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 worldâs multitudinousness: or, if they cannot get that, at least with isolated ideas: and all other things shall (perhaps) be added unto them.
âArnold to Clough1
You are face to face with the heterogeneous, and the test of oneâs harmony is our power to absorb it and make it harmonious.
âYeats to Russell2
i.
IN TRACING THE DEVELOPMENT of Yeatsâs 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 historianâs most serious temptation: âfor, if he cares for his truths, he is certain to falsify his facts.â3 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 artistâs pride and humility he attributed it to the basic correspondence between mind and world. âOf the many things... that are to change the world,â he declared in an early prophecy of a new age, âthe 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.â4 Surely he was correctâat least for the artist whose mind has the passionate breadth and balance of Yeatsâs own. We can then see the point in Emersonâs brash question: âWho cares what the fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign?â5 For the poet may illuminate universal experience by presenting what Blake, as he applied Aristotle to scriptural history, called âprobable impossibilities.â6
Indeed, granting the defensible subjectivism of Yeatsâs approach to the world, I can find no very sound reasons for condescension toward his thought. He could say to himself with full seriousness, âEverything that has occupied man, for any length of time, is worthy of our study.â 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, âIt is still true that Yeats had a more inclusive mind than any of his critics has had.â8 We continue to pool our efforts at understanding and judgment.
It is clear, then, that we have to do not with âobjective factsâ (assuming they exist) so much as with âpoetic constellations.â It will therefore be useful to glance at Yeatsâs 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 âfrom boyhood up.â9 Blake, as Ellis and Yeats said, wove âhistorical incidents and names into mystical poetry, . . . under the belief that he was following the highest example, and that âprophecyâ was the right term for literature so conceived.â That âexampleâ was the Bible as interpreted by Swedenborg, who held that âthe historical books while dealing with facts which occurred treated them as symbols, as though they had been fable or parable.â Yeats probably knew also that Coleridge had likewise explained how the âSacred History becomes prophetic, the Sacred Prophecies historical,â because they present âthe stream of time continuous as life and a symbol of eternity.â In them, Coleridge said, facts and persons have âa particular and a universal application,â for unlike histories based on âmechanic philosophyâ they are âthe living educts of the imagination,â that power which âgives 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 ...â10
But Blake had also described those wheels, or the cycles of history, as âseen in Miltonâs Shadow, who is the Covering Cherub.â In other words, the world of time is the dark reflection of the poetic imagination and alsoâas Yeats theosophically interpreted the doctrineâthe Shadow of God. For the Covering Cherub is âthe self-devouring serpent, Natureâat once the garment of God and his negation.â11 The coils of that serpent, the cycles of Western history, are in Madame Blavatskyâs terms the âGlory of Satanâ and âthe shadow of the Lord.â12 Envisioning that shadow in its fullness, the poet might realize his own divinity. Yeatsâs hermetic order title, Demon Est Deus Inversus, as expounded by Madame Blavatsky, carries that meaning and provides an important clue to Yeatsâs 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 âwheelsâ 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 artistâs heavenly constellation. Poetry arises, he said in 1904, from subjective experience, which the poet must objectify by mastering âa definite language, a definite symbolism of incident and scene.â He quoted Goethe: âWe do the people of history the honour of naming after them the creations of our own minds.â And he pointed to Shakespeareâs Richard II, who âcould never have been born before the Renaissance, before the Italian influence, or even one hour before the innumerable streams that flowed in upon Shakespeareâs 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.â In 1910 he gave further examplesâ Dante, Keats, Syngeâof poets who by imaginative distortions of history have added to our âbeing,â not our âknowledge.â Still later he would call his own cycles of history âstylistic arrangements of experience comparable to the cubes in the drawing of Wyndham Lewis and to the ovoids in the sculpture of Brancusi.â14
Evident in this position is the early influence of Oscar Wilde, whose Intentions had seemed to Yeats a âwonderful book.â Art, said Wilde, âis not symbolic of any age. It is the ages that are her symbols.â Art is a fine lie, âthat which is its own evidenceâ and which is therefore a kind of truth. Hence the value of Shakespeareâs historical plays depends upon âtheir Truth, and Truth is independent of the facts always, inventing or selecting them at pleasure.â And hence to âgive 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.â Wilde praised artistic histories from Herodotus to Carlyle, paying special tribute to âthe great Raleigh,â who wrote âa whole history of the world, without knowing anything whatsoever about the past.â Writing in âDove or Swanâ his own history of the Western world, Yeats would later say with more subdued irony that he knew ânothing but the arts and of these little.â15
Behind such paradoxes lurks Wildeâs shrewd perception of what many nineteenth-century historians and men of letters had actually been doing. Matthew Arnold had argued that religion had âmaterialised itself in the fact, in the supposed fact,â and that the fact had failed itâbut that the future of poetry was âimmenseâ because âfor poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion.â16 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 âthe spring from which the human race recruits its strength, the spring of the soul, which when alone feels itself greater than the world.â17 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 âidea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself all modes of life and thought.â And in the style and argument of Joachim du Bellayâs treatise on the French language, âthe Renaissance became conscious.â18
Immersed in Paterâs work, the early Yeats could easily see Titian as the end of the golden age and Velasquez as âthe first bored celebrant of boredom.â19 But he could also share both Wildeâs ironic detachment from such mythologized history and his more serious defense of its value. âA Truth in art,â said Wilde, âis 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 Hegelâs system of contraries. The truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks.â20 Those remarks anticipate much of Yeatsâs own later system.
What the masks hide or reveal, of course, is a question in Wildeâs aesthetic theory and remained always debatable for Yeats himself. In a world where âfactsâ are unreliable, what is the ultimate source or meaning of the Arnoldian âideaâ? Sometimes, moving toward Platonism or theosophy, Yeats held that art âbrings us near to the archetypal ideas themselves, and away from nature, which is but their looking-glass.â Sometimes he argued that the âmost perfect truth is simply the dramatic expression of the most complete man.â21 Or he could announce that ârevelation 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.â And he could give that âselfâ 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 âwisdom first speaks in imagesâ;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: âOur daily thought was certainly but the line of foam at the shallow edge of a vast luminous sea.â24
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 poetâs entire âbeing,â both conscious and unconscious; and it should therefore bring into the light of understanding hitherto unknown areas in the readerâs âbeing.â And on occasion Yeats might hope to establish for the poetâs symbolic vision an objective historical validity, to claim for his writings the status which Coleridge granted to scriptural history and prophecy. Indeed, Coleridgeâs theories of symbolism, of organic correspondence, and of the primary imagination as a ârepetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AMâ25 are like the transcendental sanctions for such hope which Yeats himself found in occult, neo-Platonic, and romantic thought.
In following Yeatsâs dialogue with history, we should be put off neither by extravagant claims to special insight nor by contradictory disavowals of anything but âpoeticâ intent. Amid his vacillation Yeats was feeling his wayânow boldly, now cautiouslyâwithin a symbolic mode of cognition based upon an intuited affinity between creative mind and creative univers...