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

by W. B. Yeats

  XVI

  When in later years some play after months of work grew more and more incoherent, I blamed those two years’ collaboration. My father began life a Pre-Raphaelite painter; when past thirty he fell under the influence of contemporary French painting. Instead of finishing a picture one square inch at a time, he kept all fluid, every detail dependent upon every other, and remained a poor man to the end of his life, because the more anxious he was to succeed, the more did his pictures sink through innumerable sittings into final confusion. Only when he was compelled to finish in eight or nine sittings were his pictures the work of a great painter. Deirdre and On Bailees Strand, unified after I had torn up many manuscripts, are more profound than the sentimental Land of Hearfs Desire, than the tapestry-like Countess Cathleen, finished scene by scene, but that first manner might have found its own profundity. It is not far from popular songs and stories with their traditional subject-matter and treatment, it travels a narrow path. A painter or poet can from the first carry the complete work in his head and so finish scene by scene, but when the puppet-play becomes Goethe’s Faust, Parts I and II, when Gil Blas is transformed into Wilhelm Meister, the Waverley Novels into the Comedie Humaine, he must, unhelped by tradition, all nature there to tempt him, try, fail perhaps, to impose his own limits. Hodos Chameliontos had no terrors for Moore; he was more simple, more naive, more one-idea’d than a Bank-holiday schoolboy. Yet whatever effect that collaboration had on me, it was unmixed misfortune for Moore, it set him upon a pursuit of style that made barren his later years. I no longer underrate him, I know that he had written, or was about to write, five great novels. But A Mummer’s Wife, Esther Waters, Sister Teresa (everything is there of the convent, a priest said to me, except the religious life), Muslin, The Lake, gained nothing from their style. I may speak later of the books he was to write under what seems to me a misunderstanding of his powers.

  England had turned from style, as it has been understood from the translators of the Bible to Walter Pater, sought mere clarity in statement and debate, a journalistic effectiveness, at the moment when Irish men of letters began to quote the saying of Sainte- Beuve: ‘There is nothing immortal in literature except style’. Style was his growing obsession, he would point out all the errors of some silly experiment of mine, then copy it. It was from some such experiment that he learnt those long, flaccid, structureless sentences, ‘and, and and, and and’; there is one of twenty-eight lines in Muslin. Sometimes he rebelled: ‘Yeats, I have a deep distrust of any man who has a style’, but it was generally I who tried to stop the obsession. ‘Moore, if you ever get a style’, I would say, ‘it will ruin you. It is coloured glass and you need a plate-glass window.’ When he formed his own circle he found no escape; the difficulties of modern Irish literature, from the loose, romantic, legendary stories of Standish O’Grady to James Joyce and Synge, had been in the formation of a style. He heard those difficulties discussed. All his life he had learnt from conversation, not from books. His nature, bitter, violent, discordant, did not fit him to write the sentences men murmur again and again for years. Charm and rhythm had been denied him. Improvement makes straight roads; he pumice-stoned every surface because will had to do the work for nature. I said once: ‘You work so hard that, like the Lancelot of Tennyson, you will almost see the Grail’. But now, his finished work before me, I am convinced that he was denied even that ‘almost’.

  XVII

  Douglas Hyde was at Coole in the summer of 1899. Lady Gregory, who had learnt Gaelic to satisfy her son’s passing desire for a teacher, had founded a branch of the Gaelic League; men began to know the name of the poet whose songs they had sung for years. Lady Gregory and I wanted a Gaelic drama, and I made a scenario for a one-act play founded upon an episode in my Stories Red of Hanrahan; I had some hope that my invention, if Hyde would but accept it, might pass into legend as though he were a historical character. In later years Lady Gregory and I gave Hyde other scenarios and I always watched him with astonishment. His ordinary English style is without charm; he explores facts without explaining them, and in the language of the newspapers---Moore compared one of his speeches to frothing porter. His Gaelic, like the dialect of his Love Songs of Connacht, written a couple of years earlier, had charm, seemed all spontaneous, all joyous, every speech born out of itself. Had he shared our modern preoccupation with the mystery of life, learnt our modern construction, he might have grown into another and happier Synge. But emotion and imagery came as they would, not as he would; somebody else had to put them together. He had the folk mind as no modern man has had it, its qualities and its defects, and for a few days in the year Lady Gregory and I shared his absorption in that mind. When I wrote verse, five or six lines in two or three laborious hours were a day’s work, and I longed for somebody to interrupt me; but he wrote all day, whether in verse or prose, and without apparent effort. Effort was there, but in the unconscious. He had given up verse writing because it affected his lungs or his heart. Lady Gregory kept watch, to draw him from his table after so many hours; the game-keeper had the boat and the guns ready; there were ducks upon the lake. He wrote in joy and at great speed because emotion brought the appropriate word. Nothing in that language of his was abstract, nothing worn-out; he need not, as must the writer of some language exhausted by modern civilization, reject word after word, cadence after cadence; he had escaped our perpetual, painful, purification. I read him, translated by Lady Gregory or by himself into that dialect which gets from Gaelic its syntax and keeps its still partly Tudor vocabulary; little was, I think, lost.

  I was myself one time a poor barnacle goose;

  The night was not plain to me more than the day

  Till I got sight of her.

  That does not impress me to-day; it is too easy to copy, too many have copied it; when I first read it, I was fresh from my struggle with Victorian rhetoric. I began to test my poetical inventions by translating them into like speech. Lady Gregory had already, I think, without knowing it, begun a transformation of her whole mind into the mind of the people, begun ‘to think like a wise man’ but to express herself like ‘the common people’. I proposed that Diarmuid and Grania should be turned or half turned into dialect, the rough, peasant-like characters using much, the others using little or none. But Moore was impatient and would not listen. Later on this method was more clearly defined by Lady Gregory. The more educated characters should use as much dialect as would seem natural in the mouth of some country gentleman who had spent all his life on his estate. It was first tested in The White Cockade. Deirdre of the Sorrows, had Synge lived to weave, as he had intended, a grotesque peasant element through the entire play, would have justified it by a world-famous masterpiece. It should have been obvious from the first; Shakespeare made his old man with the ass talk ‘Somerset’. The distant in time and space live only in the near and present. Lady Gregory’s successful translations from Moliere are in dialect. The Indian yogi sinks into a trance, his thought, like his eye, fixed upon the point of his tongue, symbolical of all the senses. He must not meditate upon abstractions, nor, because unseen, upon eye and ear. Yet when I made my suggestion to Moore I was not sure, I was easily put off it. A movement develops in darkness and timidity, nor does it follow that Lady Gregory remembered my suggestion when she began The White Cockade; a movement is like an animal, its shape is from the seed.

  XVIII

  Diarmuid and Grania was read to famous actors and actresses, was greatly admired; a famous actress offered some hundreds as a first payment; but there was always the difficulty; there must be a simultaneous or first performance in Dublin. The actress said: ‘If you make a failure there, it will be no use coming to me’. I was in negotiation with her, but took to my bed with influenza. After a fortnight Moore came: ‘I have withdrawn the play. She asked me to call upon her manager. I said that her manager should call upon me. Am I not right?’ I said: ‘The naturalist Waterton climbed to the top of Saint Peter’s at Rome and put his glove on the lightning-con
ductor; such feats make me dizzy’. ‘But don’t you see it?’ he replied. ‘I thought her manager was going to refuse the play; now instead of that refusal getting into the papers there will be weeks of controversy as to whether a manager should call upon an author or an author upon a manager.”And now,’ I said, ‘in spite of all that, you want me to call upon her, repudiate you, and give the play back.’ Yes, that was what he wanted. He was repudiated, and all seemed well. I cannot remember, and my letters to Lady Gregory do not record, what arrangements were made or unmade except that Benson undertook the Dublin performance, with Mrs. Benson as Grania. ‘She will be all right’, said Moore. ‘She will play her body.’ Moore had behaved well, although convinced that the play was worth ‘two thousand pounds’--- I learnt later that always when writing a play he valued it at that sum---he risked it for the sake of the Irish Literary Theatre. On October 2nd, 1901, Diarmuid and Grania, preceded by The Twisting of the Rope, was produced for a week by the Benson Company at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin. Theatre managers must have thought it failed, or that the newspapers’ comments had taken freshness from it, for the London managers who had admired it in MS. were silent. Yet it did not seem to fail; when Maud Gonne and I got into our cab to go to some supper party after the performance, the crowd from the gallery wanted to take the horse out of the cab and drag us there, but Maud Gonne, weary of public demonstrations, refused. What was it like? York Powell, Scandinavian scholar, historian, an impressionable man, preferred it to Ibsen’s Vikings at Helgeland. I do not know. I have but a draft of some unfinished scenes, and of the performance I can but recall Benson’s athletic dignity in one scene and the notes of the horn in Elgar’s dirge over the dead Diarmuid. The Twisting of the Rope, Hyde as the chief character---he had always acted his speeches---, the enthusiasm of his Gaelic Leaguers for the first Gaelic play ever acted in a theatre, are still vivid. But then Lady Gregory’s translation of the Gaelic text has renewed my memory.

  XIX

  Moore had inherited a large Mayo estate, and no Mayo country gentleman had ever dressed the part so well. He lacked manners, but had manner; he could enter a room so as to draw your attention without seeming to, his French, his knowledge of painting, suggested travel and leisure. Yet nature had denied to him the final touch: he had a coarse palate. Edward Martyn alone suspected it. When Moore abused the waiter or the cook, he had thought, ‘I know what he is hiding’. In a London restaurant on a night when the soup was particularly good, just when Moore had the spoon at his lip, he said: ‘Do you mean to say you are going to drink that?’ Moore tasted the soup, then called the waiter, and ran through the usual performance. Martyn did not undeceive him, content to chuckle in solitude. Moore had taken a house in Upper Ely Place; he spent a week at our principal hotel while his furniture was moving in: he denounced the food to the waiter, to the manager, went down to the kitchen and denounced it to the cook. ‘He has written to the proprietress’, said the manager, ‘that the steak is like brown paper. How can you believe a word such a man would say, a steak cannot be like brown paper.’ He had his own bread sent in from the baker and said on the day he left: ‘How can these people endure it?”Because’, said the admiring head-waiter, ‘they are not comme il faut.’ A little later I stayed with him and wrote to Lady Gregory: ‘He is boisterously enduring the sixth cook’. Then from Sligo a few days later: ‘Moore dismissed the sixth cook the day I left---six in three weeks. One brought in a policeman, Moore had made so much noise. He dragged the policeman into the dining-room and said: “Is there a law in this country to compel me to eat this abominable omelette?”‘

  Sometimes Moore, instead of asking us to accept for true some monstrous invention, would press a spontaneous action into deliberate comedy; starting in bad blood or blind passion, he would all in a moment see himself as others saw him. When he arrived in Dublin, all the doors in Upper Ely Place had been painted white by an agreement between the landlord and the tenants. Moore had his door painted green, and three Miss Beams---no, I have not got the name quite right---who lived next door protested to the landlord. Then began a correspondence between Moore and the landlord wherein Moore insisted on his position as an art critic, that the whole decoration of his house required a green door--- I imagine that he had but wrapped the green flag around him---then the indignant young women bought a copy of Esther Waters, tore it up, put the fragments into a large envelope, wrote thereon:’ Too filthy to keep in the house’, dropped it into his letter-box. I was staying with Moore, I let myself in with a latch-key some night after twelve, and found a note on the hall table asking me to put the door on the chain. As I was undressing, I heard Moore trying to get in; when I had opened the door and pointed to the note he said: ‘Oh, I forgot. Every night I go out at eleven, at twelve, at one, and rattle my stick on the railing to make the Miss Beams’ dogs bark.’ Then I saw in the newspapers that the Miss Beams had hired organ-grinders to play under Moore’s window when he was writing, that he had prosecuted the organ-grinders. Moore had a large garden on the other side of the street, a blackbird sang there; he received his friends upon Saturday evening and made a moving speech upon the bird. ‘I enjoy its song. If I were the bad man people say I am, could I enjoy its song?’ He wrote every morning at an open window on the ground floor, and one morning saw the Miss Beams’ cat cross the street, and thought, ‘That cat will get my bird’. He went out and filled his pocket with stones, and whenever he saw the cat, threw a stone. Somebody, perhaps the typist, must have laughed, for the rest of the tale fills me with doubt. I was passing through Dublin just on my way to Coole; he came to my hotel. ‘I remembered how early that cat got up. I thought it might get the blackbird if I was not there to protect it, so I set a trap. The Miss Beams wrote to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and I am carrying on a correspondence with its secretary, cat versus bird.’ (Perhaps after all, the archives of the Society do contain that correspondence. The tale is not yet incredible.) I passed through Dublin again, perhaps on my way back. Moore came to see me in seeming great depression.

  ‘Remember that trap?”Yes.”Remember that bird?”Yes.”I have caught the bird.’

  Moore gave a garden party during the annual festival of the Gaelic League; there was a Gaelic play by Douglas Hyde based upon a scenario of Moore’s, and to this garden party he invited the Catholic Archbishop, beginning the letter with: ‘Cher confrere’. The Archbishop did not answer. He had already in a letter to the Press invited the Archbishop to institute a stage censorship. ‘But, my dear Yeats, Archbishops are educated men. If there is some difficulty about a play, I will call upon him. I will explain. He will approve the play. No more mob rule. No more such trouble as we had about The Countess Cathleen. No more letters to the Press signed “Father of a Family”.’

  XX

  I was depressed; we had promised, seeing no other way, to bring over English actors for a week in every year for three years, and now the three years were up. Moore wanted to negotiate with Benson for a stock company, taught by English actors, or made up of actors chosen by Benson, or with such actors in the principal parts. At first it seemed probable that Martyn would find the money; I urged him to employ Gordon Craig, a young unknown man who had staged a Purcell opera at his own or his friends’ expense. But Martyn said with characteristic decision: ‘Henceforth I will pay for nobody’s plays but my own’. Perhaps somebody, or some committee, would take his place, negotiation dragged on; perhaps Moore’s unpopularity, or mine, made Benson hesitate. We had attacked Queen Victoria, said that she came to Ireland recruiting, that she had, in Moore’s words, driven through the city ‘a shilling between her finger and thumb, a bag of shillings under the seat’. William Fay and his brother, whose company of amateurs played in a Lockhart’s coffee-house, were putting their case, and all my Nationalist friends backing it. I summarized their arguments in Samhain, a little annual published in the interests of the movement. Any project that needed much money would have to promise good behaviour, and Ireland was turning tow
ards revolution, but I did not give my own opinion. As yet I had none, and if I had I would have held it back.

  I felt that Moore wanted the professional stage that he had known all his life. I wanted to keep him in good humour till Diarmuid and Grania was finished; we had learnt from the performance, and he had just accepted my sketch of a new second act. Then I wanted to write; I had been organizing for ten years and if I joined Fay I saw no end to it. I felt acutely my unpopularity and told my publisher not to send my books for review in Ireland, a decision kept for many years. A. H. Bullen, Elizabethan scholar, a handsome man with a great mass of curly grey hair, at that time my publisher, came to Dublin. ‘He told me’, I wrote to Lady Gregory, ‘that he was amazed to find the hostility of the booksellers. A---, he declared, seemed hardly to like to speak my name. I am looked upon as heterodox. The Secret Rose was particularly disapproved of, but they spoke with hostility, too, of The Shadowy Waters.... Memory of the Countess Cathleen dispute accounts for a great deal. Bullen found the Protestant booksellers little better, asked if T. C. D. disliked me. B---, the College bookseller, said, “What is he doing here? Why doesn’t he go away and leave us in peace?” Bullen was rather drunk, but his travellers gave the same account. He had tried to sell a book of Carleton’s, too, and said that Carleton and I were received with the same suspicion. This was, of course, because of Carleton’s early stories. I imagine that as I withdraw from politics my friends among the Nationalists grow less and my foes more numerous. What I have heard confirms the idea that I had at the time of the Countess Cathleen row, that it would make a serious difference in my position.’ I had withdrawn from politics because I could not bear perplexing, by what I said about books, the simple patriotic men whose confidence I had gained by what I said about nationality.