Swan and Shadow

Yeats's Dialogue with History

Thomas Whitaker

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780807836859
  9780807809167
• eBook ISBN:
  9780807836866
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

History was central in a variety of ways to Yeats's poetic development and to the meaning of his work. In this study, Whitaker suggests that history was for the poet a mysterious interlocutor, which Yeats saw at times as a bright reflection of himself and again as a dark force opposed to that self. The poet's internal dialogue is viewed as projection into historical symbolism.

Originally published in 1964.

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PART ONE

HISTORY AS VISION

II · THE CYCLES

They will not be patient neither understand that they must begin with an Idea of the world in order not to be prevailed over by the world’s multitudinousness: or, if they cannot get that, at least with isolated ideas: and all other things shall (perhaps) be added unto them.

—Arnold to Clough¹

You are face to face with the heterogeneous, and the test of one’s harmony is our power to absorb it and make it harmonious.

—Yeats to Russell²

i.

IN TRACING THE DEVELOPMENT of Yeats’s vision of history we should keep firmly in mind the fact that he was no historian but a poet. He was not, in the academic sense, a disciplined thinker. His passion for truth was what Henry Adams knew only too well as the historian’s most serious temptation: “for, if he cares for his truths, he is certain to falsify his facts.”³ Yeats was skilled at finding what he wished to find; and he often oversimplified and distorted the thought of others, moulding it to resemble his own. Nevertheless, he had an acute perception of what related to his needs, a genius for crystallizing thought in image or phrase, and a strict if complicated honesty concerning his deepest intuitions. Moreover, if he was sometimes credulous, he was often shrewdly skeptical. And if he sometimes tortured the thought of others out of all recognizable shape, his artistic alchemy often enabled the fragments to be reborn in a new unity, precise and complex.

Yeats knew this, and with the artist’s pride and humility he attributed it to the basic correspondence between mind and world. “Of the many things... that are to change the world,” he declared in an early prophecy of a new age, “the artist is fitted to understand but two or three, and the less he troubles himself about the complexity that is outside his craft, the more he will find it all within his craft, and the more dexterous will his hand and thought become.”⁴ Surely he was correct—at least for the artist whose mind has the passionate breadth and balance of Yeats’s own. We can then see the point in Emerson’s brash question: “Who cares what the fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign?”⁵ For the poet may illuminate universal experience by presenting what Blake, as he applied Aristotle to scriptural history, called “probable impossibilities.”⁶

Indeed, granting the defensible subjectivism of Yeats’s approach to the world, I can find no very sound reasons for condescension toward his thought. He could say to himself with full seriousness, “Everything that has occupied man, for any length of time, is worthy of our study.” It is instructive that he was echoing Pater, who taught him far more than aestheticism, and who had drawn that lesson of true humanism from a Renaissance neo-Platonist and Kabbalist, Pico della Mirandola.⁷ As Allen Tate said twenty years ago, “It is still true that Yeats had a more inclusive mind than any of his critics has had.”⁸ We continue to pool our efforts at understanding and judgment.

It is clear, then, that we have to do not with “objective facts” (assuming they exist) so much as with “poetic constellations.” It will therefore be useful to glance at Yeats’s understanding of historical symbolism before turning to examine the pattern of cycles that he began to discover in history. To what extent did he himself recognize that such a pattern was largely his own image or shadow projected upon the stream of time? And how did he justify that projection?

His most important teacher in such matters was Blake, of whom his mind had been full “from boyhood up.”⁹ Blake, as Ellis and Yeats said, wove “historical incidents and names into mystical poetry, . . . under the belief that he was following the highest example, and that ‘prophecy’ was the right term for literature so conceived.” That “example” was the Bible as interpreted by Swedenborg, who held that “the historical books while dealing with facts which occurred treated them as symbols, as though they had been fable or parable.” Yeats probably knew also that Coleridge had likewise explained how the “Sacred History becomes prophetic, the Sacred Prophecies historical,” because they present “the stream of time continuous as life and a symbol of eternity.” In them, Coleridge said, facts and persons have “a particular and a universal application,” for unlike histories based on “mechanic philosophy” they are “the living educts of the imagination,” that power which “gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors. These are the wheels which Ezekiel beheld, when the hand of the Lord was upon him ...”¹⁰

But Blake had also described those wheels, or the cycles of history, as “seen in Milton’s Shadow, who is the Covering Cherub.” In other words, the world of time is the dark reflection of the poetic imagination and also—as Yeats theosophically interpreted the doctrine—the Shadow of God. For the Covering Cherub is “the self-devouring serpent, Nature—at once the garment of God and his negation.”¹¹ The coils of that serpent, the cycles of Western history, are in Madame Blavatsky’s terms the “Glory of Satan” and “the shadow of the Lord.”¹² Envisioning that shadow in its fullness, the poet might realize his own divinity. Yeats’s hermetic order title, Demon Est Deus Inversus, as expounded by Madame Blavatsky, carries that meaning and provides an important clue to Yeats’s lifelong search for the divine in the demonic, for the more comprehensive self in the depths of the shadowy adversary to the self.¹³

In moments of excitement Yeats could support his own prophetic visions or his later “wheels” with such transcendental arguments; but in more skeptical or defensive moods he granted that he might have seen but his own shadow. He then deprecated the objective fact and exalted the artist’s heavenly constellation. Poetry arises, he said in 1904, from subjective experience, which the poet must objectify by mastering “a definite language, a definite symbolism of incident and scene.” He quoted Goethe: “We do the people of history the honour of naming after them the creations of our own minds.” And he pointed to Shakespeare’s Richard II, who “could never have been born before the Renaissance, before the Italian influence, or even one hour before the innumerable streams that flowed in upon Shakespeare’s mind.... He is typical not because he ever existed but because he has made us know of something in our own minds we had never known of had he never been imagined.” In 1910 he gave further examples— Dante, Keats, Synge—of poets who by imaginative distortions of history have added to our “being,” not our “knowledge.” Still later he would call his own cycles of history “stylistic arrangements of experience comparable to the cubes in the drawing of Wyndham Lewis and to the ovoids in the sculpture of Brancusi.”¹⁴

Evident in this position is the early influence of Oscar Wilde, whose Intentions had seemed to Yeats a “wonderful book.” Art, said Wilde, “is not symbolic of any age. It is the ages that are her symbols.” Art is a fine lie, “that which is its own evidence” and which is therefore a kind of truth. Hence the value of Shakespeare’s historical plays depends upon “their Truth, and Truth is independent of the facts always, inventing or selecting them at pleasure.” And hence to “give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.” Wilde praised artistic histories from Herodotus to Carlyle, paying special tribute to “the great Raleigh,” who wrote “a whole history of the world, without knowing anything whatsoever about the past.” Writing in “Dove or Swan” his own history of the Western world, Yeats would later say with more subdued irony that he knew “nothing but the arts and of these little.”¹⁵

Behind such paradoxes lurks Wilde’s shrewd perception of what many nineteenth-century historians and men of letters had actually been doing. Matthew Arnold had argued that religion had “materialised itself in the fact, in the supposed fact,” and that the fact had failed it—but that the future of poetry was “immense” because “for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion.”¹⁶ Caught in the Arnoldian religious predicament, many historians were semipoetic, locating some variant of the myth of fall and redemption within the stream of history. For medievalists like Carlyle and Ruskin, the Renaissance repeated the fall of man; for neo-Hellenists it was a time of paradisal freshness, proud individualism, and cultural unity. Michelet, for example, called it “the spring from which the human race recruits its strength, the spring of the soul, which when alone feels itself greater than the world.”¹⁷ And Pater, viewing history as an organic process and the work of art as symbolic of its age, disseminated such neo-Hellenism in England. For him the Mona Lisa, fruit of centuries of development, embodied the “idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself all modes of life and thought.” And in the style and argument of Joachim du Bellay’s treatise on the French language, “the Renaissance became conscious.”¹⁸

Immersed in Pater’s work, the early Yeats could easily see Titian as the end of the golden age and Velasquez as “the first bored celebrant of boredom.”¹⁹ But he could also share both Wilde’s ironic detachment from such mythologized history and his more serious defense of its value. “A Truth in art,” said Wilde, “is that whose contradictory is also true. And just as it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we can apprehend the Platonic theory of ideas, so it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we can realise Hegel’s system of contraries. The truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks.”²⁰ Those remarks anticipate much of Yeats’s own later system.

What the masks hide or reveal, of course, is a question in Wilde’s aesthetic theory and remained always debatable for Yeats himself. In a world where “facts” are unreliable, what is the ultimate source or meaning of the Arnoldian “idea”? Sometimes, moving toward Platonism or theosophy, Yeats held that art “brings us near to the archetypal ideas themselves, and away from nature, which is but their looking-glass.” Sometimes he argued that the “most perfect truth is simply the dramatic expression of the most complete man.”²¹ Or he could announce that “revelation is from the self, but from that age-long memoried self, that shapes the elaborate shell of the mollusc and the child in the womb, that teaches the birds to make their nest.” And he could give that “self” a provisional basis in the psychology of Maxwell, Freud, or Jung, or in the neo-Platonism of Henry More.²² But he was unwilling finally to reduce such revelation to any clear-cut psychological or metaphysical interpretation. He knew that “wisdom first speaks in images”;²³ he took his stand with those poets, psychologists, and philosophers who have held that metaphor and not discursive theory grasps the truth of such revelation most adequately: “Our daily thought was certainly but the line of foam at the shallow edge of a vast luminous sea.”²⁴

For Yeats, therefore, a symbolic vision of history might have some-what varying meaning. In any case, however, it should embody and so reveal the desires and conflicts of the poet’s entire “being,” both conscious and unconscious; and it should therefore bring into the light of understanding hitherto unknown areas in the reader’s “being.” And on occasion Yeats might hope to establish for the poet’s symbolic vision an objective historical validity, to claim for his writings the status which Coleridge granted to scriptural history and prophecy. Indeed, Coleridge’s theories of symbolism, of organic correspondence, and of the primary imagination as a “repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM”²⁵ are like the transcendental sanctions for such hope which Yeats himself found in occult, neo-Platonic, and romantic thought.

In following Yeats’s dialogue with history, we should be put off neither by extravagant claims to special insight nor by contradictory disavowals of anything but “poetic” intent. Amid his vacillation Yeats was feeling his way—now boldly, now cautiously—within a symbolic mode of cognition based upon an intuited affinity between creative mind and creative univers...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• I . Introduction: The Dialogue
• Part One: History as Vision
• Part Two: History as Dramatic Experience
• Notes
• Index