DENIS DONOGHUE
365
but he construed the strange qualities of early Irish stories as cognate with
the transfiguring force of Symbolism:
I will put
this
differently and say that literature dwindles to a mere
chronicle of circumstance, or passionless fantasies, and passionless
meditations, unless it is constantly flooded with the passions and
beliefs of ancient times, and that of all the fountains of the passions
and beliefs of ancient times in Europe, the Slavonic, the Finnish, the
Scandinavian, and the Celtic, the Celtic alone has been for centuries
close to the main river of European literature.
I am not sure that Yeats knew those literatures well enough to pronounce
upon them or to make an invidious comparison, but we may pass over that
consideration.
I should emphasize, however, Yeats's insistence on the transforming,
subjective power of the imagination. History becomes freedom or virtue,
the force of will is changed to the force of imagination, character as some–
thing given is changed to personality as something chosen, nature becomes
creative power, time is changed to what Yeats calls "the Moods," image is
transformed into symbol, mind into dream-"the generative aspect of the
mind," as Allen Grossman calls it-and at last knowledge is transfigured as
wisdom.
It
follows that in Yeats's early work as a cultural nationalist, the
poet is the exemplar, the one in whom desire knows itself for what it is.
He is the bard, reciting ancient lore for the benefit of the people for whom
he sings. This motive animates his early work and persists, despite many
inducements to disgust and rage, till the end of his life.
David Lloyd has argued, in
Anomalous States,
that Yeats's work as a cul–
tural nationalist came to a crisis if not to an end in 1916. When Pearse and
the other leaders of the Easter Rising took to arms, they appropriated
Yeats's Ireland, seized his myths and symbols, and removed the sources of
his authority. Mter Easter Week and the execution of the insurgents, Yeats
could appeal to no authority but his own: he could no longer be the
national bard. In his poems of Easter 1916 he could only pay tribute to
the heroic, transforming power of men who had chosen to go their own
militant way-which was not his way-and to bring the people with
them. The peremptory tone of Yeats's poems and plays after 1916 is
explained by their being "speech acts" in a particular mode, performatives,
imperatives.
The evidence is not decisive. It could be argued that in the years from
1907 to 1913, that is, from the disturbances at the first performances of
