A Critic in Pall Mall: Being Extracts from Reviews and Miscellanies

In the story of his life, as he tells it to us, we find him at the age of sixteen beginning a definite and philosophical study of literature:

Summers and falls, I used to go off, sometimes for a week at a stretch, down in the country, or to Long Island’s seashores – there, in the presence of outdoor influences, I went over thoroughly the Old and New Testaments, and absorb’d (probably to better advantage for me than in any library or indoor room – it makes such difference where you read) Shakspere, Ossian, the best translated versions I could get of Homer, Eschylus, Sophocles, the old German Nibelungen, the ancient Hindoo poems, and one or two other masterpieces, Dante’s among them. As it happen’d, I read the latter mostly in an old wood. The Iliad.. I read first thoroughly on the peninsula of Orient, northeast end of Long Island, in a shelter’d hollow of rock and sand, with the sea on each side. (I have wonder’d since why I was not overwhelm’d by those mighty masters. Likely because I read them, as described, in the full presence of Nature, under the sun, with the far-spreading landscapes and vistas, or the sea rolling in.)

Edgar Allan Poe’s amusing bit of dogmatism that, for our occasions and our day, ‘there can be no such thing as a long poem,’ fascinated him. ‘The same thought had been haunting my mind before,’ he said, ‘but Poe’s argument.. work’d the sum out, and proved it to me,’ and the English translation of the Bible seems to have suggested to him the possibility of a poetic form which, while retaining the spirit of poetry, would still be free from the trammels of rhyme and of a definite metrical system. Having thus, to a certain degree, settled upon what one might call the ‘technique’ of Whitmanism, he began to brood upon the nature of that spirit which was to give life to the strange form. The central point of the poetry of the future seemed to him to be necessarily ‘an identical body and soul, a personality,’ in fact, which personality, he tells us frankly, ‘after many considerations and ponderings I deliberately settled should be myself.’ However, for the true creation and revealing of this personality, at first only dimly felt, a new stimulus was needed. This came from the Civil War. After describing the many dreams and passions of his boyhood and early manhood, he goes on to say:

These, however, and much more might have gone on and come to naught (almost positively would have come to naught,) if a sudden, vast, terrible, direct and indirect stimulus for new and national declamatory expression had not been given to me. It is certain, I say, that although I had made a start before, only from the occurrence of the Secession War, and what it show’d me as by flashes of lightning, with the emotional depths it sounded and arous’d (of course, I don’t mean in my own heart only, I saw it just as plainly in others, in millions) – that only from the strong flare and provocation of that war’s sights and scenes the final reasons-for-being of an autochthonic and passionate song definitely came forth.

I went down to the war fields of Virginia.. lived thenceforward in camp – saw great battles and the days and nights afterward – partook of all the fluctuations, gloom, despair, hopes again arous’d, courage evoked – death readily risk’d – the cause, too – along and filling those agonistic and lurid following years.. the real parturition years.. of this henceforth homogeneous Union. Without those three or four years and the experiences they gave, Leaves of Grass would not now be existing.

Having thus obtained the necessary stimulus for the quickening and awakening of the personal self, some day to be endowed with universality, he sought to find new notes of song, and, passing beyond the mere passion for expression, he aimed at ‘Suggestiveness’ first.

I round and finish little, if anything; and could not, consistently with my scheme. The reader will have his or her part to do, just as much as I have had mine. I seek less to state or display any theme or thought, and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of the theme or thought – there to pursue your own flight.

Another ‘impetus-word’ is Comradeship, and other ‘word-signs’ are Good Cheer, Content and Hope. Individuality, especially, he sought for:

I have allow’d the stress of my poems from beginning to end to bear upon American individuality and assist it – not only because that is a great lesson in Nature, amid all her generalizing laws, but as counterpoise to the leveling tendencies of Democracy – and for other reasons. Defiant of ostensible literary and other conventions, I avowedly chant ‘the great pride of man in himself,’ and permit it to be more or less a motif of nearly all my verse. I think this pride is indispensable to an American. I think it not inconsistent with obedience, humility, deference, and self-questioning.

A new theme also was to be found in the relation of the sexes, conceived in a natural, simple and healthy form, and he protests against poor Mr. William Rossetti’s attempt to Bowdlerise and expurgate his song.

From another point of view Leaves of Grass is avowedly the song of Sex and Amativeness, and even Animality – though meanings that do not usually go along with these words are behind all, and will duly emerge; and all are sought to be lifted into a different light and atmosphere. Of this feature, intentionally palpable in a few lines, I shall only say the espousing principle of those lines so gives breath to my whole scheme that the bulk of the pieces might as well have been left unwritten were those lines omitted..

Universal as are certain facts and symptoms of communities.. there is nothing so rare in modern conventions and poetry as their normal recognizance. Literature is always calling in the doctor for consultation and confession, and always giving evasions and swathing suppressions in place of that ‘heroic nudity’ on which only a genuine diagnosis.. can be built. And in respect to editions of Leaves of Grass in time to come (if there should be such) I take occasion now to confirm those lines with the settled convictions and deliberate renewals of thirty years, and to hereby prohibit, as far as word of mine can do so, any elision of them.

But beyond all these notes and moods and motives is the lofty spirit of a grand and free acceptance of all things that are worthy of existence. He desired, he says, ‘to formulate a poem whose every thought or fact should directly or indirectly be or connive at an implicit belief in the wisdom, health, mystery, beauty of every process, every concrete object, every human or other existence, not only consider’d from the point of view of all, but of each.’ His two final utterances are that ‘really great poetry is always.. the result of a national spirit, and not the privilege of a polish’d and select few’; and that ‘the strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung.’

Such are the views contained in the opening essay A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads, as he calls it; but there are many other essays in this fascinating volume, some on poets such as Burns and Lord Tennyson, for whom Walt Whitman has a profound admiration; some on old actors and singers, the elder Booth, Forrest, Alboni and Mario being his special favourites; others on the native Indians, on the Spanish element in American nationality, on Western slang, on the poetry of the Bible, and on Abraham Lincoln. But Walt Whitman is at his best when he is analysing his own work and making schemes for the poetry of the future. Literature, to him, has a distinctly social aim. He seeks to build up the masses by ‘building up grand individuals.’ And yet literature itself must be preceded by noble forms of life. ‘The best literature is always the result of something far greater than itself – not the hero but the portrait of the hero. Before there can be recorded history or poem there must be the transaction.’ Certainly, in Walt Whitman’s views there is a largeness of vision, a healthy sanity and a fine ethical purpose. He is not to be placed with the professional littérateurs of his country, Boston novelists, New York poets and the like. He stands apart, and the chief value of his work is in its prophecy, not in its performance. He has begun a prelude to larger themes. He is the herald to a new era. As a man he is the precursor of a fresh type. He is a factor in the heroic and spiritual evolution of the human being. If Poetry has passed him by, Philosophy will take note of him.

November Boughs. By Walt Whitman. (Alexander Gardner.)

IRISH FAIRY TALES

(Woman’s World, February 1889.)

‘The various collectors of Irish folk-lore,’ says Mr. W. B. Yeats in his charming little book Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, ‘have, from our point of view, one great merit, and from the point of view of others, one great fault.’

They have made their work literature rather than science, and told us of the Irish peasantry rather than of the primitive religion of mankind, or whatever else the folk-lorists are on the gad after. To be considered scientists they should have tabulated all their tales in forms like grocers’ bills – item the fairy king, item the queen. Instead of this they have caught the very voice of the people, the very pulse of life, each giving what was most noticed in his day. Croker and Lover, full of the ideas of harum-scarum Irish gentility, saw everything humorized. The impulse of the Irish literature of their time came from a class that did not – mainly for political reasons – take the populace seriously, and imagined the country as a humorist’s Arcadia; its passion, its gloom, its tragedy, they knew nothing of. What they did was not wholly false; they merely magnified an irresponsible type, found oftenest among boatmen, carmen, and gentlemen’s servants, into the type of a whole nation, and created the stage Irishman. The writers of ’Forty-eight, and the famine combined, burst their bubble. Their work had the dash as well as the shallowness of an ascendant and idle class, and in Croker is touched everywhere with beauty – a gentle Arcadian beauty. Carleton, a peasant born, has in many of his stories… more especially in his ghost stories, a much more serious way with him, for all his humour. Kennedy, an old bookseller in Dublin, who seems to have had a something of genuine belief in the fairies, comes next in time. He has far less literary faculty, but is wonderfully accurate, giving often the very words the stories were told in. But the best book since Croker is Lady Wilde’s Ancient Legends. The humour has all given way to pathos and tenderness. We have here the innermost heart of the Celt in the moments he has grown to love through years of persecution, when, cushioning himself about with dreams, and hearing fairy-songs in the twilight, he ponders on the soul and on the dead. Here is the Celt, only it is the Celt dreaming.

Into a volume of very moderate dimensions, and of extremely moderate price, Mr. Yeats has collected together the most characteristic of our Irish folklore stories, grouping them together according to subject. First come The Trooping Fairies. The peasants say that these are ‘fallen angels who were not good enough to be saved, nor bad enough to be lost’; but the Irish antiquarians see in them ‘the gods of pagan Ireland,’ who, ‘when no longer worshipped and fed with offerings, dwindled away in the popular imagination, and now are only a few spans high.’ Their chief occupations are feasting, fighting, making love, and playing the most beautiful music. ‘They have only one industrious person amongst them, the lepra-caun – the shoemaker.’ It is his duty to repair their shoes when they wear them out with dancing. Mr. Yeats tells us that ‘near the village of Ballisodare is a little woman who lived amongst them seven years. When she came home she had no toes – she had danced them off.’ On May Eve, every seventh year, they fight for the harvest, for the best ears of grain belong to them. An old man informed Mr. Yeats that he saw them fight once, and that they tore the thatch off a house. ‘Had any one else been near they would merely have seen a great wind whirling everything into the air as it passed.’ When the wind drives the leaves and straws before it, ‘that is the fairies, and the peasants take off their hats and say “God bless them.”’ When they are gay, they sing. Many of the most beautiful tunes of Ireland ‘are only their music, caught up by eavesdroppers.’ No prudent peasant would hum The Pretty Girl Milking the Cow near a fairy rath, ‘for they are jealous, and do not like to hear their songs on clumsy mortal lips.’ Blake once saw a fairy’s funeral. But this, as Mr. Yeats points out, must have been an English fairy, for the Irish fairies never die; they are immortal.

Then come The Solitary Fairies, amongst whom we find the little Lepracaun mentioned above. He has grown very rich, as he possesses all the treasure-crocks buried in war-time. In the early part of this century, according to Croker, they used to show in Tipperary a little shoe forgotten by the fairy shoemaker. Then there are two rather disreputable little fairies – the Cluricaun, who gets intoxicated in gentlemen’s cellars, and the Red Man, who plays unkind practical jokes. ‘The Fear-Gorta (Man of Hunger) is an emaciated phantom that goes through the land in famine time, begging an alms and bringing good luck to the giver.’ The Water-sheerie is ‘own brother to the English Jack-o’-Lantern.’ ‘The Leanhaun Shee (fairy mistress) seeks the love of mortals. If they refuse, she must be their slave; if they consent, they are hers, and can only escape by finding another to take their place. The fairy lives on their life, and they waste away. Death is no escape from her. She is the Gaelic muse, for she gives inspiration to those she persecutes. The Gaelic poets die young, for she is restless, and will not let them remain long on earth.’ The Pooka is essentially an animal spirit, and some have considered him the forefather of Shakespeare’s ‘Puck.’ He lives on solitary mountains, and among old ruins ‘grown monstrous with much solitude,’ and ‘is of the race of the nightmare.’ ‘He has many shapes – is now a horse… now a goat, now an eagle. Like all spirits, he is only half in the world of form.’ The banshee does not care much for our democratic levelling tendencies; she loves only old families, and despises the parvenu or the nouveau riche. When more than one banshee is present, and they wail and sing in chorus, it is for the death of some holy or great one. An omen that sometimes accompanies the banshee is ‘.. an immense black coach, mounted by a coffin, and drawn by headless horses driven by a Dullahan.’ A Dullahan is the most terrible thing in the world. In 1807 two of the sentries stationed outside St. James’s Park saw one climbing the railings, and died of fright. Mr. Yeats suggests that they are possibly ‘descended from that Irish giant who swam across the Channel with his head in his teeth.’

Then come the stories of ghosts, of saints and priests, and of giants. The ghosts live in a state intermediary between this world and the next. They are held there by some earthly longing or affection, or some duty unfulfilled, or anger against the living; they are those who are too good for hell, and too bad for heaven. Sometimes they ‘take the forms of insects, especially of butterflies.’ The author of the Parochial Survey of Ireland ‘heard a woman say to a child who was chasing a butterfly, “How do you know it is not the soul of your grandfather?” On November eve they are abroad, and dance with the fairies.’ As for the saints and priests, ‘there are no martyrs in the stories.’ That ancient chronicler Giraldus Cambrensis ‘taunted the Archbishop of Cashel, because no one in Ireland had received the crown of martyrdom. “Our people may be barbarous,” the prelate answered, “but they have never lifted their hands against God’s saints; but now that a people have come amongst us who know how to make them (it was just after the English invasion), we shall have martyrs plentifully.”’ The giants were the old pagan heroes of Ireland, who grew bigger and bigger, just as the gods grew smaller and smaller. The fact is they did not wait for offerings; they took them vi et armis.

Some of the prettiest stories are those that cluster round Tír-na-n-Og. This is the Country of the Young, ‘for age and death have not found it; neither tears nor loud laughter have gone near it.’ ‘One man has gone there and returned. The bard, Oisen, who wandered away on a white horse, moving on the surface of the foam with his fairy Niamh, lived there three hundred years, and then returned looking for his comrades. The moment his foot touched the earth his three hundred years fell on him, and he was bowed double, and his beard swept the ground. He described his sojourn in the Land of Youth to Patrick before he died.’ Since then, according to Mr. Yeats, ‘many have seen it in many places; some in the depths of lakes, and have heard rising therefrom a vague sound of bells; more have seen it far off on the horizon, as they peered out from the western cliffs. Not three years ago a fisherman imagined that he saw it.’

Mr. Yeats has certainly done his work very well. He has shown great critical capacity in his selection of the stories, and his little introductions are charmingly written. It is delightful to come across a collection of purely imaginative work, and Mr. Yeats has a very quick instinct in finding out the best and the most beautiful things in Irish folklore.

I am also glad to see that he has not confined himself entirely to prose, but has included Allingham’s lovely poem on The Fairies:

Up the airy mountain,Down the rushy glen,We daren’t go a-huntingFor fear of little men;Wee folk, good folk,Trooping all together;Green jacket, red cap,And white owl’s feather!Down along the rocky shoreSome make their home,They live on crispy pancakesOf yellow tide-foam;Some in the reedsOf the black mountain lake,With frogs for their watch-dogsAll night awake.High on the hill-topThe old King sits;He is now so old and grayHe’s nigh lost his wits.With a bridge of white mistColumbkill he crosses,On his stately journeysFrom Slieveleague to Rosses;Or going up with music,On cold starry nights,To sup with the QueenOf the gay Northern Lights.

All lovers of fairy tales and folklore should get this little book. The Horned Women, The Priest’s Soul, 6 and Teig O’Kane, are really marvellous in their way; and, indeed, there is hardly a single story that is not worth reading and thinking over.

Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry. Edited and Selected by W. B. Yeats. (Walter Scott.)

MR. W. B. YEATS

(Woman’s World, March 1889.)

‘The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems is, I believe, the first volume of poems that Mr. Yeats has published, and it is certainly full of promise. It must be admitted that many of the poems are too fragmentary, too incomplete. They read like stray scenes out of unfinished plays, like things only half remembered, or, at best, but dimly seen. But the architectonic power of construction, the power to build up and make perfect a harmonious whole, is nearly always the latest, as it certainly is the highest, development of the artistic temperament. It is somewhat unfair to expect it in early work. One quality Mr. Yeats has in a marked degree, a quality that is not common in the work of our minor poets, and is therefore all the more welcome to us – I mean the romantic temper. He is essentially Celtic, and his verse, at its best, is Celtic also. Strongly influenced by Keats, he seems to study how to ‘load every rift with ore,’ yet is more fascinated by the beauty of words than by the beauty of metrical music. The spirit that dominates the whole book is perhaps more valuable than any individual poem or particular passage, but this from The Wanderings of Oisin is worth quoting. It describes the ride to the Island of Forgetfulness:

And the ears of the horse went sinking away in the hollow light,For, as drift from a sailor slow drowning the gleams of the world and the sun,Ceased on our hands and faces, on hazel and oak leaf, the light,And the stars were blotted above us, and the whole of the world was one;Till the horse gave a whinny; for cumbrous with stems of the hazel and oak,   Of hollies, and hazels, and oak-trees, a valley was sloping awayFrom his hoofs in the heavy grasses, with monstrous slumbering folk,   Their mighty and naked and gleaming bodies heaped loose where they lay.More comely than man may make them, inlaid with silver and gold,Were arrow and shield and war-axe, arrow and spear and blade,And dew-blanched horns, in whose hollows a child of three years oldCould sleep on a couch of rushes, round and about them laid.

And this, which deals with the old legend of the city lying under the waters of a lake, is strange and interesting:

The maker of the stars and worldsSat underneath the market cross,And the old men were walking, walking,And little boys played pitch-and-toss.‘The props,’ said He, ‘of stars and worldsAre prayers of patient men and good.The boys, the women, and old men,Listening, upon their shadows stood.A grey professor passing cried,‘How few the mind’s intemperance rule!What shallow thoughts about deep things!The world grows old and plays the fool.’The mayor came, leaning his left ear —There were some talking of the poor —And to himself cried, ‘Communist!’And hurried to the guardhouse door.The bishop came with open book,Whispering along the sunny path;There was some talking of man’s God,His God of stupor and of wrath.The bishop murmured, ‘Atheist!How sinfully the wicked scoff!’And sent the old men on their way,And drove the boys and women off.The place was empty now of people;   A cock came by upon his toes;An old horse looked across the fence,   And rubbed along the rail his nose.The maker of the stars and worldsTo His own house did Him betake,And on that city dropped a tear,And now that city is a lake.

Mr. Yeats has a great deal of invention, and some of the poems in his book, such as Mosada, Jealousy, and The Island of Statues, are very finely conceived. It is impossible to doubt, after reading his present volume, that he will some day give us work of high import. Up to this he has been merely trying the strings of his instrument, running over the keys.

The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems. By W. B. Yeats. (Kegan Paul.)

MR. YEATS’S WANDERINGS OF OISIN

(Pall Mall Gazette, July 12, 1889.)

Books of poetry by young writers are usually promissory notes that are never met. Now and then, however, one comes across a volume that is so far above the average that one can hardly resist the fascinating temptation of recklessly prophesying a fine future for its author. Such a book Mr. Yeats’s Wanderings of Oisin certainly is. Here we find nobility of treatment and nobility of subject-matter, delicacy of poetic instinct and richness of imaginative resource. Unequal and uneven much of the work must be admitted to be. Mr. Yeats does not try to ‘out-baby’ Wordsworth, we are glad to say; but he occasionally succeeds in ‘out-glittering’ Keats, and, here and there, in his book we come across strange crudities and irritating conceits. But when he is at his best he is very good. If he has not the grand simplicity of epic treatment, he has at least something of the largeness of vision that belongs to the epical temper. He does not rob of their stature the great heroes of Celtic mythology. He is very naïve and very primitive and speaks of his giants with the air of a child. Here is a characteristic passage from the account of Oisin’s return from the Island of Forgetfulness:

And I rode by the plains of the sea’s edge, where all is barren and grey,Grey sands on the green of the grasses and over the dripping trees,Dripping and doubling landward, as though they would hasten awayLike an army of old men longing for rest from the moan of the seas.Long fled the foam-flakes around me, the winds fled out of the vast,Snatching the bird in secret, nor knew I, embosomed apart,When they froze the cloth on my body like armour riveted fast,For Remembrance, lifting her leanness, keened in the gates of my heart.Till fattening the winds of the morning, an odour of new-mown hayCame, and my forehead fell low, and my tears like berries fell down;Later a sound came, half lost in the sound of a shore far away,From the great grass-barnacle calling, and later the shore-winds brown.If I were as I once was, the gold hooves crushing the sand and the shells,Coming forth from the sea like the morning with red lips murmuring a song,Not coughing, my head on my knees, and praying, and wroth with the bells,I would leave no Saint’s head on his body, though spacious his lands were and strong.Making way from the kindling surges, I rode on a bridle-path,   Much wondering to see upon all hands, of wattle and woodwork made,Thy bell-mounted churches, and guardless the sacred cairn and the earth,   And a small and feeble populace stooping with mattock and spade.

In one or two places the music is faulty, the construction is sometimes too involved, and the word ‘populace’ in the last line is rather infelicitous; but, when all is said, it is impossible not to feel in these stanzas the presence of the true poetic spirit.