POET AND MYSTIFIER
risk of supplying another tiresome recital of the main circumstances of
his life like those by Joseph Hone and Louis MacNeice? The answer is
provided for us on the jacket: Mr. E11mann had access to about 50,000
pages of material which Yeats left behind him at his death. Although
let down by false expectations of this sort in the past, one had hopes
that this time the new biographer would justify his claims upon our
attention. Unfortunately, this is not the case. In quantity the passages
from the unpublished manuscripts occupy only a small portion of the
book as a whole. Moreover, to the regret of this reviewer at least, they
throw no new light on Yeats either as man or artist. In some instances
they support or expand impressions that we have already had, but never
compel us to revise them. We would
be
much more grateful
if
Mr. Ell–
mann had presented us with a patiently edited selection from the manu–
scripts themselves and left the rest to us.
Instead, Mr. EHmann has written a solid, generally intelligent and
unpretentious book which will undoubtedly be useful to younger students
of modem literature. For others it contains too many familiar materials
-Yeats's ventures into theosophy and spiritualism and his associations
with the Irish literary movement-to prove exciting. Although on the
whole well documented, it fails in making certain discriminations. Yeats
is
casually referred to as a Celt, although neither by inheritance or tem–
perament was Yeats a Celt in the sense that Joyce or O'Casey are Celts.
Throughout there is much talk of Yeats's various "tensions"; but cer–
tainly one of the greatest of these was between his loyalty to the small
Protestant Anglo-Irish gentry out of which he came and the lifelong
fascination exerted upon him by the folklore and customs of the Celtic
and preponderantly Catholic native population. Yeats was Irish by con–
version rather than by birthright and suffered from the inner discom–
fiture of all converts. In dealing with Yeats's relationship with Maud
Gonne, Mr. Ellmann reveals a certain lack of skepticism, a tendency to
take the poet too much at his own word. This is a delicate enough mat–
ter, to be sure, since it concerns persons still living. But indeed like every–
thing else in his career Yeats's great love affair was conducted on a
public scale.
It
was just possibly a necessary ingredient in the campaign
of self-dramatization by which he built up his legend. It was appro–
priate that the first poet of his country (who was also one of its most
handsome men) should come to grief at the hands of the woman reputed
to
be
its most beautiful. Like Stendhal's Fabrizio he may have been
"in
love with love," or with the image of himself in a classical tragic
situation. In any case, the situation was a great help to the poetry.
In his final chapter Mr. Ellmann manages to tie himself up in a
197
