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marks they contain, the long series addressed to Katherine Tynan fails
to reveal any adequate human reason for its existence. He seems to have
thought she had the makings of good Irish poet, but this was not enough;
the letters become tedious with the effort to keep it up and not be
patronizing. Even the letters to his father show the strain, and his
father once complained that his son lacked "love" and made him feel
like "a black beetle." With Olivia Shakespear, on the other hand, he
is consistently engaging; she seems to have had no part in any of his
projects but was simply a charming woman who appealed to him. For
the most part, then, he had not the gift of writing letters as if he were
a man living among men and women.
If
he has more of this feeling
than, say, Wordsworth shows in his letters, he has less than, say, Byron
or Keats show in theirs. Yeats's correspondents are mainly artists of some
kind and are addressed by him as such. They are frankly his associates
in what sometimes looks like a widespread conspiracy to be great, rather
than simply to be. But he was ambitious for them as well as himself;
and it is to the advantage of his letters, not to mention his poetry, that
his ambitiousness was that of the tortoise. He was a slow, patient, moral
conspirator, seeking a triumph of merit. He may have said to his sister,
when she told him Swinburne was dead, "I know, and now I am king
of the cats," but he was no usurper. He aimed at what might be called
legitimate succession, by way of a profound absorption in English poetry
and a profound transformation of it. The size of his ambition, together
with the conscientiousness of his methods, makes his letters extremely
weighty and interesting in the mass. He was a meticulous correspondent,
giving in abundance what he could give: ideas, plans, criticism, anec–
dotes. He had a zest for problems and situations, which his letters com–
municate to us. His ever-present tact did not prevent him from being
quite firm, as in a long masterly letter to Sean O'Casey rejecting
The
Silver T assie.
Conscious as he shows himself to be of the Irish temper–
of George Moore's "incredible violence" and the "sour and argumenta–
tive" way of Irishmen in England-he clearly cultivated amenity in his
relations with people. "It's a poet's business to be amiable," he tells his
publisher,
A.
H. Bullen. But this is not the same thing as being merely
respectable: Yeats would not have relished the literary atmosphere of
the 1950's.
He was fortunate and he knew it and the knowledge colors all his
letters. He seems alternately a true example of the happy warrior in
literature and a case of clinical euphoria. He is constantly recounting his
successes-with the poems or plays he is writing, the reviewers who
review his books, the audiences who attend his plays or lectures, the
