by Kerry Bolton
Yeats saw the mythic and spiritual as the basis of a culture, providing the underlying unity for all cultural manifestations, a “unity of being,” where, writing in reference to Byzantine culture: “[The] religious, aesthetic, and practical life were one . . . the painter, the mosaic worker, the worker in gold and silver, the illuminator of sacred books were absorbed in the subject matter, and that of the vision of a whole people.”[144]
Archetypes & the Multitude
Yeats held that symbols had an autonomous power of their own in the unconscious. It was these symbols, age-long inherited memories, upon which the artist and the poet drew as the source of creativity.
To Yeats, “individuality is not as important as our age has imagined.”[145] The daimons[146] of the ancient memories acted upon the individual, and one’s creativity was an expression of these forces. These symbols and images could be brought to consciousness and expressed artistically via magic and ritual; hence Yeats’ involvement in metaphysical societies such as the Golden Dawn and Theosophy. Additionally, the “occult” provided a literally hidden culture that was above and beyond the crassness of democracy, of the herd, and of material existence, hence its being termed the “Royal Art,” where again, as in traditional societies over the course of millennia, a priestly caste, at the apex of a hierarchical society, served as the nexus between the terrestrial and the divine, serving as that axis around which High Culture revolves.[147]
Yeats’ poetry was intended as an expression of these symbols of the unconscious and the archetypal. This resurgence of these age-long memories required a “revolt of soul against intellect now beginning in the world.”[148] What is here called “intellect” was the advance of rationalism, scientism, and Enlightenment doctrines that had destroyed man’s nexus with the divine embodied in traditions and hierarchical social orders, and which has repressed man’s spiritual nature in favor of the crassly material. Spengler referred to the same cultural predicament when he wrote of the conflict in the final stages of a civilization between “blood” and “money,” the “intellect” being the superficial that is at the service of money, “blood” being a metaphor for the traditional (i.e., the organic).[149]
Yeats, like D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, et al., was particularly concerned that commercialism would mean the pushing down of cultural values in the pursuit of profit rather than artistic excellence. Hence, he called for a revival of aristocratic values. He lamented that “the mere multitude is everywhere with its empty photographic eyes. A declaration of war on the masses by higher men is called for. Everywhere the mediocre are coming in order to make themselves master.”[150]
His appeal was to the artist and to the individual of taste and culture, for, as Nietzsche had pointed out, culture is the faculty that distinguishes the human from other organisms. In this spirit, Yeats applauded Nietzsche’s philosophy as “a counteractive to the spread of democratic vulgarity.”[151]
This suspicion of democratic vulgarity, specifically what appears to be a condemnation of the democratization of literature known as the “news media,” was poetically expressed, for example, in 1921 in “The Leaders of the Crowd”:
They must to keep their certainty accuse
All that are different of a base intent;
Pull down established honour; hawk for news
Whatever their loose phantasy invent . . . [152]
Here Yeats is condemning the leveling effects of the democratic media, pandering to the lowest denominator for the sake of maximum profit via the largest market, part of a general commodification of culture, which was why Yeats, like Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Pound, et al., deplored the democratization process.
Yeats’ keen sense of historical context is reflected in “The Curse of Cromwell.” Here he identifies the English Revolution as the inauguration of the stage of “Money over Blood,” in Spenglerian terms: the victory of the merchant class over the traditional order, which was to be re-enacted in the French Revolution.[153] The Bolshevik Revolution was born of the same spirit of materialism against spirit and culture. All three revolutions were carried out in the name of “the people” against the traditional rulers, only to create a greater tyranny in the service of money. Spengler had written in The Decline of the West: “Practical communism with its ‘class-war’ . . . is nothing but the trusty henchman of big Capital, which knows perfectly well how to make use of it.”[154] “In this sense, the interest- politics of the workers’ movements also belong to it [capitalism], in that their object is not to overcome the money-values, but to possess them.”[155]
Cromwell’s English revolution has had lasting consequences for the entire West. The dominion of money over culture and tradition that Cromwell inaugurated has never been overcome. America was founded on the same Puritan money ethics and continues to spread that spirit over the farthest reaches of the world.
Cromwell’s “murderous crew” have brought forth “money’s rant” on the blood of what is noble:
You ask what I have found and far and wide I go,
Nothing but Cromwell’s house and Cromwell’s murderous crew,
The lovers and the dancers are beaten into the clay,
And the tall men and the swordsmen and the horsemen, where are they?
And there is an old beggar wandering in his pride
His fathers served their fathers before Christ was crucified
O what of that, O what of that?
What is there left to say?
The specter of Puritanism has haunted the entire world ever since, “far and wide.” Nobility of character, regardless of “class”—itself a vulgarization of the traditional castes—was destroyed by the inauguration in the West of the reign of money by Cromwell, and one that was not overcome, but rather adopted by its supposed “enemy,” socialism, as Spengler was to point out. Yeats, as “The Curse of Cromwell” shows, was one of the few to realize the full depth and lasting significance of Puritanism under whatever name it might appear.
Spengler pointed out the nature of Puritanism in the same spirit as Yeats, referring to Puritanism, not only in the West, but its analogous manifestations in other cultures in their cycle of decay, which “lacks the smile that had illuminated the religion of the Spring . . .[156] the moments of profound joy in life, the humour of life.”[157] Yeats discerned the same: “The lovers and the dancers are beaten into the clay/And the tall men and the swordsmen and the horsemen, where are they?”
Gone are those of noble tradition, those who served as part of a long heritage, “the tall men”; the old gaiety of the peasant village, the squire’s hall, and aristocrat’s manor has been beaten down:
All neighbourly content and easy talk are gone,
But there’s no good complaining, for money’s rant is on.
The artists, once patronized by the aristocracy, must now prostitute their art for the sake of money on the mass market, as scriptwriters, and “public entertainers” to sell a product. All individuals are now producers and consumers, including the artist producing for a consumer market.
And we and all the Muses are things of no account.
Yeats considered himself heir to a tradition that has been repressed by democratic vulgarity, and he lived in service to that tradition, now virtually driven to the catacombs under the dead weight of “mass culture,” which is nothing more than consumerism posturing as “art,” “literature,” and “music” manufactured according to market demands. He and a few others of the same temperament lived in the service of High Culture as contemporary troubadours “against the modern world” to uplift the spirits of the remnant who have managed to maintain their nobility in the face of the crass:
That the swordsmen and the ladies can still keep company;
Can pay the poet for a verse and hear the fiddle sound,
That I am still their servant though all are underground.
; Order from Chaos
One product of democracy and capitalism that Yeats feared was the proliferation of those he regarded as inferior people. Yeats advocated planned human upbreeding and joined the Eugenics Society at a time when eugenics was a widely held belief among the intelligentsia. As with his political and cultural views, however, his outlook on eugenics had a mystical basis, relating reincarnation to the race soul. In his 1938 poem “Under Ben Bulben,” Yeats calls in eugenic terms for Irish poets to sing of “whatever is well made,” and “scorn the sort now growing up,” “all out of shape from toe to top.” In this poem, there is a mixture of the mythic, reincarnation, the race soul, and eugenics. There is an immortality of the soul that parts one in death only briefly from the world:
Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities
That of race and that of soul
And ancient Ireland knew it all.[158]
The eugenic and the divine combine within the artist:
Poet and sculptor do the work
Nor let the modish painter shirk
What his great forefathers did,
Bring the soul of man to God,
Make him fill the cradles right.
However, in the modern age, “The greater dream had gone. Confusion fell upon our thought.” It is the duty of the cultural-bearing stratum to set the culture anew by remembering what had once been:
Irish poets learn your trade
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top,
Their unremembering hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds.
Yeats’ antidote to the modern era of decline is to return to the traditional order of peasant, squire, monk, and aristocrat:
Sing the peasantry, and then
Hard-riding country gentlemen,
The holiness of monks, and after
Porter-drinkers’ randy laughter;
Sing the lords and ladies gay
That were beaten into the clay
Through seven heroic centuries;
Cast your mind on other days
That we in coming days may be
Still the indomitable Irishry.
Returning to eugenics, Yeats had On the Boiler published the same year, where he endorsed the psychometric studies that showed intelligence to be inherited, and expressed concern at the proliferation of the unintelligent.[159]
In “The Old Stone Cross,” Yeats compares the modern era to traditional society:
A statesman is an easy man,
He tells his lies by rote;
A journalist makes up his lies
And takes you by the throat;
So stay at home and drink your beer
And let the neighbours vote
Said the man in the golden breastplate
Under the old stone Cross
Because this age and the next
Engender in the ditch . . .[160]
The democratic farce, with its politicians, newspapermen, and voting masses, is not worthy of attention. The modern cycle is also dealt with in “The Statesman’s Holiday,” where:
I lived among great houses,
Riches drove out rank,
Base drove out the better blood,
And mind and body shrank.[161]
The aristocracy of old, the noble lineage of blood, of familial descent, has been replaced by the new rich, the merchants, our new rulers are those who measure all things by profit.
Fall & Rise
In 1921, the year prior to Mussolini’s assumption to power, Yeats had prophesied in “The Second Coming” the approach of a figure from out of the democratic chaos, a “rough beast” who would settle matters amidst a world where, when “things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.”
The theme is reminiscent of Spengler’s account of the return of “Caesarism” at the end of Civilization, in a type of last hurrah, or final dying breath when the Civilization briefly reasserts itself against money and returns to its founding values.[162] In the Spenglerian cyclic paradigm, there is not only a decline and fall of a civilization but an interregnum where the “new Caesar” emerges from the decadent epoch to inaugurate a revitalization of the civilization. Yeats’ poem opens with an allusion to the “turning” of the historic cycles:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;[163]
Here Yeats is portraying history as a cycle reminiscent of a wheel, where the axis around which the civilization revolves is that of Tradition, but as the civilization advances along the path of cyclic decay, it begins to fall asunder as the axis of Tradition is no longer strong enough to hold the structure of civilization together. “The falcon cannot hear the falconer”: “modern” man in the last phase of every civilization no longer hears the call of his Tradition, or metaphorically, his “blood.” He is detached and loses the anchorage of the axis of Tradition. Consequently everything falls apart: the civilization dies, and its light is extinguished, existing perhaps only in the form of ruins of once great monuments, of the Colosseum and the pyramids. Although Yeats had worked out his theory of history prior to reading Spengler, he found the coincidence between his views and those expressed in The Decline of the West, “too great for coincidence,”[164] or perhaps what one might call in Jungian terms synchronistic.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
One can read in the above what appears to be then the growing tide of Bolshevik revolution amidst the loss of tradition, having described Marxism as “the super-head of materialism and leading to inevitable murder.”[165] The answer is the rise of a strong leader who will get civilization back on course, the “new Caesar” that Spengler later saw in the possibility of Mussolini.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.[166]
Like Spengler, Yeats saw hope in Fascist Italy: “The Ireland that reacts from the present disorder is turning its eyes towards individualist Italy.” In particular, he admired the educational reforms and cyclic historical doctrine of Italian Fascist philosopher and Minister of Education, Giovanni Gentile, stating in 1925 before the Irish Senate, of which he was a member, that Irish teachers should study the methods that Gentile had enacted in Italian schools, “so to correlate all subjects of study.”[167] The following year Senator Yeats[168] stated that the Italian educational system was “adapted to an agricultural nation” which was applicable also to Ireland, “a system of education that will not turn out clerks only, but will turn out efficient men and women, who can manage to do all the work of the nation.”[169]
In 1933, the year after Éamon de Valera came to power, Yeats sought to formulate a doctrine for Ireland that would be a form of “Fascism modified by religion.”[170] History consisted broadly of “the rule of the many followed by the rule of the few,” again reminiscent of Spengler’s idea of a “new Caesarism” that follows on the rule of plutocracy at the end phase of a civilization. For Yeats, the rule of the few meant a return to some form of aristocracy.[171]
That year, 1933, Yeats met General Eoin O’Duffy, leader of the Irish Blueshirts, whom Yeats thought might be capable of overthrowing de Valera and instituting a sound government. O’Duffy, a hero of the Irish revolt and Michael Collins’ principal aide, created a mass movement, one of the many “corporatist” movements that were sprouting up all over Europe and further afield in the midst of the Depression, and Eire was almost brought to civil war between h
is “Blueshirts” and the IRA.[172] Yeats approvingly regarded the Blueshirts as part of a worldwide movement of “fascism”[173] and wrote three marching songs for them. These sang of the heroes of Ireland, and of the need for a renewed social order:
When nations are empty up there at the top,
When order has weakened and faction is strong,
Time for us to pick out a good tune,
Take to the roads and go marching along . . .
However, Yeats, like Lewis, Evola, and others, was suspicious of any movement that appealed to the masses, and of what he saw as the demagoguery of the Fascist leaders in appealing to those masses. This was regardless of the fact that the masses were being won over to national ideals and away from the internationalism of the Communists.
Even Spengler expressed reservations about Fascism because of its nature as a mass movement, writing that:
