the Cheshire Cheese he was looking for disciples; he sought in vain till he met Lady Gregory. And a great day it was for Ireland when she came over to Tillyra, and met, whom do you think? Yeats, of course. Here I must break off my narrative to give a more explicit account of Lady Gregory than the reader will find in Ave.
Lady Gregory is a Persse, and the Persses are an ancient Galway family; the best-known branch is the Moyaude branch, for it was at Moyaude that Burton Persse bred and hunted the Galway Blazers for over thirty years ... till his death. Moyaude has passed away, but Roxborough continues, never having indulged in either horses or hounds, a worthy but undistinguished family in love, in war, or in politics, never having indulged in anything except a taste for Bible reading in the cottages. A staunch Protestant family, if nothing else, the Roxborough Persses certainly are. Mrs Persse and her two elder daughters were ardent soul-gatherers in the days gone by, but Lady Gregory did not join them in their missionary work, holding always to the belief that there was great danger in persuading any one to leave the religion learnt in childhood, for we could never be sure that another would find a place in the heart. In saying as much she wins our hearts, but our intelligence warns us against the seduction, and we remember that we may not acquiesce in what we believe to be error. The ignorant and numbed mind cannot be acceptable to God, so do we think, and take our stand with Mrs Persse and the elder sisters. We are glad, however, though we are not sure that our gladness on such a point is not a sign of weakness, still we are glad that Sir William chose Augusta rather than one of her elder sisters, either of whom would certainly have fired up in the carriage when Sir William, on his way to Coole, suggested to his bride that she should refrain from pointing out to his tenants what she believed to be a different teaching of the Bible from that which they received from the parish priest. He would probably say: You have made no converts — (we have forgotten Mrs Shaw Taylor’s Christian name, but A
gnes will serve our purpose as well as another) — you have made no converts, Agnes, but you have shaken the faith of thousands. The ground at Roxborough has been cleared for the sowing, but Kiltartan can wait. Which Path Should Agnes Have Followed? is clearly the title of a six-shilling novel which I pass on to my contemporaries; meanwhile I have pleasure in stating here, for my statement is implicated in an artistic movement, the Abbey Theatre, that the Gospels were never read by Lady Gregory round Kiltartan. I should like to fill in a page or two about her married life, but though we know our neighbours very well in one direction, in another there is nothing that we know less than our neighbours, and Lady Gregory has never been for me a very real person. I imagine her without a mother, or father, or sisters, or brothers, sans attache. It is difficult to believe, but it is nevertheless true, that fearing a too flagrant mistake, I had to ask a friend the other day if I were right in supposing that Mrs Shaw Taylor was Lady Gregory’s sister, an absurd question truly, for Mrs Shaw Taylor’s house (I have forgotten its name) is within a mile of Tillyra, and I must have been there many times. We may cultivate our memories in one direction, but by so doing we curtail them in another, and documentary evidence jars my style. I like to write of Lady Gregory from the evening that Edward drove me over to Coole, the night of the dinner-party. There is in the first part of this book a portrait of her as I saw her that night, a slim young woman of medium height and slight figure; her hair, parted in the middle, was brushed in wide bands about a brow which even at that time was intellectual. The phrase previously used, if my memory does not deceive me, was high and cultured; I think I said that she wore a high-school air, and the phrase expresses the idea she conveyed to me — an air of mixed timidity and restrained anxiety. On the whole it was pleasant to pass from her to Sir William, who was more at his ease, more natural. He spoke to me affably about a Velasquez in the National Gallery, which was not a Velasquez; it is now set down as a Zurbaran, but the last attribution does not convince me any more than the first. He wore the Lord Palmerston air; it was the air of that generation, but he did not wear it nearly so well as my father.