YEATS AND THE DRAMA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18571, 1 December 1923, Page 1 (Supplement)

YEATS AND THE DRAMA.

THE ROMANTIC REACTION,

• BY XOTABZ.

In his dramatic work, Yeats represents the reaction against 19th Century realism. Mid-Victorian drama moved in the false world of stage convention. It never seemed to get within hail of reality. Its figures postured in the same old way in the same old artificial environment. It never even tried to get to grips with the facts of life. The Victorians were so dazzled by their splendid achievements that they very easily elevated their own narrow standards into binding universal laws. Even the discoveries of Darwin, iconoclastic as they ultimately proved to be,'confirmed at first the contemporary worship of law. " We have seen the great uprising of the English spirit, the expansion of England to the ends of the earth; thus and thus did our fathers think and act; therefore thus shall all men think and act." Conventions may be good or bad; but a. slavish worship of convention in art and in morals is bound to lead sooner or later to futility and folly.

Darwin soon sent literature on strange paths. The drama became, for a time, mere photography of the lower elements of society and the human heart. The goal of art was meticulous reproduction of things as they are. Ibsen touched the drama with a giant's hand. He redeemed it from the curse of ultra-realism. He swept away the new realism which had become as conventional, in its own way, as the Victorian drama it has displaced. He cut his way down to the springs of action in the heart of man. It became almost an axiom with him that " what-, ever is, is wrong," He made the world face its motives, drag them into the light of day. No sane man would think or act in a certain way simply because his fathers had thought and acted so. What the majority think or commend is sure to be wrong. And Ibsen Was a seer and a poet; his realism was always transfigured by his imagination. With him, too, the things that lay beneath the surface and the show which had hypnotised his contemporary dramatists were the -. only things that mattered. Maeterlinck. Modern drama flows from Ibsen. But there has been a strong reaction against his ideas and ideals. In Belgium Maeterlinck raised the standard of romanticism. His men and women 'move like sleepwalkers in a world of shadows thin voices wail down endless corridors; the menacing nightwind moans through the grim turrets of lonely storm-beaten castles; even Nature shivers before the unintelligible mystery that is life; and over all broods the sense of a blind, irresistible, infinitely cruel Fate that will grind its inevitable way over the ■ broken hearts and bodies of men.

In his early plays he seems bent on preserving as few contacts with reality as possible- Later came his romantic plays when he had won through the valley of shadows to the sunshine again. If Maeterlinck had carried the symbolism of his early plays, into tins work of the later days when faith found him again, ho would have been an exact counterpart of Yeats, making allowance, of course, for the wide difference of national temperament. In France, Eostand with his magnificent "Cyrano do Bergerac," kept the flag of reaction flying. He takes us .Vack/to the colourful roystering days of the "Three Musketeers." In England, Barrio under the same impulse took 7 ais oWn line. And Yeats is with Barrio in the forefront of the. romantic reaction., AH literary progress comes throng.'i reaction. The realist drama is fai from being exhausted; probably its greatest achievements are ahead. ' But Barrie and Yeats have won a place for a kindlier mode, < ;ie that grips the heart while it does not outrage the head. Barrie sees life perhaps 'too persistently in the soft, sweet ligh.i oi' the gloaming; Yeats too persistently in the distorting glamour of the moonlight. But after all, tho gloaming and the moonlight are every bit as real as tho glare of the noonday sun. Critics of Yeats. I suppose Yeats can never fully appeal to" anyone not temperamentally akin to him. I can follow him so far and then I lose him. After the period of swift harsh judgment and narrow vision is past, after one has realised that the little foot-rule his tastes and temperament put in his hand is a very poor and inadequate implement after all, one learns to assume in coming to any literary judgment that an author means something, that he is not a fool, and the difficulty is more likely to be in the reader's inability to get into sympathetic touch with the writer's point of view. Some critics have no patience with Yeats. His symbolism seems poor maundering and drivel. With all the resources of the greatest language the genius of mankind has ever devised at) his disposal, he must run off into a fantastic symbolism that means nothing to the reader and probably means nothing to himself. ; "Mr. Yeats represents the last state of symbolic imbecility," writes Miss Storm Jameson. "He conjures up spooks from the vast inane; his symbols are purely arbitrary, expressing no truth, real or, imagined. To search for a meaning behind his babblings of the little people or his visions of blue-gowned figures is to court madness." Every reader of Yeats must.feel like that sometimes. Did not Ibsen himself wander into the marshes in the last years when the symbolic ignis factuus hypnotised him? And is not this loes of grip on reality a sign of mental instability? No doubt n strong case can be made out from the point of view of the. man of plain common ?€nse. There is a poem of Yeats' that has always appealed to me above all else that he ever wrote. lam not sure of the meaning of it; perhaps its very elusiveness gives something of its charm. I quote it here in full because it represents every side of his literary work, is full of mystery and symbolism, and shows better than any other, perhaps, the bewildering grace and charm of his style I "■•■r,t out to tho hazel wood. Because a fire was in my head. And cut and peeled a hazel wand. And hooked a berry to a thread; And when white moths were on tho wing, Aand moth-like stars were flickering out. I dropped the berry in a stream And caught a little silver trout. When I had laid it on the floor I went to blow the fire aflame. But something rustled on the floor. And someone called me by my name: It had become a glimmering girl With apple-blossom in her hair. Who called me by my name and ran And faded through the brightening air. Though I am old with wandering Through hollow lands and hilly lands. 1 will find out where she has gone. And kiss, lips and take her hands; And walk among long dappled grass. And pluck till time and times are done, The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun. Wandering Aengus has seen the light of romance on the far hills, and though he will never reach it he must fare forth on his soul's quest, resting not* though circumstance - has battered him and at last nld acre hpi ra«e l, * Mm • tin''- •---'• '- time and fate, perhaps; but nothing will ever quench the flame that burns on the altar of his heart.