APOCALYPSE
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the rituals of the occult; on the one side were the shopkeeping
logicians, on the other the seductive and various forms of unreason.
What saved him in the end was a confidence basic to the entire
European tradition, a confidence in the common language, the ver–
nacular by means of which from day to day we deal with reality as
against justice. Everything depends upon a power
To compound the imagination's Latin with
The lingua franca et jocundissima.
In the same way, Yeats, though he entertained the fictions of
apocalypse, decadence, renovation, transition, saw the need to com–
pound them with the
lingua franca
of reality. This composition occurs
in the poetry. But outside the poetry the situation is different; and
here we touch on a general critical failure in early modernism. Yeats
wrote a good deal about the Last Days as he saw them, the aristocratic
Irish knights who would be faithful and true, the end of a broken–
down, odious epoch and the start of another, aristocratic, courtly,
eugenic. In poetry this is well enough; it enters the mix of our own
minds, which are richer for the new ingredients: "A Bronze Head"
enlarges the imagery by which we represent to ourselves "This foul
world in its decline and fall," and the terrors are newly lighted by
the vision of the daughters of Herodias and that insolent fiend, Robert
Artisson. Outside poetry the situation is different. Yeats was enthusi–
astic for Italian fascism, and supported an Irish fascist movement. The
most terrible element in apocalyptic thinking is its certainty that there
must be universal bloodshed; Yeats welcomed this with something of
the passion that has attended the thinking of more dangerous, because
more practical men. "Send war in our time, 0 Lord." Soon the towns
lay beaten flat, and the great mass experiment in eugenics began. The
dreams of apocalypse, if they usurp waking thought, may be the
worst dreams.
As a poet Yeats, at his best, was proof against enchantment by
the dream. As a thinker outside poetry he was not; the only reason
why this is unimportant is that he had no influence upon those who
might have put his beliefs to an operational test. The thoughts of
poets may be put to this test. It is true that Yeats's occult speculations
are ultimately a mask for a system of esthetics; nevertheless, as Dewey
