The Life of W. B. Yeats: A Critical Biography / Edition 1 available in Paperback
The Life of W. B. Yeats: A Critical Biography / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0631228519
- ISBN-13:
- 9780631228516
- Pub. Date:
- 04/25/2001
- Publisher:
- Wiley
The Life of W. B. Yeats: A Critical Biography / Edition 1
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780631228516 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wiley |
| Publication date: | 04/25/2001 |
| Series: | Wiley Blackwell Critical Biographies |
| Edition description: | Revised ed. |
| Pages: | 432 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.14(w) x 9.07(h) x 0.93(d) |
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Chapter One
Victorian Cities: London and Dublin
* * *
In 1888 Henry James recalled his first sight of England, twenty years earlier. He had arrived by ship and he remembered how `the sense of approach was already intolerably strong at Liverpool' and how `the perception of the English character of everything was as acute as a surprise' (James 1905: 2). Many Irish men and women have shared this experience of the foreignness of England on first disembarking at that same port. The young W. B. Yeats frequently made the journey to Liverpool on his grandfather's craft, though perhaps because he first set foot in the country as a very young child, we have no description of a sea voyage to the neighbouring island as Irish rite of passage, to set beside those of various other Irish writers. Reveries Over Childhood and Youth, by contrast, records the excitement of a return journey to Ireland through Liverpool. In fact the England in which Yeats was to spend much of his life plays surprisingly little part in his writings and is specifically referred to only three times in his poetry.
Yeats as a schoolboy in London seems to have been almost completely immune to the undoubted atmospherics of the world's largest metropolis. The city in which his family settled in 1877 for sufficient time for the future poet to attend a school, the Godolphin in Hammersmith, was unquestionably a challenge to the imagination. The paintings of Turner had opened English eyes to the beauty of an urban sunset. Whistler did for London's famous fogs what Turner haddone for sunsets (J. B. Yeats disapproved of Whistler, but his son felt that his work reflected an aesthetic in which `creation should be deliberate'; Au: 83). And it was in 1877 that Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold; The Falling Rocket, that distillation of an urban mood, inspired by a fireworks display on the Thames, led to Ruskin's denunciation of his talent and a famous libel trial. London as artistic subject was available and controversial. In the 1890s Yeats's friend Arthur Symons would evoke it as an art object in its own right: `continually changing, a continual sequence of pictures, and there is no knowing what mean street corner may not suddenly take on a glory of its own' (Symons 1918: 164).
The young Irish schoolboy Willie Yeats, who spent over three formative years in London in the late 1870s and early 1880s does not seem to have been affected by such urban aestheticism. The pages in Reveries Over Childhood and Youth dedicated to this period of his life are marked by the settled distaste with which he had viewed most things English, as if he had in part been responding to the world though his mother's jaundiced eyes. For it is she who had taught him, on noticing how the English kiss at railway stations, `to feel disgust at their lack of reserve'. Since she hated London and longed for Sligo, so her son for some days told himself `that whatever' he `most cared for had been taken away' (Au: 32). No identification with his surroundings, normal in childhood, filled this vacuum. Rather, a developing sense of his own distinctiveness as an Irish son of an artist overcame him and anti-Englishness began to coalesce, indeed, into a distinct sense of the individual and his world. Where another imaginative and sensitive child might have developed a romance of the city, Yeats began to respond to the glamour of a country whose name was danger. At school, he tells us: `Anti-Irish feeling was running high, for the Land League had been founded and landlords had been shot, and I, who had no politics, was yet full of pride, for it is romantic to live in a dangerous country' (Au: 35).
One part of London did, however, offer some attractions: the garden suburb of Bedford Park where the family, as we saw, took a house in the spring of 1879. Yeats remembered that `for years Bedford Park was a romantic excitement' (Au: 42) and how when they lived there he and his siblings `could imagine people living happy lives as we thought people did long ago when the poor were picturesque and the master of a house could tell of strange adventures over the sea' (Au: 43); almost as he would have done in an ideal Sligo.
The London of the 1870s and 1880s in which Yeats spent part of his boyhood and young manhood was a city undergoing rapid transformation. Its ancient `agglomerating habit' (Waller 1983: 24) had, since the the 1860s, become a kind of mania. Indeed the population in the greater London conurbation grew by 125 per cent in the period 1861 to 1911 when the population of England as a whole grew by 80 per cent. A huge public housing crisis developed and by the 1880s there was a widespread sense that London, a city increasingly of migrants and immigrants (from a depopulating countryside, from various parts of the Empire, including Ireland, and from repressive regimes in Europe), was becoming dangerously overinhabited. There was a reactive fear that the city was becoming overpopulated by undesirable elements. Voices were raised to express an apocalyptic premonition of imminent urban degeneration, there were social commentators who suggested the forced removal of unwanted people. One less drastic response was for capital to flow to the periphery of the city, where new middle-class housing estates sprang up to meet the demand for salubrious dwelling-houses with rail links to the city, secure from the threat posed to daily life by the immiserated urban poor. The era of the speculative builder had arrived with a vengeance.
Where Sligo had not been immune to the forces of Victorian change, in London the Yeats family was close to the heart of the monster. And its power was not only extending in tentacles of suburban blight — it was changing the social environment and the psychic landscape. For the nature of city life was altering, as one social historian reports: `Between 1870 and 1900, there was a sterilisation of public space as activities moved into specialised and purpose-built locations: the music hall, sports ground and department store. Streets were not used in the same way as they had been in the past in British cities, or as they continued to be used in most European cities' (Olsen 1976: 67). The era had dawned when privacy would be a prime value in the world of Pooterism and the semi-detached villa on a suburban line. The city Dickens had celebrated, in which public and private intermingled in the thronged streets of a socially variegated capital, was rapidly disappearing. Class and location became instinctively associated in a universally comprehended mental map, with the working class East End as a version of the inferno.
Bedford Park was purpose-built in the era of the purpose-built; but, paradoxically, its purpose was to resist the spirit of the times. The district which G. K. Chesterton dubbed `the fantastic suburb' and described as a `queer artificial village' (Chesterton 1992: 139) had been deliberately envisaged as an artists' colony by its architect, Jonathan Carr. When the Yeatses moved in it was still very new and worthy of comment. In 1881, for example, Harper's Monthly Magazine featured it in a lengthy illustrated article which caught the atmosphere of the place, where in little more than three years, 350 houses had been constructed (many of them built by Norman Shaw in the `Queen Anne' style; interior decor tended to be William Morris). Harper's commended its sanitary efficiency (which deteriorated swiftly), its elegant lack of fussy ostentation, its air of instant antiquity, its adjacency to the city by rail, its co-operative stores, club-house (built in 1879 and progressively open to men and women `on a perfect equality') and a tavern named after Chaucer's Tabard Inn.
The journalist reckoned that the suburb met two needs. It offered a solution to the problem that `the people who most desired beautiful homes were those of the younger generation whom the new culture had educated above the merg pursuiv of riches, at the same time awakening in them refined tastes which only through riches could obtain their satisfaction' (`Bedford Park' 1881: 482). In other words, affordable chic. And in as much as it functioned co-operatively, it did not mean that an exquisite environment and domestic regime had to be bought at the cost of destructive personal toil. The Yeats family should have thrived.
To a limited extent it did. The children enjoyed the garden and the adventure of living in so new a place. A governess was employed for the young ones, while Willie continued to attend the Godolphin. There was a cheerfully complete Devon family holiday in 1879, when Willie was fourteen. There, Jack's talents as an artist began to show themselves in a family of sketchers. Willie even started to excel in school, though he hated its bullying and English complacency. He exhibited great promise in scientific subjects. His father was gratified when in his son's last year at the school the `reports were written in rose-water'. He recalled: `"Of exceptional ability" was a blessed phrase that once occurred, and I said to myself, "He will be a man of science; it is great to be a man of science"' (Murphy 1979: 122). J. B. Yeats remained true to Comptean positivism.
Perhaps the family's comparative happiness in these years, despite the chronic money worries, can be explained by the simple fact that they were occupying a house that they liked. For in the Anglo-Irish way, houses were a measure for the Yeatses not only of social standing but of how well life was being lived, a tribute paid to ideals of amplitude and traditional hierarchy. Their home at this time 'was the biggest and most elegant house the Yeatses ever lived in alone as a family' (Murphy 1995: 47) so perhaps there was an underlying familial satisfaction that, in a world of suburban mediocrity and privacy, the Yeatses were living with stylish creativity among talented people in the Bedford Park collective (as well as artists, there were professional men and retired military types), as befitted the family of the Irish gentleman John Butler Yeats believed himself to be. For although the house lacked grandeur of scale, it was very charming and airy, its formal rooms giving on a well-designed garden that extended the living space in the integrated fashion William Morris had originated when he had built his own house at Upton, near London, in 1859/60. (MacCarthy 1995: 165).
Certainly Yeats as poet was to take `the house' as theme. He would discover in the metaphor of a country house in its landscape, dynastic and cultural lessons for a degraded present. His ideal was to become a complex blend of memories of the long avenues of the Big Houses in County Sligo, Lissadell pre-eminently, from which his essentially middle-class family had been excluded in his childhood years, of images drawn from the poetry of Jonson and Marvell, and his own social experience of country-house life as a guest, in Ireland and in England, when he was a mature man. Anything approaching an actual, secure personal hold on even an approximation of such a residential ideal was not to be his until after his marriage, in his fifty-second year.
Yeats's parents were never again really to enjoy a sense of being at ease in an appropriate house with their children around them. For in 1881 the family returned to Ireland and domestic uncertainty reasserted itself. Perhaps one may account for Yeats's preoccupation in his work with the ideal of the house as not only a consequence of a characteristic caste concern, but as a compensation for what had been so absent in his own immediate background. There was no Yeats house, for memory and legend to mythologize, until the poet purchased a Norman keep at Thoor Ballylee in County Galway in 1917 — only a series of addresses. And these (the Sandymount villa, a long, low cottage on the cliffs at Howth, a villa overlooking Howth harbour, the Bedford Park residences) symbolize the social precariousness of a family existing between the rooted, customary life of the country-house ideal, with, in Ireland, its estates and agreeably collective life of farm, stable-yard, horse-boxes, well-run kitchen and the modern anonymity of a suburban villa in such a place as Dublin's Rathgar, to which the Yeatses must at times have felt themselves ignominiously reduced. Yeats himself recalled in a letter written in 1922 `that Rathgar villa where we all lived when I went to school, a time of crowding & indignity' (CL1: 9). The offence still rankled after almost forty years.
The return to Ireland in 1881 meant a new school for Willie — the Erasmus Smith High School in Harcourt Street in central Dublin. It is from this period that we begin to have records of the poet-to-be as he was seen by people other than his immediate relatives and to gain an impression of the young person beginning to emerge from the family chrysalis. The scientific bent, already noted in London, blossomed, in the way of boyhood's obsessional hobbies, into a fascination for entomology. His capacities and curious incapacities began to reveal themselves too. His school-fellows sensed his reserve and observed his distracted air. He could not spell and had no talent for foreign languages. What may have been a mild form of dyslexia and a tone-deaf ear made it always difficult for Yeats to rectify these deficiencies in later life. He was also very shortsighted. However at school, as one acute fellow pupil recalled, he evinced strong ability in Euclid and algebra. Arcane geometric and mathematical interests would resurface in later life.
Yeats was in fact somewhat older than his fellows in the High School classroom and was already displaying in elaborate conversations the wide reading he had done and his commitment to the discussion of general issues of life and art. He spoke of T. H. Huxley and Herbert Spencer. He seemed to come and go as the fancy took him, as if attendance was a matter for himself alone. Shortly after he left the school in December 1883, he loaned one senior pupil A. P. Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism, a book to which his Aunt Isabella Pollexfen had introduced him.
By his own admission, Yeats departed school with `small Latin and less Greek'. It scarcely mattered, for his real education had been going on elsewhere. Daily he and his father left Howth for the train journey to Dublin, where J. B. had his studio just off St Stephen's Green in the centre of the city. They breakfasted together there and Yeats returned from the nearby school at midday for a light meal. Edward Dowden frequently joined them; he was now a distinguished professor at J. B. Yeats's old university and author of a popular study of Shakespeare which had made his academic name in 1875. There was much wide-ranging talk. Charles Johnston, another High School boy, who shared Yeats's burgeoning interest in theosophy and the occult — which dates from this period — recorded his impressions of that studio, where the poet experienced his intellectual awakening:
Many of the finer qualities of Willie Yeats' mind were formed in that studio on St Stephen's Green, in long talks on art and life, on man and God, with his sensitive, enthusiastic father. One remembers the long room, with its skylight, the walls of pale green, frames and canvasses massed along them; a sofa and a big armchair or two; the stout iron stove with its tube; and, filling the whole with his spirit, the artist stepping forward along a strip of carpet to touch his work with tentative brush, then stepping back again, always in movement, always meditating high themes, and now and then breaking into talk on the second part of `Faust,' or the Hesperian apples, or the relation of villainy to genius. (Mikhail 1977: 9-10)
It was hardly surprising that Yeats preferred the studio to the High School, where the headmaster measured the worth of his pupils solely by examination prowess.
The Dowden who came visiting in those Dublin days was no longer the impecunious young man who had looked on a Trinity chair with trepidation. The Professor's stipend and fees for the diverse literary tasks he performed (as well as income deriving from the family business in Cork) had brought him a large house in the prosperous suburb of Rathmines. His mild bohemianism found occasional expression; he irritated the Board of his college by lecturing on risky literary topics. He was an advocate of Whitman, with whom he had corresponded. He was becoming too a pronounced Unionist. Although his marriage was less than happy, he must have seemed an object lesson to the young Yeats in how it was possible to shape a cultivated life in the Ireland in which his own future might lie. For a time Yeats seems to have hero-worshipped the elegant, ironical older man until, as is the way with such youthful enthusiasms, he began to suspect feet of clay. J. B. Yeats had always reckoned Dowden a traitor to his own poetic nature, one who had forsaken the cause of art for security (though he was not averse to borrowing money from his old friend, who never pressed for repayment). He told Dowden that all his poems had `a furtive look' (Eglinton 1914: 187), as if Dowden were ashamed to confess himself a poet. W. B. Yeats, later, when his own personal identity as the distinctive kind of Irishman he became, was more secure, was to indict the professor and family friend as the chief representative of an intellectual Unionism which in Victorian Dublin had betrayed Irish possibility.
In the autumn of 1882, in Howth, Yeats caught sight of a red-headed girl driving in a dog-cart. He was smitten. She was in fact a distant cousin, so a meeting came easily enough with the Laura Armstrong for whom Yeats wrote some of his earliest verses. In 1889 he remembered her `wild dash of half insane genius' (CL1: 155). Perhaps he was recalling her performance in Vivienne and Time, a play he had written for her. It was put on in a local judge's house in Howth, in the home of the family's landlord in fact.
Armstrong was engaged to be married when Yeats fell for her. She would scarcely have taken his poetic suit too seriously. The daughter of an army sergeant, she had set her cap higher than the son of an impoverished portrait painter. For in the stratified, genteel world of Protestant Dublin Yeats's status was unquestionably anomalous. Trinity College would have helped to clarify that uncertain marginality which made him a somewhat solitary figure as a Dublin schoolboy, even when putting on a play he had written in Judge Wright's imposing redbrick house overlooking the sea at Howth. At Trinity he could have mixed with the scions of Ireland's Protestant middle class (the Ascendancy proper preferred Oxbridge for their sons) and, by his gifts for debate and conversation, have made a name for himself in the Historical Society, where many an Irish lad of parts had caught the public eye and established the contacts which in later life could compensate for lack of family means. Yeats's paper qualifications, when he left school in December 1883, were too poor to allow matriculation. Instead, in May 1884, he enrolled in Dublin's Metropolitan School of Art, Kildare Street, in sight of his father's alma mater but different in tone and social composition for it was less conventional politically, with a touch of bohemian eccentricity among its students. There he met George Russell (AE), just the kind of person Trinity would scarcely have produced for him as a possible soul-mate. They shared a dislike of the School's teaching methods, which Yeats later characterized as `destructive of enthusiasm' (Report 1906: 60).
Russell was a native of Lurgan, County Armagh. He was the son of an accountant who had settled in Dublin when George was eleven. When Yeats met him, he had been attending the art college in a desultory way since his arrival in Dublin. He had a fluent, facile style with the brush, but (much more significantly for Yeats) he painted the visions which rose up before him like emanations from some alternative reality. Russell was one of those people (William Blake, whose work Yeats was to edit in the 1890s, was another) who have what can only be described as the capacity for waking dreams. He truly `saw' the mythological personages, the angelic or fairy folk, who appeared before him as in some mysterious tableau. For Yeats, who was beginning to revolt against his father's materialism and the realistic Rembrandt-inspired art he had turned to after his Pre-Raphaelite phase, Russell was like a messenger sent to set him on a true path. He was a godsend to a dreamy youth who was beginning to make poetry, not painting, his avocation.
Russell was not the only acquaintance outside the social circle of the family whom Yeats was developing at this crucial point of his development. There were others as involved in heterodox speculation as Russell who were ready to explore occult possibilities. Among them were Charles Johnston (son of a Unionist MP and fanatical Orangeman from the North of Ireland) and Charles Alexandre Weekes, another High School boy who sought occult illumination. Yeats also became a regular attender at the Contemporary Club, which met initially in the college rooms of a Trinity don, C. H. Oldham, and then took a more public address in Grafton Street, near the college but distinct from it. The Club for Yeats was an introduction to political, social and cultural debate superior to anything the college's Historical Society could have supplied, with its essentially undergraduate atmosphere. For under the Protestant Home-Ruler Oldham's liberal-minded regime, its meetings attracted some of the most energetic and persuasive of contemporary public speakers. The ethos was one of freedom of speech, with no holds barred. Yeats encountered a range of Irish opinion, the kind of thing the Unionist-dominated university would not have offered. And he was challenged to overcome innate shyness and personal insecurity when confronted by polemical opposition. He remembered it as a test of his `self-possession' (Au: 94). His experience in the Club meant that Yeats put himself to the hard school of public debate, seeking out controversy where he could find it, as a means of honing his own rhetorical skills.
The principal orator at the Contemporary Club and Yeats's chief antagonist was John F. Taylor, in whom the young poet faced the force of histrionic authority in the service of a windy, essentially pious Catholic nationalism (James Joyce rescued Taylor from obscurity, only to immortalize him as a Victorian windbag in the `Aeolus' chapter of Ulysses). In the figure of John O'Leary, another Club disputant, he met a man whom, he believed, exerted a more effective and profound (because moral) authority in the Ireland of his day.
John O'Leary (1830-1907) was a Fenian (the revolutionary Brotherhood that had risen in 1867 to assert Ireland's right to independence by force of arms), an associate of those who had provoked alarm in the Sligo of the poet's childhood. For the Yeats who was beginning to suspect Dowden of an artistic bad faith disguised in an ironical pose, and whose own father must at times have seemed a loquacious but ineffectual dilettante, O'Leary was a new mentor. And where Taylor was loudly contentious, O'Leary was courteous and noble in demeanor. He had been sentenced to twenty years' penal servitude in 1865 for treason-felony, which added romance and danger to his record for the impressionable youth inebriated by the headier passages of Shelley's romantic and revolutionary verses (Yeats had made Prometheus Unbound a `sacred book'; Au: 87). O'Leary had been released from prison in England in 1871, on condition that he would not live in Ireland. His protracted Parisian exile invested his return to the country in 1885, when Yeats met him, with further glamour. Here was a man who had suffered and had kept the faith. That he was bookish and cultivated added to the appeal of a figure who began to occupy the role of a substitute father for the poet.
In Reveries Over Childhood and Youth O'Leary is represented as a foil for Dowden, the one's austere, classical dignity rebuking the other's suave, condescending provincialism. With O'Leary came his politics, the antithesis of Dowden's and apparently more hard-edged than J. B. Yeats's unfocused if good-hearted national feelings. He was anti-clerical, suspicious of Parnell and, as a landlord himself, his attitude to tenant rights was decidedly cool. O'Leary believed that ultimately `a people who are not prepared to fight in the last resort rather than remain slaves will never be made free by any sort of Parliamentary legerdemain whatsoever' (Pierce 1995: 87). But he combined this with a conviction that a country must be worth fighting for. It must, accordingly, have a cultural life of its own and its citizens must be the epitome of the moral virtues. There was something Robespierre-like in O'Leary's sense of the revolutionary as just man, and his obiter dicta, brief and stoical, in a country of garrulous overstatement, impressed Yeats enormously: `There are things a man must not do to save a nation' (Au: 96); `I have but one religion, the old Persian: to bend the bow and tell the truth' (P&I: 2) (O'Leary was quoting a character in a Charles Kingsley novel). Yeats judged that O'Leary had `the moral genius that moves all young people' (Au: 95) and deemed him `the one indispensable man' (Mem: 52). Late in life he reflected in valedictory self-assessment that he was `a nationalist of the school of John O'Leary' (L: 920-1), as if to remind himself that he had never abandoned the curious blend of public spirit with individual hauteur in the service of a revolutionary elitism, which O'Leary had preached verbally and represented in what Yeats had regarded as his dignified person ('O'Leary's noble head'; `Beautiful Lofty Things').
O'Leary, so different in his austere single-mindedness, which Yeats subsequently was to find abstract and uncreative, shared with Yeats's father a pecuniary problem. Although he had embarked on a medical education, he had no actual profession. He depended on the rents from his property in County Tipperary, which dried up during a bitterly fought rent strike that lasted from 1889 to 1891. A man who counselled that it might be better to wait 100 years before Home Rule lest it be `an altogether wrong sort' (Pierce 1995: 86), was directly affected by the more pragmatic revolutionary energies which had been released in a swiftly modernizing Ireland by the Land War of the 1880s. Agitation and consequent land reform were transferring power from the ascendant landowning Protestant caste, with its ecclesiastical, legal and professional penumbra (in which decent, even ample, livings could be achieved), to an emerging class of former tenant farmers who believed they had at last come into their national inheritance. They were flexing their political muscles in a demand for Home Rule, of a kind which O'Leary the landlord found distinctly threatening.
In June 1885 Yeats met a Miss Katherine Tynan to discuss with C. H. Oldham plans for the recently founded Dublin University Review, at her father's residence (`a pretty thatched ... farmhouse'; LTNI: 85) in Clondalkin, then a village to the west of Dublin. Tynan's father was a prosperous Catholic farmer and entrepreneur, who had seen to it that his daughter, one of twelve children, had been provided with a genteel, convent education. His hopes for his daughter were well founded, for not only did she share her father's strong support of Parnell's crusade for legislative independence, she displayed distinct literary gifts. In 1885, through a fatherly subvention, she published a first volume of verse; it met with a gratifying critical reception. Seven years older than Yeats (though she claimed she was only four years his elder), she already had the self-confidence to conduct a regular 'evening' of literary conversation in her Clondalkin home. For Yeats, this was an introduction to the middle-class Irish Catholic world that hitherto would have been closed to him in Sligo and Dublin. Friendship developed. Tynan would stay with the Yeatses in Dublin and the poet corresponded frequently with her on his family's return to London in 1887. It is in these letters from the English capital that we find the young poet trying out ideas about poetry and, with Tynan (whom he feared, rather presumptuously, might wish to marry him) as confidante and sounding-board, dealing surprisingly frankly with the insecurities of late adolescence amid minor illnesses and frequent debilitating nervous crises.
Among the pressures provoking these distresses were a father's financial inadequacy and a growing awareness that, by finding employment himself, he could ameliorate the family's exiguous circumstances. To make matters worse, his father disapproved of his literary son seeking regular work. In a letter of 12 February 1888, this anxiety about work, and the conflict with his father, comes to a head. Yeats felt caught in a `web of thoughts' (CL1: 48): `To me the hope of regular work is a great thing for it would mean more peace of mind than I have had lately but Papa see all kinds of injury to me in it' (CL1: 48). Things did not improve. In June the family finances reached a crisis. Yeats was at work, with a July deadline, on a collection of Irish folk tales for the Camelot Classic series which he hoped would bring ready cash. Still his father disapproved, yet the poet bowed to practical literary industry. Over the next two months the word `work' recurs in his letters in the context of the lists and prospectuses of a young man desperate to establish himself in a career or its literary equivalent. It all took its toll. As usual the motherly Tynan received the cri de coeur: `I have had three months incessant work without a moment to read or think and am feeling like a burnt out taper' (CL1: 92). He had been reduced to a job of mere transcription to raise some ready cash.
Autumn was a rush of proofs and scrabbling for new commissions, with `as much work' as he could manage, `only badly paid' (CL1: 95). In mid-December he began to compose `The Lake Isle of Innisfree', with its longing for `peace ... dropping slow' (CL1: 121). A year of literary drudgery reached its ironic conclusion when Oscar Wilde, then thirty-four years old, invited Yeats for Christmas dinner at the elegant home he shared with his wife in Tite Street. He thought the young man alone in London. The poet was impressed by the precious interior of the house beautiful, by Wilde's studied act of self-fashioning and by his commitment, in disdain of the market-place, to art as a form of moral vision. It was this latter aspect of his fellow Irishman's experiment in living that was to mean most to Yeats. He would remember how Wilde in his person and in his critical writings had espoused a doctrine which made the aesthetic a force for the spiritual transformation of human consciousness. After dinner Wilde read aloud to Yeats from the proofs of his iconoclastic treatise `The Decay of Lying'.
Yeats's conflict with his father was not only about the conventional employment which J. B. Yeats believed was inimical to creative freedom. It was, even more seriously, a religious conflict. The mature Yeats recalled the religious crisis he had experienced as a youth in the following terms:
I was unlike others of my generation in one thing only. I am very religious, and deprived by Huxley and Tyndall, whom I detested, of the simple-minded religion of my childhood, I had made a new religion, almost an infallible Church of poetic tradition, of a fardel of stories, and of personages, and of emotions, inseparable from their first expression, passed on from generation to generation by poets and painters with some help from philosophers and theologians. I wished for a world where I could discover this tradition perpetually, and not in pictures and in poems only, but in tiles around the chimney-piece and in the hangings that kept out the draught. (Au: 115-16)
This passage, despite Yeats's claim of generational uniqueness, seems to recall a quintessentially Victorian crisis of faith — the dogmas of orthodox Christianity melting in contact with Darwinian evolutionism and scientific humanism. Yet there was little in his immediate family background to suggest that he was so earnestly instructed in Christianity that he would have found its abandonment psychologically disturbing. For although he had been baptised and confirmed and had been taken to church by his mother, religion played little part in his upbringing, despite the clerical tradition of the Yeats family. In fact Yeats as a man and writer shows few signs that his developing imagination was much affected by religion as he could have experienced it in church service and school teaching as a child and youth. His religious feelings in childhood were expressed in private prayer and an overly scrupulous conscience. In as much as Christian liturgy and symbology surfaces in his poetry, it is the iconography of a more Catholic faith that fires his imagination (the true cross, the Madonna with Child, the image of the Holy Family), rather than anything redolent of the low-church, Biblically earnest piety of the nineteenth-century Church of Ireland. Losing orthodox Christian faith can scarcely have been traumatic.
What Yeats may mean in the passage cited above is that for him religion is related to his perennial sense that life must be comprehended systematically. For the poet refers there to his first attempt to construct a religious system of his own. And, as we shall see, religious speculation and system-building are inseparable in Yeats's mature intellectual processes, in a way which makes his spiritual nature not at all one that deals in piety, faith or good works, but in systematic knowledge, structured ritual and organized power. In this, of course, the no-nonsense scepticism of Huxley and Tyndall and his father's Comptean rationalism were just as much the enemies of what he sought to build as of the childhood Christianity he had shed.
So religious ambition meant that he was seriously at odds with his father. In the early months of his friendship with Russell, both paternal parents, in a nice irony, disapproved of the new relationship. Russell's father deprecated Yeats as an influence luring George away from orthodox faith; J. B. Yeats feared that Russell would encourage his son in the foolish irrationality, towards which he seemed attracted like a moth to a flame. Oddly enough, though, it was Dowden's account of Shelley's diabolism at Eton College, in his biography of the English poet, which prompted the friends to try raising spirits. The fundamental conflict between Yeats and his father, however, was about much more than a parent's concern at a son's youthful follies among dubious companions. A clash of outlooks and of ways of being in the world was in the making.
How intense this conflict became is clear in the disturbing incidents that the poet described in the first draft of an autobiographical account (it remained unpublished in his lifetime) of the years following the family's return to London in 1887. The poet remembers a quarrel over Ruskin which turned physical. Ruskin `added to [the poet's] interest in psychical research and mysticism' (Mem: 19), enraged J. B. Yeats. One night he broke the glass of a picture with the back of his son's head as he put him out of the room. Another night he ended a similar argument in a challenge to fisticuffs.
'I was much among the Theosophists, having drifted there from the Dublin Hermetic Society' (Mem: 23), recalled Yeats of his early years in London as a young man. The Dublin society had been founded on 16 June 1885, with Yeats as the president of a small group of spiritual neophytes. George Russell, no joiner of groups, disapproved of their aims and kept himself apart. It was an early hint of the controversy Yeats would discover in the worlds of occultism and Theosophy where disagreements were endemic. It was also an introduction to the way in which leadership and conflict are inevitably joined in human affairs.
When Yeats wrote to John O'Leary in 1892 that `the mystical life is the centre of all that I do & all that I think & all that I write. It holds to my work the same relation that the philosophy of Godwin held to the work of Shelley & I have all-ways considered my self a voice of what I beleive to be a greater renaisance — the revolt of the soul against the intellect -- now beginning in the world', (CL1: 303), he was identifying what had been his principal preoccupation since he had left the High School: the occult. And the occult was to remain a controlling, energizing obsession throughout his life.
Yeats's fascination for and deep interest in the possibility of occult reality and powers which might be acquired through esoteric knowledge, had, by 1892, brought him into contact with some individuals whom his rationalist father must have found alarming in the extreme. They were individuals who fed on a diet of controversy in a world of claim and counter-claim to magical authority and of scandalous revelations of fraud and deception. The Dublin Hermetic Society itself had been founded in 1885 in emulation of a branch of the Theosophical Society in London (Kuch 1986: 14). One of the most extraordinary of the many extraordinary figures who made late Victorian London an emporium of exotic cults, creeds, social experiments and outright religious lunacies was the presiding genius of Theosophy.
Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-91) was a native of southern Russia. Following a life of colourful international gypsydom, marital confusions and (or so her followers were required to believe) religious initiation in the tenets of what came to be called Esoteric Buddhism, at the hands of occult masters in Tibet, she fetched up in London in 1887. She had founded the Theosophical Society in 1875 and had communicated her religious discoveries to the world in general through her treatise Isis Unveiled (1877). From 1879 to 1885 she had been in India where she established the headquarters of her movement. One of her main, if not unambiguously loyal, advocates in Europe was A. P. Sinnett, author of Esoteric Buddhism (1883).
Sinnett's book, together with his earlier more anecdotal text The Occult World (1881), was Yeats's introduction to a way of thinking about reality that retained the supernaturalism of Christian faith, but in a totally different doctrinal context. Sinnett's writings revealed that there were living in the world, in the secret land of Tibet or in inaccessible northern India, a group of spiritual masters, or Mahatmas, who shared their occult knowledge of the very nature of the universe with selected individuals with whom they could communicate at a distance. Madame Blavastsky was one such privileged messenger, who was empowered to inform all who would listen of the truths vouchsafed to her. High romance indeed for the young poet already entranced by Shelley's Neoplatonism, full of revolt against scientific positivism. In his early poetry, India, the India to which Sinnett's writings had introduced him, became indeed a version of the Sligo of his dreams, a secret place apart, where, as on an isle in a western lake, the modern world could be escaped in a transcendental eastern peace. As `An Indian Song' (subsequently `The Indian to His Love') had it: `there we will moor our lonely ship/ And wander ever with woven hands'. Yet it is also a place, like the west of Ireland, where immemorial folk wisdom has its roots in deep antiquity, of great spiritual power, where the gods `dwell on sacred Himalay — / On the far Golden Peak; enormous shapes — /Who still were old when the great sea was young' (`Jealousy', subsequently retitled `Anshuya and Vijaya').
Sinnett's books, moreover, offer a thoroughgoing system, albeit one that comes from oral sources. Yeats, who esteemed his mother's innocence of literature in her direct contact with the `folk', must have been pleased to hear that the Mahatmas were the custodians of an unwritten tradition. It was a system too that claimed to take account of science, even that of Darwin. The opening sections of Esoteric Buddhism seek indeed to defend the new creed as a higher form of evolutionary theory, one that avoids the scientific reductionism of the Darwinian version. Sinnett attacked what he termed `Dense materialism which cannot conceive of consciousness as anything but a function of flesh and blood' (cited in Oppenheim 1985: 161). And in letters in The Occult World, purportedly from a very Mahatma himself (one Koot Hoomi Lal Singh), Yeats heard a refreshing counter-voice to his father's philosophical complacency — `Full always of Mill and humanitarianism' (Kuch 1986: 11). Here was secret doctrine, anti-materialistic and reserved for the privileged few:
The mysteries never were, never can be, put within the reach of the general public.... The adept is the rare efflorescence of a generation of enquiries; and to become one, he must obey the inward impulse of his soul, irrespective of the prudential considerations of worldly science or sagacity. (Sinnett 1881: 101)
Sagacity, whether prudential or not, was something Yeats, in his lifelong quest for occult knowledge and power, never quite abandoned. His sensibility was always to be marked by extremes of enthusiasm, held in check by a canny circumspection, and his intelligence, in a curious dialectic, was simultaneously credulous and sceptical. Throughout his life he remained hungry for belief, but inveterately the investigator who seeks demonstrable proof of the supernaturalism he could not live without. When in 1886 the Dublin Hermetic Society, which he had sought as president to direct towards metaphysical rather than ethical concerns, became a branch of the Theosophical Society, Yeats disassociated himself. Theosophy as a body of esoteric doctrine appealed to him to be sure, but not the atmosphere of pious moral uplift and vaguely progressive self-improvement its initiates also encouraged (Chesterton similarly noted the Theosophists' irritating complacency as they `waited for others to rise to the spiritual plane where they themselves already stood'; Chesterton 1992: 148-9). Nevertheless when an Indian missionary, Mohini Chatterjee, had arrived in Dublin in 1885 to instruct the members of what would become the new branch, Yeats had begun to waver. And Blavatsky worked her curious magic too.
Chatterjee, from whom, the poet later testified, he learnt more as a young man than from any book, was an Indian associate of Blavatsky. Yeats recalled him as a `handsome young man with the typical face of Christ' (Au: 92) and as `beautiful, as only an Eastern is beautiful' (cited in Sri 1994: 62). This orientally glamorous personage was helping HPB, as Blavatsky was known to her acolytes, to recover in London from the damning report on her activities in India, which the Society for Psychical Research had commissioned in 1884. That report had concluded that HPB's repertoire of mediumistic tricks — flowers mysteriously falling from ceilings, `precipitated' letters which inexplicably arrived bearing messages from the Mahatmas, astral bells, music, moving bodies — was wholly fraudulent. Its conclusion managed to be both damning and oddly celebratory. It had determined of HPB that she was `neither the mouth-piece of hidden seers, nor ... a mere vulgar adventuress; we think she has achieved a title to a permanent remembrance as one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting imposters of history' (cited in Washington 1993: 83).
It was the impact of Chatterjee and especially that of Blavatsky herself that for a time made Yeats a member of a section of the Theosophical Society. From Chatterjee he had acquired that pose of world-weary longing for a reality where will is forsaken for dream, which invests such early poems as `The Song of the Happy Shepherd' and `Fergus and the Druid'. Blavatsky offered information about that reality. The poet, it seems, fell under the spell of her extraordinary, even mesmeric, personality. It was not that he disregarded the evidence of the Psychical Society's report (though he did reflect in 1889: `the fraud theory in its most pronounced form I have never held for more than a few minutes as it is wholly unable to cover the facts'; Mem: 281). For as Peter Washington has observed of Theosophy's attractions: `it appeals to passionate amateurs and spiritual autodidacts' (Washington 1993: 53). Yeats as a young man was assuredly both and, essentially motherless, was vulnerable to the authority of a powerful woman (though he detected something masculine in her, the spirit of a female Dr Johnson) who unabashedly sought to dominate through the force of her legend and her bizarre, psychologically uninhibited personality. In 1889 Yeats dubbed her in an American newspaper `the pythoness of the Movement'. Still in the coils of her strange hold on him, he tried in a flippant tone to assert his intellectual independence as he reports how HPB `holds nightly levees at Lansdowne Road. She is certainly a woman of great learning and character. A London wit once described her as the low comedian of the world to come' (LTNI: 84). `Great learning' was accompanied by ample girth. Her favourite dish was fried eggs floating in butter and on this diet she weighed in at over seventeen stones.
Madame Blavatsky's learning was not in fact as substantial as her person. It was almost completely second-hand, even plagiarized. An early critic of her book Isis Unveiled assessed that volume as a `rehash of Neo-Platonist and Kabbalistic mysticism with Buddhist terminology' (cited in Oppenheim 1985: 165). A proven charlatan, she yet managed to influence individuals whose distaste for the materialism of much Victorian science made them ready to grasp at spiritual straws. Derivative as it was, her system of doctrines did, nevertheless, amount to a largely coherent account of reality which could command credence among the susceptible. They were doctrines which Yeats was to embrace and hold to with great tenacity. For, as Graham Hough has argued, they were, when stripped of much nonsense and a farrago of mystificatory mumbo-jumbo, the elements of what can be deemed a perennial occultist philosophy, which has found expression in a variety of religious traditions. Ignoring for the most part the complex cosmology of the Society itself, Yeats took from Theosophy the doctrines which can be made readily comprehensible in Hough's succinct summary:
The idea of an age-old secret doctrine, passed on by oral tradition from generation to generation. He found a God seen only as the boundless, Absolute, impassible, unknowable, indescribable. He found a world consisting of emanations from this Absolute, and souls who were sparks or separated fragments of the same substance. Their object was to return to the One from which they came, but to accomplish this they have to make a long pilgrimage through many incarnations, live through many lives both in this world and beyond. (Hough 1984: 39)
The concept of each soul experiencing many lives meant much to Yeats. It appealed at the outset, one may surmise, to his own youthful crises of identity, as his early encounters in Dublin and London offered him a range of possible modes of life and challenged the shy, insecure youth to acts of social self-definition: in 1933 Yeats remembered how in his youth `sometimes the barrier between [himself] and other people filled [him] with terror' and recalled how he had in `an extreme degree the shyness ... that keeps a man from speaking his own thought' (LTNI: xii). The doctrine of many lives allowed that the self was not an absolute but a site of possibility. The principle of karma, also annunciated in the Theosophical creed, implied too that a spiritual destiny would work itself out in many times and places, in many human guises. Perhaps Yeats's mature belief in the dramatic mask as a self-fashioned expression of a complex, polar human identity, has its source in the occult doctrine of the soul's reincarnation, which he espoused as a young man under the tutelage of the redoubtable HPB. For in both conceptions the self is denied singularity, is subject to change and reconstitution. In the one it experiences dramatic duality; in the other plurality.
In Theosophy Yeats also met with the idea that reality is antinomial, that, in Hough's words, there are `two alternating phases in the self-unfolding of the one — active and passive, objective and subjective; called in Isis Unveiled "the days and nights of Brahma"' (Hough 1984: 40). Such a teaching must have touched a chord in the youthful poet whose verses were beginning to exhibit a fascination for a world imagined in terms of ubiquitous oppositions and polarities — between the domesticated and the wild, between the quotidian and the claims of fairyland, between sun and moon, between reality and romance.
There was more to Yeats's membership of the Theosophical Society in London than a desire for religious truth. Theosophy itself had emerged alongside the rich Victorian sub-culture of Spiritualism. That movement offered to those who put their faith in mediumship more than a metaphysical account of the universe. It promised direct experience of the supernatural, contact with the dead and with spirits. It was an era of table-rappings and spirit manifestations. Spiritualism had indeed almost achieved the status of a religion in its own right as belief in orthodox Christianity waned in a climate of middle-class speculation about such topics as mesmerism, phrenology, clairvoyance and faith healing. The young Yeats was avidly curious about all such matters. Madame Blavatsky, who had begun her strange career as a religious teacher in the increasingly competitive world of mediumship, had by the 1880s abandoned its practice and she discouraged her disciples from experimentalism in the spiritualist field. No doubt as a proven fraudster, she had good reason to direct acolytes to the doctrinal content of her teachings, rather than to her discredited `powers'. She told Yeats that `mediumship and insanity are the same thing' (CL1: 164).
Yeats was not to be curtailed. As if to give him his head, while keeping the reins in her own hands, HPB allowed the formation in 1888 of an esoteric section of the London lodge, in which Yeats sought to expand his knowledge of practical magic, whatever the personal risks. In January 1888 he had attended a seance in Dublin at which he had been forced to rely on the opening lines of Paradise Lost (he could remember no prayer) to protect himself from a terrifying experience. Then his `whole body', already depleted by bouts of anxiety, depression and by chronic minor infections, `moved like a suddenly unrolled watch-spring'. He was `thrown backward on the wall'. `For years afterwards', he confessed, `I would not go to a séance or turn a table and would often ask myself what was that violent impulse that had run through my nerves. Was it a part of myself — something always to be a danger perhaps; or had it come from without, as it seemed?' (Au: 103-5)
The following month he heard from one of HPB's disciples of the even more terrible things which can happen at a seance. He reported to Tynan who had been present with him at the Dublin `occurrences'. His tone in this letter is chastened; he is at pains to set her tender Catholic conscience at rest by assuring her that he has learnt his lesson: `When she heard I had been to a spiritualistic sceance, she told me she had gone to many till Madame Blavatsky told her it was wrong. So you need not fear for spiritualistic influence coming to me from that quarter. She told me of horrible things she has seen or beleives she has seen at sceances. She has seen the medium thrown down by a spirit and half-stifled, the marks of fingers coming on his throat and finally his clothes set on fire' (CL1: 49). Yeats's curiosity conquered his caution, however, in other branches of occult experiment, even if his hold on mental health occasionally seemed tenuous. At the end of 1888 he wrote to Tynan of one of his `collapses' and of how a `single vigerous conversation, especially if any philosophic matter comes up, leaves me next day dry as a sucked orange' (CL1: 118).
Yeats was clearly living on a knife-edge in these difficult years of his young adulthood. But he pressed on, whatever the psychological and social risks, with attempts to disprove the Victorian materialism he found so threatening. In February 1890 he wrote to Tynan once more, whom he had earlier assured that mesmerism held no appeal, of recent experiments in mesmerism and clairvoyance he had made with colleagues and of their shattering implications: `To prove the action of man's will, man's soul, outside his body would bring down the who[le] thing — crash — at least for those who beleived one but then who will beleive' (CL1: 212).
It was perhaps inevitable that the young Yeats should have been intrigued by the experimental aspect of the material he was studying (and his commitment to such study provoked his expulsion from the esoteric section of the Theosophical Society in 1890). His sister `Lily' was gifted with `second sight' in the Irish way. Uncle George Pollexfen's servant, Mary Battle, also had `the gift'. The folklore of the Irish countryside too, with its hauntings, revenants and changelings, its Hallowe'en games to placate the walking spirits of the dead, was an integral part of everyday awareness, even in the middle-class world of Yeats's childhood. What seems like an innate Gothicism in the Ascendancy caste's preoccupation with dynasties, misalliance, ancestral houses — repeated motifs in their nineteenth-century fictions — meant as well that spectral matters were never far from a social consciousness that anticipated, but feared it could not prevent, imminent ruin. The uncanny and the weird often broke through the surface of polite Irish convention, as spiritualist obsessions, and like the prevailing hypochondriasis, found ready soil as the political unconscious maybe sensed seismic, threatening shifts. In an Irish setting, the young Yeats, who on reading a work of astrology persuaded fellow esotericists to seek to summon the phantom of a flower from its ashes under a bell-glass, is certainly no singular figure. There is something characteristic, even traditional, about his Irish instinct for the spooky and the domestic supernatural (Foster 1989: 251-3).
There were, however, implications in the mid-Victorian occultism, which quickly became an obsession with Yeats, that were anything but traditional; for more was at stake than the scientific world-view which Yeats thought could come crashing down if his kind of experimentalism could gain a hearing. The role of woman was intimately bound up with the emergence of Spiritualism and of occultism as a kind of counter-culture in a society governed by ideals of empiricism, scientific validity and material, technological progress.
The great majority of the mediums who had made Spiritualism a fashionable craze and something of a religious cult in Britain since the 1840s were women. A historian comments of the period: `the typical spiritualist experience involves a female medium and a male spirit or control' (Skultans 1983: 17). A census of hallucinations by the Society for Psychical Research in the years 1889-92 confirmed this gender difference when it found that women were twice as prone as men to mediumistic experiences (ibid.). In one way this gender imbalance among the Spiritualists simply tended to consolidate conventional Victorian estimates of female character. For the irrationalism of the Spiritualist and occult movements, their opening up of zones of bizarre experience and belief beyond the purview of empirical philosophy, could readily be dismissed as forms of pathology, hysteria, at the further reaches of typical feminine psychology. Theoretically such an analysis might have seemed satisfactory to a certain kind of rationalist; in experience, however, more complex relations and exchanges between the sexes were being actualized and figured in the worlds of mediumship, magic and occult adeptship. For although the image of female medium and male spirit control might appear to replicate in the supernatural world the social relations of the actual one, the feminized spirituality vested in mediumship gave to women a symbolic power as desire, insecurity, religious doubt and sexual ambivalence circulated in the foggy late Victorian cultural atmosphere. Woman, as Alex Owen has argued in The Darkened Room, became a site of divinatory, almost priestly energy, at the point in Victorian culture where medicine, law, and science vied with religion for authority over the human body (much was made of corporeal manifestations, even to the point of eroticism, in the Spiritualist repertoire).
As a version of female power, Spiritualism and its sister, the Victorian flowering of occult magic, became a handmaid of the vigorous contemporaneous crusade for female emancipation. Indeed, a religious fashion which may have had its roots in the `frustrations experienced by uncounted mid-Victorian women barred from gainful and stimulating employment by social conventions, with horizons limited by the predictable routine that domestic responsibilities imposed' (Oppenheim 1985: 10), in time became one inspiration in an emancipatory movement that sought a social order in which such frustrations would be a thing of the past. For Spiritualism and occultism offered a mode of behaviour for women which signalled that they would no longer accept the prescribed roles that society had determined for them in suburban isolation from political and social power.
For Yeats, occultism was a way of defining himself as a man who had revolted against his father's materialism. It did not, by contrast, offer him any stable vision of masculinity as he sought to carve a role for himself as an adult in the insecure space between the Ireland he considered his home and the England in which he tried to make his way. Indeed in stepping into the the world of occultism, he was entering a psychological zone in which sexuality and gender, the role of woman, and correlatively, the role of man, were set in question in the eddying confusions of power relations and of gendered identity itself. It was not a world for a young man whose own sense of selfhood and of masculinity were inchoate. In a poignant, even distressing letter of 6 September 1888, written from Blenheim Road to Tynan, Yeats, on the day on which he received a first proof of his first volume of verse, The Wanderings of Oisin and other poems (1889), admits to the terrible self-consciousness that he fears has made him an inarticulate victim of his own nature. It is a letter which betrays the anxiety of the man who is not as yet assured of a self, who has tried to make that uncertainty the stuff of his art:
Some thing I had to say. Dont know that I have said it. All seems confused incoherent inarticulate. Yet this I know I am no idle poetaster. My life has been in my poems. To make them I have broken my life in a mortar as it were. I have brayed in it youth and fellowship and worldly hopes. I have seen others enjoying while I stood alone with myself — commenting, commenting — a mere dead miror on which things reflect themselves. I have buried my youth and raised over it a cairn — of clouds. (CL1: 93-4)
There is in this fraught confession a history of self-inspection, of repeated assessments of many selves which seem to be mere reflections of an external world. The self is incoherent. That was something the worlds of Spiritualism and occult experiment confirmed. For not only were the two movements loaded with ambiguous messages about sexual difference and power exchanges between the sexes, but their intimacy with altered states of consciousness, trances, visions, out-of-body experiences, astral-travel, mediumistic possession, challenged the very basis of individual personality. As Owen astutely observes, mediumship in particular (and her words hold good for the other phenomena encountered in occultism and magical experiment) `helps to lay bare the paucity of any analysis based on the often unacknowledged notion of the unified subject. Mediumship, because it so often involved the dis closure of a multivalent and disruptive unconscious, revealed the inconsistency, heterogeneity, and precariousness of human identity' (Owen 1989: 226).
For the immature Yeats Theosophy and occultism performed one signal service. It offered social acquaintanceship with a range of spirited women for whom respectable domestic life in a Victorian marriage offered few attractions. Mrs Annie Besant, for example, the socialist activist and progressive advocate of women's rights, turned to the oriental creed in 1889. She had separated from her boring, authoritarian clergyman husband in 1873 to travel a well-publicized route that took her from secular atheism to Theosophy and prophetic leadership of a section of the movement after HPB's death in 1891. Yeats found her a `very courteous & charming woman' (CL1: 184). She became one of his occult experimental coterie, whose dabblings in practical magic led to Yeats's expulsion from the esoteric section of the movement in October 1890.
Florence Farr, the actress, and sexually free spirit, who in 1894 produced and acted in Yeats's The Land of Heart's Desire, also shared Yeats's occult interests. They began their friendship in 1888 and by May 1889 he trusted her sufficiently to read a scene of an earlier play The Countess Kathleen to her for comment. A year later she appeared in one of the two main roles in Todhunter's pastoral romance, A Sicilian Idyll. This had its première in the Clubhouse on an early summer evening in Bedford Park, where the residents were much given to fancy-dress balls, amateur theatricals and masques (Fletcher 1987: 65-7). The play itself, with its Alma-Tadema classical poses in self-conscious expression of a titillating sexual modernity, was of a piece with such cultivated entertainments for relaxed, mildly bohemian, metropolitan suburbanites at leisure. Fashionably progressive attitudes were aired amid the wine-glasses, the flower-boxes and good taste of a slightly precious night out. Farr, in the person of Amaryllis, a classical prototype of the New Woman, got to denounce marriage (her own had ended after four years, though she still employed her former husband's name). The ambiance was one of vaguely realized Sapphism (the published version of the play has an epigraph from the poet of Lesbos).
Yeats was enraptured by Farr's beauty and the enchantment of her voice. For on stage she and her fellow actor Heron Allen sought to speak verse with `a passionate austerity that made it akin for certain moments to the great poetry of the world.' (Au: 120-1). Farr possessed for the youthful Yeats `three great gifts, a tranquil beauty like that of Demeter's image near the British Museum Reading-Room door, and an incomparable sense of rhythm and a beautiful voice, the seeming natural expression of the image' (Au: 121).
Yeats understood that the occult was a feminized spirituality. In the revised and enlarged edition of The Celtic Twilight (1902) he averred that `women come more easily than men to that wisdom which ancient peoples, and all wild peoples even now, think the only wisdom' (CT2: 132-4). Furthermore he was entering on manhood in a era when the concept of masculinity was undergoing the sea-change which in the 1890s would allow the epicene heroes of Wilde's boulevard comedies to situate the androgynous dandy at the apex of a decadence that had its many layers of ambivalent and inverted sexuality. In 1873 Walter Pater had published The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, in which a series of impressionistic meditations in art history and literary criticism were an elaborately disguised paean to an equivocal aestheticized eroticism, at its most narcotic in his prose poem on the famously enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa. It influenced a generation for whom the idea of the beautiful in the 1880s and 1890s came charged with a bisexual voltage, when it was not in direct contact with socially repressed homoerotic energies.
For Yeats `beauty' was quintessentially a female attribute. Although he had entered a milieu in 1880s' London where sexual difference had been made problematic in all sorts of ways (Farr wore her hair short in the deliberate fashion of New Womanhood), his own sexual nature was positively heterosexual. Heterosexual, but not uncomplicatedly so. For constitutional shyness and social insecurity, together with a touch of Protestant Irish prudery (he was uncomfortable with friends' crude conversation), together with his sheer impecuniousness as a prospective suitor, meant that his sexual initiation was delayed until his thirty-first year. Some of the most anguished passages of the autobiographical draft which he began in 1915 recount with raw adult pain how the shock of sexual awakening in his teens inaugurated a lengthy period of unbearable sexual starvation and nervous tension. There he recalls how his struggle with his senses made him dread the subject of sex and `the almost unendurable strain' of his chaste life. His confession in that text to the effects of masturbation on his overwrought sensibility is a reminder that he lived at a time when, for all the sexual frisson of its art and social experimentalism, self-relief was regarded as moral pollution. It was `plain ruin' (Mem: 72) and filled him with self-loathing.
However difficult Yeats found the demands of the flesh, the object of his desire was the opposite sex. None of the friendships of his early youth seem to have involved the kind of homoerotic intimacy with another young man that had reached its Victorian apogee in Tennyson's regard for the short-lived Arthur Hallam and which had characterized the male-bonding atmosphere in which Pre-Raphaelitism had its inception. Yeats himself, in what he identified as an `incredible timidity' (Mem: 33) found it easier to make intimate intellectual contact with women, since in a man he always found `some competing thought' (Au: 153). For him, however, sexual desire was strikingly modulated by a sense of female beauty which art had stimulated, for all its urgent, bodily imperatives and frustrations. He was not necessarily unusual as a young man in the way he read the world in terms of literature and painting. Many literary-minded people instinctively do so. That, in as immediate and pressing a dimension of experience as the sexual, he so readily turned to iconographic representation as a means of coping with such a disturbed aspect of his life tells us, nevertheless, in a markedly distinctive way, something crucial about his sensibility. And it is something which offers a guide to the peculiar quality of his own artistic procedures, the governing principles of his oeuvre.
When Yeats remembered how Farr had seemed a very Demeter to his youthful eye, like a statue he saw frequently, he was recalling how, even as a young man, life and image were for him in complex relationship. A habit had established itself early whereby experience was interpreted in terms of its iconographic potentiality, its tendency to approximate to pre-existing forms, to enter relationship with its own dynamic capacity for taking on significance. An agenda had begun to be set, in which the poet's own life could be rescued from mere individual inconsequence and become the stuff of an exemplary, formal art. It could do so in an artistic transcendence as image among the many images which tradition and certain contemporary writers and artists had bequeathed to a world rapidly losing any significant form in the incoherence of urban modernity.
Images of women nevertheless had their direct effect on the young Yeats, as he confessed in 1915: `women filled me with curiosity and my mind seemed never long to escape from the disturbance of my senses, I was a romantic, my head full of the mysterious women of Rossetti and those hesitating faces in the art of Burne-Jones which seemed always anxious for some Alastor at the end of a long journey' (Mem: 33). In the poetry he composed in the 1880s Yeats was willing to represent himself as just such a Shelleyan figure, in thrall to an ideal of female beauty that represented sexual desire as a quest romance. The intensity of sexual longing finds expression in an erotically inspired dedication. Its object is unambiguously female, though Yeats does derive from the art and poetry of Morris, Swinburne and Rossetti, if not its equivocal images of sexual difference, then its acknowledgement of the unsettling power vested in the beauty of woman. For as Nina Auerbach has shown, in Woman and the Demon, Victorian culture, for all its attempts to restrict woman to the domestic sphere, was granting her, in its poetry and art, symbolic power as enchantress, sybil or goddess. The courtly hero on his quest (the Arthurian cycle of tales was a constant source of imagery) may be a figure of noble ardour, but he is captive to a power — his own desire — that the woman in her beauty provokes. She becomes masterful, dangerous, sinister, even mortally threatening, since her power so unmans the hero. Elizabeth Cullingford astutely comments on this process: `Woman' is granted immense textual and symbolical significance in order to disguise (or to maintain against increasingly vehement feminist demands) her lack of social significance' (Cullingford 1993: 34). Yet the permission so granted for woman to enter iconographic and textual space in art and literature — paradoxically — unleashes her power.
Yeats's 1880s' apprentice verse is populated by figures of woman as enchantress and as agent of occult power in a context of quest and death. George Bornstein (1995: 21) points out that: `Female magicians' appear in all four of the verse-plays that Yeats published at this initial stage of his career. His masters as he set his hand to verse-making were the Keats of `La Belle Dame Sans Merci' and the Shelley of `Prometheus Unbound' and, especially, `Alastor', as the images of Rossetti and Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelite school gave flesh to literary imagining. In Mosada (published in 1886 and the most fully realized of these early dramatic experiments) a Moorish lady, who is to be condemned by the Inquisition as a witch and who dies at her own hand, summons
a phantom fair
And calm, robed all in raiment moony white.
She was a great enchantress once of yore,
Whose dwelling was a tree-wrapt island, lulled
Far out upon the water world and ringed
With wonderful white sands, where never yet
Were furled the wings of ships. There in a dell,
A lily-blanchèd place, she sat and sang,
And in her singing wove around her head
White lilies, and her song flew forth afar
Along the sea; and many a man grew hushed
In his own house or 'mong the merchants grey,
Hearing the far-off singing guile, and groaned,
And manned an argosy and sailing died.
Woman is the enchanting, magically powerful alternative to the worlds of domesticity and commerce, but she can be deadly in her mesmeric `guile'.
Woman as beautiful temptress reaches its apotheosis in Yeats's 1880s' poetry in the figure of the fairy Niam in his first major poem, `The Wanderings of Oisin', which he completed in its earliest version in November 1887 after almost two years of dedicated work. The poem was the title poem of the poet's first collection. It was heavily revised in later publications. The question as to where it should stand in any collected edition of Yeats's poems became one of the many editorial cruces which have marked the publishing history of this most self-revising of authors (he came to fear that when placed at the head of his work, the poem tended to distract from what followed). For from the first Yeats was conscious that a poem is more than an individual work, that it finds richer meaning and new kinds of life in the many contexts in which it appears, until it rests in the canonical finality of a posthumously established Collected Poems. This means that, from a very early stage in his career, Yeats had a clear and abiding sense of himself as a poet, for all his social insecurity and personal and sexual timidity. The fact that over the years he returned frequently in his writings to `The Wanderings of Oisin' to comment on it, suggests that it was in this work that he felt he had come into possession of his own talent, had become sure of a poetic destiny. If so, he was assuredly right, for it was a truly impressive debut.
In 1931 Yeats offered what Harold Bloom has identified as `the most illuminating of his many insights into his own poem' (Bloom 1970: 100). In an introduction to his play The Resurrection Yeats wrote:
When I was a boy everybody talked about progress, and rebellion against my elders took the form of aversion to that myth. I took satisfaction in certain public disasters, and felt a sort of ecstasy at the contemplation of ruin, and then came upon the story of Oisin in Tir na nOg and reshaped it into my Wanderings of Oisin. He rides across the sea with a spirit, he passes phantoms, a boy following a girl, a hound chasing a hare, emblematic of eternal pursuit, he comes to an island of choral dancing, leaves that after many years, passes the phantoms once again, comes to an island of endless battle for an object never achieved, leaves that after many years, passes the phantoms once again, comes to an island of sleep, leaves that and comes to Ireland, to S Patrick and old age. I did not pick these images because of any theory, but because I found them impressive, yet all the while abstractions haunted me. I remember rejecting, because it spoilt the simplicity, an elaborate metaphor of a breaking wave intended to prove that all life rose and fell as in my poem. (W&B: 101-2)
Such a passage gives a critic leave to read the poem so summarized not only as autobiography, but as a poem of Victorian crisis, a revolt, couched as apocalypse, against the dominant myth of social progress.
Richard Ellmann took the autobiographical hint. He suggested that the three islands where Oisin spends 100 years apiece can be associated with the three phases of Yeats's early life: the isle of dancing and song with the Sligo of `Sindbad's yellow shore'; the isle of battles with his unhappy years at school in London when he was locked in futile conflict with his English school-fellows; and the island of sleep with the idyllic days in Howth (Ellmann 1964: 18). He also recognized how such a pattern, which Yeats himself, in his late poem `The Circus Animals' Desertion', saw as one of `Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose', was that not only of youth, but of life as a whole. Other critics have sought not only to read `The Wanderings of Oisin' as a social and human document, but as a work which gives insight into the poet's psyche. David Lynch makes much of the heavily charged eroticism of the work, with its crowded symbolic landscapes, which he finds all too open to a reading where the vain battle with a continually reviving monster in the second isle can be reckoned an oedipal conflict with the father which is repetitive, futile and issueless (Lynch 1979: 92-138). Another critic finds the `dusky demon' of the same book `orgasm incarnate' (cited in Archibald 1986: 87).
The most admiring account of the poem is Bloom's (though he addresses the poem in its revised form). He prefers it to some of Yeats's later and more widely regarded works. For Bloom `The Wanderings of Oisin' is a late and notable entry in the tradition of romantic quest poems in which the epic action of a major narrative becomes the vehicle for a subjective spiritual history. In this, Yeats observes the emotional trajectory of his high romantic precursors (Blake and especially Shelley) but makes his poem, for all its commitment to the direct expression of transformative feeling in the person of the poet/Oisin, subject to the implacable, divisive forces of nature. The poem ends with Oisin, who has abandoned his fairy-bride for love of his old warrior companions, arguing with the St Patrick who has conquered pagan Ireland with a new faith. When Oisin touches the earth, the weight of the ages falls on him and he perishes. It is an ambiguous victory, which allows Oisin's poetic imagination only the consolation of nostalgia. He will `go to the house of the Fenians, be they in flames or at feast'. For Yeats, if not for Oisin/Yeats (and the poem is the one where the poet and his hero are the least distinct) however, the ambiguity was potentially more tragic than nostalgic, since in entering so Shelleyan a subjectivity, he was forced to embrace `the quester's natural defeat as a victory ... of a man divided against himself, natural against imaginative, neither capable of final victory over the other' (Bloom 102-3).
Such a formulation for all its force lacks, it is necessary to add, a sense of history. Bloom is so anxious to set the text in the ideal dimension of a literary tradition that history — which is represented by the querulous voice of St Patrick in the poem — is ignored. For Patrick speaks to Oisin not simply as the voice of the reality before which the timeless world of vision in the land of youth must wither, but as a force for the very progress that Yeats had rejected in the poem's defiance of his own social world. In fact in Victorian Ireland St Patrick was not simply a figure in an antique source text from which Yeats took the matter for a poem, nor indeed just a folkloric motif (the debate between Oisin and St Patrick was extant in contemporary Irish folklore) but a living presence in national self-understanding. The Catholicism which was transforming Yeats's Ireland in the post-Famine period regarded the coming of St Patrick to the country in the fifth century as a progressive event, which had resulted in its own increasingly hegemonic if benign power over the social order. The centre of that power was St Patrick's College, Maynooth, the national seminary founded in 1795. Yeats, by contrast, offers in this initiatory work a vision of apocalypse in which the concept of progress itself seems paltry and sacrilegious in face of a Celtic Götterdämmerung in which old age consumes the pride of life, and death is preferable to mere existence among `a small and a feeble populace stooping with mattock and spade,/Or weeding or ploughing with faces a-shining with much-toil wet' in the land of St Patrick's `bell-mounted churches'.
It is these historical implications of Yeats's text which also make Richard Ellmann's negative critique of the poem wide of the mark. Ellmann reckoned that among the work's weaknesses were inconsistencies in its symbology: `a powerful contrast which Yeats draws in the poem between Oisin and Patrick, as representatives of pagan and Christian Ireland, seems irrelevant to the timeless portrait of life in the three islands' (Ellmann 1964: 19-20). In fact that contrast is of the essence since the pagan world of fairy is rendered in terms which make it seem non-teleological, non-purposive, ahistorical. It is repetitive, patterned as if obeying typological imperatives, cyclical. Yeats himself indeed, in his introduction to The Resurrection, as he thought of the image of life as a process of rising and falling, continued: `How hard it was to refrain from pointing out that Oisin after old age, its illumination half accepted, half rejected, would pass in death over another sea to another island (W&B: 102). He would be free not only of the biological and human facts of life, but of the progressive history over which St Patrick and his followers assume they have authority.
Presumably he would be led onwards by the fairy Niam. For she is the poem's female presiding genius. And `The Wanderings of Oisin' is a poem which, as Yeats told Tynan, contained nothing in `clear outline', and things `under disguise of symbolism' (CL1: 98), to which only he possessed the key, where a tapestry, a `cloud and foam' of interrelating images of bird, tree, water, sea, glimmers with indeterminate implication, like shot-silk in changing light. It is a poem which sets the magic power of enchantment against history; secret lore, the hermetic, against what is conventionally known of life and destructive time.
Yeats as he worked on this poem sought to comprehend much he had experienced and felt in his life. His mother had suffered her first stroke in the late summer of 1887, so it was also a time of anxiety. Both personal life and the work of creation took their toll. That autumn in Sligo he finished the poem and brought the last part round to read to his Uncle George. He could hardly read so `collapsed' he felt, his voice `quite broken' (CL1: 98). Subsequently he endured a period of weeks when his voice deserted him and he suffered a series of minor nervous collapses. That part of the poem, he told Tynan a year after he had finished it, `really was a kind of vision it beset me night and day' (CL1: 98). The poem as a whole has a dreamy visionary quality, and perhaps no moment seems more the stuff of dreams than that when Oisin first glimpses Niam:
Her eyes were soft as dewdrops hanging
Upon the grass-blades' bending tips,
And like a sunset were her lips,
A stormy sunset o'er doomed ships.
Her hair was of a citron tincture,
And gathered in a silver cincture;
Down to her feet white vesture flowed,
And with the woven crimson glowed
Of many a figured creature strange,
And birds that on the seven seas range.
For brooch 'twas bound with bright sea-shell,
And wavered like a summer rill,
As her soft bosom rose and fell.
A Rossetti temptress, with Burne-Jones coloration and William Morris costuming. Yet a vibrant erotic longing energizes the verse with youthful desire, despite the obligatory gesture, in such conventional Victorian imagining of alluring womanhood, to the female as death-dealer. This is the poem of a young man anxious to meet his own amatory destiny. He had not long to wait.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations.Preface and Acknowledgements.
Abbreviations.
Prologue: Sindbad's Yellow Shore.
1. Victorian Cities: London and Dublin.
2. The English 1890s.
3. Poems 1895.
4. Conflicts and Crises.
5. Patronage and Powers.
6. An Irish Ireland.
7. The Strong Enchanter.
8. The Mid-Life Mask.
9. Darkened Rooms.
10. The Lonely Height.
11. All Changed.
12. Occult Marriage.
13. The Weasel's Tooth.
14. Senator and Seer.
15. Visionary Modernist.
16. Home and Abroad.
17. An Old Man's Frenzy.
18. Stroke of Midnight.
Epilogue: Afterlife.
Works Cited.
Select Bibliography and Guide to Further Reading.
Index.