Finders Keepers

by Seamus Heaney

  Yeats was then twenty-eight, and could deploy that elaborate style he had learned from Pater with as much indolent calculation on a sofa as in a sentence. If he had not yet formulated his theory of the mask, he had an instinctive grasp of the potency of his image; and if he does not altogether ruffle here in a manly pose, there is nevertheless a bit of a peacock display going on. The Homer volume was a good touch, and so was the cigarette and the ‘ceremony’ of the tea.

  The young man whose concern for appearances had led him, a few years earlier, to ink his heels in order to disguise the holes in his socks had obviously mastered more complex and sure-footed strategies for holding the line between himself and the world around him. He had not, to be sure, acquired the peremptory authority which Frank O’Connor was to see in action decades later, when the poet could silence an argument or buttress a proposition with a remark such as ‘Ah, but that was before the peacock screamed’, but he had about him already a definite atmosphere, a style that declared allegiance to disciplines and sources of strength not shared by his contemporaries. He was an artist, devoted to the beautiful; he was a magician, adept among hidden powers; he was a Celt, with a lifeline to the mythological depths; he was a propagandist, with a firm line for journalists. He was all these things, self-consciously and deliberately, yet they did not constitute a dispersal or a confusion of his powers or of his personality; on the contrary, they concentrated one another, grew from a single root, and if they were deliberate, the deliberation sprang from an inner compulsion, an energy discovering itself as vision. Yeats’s performances, we might say, then and for the rest of his life, manifested themselves in the service of creative action. The longer we think of Yeats, the more he narrows the gap which etymology has forced between mystery and mastery.

  Aspects of the mysterious and the masterful reveal themselves in one of his coolest strokes during the interview, which was essentially a conversation about Yeats’s connection with the Blavatsky Lodge of the Theosophical Society. He had been expelled by Madame Blavatsky, or at least had been asked to resign about three years earlier. Dunlop asked him:

  ‘Can you remember anything in the nature of a prophecy, Mr Yeats, made by Madame Blavatsky, that might be of interest to record, notwithstanding the fact that you are yet awaiting your prophesied illness?’

  ‘The only thing of that nature,’ replied Mr Yeats, ‘was a reference to England’. ‘“The Master told me,” said she, “that the power of England would not outlast the century, and the Master never deceived me.”’

  It seems to me that Yeats cut a sly swathe with that answer, enlisting the esoteric fringe to serve the nationalistic heartland, hiding the cultural agitator behind the po-faced dreamer, making a cast across the sleeping pool of historical enmity with a line as neutral as theosophy itself, the calm surface of his speech death-charged with potential rebellion. The remark leaves a broadening wake in the imagination and operates by the perfect camouflaging of judged intention in an aftermath of overlapping effects; and in this way it rehearses in miniature the more complex orchestration of intention and effect which he was to achieve in The Wind Among the Reeds, a book whose title was already haunting his mind.

  ‘And what about your present work?’ I asked.

  ‘Celtic Twilight, a work dealing with ghosts, goblins and fairies, will be out shortly, also a short volume of Blake’s poems,’ he replied. ‘Then I am getting ready for publication, next spring, a book of poems, which I intend calling The Wind Among the Reeds and, as soon afterwards as possible, a collection of essays and lectures dealing with Irish nationality and literature, which will probably appear under the title of the Watch Fire.’

  In the event Watch Fire never materialized. His essay on nationality and literature had appeared, however, five months earlier in the United Irishman and work on similar themes had been published all through the late eighties and continued to be published throughout the nineties. He began with his famous championship of Sir Samuel Ferguson’s poetr – ‘the greatest poet Ireland has produced, because the most central and most Celtic’ – and went on to praise James Clarence Mangan, William Allingham and the ballad poets; to sponsor new voices like Katherine Tynan’s and AE’s; to write for English and Irish magazines bibliographies and reader’s guides to the best Irish books; to affirm the validity of that magical world-view implicit in Irish country customs and beliefs, and to rehearse those beliefs and customs in the book he mentions which would give its name to an era, The Celtic Twilight. It was all part of a campaign and the various suggestions in the word campaign are apposite. It was sustained over a long period and was pursued on a number of fronts: journalistic, political, poetic, dramatic, amatory even, if we think of Maud Gonne as leading lady in The Countess Cathleen; it was pursued with the idea of conquest, not of territory perhaps but of imagination – though a successful awakening of the people’s imagination would allow them to repossess their territory with a new conviction. As he comes to the end of that part of his autobiography dealing with the years 1887–1891, the note swells as he recollects his purpose:

  I could not endure, however, an international art, picking stories and symbols where it pleased. Might I not, with health and good luck to aid me, create some new Prometheus Unbound; Patrick or Colmcille, Oisin or Finn in Prometheus’s stead; and, instead of Caucasus, Cro-Patrick or Ben Bulben? Have not all races had their first unity from a mythology that marries them to rock and hill? We had in Ireland imaginative stories, which the uneducated classes knew and even sang, and might we not make those stories current among the educated classes, rediscovering what I have called ‘the applied arts of literature’, the association of literature, that is, with music, speech and dance; and at last, it might be, so deepen the political passion of the nation that all, artist and poet, craftsman and day-labourer would accept a common design?

  If there is something plangent in this proud recollection, there was nothing of the dying fall in the notes struck by the journalism and controversy of the eighties and nineties as he pursued that ‘common design’. For example, after declaring in his 1886 Dublin Magazine article on Sir Samuel Ferguson that of all things the past bequeaths the future, the greatest are great legends and that it was therefore the duty of every Irish reader to study those of his own country, he went on to make clear that this appeal was directed to the selfless and idealistic young:

  I do not appeal to the professional classes, who, in Ireland, at least, appear at no time to have thought of the affairs of their country till they first feared for their emoluments – nor do I appeal to the shoddy society of ‘West Britonism’…

  That pugnacious thrust never deserted him, although he was to develop a less bare-fisted style, abandoning the short jab in the face in favour of a long reach for the side of the head.

  The point is, however, that no matter how much we have been led to think of the young Yeats as a dreamer, we must not forget the practical, driving side of him, driving forward towards his ideal goal. The founding of libraries, the association with political activists, all this was not undertaken without some resoluteness, some ambition, some expense of spirit. And all of this was by no means the whole story. There were his love affairs, first with Maud Gonne and then with Olivia Shakespeare, those enhancing and disturbing events in his emotional life that gave him power in other spheres. There were his more serious literary projects, such as the stories of Red Hanrahan, and those other strange stories, at once robust and remote, which formed the substance of The Secret Rose; and there was above all his own secret rose, the poetry itself.

  It is easy to admire this young Yeats: his artistic ambitions, his national fervour, his great desire to attach himself to a tradition and a corpus of belief that was communal. For all the activity and push of the enterprise, the aim of the poet and of the poetry is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual work into the larger work of the community as a whole, and the spirit of our age is sympathetic to that democratic urge.

  It is l
ess than sympathetic, however, to the next stance we find the poet adopting. Twenty years after the Irish Theosophist interview in October 1893, in his poem ‘September 1913’, Yeats’s style had evolved a tone for detaching rather than attaching himself, for saying ‘I’ rather than ‘we’. By then, Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone. We are in the presence of a poet in his late forties, the Abbey Theatre manager, scorner of middle-class piety and philistinism, mythologizer of aristocratic ceremony and grace. We are in the presence of a man who believes that the redistribution of the Coole Park estate among its tenants would be a step back, not a step forward, in the life of the country. A man stung into superb attitudes by the rude handling meted out to J. M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World and by the refusal of Dublin Corporation to provide a gallery for Hugh Lane’s collection of Impressionist pictures. All that. An Anglo-Irish Protestant deeply at odds with the mind of Irish Catholic society. A man who is remaking himself, finding a style for resisting his environment rather than a style that would co-opt it, at that thrilling stage of development which he calls, in ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’, ‘the finished man among his enemies’. And that poem goes on to ask about this man among his enemies:

  How in the name of Heaven can he escape

  That defiling and disfigured shape

  The mirror of malicious eyes

  Casts upon his eyes until at last

  He thinks that shape must be his shape?

  So I want our next image of Yeats to be one that the malicious eyes of George Moore cast into shape when he came to write his classic autobiographical account of the Irish Literary Revival in Hail and Farewell. Though ‘malicious’ is perhaps too severe an adjective. Many of Moore’s most quotable jabs at the romantic figure of the poet are more suggestive of affection than of a desire to afflict, as when he describes his laugh as a caw, ‘the most melancholy thing in the world’, or when he presents a bedraggled Yeats on the margins of Coole Lake looking like an old umbrella left behind after a picnic. Moore’s book is finally more of a testimony to Yeats’s genius than a worrier of it, sustained and elaborate in its ironies, corrective, accurate in its own way. The following passage occurs after Moore has given his account of the Lane controversy and has reported the text of his own lecture on the Impressionists, a lecture delivered for the edification of the reluctant burghers:

  As soon as the applause died away, Yeats who had lately returned to us from the States with a paunch, a huge stride, and an immense fur overcoat, rose to speak. We were surprised at the change in his appearance, and could hardly believe our ears when, instead of talking to us as he used to do about the old stories come down from generation to generation he began to thunder like Ben Tillett against the middle classes, stamping his feet, working himself into a temper, and all because the middle classes did not dip their hands into their pockets and give Lane the money he wanted for his exhibition. When he spoke the words, the middle classes, one would have thought that he was speaking against a personal foe, and we looked round asking each other with our eyes where on earth our Willie Yeats had picked up the strange belief that none but titled and carriage-folk could appreciate pictures …

  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 coats 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 …

  The conscious theatricality of this Yeats, the studied haughtiness, the affectation – this kind of thing has often put people off. This is the Willie Yeats whom his contemporaries could not altogether take seriously because he was getting out of their reach, the Yeats whom Maud Gonne called ‘Silly Willie’ and whom W. H. Auden also called ‘silly’, in his 1939 elegy: ‘You were silly like us, your gift survived it all.’ But in setting the silliness in relation to the gift, Auden went to the heart of the matter – survival. What Moore presents us with is a picture of Yeats exercising that intransigence which I praised earlier, that protectiveness of his imaginative springs, so that the gift would survive. He donned the mantle – or perhaps one should say the fur coat – of the aristocrat so that he might express a vision of communal and personal life that was ample, generous, harmonious, fulfilled and enhancing. The reactionary politics implied by Yeats’s admiration of the Coole Park milieu are innocent in the original sense of that word, not nocent, not hurtful. What is more to the point is the way his experience of that benign, paternalistic regime and of Lady Gregory’s personal strengths as conserver of folk culture and choreographer of artistic talent issued in a poetry whose very music is a guarantee of its humane munificence. The silliness of the behaviour is continuous with the sumptuousness of the poetry of the middle period. Yeats’s attack upon his own middle class really springs out of disappointment: why aren’t they taking the lead culturally now that they are in the lead economically? Of course Moore is right to say he belongs to them, and of course Yeats’s pretensions looked ridiculous to his contemporaries. But this was his method of signifying his refusal to ‘serve that in which he no longer believed’.

  When Joyce rebelled, he left by the Holyhead boat and created his drama by making a fictional character called Stephen Dedalus point up and repeat the terms of his revolt. When Yeats rebelled, he remained – Joyce scorned such ‘a treacherous instinct for adaptability’ – but he still made a new W. B. Yeats to tread the streets and stage of Dublin, a character who was almost as much a work of imagination as Stephen Dedalus. In order to fly the philistinism of his own class and the pious ignorance of another creed, Yeats remade himself, associated himself with cold, disdainful figures of whom Charles Stewart Parnell was the archetype and ‘The Fisherman’ was a pattern. The solitude, the will towards excellence, the courage, the self-conscious turning away from that in which he no longer believes, which is Dublin life, and turning towards that which he trusts, which is an image or dream – all the drama and integrity of his poem ‘The Fisherman’ depend to a large extent upon that other drama which George Moore so delightedly observed and reported:

  Maybe a twelvemonth since

  Suddenly I began

  In scorn of this audience,

  Imagining a man,

  And his sun-freckled face,

  And grey Connemara cloth,

  Climbing up to a place

  Where stone is dark under froth,

  And the down-turn of his wrist

  When the flies drop in the stream;

  A man who does not exist,

  A man who is but a dream;

  And cried, ‘Before I am old

  I shall have written him one

  Poem maybe as cold

  And passionate as the dawn.’

  We are moving from what other people saw to what Yeats himself envisaged. I have said enough, I think, about the outer man and what he intended, so it is time to consider the inwardness of the poems instead of the outwardness of the stance.

  Yet the poetry is cast in a form that is as ear-catching as the man was eye-catching, and as a writer, one is awed by the achieved and masterful tones of that deliberately pitched voice, its bare classic shapes, its ability to modulate from emotional climax to wise reflection, its ultimate truth to life. Nevertheless, the finally exemplary moments are those when this powerful artistic control is vulnerable to the pain or pathos of life itself.

  But I have to say something about why I put the question mark after the title of this lecture. ‘Yeats as an Example’ was the title of an appreciative but not ecstatic essay that W. H. Auden wrote in 1940, so my new punctuation is partly a way of referring back to Auden’s title.
But it is also meant to acknowledge the orthodox notion that a very great poet can be a very bad influence on other poets. What Yeats offers the practising writer is an example of labour, perseverance. He is, indeed, the ideal example for a poet approaching middle age. He reminds you that revision and slog-work are what you may have to undergo if you seek the satisfactions of finish; he bothers you with the suggestion that if you have managed to do one kind of poem in your own way, you should cast off that way and face into another area of your experience until you have learned a new voice to say that area properly. He encourages you to experience a transfusion of energies from poetic forms themselves, reveals how the challenge of a metre can extend the resources of the voice. He proves that deliberation can be so intensified that it becomes synonymous with inspiration. Above all, he reminds you that art is intended, that it is part of the creative push of civilization itself: from ‘Adam’s Curse’ to ‘Vacillation’ and on until the last poems, his work not only explicitly proclaims the reality of the poetic vocation but convinces by the deep note of certitude registered in the proclamation itself.

  No longer in Lethean foliage caught

  Begin the preparation for your death

  And from the fortieth winter by that thought

  Test every work of intellect or faith,

  And everything that your own hands have wrought,

  And call those works extravagance of breath

  That are not suited for such men as come

  Proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.

  ‘Vacillation’

  Malachi Stilt-Jack am I, whatever I learned has run wild,