200
PARTISAN REVIEW
This passage, written in 1909, contains a theme Yeats elaborated bitterly,
over and over, in prose and verse. His role, he realized, was like and yet
unlike Synge's. He was a fanatic, a passionate artist, confronting
fanatics. He was, as well, a shrewd practical man. "The demagogic
virtues bound up with logic" were English virtues, bred from the 19th
century. Irishmen had passed from "the old half-mediaeval peasantry
into an agrarian political party"; and now the countryman's culture was
passing into the frame of the petty bourgeois: the suburban frame of
mind. (See Joyce's "Dubliners" and "Portrait of the Artist" for a realistic
picture of this process.) Anyone who sentimentalizes the Irish character
must miss an understanding of Yeats' later role both as poet and public
figure.
The role which came into being consciously or subconsciously was
unmistakably that of the shaman. Yeats was creating a myth, and ritually
taking part in his creation. Breaking the taboos brought, in some measure,
the symbolic guilt upon himself. The awakening of an heroic Irish spirit
came more quickly than he expected and in a form that he did not foresee.
It lead to action: it is certain that at least half of the leaders of the
Easter Rising were steeped in the legendary glories, revived by Yeats,
of their country and race. And, finally, it iead to a civilized point of
view; the Abbey Theatre, after the passage of years, presented fantasy
and satire to an audience now capable of understanding and enjoy·
ment. After a Government was set up, following the Civil War, Yeats
became a Senator and found another task before him: to reconcile the
Catholic Irish, now in the ascendancy, to the virtues of the Anglo-Irish
tradition. This task he also brought to partial success, through his praise
of Berkeley, Swift, Grattan, Burke and Goldsmith.
How far he was taken in by his shaman role, it is not yet possible
to judge. The period of "the Unknown Instructors" which came upon
him after his marriage, made him and his wife co-mediums, and is set
forth in "A Vision," is a period difficult for the skeptical uninstructed
to accept. His worst side, which included credulity and self-deceiving
dramatization, here reappears, brought over from his youth. Yet some
magnificent poetry belongs to this time; and "The Vision" includes a
lot of sound common sense, along with its Cabalistic jargon. This
desire to tinker with the universe, to hold up the laws of nature for his
own pleasure, was Yeats' least admirable occupation, as Stephen Spender
has said. The whole question of Yeats' occultism will attract the attention
of psychologists in the future.
.
He could lash out at Ireland because he loved it, and understood
the special pride born of humiliation behind Irish bitterness.
"If
W.
B.
were in the Gobi desert and someone mentioned Ireland," Stephen
MacKenna once remarked, "he would be all aquiver." He fought censor·
ship in the Free State, and has been called a "fascist" for his pains.
He considered humanitarianism a sort of neurosis native to the middle
