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JOHN SIMON
the three last lines of "Ribh at the Tomb of Baile and Aillinn" are
"almost in themselves an answer to the charge that [Yeats's] poetic craft
is
failing him in his lalOt years." Note, first, that "almost," one of a
group of prudential terms Stewart works as hard as the later Eliot
used to. Secondly, against whom is this defense needed? Who ever said
Yeats declined in his last poems? Most importantly, what is so extra–
ordinary about the lines: "Though somewhat broken by the leaves,
that light / Lies in a circle on the grass; therein / I turn the pages of my
holy book"? What is extraordinary is to learn that "Three Things"
is "perhaps" Yeats's best poem, and then find no mention of the two
lyrics adjoining it in the
Oollected Poems,
"After Long Silence" and
"Lullaby," which are immeasurably superior. That forbiddingly private
poem, "On a Picture of a Black Centaur" is "delightful"; though Yeats's
drama is slight,
Cathleen ni Houlihan
is "a small masterpiece" on page
327, and
Purgatory
is "a small masterpiece" on page 405.
Perhaps these verdicts will seem less peculiar in the light of Professor
Stewart's textual explications which, on rare occasions, he ventures into.
So, when he analyzes the "Sinbad the Sailor" passage from
Ulysses,
"Xinbad the Phthailer" means to him no more than "the point at which
the conscious mind gives up altogether"; yet Joyce clearly uses Bloom's
somnolent mind as a verbal time machine to transport us back to Greece
(Xin-, i.e., Xen-) and, farther back, to Egypt (Phtha-) . Nor can
Stewart extract much meaning from "Darkinbad the Brightdayler." Even
simpler things escape
him.
He quotes at length Father Keegan's diatribe
against the world as hell from
John Bull's Other Island,
and includes
Broadbent's reply that some of these evils occur mainly when the Tories
are in office. Stewart notes that we are here "being taken outside the
boundaries of comedy" and have a "jarring sense" at "Broadbent's anti–
climactic invoking of the Tories." This is worse than failure to appreciate
a comic anticlimax; it makes one question Mr. Stewart's very concept
of comedy.
When Sir Thomas Browne wrote his son Edward, "Pray bee
mindfull to order your speech distinctly and leasurably, and not after
that precipitous way of France," he might have set down this somewhat
Polonian precept for the benefit of English criticism, whose mainstream
has ever since proceeded distinctly and leisurably, joining neatness and
urbanity to a thoroughly dignified pace. Mr. Stewart is no exception
as he takes us step by step, in chronological order, through the major
works of each writer, now and then discreetly alluding to a biographical
fact, or pronouncing a usually guarded judgement, or indulging in a
carefully balanced antithesis or parallel between writers. What this adds