ADAM’S CURSE AND CUSSEDNESS
W. B. Yeats’s Rebellion against
British English and its Lesson to
It
is wrong to suggest a clear division between the earlier ‘bad’ Yeats and the later ‘good’ Yeats;
he himself perceived no such division: “I do not remember any development with
that precision”.1 If divisions are to be made, the whole of Yeats’s career would be filled with criss-cross
lines; he was perpetually learning and renewing himself. The grand fact is the
self-consistency both in ‘error’ and ‘choice.’ The whole of Yeats’s
earlier achievement needs a reassessment, although Eliot’s compliment, ‘by no
means the least of the pre-Raphaelites’ has done much to encourage a respectful
attitude. But both the compliment and the attitude have not done sufficient
justice to the world-view that motivated Yeats’s
poetry. Eliot’s compliment on Yeats’s success in the
Poetic Drama has a topical literary context whereas Yeats’s
motives were derived from a wider life-context. To recreate that unified sensibility
in which arts and professions become one, feeling and thought become one, and
literature becomes at once distinguished and ‘popular’–such was his aim. He
believed that to recreate that
The
literary critic, strictly speaking the historian, stops, short at the
assessment of the situation without engagement. Thanks to the ‘Critic as judge’
theory, a barren period of a fertile period gets an equally disinterested
praise or blame from him, since that is the utmost he can do. So too does, a
mediocre ‘good’ poet. But a poet who would create a new way of life, thought
and art, needs respectful attention beyond the scholarly caution and moderation
when he makes an assessment of his time. It is likely that he knows it better
because he has seen it as a personal problem affecting his creativity in a
day-to-day experience. Especially so when he writes in an
alien tongue, which though he has spoken since his birth, has a certain
normative pressure emanating from an alien society, which leads a different
kind of life. In such a case, the engagement becomes two-fold; he has to
assert his loyalty to his national culture,–since his mainspring of inspiration
is from that,–and yet has a hypercritical audience outside the nation; and
within the nation too, because the scholarly readership with its traditions of
conservatism usually has accepted the normative pressure from outside and
thereby strait-jacketed its criteria of judgment. This slavish readership is
the most vocal and unless the poet has set convictions,–‘fanaticism’ as Yeats himself described it, he is likely to succumb to
these alien norms. If he does, possibly he may succeed as a poet, but he is
doomed as a national poet. With alien norms the nation can not voice
itself.
It
is a great problem. It is significant that so few English-speaking countries
(with the exception of
Now
it could be said that English as a respectability is subjected to normative
pressure even inside Britain;–witness the Good English classes there!–It is
also possible to say that some kind of normative pressure becomes necessary to
hold a language together from disintegration, and a chaos of dialects. But even
admitting this, one must insist, as Yeats did, that
when the norms themselves are wrong, or incapable of voicing a national culture
and varied sensibility, or incapable of withholding the flowering of genius, or
exercising an inhibitive influence over certain valuable emotional receptivities, or more, curtailing the possibilities of the
language as a whole by alienating it from its previous cultivation, etc., the
only way out is to protest and to recreate. Yeats
fought the battle of the whole English-speaking world (including
Yeats’s estimate was that
these norms were wrong; these norms were the illegitimate children of the
Renaissance and the Reformation. The Renaissance, although it threw up a Merry
England at its best, reached a gyrative extreme of
subjectivism only to vanish in the dust and smoke of a Puritanical sensibility.
Renaissance had its own murderer accompanying it,–the alien Italianate
influence. Even before that, Chaucer’s mediaeval architectural design had no
mediaeval imagination about it,–being under the Neo-French influence; because
his pilgrims to
The
remarkable agreement of Yeats’s estimate with that of
Eliot is evidenced in the following passage: “Here and there, in Blake, in Keats,
in Blunt, in Browning,…there is a deep masculine
resonance that comes, I think, from a perfect accord between intellect and
blood lacking elsewhere since the death of Cowley”.
And Eliot accepts Cowley
as the last metaphysical. Yeats traces it to Chaucer
himself, interested as he was in Mind, and engaged in the pain of the defeat of
Celticism. Cromwell appears to him not as a tyrant
invader, but much worse, the Puritan Demagogue. The second generation of
puritanical middle classes embraced Locke and Hobbes and bred the generation
that embraced Mill’s Utilitarianism. As this dry unmythical
timid religio-rational mind grew, things began to
exist less for themselves, than for their uses; and commercial competence, unambiguity, brevity, lack of embellishment, lack of
eloquence, lack of music, these began to become the ideals.
Such
an English certainly can not be a language of self-expression, if one’s self
has some value of its own, apart from its utility to others. A delight and a
value in oneself, a delight in one’s tools, a delight in the audience that
meets the poet halfway by its responsiveness, a delight in the myth, belief and
thought
that unifies the poet to his audience, these were some ideals
Yeats had in mind. Only in such a milieu, Homeric
song becomes possible. If Maud Gonne was less than
Helen, Ireland less than Troy (or Greece, it does not matter), Yeats too had to be less than Homer, and chose to write
fragments only. 3
It
was a stroke of genius to have rejected so many heuristic restrictions. But
probably the inherited Anglophobia helped him. To have declared at the outset
that his ambition was to be counted among Davis and Mangan
4 and not among Tennyson and Browning was
not merely an act of patriotism. It was the declaration of preferance
for a species of poetry,–or more strictly, a species of poetic
sensibility in which both the creator and the audience meet. Whether Davis and Mangan were good practitioners of poetry is another
question. Yeats would prefer bad practitioners in his
own genre than practitioners found good by merely English standards. It is not
an accident that his “Oxford Book of Modern Verse” is considered an eccentric
collection.5 The generous praise
of some of his poet-friends appears bewildering. This does not mean that Yeats was insensitive to the achievement of modern poets.
He even hopes to have anticipated this kind of poetry in the “Eighties”.6
His evaluation of T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound appears wildly contradictory for
exactly the same reason. In some of his letters, he denounces some modern poets
as clever journalists. In his public pronouncements, not only is he tolerant
but complimentary. This can not be dismissed as hypocrisy. The praise of Ezra
Pound in his prefatory remarks to his “A Vision” is remarkable. It is a
challenge to Pound’s subconscious mind which dictated to him a poem like “The
Return”7 which clearly is the
announcement of the return of sages in God’s holy fire!–Could there be anything
more obstinate than that?–So too, after praising poets like T. S. Eliot,–for
whose suffering he showed full sympathy, and after praising them for their
return to philosophy, Yeats declares his preference
for Oliver Gogarty.
8 And there is a meaning in this preference. It
is perfectly legitimate to appreciate the excellence of poets within a certain
genre yet decry the whole genre. In the genre of one’s own preference, it is
possible, there are at present not very able practitioners. Nevertheless they
deserve praise,–not for being as meritorious as poets of the other genre, but
for representing a rare species. Gogarty certainly is
a good poet. Yet the special place he has in Yeats’s
preferential scheme is because while trying to escape the assassins he jumped
into a river and promised the river two swans if he could escape! “That story
shows the man,–scholar, wit, poet, gay adventurer”. 9
To separate the man from the poetry, to separate his voice, his gesture, his
person from his poetry, has been the very basis of morphological objective
ideals in criticism. Yeats questions those ideals
themselves. For all we know, he may be right and the practice of four centuries
may be wrong. If this is not wrong, it certainly is wrong to believe that the
poetic practice in Great Britain for three centuries of history has laid down
principles to judge poetry of all kinds in all climes, merely because it is
written in English. Far from that; it has yet to set its own house in
order; it has alienated itself from sensibilities created in its own
cultivation.
Thus,
the language of prose used by Yeats is English
certainly, but with a different emphasis. It is not the tight competent stiff
formal impersonal English of Good English classes. It is an English that
derives from the whole cultivation to which English was subjected. It is
interesting to see what Yeats felt he saw in English
spoken by Irish peasants. He says, Synge heard in the
Aran island, “the beautiful English which has grown
up in Irish-speaking districts, and takes its vocabulary from the time of Malory, and of the translators of the Bible, but its idioms
and its vivid metaphor from Irish”.10
The English linguists, till now, have posed the phenomenon of the wearing-out
of words (which become cliches and die out) as a sign
of health; it is possible that such easy wearing-out is a sign of Anaemia, of both language and life. George Eliot, in her Silas
Marner, refers to the habit of preferring the
word ‘handle’ to ‘haft’, a much more poetic word. Mary Ann in Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge learns
to prefer the phrase “to have indigestion” to the one she knew earlier “to be
hag-ridden”. Words do not always die because of their wearing-out. They die
because attitudes change. Since Yeats’s attitudes
were different, he preferred a vocabulary known to the translators of the
Bible; more than that, as a result of what Yeats
called the growth of Abstraction and what T. S. Eliot called the Dissociation
of Sensibility, that wealth of simile, metaphor, gesture, rhyme, pun,
alliteration, which used to delight the Elizabethan audience died out,–because they
could not evoke any response. They appeared superfluous to the earnest Puritan,
the moneyminded merchant, the thrifty middle-class.
Even life was utilitarian, and Yeats laughs at the
besetting utilitarianism that made men fall in love so that they may get
children.
Thus
the language Yeats used was not any special English.
It is futile to search for his Irishisms. It is worse to question whether they
truly represent the English spoken by Irish people. English, though in
contemporaneous use, tends to dismember itself and to impose a partial
cultivation, has immense latent possibilities. It needs only a courageous
genius to use the language or vocabulary of the Bible or Burton or Shakespeare,
and to withstand the normative pressure.
The
price one has to pay for such convictions is to speak “a barbarous tongue”.11
Yeats’s barbarous tongue includes apart from a
language of parable, words of strange semantic content, strange syntax. Whether
one calls these Irishisms or not, they have to be contended with, because apart
from the value of the thought, they are an experiment in the use of English
itself.
1 Wade.
Letters, p. 592
2
Ure. T. M., p. 98-99.
3 Autos,
p. 165.
4 C.
P., p.57. To Ireland in the Coming Times.
5 The
Contemporary reaction to this book was one of shock and he anticipated it.
6 Wade-Letter’s, p. 593.
7 A
Vision, P.29
8
Read “Modern Poetry”. Essays & Intros., p. 491-508
9 Essays
& Intros., p. 597
10 Essays,
pp. 370-71.
11 C.
P., p. 137. Two Years Later.