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PARTISAN REVIEW
famous people he meets at parties. And his satisfaction in the material
arrangements of his life makes him purr like a cat. He rejoices in the
comforts introduced into his lodgings by Lady Gregory: the port wine
and the blankets. He rejoices in his periods of residence at Coole Park,
her country house; the "great rooms" (in the plural) are splendidly
silent and there are no fewer than seven woodlands, all magnificent. In
all this there is something of the eternal spirit of the bachelor: he must
make his nest all the cozier, and chirp louder over it, because it is a
nest for one. The spirit persists after Yeats's belated marriage, when
he begins to celebrate his wife's feats of housekeeping and decorating,
and the attractions of the houses which he himself is now in a position
to acquire. But it must be noted that he did not long remain in the old
tower which he called "my castle," or the house in Dublin which he
describes as a "mansion." He never really settled down; and of the
money that came to him in prizes and from lecturing in America, he
gave much to other poets and to his various causes. In his letters he
has an odd way of keeping the phenomena of his suffering in the back–
ground. From an allusion here and there, we may guess at the "ignominy
of boyhood" as he knew it, the hand-to-mouth existence he led in youth
with his loving improvident father, his detestation of London in those
days, the hardship of his life in ill-heated and candle-lighted rooms, the
pain caused by his bad eyesight and frequent failures of health, the un–
happy consequences of his long vain wooing of Maud Gonne, the labor
of supporting himself by his writing and lecturing, the sheer fatigue of
being a poet in the twentieth century. But such experiences merely give
a tragic accent to the strange high comedy of his career. Even when, in
the late 'twenties, he breaks down and becomes very
ill,
he has a way
of exulting in the misfortune. "Yesterday the doctor gave me a shock.
I said, 'Why am I so exhausted?' He replied, 'The overwork of years.' "
Complacency or courage? A little of the first, a great deal more
of the last. He writes as one who has earned his good fortune, made
himself lucky. "They went forth to battle but they always fell"-Matthew
Arnold's motto for the Irish spirit must have rung in his ears, as it did
in Joyce's, not as a knell but as a challenge. The waste of Irish genius
in indolence and backbiting, the waste of his father's genius in partic–
ular, seem to have determined him to husband his own. He developed
a system of thought, a method of style, an entire economy of literary
action. Primarily his thought reached inward, to the power resident in
the self. "Even things seemingly beyond control answer strangely to what
is within," he told Florence Farr. This was applied spiritualism, table–
tapping become a way of life, magic raised to the proportions of an
