DENIS DONOGHUE
373
But "Parnell's Funeral" was not Yeats's last word on politics, race,
nation, and state. I will end with a reference to two literary episodes in
1938. In that year Samuel Beckett published his first novel,
Murphy.
The
fourth chapter is set, briefly, in the General Post Office in Dublin, Pearse's
chosen place for the Rising and, outside, for the Proclamation of the
Republic. Neary is contemplating from behind the statue of Cuchulain,
Oliver Shepherd's work:
Neary had bared his head, as though the holy ground meant some–
thing to him. Suddenly he flung aside his hat, sprang forward, seized
the dying hero by the thighs and began to dash his head against his
buttocks, such as they are.
A policeman approaches, but one Wylie, a former pupil of Neary's, leads
Neary off to the exit. When the policeman shouts to them, Neary says:
"John
0'
God's. Hundred per cent harmless...Stillorgan...Not Dundrum."
That is: a nursing home for mentally ill patients, not an asylum for the
criminally insane.
Presumably Beckett wrote the scene in 1937 or earlier. I have no evi–
dence that Yeats read the novel then or later. We are dealing with a
coincidence. In April 1938 he wrote one of his last poems, "The Statues,"
which is based on a conviction he arrived at by reading Adolf
Furtwaengler and other historians of art:
There are moments when I am certain that art must once again accept
those Greek proportions which carry into plastic art the Pythagorean
numbers, those faces which are divine because all there is empty and
measured. Europe was not born when Greek galleys defeated the
Persian hordes at Salamis, but when the Doric stuclios sent out those
broad-backed marble statues against the mul tiform, vague, expressive
Asiatic sea, they gave to the sexual instinct of Europe its goal, its fixed
type.
I'll read only the last stanza:
When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side,
What stalked through the Post Office? What intellect,
