STEPHEN SPENDER
his work, then the converse would also be true that one could deduce hIS
party or creed from an analysis of any smallest detail, whether or not
the writer thought that he supported such a party or a creed.
This leads back into the objectivist fallacy of the writer holding
certain views whether he thinks he does or not.
What is wrong is Orwell's loose bracketing of religious and political
beliefs, and his assumption that it is a comparatively simple matter
to know what a writer believes. But it is not simple, since he is writing
out of his imagination, his vision of life, and not according to labels
which he or others may stick on to him. Orwell appears to
think
that Yeats's symbolism, mythology, imagery-his poetry in a word–
are projections onto the plane of the imagination of his declared
political and religious beliefs. It is really the other way round. Yeats's
religion and politics are the results of numerous inconsistent attempts
to rationalize his central poetic vision, as dogma, politics, action.
Whether or not they should be "laughed off," Yeats's Fascism was an
excrescence. It grew rather approximately and grossly from the center of
his poetic imagination which was neither approximate nor gross. To any–
one who reads
A Vision
or his journals and prose, it must be quite
clear that his opinions are attempts to systematize the intuitions of his
imagination.
Add to this that even when they are stated as prose, one cannot
discuss Yeats's beliefs without making many qualifications. Outside of be–
lieving in art and in some universe of the spirit in which the visions
of art are realistic truth, Yeats himself was extremely approximate about
what he believed. He was candid in admitting that he cultivated be–
liefs and attitudes in himself for the purpose of propping up the sym–
bolism of his poetry. He also had a sharp picture of a materialist world
which undermined his world of the poetic imagination: this was
Bernard Shaw's Fabian philosophy and belief in material progress.
That which to Shaw was superstition and reaction recommended itself
as dogma and practice to Yeats.
Dr. O'Brien has drawn up a formidable list of Yeats's pro-Fascist
statements, including one or two sympathetic to Hitler. But to the
reader who thinks that Yeats's poems and not his opinions matter, it
will seem, I think, that he used the political stage properties of the
thirties in the same way as he used the assertions of his esoteric system
set out in
A Vision-as
a scenario stocked with symbols and metaphors
which he could draw on for his poetry. To Yeats writing the tragic-gay
poetry of his old age, Hitler had the seductive charm of an apocalyptic
cat.
