WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18565, 24 November 1923, Page 1 (Supplement)

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS.

THE CELTIC REVIVAL. BY KOTARE. The Nobel prize for literature has been awarded this year to William Butler Yeats (pronounced " Yates,'*, if you please). Yeats is generally recognised to-day as the greatest Irish . poet who has, written ;in English. On the ground of his own i splendid achievements in literature he is ■ worthy of any honour his contemporaries j can do him; but the glory of this high j distinction must be shared by all the j members of that little Irish group who ! have contributed to the Celtic revival, | one of the most significant and most i potent literary movements of our times. | eats is the dominating figure of the j revival; most would agree to fiat. but i in a great triumvirate he is only primus inter pares. J. M. Synge, strange son of genius, furiously girding at a world I order that had doomed him to an early ; grave, while the ideal can drowse and ! drivel out his sheltered days to the furthest limit of senility, a gigantic mind | o'er informing the tenement of clay and ; setting a pace that soon laid " our brother the ass." a helpless wreck by the roadside; A.E. (G. W. Russell); mystical, i too, but the embodiment of commoni sense for ail that, not the most brilliant lof the trio, but having his powers best !in hand, seeing not only ends, but the : means to realise them —these twain stand with Yeats head and shoulders above the lesser men that found in Ireland their | inspiration, that wrote only of Ireland j and for her, and by the irony of fate, j added a new literary glory to England. Ireland and Poetry. I Ireland has produced a surprisingly ; inadequate quantity of poetry of the highest rank. One would say that the Celtic temperament would express itself most a-Rurally in poetic form. There is the vision, the emotional glow, the feeling for colour, all the qualities that should make for poetic inspiration. But the matter-of-fact Englishman and Scot have occupied all the highest places in Parnassrs Hill. There has been no other nation since the world was that can boast a literary achievement, either in quality jor in quantity, - comparable with the : glorious poetic . heritage of the . phlegmatic i English race. - | In prose Ireland has found her true j medium. But it seems that the old i spell is broken. And it is largely due ■to Yeats that this is so. The Celtic i fire that flamed in others only j into incoherence, has become at last the pure light on the altar. The sense of I something far more deeply interfused has : ceased to be lost in vague emotion, and has become as far as might be clearly | articulate. "Hie Celtic temperament has found at last its voice, has created its own symbols* and can bring its own great vision home to the hearts of men. For the Celt has always sensed life, as a mystery. He is not primarily interested in the fact that two and two make four. As Bernard Shaw has demonstrated in " John Bull's. Other Island." thai has pat him at a grave disadvantage when dealing with the more practical Saxon. " Life is to him a thing of passion and . beauty." He P ii* not so " much concerned with the outward show of things. The inward and spiritual grace that tie material embodies is what appeals to him. So it is the straggling soul of Ireland that Yeats has tried to interpret to a world too much engrossed in the things it can see and taste) and handle. Yeats the Artist. But Yeats is an artist to his finger tips. He might * easily have become a propagandist : he might have harnessed his Pegasus to a political chariot. And the result would have been pure tragedy. He has kept in the clear upper air. He has not sullied his art with the dust of conflict. He has kept his eyes on the stars. So he has moved among the great legends of his race, the strange embodiment of a nation's aspirations and visions and sorrows and hopes and fears, the finest expression, the only expression, of the nation's heart. He conceived that here he would find for the present generation and for coming days the one pure fountain of inspiration. " Every new fountain of legends is a new intoxication - for the , imagination of the world." The big things were sensed long ao; we have missed our way and wander in a savourless world of scientific facte. But our fathers have enshrined their discoveries ; the only discoveries worth while, in the stories that oome from the morning of the world. The symbols by which life shall find its escape from the arid wilderness of ' science and business and matter-of-fact are there in the legends ready to our hand. The Mystic. ilt is plain, then, that Yeats is no mere facile versifier of the obvious. He .is essentially a mystic. It is the things not seen that matter most to him. A thing never is what it appears on the surface. Its true meaning is to be apprehended not by the reason but by a kind of mystical clairvoyance. This sense of • the deeper i meaning has brought him to endow with I •personality the impulses and presences 1 that he believes he can perceive even m life's commonplaces. The little people are real to him. Sometimes this tendency ! leads him precariously near the ridiculous. Take this for example from prose work. "Ideas of Good and | '£vil." * 4 AH sounds,'; 1 all colours, - ail | forms, either because of their pre-ordained I energies or because of long association, i evoke indefinable and yet precise emotions, or as I prefer to think, call down ! among us certain disembodied powers 'whose footsteps over our hearts we call i emotions."' An exquisite idea, exquisitely i expressed, but perilously close to utter j .surdity. - , ... . That was written some 25 years ajp, 1 and he has gone much further along the i same, path since. The wonder is that 'he should be as intelligible as he is. We : are apt to jrdge everything in the light !of experience:: and,. Yeats very soon ; reaches a point where we cannot follow 1 him. - But that is the way of all mystics. The main thing is to be sure that he is : after something. Sometimes it is hard Ito believe that; but be has left us so magnificent a body of pure poetry, , his | symbols, even when we cannot fathom «i»m. blend in such a pure perfection of I melody that we are content to swing I nwfie. of his music i though £b' rich words cinvey no clear 1 mug to - ur minus. > Hie mystic's first task has always been ; to relate' his 5 vision with the other conI tents of his mind. Words are a poor medium after all, and when the mystic j has established a complete , unity in his own soul, he finds himself, {are to face with: the hopeless task of expressing himself through words that were not zr'Ae to carry the meaning he perforce must put upon them. As with Blake, words cease 'to have their ordinary value; probably : from some fitness of sound 'they are appropriated as symbols of an idea or .a vision. But they have that value only for the seer. The . plain man grapes among,; them in bewilderment. Yeats has not fully succeeded where others, have failed ; Hut for all that he ranks among jtua first of contemporary poets.