e. F.

POSTER

W.B.YEATS
m@ LIFE

=———
f
I 61 THE APPRENTICE MAGE
po ae (0 ‘magnificent ...a work of huge significance’
- bf ss SEAMUS HEANEY
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2022 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

httos://archive.org/details/wbyeatslifeOO0Ofost
 frist
FEB 26 189
W.B.YEATS: A LIFE Wo

Roy Foster was born in Waterford, Ireland, in 1949. In 1991

he was elected first Carroll Professor of Irish History at the
University of Oxford. He had previously been Professor of
Modern British History at Birkbeck College, University of
London, as well as holding visiting fellowships at St
Antony’s College, Oxford, The Institute of Advanced
Study, Princeton, and Princeton University. He has been a
Fellow of the British Academy since 1989. His previous
books include Charles Stewart Parnell: The Man and His
Family (1976), Lord Randolph Churchill:APolitical Life (1981),
Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (1988), The Oxford Illustrated
History ofIreland (1989), The Sub-Prefect Should Have Held
His Tongue: Selected Essays ofHubert Butler (1990), and Paddy
and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (1993).
He is currently working on the second and final volume of
this biography.
‘Roy Foster’s extraordinary achievement in this marvellous first
half of his life of Yeats, covering the first 50 years, is to lay bare the
foolishness without any way diminishing the greatness. He does
this by restoring to biography a dimension so often lost in the
pursuit of sexual scandal and psychological theory—a sense of
history’
Fintan O'Toole, The Economist

‘a marvel of painstaking historical research, which distils a

formidable heap of evidence into a splendidly elegant narrative.
R. F. Foster has a remarkably shrewd, worldly-wise sort of mind, at
once tough and generous, and resists both idolatry and iconoclasm
in this magnificently sane account. It is also for the most part a
remarkably judicious, even handed portrait’
Terry Eagleton, Sunday Independent

‘the reader is convinced that the only possible biographer of

Yeats has to be a social historian, if that historian happens to be
R. F. Foster. This is because of the brilliance with which he handles
his material and because of the extraordinary depth of Yeats’s
involvement in the social history of his island and his time...
enthralling’
P.J. Kavanagh, Spectator

‘a spellbinding story of a man who himself used and wove spells all
his life; the most elaborate being the one he wove for and around his
own conflicted, but always meticulously polished personality’
Tom Rosenthal, Daily Mail

‘Subtly alert to the relevance of his material to the current debate

in Ireland about nationalism, secularism, and materialism, but also
a brilliantly clear and meticulous version of the formation of a
complex and protean genius’
Colm Toibin, Times Literary Supplement

‘probing, determined, intellectually bold . . . extremely moving and

humane... wonderfully funny. . . astute and astringent . . . brilliant
‘Foster constantly returns us to the sound of Yeats, not only in his
verse but in his public diatribes and conversation . . . brilliant’
Fiona MacCarthy, Odserver

‘one of the greatest feats of intellectual history of our time .. .

This work is an academic masterpiece; but it is also a book to be
read and re-read with that affection we give to the most dependable
of friends among our books. It has zest enough for the most
impatient youth, and ironic urbanity to gratify the most experienced
old age’
Owen Dudley Edwards, Scotsman
‘By far the fullest and most reliable account of Yeats’s career . . .
The detailed narrative is like a sumptuous brocade, but it has the
intricate patterning of a Turkish carpet... Not least amongst the
book’s many triumphs is the adroit way it manages to do justice
to this tangled but crucial reciprocity . . The range of the research
and the exactitude of the scholarship make this required reading:
the grace and wit of the style make it enjoyable reading’
John Kelly, Irish Times

‘a splendid beginning on what will surely be the best, as well as the

most authoritative study of the poet to date’
John Bayley, Evening Standard

‘Foster pulls off brilliantly the task of getting in behind the myths
surrounding Yeats without cutting him facetiously down to size.
By restoring historical immediacy to his various activities, he takes
them seriously in the best possible sense’
Simon Carnell, Yorkshire Post

‘A lay reader, even one without strong literary interests, should read
this book as an enthralling work of history and as a drama whose
characters were as large in their lives as they now appear’
Grey Gowrie, Daily Telegraph

‘Foster’s life of Yeats promises to be a defining moment in the

history of Irish culture’
Kevin Barry, Irish Review

‘this is a wonderful work of scholarship. It turns Yeats around,

making us see his poems from within his life and helps us to
experience them in a way that is both revealing and intensely
moving . . . a great story of Ireland’s greatest poet, and it is superbly
told’
Bruce Arnold, Washington Post

‘In this superb biography, Foster unscrambles destiny and com-

plicates it into life. The most distinguished Irish historian alive,
Foster floods his Yeats with historical detail. He is less interested in
literary exegesis than in historical accident; indeed, his criticism of
the poems is a little spare. But he attends to the chaos of Yeats’ early
life, a bohemian shuffle during which he was at the mercy of his
improvident peripatetic father, the painterJ.B. Yeats. He gives a
deep description of the tensions and ambiguities of Yeats’ shabby-
genteel Protestant origins. His sketch of the hierarchical and
socially touchy Dublin of the 1880s is almost novelistic—
something like the caste-frozen Bombay of some contemporary
Indian fiction . . . not only a fine account of Yeats’ early life; it
is a subtle introduction to 20th century Irish nationalism’
James Wood, Slate
‘The old magician, apprentice no longer, has found in Mr Foster
a worthy biographer. He would be relieved to know, as readers of
Irish writing have known fot some years that the biographer is
himselfa fine writer, bearing with grace his knowledge of Irish
history, and writing with wit, authority and, when appropriate,
considerable eloquence’
Thomas Flanagan, NY Times

‘promises to place Mr Foster’s Yeats in the sparse pantheon of

Olympian biography, next to Ellmann’s Joyce and Wilde’
Ronald Schuchard, Wall Street Journal

‘The word “masterful” is a reviewer’s cliché, but the integration

within this volume of so much material and so many details from so
great a number of primary sources is masterful. The life is told with
a “density of specification” no one else has had the energy or the
patience to attempt; but the specifics are arranged and ordered with
a formalist’s vision and a historian’s abiding concern for their larger
and longer significance’
Lucy McDiarmid, Irish Literary Supplement

‘truly fascinating and absorbing . . . The chief glory of Foster’s book

is the nuanced and sympathetic understanding and comprehensive
documentation he brings to WBY’s personal relationships’
Gerry Dukes, Irish Independent

‘never before in a single volume have the intersections and nuances

been presented in such sophisticated detail. Or with such grace:
Foster recreates Yeats’s experience with an aphorist’s concision
and novelist’s wit, while never forgetting that his man is a poet’
PatrickJ. Keane, WQ
 FEB og 1999

We VARNES) eA EIDETS,
Lg Teh d2aed RIDING OCS, MiLAG8
1865-1914

R. F. FOSTER

3 1336 04718 2242 ;

Oxford New York

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1998
Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 0x2 6DP
Oxford New York
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and associated companies in
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Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press

OR. F. Foster 1997

The acknowledgements on pp. xvti—xvtit constitute an extension ofthis copyright page

First published by Oxford University Press 1997

First issued as an Oxford University Press Paperback 1998

All rights reserved. No part ofthis publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
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Within the UK, exceptions are allowed in respect ofany fair dealing for the
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under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, or in the case of
reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms oflicences
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This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way
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without the publisher's prior consent in any form ofbinding or cover
other than that in which tt ispublished and without a similar condition
including this condition bein ig imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

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ISBN 0-19-288085-3

NO) S35 70 Toy Si AE BS ah

Printed in Great Britain by

Bookcraft Ltd,
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Supposing the mage to stand outside the All, his evocations
and invocations would no longer avail to draw up or to call
down; but as things are he operates from no outside standground,
he pulls, knowing the pull of everything towards anything in
the living system.
Plotinus, Enneads (1v, 4, 40),
translated by Stephen MacKenna

A poet is by the very nature of things a man who lives with entire
sincerity, or rather the better his poetry the more sincere his life;
his life is an experiment in living and those that come after have
a right to know it. Above all it is necessary that the lyric poet’s
life be known that we should understand that his poetry is no
rootless flower but the speech of a man. To achieve anything
in any art, to stand alone perhaps for many years, to go a path
no other man has gone, to accept one’s own thought when the
thought of others has the authority of the world behind it, that
it should seem but alittle thing to give one’s life as well as one’s
words which are so much nearer one’s soul, to the criticism of
the world.
W. B. Yeats, draft of lecture ‘Friends of my Youth’,
delivered 9 March 1910
In memory ofFrancis Stewart Leland Lyons
 CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATIONS XIV

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FOREWORD

FAMILY TREES

INTRODUCTION

PROLOGUE Yeatses and Pollexfens

Chapter 1 The Artist’s Children: Sligo 1865-1881
2 Explorations: Dublin 1881-1887
3 Two Years: Bedford Park 1887-1889
4 Secret Societies 1889-1891
5 The Battles of the Books 1891-1893
6 Lands of Heart’s Desire 1894-1896
7 Waiting for the Millennium 1896-1898 162

8 Shadowy Waters 1898-1900 201

9g Occult Politics rg00-1901

10 National Dramas 1901-1902
1m The Taste of Salt 1902-1903
12 From America to Abbey Street 1903-1904 304
13. Delighting in Enemies 1905-1906 330
14 Synge and the Ireland of His Time 1907-1909 359
I5 Severances 1909-1910 402

16 ‘True and False Irelands 1910-1911 433

17 Ghosts 1911-1913 453
18 Memory Harbour 1913-1914 492
 CONTENTS

APPENDIX: “The Poet Yeats Talks Drama with Ashton Stevens’,

from the San Francisco Examiner, 30 January 1904 535
ABBREVIATIONS 539
NOTES 542
INDEX 626
 ILLUSTRATIONS

Jack B. Yeats, detail from Memory Harbour, 1900 front endpaper

LIST OF PLATES

Between pages 160 and 161

1. John Butler Yeats, 1863
Susan Pollexfen Yeats as a young married woman
wBy as a baby, 1865
2. wBY asa child, Sligo, c. 1873
3. Sandymount Castle, Dublin, with Corbets and Yeatses
Merville, Sligo
4. Sligo Harbour in the late nineteenth century
The Middleton & Pollexfen mills, Ballisodare
5. John Butler Yeats, c. 1875
George Pollexfen, c. 1906
6. Sketches by the Yeats children of Branscombe, Devon
wey aged about nine
7. WBY, late 1880s
Jack Yeats, 1900
George Russell (‘AE’), 1890
8. 3 Blenheim Road, Bedford Park
g. Lily and Lolly, early 1890s
wBy as ‘King Goll’ by jBy, 1887
10. Maud Gonne, 1889
Maud Gonne, early 1890s
II. wBY, probably with John Todhunter, early 1890s
12. wBy at Blenheim Road
MacGregor Mathers
13. The Land ofHeart's Desire, April 1894
Florence Farr
14. Constance and Eva Gore-Booth
Arthur Symons, 1896
15. WBY in his study, 1904
Woburn Buildings
16. Olivia Shakespear, 1897
 ILLUSTRATIONS

Between pages 352 and 353

7. Augusta Gregory, c. 1912
18. Tillyra Castle
Coole Park
19. wey and George Moore at Coole, 1902
20. Robert Gregory, 1902
Margaret Gregory with Richard, 1909
Willie Fay
Frank Fay as Cuchulain, 1904
2I. Cathleen ni Houlthan, 1902
Riders to the Sea, 1906
22. Annie Horniman’s costumes for The King’s Threshold, 1903
Charles Ricketts’s costumes for On Baile’s Strand, 1915
23 The foyer of the Abbey Theatre
The stage of the Abbey Theatre
24. The Abbey Theatre, embroidered by Lily Yeats
25, Maud Gonne MacBride, John MacBride and their baby Seaghan (Sean), 1904
John Quinn
wBy arrives in New York, 1903
26. Printing at Dun Emer, 1903
roe John Butler Yeats, 1906
wey as seen by Augustus John, 1907
28. wey, Jack and Cottie Yeats and Sara Allgood at Ruth Pollexfen’s wedding, 1911
29. Ezra Pound, c. 1913
George Hyde-Lees, c. 1910
Stone Cottage
30. Rabindranath Tagore
Bi. A spirit photograph of wBy
Julia’s Bureau’
Etta Wriedt
22. Iseult Gonne, c. 1906
Maud Gonne, c. 1906
WBY, ¢. I9I0

LIST OF TEXT ILLUSTRATIONS

Binding design for The Wind Among the Reeds XXIV

I. Susan Pollexfen Yeats and Lily Yeats, 13 February 1870 22
2. wBy drawn by jpy for the frontispiece of Mosada, 1886 40
Xil
 ILLUSTRATIONS

3. John O'Leary by say 42

4. Katharine Tynan by William Strang 54
5. ‘A Legend’ in the Vegetarian, 22 December 1888 66
6. Frontispiece of Poems (1895) 151
7. Edward Martyn by Grace Plunkett 166
8. George Russell sketching at Coole 183
g. wBy and the Black Pig, by Russell 192
10. Synge, wBy and Russell fishing at Coole 248
1. Killeeneen feis programme, 31 August 1902 271
12. Annie Horniman by yBy 297
13. wBy lecturing in America, as seen by Jack Yeats 310
14. Robert Gregory on ‘Sarsfield’, 25 September 1906 351
15. Synge at a Playboy rehearsal, 25 January 1907 361
16. The Abbey Row, a Dublin pamphlet immortalizing the Playboy
controversy 362
17. “The Gift’ as printed in the Irish Times, 11 January 1913 480
18. “The “Playboy” and the Gallery’ as seen by the Leader, 5 April 1913 484

Robert Gregory, detail from Lake at Coole, n.d. back endpaper

Xiil
 SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATIONS

A 1 illustrations are reproduced by courtesy of Michael B. Yeats and Anne Yeats, photography by
Rex Roberts, with the following exceptions.

PLATES

1 (top left) Courtesy of William M. Murphy

4 (40th) Author’s collection
7 (bottom) From John Eglinton, Memoir ofAE, 1937
8 Department of English, University of Reading
9 (bottom) Author’s collection
10 (insert) From Lucien Gillain, Heures de Guérite. Poésies d'un Dragon, 1893
12 (bottom) Department of English, University of Reading
13. (top) Mander and Mitchenson Collection
13 (bottom) Sketch, 25 April 1894
14 (top) Department of English, University of Reading
15 (top) Tatler, 157, 29 June 1904
17 Mansell Collection, London
18 (¢op) Irish Tourist Board, Dublin
18 (bottom); 19; 20 (top left and top right) Courtesy of Colin Smythe
20 (bottom left) From W. B. Yeats, Samhain, 1904
20 (bottom right) Mander and Mitchenson Collection
21 (top) Illustrated London News
21 (bottom) Abbey Theatre Collection, National Library of Ireland
23 (top) The National Theatre Society, Abbey Theatre, Dublin. Photo: Rex Roberts
23 (bottom) Abbey Theatre Collection, National Library of Ireland
25 (top) Tatler, February 1904
25 (ottom left) Department of English, University of Reading
27 Courtesy of William M. Murphy
27 (insert) Manchester City Art Galleries
29 (top right) Courtesy of Dr Grace M. Jaffé
29 (bottom) Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
30 Manchester City Art Galleries
31 (top left) Courtesy of Professor George Mills Harper
31 (top right and bottom) Mary Evans Picture Library.
TEXT ILLUSTRATIONS

p. xxiv British Museum

2 Sotheby’s, New York
5 British Library Newspaper Library, Colindale
6 From W. B. Yeats, Poems (1895)
7 From Grace Plunkett, To Hold as Twere, 1920
8 Courtesy of Colin Smythe
g Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta
o Courtesy of Colin Smythe
11 Berg Collection, New York Public Library
13 Foster-Murphy Collection, New York Public Library
14 Courtesy of Colin Smythe
15 National Library of Ireland, Henderson scrapbook, MS 1730, p. 93
16,17 British Library Newspaper Library, Colindale
18 Mander and Mitchenson Collection
Back endpaper Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

IN the course of writing this book I incurred outstanding debts to many

people. The first, to Leland Lyons, is recorded in the foreword and dedica-
tion, as is my gratitude to Jennifer Lyons for her unfailing friendship and
helpfulness. And I owe an immeasurable amount to Michael and Anne
Yeats. Scholars have long been indebted to their authoritative knowledge and
discerning care of the unique collection of material to do with their father,
and the generosity with which they have entertained never-ending inquiries
and visits from all over the world. My own importunities have been met
with unfailing good humour and helpfulness, and I am deeply grateful to them
both, and to Grainne Yeats, for many kindnesses: perhaps most of all, for under-
standing so well the task of the biographer.
Elsewhere too the world of Yeats scholarship has been, all things con-
sidered, remarkably generous and friendly to an interloping historian, and I
have incurred special obligations to several Yeatsians. John Kelly, whose
great edition of the Collected Letters was transforming the subject of Yeats’s
biography even as I wrote, was endlessly helpful and supportive through-
out. William Murphy not only cleared an important part of the path with
his classic biography of John Butler Yeats but shared many insights, gener-
ously gave me access to his archive of transcriptions, and — with his wife
Harriet — provided hospitality and encouragement. Warwick Gould and
Deirdre Toomey, who have also blazed new trails through the indispensable
Yeats Annual, were sterling guides, critics and friends from the outset. Their
close reading of the text steered me out of several errors and provided many
pointers to where I might go. And I am extremely grateful to Colin Smythe
— another figure whose intellectual enterprise has extended the boundaries
of Yeats studies — for his kindness in answering queries and making mater-
ial available to me.
I should also like to thank the custodians and librarians at many institu-
tions for helping me find material and answering inquiries, in particular
Cathy Henderson at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin,
Texas; Anthony Bliss, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley;
Steve Crook and the late Lola Szladits at the Berg Collection, New York Public
Library; Nicole Laillet at the Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris; Robert O’Neill
at the Burns Library, Boston College; Nancy Weyant at the Ellen Clarke
Bertrand Library, Bucknell University; Paula Lee at the University of Chicago
Library; Kathy Knox and Stephen Enniss at the Robert R. Woodruff Library,
Emory University; the staff at the Houghton Library, Harvard; Alexandra
Mason at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas at
XV
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Lawrence; Christopher Sheppard at the Brotherton Library, Leeds; Catherine

Fahy at the National Library of Ireland; the staff at the Firestone Library,
Princeton University; Margaret Kimball at Stanford; Bernard Meehan at
Trinity College, Dublin; John McTernan at the Sligo County Library; and
the staff at the Beinecke Rare Book and MS Library, Yale University. Many
others provided insights, answered queries, and helped to make the life of the
wandering scholar a more pleasant one than it might otherwise have been.
They include Douglas Archibald, George Bornstein, Liz Cullingford Butler,
Wayne Chapman, David R. Clark, Eamon Duffy, Tom Dunne, Stephen Fay,
Richard Finneran, Adrian Frazier, Michael Gilsenan, Victoria Glendinning,
Robert Greacen, George Mills Harper, Ruth Harris, Elizabeth Heine, Fritz
and Leslie Hoffecker, Michael Holroyd, Sam Hynes, Declan Kiberd, Peter
Kuch, Gifford Lewis, Walton Litz, Edna Longley, Lucy McDiarmid, James
McFadden, Gerald MacMahon, John Maddicott, Robert Mahony, Christina
Hunt Mahony, Clare O’Halloran, Tom Paulin, James Pethica, David Pierce,
Omar Pound, Ann Saddlemyer, Linda Satchwell, Ron and Keith Schuchard,
Bob Spoo, Tom Staley, Tom Steele, Colm Toibin, Jay Tolson and Mary
Bradshaw, Marina Warner and George Watson.
Other assistance was provided by those who helped in the search for
material and the checking of references: Mary-Lou Legg most of all, but also
Ben Levitas, Gerard Keown, and Sarah Foster. I am grateful to those who
granted me access to privately held material: Maureen Rosenhaupt for her
collection of jBy letters and sketches, Nicholas Boyle for William Boyle’s cor-
respondence, and Edward Plunkett for his grandmother’s diary. Anna
MacBride White allowed me to consult the correspondence between Maud
Gonne and W. B. Yeats well before its publication. Mary, Owen and Ruth
Dudley Edwards generously gave me unrestricted access to the research notes
and library of their mother, the late Sile Ni Shuilleabhain. And I en-
joyed enlightening interviews with Molly Adams (Mary Manning), the late
Sir Frederick Ashton, R. J. Gluckstein, Dame Ninette de Valois, the late
A. S. O’Connor, Kathleen Raine, Francis Stuart and the late George White.
I am extremely grateful to the British Academy for electing me to a
Research Readership at an early stage of my research; to Birkbeck Col-
lege, the University of London, Hertford College and the University of
Oxford for periods of research leave; and to the Institute of Advanced Study,
Princeton, and the Department of English, Princeton University, for pro-
viding such stimulating and agreeable circumstances in which to work when
my research was getting under way in 1988 and 1989. On more recent visits I
am indebted to Robert Scally, Eliza O’Grady and the staff at Glucksman Ireland
House, New York University.
The actual process of producing this book also owes much to others. Sheila
XV1
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Sheehan in Kerry provided a safe haven where much of it was written. Valerie
Kemp put enormous effort and dedication into preparing the manuscript. At
Oxford University Press, the original arrangements were much facilitated by
Ivon Asquith and Will Sulkin; Judith Luna’s commitment and helpfulness
have been constant throughout; and I have depended heavily upon the ded-
ication, good humour and astute advice of Kim Scott Walwyn. In New York,
Laura Brown and Amy Roberts were immensely encouraging. I should
also like to record my appreciation of the design and pictorial skills of Paul
Luna, Sue Tipping and Suzanne Williams. I am grateful to my agent at the
time the project was initiated, Giles Gordon, and to my present agent, Gill
Coleridge, who has helped me immeasurably in many ways. Andrew Motion
and Selina Hastings read the first draft and provided many perceptive and
valuable suggestions. And Donna Poppy edited the final version with skill,
commitment and flair far transcending the bounds of duty.
A large proportion of the debts recorded here will be carried forward to
the second volume. So will the pressures on my children Phineas and Nora,
who have put up with a father periodically absent and permanently distracted;
and on my wife, Aisling, who has read, discussed and advised on the project
for the past eight years. Neither they nor any of those listed above are re-
sponsible for the shortcomings in this book, but it could not have been
written without them.

Poetry, prose, and unpublished writings by W. B. Yeats and other members

of the family appear by permission of Anne Yeats and Michael Yeats. The
extract from Canto LXXXIII of The Pisan Cantos is quoted with the permission
of the estate of Ezra Pound, Faber and Faber Ltd and New Directions. For
other permissions I am grateful to Anne de Winton and Catherine Kennedy
(unpublished letters of Augusta Gregory and Robert Gregory); the estate of
Diarmuid Russell (unpublished letters of George Russell); the estate of J.C.
Medley (unpublished letters of George Moore). Iam also grateful to the fol-
lowing holders of copyright material who have granted access and permis-
sion for quotation: Amherst College Library; Harry Ransom Humanities
Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; Bancroft Library, University
of California, Berkeley; Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, the New
York Public Library (Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations); Bibliothéque
Nationale de France, Département des Arts du Spectacle; Bodleian Library,
Oxford; Burns Library, Boston College; University of Delaware Library,
Newark, Delaware; Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta;
Houghton Library, Harvard University; the Department of Special
Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, California; Huntington
XV11
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Library, San Marino, California; University of Illinois at Urbana~Champaign

Library; Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas, Lawrence,
Kansas; Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library; University of
London Library; William M. Murphy; National Library of Ireland; Charles
Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University
Library, Evanston, Illinois; Plunkett Foundation, Oxford; Princeton University
Libraries; University of Reading Library; Colin Smythe, Ltd; Morris Library,
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale; Trinity College, Dublin; Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Every effort has been
made to establish contact with the holders of original copyrights; in cases where
this has not been possible I hope this general acknowledgement will be taken
as sufficient.

XVI
 FOREWORD

Tuis book is in no sense a work of joint authorship, but the contribution of

the late F. S. L. Lyons should be recorded at the outset. For nearly ten years
he worked on a biography of W. B. Yeats, amassing a great deal of material
before his untimely death in September 1983. A small portion of text had been
written, and remains unseen. Both his widow, Jennifer, and I felt that, when
I began my own project, it must remain so; nor has any overall plan been found
in his papers. Jennifer Lyons, however, has made his archive of transcripts
and notes unconditionally available to me, and they immeasurably eased my
initial entry into a vast and unfamiliar subject. I owe a great deal to her gen-
erosity and friendship, as I do to his. My interpretation and emphasis may
inevitably be at variance with what Leland Lyons would have written; when
I worked through manuscript collections in his footsteps I often found that
we were looking from different angles, and this will be a different book from
the one denied to us by his death. But his influence is great and continuing.
The Apprentice Mage is dedicated to his memory, with gratitude, affection and
admiration.
 1628
Claude Voisin = Catherine Ruant Edmond = ?
(of Orléans) Butler
(d. 1637)
®

| 1668
Jacques Margaret Abraham Voisin = Anne Heaton Edmond Butler = Jane Ferrar
(1637-1748) (d. 1705) (d. 1687)
{b. Orleans, (of Monkstown)
nat. in England,
1657]
1696 or
1697
Mary Voisin = Edmond Catherine Jane Mary William Martha
(1676-1748) Butler (b. and d. (1684-9) (b. and d. (b. 1687) (b. and d.
1681) 1686) 1687)

1722
Elizabeth = William William Edmond Pollard Abraham = Anne
Tandy Taylor Butler (b.andd. (b. 1700) (1701-32) | Meredi
(d. 1784) (d. 1741) (1698— 1699) Lloye
1766)

1750
Lindsay Roper = Jane Rebecca = Thomas Anne Margaret = John(1725-83) Margaret Abrahar
{High Sheriff of | Matthew — [dau. of Taylor (b.17230r [dau. of Charles | [Chief Clerk, (b. 1727) Voisin
Dublin] Charles 1724) Goddard of War Office, (1731-9:
Goddard of Kilkenny] Dublin Castle]
Kilkenny]

Capt. Robert = Miss Young Eleanor = William — Charles James Margaret = Matthew Rebecca Henry
Armstrong (dau. of Roper Taylor = (b.1752) Goddard (1759— Handcock (b. 1760
(d. 1797) Col. Young, (1747— — [d. young] (1754-98) 1827) (d. 1824)
(of Hackwood) Queen’s County] 1817)
©
1791 1805
Alexander Jane Grace William Sarah = George Jane = Rev.John Benjamin Mary = Capt.
[d. New Armstrong | Corbet Yeats Taylor Yeats (1777-80) — (1779- Henry
Orleans, (1767- (1757- {brother of = (1777- (1774- 1806) Terry
1813] 1861) 1824) Rey. John 1842) 1846)
® Yeats]

1835
Patrick Robert Elizabeth = Major JaneGrace = Rey, John = Ellen Thomas _—_George Henry
Corbet Corbet (b. 1815) Stewart Corbet William —(b, 1808) Terry (1808-79) (b. 1809) (1811-6:
(1793- _— (d. 1870) (1811-76) Butler {his
1840) ©) Yeats cousin]
@O a (1806-62)

1863
{2 elder sisters Susan Mary = John Butler Yeats Mary Letitia = Robert Blakely Ellen Robert Corbet
d. in infancy] Pollexfen (1839-1922) (1841-95) Wise (d. 1869) (c. 1842-57)
(1841-1900) {unm.]}

WILLIAM BUTLER Susan Mary Elizabeth Corbet Robert Corbet John Butler Jane Grace
YEATS Yeats Yeats Yeats Yeats (1875-6)
(1865-1939) (1866-1949) (1868-1940) (1870-73) (1871-1957)
‘Lily’ ‘Lolly’ ‘Jack’
 WBY’S DESCENT THROUGH THE YEATS FAMILY TREE
1 Appears in ‘Inquisition’ of 20 Decem- Oudenarde, appointed Chief Engineer in ro Lieut., 8th Madras Infantry,
ber 1606 as tenant of premises in 1714, Colonel of Royal Irish Regiment of commission dated 12 May 1812; served
Co. Dublin. Will dated 1637. Footsoldiers, 1735-42; buried in Tower in Burmese war, notably at taking of
2 Owned Thomastown, Co. Kildare. of London. But this must have been the Rangoon; created Major on field of
3 Shot by assassins when returning to previous generation. He was son of battle; governor of Penang; died on
Bishop of Meath’s seat, in revenge for Robert Armstrong and Lydia, dau. of voyage home, buried Madras. See
his ‘activity in suppressing the late Michael Harward, Ballyard, King’s Autobiographies, 21.
disturbances in the County Meath’ — County. See Autobiographies, 20. 11 Master of ‘Sandymount Castle’.
Dublin Evening Post, 26 November 1793. _ 6 Killed in 1798 Rising; a clergyman. See 12 ‘Uncle Matt’, Celbridge, agent of
See Autobiographies, 21. Autobiographies, 21. Thomastown estate.
4 Hannah Wickens m.(z) Thomas Brewer 7 See Autobiographies, 21. 13 ‘Aunt Mickey’, Sligo.
in 1751. 8 Son of Patrick Corbet, who came to
5 According to Lily, his ‘brother’ was Ireland from Shropshire as Registrar to The earlier branches of this tree are based
Major-General John Armstrong the Irish Lord Chancellor. on family records and historical notes
(1674-1742), ADC to the Duke of 9 Lived with her nephew Thomas Yeats at _ gathered by Lily Yeats.
Marlborough at Ma!plaquet and Seaview, Ballina, Sligo.

Anne Edward Voisin Hen John Martha = Jervis Yeats

(b. 1703) (b.1705) (b.1706) (b.1709) = (b. 17110) (Freeman, 1706]

q 1742
Rev. Hannah = Benjamin Mary John Eliza Mary Samuel = ?
Thomas Wickens | (d.1750) (1699- (b.1700) (b.1710) (d. 1711) Jervis
1732-93) ® [Freeman, 1707)
@ 1739]

| |
William Hamilton Thomas John Sarah MaryButler = _ Benjamin William Thomas Martha Thomas
1761-97) (b.1763) (b.1765) (b.1767) =(b. 1768) = (1751-1834) Yeats [Freeman, [Freeman,
Ensign; (1750-95) 1786; shoe- 1770]
Jamaica} {linen merchant] maker]

May Sarah = Col. Sarah Henry George = Sarah Taylor Harriet Anne Frances Charlotte Arabella
1781-3) | (b.1782) Handcock Rebecca (1783-4) — (1784— | [dau.of Wm. (1785-7) (b.1787) (1788-9) ~— (1792—_—(b. 1794)
(b. 1782) 1859) Taylor] 1872)
@

a
Eleanor = Archdeacon Benjamin Jane
ar James aeMatthew ee= Grace
Richard Mary
| |
Ellen = Dr Hamilton
b. 1813) Elwood (b. 1814) (b.1815) (b. 1816) Goddard (1819-85) | Drew (1821-91) (of Drumcliffe)
‘[d.in (1818-40) | (4. 1885) ®@
Canada] ne

| | 1880
William Butler = Alicia Freeland Grace Jane Jane Grace Isaac Fanny = Dr Samuel
(?1843-99) (1846-1935) (1847-1938) (1848-1950) (1854-1944) Gordon
{d. in Rio de {unm.} {unm. J {unm.]
Janiero] (‘Jenny’)

issue
issue
 1673
Edmund Warwick = Elizabeth
Pollexfen Pollexfen
(of Kitley) (of
Mothcombe)

1698 1705
Cissilia = Francis John = Elizabeth
Calmady Pollexfen Calmady
(of
Mothcombe)

eo deed cote
Susan = Charles Elizabeth John Henry Josias Elizabeth James
Hawkings (b. 1706) (b. 1707) (b. 1708) (b. 1710) (b. 1712) (b. 1714) (b. 1716)
{d. young]

175 |
George Elizabeth Charles = Elizabeth MaryRoach Henry Elizabeth
(b. 1732) (b. 1733) (b. 1735) Liddon (b. 1736) (b. 1738) (b. 1740)
[d. young] —_{d. young]

Susannah William Mary = Richard Rey.Charles = Agnes

(b. 1756) (b. 1765) (b. 1775) Cuming (b. 1776) Cuming

1813 |
William = Elizabeth Anthony Mary Ann John Isabella
Middleton (1798— (b. 1800) (b. 1801) (b. 1806) (b. 1810)
(¢. 1770- 1853)
1832)

Isabella William John = Janet Agnes = John

(d. 1832) (1820-82) Raeburn Raeburn
\—. [of Glasgow] —”

| [ ihe 1863 1878 ie

issue Charles George Susan Mary = John Butler Elizabeth = Rev. William John
[George, William Thomas (1841-1900) Yeats (1843-1933) | Alexander (1844-46) Anthony
Lucy] (1838-1923) (1839-1910) (1839-1922) Barrington (1845-1900)
[d. unm.]} Orr

WiLtiam BuTLeR — Susan Mary Elizabeth Corbet Robert Corbet John Butler Jane Grace issue
YEATS Yeats Yeats Yeats Yeats (1875-6)
(1865-1939) (1866-1949) (1868-1940) (1870-73) (1871-1957)
‘Lily’ ‘Lolly’ Jack’
 p)
WBY S DESCENT THROUGH THE POLLEXFEN FAMILY TREE
The earlier branches of this tree are based on information gathered by Gifford Lewis for her book
The Yeats Sisters and the Cuala (Dublin, 1994).

| at
John George = Elizabeth James Susannah
(b. 1742) (b. 1743) (b.1748) — (b. 1750)

1809 or 1810
Mary Stephens = Anthony Elizabeth
(1771-1830) (1781-1833) _(b. 1787)
{dau. of Ann
Stephens of
Wexford
1746-1824]

1837
Elizabeth = William
(1819-92) (1811-92)

~
5 | 1878 I | 1878
= Robert Alice = Arthur
Isabella = John Varley Frederick = Henrietta Alfred Agnes
William Jackson
Middleton (1849-1938) Henry Johnson Edward (1855-1926) | Gorman (1857-1932)
(1847-1913) (1852-1929) (1854-1916)
{d. unm.]
(d. unm. and
insane]

issue issue
issue issue
[including
IQII
Ruth = _ Charles
Lane-Poole]
 W B oe

Proposed binding design by Althea Gyles for The Wind Among the Reeds.
 INTRODUCTION

Tus volume of Yeats’s biography, the first of two, ends with his memories
of childhood and youth. Approaching fifty and looking to the expected
future, he sat down to make sense of his early life — and produced a disingenu-
ous masterpiece which said far more about him in 1914 than it did about his
life from 1865 to 1886. But when he gave this interim report to the world,
it was not universally well received; and the reactions of old friends and en-
emies tell us much about that preceding fifty years. “The most vacant things
man ever wrote, remarked George Russell (AE), who had known him since
art school days. “The boy in the book might have become a grocer as well as
a poet. Nobody could be astonished if this had been issued as a novel, part
one, to find in part two the hero had for some reason given up thinking of
literature and become a merchant. Why does he do it?”
Russell’s critique, which seems strangely off-beam, was conditioned by his
disapproval of his old friend’s adoption of a mask, an artistic persona, a pre-
occupation with style: ‘the present wsy is the result’. There is something in
this, and the years this book covers are the years of making ‘wsy’: hence I
have adopted this acronym to refer to a man who hated his first name, “Willie’,
and whose surname is somehow even more forbiddingly hieratic than his
initials. Even his family referred to him as ‘ws’, and still do. By different-
iation, his father remains JBy, and appears thus throughout this book. This
is not only a matter of convenience. They were both, in their ways, achieved
and astonishing personalities — as William M. Murphy has so eloquently
shown. In his own heroic self-construction, as in his continuing rework-
ing of poems, wBy painted many layers over the portrait of himself as a
young man. ‘Such a delightful creature he was when young!’ added Russell.
‘And at rare moments when he forgets himself he is still interesting as ever
almost.’
This condescension amuses us, because wByY from 1914 was to become incre-
mentally more and more ‘interesting’ until he died a quarter of a century later.
Russell, along with George Moore and many others, assumed that wBy had
finished his important work and become an impresario of his own image and
the work of others: a ‘schoolmaster’, as Moore put it, who had instructed a
whole generation in poetry, much as Sickert’s teaching had trained ‘a tribe
of little female Sickerts [who] go forth all over Europe, bringing back end-
less gable ends, every one of which may be hung in an exhibition’. Still, he
admitted, ‘all begins in Yeats and all ends in Yeats . . . Itis easier to write about
Yeats now [in 1914] than it was ten years ago, and he is better worth writing
about, for as he ceased to write he became literature, or at least the material
XXV
 INTRODUCTION

outofwhich literature is fashioned.” As usual, Moore is at once impressively

astute and sublimely wrong. By 1914 wBy had become a literary ‘subject’, but
he was very far from ceasing to write. In many ways the poet would have the
last laugh; enabled by that faculty which always amazed his wife, of know-
ing how things would look to people afterwards.
There is a final point concerning that early autobiography — final, that is,
until the reader reaches the last chapter of this book. Dismissing wBy’s
Reveries, Russell went on to grumble: ‘We are interested in Yeats’s inner
mind, whatever it is, but not in anecdotes of things he saw and whose effect
on his own mind is not clear.’ Like Moore, he is only half right. We are inter-
ested in his inner mind; but the things he saw, and the things he did, are
of surpassing interest because of his alchemical capacity to transmute the
events of a crowded life, lived on many levels, into art. We are confronting a
poetic genius who was also, both serially and simultaneously, a playwright,
journalist, occultist, apprentice politician, revolutionary, stage-manager,
diner-out, dedicated friend, confidant and lover of some of the most inter-
esting people of his day. To approach his ‘inner life’ we have to see these ‘outer’
experiences impacting upon each other, and to reassemble them both chrono-
logically and circumstantially. What is needed is this kind of biography: not
another exegesis of the poetry from a biographical angle, not an analysis of
the development of his aesthetic theories, and especially not a study that ranges
at will across the work of nearly sixty years, relating — as one critic has done
— the poetry of the early 1890s to the enterprise of state-building in the 1920s.
It is also worth bearing in mind the injunction of Michel Serres: that one can
read from the work of art to its conditions, but not — or not entirely — from
the conditions to the work of art.?
Here lies the justification for this long book; and for the fact that it is a his-
torian who has written it. wBy’s life has been approached over and over
again, for the purposes of relating it to his art: a process that began before
the end of the period dealt with in the following pages. Shortly after he died,
Joseph Hone produced his official life; a literary biography followed from A.
Norman Jeffares, and then the luminous works by Richard Ellmann, which
still hold the critical field. Many other one-volume biographical studies were
still to come, and more are being written at this moment; but they all tend
to follow Ellmann’s dazzling structure. Faced with the multifarious activ-
ities, the feints and turns, the wildly differing worlds which wBy embraced,
Ellmann followed his subject’s example in dealing with his life thematic-
ally. wBy’s own Autobiographies dictate an arrangement for his life, and it is
a thematic one; this is hard not to follow, even if it looks like the way of the
chameleon. The natural reaction is to shadow him from young Celtic Revivalist
to theatrical manager to witness of revolution to smiling public man; to
XXV1
 INTRODUCTION

accept his Autobiographies as straightforward records rather than to see

them in terms of the time they were composed; and to deal with periods of
frantic and diverse involvements, as in the early rg00s, by separating out
the strands of occultism, drama and love, and addressing them individually.
The result, in Ellmann’s work, was a masterpiece of intellectual analysis and
psychological penetration, to which all Yeatsians are for ever indebted.
However, we do not, alas, live our lives in themes, but day by day; and way,
giant though he was, is no exception.
Most biographical studies of wBy are principally about what he wrote; this
one is principally about what he did. The marvellously annotated volumes
of his Collected Letters, as they appear, reconstruct how intensely he combined
different preoccupations, involvements, lives, personae, circles of friends; so
do the detailed studies of certain episodes in his life by a phalanx of brilliant
scholars in the last generation. But in his own memories, the themes were
sorted out under various headings, and his personality, in these apprentice
years, was presented accordingly. Most of all, an apprenticeship in magical
and occult studies required solitude and a rejection of the world. ‘When [a
mortal] goes his way to supreme Adeptship,’ he wrote in 1901, ‘he will go
absolutely alone, for men attain to the supreme wisdom in a loneliness that
is like the loneliness of death.’* He meant this. But it was said by someone
simultaneously capable of tremendous social gregariousness, who wrote end-
less letters, who had a connoisseur’s taste for psychological quirks and gos-
sip about his friends, who ruefully accepted his own propensity for indiscretion.
(Like Marx, the only novelist whose work he read consistently was Balzac,
and he was acommitted admirer.) And the conjunctions of his life show that
he was never more authoritarian, uncompromising, esoteric than after a
reversal in one of the parallel ‘external’ worlds of politics or love. This could
work two ways: his obsessive plunge into theatrical activity followed a reverse
in the world of occult organizations, and met the needs to which occultism
had ministered. At the point this volume ends, at the very time Russell was
dismissing him as no longer ‘interesting’ and mummified beneath his mask,
his newer friend Ezra Pound explained to Harriet Monroe (with character-
istic certainty) why wBy was still the best living poet. ‘Yeats knows life,
despite his chiaroscuro, and his lack of a certain sort of observation — He learns
by emotion, and is one of the few people who have ever had any, who know
what violent emotion really is like; who see from the centre of it — instead of
trying to look in from the rim.”
What this volume attempts to do is restore the sense of a man involved in
life, and in history: notably in the history of his country, at a time of excep-
tional flux and achievement. His extraordinary life deserves to be studied
for its relationship to his work, it also needs to be studied for its influence on
XXVI1
 INTRODUCTION

his country’s biography. This is true in several unexpected ways. His best-
known poetry defines for many people the Irish identity which was forged
in revolution. But he represented, in the intersections and traditions of his
own life, a complex tangle of historical allegiances as well as personal rela-
tionships. A historically grounded biography can attempt to survey this,
without necessarily adopting the nineteenth-century framework of the ‘exem-
plary life’ and merely rearing up what Yeats called an ‘image for the affec-
tions’. The idealized portraits of national heroes, he once remarked, destroyed
‘that delight in what is unforeseen . . . the mere drifting hither and thither
that must come before all true thought and emotion’.® The delight in what
is unforeseen is a theme throughout this book. Moreover, many of the prob-
lems which currently exercise Irish historians are woven directly into the
interpretation of wBy’s life. The marginalization of the Protestant Ascendancy
from the 1870s, the chronology of nationalist revival in the 1890s, the import-
ance (or otherwise) of Fenianism around the turn of the century, the impact
of the Boer War on Irish politics, the rise and nature of Sinn Féin, the con-
stitutional crisis before the First World War, the effects of deferring Home
Rule —all these subjects occur here and in all of them his personal life is deeply
implicated. His life also illuminates the large historical theme of the change
in Ireland’s relation to Britain. The challenge to the authority of the class and
caste from which wy came — the Protestant Ascendancy and middle class
— was followed by a challenge to the very idea of a link between the two
countries. And the cultural as well as political implications of this lay close
to his own preoccupations.
Napoleon’s dictum that to understand a man you have to know what was
} happening in the world when he was twenty is manifestly true of wBy. He
" came to fame as the poet of the new Ireland, asserting its identity; his own
discovery of his voice is often neatly paralleled with his country’s discovery
of independence. But he was also a product of the ancien régime: Victorian,
Protestant, Ascendancy Ireland. And his childhood and youth were punc-
tuated by the events which charted its decline. Born in 1865, he was four years
old when Gladstone disestablished the Church of Ireland, which provided
livings for many of his ancestors. He was five when the 1870 Land Act inter-
fered with landlords’ control over their property, and Isaac Butt founded the
Home Rule movement. He was seven when the Secret Ballot Act liberated
tenant voters and dealt a major blow to landlord political power. He was twelve
when Parnell began to dominate the Irish Parliamentary Party, fourteen when
the Land War broke out and tenants began witholding their rents in the
long campaign towards a peasant proprietorship, seventeen when Parnell
and Gladstone began the rapprochement between the Liberal Party and the
Irish nationalists which would produce a (failed) Home Rule bill in wsy’s

XXV1ll
 INTRODUCTION

twenty-first year. So his youth spanned the exact period of crisis which
inaugurated the decline of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy. It was a process
of which he and his immediate family — who had become déclassé bohe-
mians, living in London — approved, though their relations did not. How-
ever, strong Home Rulers though yy and his children were, it disadvantaged
them objectively, and they remained slightly uncomfortable with the suc-
cessor class who were poised to take over by the eve of the First World
War. And wey’s quarrels with himself and others over the shape-changing
phenomenon of Irish nationalism fit into this framework with compelling
interest.
This background illuminates his creative and mutually dependent friend-
ship with Augusta Gregory, no less than his stormy relationships with his col-
leagues in the Abbey Theatre; it helps explain the way the dramatic movement's
leaders tried to build a nationalist enterprise that would be somehow non-
political; and it pervades those memories of childhood which flooded and pos-
sessed him in middle age, when this volume ends. At that point he thought
he had reached a plateau where he would look back as well as forward, believ-
ing that his continual questioning of Irish nationalism and Irish cultural
identity had reached some kind of resolution. The mentors of his childhood
and youth were to be fixed into a heroic frieze as he relived his past. The irony,
marvellous and immense, lies in the fact that so much was yet to come. But
he was not wrong in believing that the years up to 1914 fixed the patterns by
which he lived his astonishing life. ‘Ireland is being made,’ he wrote towards
the end of the period covered here, ‘& this gives the few who have clear sight
the determination to shape it.” By then his claim to shaping it had been lodged,
and these pages chronicle the process.
The themes of an independent mind and a national commitment, con-
tinually explored in his writing, are linked closely to wBy’s family back-
ground and his own political involvements, as well as to the question of
contested Irishness which preoccupied him all his life. To examine that life
should bring into view a whole range of identifications, backgrounds, experi-
ences, epitomized by himself, his family, his collaborators, his friends:
a palimpsest of Irishness, which he never stopped interrogating, and which
developed and changed with the conditions of his time. Hence the import-
ance of chronology: of restoring, for instance, the order of his political involve-
ments from 1895 to 1900, strategically jumbled in his Autobiographies, and of
relating them to his relationships with the important women in his life,
Augusta Gregory nearly as much as Maud Gonne. Throughout, isis neces-
sary to hold in the frame his relationships with other people, and how they
saw him: to capture them before immobilization into that frieze. The process
should recover Gregory's attitude towards Synge’s work, or the resentment
XX1X
 INTRODUCTION

felt by her son for wBy, as well as his relationship with Dublin opinion, with
contemporary Ireland at large, and with the worlds of English literature and
(increasingly high) society.
Hence the importance of letters and ephemeral journalism, written before
hindsight. In some cases I have quoted a manifesto or a letter with the ex-
cisions and cancellations which indicate a thought in the process of forma-
tion (with Yeats’s erratic spelling and punctuation preserved whenever
possible). Similarly, I have tried to see those poems that are discussed here
in their immediate historical context. Simple-minded as it may seem, the con-
junctions of chronology cast light on the gestation not only of public poems
like “To Ireland in the Coming Times’ and ‘September 1913’ but of ‘private’
ones like ‘The Cold Heaven’ and ‘Adam’s Curse’. In an effort to recapture imme-
diacy, I have often quoted a poem in the first version wBy released to the
world — or to a friend, embedded in or alongside a letter. The high polish of
the canonical version may be lost, but a more vivid colour sometimes comes
through, with a rougher texture. At the same time this volume may contain
less about poetry and its making than might be expected. Without endors-
ing Russell’s comment that the boy portrayed in wBy’s first autobiography
could as easily have become a grocer, it remains true that in his early life numer-
ous commitments and interests competed for his attention, and writing
poetry was not always at the forefront. Indeed, during his apprenticeship
there were junctures when other forms of writing took nearly all his thought;
not only plays (with which he began his writing career) but also fiction and
critical commentary. This too is a contemporary emphasis which is reasserted
in this volume.
Seamus Heaney has described a poem’s construction as building a trellis
~ the structure — and then training a vine across it. For wBy’s life, a strict chro-
nological ordering must form the basic grid; integrating themes then grow
across the lattice. But even in building that grid, there is room for reconstruc-
tion: for one thing, at least two of the most important encounters of wBy’s
young life (with Mohini Chatterjee and with Maud Gonne) may have been
consistently misdated. And, crucially, the interactions between events in
his life, such as the wars over the National Literary Society in Dublin in the
early 1890s, the underlying political agenda, and the theoretical principles
he laid down in critical manifestos, need to be drawn out. Many of the
ambiguities and apparent inconsistencies in wBy’s aesthetic and literary
pronouncements can be clarified by relating them to events in the ‘real’ (or
at least day-to-day) world.
wy, like all of us, lived out his life constantly expecting various kinds
of future: perhaps more so than many, because he was a practised and com-
mitted astrologer. But, as with everyone, the expected future never hap-
XXX
 INTRODUCTION

pened. Unlike most of us, he possessed a protean ability to shift his ground,
repossess the advantage, and lay a claim to authority — always with an eye to
how people would see things afterwards. Perhaps above all, this biography
tries to explain the basis for his expectations, and the reasons why things
turned out differently. :
 ; J

at ="niet tn yi elsconon ane -

ay :
ne
‘
— *
_ = i -
ar
. -_ 4 hon wR
Prologue: YEATSES AND POLLEXFENS

I watched him as the mousing cat, fearful lest some trait, some
inclination which I had deplored in my own family or in his
mother’s, might develop to his undoing . . . There are no rules
for the breeding of poets.

John Butler Yeats, unpublished memoirs

A MARRIAGE is not only the union of two people but the confluence of two
families. When John Butler Yeats (born 16 March 1839, barrister at law) mar-
ried Susan Mary Pollexfen (born 13 July 1841), the conjunction brought
uneasily together on 10 September 1863 two clans quintessentially of the
Trish Protestant middle class. But the strains which they represented were so
different, and their individual cultures so contrasting, that it became a com-
monplace for py and his children to ascribe character and fate to the clash of
two tribal constellations. Above all, in the view of the father, this produced the
poet. ‘By marriage with a Pollexfen I have given a tongue to the sea cliffs.”
This determinism curiously anticipated the part that astrology would play
in that poet’s own attempts to make sense of his life. For the social histor-
ian, however, what is interesting is the way that the Yeatses and Pollexfens
backgrounds, preoccupations and cultural iden-
together spanned the variety of
tifications associated with the Victorian Irish Protestant bourgeoisie. This
nearly forgotten class was part of the structure of Protestant Ascendancy in
Ireland, still in place when ypy married Susan Pollexfen, but about to enter
its long decline.
That decline too was typified by the Yeats—Pollexfen marriage. The Yeatses
had had money, social influence and a history in Ireland. By the later nine-
teenth century all they were left with was the history. The aristocratic ‘Butler’
connection was inserted into most male Yeats names; its link back to the great
Norman dynasty of the Dukes of Ormonde was an important part of fam-
ily lore, though official genealogy did not bear them out.? And when Mary
Butler married Benjamin William Yeats, son of Benjamin Yeats, a wholesale
linen merchant of William Street, Dublin,’ on 22 August 1773, she allegedly
brought with her another thread of romance from the armorial banner of
Irish Protestant folk-history: through her great-grandmother, born Mary
Voisin, she was supposed to be of Huguenot descent. The Voisins, a family
of bankers and goldsmiths, had, however, arrived in Ireland from Orleans
via London, not as part of the direct Huguenot diaspora from France to
Ireland. Even this romantic association was not all that it might seem.*
Hi
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

Benjamin and Mary Yeats’s eldest son, John, was born on 13 November
1774; he went to Trinity, took his degree (winning a Berkeley medal) in 1797
and, like many of the family, entered the Church of Ireland. From 1811 to
1846 he was Rector of Drumcliffe, County Sligo, a part of Ireland which his
great-grandson would immortalize. He married Jane Taylor, eldest daughter
of William Taylor of Dublin Castle, at St Werbergh’s on 7 September 1805.
By the early nineteenth century the Yeatses appear firmly located in the
world of the Protestant middle classes: Trinity College, the Church of Ire-
land, professional occupations. John’s son William Butler Yeats, the poet’s
grandfather, was even born (on 19 July 1806) in the impeccable surround-
ings of Dublin Castle, where his maternal grandfather, William Taylor, was
Chief Clerk in the Chief Secretary’s office — a post held by five generations
of his family.” William Butler Yeats attended Trinity, married (in November
1835) Jane Grace Corbet,° and became a clergyman. After a brief period in
the parish of Moira, County Down, he became Rector of Tullylish in the same
county. The previous incumbent, Dr Beatty, retired in his favour — possibly
because he was a relative by marriage.’ But the Reverend Yeats left his
living inexplicably early in 1853, and did not take up another. Though he
remained technically Rector, he stayed away from the parish.* Possibly he left
under a cloud or after a breakdown; his sonJBy remembered him as charm-
ing but unrealistic (“he made castles even in Ireland, as others did in Spain’).
His daughters, the poet’s aunts, never spoke of him.’ Nine years later he died
suddenly at the home of his brother-in-law Robert Corbet, Sandymount
Castle, Dublin. This was a castellated house in the Dublin suburbs whose
name, like the Yeatses’ Huguenot connection and Butler ancestry, could not
quite deliver the promise of its associations.’
By was born in the Old Vicarage, Tullylish, on 16 March 1839; two elder
sisters had died of scarlet fever." He grew up in a family ‘dyed’, he remarked
later, ‘in a sort of well-mannered evangelicalism’.1?7 He remembered life at
Tullylish during the Famine, when the clergyman’s family were watched
through their windows by starving skeletons of people.’ They were essen-
tially a professional and clerical family, but some farms remained to them at
Thomastown, near Enfield, County Kildare, providing rough shooting and
bringing in a diminishing rent (4600 gross, £220 net); this had come through
Mary Butler, wife of the younger Benjamin Yeats. The atmosphere of
Protestant gentility chafed on jsy; with time he turned to free thought,
bohemianism and nationalism. The family’s friends were clerical, Trinity and
Unionist; but an important influence from early on was Isaac Butt, in the 1830s
a young Trinity intellectual preoccupied with ideas of Protestant ‘national-
ity’. He would become the founder of the movement for Irish Home Rule
in the 1870s, subsequently to be displaced by Parnell. Butt was a close family
2
 PROLOGUE : YEATSES AND POLLEXFENS

friend of the Yeatses: another of William Butler Yeats’s sons was named after
him; Butt’s daughter, Rosa, became the great unattainable love of jsy’s life.
Her father’s ghost remained a haunting presence, representing Irish Protestant
nationalism as it might have been. ‘The career of Butt and its disasters,’ BY
wrote to his eldest son, ‘is enough to prove the necessity of the Irish poetical
movement.’* Also characteristic of this culture was a certain contempt for
English obviousness — their ‘elephantine naivete’, in JBy’s mordant phrase.®
This antipathy was shared by many Irish people who would not describe them-
selves as nationalist.
Heterodox opinions, however, developed against a background of Irish
gentility. The concept of an Irish gentleman was central: often defined in
contradistinction to Anglo-Saxon unsubtlety and insularity. (When jsy in
old age discovered America, he was struck by the liberation of not being
seen as a Protestant in Ireland, or as an Irishman in England. ‘In London and
in Dublin I am arguing on the defensive. Here I feel valiantly on the offens-
ive.’) Equally important was a graceful style of life, which would be sym-
bolized for yBy’s children by their grandmother, his mother — ‘a big woman
high above her rather petty surroundings. She had a most progressive mind
up to the very last. I see her so clearly with her pale colour and handsome nose
and mouth and chin, her small very dark eyes, upright figure and dignified
dainty clothes. They were both handsome, as her age and position called for,
and dainty as a girl’s as her habit and character required.”* At Sandymount
Castle, Lily Yeats remembered, they drank out of silver cups, not glasses;””
late in life she was still meeting connections on the Yeats side, like the
Armstrongs, who clung to the notion of lost Ascendancy. (An Armstrong
relation encountered in 1921 ‘had a most impressive way of dropping his voice
and saying sadly, “so very sad that so and so had to be sold”. By this I gather
the clan owned large estates, all of which he thought was known to me’.”’)
By then, the folk-memory of banishment from a lost Eden was part of the
Irish Ascendancy mind: vanished demesnes loomed larger and larger in the
mythology. But the asperity of Lily Yeats’s tone indicates that she came from
a less nostalgic tradition as well: the Pollexfen strain.
The Pollexfens were Irish Protestants too, but much more recently arrived.
By origin, they were Devon gentry with branches at Woodbury, Mothcombe
and Kitley in the early eighteenth century. The Sligo Pollexfens were des-
cended from the Kitley branch, who by the early nineteenth century were
established in Brixham, Devon, where they had shipping interests; through
an unprotected entail their fortunes had declined.” There was a slender
Irish connection through Mary Stephens of Wexford, the wife of Anthony
Pollexfen, barrack-master” and Keeper of Forts at Torquay, who died in
1833, aged fifty-two. The way their son William came to Ireland has itself an
3
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

aura of seafaring romance. In the early 1830s William, who was born in 1811,
arrived almost by chance into the rainwashed western Irish seaport of Sligo
on his ship. Here he found his widowed cousin Elizabeth Middleton in
difficulties with the milling and shipping business she had inherited from her
late husband, William Middleton, who had died of cholera in 1832. (She came
from a Channel Islands branch of the Pollexfen family, where they had
become Wesleyans.”) William Pollexfen stayed, helped out, entered the
firm with her son William Middleton, and eventually married her daughter,
Elizabeth (b. 1819) on 4 May 1837.4 He became a formidable patriarch, rais-
ing and terrifying a large family; his eldest daughter, Susan, married By and
was the mother of the poet.”
The Middletons were country businessmen, comfortably off members of
the local Protestant bourgeoisie with odd ‘squireen’ offshoots; the Pollexfens
fitted this mould. But, according to By, they brought into this world an intense
and sardonic flavour all their own. ‘Curiously the Pollexfens are entirely
without the sentiments of reverence, and so religion never touches them. Law
they understand, definite rules and laws, but not religion, unless perhaps the
kind of religion the Jews practise, a religion of ceremony and fixed law.”° With
this, jBy always maintained, ‘they had all the marks of imagination, the con-
tinual absorption in an idea — and that idea never one of the intellectual and
reasoning faculty but of the affections and the desires and the senses’. Pollexfens
were drawn to mysticism and morbidity; at the same time yBy used the word
‘puritan’ to distinguish their disapproval of the life of the mind, as much as
their Low Church Protestantism. But they had reserves of repressed passion,
which altered their world-view: ‘a Pollexfen in a rage is like a dog gone mad,
everything is blotted out in a general blackness’.”” And he often repeated that,
though the Pollexfens were the most truthful people he ever met, he would
not believe a word they said.”
Two things should be pointed out regarding jBy’s testimony about the
Pollexfens. First, it is mostly retrospective, constructed both to answer the
question of how he had produced artistic genius in his own family and to
explain, self-absolvingly, the shortcomings of his own marriage. And second,
most of his Pollexfen generalizations appear to be based on the behaviour and
psychology of his brother-in-law George Pollexfen, a figure who obsessed
him from their schooldays together at Atholl Academy in the Isle of Man.”
By no means all the Pollexfens fit into yBy’s decisive dichotomies: not only
were they descended from gentry at least as well-bred as the Yeatses, but
the majority of them settled comfortably into provincial bourgeois lives.
However, there was certainly a strain of mental instability, taking the form
of manic depression in JBY’s sister-in-law Agnes Pollexfen Gorman,°° and
also affecting her daughter Elma and another sister Elizabeth Pollexfen Orr;
4
 PROLOGUE : YEATSES AND POLLEXFENS

a brother, William Middleton Pollexfen, actually died in an insane asylum.

Privately, yBy made much of this — particularly when discussing the behavi-
our of his daughter Elizabeth (Lolly). And his wife’s withdrawal into her own
abstracted world towards the end of her life was fitted into this pattern too.
All this was far in advance in 1862, when ysy visited his schoolfriend
George Pollexfen in Sligo, and ended by proposing marriage to his sister. But
it led to the union of two original and distinctive families, which together em-
brace the ethos of mid-Victorian Protestant Ireland. The Yeatses had their
past aristocratic associations, Trinity College culture, remnants of landed prop-
erty and well-bred fastidiousness; the Pollexfens seem more reminiscent
of the ‘New English’ settlers of an earlier period, tough-minded townsmen,
impatient with the pretensions of the Yeats connection. When yBy’s son Jack
remarked dismissively that ‘we had no gate lodges and no carriage drives’, he
spoke as a Pollexfen, deliberately trying to puncture the Yeats pretensions of
his brother Willie.* But both clans were, in their own way, peculiarly Irish
— as Lily Yeats sharply remarked, long after separation from Britain had
redefined ‘Trishness’ for families like hers. “We are far more Irish than all the
Saints and Martyrs — Parnell — Pearse -Madam Markiewicz— Maud Gonne
— De Valera — and no-one ever thinks of speaking of them as Anglo-Irish.
Our nearest English blood is a 100 years ago — and Grandfather William
Pollexfen’s mother Ann Stephens came from Wexford.”” The cultural roots
of Irishness would strike a problematic note for jBy’s children: descended
as they were from Irish Protestant stock, living much of their early life in
England, but deeply rooted in Ireland in general and Sligo in particular.
Moreover, from the 1860s on, a sense of cultural and social marginalization
and insecurity haunted the Irish Protestant universe, as the new world of self-
confident Catholic democracy took over Irish public life.*? Behind this, the
Yeats—Pollexfen marriage stands as the enduring cornerstone of the fam-
ily’s cultural, as well as their actual, existence. JBy’s belief that it made artists
of them all may have more truth in it than seems likely at first sight.
Chapter1:THE ARTIST’s CHILDREN
SLIGO 1865-1881

Children live a fantastic life, in which there is everything except

human love and human pity and human regret. They weep, like
geniuses, tears upon tears for some dead Orpheus of whom they
have dreamt and pass with wondering indifference, like geni-
uses, among the sorrows of their own household.
Cancelled passage from The Speckled Bird

I
‘EVERYONE'S life is a long series of miraculous escapes,’ wrote JBY with char-
acteristic insouciance.’ His own career was certainly a series of determined
attempts to avoid entrapment of one sort or another. The clergyman’s son,
with his romantic good looks, graceful manner and myriad talents, grew up
determined to fly by the nets of Irish Protestant respectability. He succeed-
ed in this through a determined cu/te de moi; in many ways sweet-natured,
formidably articulate and relentlessly charming, he was also fundamentally
self-centred and prone to storms of petulance. Like many such people, he was
a great dilettante; although unlike many, he possessed a real artistic talent.
But there was a determined addiction to failure in his character; and he was
often inconsistent, even in his brilliantly articulated opinions.
The career that was marked out for him was one of the preordained
paths for his caste: school in England, Trinity College, Dublin, the Irish
Bar. But early on he was determined to deviate. Symbolically, he described
himself as having an ‘incapacity for arithmetic . . . a genius for ignoring
and denying facts’.* Long before he met his wife, the patterns which would
infuriate her had been fixed: his refusal to ‘settle’, his mockery of the world
of ‘getting on’, his need to be the centre of a sociable circle. And equally early
his simultaneous fascination with and repulsion towards her family had
been awakened. If it is true that in all human relationships a third person
is silently present, that presence in the Yeats marriage was Susan Pollexfen’s
brother George.
yBy’s obsession with George Pollexfen is important, not least because it
was inherited by his eldest son. Both Yeatses needed to fascinate, and George
Pollexfen was determined not to be fascinated. ‘He was a genuine Pollexfen,
and regarded affection as something contraband.” Nor, for his part, did he
have any interest in fascinating other people. ‘George looks at you with the
face of a horse, which effectively prevents his being a social success.’ But what
6
 THE ARTIST'S CHILDREN: SLIGO 1865-1881
excited yBy about the morose fellow-Irishman he first encountered at his Isle
of Man school in 1851 was the original and implicitly poetic nature banked
beneath. “That was the light within him that lured our affection.”> He told
spellbinding stories to the other boys at night; he was, and remained, a devout
believer in astrology and occultism. And he remained unmoved by opinions.
To yBy, formed by reading Mill, Comte and other positivists,° and plagued
by opinions, George presented an infuriating conundrum. jpy’s annoyance
did not decrease as George retreated into hypochondria and occult invest-
igations, and was exacerbated when his friendship, so earnestly desired, was
removed from yBy and extended instead to his eldest son. George and JBy
fell out, eventually, over an unpaid debt of £20 — a matter in which George’s
attitude genuinely dumbfounded sy. ‘That in his estimate outweighed all
my qualities and, as it were, nullified all the claims of friendship which began
at school where we were inseparable companions.” Similarly, he found it
incredible that George refused him a ‘loan’ when jBy was emigrating to the
USA-—‘to me his school friend who married his sister.’”* And, a Pollexfen would
have added, a man who never paid his debts.
From Atholl Academy jBy proceeded to Trinity College in 1857; never
really happy there, he graduated (with an unclassified degree, due to illness)
in 1862 and proceeded to read law at the King’s Inns. George Pollexfen had
returned to Sligo and the family business. And here JBy came to visit in Sep-
tember 1862. The Yeatses themselves had Sligo connections through yBy’s
grandfather John, Rector of Drumcliffe; his courtship of George’s sister
Susan began, and he returned there to marry her on 10 September 1863. Thus
Sligo would be the basis of their marriage; both their addresses were given
as the Pollexfen home on Union Place, though ysy stayed at the Imperial Hotel.
The wedding at St John’s, Sligo, was witnessed by sBy’s uncle Thomas Yeats
and Susan’s uncle William Middleton; the bridesmaids were two Yeatses, a
Pollexfen, an Armstrong, a Dawson and a Middleton.’ A story of their honey-
moon was retailed long afterwards by their daughter Lily:

It was here [the Railway Hotel, Galway] Papa and Mama came over 60 years ago
on their honeymoon. Mama had never stayed in an hotel, and Papa got ill, and she
tried to light a fire and failed, and Papa got cross and said it would take a coach and
four to wait on her, and then she went out for help and stood on the landing and looked
down the great well to the hall, and heard some children on the top floor saying their
prayers, and she felt homesick. They had a sitting room and Papa had to go to bed.
She sat alone for dinner and they brought her a shoulder of mutton. She cut it once,
and then, aghast at the way it opened out, looking as if she had eaten quite a pound
of meat, she had not the courage to cut off even one slice, and so took just the ve-
getables. Next day Papa sent for his mother, who came and took him to Dublin in
an invalid carriage, and his illness proved to be Diphtheria!”°
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

This not only indicates the kind of stories their mother told her children, as
full of artistic and circumstantial detail as any Irish seanchai; it also symbol-
izes much about the relationship that was to develop. ‘I became engaged on
two or three days acquaintance, and it was not first love or love at all,’ wrote
ysy over fifty years later to Rosa Butt, ‘(this really entre nous — I have never
confessed it to anyone) — but just destiny.’ Elsewhere he complained that
he could never talk to his wife: ‘If Ishowed her my real thoughts she became
quite silent and silent for days, though inwardly furious.””
This may be less surprising to us than to him. Susan Pollexfen Yeats
was notably pretty; her eldest son was told later that she had been ‘the most
beautiful woman in Sligo’, and her husband’s early sketches show a pensive
face, large-eyed and delicate. He liked to write of his wife as withdrawn
and unsure of herself, but their correspondence before marriage gives a very
different impression. It also shows that yy had a strong intuition of the
kind of difficulties that marrying him might involve:
. .- [love you so much that I would like to share every mood with you. And to have
nothing secret from your quick strength and common sense — you are more a man
than a woman. Only I hope you won't henpeck me. And make me withdraw from
the intimacy of all people who are not acceptable to your ladyship. You are fond of
the Exercise of power and authority in which I quite agree & which bodes ill to my
freedom. I shall be afraid to ask anybody to the house without first asking your per-
mission and if I do how cross you'll be with your head thrown back. Your utterance
short and abrupt, your dress rustling angrily. The storeroom key grating harshly and
sharply in the lock. How my spirits will sink. And how uncomfortable the unfortu-
nate guest will be. And what a milksop I'll be thought and what a tyrant you'll be
thought and how you'll be dreaded accordingly. How my poor sisters will tremble at
your frown and how we shall make common cause together."
But it was not Susan who turned out the tyrant; her husband’s facility for a
fait accomph outflanked her. Having married a law student with good con-
nections and a solid background in the Protestant clerical establishment,
she had no reason to anticipate being carried off to bohemia, and never rec-
onciled herself to the abduction. Sligo remained her emotional base; reticent
and occasionally caustic in the Pollexfen mode, she hated what she con-
strued as the pretensions and social frivolity of ‘artistic’ life. Nor did she
share the Yeats fascination with how people behaved: like her brother George,
she put up barriers. ‘All the time they were longing for affection, jay thought,
‘and their longing was like a deep unsunned well. And never having learned
the language of affection they did not know how to win it. It is a language
which, like good manners, must be learned in childhood. I more than once
said to my wife that I never saw her show affection to me or to anyone, and
yet it was there all the time.”
8
 THE ARTIST'S CHILDREN: SLIGO 1865-1881
The Pollexfens’ lack of amusement may have been to do with money.
At the time of their marriage, the young couple were probably expecting the
bride’s family to help out. yBy’s father died on 24 November 1862; while his
capital was valued at about £10,000, it was subject to mortgages and claims,
and his eventual estate was registered as ‘effects under £300’.'° The Registry
of Deeds in Dublin records a long list of charges on Yeats property arranged
by jBy’s father — some of them involving deals with the Royal Exchange
Assurance Company, which his brother-in-law Robert Corbet represented;
in 1861 a case was brought against the Reverend Yeats by a creditor who tried
to claim the Thomastown lands, but they stayed in the family’s hands and
were repeatedly remortgaged.'” His son’s only income came from some
Dublin house property (sold for £600 in early 1877, which was all swallowed
by debts), and the farms at Thomastown, which had come down from his Butler
great-grandmother.'* Family lore supposed this income to be 4500 to £600
a year, a good income for an era when a hundred a year could keep hunters
and servants."? Actually in 1863 it brought in 4379. 6s. od. net and that declined
with agrarian crisis. It was remortgaged before the end of 1867; in 1873 net
receipts were £206; in 1874, £72; and by 1880 it was bringing in practically noth-
ing at all.*° The Corbet relationship, for all the apparent grandeur of
‘Sandymount Castle’, ran more spectacularly into insolvency. Uncle Robert
Corbet was a stockbroker and agent for the Royal Exchange Assurance Com-
pany, working for the Encumbered Estates Court, which sold off bankrupt
estates after the Famine; he should have made a comfortable fortune. But he
became embroiled in difficulties, and in 1870 committed suicide by jump-
ing off the Holyhead mailboat.** The Corbet-Yeats family history brings
together all the emblems signifying the decline of an Ascendancy elite.
The Pollexfens, on the other hand, were apparently rich. The milling
and shipping interests had prospered and expanded; grandfather Pollexfen
reputedly had £4,000 a year. But he gave none of his daughters marriage por-
tions, nor allowances to his unmarried daughters, even though he took over
the property they inherited from the Middleton side.” George Pollexfen made
a good deal of money for his part, according to By, through the exertions of
an alcoholic clerk possessed by financial genius, called Doyle.” Though
George was a nominal partner from 1884, in practice the firm was increas-
ingly taken over by Arthur Jackson, who had married Alice Pollexfen. There
were subsidiary elements of the business, like the Sligo Steam Navigation
Company (founded by Susan’s father, William Pollexfen, and his brother-
in-law William Middleton), whose Liverpool office was at one point man-
aged by George (and also employed another brother, Alfred). Both Middleton
and Pollexfen were directors of the Sligo Gas, Light & Coke Company, and
prominent members of the Butter Market.
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

Middleton & Pollexfen were a not uncontroversial firm. Bitter battles had
to be fought on the Town and Harbour Commission Board (a spectacularly
unreformed body), and unfortunately for the public image of the brothers-
in-law a fellow-member who opposed them, Alexander Gillmor, was also the
proprietor of the S/igo Independent. William Pollexfen failed to be elected to
the town council in November 1863, and again in 1867, running on a stout anti-
reform platform. The firm’s vested commercial interests were thrown against
the Board’s efforts to reform regulations concerning pilots. Middleton’s
immortality may be ensured through a mention on the first page of wBY’s
Autobiographies, expressing gratitude to his great-uncle for the reflection that
‘we should not make light of the troubles of children’. But in contemporary
local history he emerges as the voice of hard-headed and belligerent business
interests,”* frequently accused of exploitation and monopoly. He was particu-
larly notorious for ‘the grasping spirit displayed by him in the salvage courts’,
through whose activities the firm made much of its money~ since they owned
the only steam-tug in the port. This explains why William Falconer’s Shipwreck
was the only book wBy remembered upon his grandfather’s table, except for
the Bible.” The Stigo Independent's description of the firm’s attitude to rival
local interests oddly echoes jBy’s description of the Pollexfens: ‘uniform
bitterness, implacable hostility, and morose discontent’.”° Later, they were
equally unpopular when they blocked the water-run to a local salmon-weir?’
and opposed efforts to reform the harbour administration. They also argued
against the preferred scheme for a clean water supply—again, in order to pro-
tect family interests.** The firm stood ‘alone in obstruction and opposition’,
according to the S/igo Independent: just the old story over again’.”” Middleton's
effrontery, attempted ‘dictatorship’ and nepotism in local affairs dominated
the Sligo press in the 1870s; his influence in local elections was exerted on the
Tory and Protestant side, though the firm employed Catholics and Protestants
equally.°° William Pollexfen was among those found guilty of bribing voters
in 1860: Sligo, until its disenfranchisement in 1870, was supposed to be ‘the
most rotten borough in the kingdom’.
This was the basis on which local prominence was built. Oddly, wsy’s child-
hood vision saw Pollexfen as a passionate Lear-figure, and Middleton as quiet,
civil and withdrawn — images reversed in local lore. To their grandchildren’s
generation, however, Middleton and Pollexfen stood as the elders of the
tribe, respected and feared. Lily Yeats remembered returning to the town after
a long English visit, aged seven or eight, and being greeted by blazing tar-
barrels all along the road from the station.*! The family’s move from Union
Place to Merville, a large house outside the town with extensive outbuild-
ings and a fine view of Ben Bulben, signified an advance in status. But they
expected respectability of their relations: and ysy did not conform. In January
IO
 THE ARTIST'S CHILDREN: SLIGO 1865-1881

1866 he was called to the Bar, but in 1867 he abandoned law and went to art
school in London: first Heatherley’s, then the Slade. He was already atalented
draughtsman, and his sketches of scenes in Dublin’s law courts had become
celebrated — too celebrated to do his career much good.” On the strength of
encouragement from a London magazine editor (Tom Hood of Fun) he
took adrastic plunge. His first commission did not come until 1871, by which
time he had four children and a discontented wife — all of whom spent much
of their time with the Pollexfens in Sligo, for reasons of financial necessity.
Under such circumstances the marriage could not prosper. Susan Yeats,
increasingly withdrawn and resentful, left her husband in no doubt about her
feelings. ‘At first when Susan insulted me and my friends I used to mind a
great deal, but afterwards I did not mind at all. Iwould say laughingly to her
that if she drove me away there would not be a friend left to her.’ (Such a
fate was, of course, far less of a hardship to a Pollexfen than to a Yeats.) Her
withdrawal eventually became depressive: Lily Yeats described her habit of
lapsing into sleep. ‘[Her] illness was mental. She used to fall asleep as a young
woman any time she sat quiet for a while or read out to us children. We just
rattled her up again, poor woman.”** Some local opinion thought that Susan
was ‘always very odd’,®* but yBy too readily stressed the Pollexfen propensity
to ‘depressive mania’.*° He endlessly categorized and analysed her character,
especially when writing after her death to his great love, Rosa Butt, trying
to explain the low-key tragedy of Susan’s life. Under the circumstances, he
needed to be defensive: it is probable that he unduly emphasized his wife’s
propensity to lash out at him.*” Similarly, he stressed her hatred of his relent-
less sociability with like-minded artistic and literary friends.

She always had a poor opinion of her neighbours. This was her puritanism. Of the
cleverest people she would always mutter, ‘They had no sense.’ Her ill opinion was most
undeviating and impartially unfair. But she never could see any difference between
alord anda labourer. Not that she had any kind of spite against the lord. Simply, dis-
tinctions of class did not exist for her, and the labourer she knew a great deal about.
She was selfcentred and did not notice any person outside the few people she liked.
They were very few.

There were, of course, two sides to this story, and hers is silence. JBY was,
he told Rosa Butt, ‘always chaste . . . Iwas faithful to my dear wife except for
that one transitory passion which was to me a source ofmisery at the time.’
Elsewhere he dates this lapse as soon after the marriage, in the 1860s.” But
there are other forms of infidelity. Susan Yeats, her background dominated
by a powerful and taciturn father, entered marriage to be dominated by an
equally self-willed, though talkative husband. His letters to her convey exas-
peration at her anxiety, and her health worries (‘You tell me your weight but
II
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

I don't know in the least whether it was good or bad — as I don’t know what
your weight was when last weighed.’ ‘All your family’s ailments begin in the
mind a sort of nightmare takes possession of them and they lose their appetite
and get ill.’*°) But she had good reasons to feel uneasy.
From the beginning, it was a peripatetic life. yay had lived with his
widowed mother at 2t Morehampton Road, Dublin, before his marriage; the
young couple rented 18 Madeley Terrace, Sandymount, after their wedding,
and subsequently (in 1865) 1 George’s Ville (now 5 Sandymount Avenue)
near the Corbet home at Sandymount Castle. In late February or early March
1867, with jBy’s decision to leave the Bar and study art in London, they
moved to 10 Gloucester Street, Regent’s Park; from 1 July 1867 until July 1873
they occupied 23 Fitzroy Road near by. From October 1874 the whole fam-
ily, reunited after an interim in Sligo, lived at 14 Edith Villas, North End, in
Fulham. There were also studios at Newman Street (from October 1868) and
subsequently Holland Park Road and Bedford Gardens: all this before the
move to 8 Woodstock Road, Bedford Park, in the spring of 1879. Meanwhile
there were the long summers in Sligo, often prolonged for the children into
autumn. In 1868 they visited with their grandparents until Christmas; in 1872
Susan and her children stayed there for nearly two years, while Fitzroy Road
was being given up. From the summer of 1879, a particularly low point for
the Yeats family’s morale, finances and parental relationship, the youngest child
Jack lived with his grandparents for eight years.
“You must be a good wife,’ jay wrote to Susan in February 1873, ‘& heroic
& not vex yourself about having to stop in Sligo till June or May. I know Merville
is not a very pleasant house but I think it is pleasanter to be there than to be
here with no money & not enough servants & a husband unsuccessful (you
would perhaps put up with the husband but the anxiety and the work would
simply kill you).’* Alone in London, jy could exercise unhampered his
genius for demanding and intense friendship. He was stimulated by younger
companions at Heatherley’s, like John Trivett Nettleship and Edwin Ellis,
both as interested in literature as in painting: both would become fixtures
in the Yeats circle, resented by Susan Yeats (whom Ellis in turn particularly
disliked). They were later joined, from Dublin, by the doctor-turned-poet
John Todhunter, lured to London by yay. From 1869 ypy shared a studio at 74,
Newman Street with Ellis. This group of painters and writers, known loosely
as ‘the Brotherhood’, provided him with the kind of circle he craved, and in
which he shone. And he had begun what would be a life’s course of artistic
procrastination, permanently plagued by an inability to finish a picture to his
liking, whatever the circumstances. As time passed and poverty encroached,
the Pollexfen world (which underwrote his family’s precarious finances)
maddened sy: his accusations mounted up, wildly and entertainingly. The
I2
 THE ARTIST’S CHILDREN: SLIGO 1865-1881

Pollexfens lived only for bad news; they refused to show affection, on prin-
ciple; on their excruciating Sundays they sat all over the house in different
rooms, refusing either to go out or to run the risk of meeting each other.”
Much of his Pollexfen obsession was rooted in guilt at being supported by
them. Forty years later he still dreamt about his father-in-law, ‘who asked me
how long I expected him to support me. I thought I was staying at Merville. I
awoke miserable, and remained so for along time.“ In this uncertain, shift-
ing world, with detached parents and constantly critical finances, the four
children® of John and Susan Yeats were reared, their only constant point of
reference the Pollexfen world of Sligo.

II
One of JBy’s more inexplicable remarks comes ina letter of 1903 to Rosa Butt.
‘It is often an astonishment to me that I have not a son or daughter of some
extraordinary distinction. Had my poor wife a little more intellect she would
have been something very remarkable.’ By then all four surviving children
were in their thirties, and had given ample proof of distinction. Between 1865
and 1871 By and Susan had five children (a later child, Jane Grace, was born
on 29 August 1875, but died less than a year later of bronchial pneumonia).
William Butler was born at George’s Ville on 13 June 1865; Susan Mary, al-
ways called Lily, on 25 August 1866 at Enniscrone, in Sligo; Elizabeth Corbet,
called Lolly, on 11 March 1868, at Fitzroy Road, London; Robert Corbet on
27 March 1870; and John Butler, called Jack, on 29 August 1871. Robert also
died in childhood, of croup, at Merville on 3 March 1873. The four who sur-
vived grew up asa clan: good-looking, with dark hair and high colouring. (In
later years wBy’s friend Edward Martyn rather sourly believed there was a
Romany strain in the Yeatses; his English schoolfellows, less romantically,
speculated that he was liverish.*’) They were doted upon in Sligo, where they
were often deposited; but their young uncles and aunts made harsh remarks,
which alarmed wey as a child and probably reflected a general irritation
with the feckless brother-in-law who had condemned Susan to a life of
uncertainty. The children were accordingly precocious, talented and know-
ledgeable about insecurity, both social and psychological. ‘Grandmother
Yeats thought we were such sad children we quite depressed her.’ As chil-
dren their relationships were intense, close and often quarrelsome. ‘The two
eldest, wBy and Lily, would make a ‘pair’. Lily was affectionate, funny,
strong-minded, and sustained a deep bond (through many mutual exasper-
ations) with her elder brother: ‘I always felt so happy and at ease with him.”
Deeply attached to her irrepressible father, she could also — occasionally —
discipline him. ‘No one has a chance once Lillie [sc] abuses them. If Lilly
13
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

[sic] turns on me I always feel ashamed of myself even though I know I am

right. The only one who is not afraid of Lilly is Jack, and that is only because
he was the youngest and Lilly’s unsatisfied maternal heart makes her weak
with him.’®° Her sister Lolly was a less straightforward proposition: angry,
talented, handsome and seen by the family as bearer of the hereditary Pollexfen
neurosis. jByY dreaded her ‘losing her wits’; her elder brother remarked, near
the end of his life, ‘My sister Elizabeth and I quarrelled at the edge of the
cradle and are keeping it up to the graveyard’s edge.”
Eventually, as wBy grew away from the family into adulthood, the two girls
left behind were necessarily forced to make common cause: their relation-
ship, and joint artistic ventures, would always be fraught with tension and
resentment. Jack, on the other hand, sustained ostensibly sunny relationships
all around him. But his sweetness, humour and independence were backed
by an odd childlike obduracy. Already slow in school, his childhood was dis-
rupted by his removal for eight years to Sligo, where he was brought up in
close proximity to his grandparents. This probably conditioned his artistic
developments; it also conferred a certain distance from the rest of the fam-
ily, particularly his brother. But he would make the best of things, and early
on showed his gift for enhancing life. His comparatively stable childhood in
Sligo may have contributed to this. By liked to quote a frequent reflection
of his youngest son's: ‘I spent seven years looking over the bridge in Sligo, and
I’m sorryI didn’t spend longer.” His siblings appreciated this gift for trans-
formation too. Lily remembered when she and Lolly arrived first at a par-
ticularly hated London house that jpy had rented in Eardley Crescent during
1887 — gloomy, with a dismal back yard. Jack met them at the door. ‘He then
led us to a window at the back. “Now”, he said, “look, and as the Americans
say when they show Niagara to strangers, ‘how do you feel?” and so the back
garden became to us a joke.”
In London or at Sligo, life for the children followed a fairly standard
Victorian regime (rice pudding, boiled mutton, two jam nights a week, plain
bread and butter other days”). But it was dominated by poverty, except in
Sligo — middle-class poverty, which allowed keeping a servant. “We were always
paupers,’ recalled Lily, ‘but always had a nurse till Jack, the youngest, was
six and then we had Miss Jowitt and a schoolroom. And in Merville we had
our nursery. One nurse, Emma, I remember well, an English countrywoman
full of country knowledge and ways. She brought up a motherless lamb on
‘the bottle in the Merville nursery and taught us to make cowslip balls.’*° Martha
Jowitt, their Yorkshire governess from 1878 to 1881, was a great favourite,
though ‘a demon of tidiness’ by Yeats standards. Later she told Lily and
Lolly that ‘she had laughed more in the three years she was with us than in
all the rest of her life’.°°
14
 THE ARTIST’S CHILDREN: SLIGO 1865-1881

But entertainment in the London years of childhood had to be cheap

and self-starting, like shadow plays: “Willy was serious about it. We others
just romped about.”’ “We were there for twoJubilees, several Royal weddings,
funerals and one coronation, but not having a penny saw nothing but the
local decorations.** In any case, the children were taught by their father
that entertainment could always be created through observation and rear-
rangement. ‘When I was a girl,’ Lily recalled,
and went even to the letterbox at the end of the road, Papa expected to hear descrip-
tions, adventures. When I felt lazy and said I had seen and heard nothing, he would
say, ‘Go on now, you saw something, don't be lazy.’ Then ILused to go ahead and make
him laugh. It was not deliberate on his part, he was not training me to observe and
recount, he just wanted to hear what I had seen and done, and knewI had eyes and
ears and some brains and a tongue.*”

The traditional Yeats imperatives of disciplined, imaginative, merciless

observation and good conversation were imposed by yy on the household,
wherever they were.
He was an unVictorian father. “Working and caring for children makes
me anxious and careful of them, but amusing them makes me fond of them,’
he wrote to his wife when they were apart. “The first week I was here every
perambulator passing along the pavement used to make me start fancying it
was the children and several times in the night I woke up thinking I heard
them crying.” From the beginning jBy devoted a special and intense atten-
tion to his eldest son. William Butler, named for his paternal grandfather,
the Rector of Tullylish, was a healthy child, delivered at 10.40 p.m. on 13 June
1865. The family was resident in 1 George’s Ville, a medium-sized house near
the suburban Corbet ‘castle’.°! The doctor, Thomas Beatty (a Corbet rela-
tion), ‘looked at the baby and said “fine os frontal and so strong you could
leave him out all night on the window sill and it could do him no harm”.’*
jy (still, for the purpose of the birth certificate, a ‘law student’) was surprised
to find himself powerfully possessive about the child. ‘I think your birth was
the first great event in my life,’ he wrote to wsy fifty-four years later, when
his first grandchild was born. ‘I was as surprised as if I had seen a house
built up in the nighttime by magic. I developed an instantaneous _|for the
professional nurse. I could not bear to see you lying on her knees. I was for
the first time — I suppose — pure animal. I never felt like that afterwards at
the birth of the others.’® Something of this is conveyed in a sketch he made
of wBy as a baby, and in the close observation he devoted to the child,
whom he identified from the outset as an original. ‘All little children when
they begin to think and talk are like strangers suddenly arrived in our dusty
old world, and come from another planet which, though like ours, is by no
15
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

means identical — hence a certain quaintness in what they say or do. If this
quaintness lasts into adult life and continues on to the end, they are men of
genius.’°*
The child grew up lanky, untidy, slightly myopic and painfully thin; he
was possibly tubercular. At least one medical friend always suspected so,
and later X-rays showed much scar tissue and healed-up spots, which may
date from a major but undefined illness when he was four or five years
old.® Psychologically, he developed marked characteristics which would
stay with him in later life — notably a hatred of being ridiculed and (accord-
ing to his father) an irritatingly deliberate vagueness. “Willie’s sensitiveness
to being laughed at is with him an old story. When he was a baby boy, if
you laughed at him he would cry oh! so sorrowfully, not with anger but in
sorrow that it was pitiful to see.’°° jBy wrote obsessively about him, not only
in after years to journalists but at the time in a letter to his wife, subsequently
much quoted. 5
Tam continually anxious about Willy — he is almost never out of my thoughts.
I believe him to be intensely affectionate but from shyness, sensitiveness and ner-
vousness very difficult to win and yet he is worth winning. I should of course like to
see him made do what was right but he will only develop by kindness and affection
and gentleness. Bobby is robust and hardy and does not mind rebuffs — but Willy is
sensitive, intellectual arfd emotional — very easily rebuffed and continually afraid of
being rebuffed — so that with him one has to use great sensitiveness — sensitiveness
which is so rare in Merville. Above all keep him from that termagant Agnes who is
by no means as indulgent to other people’s whims and oddities as she has been to
her own. Bobby being very active in nature will always resent a rebuff—and so a rebuff
will do him no harm — but Willy is only made timid and unhappy and he would in
time lose frankness.
I think he was greatly disimproved by Merville — he was coming on again from
being so much with his mother and away from his Grandfather and dictatorial young
Aunts.
_ From his resemblance to Elizabeth he derives his nervous sensitiveness.
I wish greatly Willy could be made more robust — by riding or other means — not
by going to school. | was very sorry he could not have the pony more but perhaps he
might ride that donkey of which he used to tell me . . . Tell Willy not to forget me.”

yBy’s ideas on education were not typical for his time, with his dislike of
boarding-school, flogging and other accepted educational practices. As an
under-employed artist, living at home, he saw far more of his children than
was normal for the time; when the Sligo summers stopped, and they were
strong-willed adolescents, this proximity would lead to much tension. In their
early youth it meant that he concerned himself closely with shaping their
minds. In his unpublished memoirs he reverts again and again to the efforts
16
 THE ARTIST’S CHILDREN: SLIGO 1865-1881
he made at imparting knowledge to his eldest son: ‘he was a joy to anyone
who would tell him things out of ancient philosophy or modern science’.
There is a retrospective flavour about this; and while yBy’s conversation
was first class, it may be doubted if his dilettante genius was best adapted
to instructing the young. He did see his son as a potential ally against what
he conceived to be the confining trivia of domesticity, since wBy ‘was
an exasperation in everyday matters over which the women preside’.”? The
development of his son’s mind was a preoccupation, at least in retrospect;
notably the boy’s liking for an appealing or resonant phrase, which, once
heard, he would repeat over and over again.”” Though he had chosen to be a
painter, JBy's friends were writers; he read widely and critically, and all his
life nurtured literary ambitions of his own, though they were most nearly
achieved in his marvellously assertive and entertaining letters. The father also
claimed to have dictated his son’s interests by reading aloud Balzac’s Le Peau
de chagrin in the summer of 1874, and David Copperfield, Old Mortality and
The Antiquary in the summer of 1879, on a family holiday at Branscombe in
Devon.
This last episode (possibly enabled, like the move to Woodstock Road,
by asmall legacy from JBy’s mother”’) was often and warmly remembered by
the family, probably because of its uniqueness.”” Here and elsewhere, read-
ing aloud from Scott and Macaulay figured largely, particularly The Lays of
Ancient Rome and The Lay ofthe Last Minstrel. wBy recalled that the read-
ing that interested him most as a boy was ‘Scott first, and then Macaulay’;
and, instructed to amuse his own children a half-century later, he turned auto-
matically to the Last Minstrel, rather to their surprise.” In 1872 By tried to
teach his son, then living with his grandparents in Sligo and being taught
erratically by Eliza Armstrong (no relation), who had been his mother’s
bridesmaid.” He also claimed to have taught his son geography and chem-
istry, on a sketching holiday at Burnham Beeches when he was eleven; wBy
would later describe him as ‘a tyrant’ of a teacher, but insufficiently so. A
Sligo neighbour thought JBy was cruel to his son, pushing him around the
room. As jpy remembered it, the whole tamily tried to teach him to read,
and became convinced he would never master it; all his life wByY would admit
his blindness to grammar, spelling and the appearance of ‘my lines upon
paper’.” Dyslexia has been retrospectively alleged, but is not borne out by
the ease and fluency with which wBy devoured books when he finally learnt
to read. During that long sojourn in Sligo, from 1870 to 1874, he had lessons
from a much loved nursemaid, Ellie Connolly; later he received coaching in
spelling and dictation from Esther Merrick, a neighbour who lived in the
Sexton’s house by St John’s, and who read him quantities of verse. “We always
said she made a poet out of Willy.’
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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

III

What stability there was in the children’s life was rooted in Sligo, lyrically
conjured up years later by Jack.
I remember a small town where no one ever spoke the truth but all thought it. It was
a seaport town, like all the best towns. But there was a lake very near to it. The cold
brown bosom of the fresh water, and the blue steel verdigris green corsage of the salt
water, and between the two the town . . . The weather in this town was ever of the
bland and sweet, and the air always smelling sweet. It should have been a rainy place,
for it was in a cup of hills. But a rock island, a mountain island, in the sea, off the
mouth of the bay before the town, collected all the heavier clouds and caused them
to break and run foaming down the mountain side all among the green trees and the
moss-covered rocks.’

Far from this watery paradise, the Thomastown farms in Kildare remained;
and yy and his children occasionally went there to shoot, staying with the
bailiff, John Doran. But the land was remortgaged as early as 1857 for £850,
and again in 1868 for £300. The seventeen tenants paid less and less rent. One
particular malefactor, Mrs Flanagan, inspired the name of a doll regularly
abused by the Yeats children in bouts of primitive magic, since her defection
was the constant excuse for their being denied a treat.’”* But Sligo provided
security — of more kinds than one, as jBy indicated in a wistful letter from
London in April 1870 to his friend John Todhunter.

The worry of living over here beyond our income with the chance of some day being
left moneyless is fearful to me and wife — destroying health & spirits & happiness
and retarding greatly artistic progress — in Sligo I could live within my means and
there are many pictures I could paint there — Since this cold and cough and blood
spitting I’ve been thinking about going to Sligo if I could manage to get the house
[Fitzroy Road] off my hands — what do you think? . . . Iwould there take a small
house live within my income and do my work. I would have John Dowden [then a
curate in Sligo] for my companion, an occasional sight of you, Edward Dowden and
the great family the Pollexfens to give me home love and warmth.

But, he concluded, ‘it is after all only a castle in the air’.”” Certainly, his rela-
tionship with the Pollexfens was fantasized in this picture, with heavy irony.
For his children, however, the castle in the air bore some semblance to real-
ity. Most of 1870 to 1874 was spent with their grandparents.®° The summers
there, the romantic journeys by steamer from Liverpool Basin to Sligo
Harbour,” the large house with its bedrooms over the stableyard and the view
of the mountains, were all touched with magic. Lily described Merville with
the acute memory of old age for long-ago childhood:
18
 THE ARTIST’S CHILDREN: SLIGO 1865-1881
In our day it was a solid house, big rooms — about 14 bedrooms, stone kitchen offices
& a glorious laundry smelling of soap full of white steam & a clean coke fire with
rows of irons heating at it. Our grandmother's store-room like a village shop —a place
with windows and fireplace — shelves & drawers & a delicious smell of coffee — the
house was of blue grey limestone — the local stone — 60 acres of land round it — a very
fine view of Ben Bulben from the front of the house.”

Sligo gave the Yeats children confirmation of something their father

continually adverted to: the superiority of the Irish ethos not only in scenery
and climate but in manners, conversation, artistic sensibility and gentlemanly
behaviour. This compensated for distance both from London’s bohemia
and from the Dublin bourgeois world. For the children, the magical quality
of Sligo was enhanced by the family’s romantic shipping tradition — colour-
fully illustrated by the Merville gardens, dotted with ships’ figureheads.
They ran a fleet of fast sailing vessels between Sligo — Portugal and Spain. What they
traded in I don’t know. Salt was, I think, the cargo they brought back from Portugal.
In our day these gay little ships’ lives were over, and they as old black hulls were used
as lighters and clustered round the great corn steamers from America and the Black
Sea, yellow corn being poured into them with a delicious rushing sound as the steam-
ers lay out in the deep water anchorage at the Rosses Point. Uncle George used to
name them for us and tell of his one adventure when as a young man he had gone in
“The Baccaloo’ [recte ‘Bacalieu’] to Portugal.
In time the sailing ships were replaced by steamers, and the Ballysodare and Sligo
mills were bought, and when we were children the firm was big and rich and proud.®

It is the world Jack Yeats drew upon for his art, and it formed the imagina-
tion of all his siblings too. Years later, Jack’s painting of Rosses Point as
Memory Harbour still filled wBy with ‘disquiet and excitement . . . houses and
anchored ship and distant lighthouse all set together as in some old map’.™
The particular social level of Sligo society occupied by the Pollexfens
deserves attention: the provincial Protestant bourgeoisie, with connections
through the Middletons to squireen Ireland. They subscribed to the local
Protestant charities (though Elizabeth Pollexfen had, unusually, been edu-
cated at the convent and retained friends among the nuns).*° But while their
wives attended the meetings of the Sligo Protestant Orphans’ Society, they
were not on the committee, which was dominated by aristocratic names
like Gore-Booth, Wynne and Cooper. Middleton and Pollexfen were not
members of the Sligo Board of Guardians, nor the Grand Jury, nor were they
even on the ‘long list’ of those eligible to be called to the latter body until
William Pollexfen joined it in 1869. In a word, they were not ‘county’ ~ ina
society where such things were closely noted. Sligo class distinctions were
mordantly explored by the local press, recording how the social claims of
oy)
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

‘the mercantile class’ were ignored, and mulling over issues like the com-
position of the Royal Agricultural Society Committee, where ‘the county or
aristocratic element do things much in the same manner as their forefathers
did when Geroge the Third was king and, notwithstanding the shock of
time, the idiocy of the class appears to be much the same as in the days of
the Plantagenets’.% The Pollexfens’ well-connected son-in-law also noted
this bitterly. ‘One reason why I am so incensed against class distinctions is
because these very small gentry round Sligo always excluded the Pollexfens
from their friendship. Because they were engaged in business they were
not fit company.’’”
None the less, the move from Union Place to Merville was socially import-
ant. The Pollexfen houses were substantial dwellings: George’s ‘Thornhill’,
a gloomy square block on the Strandhill Road west of Sligo; ‘Rathedmond’,
where Susan Pollexfen’s parents moved before their deaths in 1892, ‘a good
house spoiled by the railway’; the haunted ‘Elsinore’ at Rosses Point, set
low by the sea and lived in during the summer by Henry Middleton, their
mother’s first cousin. (Dark and eccentric, the family later assumed he was
the model for wBy’s John Sherman.) But these were not ‘Big Houses’ in the
Anglo-Irish sense. And Rosses Point, where the Pollexfens and Middletons
built summer villas, had been bought as recently as 1867 byWilliam Middleton
from the Cooper family as a land speculation: he paid just under £9,000.*
By 1879 it was a favoured summer resort, with a Middleton & Pollexfen
steamer taking bathers out there from the town. Middleton was building
villas, and a hotel had been established. To the young wy, however, this
was not the poetic reality of Sligo. Rather, it featured glimpses of ‘grey coun-
try houses”? over walls and among trees, their names a litany (the Wynnes’
Hazelwood, the Gore-Booths’ Lissadell, the Coopers’ Markree), their life a
world apart from haphazard London and bourgeois Merville. When the
youthful Jack went to Lissadell for a cricket match, he referred to it as a day
‘all among the nobs-oh’.” His more precocious brother noted that the
Merville avenue was not long enough for social significance.” If the inten-
sity of the memory is Proustian, so is the sense of social and psychological
apartness.
In another way too the Sligo world was apart: for both family and servants
at Merville were, like many mid-Victorian households, preoccupied with
the supernatural. The 1832 cholera epidemic had affected Sligo more than
any other Irish town, and a Middleton great-grandfather had died with
his four-year-old daughter Mary; they were ‘seen after death walking hand
in hand in the garden . . . a pet dog saw them also and ran to meet them’.
The Merville servants ‘knew so intimately angels, saints, banshees, and
fairies. Our English nurse and English servant in London knew none of
20
 THE ARTIST’S CHILDREN: SLIGO 1865-1881

these but knew a great deal too much of murders and suicides’.** Once more,
Irish sensitivity contrasted with English vulgarity. wBy’s own early memor-
ies featured prescient visions, ghost stories and haunted houses out at Rosses
Point: a cousin, Lucy Middleton, was credited with special powers and
engaged in experiments with him.” The background to all this should be
remembered: the context of childhood. The Yeatses were the only children
in this family fiefdom until the arrival of their cousin Geraldine Orr, ten years
younger than wy. Everyone in Sligo, it seemed to them, talked of fairies,
and so they did — to children. In some ways, wBy required them to project
this approach into later life as well.
Family relationships took the Pollexfen form: dinner (at four in the after-
noon) was dominated by fear of Grandfather Pollexfen, who stopped his habit-
ual grumbling and glared in silence at the children if they helped themselves
to sugar: ‘a sigh of relief went up all through Merville when he went to bed’.”*
The young wy did not respond well to the sardonic Pollexfen manner: JBY
worried that his son’s aunts, especially the neurotic Agnes, persecuted him
for his vagueness and untidiness. When the children’s father visited Sligo
in the summer of 1873, there was a good deal of tension. For one thing, he
refused to go to church; wBy temporarily followed his example until he
found it meant reading lessons instead. Not all memories of Merville were
happy ones. It was there too that little Robert Yeats died of croup, aged three.
Lily and wsy woke to hear their mother cry “My little son, my little son’
and horses’ hoofs galloping for the doctor. After the death, the children sat
drawing pictures of the ships along Sligo quay, with flags at half-mast.
Susan Yeats, who thought she heard the banshee cry before her child died,
was probably precipitated by the loss into the depression from which she
never really returned.”
Not unusually for the times, the children were as close to the servants as
to the family. Reading Kate O’Brien’s novel The Ante-Room in old age, Lily
was struck by the similarity between its depiction of late nineteenth-century
Irish bourgeois provincial life and her own Merville childhood, ‘although
there the atmosphere was very Protestant. But we lived much among the ser-
vants and men in the stable and gardens and got a good deal of the Catholic
side, and Grandmama was very tolerant in all things’.”* Ellie Connolly, until
she emigrated to America, took a great interest in wBy, and was endlessly
patient with him. Johnny Healy, the stable boy, was another intimate: wBy
and Lily picked up his accent, to the pleasure of their father’s London
friends,” and the two boys read Orange doggerel-poetry together in the
hay-loft, creating in wBy’s mind a continuing fantasy of commanding a ship’s
company of young athletes and of dying fighting the Fenians.’ Outside the
walls of Merville, there were relations who provided additional excitements.
21
1. A pensive and withdrawn Susan Pollexfen Yeats with the three-year-old Lily, drawn by
her husband on 13 February 1870 — six weeks before the birth of her short-lived son Robert
Corbet Yeats.

22
 THE ARTIST’S CHILDREN: SLIGO 1865-1881

There was the glamour of George Pollexfen’s horses, racing under his colours
of primrose and violet: the children went to Lissadell races with four horses
and postilions, nosegays of primroses and violets pinned to their coats." The
scene they viewed is preserved in a contemporary description which also
makes some critical innuendoes about Middleton & Pollexfen, and surveys
the topography of what would one day be commercialized as ‘Yeats country’.
As a spectator dragged himself away— especially a youthful one — from the contem-
plation of the fair beauties in the cars and in the carriages — on horseback and walk-
ing — the eye had much to gaze upon in the surrounding beauties of the picturesque
scenery that surrounded him on all sides . . . Immediately in his front — taking the
line parallel with the starting ground for the first race — was to be seen ‘the beautiful
city of Sligo’, which could be plainly seen with the unaided eye as it lay quietly in the
distance, enjoying a repose caused by the desertion of a large proportion of its adult
population. No one would suppose by looking at it that anything like an agitation
could ever happen in it, or that persons would be found rude enough to disturb the
solitude and repose by opposition to its improvement! To the right and to the left
of it, behind and before it, nature seemed bountiful of its gifts. Knocknarea stood
boldly to the westward of it, like a huge breakwater raised to prevent an inroad of old
Neptune; its various slopes and undulations looking ‘green far away’, and present-
ing a pretty foreground to the more distant mountains that behind it looked blue in
the horizon. The proud Atlantic rolled at its base and from thence, across to Rosses
Point, lay Sligo Bay, where the dark blue sea calmly reflected the rays of a mild sun.
The neat little sea-side village of Rosses Point appeared on this occasion to the best
advantage. Its light house and whitewashed cottages, with the well tilled lands
adjoining, gave it a look of peace and comfort, with which we hope soon to see eleg-
ance combined, as we know of no place more favourably situated for the purpose of
being made a fashionable sea-side resort. We are confident that its new and enter-
prising proprietor, William Middleton Esq., will take advantage of its highly pic-
turesque situation by making it what it ought to be, the Brighton of the West. The
view inland from the Point was exceedingly bold and picturesque — in the distance
the woods that surround the handsome residence of our worthy county member, Sir
Robert Gore-Booth, Bart., through whose kindness and liberality we are enabled
to enjoy each year these sports. Rising from Lissadell, the village of Drumcliffe was
to be seen, and its church, and ancient cross was plainly discernible. Behind the many
great slopes of land surrounding Drumcliffe, Benbulben raised its mighty over-
hanging cliffs, and stretched back its slopes like an enormous monster that lay down
to sleep. Looking more inward, the hill of Glencar came into view, whose slopes meet-
ing those of Benbulben form a picturesque valley from whence Sligo, it is to be
hoped, will be supplied with that desideration which it so much needs — ‘pure water’.
Gazing more inland, the eye rests on the spot wherein lay ‘our own Lough Gill’ beyond
which the mountains gracefully rise, and are lost in the distance by interminable folds.’
There were Yeats connections in the area too: an independent farming
‘Aunt Mickey’ (Mary, sister of their grandfather William Butler Yeats) lived
23
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

with one manservant, treasured small pieces of silver, and preserved the tra-
ditions and memories of Drumcliffe. At church on Sunday the handsome
family were noted: ‘the Yeats children are worth getting wet to see’."°° wBy’s
Autobiographies stressed the respectability and rootedness of his family
background in Sligo: possessive love of the landscape conferred a claim on
the land, free of politics and suffused with a sense of belonging.’ In 1891 he
wrote that William Allingham ‘will always, however, be best loved by those
who, like the present writer, have spent their childhood in some small west-
ern seaboard town and who remember how it was for years the centre of their
world, and how its enclosing mountains and its quiet rivers became a por-
tion of their life for ever’.® By then, the links with the Pollexfen world were
loosening and his own life was set on a path which would distance him from
that enveloping background. But the sense of a lost Eden remained. ‘No one
will ever see Sligo as we saw it,’ he told his sister shortly before his death.1°°
This vanished dream stood for more than the lost domain of childhood: it
was the world of the Protestant Irish bourgeoisie, integrated into the life of
their native place, still (in the 1870s) calmly conscious ofa social and economic
ascendancy which appeared theirs by right.
But if Sligo seemed the eternal moment, the farms at Thomastown, with
their seventeen bickering tenants, recalcitrant income and occasional violent
incidents, represented a closer augury of the future. In 1879 the rents received
amounted to barely £50. That very year the dislocations of Land War, eco-
nomic decline and the rise of militant nationalism were about to change the
Yeats family world beyond recognition.

IV
‘Here you are somebody. There you will be nobody at all.” This cutting remark
from a Pollexfen aunt, inevitably Agnes, summed up for wsy the difference
between Sligo and London. For jsy’s family, London was the background
of reality. Their poverty there, the long walks in the dusty streets, painfully
missing Sligo, are recalled evocatively in his son’s Autobiographies; sailing
model boats in Kensington’s Round Pond was poignantly different from the
real seafaring world of Sligo quays. There were intervals out of town: in the
autumn of 1876, leaving his family in Sligo, yBy rented lodgings at Farnham
Common, near Slough, in order to paint landscape at Burnham Beeches. There
he imported his eleven-year-old eldest son, reading to him aloud, educating
him erratically in geography and chemistry, and allowing him free range for
his natural-history explorations in the surrounding countryside. wBy’s first
known letter, from Farnham, breathless and semi-literate, recounts adven-
tures with frogs and lizards, as well as his father reading Redgauntlet.'
24 x
 THE ARTIST’S CHILDREN: SLIGO 1865-1881
A more conventional encounter with education was shortly to follow.
On 26 January 1877, aged eleven and a half, wsy started at the Godolphin
School, Hammersmith, an old-fashioned and not very distinguished founda-
tion, with a traditional curriculum devoting much time to Latin and ‘Arith-
metick’, and rather less to geography, history and French; science was one
period a week." Family lore preserved his prowess at science; he was ‘deep
in chemistry’, according to Lily,'° and his father recorded that when aged
thirteen he won a prize forscientific knowledge, competing against eighteen-
year-olds ‘whose subject it was, while his knowledge was simply the result of
private reading’. Other achievements, according to his father, included a
facility for classics. Though he despised Latin and Greek ‘under the influence
of Huxley’, he had a brilliant success translating Catullus into English verse
for a visiting examiner.’"’ His first school report, which survives, gives a less
high-flown impression. In a class of thirty-one boys he was sixth in classics,
twenty-seventh in mathematics, eighteenth in modern languages and nine-
teenth in English. His general work was ‘only fair. Perhaps better in Latin
than in any other subject. Very poor in spelling.’ His writing difficulties obvi-
ously held him back. The next two terms saw some modest improvement
but nothing spectacular (Mathematics: still very backward, progress very
slow’). Absences were complained of, and black marks accumulated for idle-
ness. In the Lent term of 1878 he was bottom, or next to it, in every subject.
He had improved by the summer of 1878 (‘seems to like Latin’) but was bot-
tom of the class in mathematics and ‘very indifferent’ in modern languages.
The next year, after a long break in Sligo, things were even worse: in a class
of thirteen boys he was twelfth in classics, twelfth in modern languages, and
bottom of the class in maths and English. By Christmas 1878 his placing had
drifted up to twentieth out of thirty-one, with his best work in Latin. His
form master, W. G. Harris, generally reported favourably on his behaviour
(‘Very good boy. Tries to do as well as he can’), but the theme of ‘idleness’
recurred: though jBy wrote to the headmaster three years later and ‘told him
you were not naturally at all idle but had a dislike to dull task work. In fact
your will wants a little being hardened.” As wsy himself recalled it, ‘I spent
longer than most schoolboys preparing for the next day’s work and yet learnt
nothing, and would always have been at the bottom of my class but for one
or two subjects that I hardly had to learn at all’; he put it down to ‘psycho-
logical weakness’ rather than to ‘poetic temperament’. However, his friends
were at the top of the class because ‘then, as now, I hated fools’.’ And he was
fascinated by biology and zoology, or what was then called ‘natural history’.
The story his wife heard long afterwards took a typically off-beat form: ‘He
decided to eat his way through the animal kingdom — but couldn't get beyond
the sea gull."
25
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

Outside the classroom a similarly eccentric quality attached to him, as well

as the inescapable taint of the shabby-genteel. He remembered his induc-
tion into playground cruelty, insults about Irishness, and saying the wrong
thing without knowing why: tutored by his father, he ‘did not think English
people intelligent or well-behaved unless they were artists’. At thirteen he
won a cup for running the mile, but did so by ‘ambling along, looking behind
to see where his great friend was — and the Mothers standing about say-
ing “look at that boy. Did you ever see any boy so thin? I would like to have
the feeding of him.”’"”* The great friend was Charles Cyril Veasey, a son of
Hammersmith neighbours, who had entered Godolphin at the same time:
Veasey fought battles on behalf of the unpugilistic wBy, and tried to teach
him how to box. Though the Yeatses ‘with difficulty paid for Willy to have
dinner at school’, he tended to go home with Veasey, and wait for him in the
garden, sometimes joining the family for pudding through the window."”
They were not happy years. A certain conventionality was sustained (wBy
was confirmed by the Lord Bishop of London at Christ Church, Ealing, on
13 June 1880"'’); but, as he later remembered his childhood, he was indoc-
trinated with the consciousness that he was an artist’s son who necessarily
held different opinions from the norm, and ‘must take some work as the
whole end of my life’. He was elaborately kind to another boy because he knew
there was a disgrace in the family; later he discovered that the boy’s father’s
shame consisted in making ‘certain popular statues, many of which are now
in public places’."!
In the spring of 1879 the family moved to yet another address: 8Woodstock
Road, in the district still called Hammersmith, but rapidly identified as
the artists’ colony of Bedford Park . Though this was a temporary sojourn,
JBY came as near to putting down roots as he could: the conscious aestheti-
cism of the architecture, the artistic neighbours, ‘the newness of everything’
delighted both children and father. In way’s memories of this period, nearly
everything is ‘peacock-blue’, and Pre-Raphaelitism rules. But 1880 was a par-
ticularly low point for the Yeatses: money was scarcer than ever, JBy’s debts
to his friends accumulated, and the lease on Woodstock Road was due to run
out in mid-188r. JBy became possessed with the idea that portrait commis-
sions would arrive more easily in Dublin: the little work that had been com-
missioned had come largely from Irish sources. He spent more and more time
in Dublin, occupying his friend Edward Dowden’s rooms in Trinity College
for some tense weeks in the spring of 1880, and finally in February 1881 tak-
ing lodgings at 90 Lower Gardiner Street as well as studios at 44 York Street,
and subsequently at 7 St Stephen’s Green. The family stayed in Bedford Park
for the moment; but wBy left Godolphin School that summer.!”° The whole
family moved to Dublin, taking lodgings in Leeson Street and then moving
26
 THE ARTIST’S CHILDREN: SLIGO 1865-1881
for the winter to Howth, a fishing village outside the city. Here they first occu-
pied Balscadden Cottage, by the courtesy of friends (probably the Jameson
family). They then rented another ‘horrible little’ Howth house, called Island
View, where they stayed for two years.” The poverty remained but cir-
cumstances were happier, particularly for Susan Yeats, who felt at home by
the sea and liked to exchange stories with the local people. ay managed to
escape to convivial company, including the fabled parties given in Howth
by Lord Justice FitzGibbon for Lord Randolph Churchill, Father Healy of
Little Bray, and other stars of the Dublin social firmament.” wsy began to
attend the High School, Dublin, a long-established, no-nonsense Protestant
establishment on Harcourt Street, travelling in by train from Howth and break-
fasting with his father in the St Stephen’s Green studio — where he also
lunched, for economy’s sake, on tea, bread and butter.!”3
He was now fifteen. Much in his life had been miserable, and his later
memories of his youth shocked some of his family by what they saw as embit-
tered distortion: ‘I remember little of childhood but its pain.”* There was
certainly more tension and barely repressed anger than yBy could allow him-
selftoremember; buta reflection in his unpublished memoirs stirs an uneasy
echo. ‘If it is deeply enquired into, I think it will be recognised that the founda-
tion of the artistic nature is affectionateness which, denied its satisfaction,
as it always is, in real life, turns to the invention of art and poetry.> He was
probably thinking, as usual, principally of himself; but the inclusion of
‘poetry’ hints that the theory is also applied to his eldest son. wBy himself
later remarked that he was constrained in his published memories of this
period by the fact that his father was still alive: ‘he could not do his father
justice by doing him injustice’. ‘I could not tell little things about him that
would have made him clearer.’ He was influenced, almost overshadowed, by
yBY’s love of intensity. But ‘I developed late. For a long time I had trouble in
selecting the ideas that belonged to me.”!”°
None the less, it was about this time — between fifteen and sixteen — that
he began writing. Lily remembered him composing poems at Howth; and a
friend at High School, Frederick Gregg, ‘first tempted Willie’ away from sci-
ence by asking him when they were schoolboys to join with him in writing
a verse play.!”” At this point his father (watching him as closely as ever)
believed wsy discovered in himself the ability to write verse by the ream. ‘But
an artist must have facility and then not use it. He knew that. He has never
made use of it.’!”8

if
 Chapter 2: EXPLORATIONS
DuBLIN 1881-1887

At any rate if I had not been an unsuccessful & struggling

man Willie & Jack would not have been so strenuous — & Lily
& Lollie? Perhaps they'd have been married like your daughter
—a successful father is good for the daughters. For the sons it
is another matter.
jBy to Mrs Hart, 25 May 1916

WHEN the family came to live in Dublin in late 1881, way remembered
his father’s intellectual influence on him as paramount: ‘He no longer read
me anything for its story, and all our discussion was of style.”! But from this
point too a necessary tension began to develop. While the York Street studio
became a concourse for Dublin’s bohemia, yBy’s portraits remained unfinished,
and his debts accumulated.” And wsy began to note his father’s weaknesses,
ruefully delineated by yey himself. ‘At the [Trinity College] entrance examina-
tions . . . the examiner said that my explanation of the rules was without a mis-
take but that all my sums were wrong. It has been so with me all my life. Ican
always tell what should be done, but the performance is inadequate.”
Precept and practice continued to diverge in family life as well. Susan Yeats
lived an isolated life out at Kilrock Road in Howth, happy — so her son later
believed — in exchanging stories with fishermen’s wives in the kitchen; he would
transpose such a scene into his essay ‘Village Ghosts’ seven years later.* For
the children, the seaside surroundings, marine life on the shore, and rowing
expeditions into Dublin Bay added excitement; but the stimulation of Howth
was not intellectual, though they knew the poet Sir Samuel Ferguson lived
near by at Strand Lodge, and Lily used to present fish at his door in homage.
(He died a few years later, and furnished wey with the subject of his first review -
article.°)
To wy, however, Ferguson alive pointed up a certain moral: the fate of
artists who were received into the embrace of the Dublin establishment. In
his poetic youth a romantic Tory nationalist, and an associate of Isaac Butt
and yBy’s father in the Dudlin Un iversity Magazine circle, Ferguson had
married a Guinness and immured himself behind the stockade of Protestant
respectability. This was the world the Yeats family had left. The Dublin they
had returned to was possessed by small-scale metropolitan pretensions, and
28
 EXPLORATIONS: DUBLIN 1881-1887
mingled contempt and envy for the attractions of London. City life was com-
partmentalized: the middle classes knew little of the Stygian slums north of
the Liffey, and operated on a closed circuit which took in the professional
squares, south-side suburbs like Ballsbridge, Rathgar and (still) Rathmines,
and outlying seaside villages such as Blackrock and Dalkey. Social life revolved
about a tightly knit nucleus of institutions: the Royal Dublin Society, Trinity
College, the National Library, and the clubs around St Stephen’s Green.
Walking between them, or down Grafton Street, or around the Green, people
constantly met one another. Society was small enough to know ‘everybody’,
or at least one of their relations; family links and dynasties counted for much
in the structures of career and marriage, though in some professional areas
a Catholic elite was becoming prominent (notably medicine and law). The
Yeatses, poor as they were, inhabited Protestant Dublin, safely removed from
the petit bourgeois north-side suburbs anatomized in Joyce’s Dudiiners; the heart
of their city was not the plebeian landmark of Nelson's Pillar (hub of the
tramway system) but Stephen’s Green. The leisured, intimate, comfortably
idiosyncratic nature of middle-class life in Dublin created a unique atmo-
sphere; it also imposed limitations. To be of a once distinguished Protestant
middle-class family still conferred a sense of caste. But it was a caste whose
assumptions were increasingly threatened, and whose perilous superiority had
been challenged and, in objective terms, defeated — though full recognition
of this came only slowly to the generation after 1881.
The Yeats household derided those who restricted their lives to the com-
placently introverted world of the Protestant establishment, much like the
popular sculptor whose son wBy had befriended in Hammersmith. Ferguson,
however, was a less immediate target than a writer of JBy’s own generation:
Edward Dowden. Dowden, part-time poet, influential critic and Professor
of English Literature at Trinity, conveniently represented to jBy the fate of
men who subordinated artistic genius to the bourgeois embrace. Their rela-
tionship was fraught with half-spoken resentments. JBy needed his respectable
friend as an unconscious demonstration of his own moral probity; he was also
a convenient source of small loans and occasional favours. Dowden appears
to have sustained a genuine affection for the charismatic companion of his
youth, and would dispense advice and encouragement to his friend’s preco-
cious son — as wBy gratefully remembered much later.° His early and endur-
ing reverence for Shelley’s poetry, while instituted by his father, also owed
something to the influence of Dowden — perhaps the foremost Shelleyan of
his time. wBy inherited his father’s view of respectable Dublin and of Dowden,
who was cast as the symbol of all the city’s shortcomings.
The date of the Yeatses’ return to Ireland is significant. Since the 1870s the
language of constitutional nationalism had changed beyond recognition.
29
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

Their family friend Isaac Butt, now dead, had been displaced as leader of
the Home Rule party by Charles Stewart Parnell, just entering the zenith of
his notoriety as an aggressive nationalist leader apparently prepared to take
confrontational politics to the edge of revolution; he was simultaneously
President of the Land League, which co-ordinated tenant resistance to land-
lords all over Ireland, using violence both explicitly and as a threat. During
the autumn of 1881 social and political instability were at their height. In the
countryside the writ of the League apparently ran unchecked; landlords and
agents lived in a state of siege that was often literal as well as psychological.
Parnell was arrested in October, and agitation moved into a new phase of
extremism. It was no solution to Unionist fears to have the leader of consti-
tutional Irish nationalism incarcerated in Kilmainham Jail, while for the
rentier classes landed income had declined to critical levels. In 1881 Gladstone’s
new Land Act redefined the relationships of landlord and tenant in a manner
which both carried enormous implications for the sacrosanct rights of prop-
erty, and indicated that Irish Ascendancy interests could not automatically
expect the acquiescent protection of British governments.
The Yeatses knew about rent difficulties, incoming and outgoing. The
Thomastown tenants lived up to the best Land League precepts, and stopped
paying; Uncle Matthew Yeats was now agent, having moved from Fort Louis,
Sligo, to Celbridge outside Dublin, and he was continually pestered by jay
for small advances. Though the bailiff from the Thomastown farms appeared
on a state visit to Dublin at least once, speaking firmly to the Yeats girls but
deferring respectfully to their brother ‘the heir’, this was an embarrassing and
irrelevant reminder of a fading and unprofitable connection.’ In the real
world, rent was due not only on the family’s domestic accommodation, but
also (from late 1883) on JBy’s new studio at 7 St Stephen’s Green. In the
autumn of 1883° they had moved to 10 Ashfield Terrace (now 418 Harold’s
Cross Road), a cramped terrace house in the dreary red-brick suburb of
Terenure. Though geographically close to Dowden’s villa on Temple Road,
Rathmines, it occupied a distinctly lower rung on Dublin’s social ladder.
wey slightly altered its location when writing long afterwards to Augusta
Gregory, but the shudder is palpable: ‘that Rathgar villa where we all lived
when I went to school, a time of crowding and indignity’.’ Indignity took a
financial form: credit was stopped at the butcher’s; jBy scrounged from his
old TCD acquaintances; the family huddled around a single lamp at night
for economy’s sake.'® Yet wBy’s schoolfriend Charles Johnston remembered
that ‘the happiest atmosphere filled his home life, gay, artistic, disinterested,
full of generous impracticability ... The artistic spirit radiated out from
everything in the house, sketches, pictures, books, and the perpetual themes
of conversation.’ But he added that Susan Yeats slept through much of the
30
 EXPLORATIONS: DUBLIN 1881~-1887
talking and reading aloud: ‘Called on suddenly to tell the subject, she invari-
ably repeated the last sentence, with a quaint little smile.’
Perhaps she was dreaming of Sligo. Escape there was still possible; in the
winter of 1881 all four children were staying with their grandparents when Lough
Gill froze over, and rapidly learnt to skate. Lily remembered ‘Willy’s long legs
whirling in the air, and seeing that he had red socks’, while on the frozen shore
fires were kept burning and tea was dispensed from Cottage Island.'? But their
Sligo world was changing too: William Middleton died in January 1882, and
seven ships were sold off over the next two years.'° The firm became W. & G.
T. Pollexfen & Co., eventually to be taken over by Alice Pollexfen’s Northern
husband, Arthur Jackson — whom the disdainful Yeatses considered pushy.
In the Unionist world, land agitation and aggressive Parnellism raised
a more ancient spectre: the revolutionary movement for Irish separatism
known as the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood (IRB), or the Fenians. Osten-
sibly quiescent, the organization was thought, not always fancifully, to pull
many of the strings behind the Land League and even sections of the Irish
Parliamentary Party. What the Yeats family felt about the political upheavals
around them is hard to trace. Surviving correspondence from the early 1880s
is innocent of political commentary, which is in itself significant. BY was a
follower of Isaac Butt, for reasons of family affiliation and gentlemanliness,
and distrusted Parnell. While disliking the English, he was not inclined
towards separatist nationalism — though according to Lily he concealed a gun
when asked to do so by the wife of his caretaker at York Street. In May 1882
the Invincibles, an extremist splinter-group from Fenianism, murdered the
Chief Secretary and Under-Secretary in Phoenix Park, an outrage which con-
vulsed ‘respectable’ society. Everyone always remembered what they were doing
when the news came. Lily and Lolly were spending the weekend with Uncle
Matthew at Celbridge. “The Rector before he gave his text said that a very
terrible thing had happened in Dublin the evening before. He said no more,
went on to his sermon. Nearly all the men in the church tip-toed out and van-
ished to find out more.’ But JBy’s attitude towards the contemporary crisis
remained detached. Symbolically, during the trial of the Invincibles, he sat
in court and made sketches.

I]
Through these stirring times wBy was still at the High School, Harcourt
Street, where he made a distinct impression. A contemporary, W. K. Magee,
who later wrote under the name ‘John Eglinton’, remembered him as ‘a
yellow-skinned, lank, loose-coated figure, for he was several years older
than any of us, and even had the beginnings of a beard’: but he may have
31
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

been influenced by wBy’s own later Autobiographies as well as by their uneasy

personal relationship.’* The Headmaster, William Wilkins, found ‘something
quietly repellent [meaning distant] in his manner’. According to Magee, he
also betrayed what jBy no doubt would have seen as a Pollexfen streak. “There
was a certain malicious strain in his nature and . . . his worst personal fault
was a lack of ordinary good nature. No-one could say that he was without
humour, but it was a saturnine humour, and he was certainly not one who
suffered gladly the numerous people whom he considered fools. And he was
not above a liking for malicious gossip.’ The later wBy is so clearly delin-
eated here that one infers a certain retrospection: moreover, he and Magee
had had their differences. Another schoolfellow thought wy floundered in
mathematics (though this was denied both by Magee and Johnston) and was
undistinguished except by absent-mindedness.'” While this may just reflect
the memory of a complacent philistine (the High School nurtured them in
droves), it is a more contemporary recollection than Magee’s. Yet another
schoolfellow remembered Yeats as ‘lackadaisical’, uninterested in games, pre-
pared to argue with teachers, and known for an ability to churn out verse.
But he was already claiming his own intellectual niche. He stunned some
schoolfellows by relaying JBy’s opinions, proclaiming himself an ‘evolu-
tionist’, and remarking dismissively that ‘no-one could write an essay now
except Herbert Spencer and Matthew Arnold’. Authoritative intellectual
name-dropping came easily to him. ‘Brimful of the Descent of Man’, he pro-
duced a scandalous essay on ‘Evolutionary Botany’, starting a long-running
controversy with a literalist schoolfellow.’? He was still a keen natural scien-
tist, and wanted to start a field club: though weak on classics and grammar,
he liked geometry and algebra. And Magee’s claims that his teachers did not
much like him may be balanced with a private recollection from John McNeill,
who, unlike Magee, had no axe to grind. McNeill
had few remembrances . . . but very pleasant. He was for a year in the class (the upper
fourth) which I taught in the High School. He was tall for his age, dark and good-
looking and a thoroughly good boy. Of course some of his work — essays for example
— was widely different from that of other pupils, showing at every turn signs of
unusual genius. In one point, and that was an important one from the point of view
of a schoolboy, he was very deficient — his spelling was remarkably bad. He took no
interest in school games but was entirely literary. He was very popular with his
school fellows and the general verdict was that he was ‘a decent fellow’.”°

WBY's popularity was also stressed by F. R. Montgomery Hitchcock:

a charming fellow, rather fond of attitudinizing, careless rather of his appear-
ance, wore a large hat — I remember his red socks (with holes in the heels) and his
longish hair and the far away look in his dark dreamy eyes — a kindly soul that could

32
 EXPLORATIONS: DUBLIN 1881-1887
not hurt a fly . . . His father was an artist and the boy was not properly looked after.
The boy had a great manner and looked a Spaniard. It was something to see him salute
a lady. It was in the Spanish style, hat lifted high and waved, very wonderful.”

Much here presaged the future. Under its Headmaster, Wilkins, the High
School was a utilitarian institution, patronized by the middle class of
Protestant
Dublin; the ‘Anglo-Irish’ went to St Columba’s, Rathfarnham, or to school
in England. But ‘respectability’ marked wsy’s schoolfellows, most of whom
went on to assured places in the worlds of business, the Church of Ireland,
the Civil Service, and other circles where their caste still dominated, often
via Trinity College. wey was not destined for this path; he was, in the
eyes of his peers, déclasséand disadvantaged, though his father had taught him
differently. Harold’s Cross required compensation. He approached the
situation characteristically: to his more stupid companions, insecurity was
masked by hauteur and intellectual pretensions, while to those who could
understand him, a much more original (and likeable) side was discernible.
Shaky foundations could be concealed by a high style. With a few like-
minded friends he formed a self-conscious elite, interested in intellectual
fashion: his intimates Frederick Gregg and Charles Johnston drew a
facetious tree of evolution which showed ‘wsy’ as the summit of organic
development.” He was also displaying a quality which would remain
dominant: the need to form organizations, and to assert his authority
within them. The attempted natural history society was the first of many.
Indeed, what attracted him to the idea may have been the organizational rather
than the scientific aspect. His father already suspected that for all his appar-
ent enthusiasm for science, he was ‘playing at it’; his son would ‘return to
his trespasses and sins’ and be a poet or an artist.”
Magee, again, bore this out. wBy’s final results were not spectacular —
‘ruined’, his headmaster thought, by taking up French and German simul-
taneously with Latin and Greek. (What he learnt of these modern languages
was not of much use to him in later life.) His best mark was in mathematics
(76); English (69), classics (28). But Magee saw further. By the time wBy left
the High School in 1883, he was ‘really an unusually well-read young man of
about nineteen [actually eighteen] with a conscious literary ambition’. This,
at least, was borne out by the last memory of the sympathetic McNeill. ‘My
clearest recollection of him is along talk we had in the [Trinity] College Park
shortly after he left school. He confided to me all the plans he had for the
future as to writing and reciting poetry— plans which he stuck to firmly and
carried out fully.’
Adolescent insecurities and poses were exacerbated by the underlying ten-
sion of sex. Later in life wey recalled his first conscious experience of sexual
33
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

desire at Bowmore Strand, Sligo, during 1882; some years earlier he had been
(incredulously) instructed in the mechanics of sexual reproduction by a well-
versed Sligo boy. The experience of sexual desire came upon him like ‘the burst-
ing ofa shell’— or so he wrote in his fifties, when he had assumed a hard-won
(and rather brittle) sexual confidence, and cast himselfas an unshockable seer
who could say anything. In 1882 it had all been very different. Intellectual know-
ledge and psychological consciousness remained divorced from experience,
and would continue so for many years. Classically, this incongruence was over-
come by idealizing unattainable and uninterested women, while remaining
resolutely unconscious of the interest indicated by those closer to hand.
The first such ideal was represented by a cousin, Laura Armstrong, red-
haired daughter of a Yeats connection and three years older than wsy: pretty,
impetuous, unstable and already spoken for (she married shortly afterwards,
in September 1884). He first noticed her in 1882, flying past in a pony-
carriage at Howth, and after meeting they corresponded in a high-falutin and
‘literary’ way. Lily, deflating as ever, ‘always denied that wBy had been in love
with L.A. and said he hardly knew her’.*° wBy’s own later memory of her was
intertwined with his first burst of literary creativity. He recalled her ‘wild dash
of half insane genius. Laura is to me always a pleasent memory she woke me
from the metallic sleep of science and set me writing my first play. Do not
mistake me she is only as a myth and a symbol.”° This confirms that he used
her for the scheming 4e//es dames sans merci in his early work: the witch
Vivien, Margaret Leland in John Sherman and the enchantress in The Island
ofStatues. But a myth and symbol she remained.
Part of the reason lay in a lack of confidence in his own attractiveness. His
unusual good looks — a thatch of black hair, high cheek-bones, olive skin, and
slanting eyes to which myopia contributed a faraway look— were emphasized
by all who knew him in his youth. These attributes would shortly be noted
by girls like Katharine Tynan. ‘I write for boys and girls of twenty,’ he remarked
forty years later, ‘but Iam always thinking of myself at that age — the age I was
when my father painted me as King Goll, tearing the strings out [of] a harp,
being insane with youth, but looking very desirable — alas no woman noticed
it at the time — with dreamy eyes and a great mass of black hair. It hangs in
our drawingroom now ~ a pathetic memory of a really dreadful time.?”

II]
It was the time, none the less, when he began to write, and to be published.
By 1882 he was already writing about poetry, and sending verses, to a literary-
minded acquaintance encountered at the house of his father’s landlord.28 From
this time his family grew used to the ‘humming’ sound of wBy composing in
34
 EXPLORATIONS: DUBLIN 1881-1887
his room: achieving rhyme and rhythm through articulation, in default ofan
acquired technique and anticipating the importance of chanting and invoca-
tion in his later work.” On two occasions jBy recalled that his son composed
a verse play with a fellow-pupil at the High School (Frederick Gregg) when
aged sixteen, which would have been in 1881.°° He read verses to Johnston,
who persisted in admiring them more than anything he subsequently wrote.
Another family memory involved wsy producing screeds of nonsense verse
for an importunate neighbour, who respectfully concealed his bewilder-
ment; this suggests a local reputation as well. Certainly, he had cast himself
as a writer by the time he left school, and was ready to pursue the literary world
with determination. On 20 November 1883 he managed to hear Oscar Wilde
lecture in Dublin, despite a transient illness and a detour to Uncle Matt at
Celbridge (By was begging for rescue from overdue butcher’s bills that had
pursued them from London). Not everyone took him at his own estima-
tion: the formidable Sarah Purser (herself a fine painter) queried the utility
of wBy’s literary pretensions, remarking that he could study medicine quite
as cheaply and more effectively. jBy claimed he silenced her by reading her
wBys ‘The Priest and the Fairy’.** This was a long narrative in rhyming
couplets, in which a Catholic priest banishes his fairy interrogator by telling
him that the souls of his kin are condemned. Adroit though uninspired, it
evokes themes which would recur — notably the unimaginative quiescence
enjoined by conventional religion, and its blindness to the existence of par-
allel supernatural worlds.
In the real world, }By’s belief in his son’s literary future did not entail fol-
lowing the family tradition at Trinity College.
I still saw that he learned his lessons, and he was still head of the school in science.
When he entered the VI form its master, who is now a classical fellow in TCD
[George Wilkins, the Headmaster’s brother], told me that he could be as good in
classics as in science if it were not that, having read Huxley, he despised them. When
the other boys of the form entered Trinity he on his own responsibility decided to
remain outside, and he entered the art school, where he studied for two years.”

Or so the father subsequently convinced himself; the son, more realistically,

remembered that By wanted him to go to Trinity, but ‘neither my classics
nor my mathematics were good enough for any examination’, and another
family tradition remembers his father railing him about ‘his various
inabilities — his not going to Trinity’.** The family’s attitude towards the cen-
tral institution of the Dublin Protestant world was always ambivalent;
its intellectual regimen, according to JBY, was uncongenial to ‘the vagrant
mind’ of the artist. ‘Always at the back of Trinity College, drawing it on, are
hungry parents and the hungry offspring of a poor country.’
35
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

The Yeats parents were probably too ‘hungry’ to commit their offspring
to several years of higher education: plans to send Lily to Alexandra College
had already been torpedoed by debts, and she had enrolled (with Lolly) at
the undistinguished Metropolitan School of Art in Kildare Street in May
1883, where fees were only 4r. 25. 6d. per session. wByY followed them there
in May 1884, having left the High School the previous year.** Oddly, he spelt
his name differently to theirs (Yeates) and appears under a different address.
Yet more bizarrely, while their father is entered as ‘Artist’, wBy’s is ‘ecclesiast-
ical sculptor’. Possibly some concealment was necessary because of a dif-
ficulty with fees: Lily remembered having to walk from Terenure to college
because they had no money for trams. Nor was the journey worth it, since
they were deeply bored by being ‘expected to spend a month making a care-
ful drawing of the Apollo or the Dancing Faun’.*° They were artist’s children;
wey had the highly developed aesthetic sense of all the family (and continued
to paint adequate water-colours); colour and its significance were always
important to his symbolism, especially in drama. Though his contemporaries
included future acquaintances like the poet Dora Sigerson and the sculptor
Oliver Sheppard, there was not much colour at Kildare Street in the 1880s.
‘We had no scholarship, no critical knowledge of the history of painting, and
no settled standards’;’” long afterwards, he still remembered his anger at being
told to ‘copy from Nature’ by drawing a ginger-beer bottle and an apple.*8
Dublin had its avant-garde, but they were not encouraged; their eyes were
opened elsewhere. When the new French painting filtered through to Dublin,
wey found it vaguely upsetting; a Manet vision of two cocottes sitting out-
side a café made him ‘miserable for days. I found no desirable place, no man
I could have wished to be, no woman I could have loved, no Golden Age, no
lure for secret hope, no adventure with myself for theme out of that endless
tale I told myselfallday long.” This reveals the expectations which he cher-
ished about art, and the inadequacies he perceived in realism; his later aes-
thetic quarrels with contemporaries like George Moore were inevitable.
Attendance at the Metropolitan School of Art petered out in the summer of
1885, followed by classes at the Royal Hibernian Academy;® but it was clear
to him that the tapestry-like pictures he dreamt of were beyond his teachers’
imagination and his own ability. Twenty years later he gave damning evid-
ence to a parliamentary committee on education in Ireland, describing his
artistic training as ‘destructive of enthusiasm . . . Iwas bored to death by that
routine, and in consequence I have left Art, and have taken to Literature.”*!
This was tongue-in-cheek; there was, of course, more to it than that.
Several of his High School generation saw themselves as writers; heavily
influenced by the English Romantics and already widely read in the more

36
 EXPLORATIONS: DUBLIN 1881-1887
obscure reaches of Shelley’s evvre, wBy’s initial inclination was towards
plays rather than lyrics. In 1883 he was still working on verse drama and nar-
rative, and his own recollection of 1892 bears out his father’s later memory.
‘The first attempt at serious poetry Imade was when I was about seventeen
and much under the influence of Shelley. It was a dramatic poem, about a
magician who set up his throne in Central Asia, and who expressed himself
with Queen Mab-like heterodoxy. It was written in rivalry with G— [Gregg].
I forget what he wrote.” There was also aplay called at first ‘Vivien and Time’,
dated 8 January 1884, and shown to various friends. Other fragments from
this period include a draft play involving a bishop, amonk and a woman accused
by shepherds of witchcraft: pagan ‘fierceness’ is posited against Christian char-
ity. The witch rides in the sky by night, knows the ‘language of the sidhe’ (fairies,
in Irish), and casts aside her shrouds to reveal a robe of peacock feathers and
gold ornaments.* There are also short, highly conventional love-poems,
occasionally in the dialogue form he would later develop so strikingly.“
Other unpublished attempts included a long narrative poem about a medieval
knight set in a German forest: a voyage-poem concerning the search for a vision-
ary lady, incorporating Norse saga-elements as well as the inspiration of
Spenser, “The Poet’ in Shelley’s A/astor, and possibly some images from
visionary Gaelic ais/ing poetry.* ‘I was humiliated,’ he recalled later, ‘and wrote
always of proud, confident men and women.” At least one play nearly
reached completion, under the probable title “The Crater of Olives’;*” a sec-
tion of it turned up in The Island of Statues. One draft of the latter work is
dated August 1884, but an earlier version exists in a notebook, where it fol-
lows Time and the Witch Vivien and Mosada.* But publication (at least under
his full name) eluded him until in March 1885 a new ‘monthly magazine of
literature, art and university intelligence’, the Dublin University Review,
printed two lyrics: ‘Song of the Faeries’ and ‘Voices’. They were followed in
the April-July issue by ‘Love and Death’ and The Island ofStatues.
All this work was deeply conventional. It was also, as Johnston noted,
utterly unIrish, coming out of ‘a vast murmurous gloom of dreams’ and deal-
ing with Princesses of Sweden, Moorish magicians or Indian sages. It reflected
his absorption of yBy’s inexhaustible commentary, the conversation at Dowden’s
house, and the taste of his High School contemporaries for romance; but it
also reproduced echoes from the London circles which his father had fre-
quented. Shelleyan or Spenserian effects were overlaid with Pre-Raphaelite
dressing, though ysy noted ‘a wild and strange music” which may have been
contributed by some specifically Irish influences. When the first instalment
of The Island of Statues appeared, the proud father wrote excitedly to John
Todhunter (who had published Rienzi in 1881 and was building a reputation):

37
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

I have been wanting to tell you that Willie on his side watches with an almost breath-
less interest your course as dramatic poet & has been doing so for a long time — he
has read carefully everything you have written, most carefully. He finished when
at Howth your Rienzi at a single sitting — the sitting ending at 2 o clock in the
morning. Your book on Shelley he has already read.
That Willie is a poet I have long known. What I am really interested in is seeing
the dramatic idea emerge & I think before this present drama (College Review) of
his has been finished, you will see evidence of the dramatic instinct. That he is a poet
I know because he has such store of what I may call formative thought — his head is
full of plots of drama. He has a Spanish play on hand brilliant in dialogue & so full
of music. He is an intense worker with an inbred love for complicated detail & has
the patience of youth.*°

wey himself described The Island ofStatues as ‘an Arcadian play in imitation
of Edmund Spenser’,*! involving a witch, a shepherdess and a lovers’ quest
that leads to enchantment into stone. The Epilogue, however (‘Spoken by a
Satyr, carrying a sea-shell’), contained beneath its archaisms a hard philo-
sophical question about the reality of the world and the utility of ‘dreaming’.
And this fragment (retitled “The Song of the Happy Shepherd’) would be
retained by wBy in the canon of his work, conscious though he was of the
need for pruning (‘my great aim is directness and extreme simplicity’).°
He had been working on The Island of Statues before April 1884, helped
by the sympathetic librarian T. W. Lyster and reading it to interested
people like Dowden, who liked it — possibly because of the models behind
it. JBY responded enthusiastically:
I am glad you are so pleased with Willie. It is curious that long ago I was struck by
finding in his mother’s people all the marks of imagination — the continual absorp-
tion in an idea — and that idea never one of the intellectual or reasoning faculty, but
of the affections and desires and the senses . . . To give them a voice is like giving a
voice to the sea-cliffs, when what wild babblings must break forth.

Dowden, congenitally equivocal, wrote to John Todhunter that wBy was ‘an
interesting boy whether he turn out much of a poet or not. The sap in him
is all so green and young that I cannot guess what his fibre may afterwards
be. So I shall only prophesy that he is to be a great poet after the event.’ (That
was quintessential Dowden.) Later he added, ‘He hangs in the balance
between genius & (to speak rudely) fool.’
Thus the voice of the Dublin establishment, in the face of wBy’s late-
adolescent preoccupation with islands, apple-blossom enchantment, exoti-
cism and impotent yearnings. These climaxed in Mosada, a play he may have
started even earlier than The Island ofStatues, but which appeared in the June
1886 issue of the Dublin University Review. A Moorish girl, magic-obsessed,
38
 EXPLORATIONS: DUBLIN 1881-1887
is delivered to the Inquisitor, who turns out to be her lost love - though she
kills herselftoo early to find out. wey would subsequently, and correctly, decide
it was ‘feeble’, but with Dowden’s help it was reprinted as a twelve-page
pamphlet by the Dublin firm of Sealy, Bryers & Walker in October 1886.
Subscriptions were drummed up (particularly from Dowden’s episcopal
brother in Edinburgh) and copies were pressed on anyone who might be
of use — including Gerard Manley Hopkins (then unhappily based at
Monasterevin, County Kildare), who visited the St Stephen’s Green studio.
He was not well disposed to this, nor to another early publication called
‘The Two Titans’, ‘a strained and unworkable allegory about a young man
and a sphinx on a rock in the sea (how did they get there? What did they eat?
and so on)’.*
More striking than the content of this early work is the commitment
behind it. The pamphlet edition of Mosada carried a portrait of the writer as
frontispiece, rather than an illustration from the play: a new author announces
his arrival. Obscure though the production was, it received at least one review,
from his new friend Katharine Tynan. Long afterwards he would recall, ‘I
had about me from the first a little group whose admiration for work that had
no merit justified my immense self-confidence.’ He also had the Dudlin
University Review. This journal was founded in February 1885 by Charles
Hubert Oldham, then attached to Trinity College, and T. W. Rolleston, in
deliberate emulation of Isaac Butt’s Dublin University Magazine of the 1830s.
Like the DUM, it was intended to reflect a pluralist approach to national
themes, and, as its first editorial explicitly declared, would be unprovincial
and hold aloof from current politics. Around it gathered a group of people
who would help launch wy on his chosen career. Oldham’s Contemporary
Club acted as a magnet for those self-consciously determined to be raffish
and to cross boundaries, against the background of Dublin’s intimate and
censorious provincialism; ‘Contemporary’ meant that members need only
have in common the fact that they were alive at the same time. Such people
wanted more stimulus than Dowden’s Sunday-afternoon salon at Temple
Road. They could express nationalist leanings by supporting the Young
Ireland Society in York Street, which wBy joined in October 1885. And
the Contemporary Club met his needs even more precisely.
Oldham was a 25-year-old Trinity star: though he trained as a barrister he
eventually became Professor of Commerce and then Economics at the new
National University. That institution was more hospitable to his Home Rule
politics than his a/ma mater. Though Trinity had its nationally minded ele-
ment, their ambivalence was defined acutely by yy. ‘Some of them hate England
and it is a sign of grace. Hatred itselfis a sort of religion that prompts to deeds
of self-denial. There are others professing a sort of Olympian superiority who
a9
2. wByY drawn by his father for the frontispiece of Mosada, 1886. Eighteen years later wBy
wrote on John Quinn’s copy: “There was to have been a picture of some incident in the play
but my father was too much of a portrait painter not to do this instead. I was alarmed at the
imprudence of putting a portrait in my first book but my father was full of ancient & modern
instances,’

40
 EXPLORATIONS: DUBLIN 1881-1887
think that they admire and love England, finding idealism in “an empire on
which the sun never sets”.’>”7 Oldham was not of this persuasion. On 2 June
1885, some months after he founded the DUR, there was a long discussion
in his TCD rooms about ‘how to introduce an Irish national spirit into the
revue [sic]’.5® One result was the changed tone of the July issue, with a declara-
tion that the Review’s columns were to be opened ‘to a temperate discus-
sion of certain public questions by representatives of the different parties or
social movements in Ireland’. This was inaugurated by the romantic his-
torian and polemicist Standish James O’Grady, writing on conservatism,
followed by an attack from Michael Davitt, and an article by the Home
Rule politician and littérateur Justin Huntly McCarthy on Irish language
and literature.
The next initiative was the Contemporary Club, which first met on 21
November 1885, and continued for about thirty years. In the 1880s gatherings
took place outside College walls, at 116 Grafton Street, above Ponsonby’s .
Bookshop. Here on Saturday evenings a curious cross-section of literary
and artistic people met to discuss ‘the social, political and literary questions
of the day’. Declamatory speeches were not allowed; conversation was the
preferred mode, conducted sitting down. Drink was not served, but meet-
ings sometimes went on until three or four in the morning.® ‘Harsh argu-
ment which had gone out of fashion in England,’ way remembered, ‘was still
the manner of our conversation.’*° The Club was a broad church: Oldham
ironically described to Sarah Purser the never-ending search for subjects
acceptable to both religious camps. Unionist and nationalist arguments
sometimes clashed head-on, startling those used to the more oblique and
inferential nature of Dublin dialogue. But the Club’s membership indic-
ates that the political tone was generally nationalist. While Oldham began
a short-lived Protestant Home Rule Association in 1886 (again, echoing
the ethos of Butt and the young Ferguson), he also grandly referred to 1886
as ‘the year of achievement of the Irish Republic’.“! Fenian rhetoric was, for
Club members, an acceptable if half-mocking trope: reflecting the fact that
in 1885 Fenianism seemed the heroic past, and Parnellite constitutional-
ism the hopeful future. This is an important point. In later years wBy was to
launch the myth that an attempt to create a national literary culture arose
after the shattering fall of Parnell in 1891, and thus led inevitably to polit-
ical separatism. But the chronology of the DUR, the Young Ireland Soci-
eties and the Contemporary Club shows that the effort was being made
from 1885 — stimulated by the apparent imminence of Home Rule and a tri-
umphant constitutional nationalism. The agenda was not about creating an
alternative to politics; it concerned what to do when politics had delivered
national autonomy.
4I
3. John O'Leary drawn by jBy: a frequent subject, culminating in the 1904 oil-painting now
in the National Gallery of Ireland. With wBy’s autobiographies and poetry, these images fixed
O'Leary as the type of heroic—and ancient — republican.

WwBy may not have been an official ‘member’ of the Contemporary Club
from 1885 to 1887, but he attended. His father was a regular; so were the
young Gaelic scholar Douglas Hyde, the future MP, Land War hero (and
ex-Fenian) Michael Davitt, the Trinity don and journalist T. W. Rolleston
(who may have introduced wBy to Whitman’s poetry, as he had translated
it into German), the authority on Norse sagas George Sigerson, the Quaker
nationalist Alfred Webb, the aggressive barristerJ.F. Taylor, wBy’s mystic-
ally minded student friend George Russell — and the older Fenian journalist
returned from exile, John O'Leary.
To Irish Protestants and Unionists, Fenianism was an atavistic bogey: a
conspiratorial tradition which had fomented armed rebellion against the
British connection in 1867 and might at any time break out once more. But
it also carried an indefinable aura of romance, nobility and selfless commit-
ment — once it seemed to be safely dormant. This was apparently the case by
the mid-eighties, and the Fenian tradition as discussed in the Contemporary
42
 EXPLORATIONS: DUBLIN 1881-1887
Club was seen as something honourable if, to some minds, misguided. wBy
would later memorialize O’Leary as the inspiration of his own youthful
patriotism. By 1885, though at fifty-five hardly ancient, he was certainly a
voice from the heroic past: when an observer watched him ‘sitting among
us muttering of strange old things, I felt as when one suddenly comes on a
cromlech standing in a grouse-moor’.” The point was that the things of
which O'Leary spoke were ‘strange’ and ‘old’: his kind of ci-devant repub-
licanism, involving desperate and high-flown acts of resistance twenty
years before, had an archaic ring, and even wy found a certain mechanical
note in his rhetoric. ‘His once passionate mind, in the isolation of prison
and banishment, had as it were dried and hardened into certain constantly
repeated formulas, unwieldy as pieces of lava, but these formulas were invari-
ably his own, the result of the experiences of his life.’** For O’Leary, his life
was his art; this was not the least of his attractions for wBy. By contrast, the
old rebel’s conservatism appalled the young Douglas Hyde: ‘He did not think
that the masses have a right to the franchise, it was not expedient he said,
forgetting that he constituted himself the judge of the expediency.’** More
brutally, a detective from Dublin Castle, who still kept the ex-revolutionary
under desultory supervision, described him as ‘an old crank full of whims and
honesty’.
O’Leary’s importance to the Yeatses (father and son) transcended his
political credentials; he was an introduction not only to the acceptable face
of the extremist Fenian tradition, but also to a kind of free-thinking Catholic
intelligentsia of whose existence Sligo Unionists were blissfully ignorant.
Therefore, he indicated ways in which father and son could ‘belong’ to the
new Ireland: a world where like-minded people of both religious traditions
could share a pride in an ancient culture, rather than remember the conflicts
and dispossessions of the past. Protestant privilege, symbolized by the Trinity
College world, had rested on those dispossessions; but by the mid-eighties
its foundations were looking shaky. The Yeatses had already sidestepped the
world of the Unionist establishment, in search of something more interest-
ing. ‘If you will allow me to say so,’ JBy wrote to O’Leary later, ‘when I met
you & your friends I for the first time met people in Dublin who were not
entirely absorbed in the temporal & eternal welfare of themselves . . . It was
meeting you all that has left an impression on my young people that will never
be quite lost’.®°
It was at O’Leary’s urging that wBy joined the Young Ireland Society in
late 1885, whose ethos was distinctly armchair-Fenian. Papers entitled ‘Means
to Freedom’, ‘Nationalism and Internationalism’ and ‘Emmet’s Legacy to
Ireland’ were read. Members included Rolleston and the barristerJ.F. Taylor,
whose paths continually intersected with wsy’s over the following years:
43
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

Taylor would become a particular enemy, partly because of his own obses-
sion with a glamorous visitor to the Contemporary Club, the young and
lovely Maud Gonne. The new names listed in the minute-book of 30 Octo-
ber, along with wy, constituted a roll-call of the Trinity clique who were
also prominent in the Contemporary Club.” By early 1886 he was attending
eventful Young Ireland Society meetings, punctuated by aggressive debates
and threatened expulsions. He may, at this time, have taken the Fenian oath
(Maud Gonne thought so, though wy never admitted to it, and no record
remains). Once in this circle he rapidly became a favourite of O’Leary’s
sister, Ellen, who lived with her brother, and of Sigerson’s wife, Hester.
Charles Johnston believed that O’Leary pressed Samuel Ferguson’s work
on his new acolyte, who then discovered the repositories of legends in vol-
umes produced by the Royal Irish Academy and the Irish Texts Society.”
And it was probably from O’Leary that wBy borrowed the books of the
Young Ireland tradition - Thomas Davis's poems, John Mitchel’s polemic —
which led him to reconsider the canons of national literature, as well as the
acceptability of a nationalist stance. From his side O’Leary, while always
ready to offer breezy criticism of false notes in wBy’s poetry, from the first
recognized something remarkable, and expressed his opinion with none
of Dowden’s equivocation: wBy, he declared, was the only member of the Con-
temporary Club who would ever be reckoned a genius. (He was not wrong.)
It was O’Leary who helped way through his influence with the short-lived
journal of the new Gaelic Athletic Association, the Gae/(which started pub-
lication in April 1887 and actually paid for contributions), as well as Irish
American periodicals like the Boston Pilot and the Providence Sunday Journal.
All published wsy’s early poems and reviews. It was important that the
outlets for wBy’s first work were nationalist in their politics; very possibly
this helped shape the nature of the work that saw the light of day.®? He was
certainly more prepared to meet O’Leary’s strictures and criticisms than
those of many others (including ysy). And in any case, he was tentatively step-
ping towards more radical politics, in contrast to all he had known in Sligo:
not only endorsing Parnell and Home Rule, but admiring the separatist
Fenian tradition that stretched back to the romantic nationalism of the early
nineteenth century and the memory of the 1798 Rising. Thus he could find
a place among people whose interests he shared and whose achievements he
admired.
He owed this to the Contemporary Club, though not every acquaintance
made through the rooms on Grafton Street was as well disposed as O’Leary.
Stephen Gwynn, a thoughtful Protestant nationalist born and bred at the
centre of Dublin’s professional establishment, remembered that in those

44
 EXPLORATIONS: DUBLIN 1881-1887
years ‘every one of us was convinced that Yeats was going to be a better
poet than we had yet seen in Ireland; and the significant fact is that this was
not out of personal liking’. Douglas Hyde, from the more marginalized
background of an eccentric Roscommon rectory, recorded disparaging
comments about wsy’s verbosity, though they met and talked often at the
Club or the Young Ireland Society (on 18 December 1885 they talked for
three hours after a Young Ireland meeting ended). Ata surprisingly early stage
wsy realized the importance of this milieu, and its effect on him: in a few
years’ time he was already seeing the Contemporary Club as the stuff of
future memoirs, suggesting that it be memorialized in an account by Oldham,
with sketches by jy.’ Thus early, he was preternaturally conscious of the
need to impose a shape on his life, and able to anticipate the way it would
look in retrospect.

IV

While he was discovering the world of the nationalist intelligentsia, he

was serving another apprenticeship — spiritual rather than political. Like
his literary explorations, it began as he finished at the High School, and
some of the inspiration came from family example. In late 1884 wsy’s aunt
Isabella Pollexfen Varley, married to an artist in London and more intel-
lectually modish than her sisters, sent wBy a copy of A. P. Sinnett’s Esoteric
Buddhism. This was a founding text of the fashionable New Age religion,
Theosophy, blending East and West in a spiritual synthesis readily absorbed
by its devotees. wBy probably first heard about it at one of Dowden’s Sundays:
Dowden had ordered Sinnett’s work for the National Library. After obtain-
ing it, wBy lent the book to his friend Charles Johnston, still at the High School.
Johnston, handsome and enterprising all his life, had been considering a
career in the Church; instead he went to London to interview the founders
of the movement, and on his return introduced Theosophy to Dublin.” A
craze began, to the chagrin of the Headmaster, who saw ‘his most promis-
ing students [touched] with the indifference of the Orient to such things as
college distinction and mundane success’.”? For some of them, notably
Johnston and wey, the ‘craze’ continued into the time spent at art school and
far beyond.
Johnston was an established friend of wBy since the days at Howth from
1881 to 1882. Here they had gone on rowing expeditions, terrifying By on one
occasion by becoming marooned on the islet of Ireland’s Eye; a search-party
found them unconcerned, having become absorbed in a game of chess. This

45
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

was in keeping with Johnston's other-worldly persona: vegetarian, total-

abstainer and ready embracer of the latest fads. His background makes these
idiosyncrasies at once surprising and comprehensible: Johnston was an
Ulsterman, and his father, William Johnston ‘of Ballykilbeg’, was the most
celebrated Orange firebrand of his day, a founder of newspapers, Member of
Parliament and rhetorical scourge of Popery, who hated ‘reasonableness’
above all things. In the early 1880s the Johnstons were living on Leinster Road,
Rathmines, opposite John O’Leary and round the corner from the Yeatses;
later they returned to Ballykilbeg, where, wBy noted, everything was made
a matter of belief. He visited the Johnstons there, and experimented with
eating fungi — probably, at this stage, seeking sustenance rather than hallu-
cination. Charles was, in a sense, ready for wBy. Their paths would intersect
through life, with Johnston turning up in the pose of a ‘world worn man of
society’ at Madame Blavatsky’s in London later in the 1880s” and again as a
New York journalist in 1903 (when he remarked, “There is nothingIcannot
learn and nothing that I want to learn’ — the blasé schoolboy still”*). During
their art school days they visited the nearby museum in order to search for
‘Odic force’ emanating from sacred objects, a pastime encouraged by the
recently founded Society for Psychical Research;” more influentially, it was
probably Johnston, together with Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism, who encour-
aged wy in the new fad of Theosophy.
It was at this stage of his life, looking for a role in the world of art, and
trying to define himself against the declamatory certitudes of his father
and the easy cynicism of middle-class Dublin, that wBy embarked upon a
course of spiritual exploration. Sinnett began it; current intellectual fashion,
and his art school companions, carried him further. By the late 1890s he
could deliberately distance himself from this early apprenticeship, in lofty
recollections:

A little body of young men hired a room in York Street, some dozen years ago, and
began to read papers to one another on the Vedas, and the Upanishads, and the
Neoplatonists, and on modern mystics and spiritualists. They had no scholarship,
and they spoke and wrote badly, but they discussed great problems ardently and
simply and unconventionally as men, perhaps, discussed great problems in the
medieval universities.””

The comparison is not accidental: this Theosophist involvement,”* and

others like it, would be wy’s university. He had begun along career of form-
ing clubs, of organizing speculative conversations, of interrogating a widely
assorted range of spiritual disciplines and secret knowledge. The organiza-
tion described here, which called itself the Dublin Hermetic Society, dates
46
 EXPLORATIONS: DUBLIN 1881-1887
from 16 June 1885. According to wy, it was a peripatetic group of discuss-
ants, moving ‘from back street to back street’ and nurturing the voices of a
literary renaissance: Charles Johnston, Claude Falls Wright, Charles Weekes,
W. K. Magee, occasionally George Russell and, inevitably as Chairman,
himself.” But it also included the more exotic and experienced figure of
Mir Alaud Ali, Professor of Persian, Arabic and Hindustani at Trinity; and
in several ways it represented a local reflection of the fashion for Indian
things which infused intellectual avant-garde circles in the 1880s. way him-
self returned again and again to the images and parables of Indian philo-
sophy; and, judging by the Indian names that turn up in his poetry from this
time, he was probably already reading Kalidasa’s lyrical play Sakuntala.
Always theosophically bent, the Hermetic Society became in April 1886
the Dublin Theosophical Society — a limitation which disappointed wsy,
though he was impressed by the envoy sent by the Theosophist leader Madame
Blavatsky. The charter members were almost entirely recent High School prod-
ucts, but Oldham’s influence was important. ‘Can you manage to come and
join one of the circle who are to meet Mr Mohini the Theosophist in my rooms
on Wednesday afternoon 4 o'clock? he wrote to Sarah Purser. ‘Mohini very
like the pictures one sees of Christ. Very gentle. Talks, talks, talks: much like
a stream on hillside under the grass: — you listen tho’ you don’t understand —
yet it is pleasant afterwards to remember that you did listen awhile. Yes! very
pleasant. So “drop in” to the stream!’®”
wey dropped in too, and was deeply affected by his first experience of
an Eastern holy man: the exoticism, the simplicity, the gnomic utterance all
appealed, and were recapitulated in a number of poems. Mohini Chatterjee
in his youth was a genuinely impressive presence, preaching the Vedantic way
of meditation, asceticism and renunciation. Described by Blavatsky as ‘a nut-
meg Hindoo with buck eyes’, he shortly proved unable to resist the sexual
opportunities offered by his English disciples. At least four of them, accord-
ing to Blavatsky, ‘burned with a scandalous, ferocious passion for Mohini -
with that craving of old gourmands for unnatural food’.*” His own letters to
smitten disciples sharpened their appetite, and eventually he was dispatched
back to India. By 1900 he had become, according to Russell, ‘a very corpu-
lent Brahmin who has a good practice as a lawyer at Bombay’, but he still pro-
duced a widely read book on Indian spirituality in 1907, as well as his translation
of Sankaracharya into German.*’ He supplied Madame Blavatsky with the
tenets of Hindu mystical thought, which she fed into the mysteriously derived
‘Mahatma letters to her disciple Sinnett. From 1884 Mohini Chatterjee acted
as Theosophy’s roving ambassador in Europe. Rather than expounding
Sinnett’s ideas (which owed more to Western occultism), he broadcast the
more existentialist principles of Samkara, a mystical approach which queried
47;
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

much accepted religion and stressed the need to extinguish ‘action’: the end
of Samkara philosophy was to express the supreme in the individual self.™*
Souls, moreover, were emanations from four divine spirits, endlessly incarn-
ated and endlessly returning to their source. Thus in Dublin, during April
1886, he preached the necessity to realize one’s individual soul by contemplation
and the illusory nature of the material world. To wBy (not yet exposed to Blake,
Pater or the French Symbolists, and forty-odd years before his discovery of
Berkeley’s metaphysics), Theosophy could not have been presented more attract-
ively, although some of the other doctrines, such as the abjuration of all worldly
ambition, were probably not so appealing. Mohini’s visit was still vivid when
wey recalled it in an important essay fourteen years later; and by then he was
able to link the message with esoteric reading from other sources.* His friend
George Russell, who was also there, was eventually less impressed; like wBy,
he preferred not to join the reconstituted Dublin Theosophical Society, but
— like wy — he found his way to Madame Blavatsky some time later.
WBY’s own version of the Society’s origins is over-simplified, and, as always
in his relations with Russell, contrives to suggest a certain number of false
directions. Unlike Johnston, Gregg and Magee, inherited from High School,
Russell, who left Rathmines College in 1884, was a friend first encountered
by way at the art school. Russell had been attending it part time since 1880,
possibly to escape from his uncomprehending family. Like Johnston, he
was by origin an Ulsterman (born in 1867 at Lurgan and therefore two years
younger than wsy). Like way, he was possessed by the sense of being a
solitary, and drawn to the idea of life as a spiritual journey through many in-
carnations. To the outside world he appeared a scruffy dreamer, wrapped in
mysticism: the Yeatses’ maid Rose described him as ‘a strayed angel’. Periods
of withdrawal alternated with euphoric surges of spiritual well-being. He
became a painter and poet, but was also a journalist, polemicist and admin-
istrator of surprising energy and decisiveness. Quite soon he would become
known by the pen-name of ‘AE’ — derived from ‘Aeon’, a Gnostic term for
the first created beings, which Russell came upon in an inspired trance.
Russell introduced his friend to mysticism as Johnston had interested
him in Theosophy. But he felt wBy was already half-way there. ‘I first noticed
Yeats’ interest in life and its shadow,’ he remembered, ‘when he got excited
over a drawing I had made of a man on a mountain startled by his own
gigantic shadow in the mist. I was almost sixteen or seventeen [actually, it
must have been in 1884] when I did that drawing so the dualist conscious-
ness was already wakened in him.”*° Their ideas coincided in the rejection of
apparent empirical ‘realities’ in favour of visionary truth. The alliance soon
took the form of a secret society, with a uniform of flowing neckties borrowed
_ from the Romantic period. Russell, particularly, was possessed by a sense that
48
 EXPLORATIONS: DUBLIN 1881-1887
the visible world was ‘like a tapestry blown and stirred by winds behind it: if
it would but raise for an instant I know I would be in Paradise’.®” The dream
of lifting that tapestry bound the two students together. Russell, living near
by in Rathmines, was a frequent visitor to Ashfield Terrace, where they ‘sat
up to all hours talking about everything in heaven and earth’.** This was, in
a sense, where the Hermetic Society had begun, though Russell refused to
join it formally. :
Russell’s approach to magical investigations was ambivalent. The two
friends soon began experimenting in spiritism, notably with a seance inspired
by Dowden’s account of Shelley trying to evoke the Devil while at Eton.
Accounts come filtered through Russell’s mild acidity, twenty years after the
event. wBy insisted that

all must be done according to ancient formula. The Gods must be evoked with
dignity and dismissed with thanks and a high courtesy, or in their anger they might
make the rash magician insane. Then he took the most likely of our group, told her to
mutter certain words of power making them mentally vibrate within her, and himself
walked round the room with a sword pointed solemnly to the four quarters one after
another, muttering words of power. Just as the divinity was evoked a rap came at the
door. ‘Oh’, said Yeats cheerfully, ‘here is the tea’, and went off leaving the dread
deity undismissed.*

By the time of retrospection” Russell had his reasons for distancing himself
from wy and magic; but his correspondence at this time indicates a more
indiscriminate enthusiasm for both. Early on, he later recollected, wBy’s
urge to dominate had alarmed him: he had feared that ‘a nature more for-
midable and powerful’ than his own would absorb his own ‘will and centre’,
artistic and spiritual.”' For his part, wBy disagreed early on with Russell
about the correct approach to visions. Russell beatifically accepted them;
WBY wanted to interrogate them, as Swedenborg had done.” Later, Russell
would remark waspishly, ‘When I knew him most intimately he was not
clairvoyant and had to use other peoples spiritual eyes to see for him but
this did not prevent him dogmatizing about what they saw but he did not
see. Naturally his mind when unloaded with theory was idealistic. He made
a mistake in supposing that symbolism was mysticism.”’ But both young
men, as Peter Kuch has pointed out, were at this stage plunging themselves
into the traditionally separate spheres of mysticism and magic. Thought
transference, astral travel, the Odic force associated with objects reposing
in the National Museum — all were grist to this particular mill. But Russell’s
course would be set towards mysticism, while wBy was increasingly drawn
to the hierarchies, experiments and secret knowledge of the magical
tradition.”
49
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

In this, wey and Russell were representative of their times. The late
1880s saw a revival of interest in the supernatural and the occult, not par-
alleled until the 1920s or the 1960s. Key texts came back into circulation, such
as Eliphas Lévi’s Mysteries ofMagic and Cornelius Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy.
Sinnett popularized the vogue for Eastern synthesis, and Madame Blavatsky’s
Theosophy arrived on the bohemian scene, a spiritual experience for all
seasons.” This doctrine, originating in America during the 1870s,” con-
centrated upon gaining insight into the Divine nature as a way of deducing
phenomenal essence; it related readily to esoteric links with the creative pro-
cess, reflecting many of Russell’s and wsy’s beliefs in cyclical history, art as
transfiguration, and existence as an eternal conflict of opposites. In philo-
sophical terms Theosophy looked to Neo-Platonism, the symbolism of the
Cabbala, the mysticism of Swedenborg, and, later, the insights of Indian reli-
gion. It was popularized by Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled (1875), which posited a
sort of occult evolutionism, underpinned by a wide-ranging treatment of com-
parative religion, and later by her The Secret Doctrine (1888). John O’Leary
lent the young aspirants Thomas Taylor’s translations of Plotinus and the Neo-
Platonists. Thus wBy acquired a ready-made agenda for esoteric study. And
since Theosophy also reconciled Darwinian evolutionary theory, discoveries
in physics and electromagnetism, it did not require — in the short term — an
immediate break with nineteenth-century science: evolution was possible on
a spiritual level too. This, in fact, was the central thesis of Sinnett’s Esoteric
Buddhism.
More specifically, wBy (and, indeed, Russell and Johnston) might be
located in a particular tradition of Irish Protestant interest in the occult,
which stretched back through Sheridan Le Fanu and Charles Maturin,
took in wBy’s contemporary Bram Stoker, and carried forward to Elizabeth
Bowen: all figures from the increasingly marginalized Irish Protestant
middle class, from families with strong clerical connections, declining
fortunes and a tenuous hold on landed authority. An interest in the occult
might be seen on one level as a strategy for coping with contemporary threats
(Catholicism plays a strong part in all their fantasies), and on another as a
search for psychic control. The Irish Protestant sense of displacement, their
loss of social and psychological integration towards the end of the nine-
teenth century, was particularly acute in the Yeatses’ case: the family experi-
ence had anticipated the decline of a whole subculture. Lily, like her brother,
was a believer in second sight and familiar ghosts; Sligo family lore was
rich in stories of hauntings. wBy was prepared for belief. And over and above
all, far more consciously, he was ready to assert a different allegiance from
his father’s over-articulate positivism. Yet it was not simple faith, nor ever
would be. In occult matters, from very early on, he was conscious of two kinds
590
 EXPLORATIONS: DUBLIN 1881-1887
of truth, essential and factual.” The spiritual and real worlds, in wBy’s
mind, interpenetrated each other, allowing for beliefas a metaphorical rather
than a literal truth. In this, of course, he was not far from the apologetics of
conventional Christian religious faith; but, in terms of his early relationship
with Russell, this approach was more sceptical than his fellow-seeker’s.
Russell saw visions as actualizations; wBy interpreted them as symbols, to
be analysed further. And this enabled him, usefully, to come down on two
sides of the visionary question at once.
The two friends’ differences over mysticism and magic would be lifelong.
Spiritualist experiments became the rage in Dublin from 1886 to 1887, and
wey’ friends hilariously recalled his enthusiasm for them. On one famous
occasion a marvellous vision resolved itself into a glass-reflection of some-
one polishing the shopfront opposite the seance room; another time ‘an
athletic youth’ in a trance saw a pair of skulls. ‘“Skulls! Describe them!” Willie
said in a solemn voice. “They are just ordinary rowing sculls.””** But much
worse happened at a disastrous seance in January 1888, organized bya Dublin
spiritualist; Russell refused to go but wBy did. What happened shocked him
violently.
Presently my shoulders began to twitch and my hands. I could easily have stopped
them, but I had never heard of such a thing and I was curious. After a few minutes
the movement became violent and I stopped it. I sat motionless for a while and then
my whole body moved like a suddenly unrolled watch-spring, and I was thrown back-
ward on the wall. I again stilled the movement and sat at the table. Everybody began
to say I was a medium, and that if I would not resist some wonderful thing would
happen.

So it did, but in the frightening form of further convulsive movements,

and a wave of group hysteria. His friend Katharine Tynan took to saying
Paternosters, while all that wBy could remember as a mantra was the open-
ing of Paradise Lost. Equilibrium was slowly regained. But ‘for years after-
wards’, he recalled, ‘I would not go to a seance or turn a table and would often
ask myself what was that violent impulse that had run through my nerves.
Was it a part of myself — something always to be a danger perhaps; or had it
come from without, as it seemed?”
That question remained open all his life. None the less, his magical pre-
occupation continued; fuelled, as Russell nervously saw it, by the obsession
that Knowledge is Power. (Here, his father’s rational positivism overcame the
metaphors of faith.) By December 1888 Russell was already distancing him-
self from their joint experiments of a few years before; and he had begun to
fear the appetite of his friend’s ambitious demon. He wrote him a coded
warning in the form of aletter to the Theosophical Society's journal Lucifer
SI
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

on the subject of the Society’s recent decision to form an Esoteric Section

for the study of arcane philosophy. Inevitably, wBy joined it, and in an open
letter Russell seems to be addressing him rather than Madame Blavatsky:
A young man, whose intellect is of the keenest, and with great power of assimilat-
ing and applying knowledge . . . feels there may be something beyond the facts of
material science, beyond the anthropomorphic religions of the day. Drifting into
that mysterious current which is now flowing through the century, he becomes
attracted by Theosophy. For a while he studies it with avidity, strives to live ‘the life’,
to permeate himself with its teaching.
His intellect is satisfied for the time.
But, alas! he commits the fatal fault of forgetting that he has a soul . . . Mystic Union
with the Higher Self becomes more and more phantasmal. He recognises its neces-
sity, but postpones the ordeal.
‘First let me prove the lower realms of Nature’ he cries, and plunges into the
phenomena of spiritualism, table rapping, and the evocation of spooks. He declares
that
Knowledge is Power . . .
He is remonstrated with. He replies that it is necessary to test all experience,
and construes that axiom into a law that Karma is to be moulded and shaped by
the conscious Ego. Carried to a logical conclusion, his rendering of the axiom
would lead him into the lowest depths of vice to the hurt of his higher nature. He
would seek in this transient incarnation to gratify every lust, passion and ideal of
his personality.’°°

V
From Russell, we know wsy’s working routine — disciplining himself to
write for two hours a day, whatever the outcome.” By 1886, that year of
experiments, he had begun to publish regularly. Mosada was followed by a
long essay on Samuel Ferguson, who died on 9 August; wBy wrote about him
in Irish Fireside on 19 October, and the Dublin University Review carried a
longer version in November.’ This provided the opportunity for an explic-
it attack on Dowden and the spirit of West-Britonism in Ireland. ‘The Poetry
of Samuel Ferguson’ charts wBy’s awakening interest in Irish legend-cycles
(which Ferguson plumbed for inspiration and made accessible) as reposit-
ories of national tradition and spiritual truth; it also develops, despite some
mistakes,'”*the lofty and authoritative tone with which he had surprised his
contemporaries at the High School, and concealed his own insecurity. It
came entirely from his own resources; his claim twenty-five years later to have
been in the habit of dining with Ferguson seems to have been pure inven-
tion. But the assured, direct voice which sounds through his later poetry
was already audible in his earliest critical prose.
52
 EXPLORATIONS: DUBLIN 1881-1887
The content of the Ferguson essay also set guidelines for future develop-
ment. Though jeering at Matthew Arnold, he still apparently subscribed to
the Arnoldian view of the Celt as dreamy, sensitive and doom-laden; but ref-
erences to ‘Fatherland and song’ and ‘heroic deeds’ suggest the different kind
of idealization current in the Young Ireland Society, derived from Thomas
Davis via O’Leary. And George Eliot, a subject Dowden took seriously, was
superbly scorned. wBy returned to this theme in letters at the time and later
critical essays: he complained to Gregg that she understood nothing of
instinct, beauty, accumulated wisdom and passion. Worst of all, ‘she is too
reasonable. I hate reasonable people the activity of their brains sucks up all
the blood out of their hearts.
‘I was once afraid of turning out reasonable myself. The only buisness of
the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.”
In more formalized language, the Ferguson essay called for a distinct-
ively Irish passion and imagination against the imposition of bloodless
(and self-interested) English rationalism. The arguments probably recapitu-
late debates current in the Contemporary Club, as well as appealing to the
constituency targeted by O’Leary, the Young Ireland Societies and the Gael.
I do not appeal to the professorial classes, who, in Ireland, at least, appear at no time
to have thought of the affairs of their country till they first feared for their emolu-
ment — nor do I appeal to the shoddy society of “West Britonism’— but to those young
men clustered here and there throughout our land, whom the emotion of Patriotism
has lifted into that world of selfless passion in which heroic deeds are possible and
heroic poetry credible."

This thumbed the nose both at Sligo and Dowden. But if it looks in retro-
spect like neo-Fenianism, the voice and language are equally reminiscent of
the Protestant patriots on the Dublin University Magazine a generation
before. They also reflect the ideas of a growing circle of literary-minded
friends. To Russell and Johnston had now been added a more formidable lit-
erary operator, the recently published poet Katharine Tynan.
wey had met Tynan through the ubiquitous Oldham in the summer
of 1885; she remembered him saying, ‘“I’ve got a queer youth named Yeats”
— much as one might announce the capture of a rare moth.” She wrote
excitedly to a friend on 30 June that Oldham had ‘brought a young poet,
Mr Yeats, with him. I found him very interesting, he has the saddest,
most poetical face I ever saw; he looks a poet much more than Mr [Charles]
Fagan though he was poetical-looking also.’* (Fagan eventually proved his
poetical credentials in another way, by dying young.)
Tynan, four years older than wBy, was the adored daughter of a literary-
minded farmer at Clondalkin who had enabled her to publish a book of
5s)
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

poetry, Louise de la Valliére, in June 1885. Its success had given her a purchase
on the literary market which she worked assiduously; the book had been pushed
hard by well-connected literary and political acquaintances like Wilfrid
Meynell, T. M. Healy, Henry Labouchére, and Justin McCarthy. She cultiv-
ated the condescending Gerard Manley Hopkins, who found her ‘a simple
brightlooking Biddy with glossy very pretty red hair’ and a literary persona
like ‘a sparkling townfountain in public gardens [that] draws her water from
other sources’. She soon frequented jBy’s studio, bringing along visiting
journalists like Mrs Alexander Sullivan, the wife of a well-known Amer-
ican Fenian; jBy painted Tynan in the summer of 1886, during the first flush
of her literary celebrity. wBy saw in her not only a friend to discuss poetry
with, but also a link to the world of literary editors.
What she saw in him may have been more elemental. He was ‘beautiful
to look at, with his dark face, its touch of vivid colouring, the night-black hair,
the eager dark eyes’. Plain and intense, she was doomed to disappointment.

4. Katharine Tynan,
a woodcut by William
Strang for a series
which included Arthur
Symons and other
prominent ‘names’.
Literary careerism and
accomplished ‘log-
rolling’ sustained her
long writing life, and
helped the young wBy
at the outset of his.

54
 EXPLORATIONS: DUBLIN 1881-1887

Her memoirs of him, written with hindsight, stress how unaffected, gentle
and unspoilt he was in the mid-eighties; ‘the combative tendencies came to
him later’. This does not convince. wBy’s egocentricity and aggressiveness
were not a late development, they had preserved him through an unstable
childhood. But Tynan had been attracted to him, nurtured his talent, helped
publicize his early work, possibly received a nervous proposal from him,"
and then seen him outstrip her. Her later reminiscences must be read in
this light.
In 1885, however, her own future career as a high-class hack-writer of
relentless facility was as far in the future as wBy’s ascent to Olympus. He loved
staying at her father’s farmhouse, walking the five miles from the red-brick
terraces of Harold’s Cross to the fields of Clondalkin. (Sometimes he took a
lift with the driver of a milk-cart who was, inevitably, ‘a mine of information
about fairies and spirits’.) Tynan gathered friends here to discuss books
and read poetry; wBy became an enthusiastic attender. Their association was
mutually supportive (in 1887 wBy reviewed Tynan’s new collection Shamrocks
no less than three times),!!! while she indefatigably reviewed his work (start-
ing with Mosada) and profiled his personality as he emerged into celebrity,
often emphasizing his good looks.’!” She was a strong nationalist, had worked
for the Ladies’ Land League, and adhered passionately to Parnell’s side after
the Irish Parliamentary Party split in 1890: a line also followed by wsy. An
intellectual influence is less easy to discern. She probably introduced him to
Irish stories like ‘The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Graine’, which she had
written about before the motif occurred in wBy’s early novella Dhoya; he
later remembered that Tynan was ‘the first person who ever urged me to
write a play about Ireland — I had shown you some wild thing I had called
Spanish’.!3 But her prosiness increasingly annoyed him; they drifted apart
in the 1890s, and by 1898 he would write that her poetry was ‘uninteresting’
because ‘uncritical and unspeculative’; only the work that reflected her
‘impassioned and instinctive Catholicism’ was a permanent part of Irish
literature.’
This said much about the route he had travelled by then. But in 1885 they
were young, and mutually animated by literature. Tynan remembered later
the tirelessness of his talk about poetry was often something of a trial to more
ordinary mortals. Many a time, when he formed one of a circle in my dear dainty
little workroom at my Irish home, have I taken a book out of his hand, replaced
it on the shelf, and locked the book-case, to the visible relief of the company, who
were usually lovers of poetry, but less possessed than he."

She catalogued his celebrated vagueness, unworldliness and inability to look

after himself: once he absently ate a whole packet of opiated cough-lozenges
55
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

and slept for thirty hours. Years later, less cloyingly, she would sum up what
that same obsessive, discriminating approach meant for her generation of Irish
poets: ‘he swept away the rubbish and cleared the ground’.1"°
This was not yet obvious. The poetry he was beginning to plant out in less
and less obscure magazines could be as derivative as ‘A Dawn-Song’ in the
Irish Fireside of 5 February 1887 — though it is interesting for introducing
references to fairy raths, and awkward Irishisms like ma cushla. Equally cal-
culated for its audience was ‘How Ferencz Renyi Kept Silent’, a patriotic
piece for the respected Boston Pilot which implicitly paralleled Hungarian
and Irish nationalism, and echoed Davis as well as Browning."”” But a dif-
ferent note was already coming through as well. In December 1886 the Irish
Monthly published “The Stolen Child’. Here, the echoes were of Ferguson's
subtler translations, the language fresher, the close observation of natural
detail a revelation: the most mundane place-names were transformed into
magical incantations. The precision and strength of the poem may owe
something to the memory of his brother Robert’s death.
Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed —
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hill side,
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a fairy, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full ofweeping than he can understand.
wBy, always a good critic of his own work,-would see this poem (unlike
the work for the Gae/ and the Pi/o#) as canonical: and so it came to be. For
inspiration he was already trawling through back numbers of the Trans-
actions of the Ossianic Society, where in 1886 he found not only the story
‘Oisin in the Land of Youth’ but an account of the legendary Irish chief-
tain Fionn MacCumhail; this provided material for a long article published
in the Gae/ on 23 April 1887.18 The same theme inspired the narrative poem
that took shape as The Wanderings of Oisin.
He was also working out larger patterns. Walking home to Terenure along
Leinster Road with Russell, probably in 1885, he sketched out the plan of what
would become his constantly revised verse play The Shadowy Waters. “His hero
was a world wanderer trying to escape from himself, through a journey to etern-
ity.” There were echoes of A/astor, and also, possibly, Maturin’s Me/moth the
Wanderer — as well as the search for an elusive and witch-like lover. But the
56
 EXPLORATIONS: DUBLIN 1881-1887
wanderer, in this version, left his love and travelled on alone. ‘He changed
this plot which was logical when later he fell in love and did not like the notion
of going alone to the world of the immortals.’
Though he had not realized it, he may have already met his fate. Maud
Gonne, the daughter of a British army colonel stationed at the Curragh in
the mid-z800s, was eighteen months younger than wBy in 1886, and already
experimenting with the less hidebound side of Irish life. She remained con-
vinced that she first met wBy as a paint-stained art student at John O’Leary’s,
when his father was working on O’Leary’s portrait; as she remembered it,
she was twenty, he twenty-one, and he carried some books home for her.!2°
wBy himself thought they met in London three years later. Gonne was
notoriously unreliable on dates or places,’ and, absent-minded though he
was, it seems unlikely that wBy would have forgotten such an encounter. But
she certainly lived in Dublin from at least January 1885 until November 1886,
and frequented some of the same circles. She was not yet a nationalist icon,
but would become one; and, unlike Tynan, she was a Shelleyan princesse oin-
taine, equipped with great height, tragic beauty and secret sorrows.
Unknowingly, in these Dublin years, wBy encountered many of the
influences which would shape his future. ‘I had as many ideas as I have now’,
he wrote much later, ‘but I did not know how to choose from among them
those that belonged to my life.” One reason he admired O’Leary was
because, constrained though he was by certain strict formulas, ‘these formu-
las were invariably his own, the result of the experiences of his life’* — unlike
the counter-image of Dowden, who (according to By) ‘would not trust his
nature’.'**}By’s own nature was unchanged, and so were his prospects. Uncle
Matt had died in August 1885: the new agent for the family farms was more
businesslike and less amenable to extending ‘advances’ on an income which
had effectively ceased. (In the accounts for October 1886 less than £100 had
been received.) The new Ashbourne Act in 1885 allowed tenants to purchase
their holdings, and the Thomastown incumbents, active at last, commenced
this procedure before the end of the year. Though the pay-off to }By would
be swallowed by debts, the prospect galvanized yet another move: by late 1886
he was back in London.
wBy was less anxious to move. Though no longer on the art school regis-
ter after the 1885/6 session, he remained in Dublin, spending some of the sum-
mer of 1886 at Rosses Point. He was at Dowden’s Sunday soirée on 2 January
1887, where Hyde was ‘bored to death with his blather’.'”° He was still at
Harold’s Cross in early March 1887. But by late April he had followed the rest
of the family to London. Though at twenty-one he was rejoining his father,
and had been intellectually influenced by him for life, he had embraced apsy-
chological and personal course leading in an opposite direction. By now wBy
7
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

was deliberately drawn to the mystic and irrational; capable of astounding

mental energy, while castigating his own propensity to dream; careful with
money; calculating where reputation-building was concerned; prepared to
act life as a pose; and already constructing a mythology for himself, his past,
and the circles with whom he intersected. Just before leaving Dublin, he
copied an epigraph on to one of his poetic manuscripts:
Talent perceives Difference
ae Genius unity'”°

This summed up the difference between jBy and himself. He was also ambi-
tious for recognition by the world, and prepared to work towards this single-
mindedly. In one important saving characteristic, however, he remained his
father’s son: he would not compromise his art.

58
Chapter 3: Two YEARS
BEDFORD Park 1887-1889

People will forgive a publisher for having an eye to business but

they certainly will not forgive a poet.
wey to Charles Elkin Mathews, 16 May [?r910]

I
THE Yeats family arrived back in London piecemeal, wBy initially mov-
ing in with William Giles in Berkley Road, Regent’s Park; they slowly con-
verged on a temporary residence rented byyBy in Earls Court. ‘The girls seem
well satisfied to be in London,’ he wrote airily to O’Leary in May, ‘and are
full of cheerful anticipation which I hope will be realised — Willie has I think
been very homesick and has many uneasy thoughts — he has not at all settled
down — and looks not at all strong.” This at least was accurate; and by January
1888 even JBy admitted that his daughters saw Dublin as a ‘lost Eden’.? By
then, however, wBy was finding his feet. Shortly after his arrival he had
excoriated ‘this hateful London where you cannot go five paces without
seeing some wretched object broken either by wealth or poverty’ — though
this was to Katharine Tynan, who probably required such anathemas.° But
much of his initial depression was to do with an unsatisfactory sense of da
vu, and the hated conditions of the temporary house at 58 Eardley Crescent,
where the family stayed until March 1888: stuffy, cramped and racked by
noise from the neighbouring Earls Court Exhibition Hall. Then they returned
to an earlier lost Eden, Bedford Park. And by that stage wBy had begun to
establish himselfas a freelance critic and editor. In his Autobiographies, devoted
to asserting personality through gesture, and identifying development by
strictly defined epiphanies, the period from 1887 to 1891 was entitled ‘Four
Years’: constructed to end with the death of Parnell, seen in retrospect as a water-
shed. But at the time Parnell figured little in wBy’s universe: his idea of a
heroic leader was William Morris. It was the first two years that counted,
from early 1887 to the beginning of 1889. And the climax is not the public
upheaval ofa politician’s death, but a more personal apotheosis: the publica-
tion of wBy’s first book. = »-
It was vital too that he had arrived back in London during the mid-1880s:
perhaps the high point of socialist revivalism, anarchist experimentation
and philosophical conjurings amid the debris of conventional religion. In
wBy’s exposure to this heady atmosphere, the surroundings and contacts of
59
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

Bedford Park were essential. The area around Turnham Green, near Chiswick
in west London, had been made accessible by the District Railway from
the 1870s; during the Yeatses’ previous sojourn there, much of it had been a
building-site. By the late 1880s it was established as an affordable location
with artistic pretensions; vernacularly styled houses by Norman Shaw, Edward
Godwin and their associates, set in winding, tree-lined streets, gave it the air
of a garden suburb. It was not smart. By the eighties, aesthetic arbiters con-
sidered Bedford Park an imitation of essential architectural principles “by
cheap builders possessed by the idea that red brick, a blue pot, and a fat sun-
flower in the window are all that is necessary to be fashionably aesthetic and
Queen Anne’; it was considered rather passé. Bedford Park demonstrated
that by the 1880s aestheticism, long a butt for satire, was established enough
to have moved to the suburbs: a word rejected by the inhabitants, who preferred
the idea of a village or colony.”
This, of course, was not the least of its attractions for the Yeatses. A milieu
where respectable bohemianism met popular aestheticism suited both sy and
his eldest son. The population of Bedford Park included artists, journalists,
academics, poets, playwrights, a celebrated pet anarchist (Sergius Stepniak)
and an oddly high proportion of retired military men, attracted by the low
house prices. Bargain-basement aestheticism existed within convenient range
of William Morris's enterprises at Hammersmith, and even Leighton House
in Kensington, amid houses characterized by De Morgan tiles, lattice win-
dows, red brick and gables. Activities included artistic bookbinding, societies
with large names and small memberships, experiments in drama (there was
a local theatre, as well as a Co-operative store and an ‘inn’ archaically named
‘The Tabard’) and Utopian socialism. G. K. Chesterton, who was at this time
courting the Yeatses’ neighbour Frances Bloggs, constantly alluded to 1880s
Bedford Park in his fiction and autobiography: its eager fashions for agnos-
ticism, socialism and occultism, its resolute aestheticism, its indefinable
pleasantness.°
In this atmosphere JBy’s house became an extension of his studio circle —
much to his wife’s annoyance. His prophecy made before their marriage,
that his relentless sociability would conflict with her predilections, had come
true, and she was unable to stop it. The Yeatses were quickly a Bedford Park
fixture. Neighbours like the family of the painter Henry Paget soon began
to collect anecdotes about wBy’s absent-mindedness (Paget once met him
in the street in a downpour and remarked that his mackintosh was inside-
out: wBy obediently removed it and put it on with the wet side inside’). As
in Ireland, people dropped by unannounced for conversation. The people
who came in and out included Frederick York Powell, the Icelandic scholar,
John Todhunter, stray members of the Morris circle including his despised
60
 TWO YEARS: BEDFORD PARK 1887-1889
son-in-law H. H. Sparling, editor of the journal Commonweal and a col-
lection of Irish Minstrelsy.2 From 1893 their next-door neighbour was the pub-
lisher Elkin Mathews, surrounded by sisters. All helped play a part in wBy’s
continuing establishment of himself'as hard-working littérateur and appren-
tice poet.
The move from Earls Court had been precipitated by Susan Yeats’s health.
Shortly after moving into Eardley Crescent she suffered a mild stroke; a
worse one followed on a winter visit to her sister Elizabeth Orr in Derbyshire,
and she was more and more incapacitated, eventually becoming restricted
to her room. By January 1888 yay had found a more manageable house in
Bedford Park, at 3 Blenheim Road, and set himself to negotiating the rent,
eventually agreeing £50 — ‘very cheep’, as wBy remarked.? (The price-range
for Bedford Park houses in 1880 ran from £35 to £120, partly kept low because
of the notoriously unreliable drains.) It was an attractive house, in the local
Shaw—Godwin style: a pleasant jumble, with a balcony on the kitchen roof
(unfortunately facing north), draped with creeper, and a garden with trees
where the young Yeatses carefully planted aesthetically correct flowers like
sunflowers and love-lies-bleeding. There was even a ‘study’ for wBy. This
had a ceiling painted with the signs of the zodiac by the ex-art student him-
self; later it was embellished by the resourceful Jack with a map of Sligo, a
ship at each corner.”°
Thus the Yeats version of the current ‘House Beautiful’ aesthetic. But
it did not stretch to buying rush matting, art rugs or black furniture, for
reasons of simple poverty. There are constant references in Lolly’s diary to
getting groceries ‘on tick’ with ‘only 2 pence in the house’;"’ on 25 September
1888 ‘the only penny in the house went on the Pall Mall [Gazeze], but I think
it was worth it’. Clothes were cast-offs, socks had holes in them, butter was
always in short supply, and the butcher’s bills a recurrent plague. Sometimes
the children resorted to cheap vegetarian concoctions for dinner; often they
were hungry. jBy had long abandoned any compunction about asking vis-
itors for small loans, and at times of desperation was quite capable of divert-
ing minor sums intended for other purposes. Entertainment had to be cheap,
such as visits to the House of Commons (where on 6 May 1887 wBy was
impressed by the ‘good earth power’ of the Irish nationalist T. M. Healy, a
future enemy). Jack recorded occasional visits to the theatre with his brother,
but wBy’s more common routine was to spend mornings in the art library of
the V & A, and the afternoons writing. The.Yeats girls, with their friends,
produced for a time an elaborate home-grown magazine, Ye Pleiades, in the
best Bedford Park tradition. In the evenings someone often called in for
conversation, no longer inhibited by Susan Yeats’s understandably baleful
presence; she had withdrawn almost permanently to her room upstairs.
61
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

JBY, irrepressible, obtuse and generous-minded as ever, produced occasional

unexpected diversions. In February 1888 he insisted on taking wBy to visit
Alexander Middleton, a ruined cousin who had taken refuge in a London
hotel after embezzling family money; he may have taken some innocent
pleasure in demonstrating that his wife’s side of the family had its own Robert
Corbet. After sitting in the hotel room with his loquacious father and dis-
graced relative, wBy clinically noted his own indifference: he put it down to
‘the web’ which his life had become, rather than to the pure egoism of the
artist. Though his quarrels with his father over metaphysics and politics are
recorded in his siblings’ diaries as well as in his ownAutobiographies, and accord-
ing to one source ‘they quarrelled more and more as they grew older’,”” there
were calmer interludes too; on 19 November 1888 Lolly recorded an evening
gathering of J. G. Legge, W. M. Crook, jay and wey. “They are all Home
Rulers so they got on well together.’ wBy’s own politics seem to have con-
tinued as those of a fairly unquestioning Home Ruler, though the patroniz-
ing approval of English fellow-travellers annoyed him (‘as if we were some
new sort of deserving poor for whom bazars and such like should be got
up’*). He knew about poverty, deserving or otherwise; Lolly also records
Susan Yeats intermittently emerging from her upstairs exile, wandering
around ‘half clothed’, bad-tempered, erratically reading out random scraps
from whatever book was in her hand; wsy ‘sometimes was left to watch his
mother, for which he was totally incompetent. He would make her stay in
the armchair and not let her get out of it.’°
Literary obsessions were one refuge from domestic despair.’* Another was
provided by the occult interests which he had developed in Ireland. As early
as the summer of 1887 wBy had found his way to the Theosophist Madame
Blavatsky, recently arrived in England; the introduction was effected by
Charles Johnston, currently in London working for his Indian Civil Service
exams. Madame Blavatsky, now a stock figure in memories of late Victorian
spiritualist bohemia, was at a low point in 1887; her mediumistic claims had
been exposed by the Society for Psychical Research in June 1885. However,
set up in Holland Park by her faithful disciples, she provided an alternative
circle as well as a spiritual guru for wBy, who enjoyed her mixture of sardonic
Russian wit and all-embracing mysticism, though he complained that one
met mostly ‘the penitent frivilous there. Still frivilous only dull as well.’!” Odd
exotics were imported to Bedford Park, like ‘“beautiful Edmund Russell”,
the new apostle of aestheticism’, who, dressed in Grecian robes, gave lectures
in which he destroyed ugly objects with a small hammer. And further enter-
tainment was provided when Charles Johnston, observed showing off to ‘the
before mentioned penitent frivilous’, fell from the designated path of celib-
acy and eloped with Madame Blavatsky’s niece. ‘If you only heard Madame
62
 TWO YEARS: BEDFORD PARK 1887-1889
Blavatsky trying to pronounce Ballykilbeg.”® Thus one Irish involvement
was translated to the fringe world of 1880s Kensington. And on 21 March
1888, four days before moving in to Blenheim Road, wsy made his first
visit to the Southwark Irish Literary Club, one of several Irish émigré cultural
societies in that part of London. Here too was an area where he could estab-
lish himself, and build his own following.

II
But the fulcrum of his London life was work, not leisure. Ambition apart,
money had to be made. The Thomastown farms had finally been sold,
realizing £7,032, which was less than expected; after charges, 41,004. 45. 8d.
materialized, and vanished at once to meet immediate debts. By 10 October
1888, Lolly recorded in her diary, a tax summons had to be met out of wBy’s
money.” These earnings had come about through the web of literary con-
tacts in Bedford Park. As early as May 1887, at one of William Morris’s
Sunday gatherings, wBy had met Ernest Rhys, editor of the Camelot Classics
series for the publisher Walter Scott (and subsequently to become the power
behind the great Everyman Library). wsy liked him because, unlike most
literary men, he ‘had no “bon mots” and several convictions’; but he would
also be a useful contact.
Rhys was the first in a long line of serious-minded, slightly hero-worshipping
British literary men whom wBy set out to dazzle, as an incarnation of
unworldly literary genius.”’ He was duly struck by wy’s presence: ‘a very pale,
exceedingly thin, young man with a raven lock over his forehead, his face so
narrow that there was hardly room in it for his luminous black eyes’.” They
walked home together, wBy missing his train (“he did not mind that at all,
and seemed to regard trains as things that came and went at random). To Rhys,
a born-again Welshman starry-eyed about all things ‘Celtic’, wBy held forth
on Irish stories and folklore, bringing him Thomas Crofton Croker’s Fairy
Legends and Traditions of the South ofIreland (1825) a couple of days later.
Staying for supper, he ate ravenously, and as recompense invited Rhys to
dine in Bedford Park. (Like Katharine Tynan, Rhys was mesmerized by wsy's
ability to consume vast quantities of food without appearing to notice it.)
wey pressed the inevitable Tynan on his new acquaintance; while through
Rhys he met London writers like Katherine Harris Bradley and Edith Cooper,
who wrote plays together as ‘Michael Field’, as well as being introduced to
established literary people and fringe societies like the Fellowship of the
New Life. His letters to Tynan record his fledgeling judgements on London
literary life: self-consciously blasé, gauged to please his hungry listener in
Clondalkin, but betraying a certain excitement at being part ofit all. By1July
63
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

1887 he was dining with William Morris (whom he had probably met in
Dublin when Morris visited the Contemporary Club, where he had been
sketched by jBy).
Morris's ideas of creative brotherhood, a crusade against the mass-produced
values of Victorian capitalism, and promoting the overriding claims of art
upon life, were as compelling to wBy as to his father; and Morris, unlike
yey, had made his ideals work in constructing a successful life for himself.
WBY was determined to learn from him. Through the Morris circle too he
met (on 11 February 1888) the then obscure George Bernard Shaw, a Jaeger-
clad Fabian, for whom Morris was also a hero, but who was dedicated to
iconoclasm in a way wBy found incomprehensible.” ‘Like most people who
have wit rather than humour, his mind is maybe somewhat wanting in depth.’
Shaw was nine years older, and known only in advanced socialist circles,
though the Yeatses had been reading his pseudonymous literary criticism
in the Pall Mall Gazette since their arrival in London. There were odd par-
allels between the two young déc/assé Irish Protestant bohemians, on the
make in literary London; a certain mutual respect, prickled with rivalry
and dislike, would evolve over the years. For the moment, however, Morris
was the focus of wBy’s attention. He was asked to contribute to Commonweal
(‘though I think socialism good work I am not sure that it is my work’),
and revelled in the surroundings of Rossetti paintings, elaborately beautiful
fabrics and Morris’s wonderful talk booming down the trestle table. He
adopted Morrisite communism, as he later remembered it, and gave it up
quite suddenly because of the Morris circle’s attitude to religion — mounting
an attack in a post-lecture discussion which probably surprised those not trained
in the uninhibited school of the Contemporary Club and the Young Ireland
Societies.

They attacked religion, I said, or some such words, and yet there must be a change
of heart and only religion could make it. What was the use of talking about some
new revolution putting all things right, when the change must come, if come it did,
with astronomical slowness, like the cooling of the sun, or it may have been like the
drying of the moon? Morris rang his chairman’s bell, but I was too angry to listen,
and he had to ring it a second time before I sat down. He said that night at supper,
‘Of course I know there must be a change of heart, but it will not come as slowly as
all that. I rang my bell because you were not being understood.’ He did not show any
vexation, but I never returned after that night; and yet I did not always believe what
Thad said, and only gradually gave up thinking of and planning for some near sud-
den change for the better.”4

But he was launched, and the new contacts of his London life brought op-
portunities for work. By 12 July 1887 Rhys had asked him to edit an ‘Irish or
64
 TWO YEARS: BEDFORD PARK 1887-1889
other volume’ for the Camelot series; by the following February it was de-
fined as the collection which would become Fairy and Folk Tales ofthe Irish
Peasantry.
Other efforts to earn money were less notable. As the family’s debts mul-
tiplied all over Bedford Park and ysy’s artistic approach remained resolutely
uncommercial apart from some ill-paid illustrations, wBy and his siblings
placed work where they could. Gnomic references to ‘the veg man’ in diaries
kept by Lolly and Jack refer to the editor of the Vegetarian, who took draw-
ings ofJack’s and (on 4 November 1888) a poem of wBy’s. And nowI am going
to begin a story about animals for the vegetarian if I can, wrote Lolly res-
olutely on the same day. ‘I wish I knew more about animals.”° The Vegetarian
printed a story of hers in December. However, she chose instead to concen-
trate on her artistic training, working for a certificate from the Froebel
Institute and then developing a successful ‘brushwork’ method for teaching
art to children, which she popularized through effective booklets. Lily, from
December 1888, worked on embroidery with the Morrises, bringing in a regu-
lar salary and suffering under Morris’s beautiful but termagant daughter,
May (herself being tortured by the denials ofa Shavian love-affair). Both Lily
and Lolly were, however, developing the skills which would enable them to
found their own arts-and-crafts enterprise in Dublin a decade later.
In the Blenheim Road study wey continued to produce what he gloomily
described as ‘my ever multiplying boxes of unsaleable MSS — work to[o]
strange at one moment and to[o] incoherent the next for any first class
Magazine and too ambitious for local papers.’”° But he was able to lower his
sights when necessary. He attempted to find work compiling entries for the
Dictionary ofNational Biography and Chambers, though hardly qualified by
his erratic spelling and his cavalier approach to factual matters of record.
Employment was, however, offered by the folklorist Alfred Nutt.’” (This had
probably come his way by yet another Bedford Park contact; Nutt had worked
with York Powell.) By September 1888 wsy recorded that the preceding
months had brought in ‘as much work as I could do — only badly paid’.
It was certainly needed. By was now living on the precarious proceeds of
stray drawings, and dependent on his children’s enterprise. Unrealistic as
ever, he was ‘made quite mad’ by his eldest son’s desire for regular work, sus-
pecting that his facility would lead him into hack writing: wBy was quite aware
of the danger, and thought of his transcriptions for Nutt as less deleterious
to the artistic imagination than indiscriminate book-reviewing. Yet even in
a severe financial crisis during the early spring of 1888, with wBy himself
in debt for small sums to Katharine Tynan’s father and probably to O'Leary,
yBy was still prolific with suggestions ‘in the vain hope that in the eleventh
hour this regular employment he thinks such an evil might be unnecessary’.
65
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5. ‘A Legend’ as printed in the Vegetarian, 22 December 1888, with drawings by Jack Yeats:
a product of the youthful domestic industry at Blenheim Road.

67
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

Unlike his father, however, wey wanted to pay his debts, and did so: while
his letters, particularly those to Tynan, reflected a pressing sense that he
should be at work. Here at least, Pollexfen won out over Yeats.
Against this background, he wrote continually. Influenced by the mater-
ial he was already collecting for his fairy and folk tale collection, wBy worked
ona prose tale in the summer of 1887; it was finished in September, under the
title of Dhoya, and told the story of a lonely giant and his fairy love, probably
inspired by a story from O’Grady.” This disappointed yBy, who had encour-
aged his son to write something which would reflect real life. The result of
this advice would become wBy’s only published novel, John Sherman, which
he worked on through 1888. It was a difficult gestation, reflecting his unease
with the form dictated by his father. wBy had originally set the book in the
eighteenth century (once again reflecting the reading undertaken in his search
for anthology material), but he advanced its setting to contemporary provin-
cial Ireland. A first draft was finished by October 1888, although problems
of coherence remained and the author’s voice was still uncertain: ironic social
and psychological observation alternates uneasily with romantic introspection.
wBy realized that he was confining himself in an uncongenial framework.
‘The difficulty is to keep the characters from turning into eastern symbolic
monsters of some sort which would be a curious thing to happen to a curate
and a young man from the country.”*°
None the less, John Sherman retains considerable biographical interest:
it reflects wByY’s reactions to Ireland and the wider world, and the obsession
with shaping his life which began to preoccupy him in the late 1880s. Ballah,
the setting for much of the novel, is recognizably Sligo, which represents a
known, familiar, beloved world; the London scenes are placed in an accurately
realized Hammersmith. The Sherman family, ‘a deep people’, are clearly
inspired by Pollexfen—Middletons. Conversely — and strikingly — there is
nowhere in this otherwise autobiographical construction for the character,
opinions or world of jay. The indecisive hero, John Sherman, owes some-
thing to wBy’s reclusive cousin (and occasional host) Henry Middleton,
but his dilemmas are those of his creator. Uncertain what to do with his life,
he is worried about the opinions of others, and insecurely conscious of his
good looks. Provincial Ireland is balanced against metropolitan London;
a capricious and challenging woman of the world or a homespun local girl,
‘everybody's adviser’, with whom an equal friendship negates sexual attrac-
tion. This sets a figure reminiscent of Katharine Tynan against a seductive
ideal as yet imagined but unknown, unless in the memory of Laura Armstrong.
The book's hasty but striking finale suggests an inability to transmute real ex-
perience into fictional form: Sherman chooses the maternal world of Ballah,
and is chosen by the conventional Mary Carton, who looks on him with ‘a
68
 TWO YEARS: BEDFORD PARK 1887-1889
reverberation of the feeling of the mother for the child at her breast’. The novel
evokes a sense of place, and a passion for a homeland, which at certain key
points conveys homesickness and alienation both powerfully and precisely:

Ballah was being constantly suggested to him . . . A certain street-corner made him
remember an angle of the Ballah fish-market. At night alantern, marking where the
road was fenced off for mending, made him think of a tinker’s swing-can of burn-
ing coals . .. Delayed bya crush in the Strand, he heard a faint trickling of water near
by; it came from a shop window where alittle water-jet balanced a wooden ball upon
its point. The sound suggested a cataract with a long Gaelic name, that leaped cry-
ing into the Gate of the Winds at Ballah.

Both John Sherman and Dhoya, written from 1887 to 1888 and pseudonym-
ously published together in 1891," lack artistic confidence: only in the poetry
which wy was writing over the same period does a unique voice begin to
claim attention. But his approach here was no less businesslike. In 1887 he
was still quarrying local tradition for ballads in a conventional mode. ‘Moll
Magee’, based on a Howth story, was sent to O’Leary (who did not like it
much) for publication in the Gae/, as was a far more awkward piece called
‘Lug na Gall’, inspired by a story in W. G. Wood-Martin’s history of Sligo.
As with Dhoya, and very much in the current vogue, wBy continued to search
for subjects in Irish mythology and ‘Old Celtic romance’, as he still called
it. He was conscious that his, Todhunter’s and Tynan’s raiding of Irish
legends would draw attention not only to the subject but to each other.” “You
will find it a good thing to make verses on Irish legends and places and so forth,’
he wrote to one of the apprentice poets who asked him for advice as early as
January 1889. ‘It helps origonality and makes one’s verses sincere, and gives
one less numerous compeditors. Besides one should love best what is nearest
and most interwoven with ones life.’ The order of priorities is significant.
While he concentrated on this hard-headed marketing, and tried to per-
suade newspapers like United Ireland to pay on time, his lyrics were none the
less gaining in power. In late September 1888 he sent Katharine Tynan a
poem called ‘An Old Song Re-sung’, called in a later incarnation ‘Down by
the Salley Gardens’ and destined to be one of his most popular and endur-
ing early lyrics. Though inspired by a fragment heard in Sligo, it owed much
to Ferguson’s translations from the Irish;** much less rewritten than most of
the other early poems which wy retained in his canon, it rings with a con-
centrated music.
Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet,
She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

69
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

More remarkably, he knew that this hard edge must be striven for, against
a natural inclination to the ethereal and unreal. His poetry, he told Tynan
in March 1888, was ‘the cry of the heart against neccesity. I hope some day to
alter that and write poetry of insight and knowledge.” (This was another
way of expressing his father’s preference for John Sherman over Dhoya.) In
language too a harder edge had to be sought: ‘I hate the soft modern manner.*
‘Clouds’ had to be eliminated, restoring Pre-Raphaelite clarity. However, his
vocabulary and imagery remained enmeshed in romanticism, and, though
preoccupied by certain philosophical themes (notably the reconciliation of
opposites), he was still capable of turning out portentous patriotic verses for
Irish American papers like the Boston Pilot: on 6 August 1887 it published
‘How Ferencz Renyi Kept Silent’. The poem’s dedication paralleled the cases
of Hungary and Ireland, a concept which would be given wider and influen-
tial currency a decade later when Arthur Griffith wrote The Resurrection
ofues A Parallel forIreland,
for Ire and began the movement known as Sinn
Féin.*”

Ill
Ireland and Irish concerns continued to provide both an emotional refuge
and a literary raison d’étre. In August 1887 wey set off to stay with relations in
Sligo; later in the autumn he moved on to Dublin, and stayed there until
January 1888. Here, Katharine Tynan and her father offered hospitality. She
had just published Shamrocks and was assiduously planting out reviews; WBY’s
correspondence with her remained intense, and he had stressed from Lon-
don their literary comradeship. ‘I feel more and more that we shall have a
school of Irish poetry — founded on Irish myth and History — a neo-remantic
movement.”** But there was another tone too: random, funny, light in hand,
sometimes flippant. ‘I see every thing through the coloured glass of my own
moods, not being I supose very sympathetic.’ He indulged in introspection
to her, as to no other surviving correspondent, describing the ‘web’ he was
trapped in: “You used to sayIhad no heart — that is all the web.’ He was, he
would later say, breaking ‘my life in a morter’, and had to give it shape and
purpose.*”
This was dangerous territory. A few years later a more experienced woman
would accuse him of writing ‘unconscious love letters’: could the same be said
of these? In his own Memoirs wy recalled his father warning him that Tynan
(‘a very plain woman’) might make herself very unhappy about him, and
that it might be his duty to propose — a prospect he agonized over.” Far as
she was from the dream-women of his imagination and his early poetry,
7O
 TWO YEARS: BEDFORD PARK 1887-1889
convention may have impelled him towards the idea — especially as he would
spend nearly two months staying in her father’s house that winter.
From London he had kept up with other members of the Dublin circle:
Douglas Hyde was approached, not only for help with Irish translations and
advice about folklore and Gaelic poetry, but even to provide suitable clothes
for an Irish ‘peasent’ in a painting by a Bedford Park neighbour (‘Do you know
any old peasent who would sell his cloathes?”’) John O’Leary’s sister Ellen,
herself'a poet, continued to take a motherly interest: ‘among all her younger
friends these latter days’, O’Leary wrote to Hyde after her death in October
1889, ‘you, after young Yeats, were altogether the most agreeable to her’. (This
cannot have endeared wBy to Hyde, already irritated by his pretensions.) Irish
literary life had continued active; the formation of the Pan-Celtic Society,
‘national’ and literary, on 1 March 1888 brought in many of wBy’s old circle,**
and was exactly the kind of involvement he missed. His long visit to Ireland
in late 1887 represented a determination, above all, to stay in touch.
On g August 1887 he set off from London via Liverpool by courtesy (as
in his childhood) of the Sligo Steam Navigation Company. He arrived in
the town on 11 August, and by September was staying out at Rosses Point:
but here too he now felt displaced. “This to me is the lonliest place in the world,’
he wrote to Tynan. ‘Going for a walk is a continual meeting with ghosts
for Sligo for me has no flesh and blood attractions — only memories and
sentimenttalities accumulated here as a child making it more dear than
any other place.” In August, before wBy’s arrival, his uncle George Pollexfen
(saturnine as ever) had sent him a copy of a paranoid Unionist broadsheet,
the Union, which denounced both the Gaelic Athletic Association and
the Gae/ as seditious, specifically mentioning O’Leary’s involvement, but
they got on well, and wy spent his time between Pollexfen’s summer house
and ‘Elsinore’, the home of his cousin Henry Middleton. He found it
easy to write there, and also collected some fairy stories ‘for an article or two’.
His poetic production included short lyrics and ballads, some inspired by Sligo
history as retailed in the canonical books by O’Rorke and Wood-Martin;”
but he also worked on portions of the developing narrative poem The
Wanderings of Oisin, and a mythologically inspired story about a giant who
loses his fairy love in a game of chess, ‘dreamy and florid’, as wBy accurately
described it in a letter to Sparling: it indicates that Dhoya was still in progress.”*
He also extended the first outline of John Sherman, reflecting his Sligo sur-
roundings. ‘Am as usual fighting that old snake — revery,’ he wrote to Tynan,
‘to get from him a few hours each day for my writing.”
When the weather worsened he moved into Sligo town and stayed with
his grandparents — since 1885 no longer at Merville, but occupying a smaller
house overlooking the harbour. Here he worked on The Wanderings ofOisin
7!
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

(referred to breezily as ‘Oison’): by 18 November he thought it was finished,

and set off on the 22nd to visit Dublin. The O’Learys had no room for him,
though they were happy to feed him; so he remained based at the Tynans’
until 24 January, bringing out friends from Dublin like Russell, an instant suc-
cess, and the more stand-offish Hyde (who noted that the Tynans “all have
a frightful brogue”’). Here too wBy’s intense correspondence with Katharine
Tynan, and his own doubts about the expectations it aroused, may have pro-
duced some kind of indeterminate declaration. If there was one, it was eas-
ily rebuffed. Tynan’s sister, Nora O'Mahony, sarcastically claimed long
afterwards that
One night when a dear brother-in-law had come with his wife and baby to visit us,
we were sitting playing cards in the old family parlour when the door to the grander
apartments opened suddenly and to my surprise my darling Katharine came in. For
I had left her listening with interest, as I thought, to the great W. B. Yeats, chant-
ing “The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ or some other of his poems. Afterwards, she told
me that the great wBy had asked her to marry him, saying ‘would it not be a most
lovely and suitable thing for two great poets to be united’. But though she liked him
and was proud of her creation, she did not feel a bit like that! After a few minutes he
followed her into the card room. And to make things worse, he began shaking his
fingers at her playfully — which seemed the last straw.
‘Oh’ she cried at last, ‘for heaven's sake, you go to the devil!’ But being the best-
tempered soul in creation he did no more than smile affectionately.*!
This contradicts wBy’s record that ‘we were always very great friends and I
have no reason to think she ever thought of me otherwise’.*” But if he made
a feeble and unconvincing overture, it may have been during the stay at
Whitehall between 22 November 1887 and 25 January 1888. His next visits to
Clondalkin were in the summer of 1891, by which time his romantic atten-
tion (and Tynan’s) had finally found a focus elsewhere.*> From 1887 to 1888
he was unconfident, sexually frustrated (by his own admission) and lonely for
Ireland. Living in Bedford Park, he had met artists who talked easily of mis-
tresses and demi-mondaines, and socialists who believed in sexual radic-
alism. All this alarmed him: at twenty-two, still dominated by his father, he
felt unfinished. A diffident proposal to Tynan may have explored a career option
as well as paid a social duty. From her side, however, there was at this stage
little to recommend it ~ his personal attractiveness apart. By 1888 she was already
interested in Henry Hinkson, another Dublin littérateur (though doomed
to obscurity), whom she married in 1893; and, despite the heavy irony of her
sister's retrospective account, wBY was very far from being ‘great’. He would
rapidly become so, and move quickly into literary (and social) circles far
above ‘Tynan’s relentlessly productive drudgery. If he made a fumbling pro-
posal in the winter of 1887/8, she may have later regretted turning it down:
72
 TWO YEARS: BEDFORD PARK 1887-1889
all the more reason not to mention it in her memoirs, written with barely
concealed resentment at his acquired grandeur and the company he kept, and
determined to present the youthful way as something of an incubus, as well
as an innocent figure of fun.
Other involvements in Dublin over that winter holiday were equally un-
satisfactory. Russell, commencing a long period of withdrawal into spiritual
study, was attempting to distance himself from poetic composition, partly
because he did not want to be absorbed by wsy’s dominant literary personality;
he even burnt his manuscripts as a symbolic purification. The tension never
relaxed throughout their long relationship. As Russell remarked to Tynan,
it hardly mattered that he did not see his friend: he could supply the appro-
priate responses without actually hearing wBy speak, and pretend he was in
astral communication. The suggested appropriate responses are note worthy:
‘Your poem is splendid.’ ‘Your paradoxes are getting more startling every day.’
"You should not say such hard things of your friends.’ Their approach to spir-
itual investigations continued to diverge: Russell, the mystic, stayed away from
the disastrous seance attended by wsy that January, where the intrepid mage
felt himself completely possessed by spirits, and was frightened away from
mediums for the next ten years.»
His experience of Ireland on this first return home had been, in many re-
spects, sobering. Tynan’s country ‘salon’ and the determined self-promotion
of her circle were already a subject for public satire: the Dublin Evening Tele-
graph of 14 January 1888 carried ‘A Dublin Literary Coterie, Sketched by a
Non-Pretentious Observer’, written anonymously by Hannah Lynch, who
had visited Whitehall in December. This mercilessly lampooned wsy as

Augustus Fitzgibbon, considered by himself and his friends to be a titanic power,

who may accomplish great things and who may not, but whose boyish head is being
in the meantime turned in the most delightful and most deplorable fashion by the
circle which is fortunate enough to revolve round this elsewhere unappreciated star
... They will tell you that he is too exquisite and ethereal to be understood or appre-
ciated by the common British reviewer and hence his obscurity. All of this of course
Fitzgibbon fondly believes and invites you to believe by the ingratiating sweetness
with which he takes his spoiling. In his circle all are equally sincere in giving and return-
ing flattery.

Russell found it hard to laugh at the portrait of his own stammering admira-
tion of wBy until ‘when I thought of what poor Willie Yeats would think,
I began to scream with laughter and enjoyed it immensely’.*° As for wBy,
Ireland looked less attractive than from afar. While he could write there, and
remained inspired by the notion of Celtic tradition, even Sligo had changed;
Dublin was a smaller pond to swim in than London, and those who had known

73
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

him as a tyro treated him less respectfully than new metropolitan acquaint-
ances like Rhys. Whether he realized it consciously or not, a life lived between
the two countries was the logical response. And he avoided Dublin for the
next three and a half years.

IV
London provided a continuing education. Back in Bedford Park he read
omnivorously: Stevenson’s Black Arrow, Todhunter’s legend-inspired Irish
poems, George Meredith’s poetry (though Diana ofthe Crossways ‘made the
reader think too much’), Tolstoy (‘great and joyless’).*” But novels always
took second place to poetry and philosophy. The psychology explored in
wBy’s own fiction remained obstinately philosophical — ‘the antithesis that
is the foundation of human nature being ever in my sight’,** as he later put
it. On another educational level, he signed up for the French classes offered
to young socialists in the coach-house at the bottom of Morris’s garden, but
lost interest when his sisters joined and made fun of him.
Willie’s dramatic, intence way of saying his French with his voice raised to telling
distinctness and every pronounciation wrong as usual, seemed to amuse Mr Sparling
more than ever. He simply doubled up when Willie commenced. Willie of course
divided it up into any amount of full stops when there weren't any, so Madame said
‘Mr Yaytes you dont read poetry like that do you’ “Yes he does Yes he does’ volun-
teered Mr Sparling, and in truth he [sic] was rather like his natural way of reading.”
He would periodically take up French lessons throughout his life but found
himself constitutionally incapable of learning it, or any other language.
More productively, in the summer of 1888 he contracted with Alfred Nutt
to transcribe Caxton’s version of Aesop’s Fables from the folio in the Bodleian
Library at Oxford, staying in York Powell’s rooms in Meadow Buildings, Christ
Church, during August. wy despised Nutt’s ‘scientist’ approach to folklore
and would later get his own back by brutal digs in book reviews, but the sur-
roundings nearly made up for it. ‘I wonder any body does anything at Oxford
but dream and remember the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the
people to sing instead of speaking. It is all — the colleges I meen — like an
Opera.’*' He was eventually paid £5, but while there had to subsist on currant
buns.” Afterwards, he recounted in his Autobiographies, he returned ‘very pale
to my troubled family’, an assertion later stoutly denied by yBy. Ifhe was tired,
it was probably because he had delivered the manuscript of Fairy and Folk Tales
just before leaving. Certainly from the late spring he was constantly near col-
lapse with nervous exhaustion.*? Though a further copying work assign-
ment was forthcoming, it was uncongenial.** Moreover, he was beginning to
make money under his own name, and in the process to make his reputation.

74
 TWO YEARS: BEDFORD PARK 1887-1889
Over the five years from his arrival in London in early 1887, wBy contributed
more than a hundred original items to newspapers — poems, reviews, articles
and letters. There may have been other contributions to provincial papers,
now untraceable.® This early journalism is distinguished by a notably dif-
ferent tone to that in his letters, and not only because accurate spelling and
grammar have been supplied. The voice is authoritative, slightly grand, occa-
sionally savage in a dismissal or attack. His London contacts had expanded
the range of periodicals ready to print his articles: the fiery and charismatic
W. E. Henley, whom way met in 1888, was just about to take over the Scots
Observer (later National Observer) and filled the role of mentor and critic as
well as publisher. Yet wBy often expressed a dislike of journalists, whom he
saw conventionally as cynics, men about town, ‘nothing in them but titter-
ing jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal,
that is they have ceased to be self centred have given up their individuality
.. . especially the sucessful ones.’°* There spoke his father’s son.
Accused by Tynan of being obsessed with ‘bookish things’ to the exclu-
sion of all else, he had rejoined, ‘I bury my head in books as the ostridge
does in the sand’;’ but ‘bookish things’ could be a battering-ram into the
real world. Editorial work was one method of entry. By May 1887 the Dublin
circle had begun to put together the collection eventually published in
the spring of 1888 as Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland.’ Though wy was
generally identified as the editor, it was a group effort; Tynan took a leading
part, organizing proof circulation and choosing a cover. WBY’s own priority
was clear, declared in his determination to have advertisements printed at
the end for other works by Tynan, Ellen O’Leary and himself: ‘we want to
let people know that there is a little school of us’.
Accordingly, he put much thought into arranging the book’s reception.
Sparling was unreliable. Dowden was to be avoided as a reviewer, since ‘the
book is a nationalist book’. Lyster was ‘too West British’. In fact, the book’s
nationalism was kept implicit; the epigraph, “There are but two great parties
in the end’, seemed obscurely confrontational, but the division intended (by
William Allingham, a Unionist) is simply between those who love Ireland,
and the rest. Several critics noted the contributions by wsy, ‘who ought
to have a future before him’,” and “The Stolen Child’ was singled out by
several impartial reviewers — though log-rolling by friends was censured by
O'Leary. ‘The praises of you might in a sense pass, but laudation of Miss T.
induces lows. Her things there have little or no merit; she only gave you her
tenth best — or worst.’””’
For wsy, the collection’s importance — beside reprinting some of his own
work— lay in advancing him another step into a literary career. The Bedford
Park mafia (Todhunter, Ellis, York Powell) helped spread the word; reviewing
75
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

commissions began to come from new sources, like William Stevens of

Leisure Hour,” and a never-to-be completed project on Irish duellists and
outlaws was floated by T. Fisher Unwin (wsy’s reading for this would be
recycled into journalism during 18917’). O’Leary referred cynically to Poems
and Ballads \ater, in a private critique of Tynan to wBy. ‘She’s certainly no
critic, and I am strongly of opinion that neither are you, save within very nar-
row limits, but then she’s also a horrible word-monger which you mostly are
not, at least now, for you were bad enough in that first book you edited.’
What mattered far more to wBy was the publication in September 1888, at
the age of twenty-three, of his real ‘first book’, Fairy and Folk Tales ofthe Irish
Peasantry.
This had finally been commissioned by his new friend Rhys in Febru-
ary 1888, to be delivered by the end of July. It was originally conceived as
an edited version of Crofton Croker’s Fairy Legends, the book wsy had
brought to Rhys shortly after their meeting in May. In a letter to Tynan,
wy initially sounded unenthusiastic: he would prefer regular work,
though it was ‘better any way than writing articles about things that do
not interest one — are not in ones line of developement — not that I am
not very glad to do the Folklore book or any thing that comes to my hand’.”
His response was, in the end, to fit the collection into his ‘line of devel-
opement’: like everything he would subsequently put his name to, it is very
much his own. He used the project to arrange an interview with Lady Wilde,
herself an authority on the subject, and paid her the first of several visits on
28 July 1888 (Lily, who accompanied him, noted the atmosphere of ‘lower-
ing twilight’ and the two friendly Irish maids, who knew everyone). His
correspondence shows the sources he plundered; and the eventual collection
took in William Carleton, Hyde and poems of wBy’s own like “The Stolen
Child’ and “The Priest of Coloony’ (later “The Ballad of Father O’Hart’).
This was very far from any updated Crofton Croker, as wBy was deter-
mined to emphasize. ‘Make plain to the mind of Scott [the publisher] that
T have taken much trouble about [the] book,’ he wrote menacingly to Rhys,
‘and that there is origonal matter ofvalue which no one else could have got, that
is to say Douglas Hydes stories — one of them the finest thing in the book
almost — and some gathering of my own besides in notes &c.’”° Twelve years
later, inscribing a copy for Augusta Gregory, he could afford to dismiss
these notes as ‘very amateur’. He was vague about ‘something in the pre-
face that roused the vehement denial of old Morris, but what it was I never
heard’; however, Pollexfen-like, he remembered clearly that he was paid
twelve guineas and the publisher forbade the editor ever to give anybody else
as much again.””

76
 TWO YEARS: BEDFORD PARK 1887-1889
The advantages were more than financial. In late September wBy was
much exercised to see that the book received a favourable reception; he was
particularly anxious to get a notice into the Sligo papers, and to his delight the
Sligo Independent was the first critique he saw. Other reviews were friendly,
and Todhunter loyally praised the volume in a public lecture of 27 Novem-
ber.”* Fairy and Folk Tales established wsy as a reviewer of folklore collections;
he was already a student of ‘fairy’ lore (preferring to spell it ‘faery’, which sug-
gested occultism rather than archness). His approach was deliberately literal
and ‘unscientific’.” In his own writings on the subject, he created a tax-
onomy of the fairy world, using occultist distinctions regarding malignant
spirits, and the findings of contemporary mythographers: but his preferred
sources remained back numbers of the Dublin University Magazine (often tran-
scribed for him by the faithful Russell) rather than the latest findings of the
despised Nutt’s Folklore Journal, which wanted tales to be ‘full of little hooks,
as it were, to hang theories on’.*° While faithful to the integrity of the mate-
rials, he added artistic literary effects, injunctions about the decorum of deal-
ing with the spirit world and a deliberately wide-eyed ingenuousness which
qualified as fully ‘Celtic’; this is the point of Max Beerbohm’s celebrated
cartoon ‘Mr W. B. Yeats, Presenting Mr George Moore to the Queen of
the Fairies’.
It was this literal approach, declaimed in the introduction to Fairy and
Folk Tales, which probably incensed Morris. wBy remarked that readers
might wonder why he had not rationalized a single hobgoblin. ‘I seek for shel-
ter to the words of Socrates [from Jowett’s translation of the Phaedrus].’
When asked if he believed the tale of Boreas carrying off Orithia from the
banks of the Ilissus, Socrates’s defence was: “The wise are doubtful and I should
not be singular if, like them, I also doubted . . . And, therefore, I say farewell
to all this; the common opinion is enough for me. For, as I was saying, I want
to know not about this but about myself.’
He continued to defend literal belief, writing to Hyde that the Theosophist
Colonel Olcott ‘is probably quite right about the real existence of these Irish
goblins. At least I never could see any reason against their existence”*’ — an
opinion he publicly repeated when reviewing Hyde’s own Irish Folk Tales, where
he railed against rationalism as ‘that great sin against art.’ But ambivalence
crept into his critique of David Rice McAnally’s Irish Wonders in March
1889; and by 1896 his line on folklore had subtly changed. The original myths
were deliberate artistic creations, rather than common beliefs. But this was
the view of someone who no longer needed to advertise his Celticism so
assiduously, and who was self-confessedly ‘no democrat in intellectual
things’.** Later he would modify this in order to stress the therapeutic

Teh
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

function of supernatural belief as a refuge from the misery of life; and this
too reflected his own predispositions and circumstances.
September 1888 was a low point in Blenheim Road. Lolly’s diary records
a financial crisis for the second half of the month, though social life con-
tinued. ‘Dr and Mrs Todhunter came to tea the amusing thing about it was
that Willie borrowed 3/— from them which they little knew was destined to
purchase tea sugar butter and marmalade for their tea." wBy, exhausted
by his copying work in Oxford and already tense about the impending
publication of Fairy and Folk Tales, was cast further into depression by the
proofs of his own long-delayed collection of poems, The Wanderings of Otsin.
He wrote in theatrical despair to Katharine Tynan:
Iam notvery hopeful about the book. Somewhat inarticulate have I been Ifear. Some
thingIhad to say. Dont know that I have said it. All seems confused incoherent in-
articulate. Yet this Iknow Iam no idle poetaster. My life has been in my poems. To
make them I have broken my life in a morter as it were. I have brayed in it youth and
fellowship peace and worldly hopes. I have seen others enjoying while I stood alone
with myself — commenting, commenting — a mere dead mirror on which things
reflect themselves. I have buried my youth and raised over it a cairn — of clouds. Some
day shall be articulate perhaps. But this book Ihave no great hopes of — itis all slug-
gish incoherent. It may make a few friends perhaps among people of my own sort —
that is the most.”

‘Do what you can for it,’ he added characteristically, sending on to her copies
of the proofs. The letter may also be an implicit apology for the unsatisfact-
ory passages between them the previous winter.
For the rest of the autumn he remained low-spirited, fighting off ‘collapses’
when he lost all energy,*’ wrestling with the latest draft of John Sherman, and
periodically paying visits to the growing Blavatsky entourage in Holland
Park. In December he joined her recently established Esoteric Section of the
Theosophical Society. He continued to agonize about the directionless,
cloudy, incoherent nature of his poetry; by December, the month before the
publication of The Wanderings of Oisin, he was preaching the need to ‘make
poems on the familiar landscapes we love not the strange and rare and glit-
tering scenes we wonder at — these latter are the landscape of Art, the rouge
of nature.’®* Privately, he had begun to criticize Tynan’s poetry for its pro-
saic, pat quality: and with the last letter mentioned he enclosed the first
draft of ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’.
I will arise and go now and go to the island of Innis free
And live in a dwelling of wattles — of woven wattles and wood work made,
Nine been rows will I have there, a yellow hive for the honey bee
And this old care shall fade.

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 TWO YEARS: BEDFORD PARK 1887-1889
There from the dawn above me peace will come down dropping slow
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the household cricket sings.
And noontide there be all a glimmer, midnight be a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnets wings.

This version lacks the dramatic, personal intervention which closes the poem
as eventually published: “While I stand on the roadway or on the pavements
grey, /I hear it in the deep heart’s core.’ But in his Autobiographies wBy him-
self isolated the moment when he wrote ‘Innisfree’, in mid-December 1888,
inspired by the same revelation he had described in John Sherman, when a Strand
window-display suddenly transported him to the waters of Sligo. It was a
key insight: the disproportionate emotion aroused by reading some banal
verses about an ‘emigrant’s return’, the power of association and memory
which swept over him as he stared into a London shop, showed him that
‘personal utterance’ might be a way out of cloudy rhetoric. His excitement
at the time was witnessed by Lily, who recalled it long afterwards:
In Bedford Park one evening, Helen Acosta [a Greek friend who also worked
at Morris’s] & Lolly painting & I there sewing — Willy bursting in having just
written, or not even written down but just having brought forth ‘Innisfree’, he re-
peated it with all the fire of creation & his youth — he was I suppose about 24. I felt
a thrill all through me and saw Sligo beauty, heard lake water lapping, when Helen
broke in asking for a paint brush — she had not even pretended to listen. None of
us knew what a great moment it was. Not that ‘Innisfree’ is one of his greatest, but
it is beautiful & perhaps the best known.”

Altered and published in 1890, the poem would achieve immediate suc-
cess — and still pursued him around the world, to his extreme irritation, forty
years later.”
In 1888, however, it was an epiphany that would endure, showing him the
way forward in a moment of despair. This came as the climax of two years’
unremitting effort to establish himself as part of a ‘little school’. Though he
claimed this was in order to capture Rhys, whose ‘mind runs in the direction
of schools’, there was more to it than that. Todhunter, Tynan, wsy, Ellen
O'Leary, Hyde supported each other indefatigably, checking each other's work,
writing articles about each other, reviewing each other’s books, and testing
the claims of aspirant members (Evelyn Pyne, May Probyn) long since for-
gotten: accusations of log-rolling had begun early on. Their repertoire of sources
and inspirations included not only Irish fairy lore and folk-tales, but also select-
ive voices of early nineteenth-century Irish romanticism — notably the poéte
maudit James Clarence Mangan. Recruiting-grounds had been established,
not only the Young Ireland Societies in Ireland but the Southwark Irish
Literary Club. Here wsy gave a lecture on 13 June 1888, ‘Folklore of the West

19
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

of Ireland’ — part of the recycling process whereby the work done for Fairy
and Folk Tales cropped up in other places, such as a long article in the
Theosophist magazine Lucifer, published 15 January 1889.” In his increas-
ingly voluminous correspondence, wBy was already handing out criticism to
aspirant writers, a role he found congenial. The Irish circle was broadened,
for him, by the milieu of Bedford Park, which opened contacts to the met-
ropolitan literary world: not only Rhys, but also the more flamboyant
Celtophile William Sharp. Though wey at first ‘hated his red British face
of flaccid contentement’,” Sharp’s writings (from 1893 in secret disguise as
‘Fiona Macleod’) would eventually help to broadcast Celticism to the world
at large. From the summer of 1888 he had been visiting W. E. Henley on
Sundays in nearby Chiswick: Henley’s National Observer would be another
important outlet. And by December 1888 he apparently knew the Wildes well
enough to visit Oscar and Constance for Christmas dinner.”
He had first come face to face with the great aesthete at Henley’s. Over
the years since wByY had heard him lecture in Dublin, Wilde had become
formidable and utterly assured. At least one of his aphorisms sounded ring-
ingly in wBy’s ear: ‘I think a man should invent his own myth.’ With marked
kindness (and perhaps a speculative interest), Wilde invited this gauche and
unknown young fellow-countryman to his Chelsea house; contrary to WBY’s
later memory, he had not yet published his first book of poems. Wilde appar-
ently believed he was alone in London; what the Yeats family thought of his
defection is not recorded. The contrast between Tite Street and Bedford Park
could not have been greater:

There was nothing mediaeval nor Pre-Raphaelite, no cupboard door with figures
upon flat gold, no peacock-blue, no dark background. I remember vaguely a white
drawing-room with Whistler etchings, ‘let into’ white panels, and a dining-room
all white, chairs, walls, mantelpiece, carpet, except for a diamond-shaped piece of
red cloth in the middle of the table under a terracotta statuette, and, I think, a red-
shaded lamp hanging from the ceiling to a little above the statuette. It was perhaps
too perfect in its unity, his past of a few years before had gone too completely, and I
remember thinking that the perfect harmony of his life there, with his beautiful
wife and his two young children, suggested some deliberate artistic composition.”

None the less, the guest asserted his own aesthetic independence:
When dinner was over he read to me from the proofs of The Decay ofLying and when
he came to the sentence, ‘Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterises
modern thought, but Hamlet invented it. The world has become sad because a pup-
pet was once melancholy’, I said, “Why do you change “sad” to “melancholy”? He
replied that he wanted a full sound at the close of his sentence, and I thought it no
excuse and an example of the vague impressiveness that spoilt his writing for me. Only
80
 TWO YEARS: BEDFORD PARK 1887-1889
when he spoke, or when his writing was the mirror of his speech, or in some simple
faery-tale, had he words exact enough to hold a subtle ear.
But the message of The Decay ofLying struck home: an audacious riposte
to the positivist realism which wsy himself revolted against, and an assertion
that ‘truth’ lay in imaginative creation. wey had already written as much in
the Epilogue to The Island ofStatues, which was one of the few fragments of
his very early verse which he preserved in his canon.
There were later visits, but wBY never quite overcame a sense of awk-
wardness; his would-be fashionable shoes were too yellow, his manner too
intense, he unintentionally frightened one of Wilde’s sons by telling him
an unWildean fairy-story. Yet Wilde fascinated him: not only as another
middle-class Irish Protestant who had remade himself, but as a conscious
phrase-maker who ‘always dismissed questions with epigrams . . . [one] was
never quite sure whether or not he was boasting of uncommitted sins’.%
He ‘perpetually performed a play which was in all things the opposite of
all that he had known in his childhood and youth’. But for all his delight in
high life, wBy later stressed that Wilde was not a conventional snob; England
was fairyland, the social ladder was a ‘pantomime beanstalk’ and the English
aristocracy like ‘the nobles of Baghdad’. This too struck a personal echo. As
Magee perceptively noted, his schoolboy friend always ‘liked exaggerated
people — exaggerated. Dramatically—not colourless’.*” Of the friends and men-
tors encountered in the late eighties, Morris, Sharp, Henley, Wilde and his
mother, and Madame Blavatsky were all in this mould. The protest that
‘London can give me nothing’ was wearing thin.

Vv

wBy’s two years of London apprenticeship were, appropriately, sealed by

the production of his first volume of poems. He had been working on the long
narrative The Wanderings of Oisin from early in 1887 (mentioning the tale in
an article, ‘Fin Mac Cumhail’, for the Gae/ that April); his Sligo sojourn in
the autumn was dominated by furious writing and rewriting. Even before a
publisher was found, wy had begun to drum up subscriptions for a volume
featuring Ozsin as title-poem; from January 1888 names began to mount up,
including the established literary men Stephen Gwynn and Barry O’Brien.
Others were dragooned by O’Leary, airily thanked by By on 20 March: ‘We
ourselves have done very little. I have written to some people but not got answers
from more than a few that I wrote to — in fact I do not think Ihave improved
my position as a man of judgement and discretion with the few to whom
I have written.’* Subscribers had promised go copies by late February 1888,
rising to 110 in March. wBy already hada publisher in his sights — Kegan Paul,
8I
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

who had developed something of an Irish specialism with Tynan and

Todhunter. Determinedly high-Victorian in his tastes, he was not unduly
enthusiastic, and wzy found him condescending and unhelpful. When he
brought the first version of his manuscript to Kegan Paul on 12 March, the
publisher required 200 subscriptions, necessitating redoubled efforts from
O'Leary, Tynan, Father Mathew Russell, and other members of the ‘little
school’: though Hyde was predictably unenthusiastic, alleging that he had
failed to spread the light among the ‘unliterary’ of Roscommon.” In April
WBY’s new acquaintances at the Southwark Irish Literary Club were pressed
into service too. By the summer publication seemed assured, though there
would be crises about the number of subscriptions, and the projected price
of the volume, until the last minute. Kegan Paul waited until August before
committing himself absolutely. This was the background to wsy’s demoral-
ization when the proofs came in; but stray references in letters suggest that his
spirits rose as he corrected them. By mid-December 500 copies were printed
and 300 bound; though subscriptions had nominally exceeded the stipulated
200, Kegan Paul did not recover his full investment and public sales were low.
But it would prove a historic volume, for wBy himself and for literature at
the fin de siécle.
While the book included a carefully arranged series of poems that had
begun life in the mid-1880s (reorganized — and rewritten —in the ‘Crossways’
section of the eventual Collected Poems), the previously unpublished title-
poem took most of wBy’s energies, and much of the reviewers’ attention, not
always favourable. The story of Oisin, son of the legendary Fianna chief-
tain Fionn MacCumhail, who travelled with a fairy love to the land of eternal
youth, had been accessibly published by Bryan O’Looney (after Michael
Comyn) in the Transactions of the Oistanic Society in 1859. In the winter of
1886 wBy had proposed a poem on the subject for a projected volume, with
A. P. Graves and Katharine Tynan, to be called “Tales from Tara’, but it was
never written; he had probably come across it in P. W. Joyce’s popularized
prose version, appearing as ‘Oisin in Tirnanogue’ in Old Celtic Romances of
1879. The Laureate’s ‘Voyage of Maeldune’ had appeared in 1880 and wBy’s
1889 publication was full of inescapably Tennysonian echoes: he would eradic-
ate them in constant rewritings over the years. These began almost at once:
changes were made at the most advanced proof-stage, and a number of first
editions exist with his own changes added in; the eventual canonical version
of the title-poem was different in practically every line. Over the years he
reconstructed his poetic biography along with the poems themselves.’
Even if some of the influences behind the long poem which gave the book
its name were familiar, arousing echoes as recent as Todhunter’s Children of
Lir as well as traditions of philosophic journeying in Eastern and Gaelic
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 TWO YEARS: BEDFORD PARK 1887-1889
literature, The Wanderings of Oisin displayed all the audacity which would
come to identify its author. The title, unpronounceable to English ears, is
one example (in a later version the hero would temporarily appear — more
helpfully — as ‘Usheen’). The imagery, rhythm and diction of the opening
section, “The Island of the Living’, was equally arresting:

PATRICK
Oisin, tell me the famous story
Why thou outlivest, blind and hoary,
The bad old days. Thou wert, men sing,
Trapped of an amorous demon thing.
OISIN
"Tis sad remembering, sick with years,
The swift innumerable spears,
The long-haired warriors, the spread feast;
And love, in the hours when youth has ceased:
Yet will I make all plain for thee.
We rode in sorrow, with strong hounds three,
Bran, Sgeolan, and Lomair,
Ona morning misty and mild and fair.
The mist-drops hung on the fragrant trees,
And in the blossoms hung the bees.
We rode in sadness above Lough Laen,
For our best were dead on Gavra’s green.

This was unashamedly exotic to English ears. Along with familiar images of
bees hanging in blossom came obscure Gaelic names, striking repetitions, an
unremitting rhythm subtly varied as the poem proceeded through its three
sections. Similes were piled up in long lines to an incantatory climax, in true
Gaelic mode. When Oisin is led away across the ‘oily sea’ by the seductive
Niam (whom no English reader would have known to pronouce Nee-av), the
visions which pursue them are both exotic and presciently ominous; they
also assemble key images for the Yeatsian poetic lexicon.

On, on! and now a hornless deer

Passed by us, chased of a phantom hound
All pearly white, save one red ear;
And now a maid, on a swift brown steed
Whose hooves the tops of the surges grazed,
Hurried away, and over her raised
An apple of gold in her tossing hand;
And following her at a headlong speed
Was a beautiful youth from an unknown land.

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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

But the poem was far more than an azure-and-gold tonal arrangement of
islands, caverns, basaltic castles, painted birds, milky smoke and grass-blades
hung with dewdrops (though all occur more than once). It is the ‘ancient sad-
ness of man’ that drives Oisin on, as much as the temptations of Niam; the
land of eternal youth is in fact never gained, though he samples islands of
artificial pleasure, of inconclusive action (struggling with his own daemon),
and finally of forgetfulness. And as wBy wrote in a cancelled commentary
on the poem, after each island the hero ‘longs for his old companions’. Oisin’s
song of human joy strikes the fairy world as unutterably sad; their king
preaches liberation from ‘sorrow with her osprey claw’ and their songs re-
iterate freedom from the laws and limitations of ‘grievous Time on his old
crutches’, but he misses the real world. Strikingly, the story of journey and
return is framed within a dialogue between St Patrick’s Christian injunctions
and Oisin’s mounting realization that truth lies in the power and magic of his
own lost ‘pagan’ past. Moreover, his final defiance, when he opts for risking
hell with his dead companions, rouses an intentionally political echo: where
Joyce had referred to Oisin’s brotherhood as the ‘Fena’, wsy deliberately
uses ‘Fenians’.

PATRICK
On the red flaming stones without refuge the limbs of the Fenians are tost;
No live man goes thither, and no man may war with the strong spirits wage;
But weep thou, and wear thou the flags with thy knees, for thy soul that is lost,
For thy youth without peace, and thy years with the demons, and the godless fires
of thine age.
OISIN
Ah me! to be old without succour, a show unto children, a stain,
Without laughter, a coughing, alone with remembrance and fear,
All emptied of purple hours as a beggar’s cloak in the rain,
As a grass seed crushed by a pebble, as a wolf sucked under a weir.
I will pray no more with the smooth stones: when life in my body has ceased —
For lonely to move mong the soft eyes of best ones a sad thing were —
I will go to the house of the Fenians, be they in flames or at feast,
To Fin, Caolte, and Conan, and Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair.

In a famous 1867 sermon, the Catholic Bishop of Kerry had denounced

O’Leary and the modern Fenians with the words that ‘eternity is not long
enough nor hell hot enough’ to punish them; the assonance with Oisin’s con-
clusion would have been clear to Irish readers. For wey himself, the themes
were both deeply personal and strongly predicted future preoccupations: con-
flicts with the self and the will, unattainable desires, and the attractions of

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 TWO YEARS: BEDFORD PARK 1887-1889
conversing with the dead. To English readers, the pace, colour, varied rhythm
and hard-edged clarity marked an important début. If the construction
sometimes tottered, a unique diction still sounded through; themes like the
impotency of old age and the flight of elusive beauty were enlivened by
‘normal’ similes (stars in the night sky are ‘each one woven to his brother/
Like bubbles in a frozen pond’). Odd echoes prefigure later poetic effects
(‘as a fish in the water goes dumb as a stone’, ‘a moon waking white as a
shell’). The Gaelic theme and imagery, as well its superior quality and
manipulation of metre, distinguished Oisin from wsy’s other dramatic narra-
tives reprinted in the collection (Mosada, The Seeker, Time and the Witch
Vivien); yet, exotic and Gaelic though the title-poem was, wBy’s Romantic
education comes through. If Jeremiah Callanan and Ferguson are echoed,
so are Shelley, Pre-Raphaelitism and William Morris.
And so is the ‘sedative’ effect which wsy himself gloomily discerned in
his poetry as a whole: ‘a flight into fairy land, from the real world, and a sum-
mons to that flight’.°? Some of the poems looked back to his Theosophist
induction of 1885 to 1886, using the language of Indian mysticism: Mohini
Chatterjee’s Vedantic teachings were reproduced in quatrains enjoining
‘Long thou for nothing, neither sad nor gay’, and ‘Kanva on Himself’, never
republished in wey’s lifetime, turned Mohini’s injunctions straight into
poetic form. Others, like ‘King Goll’ (already published both in Leisure Hour,
September 1887, and Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland), combined Shelleyan
themes with an energetic attack which would become distinctively Yeatsian.
Poems like ‘A Lover’s Quarrel Among the Fairies’ were introduced with
decisive stage directions (‘A moonlit moor. Fairies leading a child’). The
dramatic form dominated: dialogues, scenarios, playlets, enclosing philo-
sophical exchanges punctuated by songs. This looked forward to his future
development; so did the number and range of poetic voices and personae em-
ployed, with varying success. And despite the themes of withdrawal, feyness,
depression and lassitude, at least one critic (in a private letter) pinpointed
the poet’s special quality: ‘a gift of introducing the common-place with start-
ling effect in his pictures’."”°
Bound in plain dark blue and tightly printed, The Wanderings of O1sin
was far less beautiful than any of wBy’s future books; but in other ways it
fully anticipated their impact. Copies were in hand by the end of the first
week of January 1889, and the response vindicated wBy’s relentless efforts
to carve out a niche in the literary world. The volume was more than just an
assembly of poems and constituted a fully conceived book in itself; the shape
and the arrangement had preoccupied him for over a year. The poems were
ordered thematically, not chronologically, and already he chose to exclude cer-
tain work already published, including dreamy sonnets and crudely political
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pieces. The tone was to be ‘Celtic’ rather than ‘national’: in other words,
while using Irish modes and themes, it was to appeal to an audience beyond
Ireland. But in Irish circles it caught a mood, provoking Todhunter to write
to Dowden: ‘I wish we had a Nationalist Dowden to direct the literary move-
ment now on foot, which though genuine in its way is shallow & amateur-
ish. I wish our Celtic literature, or at least the best portions of it, could be
decently edited & translated. I don’t agree with you in thinking that liter-
ature with a distinctly Irish note in it (even in the English language) must
necessarily be bad & weak.”°* Was wBy to be the nationalist Dowden? The
quantity of critical response, preserved in wBy’s own book of press cuttings,
was exceptional for a first collection: reviews mounted up over the next six
months. It was recognized that Irish mythology as a poetic subject was not
new: Aubrey de Vere, Todhunter, even Tynan had been there already. But Irish
themes were still extremely fashionable: besides the strongly flowing Celtic
tide, 1889 was the high point of the political ‘Union of Hearts’ between
Liberal English society and Irish nationalism under the newly respectable
Parnell. Coterie friends weighed in, not always quite as wBY wished. Henley
in the Scots Odserver gave an unqualified rave. Rolleston found the collection
on the whole ‘a missed opportunity’: the poet needed ‘a philosophy of
life’ and an ‘interest in realities’. Todhunter’s own feelings were mixed. Before
publication he had been positive, encouraging Dowden to subscribe to their
friend’s son’s book: ‘He has genuine imagination, richness of diction & above
all a power of writing easy musical verse quite remarkable in these days of
Tennyson Rossetti & Swinburne & their followers. One has to go back to
Coleridge & Keats to find the same kind of gift. In fact he has poetic genius.
What will come of him & it heaven only knows.’ Reviewing it, however, a
reaction set in; he found ‘flaws of execution — slovenly lines, awkward and
uncouth constrictions, exuberances which are not beauteous, concentrations
of expression which are crude and stiff rather than powerful’. Oscar Wilde,
writing anonymously in the Pal/ Mall Gazette, ‘recklessly’ promised ‘a fine
future’, mainly on the strength of wBy’s poetic imagination, the Spectator
mildly inferred plagiarism in a section of Ozsin, which provoked a letter from
wey acknowledging the inspiration of O’Looney and Comyn but indig-
nantly claiming the lines as his own.
In Ireland reactions were less enthusiastic. The Irish Monthly (February)
thought wBy ‘a true poet’ but would not like to expose his poems to ‘some
of our worthy Philistine friends’: the spectre of beautiful Edmund Russell
hovered dangerously close. The Freeman's Journal was openly antagonistic:
‘a jumble of confused ideas in a maze of verbiage’. The Svigo Independent
appreciated the local references. The Irish Times was favourable if slightly
condescending, and gratifyingly referred to the poet as an already established
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 TWO YEARS: BEDFORD PARK 1887-1889
figure: ‘Mr Yeats is more brilliantly imaginative, original and self-reliant
than ever.’
This was the word that was repeatedly used: imagination. The Nation, how-
ever, turned it against him: wBy’s imagination was ‘indulged at the expense
of his other faculties. And we think his imagination will never be brighter or
more active in the future.’ Tynan too looked to his probable future: while
instructing her readers that wBy ‘has the Celtic heritage in no ordinary
degree’, she feared ‘we can scarcely hope again for such fairy poetry as he
has given us; the fascination of the human will draw him out, and in that dir-
ection his development will probably lie’. Thus she loyally publicized wBy’s
manifestos in his letters to her the previous December. His own reaction,
both to uneven reviews and slow sales, showed remarkable assurance. Enough
critics forecast a distinguished future to compensate for sly digs from Dublin;
and he was confident, he told Tynan, that ‘I shall sell but not yet.’ But what
probably pleased him most was a London reaction: he was apprehended on
Holborn Viaduct by William Morris and told, ‘It is my kind of poetry.’
Morris then promised to write about it, ‘and would have said much more had
he not caught sight of one of the decorated iron lamp-posts, then recently, I
believe, set up [by] the Corporation and turned on it with frenzy, waving his
umbrella’.’””
Aesthetics as the bread of life, and personality as gesture: the lessons learnt
at home and abroad were already being built into his art and his life. And in
WBY'’s great personal myth January 1889 was not only the month that saw the
publication of The Wanderings of Oisin. On the 30th ‘a hansom drove up to
our door at Bedford Park with Miss Maud Gonne’, and ‘the troubling of my
life began’.
‘As I look backward, he wrote long afterwards, ‘it seems to me that
she brought into my life in those days — for as yet I saw only what lay
upon the surface — the middle of the tint, a sound as of a Burmese gong, an
over-powering tumult that had yet many pleasant secondary notes.’ The
22-year-old English ex-débutante with a passion for Irish nationalism and
romantic poetry invaded Bedford Park with an introduction to jBy, but
‘really to see Willy’, as Lolly acidly pointed out. The Yeats girls ‘hated her
royal sort of smile’ and noted that she was wearing slippers;'”” JBy argued
politics with her; the whole family was probably impressed by the fact that
she extravagantly kept the cab waiting throughout. She told wy that ‘she
cried over “Island of Statues” fragment but altogether favoured the enchantress
and hated Nachina’. Thus she cast herself precisely as the fatale, capricious
beauty of whom the poet had dreamt.
He could not but succumb. Writing to Tynan in August 1887 (in response
to a desperate appeal for ready-made ideas about the major poets’ attitudes
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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

to women), he had tried to itemize poetic types of beauty. Swinburne’s were

‘passionate and gorgious animals’, “Tennisons . . . much more like actual
every day people’; the neo-Romantics created ‘essentially men’s heroines
with no seperate life of their own in this different from Brownings’.""? Maud
Gonne, by contrast, was majestic, unearthly, appealing all at once; and her
classic beauty came straight out of epic poetry. Immensely tall, bronze-
haired, with a strong profile and beautiful skin, she was afin de szécle beauty
in Valkyrie mode: both her appearance and her character represented tragic
passion. But there was also a vulnerable side, shown to few, which struck an
immediate chord with wBy. He at once saw her as a ‘goddess’, and remem-
bered her standing luminous as ‘apple-blossom through which the light falls
... bya great heap of such blossoms in the window’.""' In January the blos-
som must have been almond, not apple: but the image remained,’” and the
recognition. Implicitly, in his work, he had already cast a woman like this for
a part in his life.
Yet at the same time there was something curiously self-conscious in
his immediate idealization of her: it may have inspired a reflection twenty
years later.
And when we love, if it be in the excitement of youth, do we not also, that the flood
may find no stone to convulse, no wall to narrow it, exclude character or the signs of
it by choosing that beauty which seems unearthly because the individual woman is
lost amid the labyrinth of its lines as though life were trembling into stillness and
silence, or at last folding itself away? Some little irrelevance of line, some promise of
character to come, may indeed put us at our ease . . . But should it come, as we had
dreamed in love’s frenzy, to our dying for that woman’s sake, we would find that the
discord had its value from the tune.'¥

Even as he cast himself into thrall, like a Shelleyan hero, the writer in him
was conscious of what he was doing.

88
 Chapter4:SECRET SOCIETIES
1889-1891

You might make a strong point of the stir caused in Dublin by

the Theosophical Society in the early nineties, and the impulse
it gave to literature as seen in Yeats’ early poems & in AE passim
— how it pressed nationalism into its service in its campaign
against materialism, 8cincidentally made spiritual heroes of the
Anglo-Irish mob-leaders and gods of the ‘fairies’ etc. This would
be a very interesting history if told with ironic judiciousness!

W. K. Magee to Ernest Boyd, 2 July 1914

From 1889 until 1903, Richard Ellmann has suggested, following wBy’s
life in ‘a strictly chronological account would give the impression of a man
in a frenzy, beating on every door in the hotel in an attempt to find his own
room’.' Tracing the young poet’s different and apparently irreconcilable
activities, working on several levels at once, Ellmann’s organizing principle
focused upon the divided self: wsy’s (and his contemporaries’) conception of
the artist as embodying two men. Helpful as this is, it is not the full answer.
Artificially separating out the several strands of wBy’s experience in the early
1890s may seem an exercise in clarification, but it creates a false impression.
The point is that his interests and involvements ricocheted off one another, dri-
ven by a number of consistent motivations. One was sexual frustration;
another, professional ambition. These everyday impulses could — and did -
drive him to produce unexpectedly exotic effects. Above all, he needed to belong
to organizations and, once attached, to shape them into the image he desired.
Acutely conscious of being an outsider in Dublin and in London, lacer-
ating himself for his apathy and indolence, wBy was spurred into never com-
pleted projects (a history of nineteenth-century Irish fiction, the long-running
account of Irish duellists). Even when abandoned, they left useful residues
to be thriftily transmuted into journalism.’ He continued to educate him-
self frenetically through the resources of the British Museum, Dublin’s new
National Library (opened in 1890), John O’Leary’s bookshelves, and the
lucky-dip of reviewing: still capable of filling in gaps by implying knowledge
which he did not possess (such as mastering texts in Irish, or, less difficult,
reading Somerville and Ross’s The Real Charlotte’). This could invite ridi-
cule, but, as his reading broadened and his interests ramified, his control of
material increased — notably in the occult and mystic writings of the sixteenth
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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

and seventeenth centuries, and in the neglected literature of early nineteenth-

century Ireland.
This could make him something of a trial to other people. ‘I had to roar at
W. Yeats’ long, long visit, and think that the tea must be of superior quality,
and run in rivers,’ wrote the Irish American poet, Louise Imogen Guiney, to
a friend who had been exposed to a long harangue on Theosophy in September
1890. ‘You poor old martyr!’* wBy’s self-presentation was still a youthful mix-
ture of art and artlessness: bearded, dark, intense, worried about his clothes,
and deeply conscious of poetic models. His early nineteenth-century immer-
sion in Irish patriotic literature supplied one particular inspiration: James
Clarence Mangan, by whom wy remained preoccupied. ‘I know not whether
I may not seem to have over-valued Clarence Mangan. No, I am not impar-
tial — who is? Under even the most philosophical utterance is a good dose of
personal bias . . He never startles us by saying beautifully things we have long
felt. He does not say look at yourself in this mirror; but rather, “Look at me
—Iam so strange, so exotic, so different.” * Of these early influences from the
Young Ireland era, only Mangan would remain undimmed; ten years later
wey would electrify an Irish Literary Society meeting with an impromptu
speech reiterating his early argument that Mangan’s best work was “as near
perfection as anything that has ever been written’, and that he helped create
a new style. There may have been a further influence, in Mangan’s idea that
the artist of genius must wear a mask at will;° but the identification was more
personal still. Not only did this romantic mystery-figure sustain an unhappy
love-life and unrequited passion, but he too was an outsider, a victimized genius
scrivening to support his family, who became the voice of his people.’
As for wsy, from the beginning of 1889 he was a poet with a widely re-
viewed book behind him, and a growing reputation in London as well as
Dublin: even the attack fromJ.F. Taylor in the Freeman’ Journal could even-
tually be accommodated, and praise repeated to him was retailed proudly in
his correspondence throughout the spring of 1889. Sales of Oisim remained
slow, but it made his reputation. Despite his complaints about being trapped
in a groove of ‘people who are like ones self— mystical, literary folk, and such
like’* and missing the cross-section of Sligo society, he was forming a circle.
His visits extended all over London, especially to literary women — taking in
bluestocking teachers at North London Collegiate School, Lady Wilde’s
shaky salon in Chelsea, and currently fashionable writers like John Strange
Winter’ (Mrs Stannard) at Putney. From Bedford Park he launched a wide
variety of missions, returning home to irritate his family by talking too much
‘for effect’.? Even in London an Irish dimension remained; the Yeatses were
visited by both Katharine Tynan and John O'Leary in the summer of 1889,
and Ellen O’Leary’s death in October sent shock-waves through their circle.
gO
 SECRET SOCIETIES 1889-1891
But wsy did not visit Ireland that year, though Jack remained in Sligo until
October and his sisters made the annual pilgrimage. He planned to go in the
spring of 1890, but was detained in London until the following autumn
by publishing projects. While Sligo provided peace for writing poetry and
‘romance’, he was realistic enough to know that London contacts were
necessary for bread and butter. “The fact that I can study some things I like
here better than elsewhere is the only redeaming fact,’ he assured Tynan in
October 1890. “The mere presence of more cultivated people too is a gain of
course but nothing in the world can make amends for the loss of green field
& mountain slope & for the tranquil hours of ones own country side.°
Yet from the beginning of 1889 there was another, intoxicating element which
affected not only his preoccupations but his movements: the possibility of prox-
imity to Maud Gonne. After the meeting on 30 January, they saw each other
incessantly. wBy dined with Gonne, her sister Kathleen and her cousin May
the very next day, where he was dazzled by the vehemence with which she
baited a young military suitor of Kathleen, home on leave from India. wBy
had dreamt of women like the girl in The Revolt ofIslam — ‘lawless women,
without homes and without children’. He himself had conjured up dream-
women of epic beauty, sadness and mystery: Gonne represented them all. Like
the other women who would attract him, she was an independent spirit with
a compelling, theatrical personality. And the fact that she saw him (or so he
remembered) every evening for the next week could only be construed as
encouragement.
Much of this, however, was misleading. Her mystery was yet to be plumbed;
but though she was without a home, she would not long be without children.
Gonne’s background was dislocated, peripatetic and unstable. Losing first
her mother and then her adored father, brought up between London, France
and his military postings in Ireland, she had identified with that country as
the one fixed point in her unhappy early life. She stressed her father’s alleged
Kerry ancestry, along with the much more questionable supposition that he
nurtured Home Rule ambitions. Financially independent since her twenty-
first birthday in 1887, she and her sister possessed £40,000 capital, around
two million in today’s terms, which guaranteed a large income; she was well-
bred and beautiful; but she resolutely repudiated conventional ‘society’.
The Dublin establishment would come to view her with alternate alarm
and derision (‘a great red-haired yahoo of a woman’, in the words of the
timid Trinity don Louis Purser’); to thein she exemplified a sort of ¢rah1-
son des débutantes, in which she was later joined by Constance Markievicz.
This too appealed to wsy. From the start Gonne had sought out national-
ists, who were initially suspicious of her: she moved from Oldham’s Home
Rule circle to demonstrations on behalf of evicted tenants in Gweedore,
OI
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

County Donegal. Her identity with ‘the people’ of Ireland was based (as
with many upper-class rebels) on memories of servants who had been kind
to her: nationalism gave her restless and insecure spirit a conviction and a base,
as well as a focus for her independent and feminist predilections. Her enorm-
ous capacity to inspire devotion, and a deep belief in self-sacrifice for pub-
lic causes, would create for her a unique place in Irish public life. There was
another reason also for her passionate interest in extreme politics. In the
summer of 1887, at the French spa of Royat, she had met the much older
Boulangist journalist and politician, Lucien Millevoye, already married, and
begun her long liaison with him. In April 1889, less than three months after
meeting wBy, she conceived Millevoye’s child.
Her Irish suitor would not learn this for many years. But part of Gonne’s
attraction was her flouting of convention, and she never believed in mar-
riage: when she eventually capitulated, it would only be as a sacrament (and
a sacrifice) to the national cause. Partly, this may have been because sexual
relations did not greatly appeal to her;’? but she was also a New Woman,”
and came from a family whose women believed they were foredoomed to
unhappy marriages. (At an early age she had to cope not only with her own
secret liaison, but with the existence of an illegitimate half-sister; Gonne sent
the mother off to Russia as a governess and kept the child herself.*) Faced
with wsy’s relentless adoration, she took refuge in a return to her Paris house,
where he could not — yet — follow her, and in admonishments that dedica-
tion to the national cause must transcend all selfish passion. But the strain
of her private life and the unhappiness of her past gave her a heart-breaking
vulnerability—hidden from most of her men friends, but eventually revealed
to wBY. And this was a no less powerful part of her appeal.
The course of their relationship was quickly set. wBy much later recalled
his obsessiveness, his neurosis, his sense of inadequacy, and his fear of making
a fool of himself: all this was connected with an ideal of passionate ascetism,
keeping his heart pure for love or hatred, like the mythical figure of Proud
Costello. A hopeless love, in fact, freed him to work (‘Our work after all is
our true Soul,’ he told Tynan in September 1890”). But wBy would also, as
ever, turn adversity to advantage: and the work he adopted might go on to
create the conditions for love's fulfilment. Thus within a year he was trying
to present himselftoGonne as her cicerone, in occultism as well as in national
revivalism: a year older, his need to dominate and his literary genius seemed
to confer that advantage. Gonne, on the other hand, possessed only a talent
for oratory (she had once planned to be an actress); she dabbled in art and wrote
awkwardly. But it turned out he could not lead her: the force of her personal-
ity matched his own. Some contemporary photographs emphasize not so much
her legendary beauty as a large and determined chin, and a mouth set hard at
g2
 SECRET SOCIETIES 1889-1891
the corners. Much later, when he knew her full story, he could conclude, ‘She
was complete; I was not.”* It is a sexual reference, but also something more.
What he could do was help present her to the world, and he rapidly took
on the task. In letters to Tynan he denied, rather defensively, that he was ‘taken
up’ with Gonne, and admitted that she was sensationalist. ‘I sympathise with
her love of the national idia rather than any secondary land movement but
care not much for the kind of red Indian feathers in which she has trapped
out that idea.” Embarrassedly, he claimed that Gonne had offered him help
in staging a play he was working on, and that was all: ‘As for the rest she had
a borrowed interest, reminding me of Laura Armstrong without Laura’s wild
dash of half insane genius.’ The awkwardness of the passage between him-
selfand Tynan a year before still persisted. Unguardedly, however, he let slip
in October that he would not have heard of Ellen O’Leary’s death, ‘only that
on MondayI heard by chance that Miss Gone was in London and rushed
off at once and saw her for about five minutes or less. She was just starting
for Paris.”"* This too forecast a pattern that would endure.
Meanwhile, he helped to create the cult of Gonne as ‘the New Speranza’
(Lady Wilde’s youthful nom de plume, as the poetess of the Nation). He planted
out articles in United Ireland, the Boston Pilot and elsewhere, describing
Gonne’s speaking-tours on behalf of the evicted Irish tenants, stressing her
‘Irish nationality’ and Celtic qualities of poetic insight, and describing aristo-
cratic Parisian audiences reduced to tears.'? At the same time he emphasized
that she was not a revolutionary, and was ‘no separatist under present condi-
tions’. While he could follow her in cavalierly dismissing the importance of
internecine murder among American Fenians (‘a spy has no rights”°), their
IRB sympathies were principally O’Learyite. Gonne, tutored in inept con-
spiracy among Millevoye’s Boulangists, was more amenable to revolutionary
politics than her Home Rule admirer, though she recalled long afterwards
that he had taken the IRB oath before she met him.*? Committed member-
ship was embarked upon in the early 1890s, reflecting political polarization
and dislocations among nationalists at the time; wByY may have taken the Fenian
oath before leaving Dublin in 1887, but Gonne’s sympathy for ‘advanced
nationalism’ was at first echoed by him from a Home Rule standpoint. And
until late 1891 the future seemed to belong to Home Rule.

II
Despite this bewitching eruption into his life, wBy’s existence continued to
be based at Blenheim Road. Here life carried on as before. Occasional enter-
tainments were mounted (one on 20 February 1889 involved May Morris, her
fiancé Sparling, John Power, and W. M. Crook). Mrs Alexander Sullivan,

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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

an American Fenian, was one exotic visitor in June 1889; the attractive but
irreverent Imogen Guiney, in June 1890, another. JBy was painting portraits
again, after a long period producing sketches only, but no more successful than
before. Susan Yeats was unseen. Jack, when at home, was a cheerful presence;
on 2 October 1889 he returned from his grandparents, shouting ‘Sligo nonsence
rhymes (he always comes home full of them) such as “You take the needle &
I'll take the thread/And we'll sow the dogs tail to the Orange man’s head.”””
By May 1891 wBy was organizing a monthly Sunday or Monday evening ‘At
Home’ to meet his literary friends.
But there was another side to it too. Yeats family life was convulsed by
volatile irritations and upheavals. jBy, always ready to sparkle for the bene-
fit of guests, was in private increasingly humiliated, aggressive and argu-
mentative with his sons. The issues that separated them might be ‘abstract
and impersonal’, but their resolution often came near violence.” The sons,
for their part, shouted at their father in an unVictorian way: when, after one
confrontation, Jack told his brother ‘mind, not a word till he apologises’, it
represented a reversal of parent-child roles. wBy’s professional success was
not the only reason why his relationship to his siblings became increasingly
distanced: a sense of survival drove him away.
But he could not afford to live elsewhere. His sister Lolly’s diary mon-
itors his earnings closely:
1889
thy @ a
Willie got
November 19
December, Manchester Courier
[1890] January 1st, Boston Pilot ORGS

January 7th M Courier iH o)

Feb 3rd M Courier
Feb 20
March 4th Boston Pilot
April 3
April 8 Scots Observer
May 3rd Manchester Courier
May 28 Scots Observer
June 19 Boston Pilot
July 14 Boston P
Sep 20th Stephenson Fairy article
Oct Scots Observer
Nov 1st Weekly Review
Nov 10/90 America OF
HHNYWRKHHO
(ON OM
1O)
1007
wk)
eh
(OseNEES
Os
©
OnION
OMONEOL
OM!
OmOUrOl
Ons
Ol

94
 SECRET SOCIETIES 1889-1891
This vividly shows the range of his outlets, and the rates of his pay, at a time
when a pound a week was a labourer’s wage. He was justifiably proud of £7
earned for one article in Leisure Hour, and the pound per column offered by
the Scots Observer and Boston Pilot was considered a good rate (though the
Observer had to be dunned). Nor did such payments last long in Blenheim
Road, being rapidly devoured by domestic debt (‘the swally-whole’, in fam-
ily slang”). Not unnaturally, book sales preoccupied him. The Wanderings of
Oisin had sold 174 copies by June: 146 already subscribed for, 28 on the open
market. Poems and Ballads ofYoung Ireland was equally unspectacular; in late
March 1889 he had to pay £o. gs. 1d. as his share of the production costs, since
it had sold only 275 copies at £o. 1s. 6d. each; wBy anxiously canvassed the
chances of a cheap paperback.” By October he was hoping that the imprint
of his Blenheim road next-door neighbour, Elkin Mathews, at the Bodley
Head, might take over the unsold. stock of Oisin; but in January it had
still not covered its costs, and he had to ask O’Leary for help. The sum of ~
£2. 35. 10d. was owing to Kegan Paul, and legal action was threatened.”°
Helped by O'Leary, he succeeded in transferring the residue to T. Fisher
Unwin, who rebound them and published a second issue in May 1892.
Therefore, publishing and reviewing contacts remained vital. wBy con-
tinued to see Rhys, and in late February or early March 1889 met the Parnellite
MP T. P. Gill, later an influential patron in Dublin journalism. He dog-
gedly provided anonymous paragraphs on London literary matters for the
Manchester Courier from 1889 to 1890, as well as the ‘Celt in London’ column
for the more munificent Boston Pilot: in both places he could ‘trumpet’ things
about friends as well as make money (another example of the uses of adver-
sity). Journalism, he told Tynan in October 1889, was ‘good work for many
people but no way, unless on Irish matters, good work for you and me, unless
so far as it be really forced on us by crazy circumstance’.””
After the publication of Ozsin he would place his offerings easily; some art-
icles written in 1887 were finally accepted in 1889.** His American patrons, the
Providence Sunday Journal and the Boston Pilot, continued to publish him until
(respectively) late 1891 and 1892. In his ‘Celt in London’ column he reproduced,
with apparent facility and occasional archness, the note of the middle-brow
essayist, complete with ‘insider’ references.” He could also press the claims
of friends like Hyde, Lady Wilde, and his poet colleagues, celebrate patrons
like Ellen O’Leary, and puff the subscription list for John O’Leary’s ever forth-
coming memoir. Economical as ever, he shuffled themes, subjects and even
phrases about between his journalistic productions, reflecting his current pre-
occupations (notably Blake*°). His reviewing tone developed — more confident
and swingeing, especially when attacking a trespasser on his own property

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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

such as McAnally’s stagey Irish Wonders, which enabled him to assert ‘real’
‘Celtic’ traditions of supernaturalism. The breadth of his reference became
more and more striking: Dante, the Mahabharata, Ibsen, Edgar Quinet’s Génie
des religions, Swedenborg’s Spiritual Diary. In July 1892 he had his first piece
in the Bookman, a regular outlet from now on; another friend well established
on the Irish literary circuit in London, Barry O’Brien, continued to send him
books to review for the Speaker (the strangest, perhaps, being B. Douglas
Howard’s Life with Trans-Siberian Savages’).
Other forms of hack work still persisted in 1889, but were being shaken off.
InJune and July 1889 the Girls’ Own Paper published two pieces of sentimental
doggerel (‘In Church’ and ‘A Summer Evening’) commissioned by the Reli-
gious Tract Society (who also provided work for the agnostic JBY), but wBY
was shamefaced in admitting as much to Tynan. ‘I shall never do any more
I think.” Copying work was no longer necessary — the last stint was during
August 1889 in Oxford — but Nutt too remained a useful contact, with wBY
mediating between him and Hyde in the autumn of 1889. As a result, some
of Leabhar Sgéaluigheachtawas translated as Beside the Fire (1891). The Dublin
group continued to help one another out. In October 1889 Tynan published
a piece on wBy in the American Magazine ofPoetry, romantically providing
a childhood 4 /a Chateaubriand by transmuting his uncle’s Sandymount
house into a castellated mansion within a dreamy park (wBy privately put
her right about his parents’ house and added ‘the place that has really influenced
my life most is Sligo”). For his part, his advice to her became more and more
pointed: to try long poems, to transcend the ‘merely pretty’, and (even in the
biography of a nun, which she was writing) to get away from ‘the white light
of piety’. This was of a piece with the increasingly astringent note in his
reviewing (Margaret Mary Ryan was told sharply that good poets, however
much sadness they possessed, did not ‘fondle it and pet it’), and it hints at
the widening gulf between himself and his early literary comrades.
Self-confidence was demonstrated in other ways too. In November 1889
he agonized about having shaved off his beard (‘the symbol I knew myself
by’). Lily recorded that he ‘looks much better we all think; Jack got him to
do it & when it was half off Willy nearly slaughtered him.” Madame
Blavatsky prophesied dire illness through losing ‘the mesmeric force that
collects in a beard’ and in January 1890 he obligingly succumbed to the local
epidemic of Russian influenza. He remained plagued by depressions, and in
November 1890 told Tynan of athreat to his heart, ‘but not of an important
nature. The docter says that I have been wearing myself out & has directed
me to live more deliberately & leasurely. By no means an easy thing for any
one of my temprement.”°
The advice was hardly surprising, for, since his encounter with Maud
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 SECRET SOCIETIES 1889-1891

Gonne, he had been plunged into a ferment of writing. He had long in-
tended to use a legend from Fairy and Folk Tales for a play: it concerned
the Countess Kathleen O’Shea (wy eventually spelt it ‘Cathleen’), who
sold her soul to save the country people in the west of Ireland from starving.
His meeting with Gonne helped inspire the image of an aristocratic beauty
sacrificing herself for love of the people — and (in a later development) turn-
ing her back on the devotion of her minstrel attendant. At this time he was
reading William Carleton’s The Black Prophet for another project, and it sup-
plied the background of a Famine-ravaged land. ‘The plot will be the best I
have yet worked on — being both fantastic and human, he wrote to a Dublin
family friend, the antiquarian and archaeologist George Coffey, on 14 February;
‘human enough to rouse peoples sympathies, fantastic enough to wake them
from their conventional standards’.*’ In early March he was still absorbed in
it, producing two prose versions before putting it into ‘virse** in The Countess
Kathleen. On 6 May he read a scene to a new friend, the actress Florence Farr,
for a theatrical opinion. It was not in proof until April 1892: a copyright per-
formance took place at the Athenaeum Theatre on 6 May 1892, though it would
not be acted publicly for many years (and then to an unanticipated reac-
tion*’). But the form and message — knowledge and power, and a poet’s love
sacrificed to a holy mission — were inspired by those electrically charged
weeks following his first meeting with Gonne.
Other book projects cross-fertilized with his reviewing activity: notably
an edition of the underrated mid-nineteenth-century Irish writer William
Carleton for the Camelot series. From late April 1889 wBy was looking out
for stories by him, and begging copies of his books; his editorial work was
also recycled into an important review for the Scots Observer.” Carleton was
a sensitive subject, because he had converted to Protestantism, been taken up
by a distinctly Orange clique of literary entrepreneurs, and produced some
proselytizing stories for an evangelical magazine. wBy defended him in the
only terms possible for an Irish audience: ‘his heart always remained Catholic,
it seems to me’.*t However, he took care to trace the original versions of
Carleton’s controversial work in the Christian Examiner, and assumed a cer-
tain authority in the area; when his Stories from Carleton was published on 23
August 1889 he received seven guineas from Walter Scott, but he had gained
much more. ‘When I want to read up a subject I get a book to do there on. I
write to read & never merely read to write.” He told the same correspond-
ent, ‘The introduction to Carleton you will hardly find of much interest, it
was done in a great hurry to fill a gap and get Rhys out of a scrape.’ But it
was important for two reasons. Reading Carleton at short notice and high
speed gave him a sense of Irish dialogue, and of peasant life, which affected
both his fiction and his ballads; and the reaction to such a controversial

oF,
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

subject anticipated later battles with Irish public opinion. The Nation attacked
Carleton’s apostasy so violently that wBy wrote along and passionate defence,
arguing that ‘Catholicism can well afford to be generous: no Catholic need
show the bigotry of some poor sectary.’ His view of authentic Irishness still
stressed a peasant and Catholic identity; and his immersion in early nineteenth-
century Catholic Irish fiction, together with his contemporary denunciation
of the ‘braggadocio’ peddled for English audiences by the supposedly Anglo-
Irish Charles Lever and Samuel Lover, helped dictate this view.
It found another expression in a volume of Representative Irish Tales, which
wey also began to edit in this annus mirabilis of creative energy; it eventu-
ally appeared in March 1891. His original ambition was to produce ‘a kind of
social history’, with stories ‘illustrative of some phase of Irish life’, defend-
ing the ‘square built power’ of unfashionable Irish novelists like Gerald
Griffin and the Banim brothers, who had written about the life of rural
Catholic Ireland in the early nineteenth century.“ This was prescient, but once
again he had chosen a sensitive subject. In July 1891 the Irish Monthly would
attack him for including tasteless and anti-Catholic material, and overly
emphasizing ‘the rollicking, savage and droll elements’ of Irish life.” For
wy, however, his Irish Tales (taken together with Carleton) proposed a
revaluation of early nineteenth-century Irish literature in English: he also
projected (but never produced) a ‘verse chronicle’ of Ireland (derived from
Davis’s projected “Ballad History’), a volume of ‘Old Celtic romances’ for
Camelot, and a collection of Mangan’s poems.” Yet another compilation, which
did appear, was a collection of Irish Fairy Tales for Fisher Unwin’s Children’s
Library, suggested in the summer of 1891 and published the following year
with illustrations by Jack. In December 1889 he thought he might write a
‘little history of “Irish Literature this Century” . . . I shall be systimatically
political or national anyway, through out the thing.’ ‘Political, or national
anyway: national-mindedness was still seen as the better, and safer, part of
politics. But in this too he was conscious of Maud Gonne’s expectations as
well as of his own hereditary insecurities.
He was about to embark upon another great project, which would take
five years to bring to fruition. Since 1888 he had been close to his vague and
depressive artist neighbour in Bedford Park, Edwin Ellis. Ellis was well
established as a Yeats family friend. Although nearer to JBy’s generation, hav-
ing been part of his art school circle, he appealed to wBy as a fellow-poet (to
whom wey read his work, and whose own poems wy pressed on Father
Russell for the Irish Monthly). One of the bonds between wsy and Ellis
(which may have distanced them accordingly from the elder Yeats) was a shared
interest in mysticism: Ellis was committed to the Blakean idea of total art,
fuelled by a mystic vision. Blake was a familiar presiding deity in Bedford Park;
98
 SECRET SOCIETIES 1889-1891

Todhunter had a particular interest in him, and stressed that no one had yet
mastered Blake’s mystical language and myth.** The date of wsy’s and Ellis’s
decision to produce a joint work on William Blake’s prophetic writings is
unknown, but the enterprise was fired by the galvanic energy released in
wey during early 1889. He announced the project to Tynan on 8 March, declar-
ing his determination to confront Blake as a symbolist working in a magical
context, rather than as an eccentric, and seeing this analysis of the poet as
part of his own Theosophical researches. (He was further inspired by the
erroneous belief that Blake was really an Irishman, in which he persisted
through the early 1890s — though his new friend Arthur Symons, a Blakean
since childhood, tried to put him right.) A large agenda had been mapped
out by May 1889. “The book must rouse a good deal of interest among liter-
erly] people & what will please me better influence for good the mystical
societies throughout Europe . . . It has done my own mind a great deal of good
— in liberating me from formulas & theories of several kinds.” Already he
was copying out the first edition of the Book of Thelin the Bodleian Library.
By October 1889 he was sure he had found the key to the prophetic books,
and was ‘trying to unravel his symbolic way of using colour’. wBy’s appren-
ticeship in Theosophy and his reading of the recently translated Cabbala now
came into its own. Blake’s doctrine of correspondence between ‘Permanent
Realities’ and the ‘vegetable glass of nature’ fitted into this Neo-Platonist world.
Moreover, wBy’s own ideas of poetry as a reflection of ‘immortal moods’, or
archetypal emotions, which he had derived from Shelley, were reinforced by
Blake: a common inspiration apparently lay in Boehme’s view of imagina-
tion as the vehicle of divine revelation. To clarify references, he read Boehme’s
mystic writings, and reread Swedenborg (first discovered by him in Dublin
during the early 1880s). By 1893, when his work on Blake had finished, wBy
had made the connection to the study of folklore as an affirmation of ‘the
ancient supremacy of imagination’, which was ‘God in the world of art’: not
only Blake but Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe
and Keats were ‘little more than folklorists with musical tongues’.
This looks forward from the first flush of enthusiasm in 1889; but it illus-
trates a strength of wBy’s synthesizing and autodidactic mind, which was
to find assonances in all he read, bend them to his purposes, and create uni-
versal patterns by annexing writers and philosophies into his personal pan-
theon. Blake was a vital part of the process, referred to as ‘my master’”? and
seen as someone whose inspiration, like wBy’s own, was misunderstood by
the everyday philosophy of a crudely materialist world. He was also becom-
ing much influenced by the ideas in Arthur Hallam’s Essay on Tennyson about
the necessary impurity of popular art; his work on Blake crystallized lofty ideas
about the dangers of fashionability, the role of an audience, and the public’s
oF.
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

hatred of the unusual.*! It therefore became a personal mission for himself

and Ellis to get back to the real Blake, not the ‘dressed and brushed’ version.
They thought of producing a short biography as well as their ambitious edi-
tion. (And if this meant rediscovering an Irish Blake, all the better.)
In the process he also discovered the pleasures of scholarship — of a Yeatsian
sort. His ideas may have been single-minded, his transcriptions imperfect,
and his interpretations idiosyncratic — but in the course of their inquiries Ellis
and wBy made the important discovery of an unknown prophetic book,
‘Vala, or the Four Zoas’, in the possession of the Linnell family,” and worked
directly from manuscripts owned by Lord Houghton and Charles Fairfax
Murray. By December 1889 wBy was staying at the Linnell house to copy out
their manuscripts, plied with ancient port by the equally ancient Linnells, who
thought he looked delicate (the lost beard and the oncoming influenza). By
the end of August 1890 the bookseller and publisher Bernard Quaritch had
agreed to publish their findings as The Works ofWilliam Blake: Poetic, Symbolic
and Critical. No money was offered to wBy (the contract was between
Quaritch and Ellis), but prestige and a beautiful book were guaranteed. wBY
and Ellis were to be paid in copies, with an added honorarium for Ellis, who
was expected to do most of the work. The whole question of collaboration
and dual responsibility was a thorny one; wBy enlarged upon it much later
to Augusta Gregory. “The actual interpretation of the philosophy . . . was made
out absolutely to geather. His mind was far more minute than mine, but less
synthetic. I had a tendency to make generalisations on imperfect foundations,
& he to remain content with detached discoveries . . . With the exception
of the part called “The Symbolic System” almost all of the actual writing is
by Ellis.” wey, however, had to warn Ellis off certain areas appropriated
for himself; Ellis’s ‘wonderful industry’ threatened to propel him into spheres
where he was hampered by ‘lack of mystical knowledge’.
It is unlikely that wey accomplished this tactfully. Already, he was rep-
resenting himself as a mage. Mrs Ellis, a neurotic German who was herself
dreaded throughout Bedford Park, had banned him from the house by March
1891 because she thought he was casting spells on her husband (‘the sight of
me made her grow white with terror’). In the end, the introduction to
Volume 1 of the Ellis—Yeats Blake (‘The System’) remained wBy’s contribu-
tion; but their notes show he and Ellis collaborated intensely on each other’s
emendations. Ellis spelled out their agenda in a letter to John Lane:
Blake’s system was of such richness that notwithstanding its simplicity it is more like
the work of a period than of an individual, & in the absence of an intelligible account
of it, has doomed its inventor to the position of a reputed madman. In conjunction
with William Yeats — the author of ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ — (a successful first
volume of very picturesque, melodious & readable poetry for which even the Saturday
I0O
 SECRET SOCIETIES 1889-1891

[Review] had none but good words,) —I am engaged in preparing a key to all Blake’s
myths, — & to show the value of W. Yeats’s part of the work his chart of the person-
ages of the great fable was laid beside Mr Quaritch’s book [a copy of Jerusalem] for
the Volumes [the Odde Volumes, a society of bibliophiles] to study. The name of
‘Vala’ as that of one of Blake’s chief works is not generally known as it lay, an un-
sorted manuscript, for about a hundred years. It is now paged and explained &it will
be issued by Mr Quaritch in his new complete edition of the poetic poems [sic]. The
question of Blake’s sanity will then be finally set at rest, for the works being brought
together & the explanation printed along with them any competent family solicitor
who is accustomed to arrange evidence will be able to see for himself whether the
poet was a madman or not. The fact is that he adopted mysticism as a language &
made it the vehicle of poetry, adding new terms & names as he chose, founding all
on the Scriptures, & blending the Swedenborg, Boehmen, & Paracelsus modes of
- expression, & so dealing with the matter that whatever most readers find miserable
& dry in their modes of expression, Blake by the infusion of his poetic vigour has
left not only more philosophic, but even enjoyable.*
This was exactly what inspired wBy. Blake had spoken to him; his mind spun
with correspondences and connections. Blake’s four Zoas, or mythological
personages, corresponded to the four quarters of London — suddenly con-
verted into a visionary territory which might be claimed, like Sligo. wBy’s
notebooks of 1889 show that Blake had inspired him to play with fourfold
divisions, based on the elements and the zodiac, related to Celtic as well as
to Christian hierarchies of angels and gods.*’ His occult reading had fired
him with notions of alchemy and its provision of metaphors for the imagi-
nation; Blake made him think in terms of the whole symbolic order of the
cosmos. Most of all, Blake had been manipulated by wsy into his own sys-
tem of universal ‘moods’, accessible through visions to the man of genius. But
this was wBy’s own contribution; and his approach to visions was essential-
ly magical, not mystical. In the end Blake, like Russell, was a mystic, wrapped
in obscurities; and wBy was an apprentice mage, determined to penetrate
beyond them.

Ill
In early 1889, as wBY was drawn into the world of Maud Gonne, he was
simultaneously proceeding with his ventures into occult experimentation.
The two obsessions became closely associated in his mind, and would re-
main so. Throughout his life, episodes of sexual energy and confusion would
be closely paralleled by periods of magical experimentation. Both the Theo-
sophical Society and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (which he
joined the year after Gonne’s visit) acted as magnets for the frustrated as well
as the credulous; both attracted a high proportion of unconventional woman
IOI
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

acolytes; both were plagued by sexual scandals. Theosophist circles were

convulsed in April 1889 by accusations levelled at the editor of their journal,
Lucifer, the novelist Mabel Collins, who was alleged to have led two of the
apprentice celibates astray (Blavatsky, as way remembered it later, ‘could not
permit her more than one’). The brethren were also shocked by reverbera-
tions from Chatterjee’s dalliances. wBy visited Blavatsky’s regularly in January
and February 1889;”* later in the year he brought O’Leary, who was brutally
amused by the effete young men, slavish women and strong-minded old
termagant dominating them all.”
wy himself retained doubts about the implicit beliefin Madame Blavatsky’s
Tibetan Masters that was required: her own cynicism and sharp tongue
accounted for much of the attraction. He would later remember her as ‘a sort
of old Irish peasant woman with an air of humour and audacious power . . .
impressive, I think, to every man or woman who had themselves any richness’.
Her astute and epigrammatical summaries dazzled him (‘I used to wonder
at and pity the people who sell their souls to the Devil, but now I only pity
them. They do it to have somebody on their side’). He had less time for her
followers, whose mystical credulity clashed with his own inclination towards
magical experimentation and the verification of supernatural phenomena. For
this reason he strongly backed the formation of an Esoteric Section of the
Theosophical Society, devoted to such rituals; he joined it in December 1888,
and renewed his pledges on 20 December 1889, along with the celebrated Annie
Besant among others. During the spring of 1890, accompanied by Besant and
Edwin Ellis, he dabbled in mesmerism and other magical experiments.
However, he had from the beginning queried the conditions of absolute
obedience to Blavatsky imposed on initiates; notes he kept in a contempor-
ary esoteric diary show that she was prepared to allow him a certain latitude
in order to keep him. For his part, he found no difficulty in describing his
Blake studies as ‘work on theosophy’. Renewing his pledges a year after join-
ing raised some further doubts, though he dismissed any idea that Blavatsky’s
‘teachers’ might be fraudulent as ‘wholly unable to cover the facts’.
His reflections on the Theosophists themselves, made in 1889, illustrate
the attitude towards fellow-students of the occult which he would retain. This
was combined realism (G. R. S. Mead had ‘the intellect of a good sized
whelk’) and indulgence:
... they seem some intellectual, one or two cultured, the rest the usual amorphous
material that gather round all new things. All, amorphous and clever alike, have much
zeal, and here and there a few sparkles of fanaticism are visible. This section will not
in any way, I believe, influence educated thought. For this as yet unattempted pro-
paganda the society has so far neither men nor method. What effects it has produced
upon it are wholly owing to the inherent weight of the philosophy.

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 SECRET SOCIETIES 1889-1891

However, he instructed himself to ‘keep out of propaganda: not my work’.

Instead, he proposed and forced through a scheme for organized occult
research ona basis of empirical experiment (much as the Society for Psychical
Research were doing, though the parallel was not mentioned). This initia-
tive was finally too independent for Blavatsky’s taste, and lay behind his
severance from the Theosophical Society in October 1890 — ostensibly because
of an article he wrote on Lucifer for the Weekly Review. He told O'Leary: ‘I
refused [to promise never to criticize the Society again] because I looked upon
[the] request as undue claim to control right of individual to think as best pleased
him. I may join them again later on’.
This was truer than it seemed. What he objected to was an abstract and
dogmatic religiosity, built around a personality cult. The eclectic Eastern flavour
of Theosophy continued to attract him, and so did the sort of people he met
there. In 1891 he was once again frequenting Theosophist circles, this time
the Adelphi Lodge founded by William Wynn Westcott, Percy Bullock and
John Watkins.® And at least two Adelphi members (Westcott and Bullock)
were members of another occult order, which by then had won wsy’s loy-
alty, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.” Its rival attractions had
impelled Madame Blavatsky to sanction the formation of her Esoteric Section;
many Golden Dawn initiates had passed through Theosophy, and retained
Theosophical connections; many also lived in Bedford Park. For wBy (already
since 1887 frequenting a Hermetic society of inquiry, with future Golden
Dawn members), the path was an inevitable one. The Golden Dawn followed
through the interest in ritual magic and study prescribed by Esoteric
Theosophists, which was exactly what wzy had taken from the Blavatsky
movement; and a central figure in its early formation exerted a considerable
influence on his occult development. This was MacGregor Mathers.
Mathers had published The Kabbalah Unveiled in 1887, a commentary on
ritual magic which provided the basis for much of the Golden Dawn's struc-
ture. He was already on the Theosophical circuit; acquainted with Blavatsky,
he lectured to her devotees, though he refused to join the Society. It seems
likely that he was already determined to build his own religion, with himself
as prophet; he is closely associated with the foundation on 1 March 1888 of
the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, in the company of Westcott (a
Freemason with Rosicrucian connections) and W. R. Woodman, Supreme
Magus of the Rosicrucian Society in England. Allegedly, its rituals were
‘revealed’ in a cipher manuscript discovered on a bookstall by the Reverend
A.F. A. Woodford (a Swedenborgian Mason who was safely dead by 1888).
This seems analogous to the part played by Fraulein Sprengel, a Rosicruc-
ian avatar invented by Westcott as his own creation-myth; it also parallels
the function performed by Blavatsky’s invisible Masters. The bookstall myth
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probably derives from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s occult novel Zanonz, and the
cipher papers actually came from the estate of Kenneth Mackenzie, a fellow-
Rosicrucian who had been close to Eliphas Lévi and founded other short-
lived occult societies before his death in 1886.° Certainly, the invention of
tradition was central to the process. Mathers helped write up rituals from the
cipher manuscripts provided by Westcott; these were adapted from German
Rosicrucianism, using language lifted from edited versions of papyri in the
British Museum as well as from the writings of the Elizabethan alchemist
and astrologer John Dee, and theories which owed much to numerology and
the Tarot.®° And inventing tradition came easily to wBy, already predis-
posed towards Mathers’s objectives: to ascend by stipulated ‘paths’ from the
world of material consciousness to that of transcendent archetypes.
He probably met Mathers in the Reading Room of the British Museum
after 1887 (wBy got his ticket on 29 June of that year). In his novel The Speckled
Bird he described Mathers in this milieu, and specified his age as thirty-six
or thirty-seven, which suggests 1890 to 1891.°” He could hardly have failed to
notice him. Mathers, born Samuel Liddell Mathers, was an apprentice guru
and self-created authority on ritual magic. He had not yet discovered his
later identity as Scots Jacobite romantic (‘the Comte de Glenstrae’), but was
still a compelling and awesome figure, at least to people of wBy’s predilec-
tions. At this stage the Golden Dawn's organization was still dominated
by Westcott, but Mathers’s time would come. To others, he probably
seemed seedy as well as silly: but his dominance over the kind of people
attracted to occultist circles, even in his later unstable period, was undeni-
able. By March 1890 Golden Dawn initiates included Moina (née Mina)
Bergson, sister of the philosopher and later Mathers’s wife, the Reverend
W.A. Ayton, an alchemically inclined clergyman obsessed by Jesuit conspira-
cies, and Annie Horniman, a thirty-year-old ex-art student and heiress,
who provided Mathers with his income. (Constance Wilde had been a mem-
ber, but had already left.) In the same month wsy became the seventy-eighth
name on the membership roll of the Isis-Urania Temple. His motto, and sobri-
quet, was ‘Demon Est Deus Inversus’: its recognition of the interdepen-
dence of opposites echoes not only Blavatsky but Blake.
He would, in turn, bring in figures from his own circle such as Florence
Farr (July 1890), Maud Gonne (November 1891), John Todhunter (February
1892) and George Pollexfen (December 1893). In the manner of Freemasonry,
the Golden Dawn spread by extending circles, like ripples ina pool. Conspiracy-
theories abounded, even before the advent of the ultra-conspiratorial
Aleister Crowley; the Reverend Ayton believed that ‘the [pre-Reformation]
Monasteries, under pretence of being Xtian Societies, were in reality Schools
of Magic, and latterly almost entirely of Alchemy’. By 1893 there would be
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 SECRET SOCIETIES 1889-1891
124 active members, with 170 initiated. Within the Order, antique precedents
were stressed. Initiates saw themselves in along tradition of priesthoods of
inquiry, where hermetic adepts worked upwards through levels of magical study,
emphasizing correspondences between colours, abstract qualities, designated
numbers and various other aspects of life, according to cabbalistic subdivi-
sions. A preoccupation with symbolism was in many ways a passport into the
Order, and it was no coincidence that the Golden Dawn attracted aspiring
artists and those of creative bent. Some of its rituals were closely connected
with theatrical experiments. Outsiders saw the acolytes as bourgeois medi-
ocrities, searching for a role: Maud Gonne, who soon left, winced at the way
commonplace clothes showed under their robes. But Mathers’s magnetic pres-
ence dominated, though even his acolytes admitted his manic ‘delusions’.”°
After a visit to Paris, Mathers declared his ‘Secret Chiefs’ had authorized him
to establish a Second, or Inner, Order, which would stress practical magic;
this especially appealed to wsy, as did Mathers’s supposed power to induce
visions by means of symbols.”!
‘It was a club,’ an ex-member remarked much later, ‘like any other club, a
place to pass the time in and meet one’s friends’.” Like all clubs, it subsisted
on gossip and internal crises. Briefly bankrolled by Annie Horniman as ‘cur-
ator’ of her father’s ethnographical museum at Forest Hill, Mathers lost this
position in 1891; the funds continued, however, and in May 1892 he decamped
to Paris, where Horniman was paying for his wife to study art. In his absence
Westcott deputized as leader until 1897, when Florence Farr took over.
Mathers became more markedly eccentric; the sensitivities of members like
Horniman could lead to sexual tensions; there was violent disagreement over
the importation of dubious Egyptian rites. wBy himself unwillingly ran near
the rocks of scandal when he had to evade the advances of Anna, ‘Comtesse’
de Bremont, briefly a member of the Order.” Still, he remained committed
not only to the institution but, for a decade, to its bizarre presiding spirit.
His family, and some of his friends, found it hard to keep patient. “Willie
has been out of sorts lately, wrote JBy to O’Leary in November 1890. ‘He over-
works himself — or rather over-fatigues himself seeing people & talking to
people upon various paradoxical subjects in which he believes or persuades
himself he is interested.’””* But the Golden Dawn’s magic was exerted in dif-
ferent ways. It was very much of its time: London in the 1880s pulsated with
societies and fraternities for self-betterment, moral and spiritual, often with
overlapping memberships. Through it, wBy could not only advance the
search for magic which had preoccupied him since his art school days; he could
(and did) meet people who interested him, who were attracted by him, and
who (like Horniman) might play a useful role in the drama of his life. The
fact that the Golden Dawn provided rich fishing-grounds for netting eccentrics
105
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

would, like so much else in wBy’s life, eventually be made to serve his art. In
the meantime, it provided a dimension at once mysterious and glamorous,
located in the unlikely purlieus of Fitzrovia, Camden Town and Shepherd’s
Bush. With its complicated, eclectic, but strictly defined grades, tests and exam-
inations, the Golden Dawn approximated to a sort of university. It filled the
need for self-education, and provided themes and motifs linked to the imagery
of classical and folk myths: all of which appealed to wBy’s fondness for self-
referencing patterns. The language which Mathers created for initiates to
approach their ‘Higher Genius’ implied the kind of transcendent powers for
which wy longed.” From 1892, the secrecy of the brotherhood was amplified
by its retraction into the Second Order (Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis, or
R. R. et A. C.): Mathers’s Rosicrucian inner circle, entered by complicated
rituals, and devoted to magic. And when Mathers left for Paris, that city became
a joint focus for the two intoxicating involvements which dominated wBy’s
life by 1890: the secret society of magical ritual, and the mysterious world of
Maud Gonne. Finally, as “Hiereus’, or mentor, he would supervise her pre-
paration for and initiation into the Golden Dawn and ‘lead her in the Path
that conducts from Darkness to Light’.
The uses of occultism were manifold. Famously, in later life, he remem-
bered that magic gave him metaphors for his poetry; this seems to have been
a half-conscious motivation from early on. In his Autobiographies he took care
to stress the importance of intellectual discipline, and the possibility of auto-
suggestion and telepathy. But from 1889 to 1890 there were other reasons
too. The world of the Golden Dawn provided a compensation for the daily
struggle in Bedford Park: a sign that, somewhere, a world might exist where
reality could echo and confirm his magnificent imagination. This could prove
a poetic tradition encompassing not only Blake but even Tennyson; and,
perhaps most importantly, an area of authority where he could assert him-
self over Maud Gonne. In a cancelled fragment of his unpublished novel a
few years later he wrote of the ‘intimacy which is only possible among lovers
and among fellow mystics; they had shared with one another the long hid-
den secrets of their life, and their dream of [the] future was the same’.”°
Upheavals and tragedies in her own life made her deeply susceptible to the
consolations of occult promises. wBy rapidly discovered this and used it. Here,
at last, was a sphere where he was ‘complete’, and she was not.
Occult connections could fuse with nationalist activities in a way peculiarly
attractive to Gonne; when wey wrote a celebrated letter to O’Leary in July
1892, stating that the magical life was at the centre of all he did, the context
was the proposed enlistment of Mathers (wearing his Jacobite revolution-
ary hat) for Fenian activities.”? All in all, occultism had a particularly Irish
relevance; in 1891 WBY was greatly excited by reading Dr Adam Clarke’s
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 SECRET SOCIETIES 1889-1891

memoirs, dealing with sorcery in eighteenth-century Dublin, and when mil-

lenarian hopes of nationalist revolution developed at the end of the decade,
occult divination came into its own.*° In some areas of nationalist activity wBY’s
position was ambiguous and his commitment suspect; occultism combined
with Irishness, however, might not only confer political credibility but weave
a lover’s spell.

IV
Throughout 1890 wy continued to build up other networks of association,
often (like the Golden Dawn) operating through the fraternities of Bedford
Park. His fascination with Florence Farr, a vague and unconventional beauty
about to embark on an affair with Bernard Shaw, was sealed by a quintessential
Bedford Park occasion: her performance in Todhunter’s play4 Sicilian Idyll
at the local theatre on 5 May 1890. wy had first heard the play read at home
in Blenheim Road, but his ecstatic reviews for the Boston Pilot and the
Providence Sunday Journal were prompted by more than duty. A Sicilian Idyll,
which was essentially a tableau, reads now as derivative pastiche; but its con-
temporary production struck wBy as a revelation of anti-materialist art, and
its subsequent West End succés d’estime suggested the wider possibilities of
coterie culture. His fascination with the pose adopted by Todhunter, and the
idea that an artistic movement or organization might claim critical attention
by asserting itself against the dominant mode in poetry, helped to inspire him.
It was no coincidence that May 1890 was also the month when he first men-
tions the group of writers, meeting regularly in the Cheshire Cheese pub off
Fleet Street, who constituted themselves the ‘Rhymers Club’.
The rudiments of such a circle were probably in existence in January 1890.""
It was mainly ‘Celtic’, with a strong Irish predominance. Rhys, Rolleston and
wByY were original moving spirits, joined off and on by Todhunter, Lionel
Johnson, Ernest Dowson, Richard Le Gallienne, John Davidson and others.
‘Celticism’ could be very flexible; Victor Plarr claimed it on account of an
Alsatian father, and Arthur Symons stressed his own Welsh and Cornish con-
nections. Edgar Jepson maliciously claimed that the epicene Lionel Johnson
demonstrated his Irish credentials by ‘addressing me as “me dearr” ’.*” The
Celtic element, in any case, became diluted with time. In the summer of 1891
wey listed ‘regular “Rhymers” who are now in London’ as George Greene,
Ernest Radford, Symons, Davidson, Le Gallienne, Johnson, Edward Garnett,
Dowson, Todhunter and Edwin Ellis. That November, John Davidson
described a meeting at Lionel Johnson's:
Low-ceiled rooms on third floor in Fitzroy Street, but plenty of space, walled with
books and overpowering pictures by Simeon Solomon. Lionel moving about among
107
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

them like a minnow, or an anatomical preparation — the Absin [the] you remember.
George-a-Greene, the Pindar of Wakefield who translates Carducci was there; also
Ernest Radford, forked radish that would fain be an eagle, and who begins his books
‘As my friend Walter Pater said to me on Saturday — no it was Sunday afternoon’;
W.B. Yeats the wild Irishman, who lives on water-cress and pemmican and gets drunk
on the smell of whisky, and can distinguish and separate out as subtly as death each
individual cell in any literary organism; Rolleston, once an Irish Adonis — now a con-
sumptive father of four children; Dowson and Clough, two rosebud poets.*

Contemporaries outside the group saw it as an efficient machine for

mutual admiration (if the word his admirers used most often about the early
WBY was ‘imagination’, the phrase which came most readily to his detrac-
tors was ‘log-rolling’). For wBy himself, the importance of the Rhymers was
more complex. They filled his need for what Balzac called a cénacle, or a
mutually supportive literary circle. They remain preserved in hisAutobiographies
(and a series of public lectures from about 1910) as ‘the tragic generation’, illus-
trating the theories he was evolving in his middle years: unfinished people,
incapable of a religious instinct, mired in bohemia. At the time, this was
not so obvious. Some Rhymers were bohemian, notably Dowson, who was
already celebrated for a youth dominated by hashish, drink and belles de nuit;
but even he was, as early as 1896, wryly amused at the highly coloured way
Symons presented this ethos to the general public.** Less generally empha-
sized was a strong homoerotic subculture. Charles Ricketts and Charles
Shannon, whose high-camp ménage acted as a court of arbitration for aes-
theticism in painting, printing and odyets d'art, were unofficial patrons. The
tone was sustained by Lionel Johnson's poems of repressed desire, and the
presence of John Gray (in some ways a Ricketts—Shannon creation), who lent
his face and his name to the hero of Wilde’s coded homosexual novel.*
Wilde himself looked in and out. The formidably well-read Johnson was, at
this stage, a powerful and decisive intellectual mentor for the ‘incomplete’ Yeats.
One of the most striking bonds between members of the Rhymers Club was
their joint influence as a reviewing mafia, exercising decisive influence on the
Star, the Pall Mall Gazette, the Speaker, the Daily Chronicle, the Bookman and
wsy’s American outlets. Moreover, one leading Rhymer, with whom wBy
rapidly formed a close friendship, had infiltrated literary London with even
more precocious success than wBy himself. This was Arthur Symons.
Symons was an exact contemporary of wBy. He too was a poetry-struck
provincial, still living with his parents and determined to make a literary
career. Though his trail-blazing book on the Symbolist movement was nine
years in the future, he was already a published poet and an influential critic.
After early Browning-worship he had attached himself to Walter Pater as
a mentor, and produced commentaries on Meredith, Michael Field, Vernon

108
 SECRET SOCIETIES 1889-1891
Lee and other vogueish contemporaries; when he met wBy in 1890 he had
just discovered literary Paris, whose English impresario he would become.
Like wry, he had cultivated Rhys and been rewarded by a commission to edit
a Camelot selection (of Leigh Hunt, though the enterprising Symons had
not previously read him). Boyishly handsome, Symons was good at ‘collect-
ing’ eminent people, and they gave his first poetry collection a fair wind in
the spring of 1888.
The Symons encountered in 1890 was not the sexually obsessed and men-
tally unstable ex-puritan of later years, whose image is so memorably fixed
in wBy’s Autobiographies. But he would introduce his Irish friend to several
of his own preoccupations, including hashish and dance (it was probably with
Symons that wBy saw Loie Fuller perform, bequeathing him an enduring
image). Though wsy lacked a conventional musical ear, the Symbolist obses-
sion with connections between music and literature appealed to him: the
nuanced language of individual movements, the harmonies of atmosphere.
How far Symons actually awakened this interest in Symbolism is another
matter; wBy took good care to stress that his interest went back to reading
Boehme, Blake and Swedenborg in the early 1880s.” But Symons read him
Verlaine and Mallarmé, and preached the techniques of modern Symbolism.
And it seems likely that through Symons wy came to grips with Pater.
Paterian influences pervade the literary world of the 1880s and 1890s, and
many of them echo wBy’s own preoccupations: the idea of the poet as priest,
the ascetic and hieratic dimensions of the artist’s life, and the aphoristic
lessons of Pater’s essay ‘Style’. A decade later wBy remembered ‘sitting all day
ina Dublin garden trying to persuade myself that Walter Pater was a bad writer,
and for no better reason that that he perplexed me and made me doubtful of
myself’;** but his own prose would remain, in many respects, Paterian. In that
stately language he would later memorialize the Rhymers’ lack of centre, and
their belief in the self-referencing nature of art. But they were much less
consistent than that. They were riven with disagreements; Todhunter and
Johnson specifically attacked the doctrine of ‘art for art’s sake’. They did
subscribe to a certain cult of Wilde, particularly Intentions and Dorian Gray
(both published in May 1891), shared by wy. In Johnson's case at least, this
carried overt homerotic implications.” But the Rhymers’ most passionate desire
was for publication. wBy accordingly cultivated the publisher John Lane on
the Rhymers’ behalf; the first Book ofthe Rhymers Club appeared in February
1892, and wey pressed on Tynan the suitability of the group as subject for a
major article.” The Book included both ‘Innisfree’ (first published in the
National Observer on 13 December 1890, and widely noticed) and “The Man
who Dreamed of Faeryland’, which struck Symons as wBy’s best poem yet.
As far as he and Johnson were concerned, wBy’s position in the Rhymers was
109
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

as ‘the one cygnet among the ducklings’,” and reading their Book it is hard
to disagree.
wey knew how to make the most of this society, as of the others he formed
and joined. But he was also aware that the Rhymers did not represent a single,
coherent approach, though he grouped them together in a piece for the
Boston Pilot in April 1892: “The typical young poet of our day is an aesthete
with a surfeit, searching sadly for his lost Philistinism, his heart full of an
unsatisfied hunger for the commonplace. He is an Alastor tired of his woods
and longing for beer and skittles.’ But this contemporary commentary on
the future ‘tragic generation’ deliberately ended by singling out Todhunter
for praise because of his Irishness. ‘England is old and her poets must scrape
up the crumbs of an almost finished banquet, but Ireland still has full tables.’
This was a note calculated for Irish American ears, which it was safe to play
across the Atlantic; his fellow-Rhymers, however ‘Celtic’ they thought them-
selves, would have felt more equivocal on the subject.
The company of the Rhymers, combined with life among the illuminati
of the Golden Dawn, did much to create wBy’s perceived image in the early
1890s: whether seen as compellingly attractive, grotesquely affected or (in
Aleister Crowley’s phrase) ‘a lank dishevelled demonologist’. ‘Such a figure,’
wrote Frances Wynne, a breezy and conventional Irish Protestant girl who
wrote poetry. ‘Hair a yard long and full of mysticism and magic.’ Symons
advised him to wear black as ‘elegant and inexpensive’,* which added to the
aura. In middle and old age he would talk endlessly about the Rhymers, gen-
eralizing from the dissolute lives and tragic fates of Dowson and Symons in
order to present them as a generation doomed through their search for lib-
eration: whereas he had found salvation by consecrating himself to the search
for a cause.”
But the literary connections he was building into his life were not neces-
sarily among doomed bohemians; and they were no less influential for that.
In October 1890 Edward Garnett agreed to read John Sherman for Fisher
Unwin, by March 1891 wy reported he was ‘quite enthusiastic’. It seemed
that The Countess Kathleen, the Blake project and now John Sherman might
all be published in 1891: ‘I shall be well in evidence’.*° The novel appeared in
Fisher Unwin's ‘Pseudonym Library’ under the fairy-sobriquet ‘Ganconagh’,
but wey made no secret of his authorship. The appearance of a work so closely
modelled on his Sligo background, and the continuing dilemmas of his per-
sonal life, led to some gloomy self-analysis — poured out to Tynan.
There is more of myselfin it than in anythingIhave done. I dont imagine it will please
many people but some few it may please with some kind of permiment pleasure . . .
Except for the wish to make a little moneyIhave no desire to get that kind of pass-
ing regard a book wins from the many. To please the folk of few books is ones great
IIO
 SECRET SOCIETIES 1889-1891

aim. By being Irish I think one has a better chance of it — over here there is so much
to read & think about that the most a writer can usually hope for is that kind of un-
prosperous prosperity that comes from writing books that lie amid a half dozen of
others on a drawing room table for a week.”
For all the personal inspiration, however, and notwithstanding the Yeats/
Pollexfen dichotomy which provided the theme of the book, his mother’s fam-
ily barely noticed its appearance. ‘I don’t think any of my Sligo relations — except
possibly George Pollexfen — has ever read this Sligo story,’ he wrote in Augusta
Gregory’s copy ten years later. ‘One apologised to me every summer for not
reading it, for several years. She used to say “I had a copy once but somebody
borrowed it.” I am sure that copy was given her. She would never have spent
a 1/— on such a purpose.”
In 1891 reactions closer to hand preoccupied him far more. “Willie seems
very well & is occupied in getting people to review his novel,’ wrote JBy drily
to O’Leary in November.” This was no more than the truth. ‘When you review
it, wBy warned Tynan, ‘you might perhaps, if you think it is so, say that
Sherman is an Irish type. I have an ambition to be taken as an Irish novelist
not as an English or cosmepolitan one chosing Ireland as a background.”
She obediently stressed the author’s rootedness in Sligo, reinforcing the
image of an Irish writer launched on the British market. The accompany-
ing fantasy-tale Dhoya was calculated to a similar effect; it stimulated the
National Observer to ask for more of the same, beginning the series of
mystical stories which wBy would later gather together as The Secret Rose.
Irishness and occultism, vitally connected, now constituted an essential part
of his appeal.
The reviews of John Sherman and Dhoya, nearly all of which obligingly
named the author, were uniformly respectful. The Pseudonym Library was
intended for cheap holiday reading,’”’ and Fisher Unwin’s aggressive mar-
keting produced respectable sales; 1,644 paper copies were printed, and 356
cloth. Even if all sold, wsy’s half-profit contract meant he received nothing
on the first thousand copies, but by early November this hurdle was cleared.
yBy reported in December that “Willie hears his novel is selling fairly well’,"”
and by then he was expecting at least £30. The departure into conventional-
ity pressed by his father had not brought a spectacular material reward. But,
taken with The Countess Kathleen (now scheduled for 1892), and the poems
he had published since Oisin in January 1889, wBy’s achievement so far seemed
to confirm what he would later state as a thesis: the Rhymers lacked a coher-
ent centre, for all their immersion in Art, but Ireland could inspirationally
make up the deficiency.’” In pursuit of this theme, and in association with
Maud Gonne, wy had already embarked upon a campaign to prove the point.
Simultaneously, he had to establish his own political credentials.
III
Chapter5:
THE BATTLES OF THE Books
1891-1893

I know that mywork has been done in every detail with a delib-
erate Irish aim, but it is hard for those who know it in fragments
to know that, especially if the most that they know of me is about
some contest with Irish opinion.

wey toJ.M. Hone, 2 January 1916

Ir is not easy to establish what formal links, if any, wy had established to

the Irish Republican Brotherhood before the 1890s. Part of the reason lies in
the obscurity of the revolutionary movement itself, but there are also a num-
ber of conflicting testimonies. In old age he liked to say he was a Fenian ‘of
the school of John O’Leary’, and Maud Gonne (also in old age) denied that
she had been responsible for his politics:
Willie joined the IRB before I did, possibly before we met for the first time at John
O'Leary’s tea party, but more probably | think, the following year [i.e. 1888], for it
was in London. He told me he was a member when he had gone to live by him-
self in Woburn Buildings. I was sworn in by Mark Ryan much later, I think about
1896 or 7.’

This implies some confusion about dates; it also contradicts wBy’s own
statement that he ‘never took any oath but regarded himself as one of the
party’.” But that denial comes from a period when he was anxious to dis-
tance himself from extreme republicanism, and the idea that wBy was
sworn in during the 1880s deserves some attention. The Young Ireland Society
of York Street in Dublin, which he had joined in October 1885, was seen by
the detectives of Dublin Castle as an IRB organization, and certainly took
a neo-Fenian stance; wBy may well have taken the oath during his membership.
But the Young Irelanders included many people whose republicanism was
purely verbal. wBy’s Autobiographies and other evidence confirm that his real
commitment came when he joined the secessionist Irish National Alliance,
through Mark Ryan, originally formed in America in 1895; he was probably
a formal but inactive member of the main body before then. It is not un-
likely, given his predilection for oaths and societies, that he joined the IRB
under O’Leary’s influence in the late 1880s — though Dublin Castle heard noth-
ing of it. More relevant is the almost complete dearth of ‘advanced’ political
II2
 THE BATTLES OF THE BOOKS I8gI-1893
sentiments in his correspondence up to the mid-1890s, and indeed the pau-
city of any political comments at all.
The exception, inevitably, is the period of the Parnellite split. In Decem-
ber 1890 Parnell, his liaison with Mrs O’Shea exposed in the divorce court,
had to fight to retain leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party, eventually
refusing to relinquish power. His minority of supporters were ranged against
the majority, who preferred not to jeopardize the alliance with Gladstone’s
Liberals. Even without the vociferous anti-Parnellism which was rapidly
mobilized among the Catholic clergy, the majority’s dependence on an
English alliance put O’Leary firmly and publicly in the Parnellite camp.* WBY
took a similar line, writing that Parnell ‘has driven up into dust & vacuum
no end of insincerities’.* But he also implied that his support of Parnell arose
from dislike of the combination of the priests and ‘the Sullivan gang’ (a
political mafia which included T. M. Healy); and he hoped the Liberals would
now pass ‘a good [Home Rule] measure if any measure at all’.6 While he
became a contributor to the Parnellite paper United Ireland, it did not stop
him writing for the ultra~-Tory National Observer (though he found it
difficult to introduce nationalist productions such as Ellen O’Leary’s Lays
of Country, Home and Friends). When the issues of politically correct cre-
dentials arose, as with the tricky question of Rolleston’s projected history of
Fenianism, wBy’s argument was consistent: such subjects should be tackled
by ‘good Irish men who can write’, whether or not (by implication) they
were republicans.
When he finally managed to get to Ireland in the summer of 1891, after
constant postponements because of work on Blake, much had changed. Cen-
tral members of his Dublin circle, like the poets Rose Kavanagh and Ellen
O'Leary, had died; O’Leary was adrift and preoccupied; the nationalist
movement was in chaotic disarray. Arriving in Dublin by 20 July, he visited
the Tynans before moving on to stay with Charles Johnston at Ballykilbeg
in County Down (leaving a litter of belongings behind him). He had delayed
in Dublin because Maud Gonne’s arrival was imminent: but her movements
were elusive, and apparently dictated by political priorities. ‘Miss Gonne
said definitely in one of her notes that she must (if you please) be in Ireland
on 31st Julywhen Dillon & O’Brien [political prisoners] are released, wrote
Oldham to Sarah Purser. “That is the only fixed date about her eccentri-
cities (in mathematical terms) that I could coax out of her.”’ She arrived on
22 July, and wsy called at her hotel, finding her exhausted, depressed, vul-
nerable. “The old hard resonance had gone and she had become gentle and
indolent. I was in love once more and no longer wished to fight against it.’
None the less, he went to Ballykilbeg as arranged, though she summoned
him back by 3 August. All this required small loans from O’Leary. Another
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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

sojourn with the Tynans followed, where Katharine, now engaged to Hinkson,
was irritated by his self-absorption.*
He had good reason for distraction. Gonne had written to him an ac-
count of a dream, where they had been (in a past life) brother and sister, sold
into slavery in Arabia. For wsy, this revelation of a spiritual association
in another existence seemed to seal their love; but it was accompanied by a
clear message from her about the platonic nature of their relationship. As he
later remembered it, he went to her at once and asked her to marry him. ‘No,
she could not marry— there were reasons — she would never marry; but in words
that had no conventional ring she asked for my friendship.’ On 4 August they
visited Howth together, a part of both their pasts; he felt more bound to her
than ever. On 7 August he sent her the first of a series of love-poems, “The
White Birds’. Yet for six more years her letters continued to open: ‘My dear
Mr Yeats’. Her unattainability had been safely fixed.
From Whitehall, wey moved to the very different surroundings of 3Upper
Ely Place. These rooms, taken in the name of a Theosophist civil servant called
F.J. Dick, harboured a bohemian commune of occultists, and would provide
him with a regular refuge over the next couple of years. (He even helped Russell
paint a mural in one of the rooms, a collaboration he later strategically for-
got.”) Here he wrote an essay on Russell, who had introduced him to this
circle, as well as ‘A Faery Song’ — perhaps inspired by his efforts to collect fairy
lore at Ballykilbeg. But his activities, especially after Gonne’s return to France,
focused more and more on the idea ofa convention of literary societies, which
eventually took place in the Rotunda on 15 September, under O’Leary’s chair-
manship. This was, effectively, the beginning of a long campaign in the cause
of nationalist culture, which would dominate wBy’s life for the next year.
His political commitments in the early 1890s relate closely to the vicissi-
tudes of his private life; but the subject is inescapably coloured by how he viewed
it long afterwards. In his Autobiographies he implies that he embraced extreme
nationalism as a way of winning Maud Gonne. She was always irritated by
the ‘misconception that many people have, that Willie’s real devotion to Ire-
land started with his love for me — it did not, he got that from his child days
in Sligo and the influence of those mountains and lakes.’"® But this misses
the point: that his intellectual nationalism might have been radicalized into
Fenian separatism in order to qualify himself as an appropriate suitor. His
obsession, and her elusiveness, fuelled a sense of his own insufficiency — as
a lover, as a nationalist, and even as an Irishman. Her decisive commitment
to popular feeling, her passionate one-sidedness, filled him with admiration
and foreboding; he would celebrate it all his life. But (like his father) he felt
a certain suspicion about English conversions to passionate identification
with Ireland. Gonne’s holy mission cut directly across the more nuanced,
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 THE BATTLES OF THE BOOKS 1891-1893
ambiguous kind of Irishness which wsy inherited from his background,
and which he was now trying to reconstruct. Literary Fenianism in general,
and O’Leary’s salon in particular, might provide a safe meeting ground, but
a conflict of commitments always loomed.
The other point about wsy’s nationalist activities is one that he repeated
over and over again in later life: an early form appeared in the first draft of his
Autobiographies. After the death of Parnell in October 1891, he states, ‘I knew
by a perception that seemed to come into my mind from without, so sudden
it was, that the romance of Irish public life had gone and that the young, per-
haps for many years to come, would seek some unpolitical form for national
feeling.’ This begged the question that cultural revival, as we have seen, had
begun several years before as a function of constitutional nationalism’s suc-
cess, not its failure. But it created the context for wBy’s mission to create a
national literature from 1891. The enterprise could be presented as politics
continued by other means, side-stepping collisions between the various
degrees of nationalist commitment across the spectrum, from literary Fenianism
to hard-line separatism. If this was his intention, it was doomed: because where
he and his colleagues were fated to disagree was precisely the question of po-
liticizing literature.
In September 1891, a month before Parnell died, an attempt began among
nationalist intellectuals to reorganize and bring together the literary Young
Ireland Societies of the mid-1880s. wBy, probably prompted by O’Leary, pub-
lished a manifesto in United Ireland on 3 October, following the inaugural meet-
ing of what was called the “Young Ireland League’ on 15 September 1891.'? In
wey’ later, Olympian view, battle-lines were already being drawn up between
the moderate ‘pan-Celtic’ cultural lobby and intellectual ‘Fenians’ (or fellow-
travellers) like himself. Much of the preparation for this, in wBy’s eyes at least,
involved Maud Gonne. But her difficult private life had become racked with
pain. After their emotional meeting in the summer of 1891 she returned to
her secret family in France, promising to come back to Ireland. But she was
kept from the inaugural meeting of the Young Ireland League by a tragedy:
her little son Georges died in France of meningitis on 31 August. When she
returned to Dublin on 10 October, way met her at Kingstown from the
mailboat that carried Parnell’s body. He had died suddenly at Brighton four
days before. But Maud Gonne’s mourning was not for him: her personal life
had been shattered.
She told wy she had adopted a child, who had died, but he was unpre-
pared for the state he found her in.

I met her on the pier and went with her to her hotel, where we breakfasted. She was
dressed in extravagantly deep mourning, for Parnell, people thought, thinking her
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very theatrical. We spoke of the child’s death. She had built a memorial chapel,
using some of her capital. ‘What did money matter to her now?’ From anotherIlearned
later on that she had the body embalmed. That day and on later days she went over
again the details of the death — speech was a relief to her. She was plainly very ill.
She had for the first days of her grief lost the power of speaking French, which she
knew almost as well as English, and she had acquired the habit, unlearned after-
wards with great difficulty, of taking chloroform in order to sleep. We were continu-
ally together; my spiritual philosophy was evidently a great comfort to her.”

The next ten days were charged with high voltage for both of them. All
nationalist Ireland was in astate of shock at Parnell’s death. wBy rapidly wrote
a banal piéce d’occasion for United Ireland (Mourn, and Then Onward!’),
which would come back to haunt him in later life.* But he also wrote a poem
which commemorated Gonne’s overture to him in July, and reflected her secret
sadness. It got as far as the proofs of his next collection, but he changed his
mind and never published it. This decision was partly dictated by its uneven
quality, but much more by the painful directness with which it reflected per-
sonal life.
Cyc.ies Aco
In memory of your dream one July night
The low crying curlew and peewit, the honey pale orb of the moon,
The dew covered grass in the valley, our mother the sea with her croon
The leaping green leaves in the woodland, the flame of the stars in the skies,
Are tossed in Love’s robe for he passes, and mad with Love’s feet for he flies.

You came and moved near me a little with pensive remembering grace
The sad rose colours of autumn with weariness mixed in your face,
My world was fallen and over, for your dark soft eyes on it shone;
A thousand years it had waited and now it is gone, it is gone.

“We were as if brother and sister of old in the desert land’,

How softly you spake it, how softly ‘I give but a friendly hand
They sold us in slavery together before this life had begun
But Love bides nobodies bidding being older than moon or sun.’
Ah cycles ago did I meet you and mingle my gaze with your gaze,
They mingled a moment and parted and weariness fell on our days,
And we went alone on our journeys and envied the grass covered dead
For Love had gone by us unheeding, a crown of stars on his head."

Gonne remained ina highly wrought state. Near collapse, she endured end-
less seances and visions with wsy and Russell, asking if a child could be
reincarnated and relying desperately on the uncertain expertise of the two
young occultists. Russell reassured her, but wBy felt secret doubts. Ata later
116
 THE BATTLES OF THE BOOKS 1891-1893
session with Moina Mathers in London, she saw avision ofa ‘grey lady’ who
had killed a child. wsy’s idea that this represented a previous incarnation
cannot have eased Gonne’s sense of loss and guilt; nor did a later revelati
on
that she had once been an Egyptian priestess whose corrupt lover, a priest,
had ‘given false oracles for money’. She was haunted by a dream ‘of journey-
ing on & on in a desert’. The association with her French lover seemed a
fated repetition of previous unhappiness. But her agony of autumn 1891, and
Russell’s consoling advice that a child could be reincarnated in the same
family, would bring about abizarre resolution. Two years later, still obsessed
by her secret tragedy, she brought Millevoye to the memorial chapel at Samois
where their son was interred, and in those strange surroundings they con-
ceived a child.
However, during the traumatic mourning for Georges in October 1891, her
resistance towards an alliance with wsy — forged in the pure light of hermetic
inquiry — was lowered. For his part, the poetry she inspired in this state
declared a need to protect her; drafts of ‘The Sorrow of Love’ and ‘When You
are Old’ date from this time.'” There is some evidence that he thought she
had agreed to marry him at this stage: if so, it may date from these transfigured
weeks, rather than from the interlude in August.’* As a final claim on her,
there was a shared possession: a notebook named “The Flame of the Spirit’,
bound in white vellum, with a series of poems inscribed to Gonne. Pages were
left blank for many more. wey had been assembling it since July; he gave it
to Gonne before she left Dublin, on 20 October. It contained love-poems like
‘Cycles Ago’, but also stern summons to occult service: ‘No daughter of the
Iron Times/The Holy Future summons you.’ Another contemporary note-
book, called “The Rosy Cross Lyrics’, is dominated by themes of suffering,
denial and consecration.
He who measured gain and loss
When he gave to thee the Rose
Gave to me alone, the cross.”

About a fortnight later, in London, she was initiated into the Golden Dawn.
Magic seemed, at last, to be granting him what he wanted.

II
wy had also returned to London (by 1 November), and found an ‘alley’ in
Gonne’s cousin May, who advised him to follow her to Paris. But he saw their
future elsewhere. He had extracted a promise from Gonne to work for the
new literary societies in Ireland over the winter: however, his real priorities
appear in an injunction to Russell. ‘Go & see her when she gets to Dublin &
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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

keep her from forgetting me & Occultism.° And he borrowed a pound from
O'Leary to pay his share of cab-travel when she returned.
In early December this frantic excitement (compounded by the publica-
tion of John Sherman and Dhoya in October) produced its usual reaction — a
black depression. Nor was he able to visit Dublin; though Rhys did, armed
with introductions from wBy to Oldham and O'Leary as a way of meeting
‘nationalist Ireland’. This mission shows that wBy’s London circle was now
co-operating in his Irish initiative. Late in 1891 it was decided to form an Irish
Literary Society, arising from the established Southwark Irish Literary Club.
On 28 December a planning meeting took place at Blenheim Road, prin-
cipally organized by D. J. O'Donoghue and wey, with Rolleston, Todhunter
and others in attendance. wy presented this as ‘starting a London branch
of the Young Ireland League’,” a Fenian agenda which some of his associ-
ates would quickly try to short-circuit. From the beginning the relationship
between Dublin and London activities provoked unease; and also from the
beginning a problem loomed in the titular presence of Sir Charles Gavan Dufty
as President of the new Irish Literary Society of London.
Gavan Duffy had spent a radical, nationalist youth as a Young Ireland
firebrand in the 1840s, later emigrated to Australia after a failed rebellion,
and ended up as Prime Minister of Victoria. wBy had met him through
O’Leary in 1889, and corresponded with him about Mangan and the ‘peas-
ant poet’ John Keegan: Gavan Duffy stood for nationalist literary culture in
the heroic period. In the interim he had become an experienced politician,
gentlemanly, resourceful and devious. Now living in respectable retirement
at Nice, his name was thought to add cachet, and a ‘national’ pedigree; but
his own approach to his involvement would be unexpectedly intervention-
ist as well as politically moderate. Meanwhile, way went ahead with what
to him was the most important aspect of the initiative: the plan for a series
of books called the ‘Library of Ireland’, to be published by Fisher Unwin.
Volumes would cost a shilling and appear every two months. Unsurprisingly,
wey was to be general editor — a condition insisted upon by Fisher Unwin,
he hastily told O’Leary. He also assured O’Leary that, in such hands, there
would be no danger of producing unreadable volumes by ‘men of learning who
cannot write’, and that the series would preach ‘sound national doctrine’. But
Gavan Duffy had his own interests here: nearly a year before he had written
to John T. Kelly of the Southwark Irish Literary Club, suggesting a programme
of reprints and promising to raise the capital. He was not prepared to relin-
quish this project to wBy and his dangerously extremist associates. A conflict
was inevitable.
wBy’s agenda also involved Maud Gonne, who was detailed to begin a
fundraising lecture-tour in France. Gonne first visited London in February
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 THE BATTLES OF THE BOOKS I8g1-1893
1892; one result was that wBy sent an early draft of ‘When You are Old’
with an accompanying piece ‘When You are Sad’, to Katharine Tynan on 2
March, for possible inclusion in a book of Irish love-songs. (Tynan included
neither.) Simultaneously he was working up a celebratory article on Gonne
for the Boston Pilot, and planting out in United Ireland the story that her
French lecture-tour had inspired ‘2000 articles about her speaches — or rather
the articles had reached this number a considerable time ago’? On g April
1892 the Irish Literary Society held its first meeting: wBy toasted Ireland’s
intellectual life, ‘when the pressure of political struggle is removed from the
country’. This could have meant liberation from the Saxon oppressor,
but was much more likely an anticipation of the Home Rule future still gen-
erally accepted. Rolleston was Secretary, and there was a strong Rhymer
presence — Todhunter, Johnson, Plarr and Arthur Hillier. Butifws¥ thought
that he could thereby manipulate the committee, he had much to learn. United
Ireland noted sharply that he was ‘irrepressible, but all at sea in matters of detail’.
Its editor, Edmund Leamy, raised a contentious issue by declaring that the
intellectual capital of Ireland must be in Dublin, given the dawning Home
Rule future.”
This harked back to a controversy which had been rumbling since March:
where should an Irish cultural initiative be located? By early May wey real-
ized he was becoming persona non gratain the cultural initiatives on both sides
of the Irish Sea. His initial idea had been to extend the Young Ireland League
to London, with its O’Learyite literary—Fenian principles; but his attempts
to manipulate this through his Rhymers clique (and publishing contacts) were
blocked by Rolleston and Gavan Duffy, while Dublin resentment at the
London initiative was brewing ominously. Moreover, the Young Ireland
League were not prepared to wait until the time came to continue the Yeatsian
agenda; they wanted to start their own kind of Society, unimpressed by wBy’s
combination of neo-Fenian rhetoric and high literary art.
On 10 May wey set off hurriedly to Dublin ‘to do my best to found there
a society of like purpose and nature’ to the Irish Literary Society. The London
initiative could not be successful ‘unless we persuade Ireland to take part with
us’ in developments like the Library of Ireland (and a travelling theatre com-
pany, one of the many new ideas floated at this time”). In a letter to United
Ireland on 14 May, he asserted the necessity to arrest denationalization: this
was why ‘we’ had founded ‘the Irish Literary Society, London’, and not to
‘do anything so absurd and impossible as to make London “the intellectual
centre of Ireland”’.° He had effectively abandoned the London terrain to
Rolleston, whether he recognized it or not, and was attempting to regain
the initiative in Ireland. But the attempt to bring literary societies in Ireland
together under the sagging Young Ireland League umbrella was fraught with
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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

difficulty: there was a rival in the field. On 21 May John T. Kelly, who had
been involved in the Southwark Irish Literary Club but had now returned
to Dublin, announced his intention to start a Dublin society ‘similar to the
one started in London, and entirely independent of it — a society which
shall be thoroughly national, in the broad meaning of the word, and non-
political’. wy and O’Leary rapidly involved themselves, and took part in the
meeting setting up the ‘National Literary Society’ on 9 June.” But the terms
of Kelly’s manifesto made it clear that aggressive Parnellism and neo-
Fenianism were unwelcome. wBy was aboard, but at a cost.
Now he had to claim the initiative. On 2 June wBy sent a manifesto to
the Conservative Dublin Daily Express. He gave hostages to fortune in his
hastily compiled model for the Library of Ireland: Gavan Duffy’s ballads,
‘The Spirit of the Nation’, John Mitchel’s O’Nei//. The idea of reissuing stand-
ards from Young Ireland’s heyday a half-century before was exactly what he
would shortly denounce — but he himself initially proposed such a formula,
while adding works ‘ranging from Fenianism to the education question, from
Oisin to Robert Emmet’. The objective was to make ‘national and legendary
heroes’ known to a larger audience than scholars. The Express responded
with a straightfaced leader stressing the literary talent to be found in the Trinity
College Senior Common Room, which was hardly what wBy meant; in
response he promptly wrote a rousing attack on the College’s culture for
United Ireland. The Express warned him that Irish political differences were
potent enough to constitute ‘a disqualification for the life in common ofa social
or literary club’.” The Dublin Figaro was more personal, producing a cari-
cature and a snide column: ‘I wonder how many Dublin folk are acquainted
with the personality or the work of the moving spirit in the new Irish Literary
Society? Not for the last time, wey was portrayed as someone who had
managed to fool opinion outside Ireland, but who would be seen for what he
was ‘at home’.”* But his private priority was to involve Gonne, and to com-
bine cultural and separatist politics in a way that would cement their personal
alliance. To O’Leary, currently in London, he trailed some ideas about the
revolutionary potential of Mathers’s murky connections in Paris; his own occult
art, he unwisely added, prophesied that the time might be right for Gonne’s
‘plan’.” O'Leary's scoffing reply called forth wsy’s celebrated defence of
magic being at the centre of his life.
Itis surely absurd to hold me ‘week’ or otherwise because I chose to persist in a study
which I decided deliberately four or five years ago to make next to my poetry the most
important pursuit of my life. Whether it be, or be not, bad for my health can only
be decided by one who knows what magic is & not at all by any amateur. The prob-
able explanation however of your somewhat testy post card is that you were out at
Bedford Park & heard my father discoursing about my magical pursuits out of the

I20
 THE BATTLES OF THE BOOKS 1891-1893
immense depths of his ignorance as to everything that I am doing & thinking. If
Thad not made magic my constant study I could not have written my Blake book
nor would “The Countess Kathleen’ have ever come to exist. The mystical life is the
centre of all that I do & all that I think & all that I write.°°
He certainly needed its consolations now. Despite Douglas Hyde’s presidency,
the National Literary Society gathered up hangers-on of organizations like
the Pan-Celtic Society, establishment ‘men of letters’ and much of the Dublin
milieu which wsy considered regressive, second-rate and collaborationist:
one of its early projects was to be a concert during Horse Show week. By the
end of July it was clear that the National Literary Society was far removed
from the neo-Fenian Young Ireland League. Moreover, Gavan Duffy had no
doubt which side he was on, and he was invited to chair the inaugural meet-
ing in August.*!
WBY's isolation was thrown into sharp relief when Gavan Duffy arrived
in Dublin. In his Autobiographies (otherwise a very uncertain guide to this
period) wy recalled his own reaction with bitter humour:
He brought with him much manuscript, the private letters of a Young Ireland poet-
ess, a dry but informing unpublished historical essay by Davis, and an unpublished
novel by William Carleton, into the middle of which he had dropped a hot coal, so
that nothing remained but the borders of every page. He hired a young man to read
him, after dinner, Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero-Worship, and before dinner was gracious
to all our men of authority and especially to our Harps and Pepperpots. Taylor com-
pared him to Odysseus returning to Ithaca, and every newspaper published his biog-
raphy . . . One imagined his youth in some little gaunt Irish town, where no building
or custom is revered for its antiquity; and there speaking a language where no word,
even in solitude, is ever spoken slowly and carefully because of emotional implica-
tion; and of his manhood of practical politics, of the dirty piece of orange-peel in
the corner of the stairs as one climbs up to some newspaper office; of public meet-
ings where it would be treacherous amid so much geniality to speak or even to think
of anything that might cause a moment’s misunderstanding in one’s own party. No
argument of mine was intelligible to him.»
WBYS resort was to raise against Gavan Duffy the memory of heroic,
Anglophobic extremism, by reminding him of the radical nationalism of
his Young Ireland youth. The contents of the Library of Ireland were still at
issue; WBY suggested starting with a study by Rolleston of Wolfe Tone, Lady
Wilde on Patrick Sarsfield, and himself on ‘ballad chronicles’. Gavan Duffy
had adroitly put himself at the head of the National Publishing Company,
set up to produce the books, and now claimed editorial powers as well. This
effectively cut out wBy, who protested in letters to the press. Fighting his
corner for a say in the Library’s contents, he claimed ‘a somewhat consider-
able experience of the editing of cheap books — I have edited five, some of
I21I
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

which were sold in thousands’; he attempted to propose an alternative

committee, which would include O’Leary and Hyde as well as ‘safe’ names
like Sigerson. But the skills which had brought Gavan Duffy to the top of
Victoria politics kept him smoothly obdurate. He could not publish works
‘which would add to the causes of distraction already existing in the coun-
try’. Hiding behind the proposed National Publishing Company, he and his
supporter, wBy’s old enemyJ.F. Taylor, were able to erect the wishes of the
‘shareholders’ against wBy’s alleged desire to forward ‘sectional’ interests —
a coded reference to extreme nationalism. wBy found himself not only tarred
with the Fenian brush, but accused (as so often before) of manipulating the
reputations of a self-serving literary coterie. ‘It is not an edifying spectacle
to see A reviewing B, and B in turn reviewing A, and both going into rap-
tures of admiration.”**
Fisher Unwin’s publication of The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends
and Lyrics at this very time handed weapons to the enemy, particularly in
the carefully constructed poem which framed the collection, ‘Apologia
addressed to Ireland in the coming days’. This manifesto repeated the theme
of his angry letter to O'Leary, fusing occultism and advanced nationalism
in a manner calculated to appeal to Maud Gonne, and to irritate nearly
everyone else. It was also the most powerful poetic rhetoric which he had
yet written.

Know that I would accounted be

True brother ofthat company
Who sang to sweeten Ireland’s wrong,
Ballad and story, rann and song;
Nor be I any less ofthem,
Because the red rose bordered hem
Of her whose history began
Before God made the angelic clan
Trails all about the written page,
For tn the world’s first blossoming age
The lightfall ofher flying feet
Made Ireland's heart begin to beat,
And still the starry candles flare
To help her lightfoot here and there,
And still the thoughts ofIreland brood,
Upon her holy quietude.

Nor may I less be counted one

With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson
Because to him who ponders well
My rhymes more than their rhyming tell
 THE BATTLES OF THE BOOKS 1891-1893
Of the dim wisdoms old and deep,
That God gives unto man in sleep.
For round about my table go
The magical powers to and fro.
In flood and fire and clay and wind,
They huddle from man’s pondering mind,
Yet he who treads in austere ways
May surely meet their ancient Laxe.
Man ever journeys on with them
After the red rose bordered hem.
Ah, fairies, dancing under the moon,
A druid land, a druid tune!

While still I may I write out true

The love I lived, the dream I knew.
From our birthday until we die
Is but the winking ofan eye.
And we, our singing and our love,
The mariners ofnight above,
And all the wizard thin 2s that go
About my table to and fro,
Are passing on to where may be
In truth’ consuming ecstasy
No place for love and dream at all,
For God goes by with white foot-fall.
I cast my heart into my rhymes,
That you in the dim coming times
May know how my heart went with them
After the red rose bordered hem.

Pace, inventiveness, rhythm and audacity struck the note already identified
as uniquely Yeatsian; it also announced his arrival as a frankly political poet.
But in practical terms he had lost. Even when Gavan Duffy’s and Rolleston’s
National Publishing Company failed, they still outflanked wBy by swiftly
approaching Fisher Unwin on their own accounts. His efforts to regain con-
trol were doomed, as Garnett’s peace-making attempts did not disguise the
fact that his own sympathies were with Rolleston in London.** O'Leary
soothingly told him to stay out of it until Gonne returned to Dublin (‘I know
you cant be kept away then’’’). wBy’s final appeal came on 16 November, cat-
egorically threatening a split between the London initiative and the Dublin
Society — which, he implied, supported him.
Our movement may split up on lines which the press will soon turn into one of
Parnellite Dublin, & the Parnellite young men in the country parts, against what they
will call “West British’ & “‘Whiggish’ Duffy & Rolleston. The most ardent of the

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youn[g] men are Parnellites & would be ready enough to raise such a cry against Duffy
who is unpopular for Michellite reasons (his reasonable but not very readable defence
never having made itself heard against the magnificent rhetoric of the JailJournal’).**

But this was unconvincing; he was now excluded, and even O’Leary censured
him for trying to make unauthorized publishing deals on the Society’s behalf.”
Rolleston put it succinctly: wBy had

chosen to make himself the leader of a small clique of what are called ‘advanced’ men
in Dublin who object to Sir C. Duffy on the score of his old quarrel with John
Mitchel, & I think he cannot so far retrace his steps as to make it possible for Sir C.
Duffy to work with him unless he is prepared to break with this clique altogether,
which he certainly will not do.*°

Garnett’s attempts to mollify wBy were less realistic: ‘I know you well enough
to know that you don’t want the credit & honour & glory — you want the
eternal things . . . Let Duffy be the English Monarch, & you & Rolleston
the joint Prime Ministers.’*!
wey had lost all along the line. The Library of Ireland did provide a few
books, including Thomas Davis's The Patriot Parliament and O’Grady’s Bog
of Stars. When its productions fell into wBy’s clutches as a reviewer, he
showed little mercy. But that was the only consolation left to him. The
London Irish Literary Society remained under Rolleston’s control until 1893,
when he returned to Dublin; while it provided a field for people like Lionel
Johnson to discover their roots, it never greatly appealed to wBy. The Dublin
_ National Literary Society was set on a path where it became more and more
pious and provincial. In June 1893 wBy’s high-handed and disorganized con-
duct of the Library subcommittee would be reprimanded by the Council
(superbly remembered in wsy’s Autobiographies as ‘half a dozen young men
who having nothing to do attended every meeting’). wBy himself occasionally
turned up at its meetings to make a defence, strike an attitude or publicize a
specific cause. By the early 1900s, even when the Society deigned to listen to
‘a weird and very melancholy and despairing composition’ by wsy, they
swiftly revived their spirits by reading ‘capital’ or ‘thrilling’ pieces with titles
like “Young Tim Clancy’ and “The Dead Hand’.* Ironically, by that point wBy
had separated from literary Fenianism as well. Accordingly, his Autobiographies
would claim that the struggle against Gavan Duffy was a battle between his
commitment to literary quality and the old Young Irelander’s wish for nation-
alist banalities. But this interpretation reflected his position since the early
19008, not his beliefs a decade earlier — when his plan had been to capture
the National Literary Society and its Library for the Fenian interest, against
the safe, all-embracing platitudes located in the middle of the nationalist road.
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III
At the climax of the battle in October 1892 he had published
an article in United
Ireland, “Hopes and Fears for Irish Literature’, which clearl
y argued for an
Irish literature of conviction, against the art-for-art’s-sake appro
ach of Eng-
lish contemporaries. At the end he loftily claimed that the true necess
ity for
the artist was work and solitude. This reflected his own circumstance
s. He
had been living in the Ely Place commune, not altogether happily: in
a pas-
sage dropped from his Autobiographies, he remarked that his companions
there
never spoke of politics, idealized the peasantry as an abstraction, and
com-
pletely failed to understand his love-poetry.** ‘Desperately hard up’, he had
retired to Sligo, brought there by the death of his grandmother Elizabeth
Pollexfen on 2 October 1892. Here he consoled himself with the review
s of
The Countess Kathleen, including two ecstatic pieces by Le Gallienne and
Johnson. Le Galliene was highly influential, and gave wBy ‘the best liftIhave
yet had’, but it was Johnson’s judgement which brought criticism of his work
to a new level: awarding wey the distinction of treating ‘Celtic notes of style
and imagination, in a classical manner . . . and his art is full of reasons *
Though other reactions were more uncertain, and the middle-brow William
Watson attacked him with gratifying fury in the [Wustrated London News, wBy’s
reputation was further advanced — notably with his publisher. He returned
to his project on duellists, now retitled Irish Adventurers’, but it was destined
never to appear. Between firing off his last salvoes to Rolleston and Garnett,
he investigated local fairy lore with his uncle George Pollexfen and his cousin
Lucy Middleton, ‘the only witch in the family’.** He was also writing fiction:
‘The Devil’s Book’, an early version of ‘The Book of the Great Dhoul and
Hanrahan the Red’, was produced at this time and appeared in the National
Observer on 26 November, one of wsy’s last essays in the stagey Irish con-
versational idiom which he would soon denounce.“
But the real world kept breaking in. By now his grandfather was also seri-
ously ill, and he too died on 12 November: calling impatiently at the end for
his dead wife and saying with relief, just as he died, ‘Ah, there she is.’4” His
estate was surprisingly small: Susan Yeats’s share came to £116. us. 11d., and
his son-in-law Arthur Jackson took over the firm. The great figures of his grand-
parents, who had towered over wBy’s childhood summers (and would dom-
inate his early autobiography twenty years later) were gone. ‘With them
went Sligo for us,’ wrote Lily, ‘8 all its charm and beauty, & our childhood
seemed pushed back into space.”
By the time he returned to the fray in Dublin in late November, wBy’s mood
was necessarily more sombre. The presidential address to the National
Literary Society delivered by Douglas Hyde on 25 November gave him much
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to think about. Under the title ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland’,
this rapidly achieved legendary status. It was credited with inspiring the
foundation of the Gaelic League a year later, and became a canonical text
of Irish cultural nationalism. But if the address is read in the context of its
time, one can see Hyde stepping very carefully indeed between the fissures
opened up in post-Parnell politics. While his basic argument was that Irish
language, Irish pastimes and even Irish dress must be defined against Eng-
lish modes, he was careful to repeat that this message was essentially unpoli-
tical: an agenda of cultural revival should be as attractive to Unionists as to
nationalists and was above politics. A revival of language was the necessary
pre-condition for any Irish identity at all; without it they might as well
accept their fate and become a people purely imitative of English modes, ‘the
Japanese of Western Europe’.
Many of Hyde’s audience besides wBy must have been waiting to see
whose side the speaker would adopt: the comfortable collaborative culture
of Sigerson and Gavan Duffy (both on the platform with him) or the more
uncompromising ideals of wBy, and his own neo-Fenian youth. Hyde (not
for the first or last time) neatly side-stepped the choice, and moved the argu-
ment on to a different plane. Moreover, this opened up a territory with dis-
turbing implications for wBy. Hyde’s address was Anglophobic enough to
please him (and Gonne); but its central argument denied that there could be
a distinctively Irish literature in the English language, and this contradicted
everything wBy’s own work stood for (as well as presenting him with an
uneasy linguistic conundrum).
His answer appeared in United Ireland on 17 December 1892, and argued
unequivocally that Irish literature could be written in English, but in a Gaelic
mode: Hyde’s own translations were adduced as proof, and the Irish language
identified with ‘the snows of yester year’. But this put him in awkward com-
pany (Dowden? Mahaffy?), so he simultaneously proved his credentials as a
hammer of the Unionist establishment by a vituperative review of George
Savage-Armstrong’s collected works. As a professor of English literature,
Armstrong ‘cut himself off from the life of the nation’, and therefore doomed
himself to literary futility. The victim of this onslaught, an old friend of ysy,
comforted himself with the thought that no ‘person of brains & education
is likely to be impressed by Willy Yeats’s opinion on any subject’.
Much later wey saw Hyde’s initiative as a deliberately political act: ‘with
more success . . . [bidding] for that forsaken leadership’, and ‘co-ordinating
intellectual and political forces” as he himself had failed to do. This was true,
but Hyde was trying to bring it off by evading the kind of open political com-
mitment with which wsy was uneasily identified. As for his own strategy, the
final nail was put in the coffin by his failure in early January to commandeer
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 THE BATTLES OF THE BOOKS 1891-1893
(or at least infiltrate) the publication committee of
the London Irish Liter-
ary Society. wBy’s claim to be an associate editor was ruled
out because of
his intemperate attacks on Gavan Duffy, and (Rolleston
added) because
‘one must possess more scholarship (of the Dryasdust type
if you like) than
Y does’.** The future ignominious history of the National Publis
hing Company
was not yet consolingly evident; wBy was forced to recogn
ize how counter-
productive his tactics had been, and how easily he made enemi
es.” He did
not give up; a last vain attempt to trammel Gavan Duffy kept
him in Ire-
land just when his and Ellis’s Blake was being published. On 27 Janua
ry 1893
Hyde witnessed ‘a terrible row between Taylor and Yeats, between
O’Leary
and Sigerson’ at a committee meeting (‘I never saw anything like it,
but I
escaped without a blow, thank God’). On 2 February there was ‘uproar
again’
between the same antagonists about the publication plans.*? wBy was busi-
ly enlisting others to write for a projected journal (eventually the Irish Home
Reading Magazine), into which he planned to infiltrate poetry and mysti-
cism; he projected a provincial tour, disseminating improving books in the
company of Maud Gonne; further consolation was provided by his ini-
tiation (with Florence Farr) into the ‘Portal’ grade of the Golden Dawn on
20 January.”* But in Irish cultural politics the advanced men had lost this
battle, and wBy knew it.
Most bitterly of all, he had been abandoned by Gonne. She cancelled
her provincial engagements ‘owing to illness’ and returned to Paris after only
two lectures.** On her next visit to Dublin in February they quarrelled, prob-
ably over her friendship with wsy’s enemy J. F. Taylor; she became ill and
put herself under Dr Sigerson’s care. wBy was kept away from her; rumours
circulated that she had become pregnant by him and had an abortion. The
reality was that she had returned to Millevoye and, in December, would
conceive her second child by him: the attempt to reincarnate Georges in a
sacrificial act of intercourse by her dead son’s tomb.
Gonne’s life was spectacularly different from the fantasy wBy had in-
carnated in The Countess Kathleen, if no less surreal. For the moment he
could feel close to her only through the work she inspired. He read from the
Countess to the National Literary Society on 26 January and stayed in Dub-
lin, continuing to associate himself with advanced nationalist opinion; at a
National Club celebration of Robert Emmet’s anniversary, he ‘gave vent to
the strong feelings of those present’ by thrillingly quoting Emmet’s speech
from the dock.* This would have pleased Gonne, though her own appear-
ances were mostly before French audiences. She lectured in Ireland during
April, but by late May she was back in France, and wBy, after a Sligo visit,
had returned to London.” There was, he recorded much later, ‘a great breach’
between them at this time, ‘for reasons I knew nothing of’.** On 30 June he

iy,
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wrote ‘Into the Twilight’ — a poem suffused with Gonne’s idea of Ireland as
a mystical motherland, but also confronting the misery he had suffered
through her, and through the politics so inextricably wound into their rela-
tionship. Thus, he later remembered, he ‘called to myself courage once
more’.””
Outworn heart in a time outworn,
Come clear off the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight,
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.
Thy mother Eri is always young,
Dew ever shining and twilight grey,
Though hope fall from thee or love decay
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue,
Come heart, where hill is heaped upon hill,
For there live the mystic brotherhood
Of the flood and flame, of the height and wood,
And laugh out their whimsey and work out their will.
And Time and the World are ever in flight,
And God stands winding his lonely horn,
And love is less kind than the grey twilight,
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.

He had written, less consciously and more ambiguously, about a similar rela-
tionship in “The Devil’s Book’ the previous November. ‘O’Sullivan the Red’,
insouciant peasant poet, summons through magica fairy goddess Cleona. She
appears as ‘a tall woman, dressed in saffron like the women of ancient Ireland’,
with shining eyes and statuesque beauty. Dim at first, her image strengthens
with each visitation, until she achieves a mortal beauty from ‘the sorrowful
dhrames o’ the world’ and offers herself to him. Faced with her reality,
O'Sullivan panics and rejects her: preferring his enslavement to the phantom.
This too would carry a prophetic charge.

IV
For all his reverses, he had become a more public figure than before. His father
wondered, only half ironically, if his eldest son nurtured ambitions to stand
for the Irish Parliamentary Party, like Rolleston or Arthur Lynch. ‘It would
I think be a hindrance to Willie’s proper work which is poetry and literature,
but he would greatly like the new experience to say nothing of the glory &
publicity.’** Thomas Stuart, a forgotten schoolfellow, wrote a paragraph
about his schooldays in the Dublin Figaro, acknowledged by its subject with
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 THE BATTLES OF THE BOOKS 1891-1893
vague grandeur (‘I remember your name very well & will I have no doubt
remember your personality also, as soon as a meeting bring it to memory. It
floats dimnly before me & may at any time take visable shape’*’). The Bookman
,
for whom he had begun reviewing in late 1892, asked him as one of ‘four dis-
tinguished poets’ for an opinion on Tennyson’s successor as Laureate: his
response praised Swinburne and Tennyson, but saw the post as an anachro-
nism. In Sligo, probably during November 1892, his growing fame had
brought him into a new social orbit: he had met (and would later see in
London) Constance and Eva Gore-Booth, daughters of Lissadell, one of the
great Ascendancy houses glimpsed across demesne walls and tree-tops on his
childhood walks.
What had brought him fame was not his political interventions but his books.
Since May, Fisher Unwin had contracted to take over The Wanderings of
Oisin, which conferred prestige if not money. Even in its first ‘meagre’ form,
The Countess Kathleen made a stir; his collections of fairy-tales were widely
available; and at the end of January 1893 Quaritch brought out Blake. wBy,
paid in copies, sold them on wherever he could; in Ireland he received reviews
forwarded by Lily (Le Gallienne in the Star, Garnett in the Speaker, Johnson
in the Westminster Gazette). Naturally, critics pitched upon the occultist
emphasis — defended by wy to Johnson as ‘our resolve not to hide our debt
to the men who have been fighting the battle’. Through the spring and sum-
mer of 1893 he spent a great deal of time at the headquarters of the Golden
Dawn in Clipstone Street (twenty-nine visits between June and September),
possibly making and consecrating the vital instruments for his initiation into
the Second Order, but also seeking solace.“ Not coincidentally, he was also
writing occult stories. ‘Out of the Rose’ appeared in the National Observer
on 27 May, ostentatiously Rosicrucian and chivalric, and dealing with con-
tention between the illuminati few and the ignorant many. In other stories,
such as “The Heart of the Spring’ (15 April) and ‘The Curse of the Fires and
Shadows’ (5 August), Sligo settings and historical traditions were used
specifically, in conjunction with fairy lore. Over and over again, a spiritual
hero is misunderstood and rejected by the world, and triumphs only in death.
And simultaneously, in much less awkward language, he was collecting and
organizing the material which would be published by Lawrence & Bullen at
the end of the year as The Celtic Twilight: not only an enterprise exploring
the avenues opened up by Blake, but also an implicit commentary on Irish
identity and literary culture.
Folklore and oral culture, as conceived by wsy and gathered in Sligo and
elsewhere, was non-English, anti-materialist, anti-bourgeois, and connected to
Theosophical and Rosicrucian symbolism, via Blake and Swedenborg.
Through this identification, and his own painstaking presentation of it, he
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could fuse the lessons learnt from his father, his lost Sligo childhood, the
Rhymers and, most recently, Maud Gonne. The stories retailed were often
framed as told by an old man at Ballisodare, or by his uncle George’s servant
Mary Battle; but folklore could also contain archetypal stories, or ‘moods’,
and those who investigated it must, like artists, ‘dare to mix heaven, hell, pur-
gatory and fairyland together’.© In this context ‘twilight’ meant the hour before
dawn, when this world and the next were closest, the interpenetration of the
spirit and the ‘real’ world recalling Swedenborg as well as Blake. The intel-
lectual inspiration for The Celtic Twilight was eclectic. It included P. W.
Joyce’s books on Irish tradition, William Wilde’s researches, Rhys’s Hibbert
Lecture on Celtic religion and (less identifiably) druidic lore. wBy had also
already encountered Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville’s lectures on Celtic
mythology, stressing Greek parallels and doctrines of correspondence; the
despised Alfred Nutt had reviewed them at length in the Fo/klore Journal for
1886, and Gonne would later translate some for the notes to The Wind Among
the Reeds.°° wsy had also noted David Fitzgerald’s Revue Celtique articles in
the early 1880s about themes of solar—lunar conflict as original elements of
mythic confrontation.*’ As yet, folklore rather than mythology preoccupied
him, though Gonne’s mythic interests spurred him further.
Much of The Celtic Twilight had originally appeared in the Scots Observer,
Leisure Hour or other journals (and Fisher Unwin had suggested a collection
in the summer of 1891); but what mattered was the arrangement, and how it
reflected wBy’s preoccupations in 1893. Material was added, and accretions
and bowdlerizations scraped off. Into the different genres (stories, poems,
commentaries) he tried to infuse seriousness and, sometimes, tragedy. He
was a more stringent editor than is often realized.®* ‘T have .. . written down
accurately and candidly much that I have heard and seen, and, except by way
of commentary, nothing that I have merely imagined,’ he wrote in the pre-
face, ending, emotionally, with a Blakean invocation: ‘Hope and Memory have
one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from
the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs
to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with
me for a little.’ His own recent lost battles, and vanished childhood, were much
in his mind.
In his work on The Celtic Twilight wBy can be seen recouping his powers
and consoling himself through the arrangement of ideas into art: a gift which
never abandoned him. Ina Belfast lecture during late November he spoke of
fairy lore as a consoling faith, ‘sent by Providence’ for those whose lives were
starved and desires blighted. In connecting fairy belief with anthropolo-
gical researches, he hinted at a scientific rationale; but more important, in his
view, was its therapeutic function and literary inspiration. ‘He did not think
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 THE BATTLES OF THE BOOKS I8g1-1893
there was a great poet in the world who had not borrowed from folk lore.”
He was absorbing the lessons of his clash with Gavan Duffy and Rolleston,
and the questions raised by Hyde. And he had to define a position regard-
ing Irish literary revival and English cultural influence, in sucha way that his
own identities (Anglophone, Protestant, Blakean, occultist, London-resident)
could be allowed for within an Irish nationalist framework. Building on his
original answer to Hyde, he delivered a National Literary Society lecture in
Molesworth Hall, Dublin, on 19 May 1893: its title was ‘Nationality and
Literature’.”°
This came at a time when political disappointments, Dublin gossip, un-
happy love and his own literary ambitions had brought him to a crossroads.
He confided to an astrological notebook twenty years later that ‘it was a year
of great trouble’ — a word which, with wsy, usually carries a sexual implica-
tion.” His reaction was a Herculean attempt to redefine the whole vexed ques-
tion of literature’s relationship to the national effort — and, in the process, to
claim a cosmopolitan identity for the Irish literary movement. Simultaneously
he defended himself from the ‘patriots’ by stigmatizing English literature as
irrelevant because decadent. (Would his friends in the Rhymers Club have
agreed?) In the tradition of Matthew Arnold, he stressed the philosophical
and anti-materialist side of ‘Celticism’; but he also stated that the new Irish
literature could learn from the Greeks and even the English. (This was, of
course, exactly the achievement for which Lionel Johnson had lauded wBy’s
own work a year before.)
In making the point, he advanced the theory that national literature
developed from narrative epic, through drama, to lyric poetry.”? The rather
convoluted argument concluded that the full development of a nation’s
literature required a cosmopolitan frame of reference. Here he represented
Rhymer thought, and also worked in some visionary hints about a forth-
coming ‘resurrection into unity’ derived from his Blakean studies. The Irish
achievement was still at the ‘epic’ stage of literature (though the lyricism of
Mangan and Allingham gave him some difficulty here). Native drama and
lyricism would develop. ‘But [though] we must not imitate the writers of
any other country, we must study them constantly and learn from them the
secret of their greatness.’ It was permissible to read foreign writers; this was
a necessary part of working at a national literature, rather than, in the Irish
style, relying simply upon divine inspiration.

Alas, the inspiration of God, which is, indeed, the source of all which is greatest
in the world, comes only to him who labours at rhythm and cadence, at form and
style, until they have no secret hidden from him. This art we must learn from the
old literatures of the world. We have hitherto been slovens . . . We must learn from

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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

the literatures of France and England for the supreme artists and then God will send
to us supreme inspiration.

This synthesized the belief of the Rhymers and the Paterian notion of the
artist as priest. It contradicted the implication of other Yeatsian dicta about
‘thin-blooded cosmopolitanism’;” but it represented the trend of his thought
in the summer of 1893. By October he was considering publishing ‘a collec-
tion of essays and lectures’ dealing with Irish nationality under the title “The
Watchfire’, but it never appeared, and the rousing Fenian poem he wrote for
it remained unpublished: several of the ideas would later germinate in Ideas
of Good and Evil.”* He had come some distance from the ‘Celt in London’
column of four years before, when he had chastised Rolleston for his devo-
tion to the ‘poor bubble’ of cosmopolitan literature, and ended nearly every
article with a refrain preaching the necessarily ‘national’ basis of true art.”
Through the remaining summer of 1893 he stayed in London, immersed
in preparation for his progress to the next stage of Golden Dawn initiation,
the degree of 5 = 6 in the Second Order, which would bring him to the inner
circle of the organization.” Stories which he wrote at this time reflect this
involvement, as well as the company of Johnson and other Rhymers: the
influence of Wilde and Pater joined the established inspirations of Shelley
and Irish mythology. Few letters survive from this era. He was reviewing hard,
reshaping The Celtic Twilight, and writing the uncharacteristic story ‘Michael
Clancy, The Great Dhoul, and Death’, finished in September. By the time
Tynan interviewed him for the Sketch in November, he was considering a vol-
ume of ‘wierd stories of the middle ages in Ireland’, which would eventually
— in 1897 — appear as The Secret Rose.
As would often be the case, he was solaced by London literary compan-
ionship, and the consolations of occult study. But, acutely sensitive to Dublin’s
jeers about log-rolling, wy asked Tynan not to sign the Sketch interview. He
made a gingerly return to that bruising environment in mid-September,
accompanied by Lionel Johnson. They stayed with wsy’s friend Joseph
Quinn, a medical student who had been imprisoned for Land League activ-
ities a decade before and was flamboyantly homosexual; he wore make-up and
(allegedly) stays, and was besotted by a young Mayoman in the same lodg-
ings. It cannot have been a comfortable ménage. Quinn had been involved
in setting up the National Literary Society, and wy was asked to help with
their projected magazine; he also helped launch Frederick Langbridge’s
periodical The Old Country, which appeared at the end of the year. wBy sug-
gested publishing a piece by Oldham on the Contemporary Club, and illus-
trating it with sketches done by By in the mid-188os. ‘Such an article would
be a most interesting record of the personal & social side of politics in this
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 THE BATTLES OF THE BOOKS I8g1-1893

country for the last 8 years & should interest people quite apart from their
political beliefs & offend no one.”” That innocent age of apprenticeship was
already consigned to the past, and he was ready to act as impresario for his
own history.
How wey appeared in the present is captured in an interview with D. N.
Dunlop for the Irish Theosophist, anxious for his memories of Madame
Blavatsky, who had died in May 1891. The interviewer found him, probably
in Ely Place, reading Homer and smoking a cigarette; the room ‘indicated
the style and taste peculiar to its presiding genius’, decorated with ‘designs
by Blake and other less well-known symbolic artists’. Asked about Blavatsky’s
prophecies, wBy obligingly retailed her belief ‘that the power of England would
not outlive the century’. But politics in the present remained a minefield.
‘Gaelic’ qualities were a priority, as he stressed in an ecstatic review of Hyde’s
Love Songs of Connacht: a Bookman piece which not only marks the high
point of his admiration for Hyde, but also deliberately presents ‘The Gael’
to an English audience. For an Irish readership he was more combative,
addressing two important letters to United Ireland” in defence of Richard
Ashe King, who had attacked partisan politics as detrimental to ‘Celtic’ cul-
ture. But Alice Milligan, an uncompromising nationalist activist and editor,
attacked wey in turn for choosing ‘some quiet paradise aspect’ in which
to develop his art, rather than linking it to the noisy field of battle in Irish
politics.
This must have seemed to wBy ironic at best, and certainly unfair. Answering
Milligan, he tried to have it both ways. A writer could pursue political com-
mitments, but must ‘endeavour to become a master of his craft, and be ever
careful to keep rhetoric, or the tendency to think of his audience rather than
of the Perfect and the True, out of his writing’.*° A further letter of 30
December considered the position of ‘oratory’ in Irish life — partly inspired
by Standish O’Grady’s just published The Story of Ireland, which condemned
this national addiction, and enshrined an early statement of the Parnell myth
later adopted comprehensively by wzy. For the moment ‘oratory’ preoccu-
pied him — a concept he did not yet distinguish from ‘rhetoric’, using both
words to mean political invective. Against the show of passionate conviction
and the ensuing loss of a sense of reality, wBy argued for tolerance and the
recognition of half-tones; all this related to the Parnell split, as Irish politics
continued to be dominated by recriminations over the lost leader. The Irish
must realize that ‘there is a truth and a beauty which, not being made by hands,
are above all expediency, above all nations.*’One way to such a truth was to
stop calling any critic of ‘national dangers and weaknesses’ a West Briton.
This was heartfelt; it also articulated opinions which had to be suppressed
when Maud Gonne was in the vicinity. Since their meeting in Ireland in the
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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

autumn of 1891, he had been thrown into personal and political turmoil: the
need to prove himself to her remained constant, while the only spheres in which
he could claim superior authority were occult study and artistic creation.
And here too her influence was enduring.
The deep unhappiness which the setbacks of the early nineties brought
was not always evident to his family. At the end of 1893 jBy considered his
children and took, as ever, the cheerful view.
Someday Jack will be a substantial man with a cheerful kind hearted spouse &
an open handed way of welcoming friends — something on the Merville pattern
tho’ on a smaller scale of course — & Willie will be famous & shed a bright light on
us all & sometimes have a little money & sometimes no¢. Lolly will have a prosper-
ous school &as I before remarked give away as prizes her eminent brother’s volumes
of poetry.”
wey found it hard to be so sanguine. Long afterwards, when his ‘Celt in
London’ pieces were reprinted as a book, he remembered his youthful self sit-
ting in the National Library in Kildare Street, ‘looking with scorn at those
bowed heads and busy eyes, or in futile revery listening to my own mind as
if to the sounds in a sea shell . . . Iwas arrogant, indolent, excitable.’ This
spectacularly underrated his achievements at the age of twenty-eight. But he
was still caught between competing gospels, and as yet unable to follow con-
sistently the abstract truth he had preached to Alice Milligan. Looking back
forty years later, he expressed this struggle in lapidary terms: ‘I was a propa-
gandist and hated being one. It seems to me that I remember almost the day
and the hour when revising for some reprint my essay upon the Celtic move-
ment [in Ideas ofGood and Evil] | saw clearly the unrealities and half-truths
propaganda had involved me in, and the way out. All one’s life one struggles
towards reality, finding always but new veils. It is the words, children of the
occasion, that betray.’
These were still the years of propaganda, though flashes of a keener
perspective intervened. By late 1893 he was still bruised by those battles of
the books where he had conspicuously failed to win his way. He returned
to London at the end of the year; from then until 1896 he would spend
almost no time at all in Dublin.

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Chapter 6: LANDs oF Heart’s DEsIRE
1894-1896

[Axél] seemed all the more profound, all the more beautiful,
because I was never quite certain that Ihad understood. Indeed,
I was quite certain of one thing only . . . Iwas not certain that
Axel was a great masterpiece but I thought of it always as if it
were a ceremony in some order or rite wherein I and my gen-
eration had been initiated.
manuscript draft for a preface to
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Axé/

THE coolness between wBy and Maud Gonne in 1893, together with the dis-
illusionment and resentment arising from Dublin literary wars, shaped his
life for the next three years. He avoided the Irish capital; he looked elsewhere
for love; and consequently he made a determined attempt to build an inde-
pendent establishment in London. In July 1894 he was considering ‘a volume
of Irish essays cheefly to be feirce mockery of most Irish men & things except
the men & things who are simple poor & imaginative and not I fear too many’.
Resilient as ever, his reaction to adversity was combativeness. He also found
consolation in publicity. From 1893 his name was constantly in and out of news-
papers: he had become a news item, and events like Robert Louis Stevenson's
admiring letter about ‘Innisfree’ were rapidly broadcast to journalists.” This
was not without disadvantages; he was also an object of satire in Arthur
Lynch’s Our Poets and the New Ireland Review (as ‘William Blitiger Klein-
bier’). And both he and Tynan had reached the point where they could
be plagiarized by the coming generation. wBy was noticeably less annoyed
about this than Tynan, partly because of the publicity value, partly because
his own early manner no longer pleased him.
There were also, as always, new projects and collaborations, such as his
attempt to help Frederick Langbridge turn his annual The Old Country into
a monthly magazine, and the perpetually postponed notion of an Irish
publishing house. wBy was also involved in the Irish Literary Society’s quar-
terly, the Irish Home Reading Magazine, along with Barry O’Brien, Johnson,
Garnett and others. But these expedients did not meet his financial needs;
his correspondence for 1893 and 1894 shows him regularly borrowing small
sums. An urgently businesslike letter to O’Leary on 5 February 1894 cata-
logued his ‘reasens’ for inability to repay debts incurred over the previous year,
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including ‘a sudden crisis here at home, which swept away £4’ (‘please burn
this letter’).* His heavyweight book-reviewing continued, but decreased in
frequency; fiction seemed a more profitable avenue, with stories like ‘Michael
Clancy, The Great Dhoul, and Death’ produced for the Christmas 1893 num-
ber of the O/d Country.’
This publication was accompanied by wBy’s photograph (‘Author of
“The Countess Kathleen”, etc.’). A soon to be familiar image was forming:
shadowed face, dark clothes, misty gaze. There were good physical reasons
for the latter: a conical cornea was diagnosed in April 1894, making the
left eye ‘practically useless’.® But the air of detachment symbolized a drift-
ing away from some of his old friends: his infrequent letters to Tynan were
now addressed to ‘Dear Mrs Hinkson’, and even his recent collaborator
Edwin Ellis cannot have been pleased by wBy’s perfunctory and satirical review
of his visionary Seen in Three Days.’ The upheavals in Dublin had reinforced
wBy’s single-mindedness, and determined him upon independence.

II
This meant a concentrated commitment to work, and the sowing of seeds
which would germinate much later. By 24 August 1893 he had begun draft-
ing poems in a small white notebook which would not achieve published form
until The Wind Among the Reeds six years later; and an important article in
the Speaker that same month defined his approach to folklore.® It was, wBy
claimed, the necessary underpinning to mythology; Shelley lacked this
substructure, which accounted for the cloudy quality of his poetry. Here, as
in other occasional writings of 1893 to 1894, and in the discussions around
the Savoy experiment two years later, he emphasized the need to derive
inspiration from a basic energy, by knowing one’s roots. This strength was
sustaining wBy himself through a difficult period of reassessment, finding
passionate expression at this time in his review of Hyde’s translations, Love
Songs of Connacht.
As for me, I close the book with much sadness. Those poor peasants lived in a
beautiful if somewhat inhospitable world, where little had changed since Adam
delved and Eve span. Everything was so old that it was steeped in the heart, and every
powerful emotion found at once noble types and symbols for its expression. But
we — we live in a world of whirling change, where nothing becomes old and sacred,
and our powerful emotions, unless we be highly-trained artists, express themselves
in vulgar types and symbols. The soul then had but to stretch out its arms to fill
them with beauty, but now all manner of heterogeneous ugliness has beset us. A
peasant had then but to stand in his own door and think of his sweetheart and of
his sorrow, and take from the scene about him and from the common events of his

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 LANDS OF HEART’S DESIRE 1894-1896
life types and symbols, and behold, if chance was a little kind, he had
made a poem to
humble generations of the proud. And we — we labour and labour, and spend
days
Over a stanza or a paragraph, and at the end of it have made, likely as not,
a mere
bundle of phrases.’

Drafts of poetry and fiction were all infused with this belief, and so was his
one-act play The Land ofHeart’ Desire. Drama possessed him at this time:
he confessed in an anonymous review of July 1893 that he could ‘read almost
anything which is written in dramatic form’.!° And this passion was closely
associated with a Hammersmith neighbour, the actress Florence Farr.
Farr had long been on the Bedford Park circuit — doing embroidery with
May Morris, and a frequent visitor to her sister Henrietta Paget next-door
to the Todhunters. She had also joined the Golden Dawn with WBY, who
was five years younger. A long acquaintanceship was ripening into something
more. But her other admirer was Bernard Shaw (both suitors sat each other
out for a gloomy evening at her Dalling Road lodgings on 13 July). Shaw wooed
Farr through theatre: might wsy do the same? Oblique and independent,
she sent out contradictory signals. Farr helped define the New Woman.
Humorous, and sexy, she possessed a talent for friendship, and for exasper-
ating people. According to Shaw ‘an aimadle woman, with semi-circular eye-
brows’, she could have been the great Shavian actress (Louka, Blanche) but
never quite delivered; or the great Yeatsian muse, but could never keep her
face quite straight. Sexually liberated and believing that intercourse once a
day was a healthy habit, she enjoyed a brief marriage to Edward Emery, an
unreliable fellow-actor, as well as an affair with Shaw in 1890, and an alleged
fourteen lovers. Prepared to take the initiative, she none the less saw love-
making (she said) as ‘a stage performance’. wBy thought her torn between
‘wit and paradox’, ‘tradition and passion’ — and between himself and GBS.
In the early nineties his admiration for her had not yet taken the form of direct
courtship, and he would have to wait more than ten years to consummate the
affair. But her ‘tranquil beauty’ became a touchstone for him, remembered
every time he passed the statue of Demeter near the door of the British
Museum Reading Room. And he could appeal to her occultist, stagey side,
which Shaw ridiculed. For Farr, wBy provided a respite from the squalid scenes
precipitated by Shaw’s discarded lover, Jenny Patterson. Most ofall, they could
co-operate in theatre. Annie Horniman had offered Farr money to put ona
theatrical season in the Avenue Theatre during 1893. According to family tra-
dition, at the Pagets’ Christmas party in 1893 Farr asked wBy to write a play
which would create a part for her niece Dorothy. This became The Land of
Heart's Desire.
For the moment, he wrestled from early 1894 with his verse play The

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Shadowy Waters, conceived nearly ten years before as he talked to Russell on

their rambles home from art school. But the influences on him were not, for
the moment, Theosophical. Much of his time was now spent with Arthur
Symons, for whom 1893 was the year when he imported Verlaine to lecture in
London (‘a dear old thing’, in Beardsley’s camp dismissal, while wey thought
he resembled a permanently drunken Socrates"). And in that same month,
November, Symons published ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’.
This popularized in English the French idea ofpoetes maudits, and would help
suggest the views later expressed by wBy in ‘The Tragic Generation’. As he
chased up literary contacts in Paris, and diligently pursued dancing-girls in
London, Symons intuited the sense of an apocalypse and the perverse
and intensely self-conscious style of a late civilization, corroborating wBY's
idea that English art was in its decadence while Ireland still possessed ‘full
tables’. Equally influential was Symons’s presentation of France — Verlaine,
Mallarmé, Huysmans’sARedours and most of all Philippe-Auguste Villiers
de I’Isle-Adam’s huge Rosicrucian play Axé/, recently published. This, in
Symons’s view, was ‘the origin of the symbolistic drama . . . pure symbol’. For
wBY, just about to begin his own Symbolist play, it was a potent message: he was
struck by Rémy de Gourmont’s judgement that 4xé/ ‘has opened the doors
of the unknown with a crash, and a generation has gone through them to the
infinite’.’* His visit to Paris, where Axé/ was to be staged, pressed it home.
On February 7 1894 wBy left London on a journey he had planned for
at least a month. It was his first visit to the Continent — made all the more
momentous by the destination of Paris, to him a centre of occult studies and
émigré Irish nationalism as well as Symbolist literature and experimental
theatre. He had just finished The Land ofHeart's Desire, and believed it had
‘turned out one of my best things’;“* he stayed in the Mathers household at
the Avenue Duquesne and re-established contact with Maud Gonne (now
nearly four months pregnant, though he did not realize it). Once more he
renewed his commitment to her: an unpublished poem written after this
reunion directly reflects their recent estrangement, and her inspiration of
his work.

I will not in grey hours revoke

The gift I gave in hours of light
Before the breath of slander broke
The thread my folly had drawn tight

The little thread weak hope had made

To bind two lonely hearts in one
But loves of light must fade & fade
Till all the dooms of men are spun,

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 LANDS OF HEART’S DESIRE 1894-1896
The gift I gave once more I give
For you may come to winter time
But your white flower of beauty live
In a poor foolish book of rhyme."

He also plunged into literary Paris, with Symons’s advice as Baedeker.

An introduction had been arranged, probably through York Powell, to
Mallarmé; but the poet was in England (his wife had to mime this infor-
mation to an uncomprehending wsy, who, despite the lessons in Morris’s
coach-house, never mastered oral French).1° But his London contacts led him
to Verlaine, who had stayed in Symons’s Temple lodgings in November and
given a reading at Oxford arranged by York Powell. wsy’s visit to the pre-
siding genius of decadence provided material for a Savoy article two years
later, and a memorable passage of his Autobiographies.” Verlaine invited
him to ‘coffee and cigarettes plentifully’ and fired off aphoristic judgements
(famously on Tennyson's In Memoriam: ‘he was too noble, too anglais, and
when he should have been broken-hearted had many reminiscences’). For
wy, Verlaine was living proof that exposure to the ideal world of art dis-
solved conventional morality — and was closely linked to ‘communion with
spiritual ideas’. ‘One . . . fancied as one listened to his vehement sentences
that his temperament, his daimon, had been made uncontrollable that he
might live the life needful for its perfect expression in art, and yet escape
the bonfire.”
A revelation of equal importance was provided by the performance of Axé/
staged at the end of his visit. (There were only two; each ran for five hours).
Symons was in London, frantically translating Zola, but wBy went with
Maud Gonne, appositely enough, since the play dealt with Rosicrucian wis-
dom and an esoteric love-alliance which finds peace only in death. Seeing it
played, it is unlikely that wey comprehended more than its atmosphere: but
in the ensuing weeks he puzzled through the text in French, guided by
Symons, and wrote a long critique for the Bookman. Here, wBy emerged as
a didactic and arresting critic of drama, much as his rival Shaw had done with
music. Realism, wBy argued, had only belatedly conquered the theatre; it was
still strong there, and though the critical spirit had recognized Symbolist form
in other areas, it had not affected drama. In France alone the achievement
of Maeterlinck had prepared the way for Ax¢é/, in its uncompromising five hours
of ‘prose as elevated as poetry’, where ‘all the characters are symbols and all
the events allegories’.
Unfortunately (if unsurprisingly) both audience and critical reception
had been hostile: but this was irrelevant. wBy went on to quote Verlaine’s
supposed comment on Villiers’s heroine Sara, which sounds far more like a

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judgement of his own: ‘a mysterious woman, a queen of pride, who is mourn-

ful and fierce as the night when it still lingers though the dawn is beginning,
with reflections of blood and of gold upon her soul and her beauty’.? The
play’s effect brought it near the ‘hierarchy of recollections’ which, in a rather
Wordsworthian way, constituted wBy’s touchstone of beauty; it could thus
take its place with ‘a certain night scene long ago, when I heard the wind blow-
ing in a bed of reeds by the border ofa little lake, a Japanese picture of cranes
flying through a blue sky, and a line or two out of Homer’.”° It also gave him
a favourite image of a lover ‘veiled’ with his mistress’s hair (‘where you will
breathe the spirit of dead roses’, Villiers added rather gratuitously). And one
magnificent aphorism stayed with him for ever, expressing with a Wildean
flair the vulgarity of quotidian existence and the attractions of the otherworld:
‘As for living, our servants will do that for us.’
He would remain faithful to Axé/, writing a preface for Thomas Sturge
Moore’s edition thirty years later; but even at the time he had to admit the
play was impossibly extended and boring in theatrical terms. ‘The imaginat-
ive drama must inevitably make many mistakes before it is in possession of
the stage again, for it is so essentially different to the old melodrama and the
new realism, that it must learn its powers and limitations for itself.’ But even
its mistakes were visionary. The public needed to be ‘reminded very forcibly
that the actor should be also a reverent reciter of majestic words’. wBy returned
to London the next day, fired with enthusiasm; his commitment to his own
Symbolist drama, The Shadowy Waters, was now absolute. Maeterlinck’s
influence had provided what Ibsen lacked (though his drama disturbed and
impressed wBy since 1889). And this directly affected the theatrical experi-
ment in which he was immediately engaged: the outcome of Annie Horniman’s
bequest to Florence Farr.
The Land ofHeart’ Desire had not been her only commission. Since No-
vember 1893 Shaw had been writing Arms and the Man for Farr; though Bed-
ford Park rallied round, with Stepniak providing Bulgarian details for local
colour, the play was not ready for the opening of the Avenue Theatre season.
The Land of Heart’ Desire therefore opened on 29 March 1894 with Todhunter’s
latest piece of laborious Arcadianism,4 Comedy ofSighs. The programme ran,
disastrously, for a fortnight, attracting general opprobrium and much jeer-
ing from an audience who had come prepared for the Avenue’s usual music-
hall fare. wsy’s play passed off with less attention: but it was not without
interest. Behind the folkloric story of an unhappy young wife stolen away
by the fairies lay the theme of a woman's escape from a confining house and
family, possibly borrowed from A Doll’s House, though in subsequent ver-
sions the influence of Axé/ predominated over the faint echo of Ibsen. Either
way, it was a muted note; and this was drowned altogether when it reopened
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a week after the first run, as the curtain-raiser to Shaw’s postponed (and hastily
rehearsed) bombshell.
The success of Arms and the Man may have owed something to a brilliantly
‘packed’ audience. George Moore, celebrated for his scandalous realistic
novels, carefully positioned himself to observe his fellow-Irishman. Not yet
an admirer of wsy, he sarcastically noted the poet surveying the assembled
literati, ‘a long black cloak dropping from his shoulders, a soft black sombrero
on his head, a voluminous black silk tie flowing from his collar, loose black
trousers dragging untidily over his long heavy feet . . . an Irish parody of the
poetry that I had seen all my life strutting its rhythmic way in the alleys of
the Luxembourg Gardens’.** And the night belonged to Shaw, not Yeats. His
detonating parody took on romance, melodrama and heroism, skewing the
audience’s perceptions and keeping the drama one sardonic jump ahead; the
play’s own vigour delivered a theatrical coup. wBy’s reaction was, inevitably,
resentful. His later recollection analysed this, while avoiding the subject of
their rivalry over Farr (demoted, in this production, from playing Raina to
Louka).
And from that moment Bernard Shaw became the most formidable man in mod-
ern letters, and even the most drunken of medical students knewit . . . though I came
mainly to see how my own play went, and for the first fortnight to vex my most patient
actors with new lines, I listened to Arms and the Man with admiration and hatred.
It seemed to me inorganic, logical straightness and not the crooked road of life, yet
I stood aghast before its energy as to-day before that of the Stone Drill by Mr Epstein
or of some design by Mr Wyndham Lewis. Shaw was right to claim Samuel Butler
for his master, for Butler was the first Englishman to make the discovery that it is
possible to write with great effect without music, without style, either good or bad,
to eliminate from the mind all emotional implication and to prefer plain water to every
vintage, so much metropolitan lead and solder to any tendril of the vine. Presently
Thad a nightmare that I was haunted by a sewing-machine, that clicked and shone,
but the incredible thing was that the machine smiled, smiled perpetually.”

Still Shaw, he went on to say, ‘could hit my enemies and the enemies of all
I loved, as I could never hit’. And ‘hitting enemies’ was now a vital part of
wBy's approach to theatre.
Axél had shown him that the new Symbolist theatre need not be popular;
Shaw’s success forced wy to console himself with the thought that he did
not want to be popular. This feeling was reinforced by Farr. Her prejudice
against the single-mindedness that brings success was strengthened by the
Avenue Theatre experience: Shaw had not only relegated her to a smaller part,
but was increasingly besotted by Janet Achurch. Like Todhunter, who referred
to his disastrous Comedy ofSighs as ‘an experiment on the taste of the British
public’,”? Farr and Yeats consoled themselves that Shavian success could

I4I
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

only be won at the price of crude populism. And Farr was, after all, the
impresario. ‘She is desirous of doing my next play,’ wBy confided to O’Leary,
‘as it is a wild mystical thing carefully arranged to be an insult to the regular
theatre goer who is hated by both of us. All the plays she is arranging for
are studied insults’.* The message of André Antoine’s Théatre Libre, so
recently absorbed by wy in Paris, was to be preached in London.
As it happened, Todhunter’s uncomprehending audience at the Avenue
had not been outraged by the avant-garde, but simply annoyed at the
theatre’s switch from its usual pantomime programme. But this was not
wsy's view. ‘The whole venture will be history any way for it is the first con-
test between the old commercial school of theatrical folk & the new artistic -
school’.”° Farr’s 1894 season took its place in the mythology of dramatic mod-
ernism, along with J. T. Grein’s productions of Ibsen, and Widowers’ Houses
in 1892. Long afterwards, she wrote to GBS that with Annie Horniman’s money
she ‘secured [Todhunter] you and Yeats & Beardsley’s poster. And I’m afraid
poor Todhunter is the only person connected with the affair that appears as
a ridiculous failure!’”°
At the time, however, Shaw’s success left the others in the shade. Farr and
wBy continued to meet through the summer. On 30 July, in the company
of Henrietta Paget and, according to By, ‘a mediumistic chemist’s assistant’,
they consoled themselves with a seance at Dalling Road. Later, they would
co-operate in further theatrical experiments. But in 1894 what mattered were
wey’ ideas about unpopular theatre. Further consolation was provided by
the fact that Fisher Unwin’s published version of The Land ofHeart's Desire
sold well, and was published in America. By the summer, his wounds healed,
wey could be lofty about Dublin’s provincialism: even the Second Book ofthe
Rhymers Club was let down by the ‘dreadful burden of the TCD tradition’
(Rolleston and company), and Gavan Duffy’s New Irish Library was eviscer-
ated in private and public. By contrast, he hailed Russell’s collection Homeward,
Songs by the Way as a masterpiece.”’ This was a deliberate campaign, as WBY
confessed to O’Leary. As his autobiographically inclined review of Russell
showed, the experiences of the 1880s were already being placed in a contrived
perspective; and, while pressing the claims of the old coterie (O’Grady, Hyde,
Todhunter, Tynan), his exposure to the avant-garde of Paris and London had
carried him on to a newstage. In the process, his metropolitan reputation had
been consolidated; when in September 1894 Ernest Radford wrote to Elkin
Mathews about attacks on the Century Guild journal the Hobdy Horse, he
remarked, ‘I take it for granted that Yeats will take his stand at your side, for
[in] that case his name would bear weight.’”® wey now knew the practical
importance as well as the psychological compensations of building a repu-
tation which would sustain a writer’s life both in London and Ireland.
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II]
By the autumn of 1894 wBy was ready to venture to Ireland again. On 10
October he travelled to Dublin, staying at the North Circular Road lodg-
ings for a fortnight. But his correspondence betrays a continuing sensitivity
about mockery from enemies within the Gavan Duffy camp; he was aware
that Dublin opinion was all too ready to accuse him of self-inflation.2” He
soon moved on to Thornhill, George Pollexfen’s cheerless house, the only base
left to him in Sligo. As usual, wy brought with him an agenda of work: on
this occasion, the project of revising his poems for a collected edition, and
the never-ending struggle with The Shadowy Waters. On 5 November he
wrote to By thatits ‘legendary details’ kept conflicting with theatrical imper-
atives;*° he was reading French ‘every day’, or so he claimed. The lessons learnt
in Paris and at the Avenue Theatre were already being put into practice.
George Pollexfen’s household provided other opportunities too. His house-
keeper, Mary Battle, was an eloquent Mayo woman with second sight; Pollexfen
himself, now an initiate of the Golden Dawn, was one of the few members
of the family sympathetic to his nephew’s occult interests and became an obses-
sive astrologer, much in demand. From the gloomy atmosphere of Thornhill,
wey and his uncle corresponded with ‘sorores’ and ‘fratres’ of the Golden Dawn
about cabbalistic ritual (‘with references to the Fire Wand enclosing a mag-
netized rod, our G. H. Frater Non Omnis Moriar, usually keeps a stock here,
which he sells to members. At the present moment we are out of them, but
some are on order. When they come in, I will send you one if you wish it, but
if you prefer it, you can, of course, have one made yourself. The usual size is
about six inches”). With Mary Battle, wBy discussed the Tipperary atroc-
ity which convulsed Ireland that winter: a woman had been burned alive by
her husband and his friends, in the apparent belief that she was possessed by
fairies. Some Irish newspapers had connected this ‘diseased spirit’ to the
undiscriminating interest in folklore encouraged by wBy and Hyde. Witha
fine sense of discrimination, Mary Battle assured him that normal practice
would simply have been to threaten the fairies out, and the tragedy occurred
simply because ‘they are so superstitious in Tipperary’.
WBY spent some time writing occult stories for Henley, but there was
little prospect of a literary income until his anthology, 4 Book ofIrish Verse,
appeared. Novel-writing continued to present the best financial possibilit-
ies; however, he already thought of John Sherman as ‘youthful and languid’,
and felt that Irish fiction lacked the ‘central fire’ produced by the Carleton
generation.** The idea of the novel that would become The Speckled Bird was
already forming, but poverty loomed. At this point George Pollexfen may
have offered his nephew an allowance of a pound a week,” but wy, with his
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habitual sensitivity about financial obligations, did not mention it in any

surviving correspondence. As winter came on, he stayed at Thornhill. He
encouraged his cousin Lucy Middleton in psychic experiments; this Sligo
sojourn provided, as ever, the consolations of childhood.** But he also ven-
tured into local society. In late November, and again in mid-December, he
stayed with the Gore-Booth family at Lissadell, their austere neo-classical
mansion on the Raughley peninsula, lost among woods and avenues. This
was a level of county society to which Pollexfens did not aspire; WBY had
breached it through the power of art, and the Gore-Booth enthusiasm for
the avant-garde. He found them ‘avery pleasent kindly inflamable family. ..
ever ready to take up new ideas and new things’.** Eva and Constance, both
beguiling and imaginative, were excited by folklore, and the Irish books lent
them by wsy; for his part, he saw their enthusiasm as representative of the
‘nationalizing’ of ‘the more thoughtful Unionists’.*” (But he shrewdly surmised
that authority really resided with a cynical old aunt, Joanna Arabella Gore-
Booth, who held the household in thrall from her bed upstairs.)
Far from Maud Gonne and Florence Farr, at a crossroads in his writ-
ing, and desperately wanting sympathy, wsy felt a brief affinity with Eva.
He shared confidences about Gonne with her; it was becoming his usual way
of forging friendships with sympathetic women, flattering the confidante
while inhibiting the development of a full love-affair. As he later remem-
bered it, wBy wondered about pressing his suit but decided ‘this house would
never accept so penniless a suitor’; when a Tarot reading delivered the Fool,
he knew nothing would come of it.*8 It is hard to believe he felt much regret;
he settled instead for directing Eva’s reading-programme in Irish matters, and
encouraging her poetic ambitions in emotionally charged language (‘when
ever the fealing is weightiest you are at your best’”), ‘She needs however like
all Irish literary people a proper respect for craftsmanship,’ he unguardedly
told his new friend Olivia Shakespear, ‘& that she must get in England’.
She did go to England, and found her métier there: but it took the form of
feminism and female relationships, and she died in London thirty years later.
The Gore-Booth girls continued to feature in wBy’s life through the long
winter and cold spring: Lough Gill froze over, and at a skating-party in
March they made coffee on the shore.*! But while based in Sligo, he kept a
weather eye on literary affairs in Dublin. Moreover, the months in the coun-
try allowed him to reassess his position in Irish cultural confrontations. Just
before leaving London, he had written a significant letter to Alice Milligan:

My experience of Ireland, during the last three years, has changed my views very
greatly, & nowI feel that the work of an Irish man of letters must be not so much to
awaken or quicken or preserve the national idea among the mass of the people
but

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 LANDS OF HEART'S DESIRE 1894-1896
to convert the educated classes to it on the one hand to the best of his
ability, & on
the other — & this is the more important — to fight for moderation, dignity,
& the
rights of the intellect among his fellow nationalists. Ireland is terribly demorali
zed
in all things — in her scholourship, in her criticism, in her politics, in her social
life.
She will never be greatly better until she govern herself but she will be greatly worse
unless there arise protesting spirits.”
Settled into Sligo, he began to mount a campaign as a ‘protesting spirit’, send-
ing letters about literary matters to United Ireland, stressing the need to work
outside Ireland, rejecting the solipsistic attitude that ‘Trish opinion’ was all
that mattered. His literary vendetta against Dowden continued, using the old
benchmark of Samuel Ferguson's ‘Trishness’.** Dowden had criticized the new
Irish school as rhetorical and sentimental; in the ensuing exchange he caught
WBY on a raw spot by insisting, ‘I have never advertised myself, and I have
never shrunk from being criticised.’** The implication that he was pushy
and thin-skinned came close to home, though wy riposted that the move-
ment he represented was more often criticized for not being patriotic enough.
Some consolation was provided by a debate at Trinity on 27 February 1895,
where the motion ‘that the Irish Literary revival is worthy of support’ was
overwhelmingly endorsed; and wey then moved the public debate ona stage
by instigating a controversy over a list of Best Irish Books’.
This was exactly the kind of involvement he liked best: ex cathedra judge-
ments, categoric lists and the promulgation of aesthetic agendas. He pre-
pared for it painstakingly by a letter to Standish O’Grady, guaranteeing that
his letter to the Express would be printed (‘We want to start a new contra-
versy, in continuation of a present one on “Prof Dowden & Irish Literature” “°)
and promising the publisher Fisher Unwin that he would plug at least two
of the works on his list. His first salvo was fired on 27 February 1895, listing his
30 best books’. This excluded ‘every book in which there is strong political
feeling’ — a deliberate attempt to spike the guns of the Gavan Duffy camp,
always ready to play the political card. (A later letter listed a few ‘political’
books he might have included — carefully balanced, from the Tory historian
Richard Bagwell through the Liberal Unionist W. E. H. Lecky to the separ-
atist voices of Tone and Mitchel.) For the moment he concentrated on works
of ‘imagination’ — an odd catalogue, redolent of Sligo parlours. It included
some short stories, Lever’s Charles O'Malley, a good deal of Carleton, O'Grady,
Hyde and others of his own company, as well as the plagiarizing Nora Hopper.
The accompanying commentary betrayed a strong reason for airing the sub-
ject in the first place: it carried an unashamed puff for his own forthcoming
anthology, A Book ofIrish Verse.
Thus far, Dublin opinion saw the old game of self-advertisement; and
it was not entirely wrong. wBy continued to write indefatigably to friends,

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commanding them to join in. But the list is interesting none the less. O’Grady’s
pastiche-Carlylean prose-poems continue to be over-estimated; d’Arbois
de Jubainville is grandly enlisted (in misspelled French); romantic history in
the Celtic mode predominates. When Dowden replied with his own list, wBy
attacked the inclusion of unIrish writers like Swift and Berkeley — a piquant
irony for the future, when they would become central to his inspiration. But
this too represented an ulterior agenda, for it was timed to coincide with
the much heralded publication of the Book ofIrish Verse. After seeing a draft
of wByY’s introduction the previous August, Lionel Johnson had written to
Tynan, ‘He will certainly be massacred by a certain kind of Irish poet if
ever he sets foot in Ireland again. And Moore’s statue will certainly fall and
crush him ~ or itself, which is vastly preferable!’ The text explains why wBY
orchestrated a discussion in the Dublin press on Irish canons of literature for
the month before publication.
That whole campaign had been calculated to prepare the ground for
the arguments set out in wBy’s introduction. Most eighteenth-century Irish
writers were excluded (though Goldsmith just scraped in) and the ‘imperfect’
inheritance of bardic tradition was stressed. Pace Johnson, although Thomas
Moore’s ‘artificial and mechanical’ style was criticized, he was credited with
playing a genuine Celtic note. Dowden was excluded, though he was allowed
‘an odd moment of inspiration, and Trinity's devotion to ‘alien themes’ attacked;
Rolleston, another recent enemy, dismissed; Allingham and de Vere favoured;
Tynan and Weekes received the traditional endorsement, though a careless
subeditor dropped several verses from Tynan’s ‘Children of Lir’. Praise for
Hyde, however, was oddly faint (‘before all else, a translator and a scholar’).
The real venom, however, was reserved for Young Ireland ‘rhetoric’; only
Mangan (episodically) escaped it. This was, of course, also a coded attack on
Gavan Duffy and on J. F. Taylor, who was portrayed in all but name:
the Irishman of our times loves so deeply those arts which build up agallant personality,
rapid writing, ready talking, effective speaking to crowds, that he has no thought for
the arts which consume the personality in solitude. He loves the mortal arts which
have given him a lure to take the hearts of man, and shrinks from the immortal, which
could but divide him from his fellows.

In his peroration wBy repeated the message of his review of Hyde’s Love Songs
ofConnacht (and raised yet again the image which would provide the title of
his 1899 collection of poems): ‘the poor peasant of the eighteenth century could
make his ballads by abandoning himselfto the joy and sorrow of the moment,
as the reeds abandon themselves to the wind which sighs through them, because
he had about him a world where all was old enough to be steeped in emotion’.‘”
The introduction toABook of Irish Verse was followed by four long articles
146
 LANDS OF HEART'S DESIRE 1894-1896
which appeared in the Bookman from July 1895 (thrifty as ever, wBy intended
to make a book of them“). Taken with his newspaper campaign and the antho-
logy introduction, they show him still trying to define cultural nationalism,
and assert a legitimate pedigree for it. In the process he raised the eternal ques-
tion of Irish nationality, and the sense of national identity, a topic which he
argued with Standish O’Grady, who saw ‘nationalism’ as a recent growth,
irrelevant to Irish history in the medieval period. In August 1895 wBy wrote
to O’Grady:
I should perhaps in my Bookman article have used the phrase ‘the armed hand of
race’ instead of ‘the armed hand of nationality’. I find it hard, knowing how jelous
one country is of another, even to day, when people travel so much, to beleive that
the Irish had no racial hatred (no matter how completely they lacked a racial policy
i.e. nationality) for invaders who spoke a different tongue & had different customs
& interests. Then too, one cannot forget a lot of gaelic poems like ‘the battle song
for the clans of Wicklow’ (translated by Ferguson). It is [vecte ‘is it’] not possible that
while the racial unity of England expressed itself in a method of government, the
racial unity of Ireland expressed it selfinthings like the bardic order & in popular
instincts & prejudices. That while the English nobles therefore expressed English
racial purpose at its best, the Irish nobles, warped by their little princedoms &
their
precarious dynasties were more for themselves & less for Ireland, than the bards, &
harpers & the masses of the people? You of course know &] do not. You speak from
particular knowledge, I from general principles merely.”
The argument that the intellectuals and ‘common people’ shared a true sense
of nationality, denied to venal politicians, had obvious contemporary relev-
ance; and the Bookman articles contained a coded message. Propagandists
like Davis and impatient hacks like Moore had lost their bearings by adopt-
ing English models: even Mitchel went similarly astray. The real achieve-
ment belonged to writers likeJ.J. Callanan, whose translations achieved the
authentic Irish note, and Ferguson, Allingham and de Vere; not the ‘inter-
esting, unsatisfying, pathetic movement’ that was Young Ireland. Carleton,
moreover, was the ‘true historian’ of Ireland. Thus yet another salvo was fired
at Gavan Duffy and his New Irish Library; while at the same time, he tried
to establish a genuine Irish literary tradition in the English language, implic-
itly culminating in the efforts of wBy himself.
Thus these articles reflect his brooding in Sligo over the defeats of the
previous year. But they also introduced (or at least presented in full) wBy’s
developing theory of ‘Moods’. This notion of Zeitgeist, accessible through
poetic insight, owes much to early nineteenth-century transcendentalism as
well as to wBy’s established distrust of positivism and rationalism. Historical
and scientific analysis is impatiently rejected: O’Grady appears as the ‘one
historian who is anything of an artist’, rising above ‘dates and dialectics’.
147
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

In Ireland we are accustomed to histories with great parade of facts and dates, of wrongs
and precedents, for use in the controversies of the hour; and here was a man who let
some all-important Act of Parliament (say) go by without a mention, or with per-
haps inaccurate mention, and for no better reason than because it did not interest
him, and who recorded with careful vividness some moment of abrupt passion, some
fragment of legendary beauty, and for no better reason than because it did interest
him profoundly.°°

For the rest, wBy’s round-up of Lecky, Patrick Joyce, Hyde, Lady Wilde
and others tended to be condescending, even towards writers he had reviewed
enthusiastically in the past. Modern-day Irish poetry was a subject limited
by his inability to discuss his own work, the endorsement of Tynan was
notably lukewarm, and he took refuge in prophetic assertions about a com-
ing ‘age of imagination, of emotion, of moods, of revelation’, which owed more
to the notions of the Golden Dawn than to literary criticism at any level. This
prepared the way for an assertion that Russell was the most beautiful poet of
the day, paying unconvincing tribute to his technical ability as well as to his
inspiration. By the last article, wsy had returned with a wolfish appetite
to the ‘best books’ controversy, Dowden, and the ‘vacant verses’ of Trinity
College men — thus contriving to insult Tynan’s husband Henry Hinkson,
who had recently compiled such an anthology. As an envoi, he loftily denied
any intention of log-rolling before proceeding to list his forty ‘best books’. This
time he included the political rhetoric of Tone and Mitchel, and ended — on
the disarming grounds that nothing better yet existed — with his own Book of
Trish Verse. The whole campaign could be seen, from one point of view, as a
breathtakingly egregious performance; but it also may be read as a manifesto
on behalf of Irish writing in English, an attack on conventional Irish polit-
ical pieties, and a demonstration that retirement to Sligo had enabled way
to consider his critics and emerge unreconciled.

IV
The energy which he brought to this controversy might give the impression
that his own poetry had been, for the moment, relegated to the background,
but he was simultaneously preoccupied by how it should be presented to the
public. At first he decided upon a new collection, to be called ‘Under the Moon’,
(The more obvious references to Blake and Shakespeare were Celticized by
the additional ‘fact’ that the moon governed ‘peasants, sailors, fishermen’ —
at least according to a publisher’s blurb.°') Before leaving for Ireland in
October 1894, wBY was discussing with Fisher Unwin ‘a new and corrected
edition’ of his previously published poems; he was also negotiating provisional
terms with Elkin Mathews. The correspondence continued from Dublin.
148
 LANDS OF HEART'S DESIRE 1894-1896
Fisher Unwin’s seemed the more attractive firm, especially given wBy’s estab-
lished relationship with Edward Garnett; though Fisher Unwin himself was
neurotic and authoritarian, and notoriously difficult to handle, which explains
the insistent tone of wBy’s letters.°? But he also wrote with a new sense of
professional confidence — and a clear expectation that he would be publish-
ing other volumes before long, since he stipulated a specific size and format
so that future works could resemble it. He named the printer to be used and
asked for a say in choosing the artist, as well as ‘a royalty from the first copy’.
Subsequent letters (much drafted and redrafted) are preoccupied with bring-
ing all his work together: the sense ofa canon in the making is unmistakable.
And he demanded that all rights should revert to him ‘unconditionally at the
end ofa term ofyears. I partly insist on this because if ever a first rate publish-
ing house arise in Ireland I must needs publish in part with them.’ That ‘in
part’ is striking: the divided life was apparently to continue, whatever the suc-
cess of the Irish renaissance.
For the moment he had two London publishers bidding for him, and
could state his terms. The ex-art student remained severe about appearances
(‘not green & no shamrocks’™); his choice of Charles Shannon as an appro-
priate illustrator showed a sharp eye for the current vogue. Fisher Unwin met
most of his terms; and through the autumn and early winter at Thornhill
wey worked on The Shadowy Waters before dinner but devoted the evenings
to revising the work of his youth. The title-poem of The Wanderings ofOisin
(rechristened, temporarily, Usheen’) was pared down and lost some (not all)
of its romantic embellishment. (Some Maeterlinckian effects, like the quat-
rain at the end of Book I, would be pruned in later editions.) The Countess
Kathleen followed, shortened and made more dramatic. After The Land of
Heart’ Desire a selection of the shorter poems from his first collection were
rearranged under the title ‘Crossways’ — proving that they represented what
WBY now viewed as a period of experiment. Another group of lyrics, chiefly
from The Countess Kathleen, were grouped together as ‘The Rose’. Several of
the poems would be further changed in later collections; Gaelic names re-
mained inconsistent, while specifically classical allusions would eventually
be grafted on to poems like “The Sorrow of Love’. Certain ninetyish phrases
still predominated; but the phrase ‘wandering stars’, for instance, was trans-
formed into ‘all dishevelled wandering stars’, gaining at a stroke the resonance
and rhythm already seen as Yeatsian.** And, with accessibility to an English
audience firmly in mind, a glossary was provided for some names and local
references.
The whole arrangement was carefully worked through; it owed nothing
to the accidents of chronology. Archaic and recondite expressions were
pruned: juvenilia from the 1880s like ‘Miserrimus’ disappeared. Read together,
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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

the three long dramatic pieces stressed a tension between old Irish beliefs
and conventional religious piety— and between ‘Fenians’ and bishops. There
was, therefore, a Parnellite message for those with an eye to such things. But
overall the themes that emerged emphasized tradition, beauty and the Celtic
essence, while politics and ‘the world’ were shunned. Thus the collected
poems bore little indication of the man who had originally written them, while
their arrangement owes much to the agenda which wy had set himself dur-
ing his Sligo retreat.
In mid-February 1895 wBy sent the final revisions off from Sligo: the pre-
face is dated ‘Sligo, March 24’. By the time it was in the press, he wrote to
Tynan, reverting to their old manner:

All the old things are re-written. I wonder how they will receive it in Ireland.
Patronize it I expect & give it faint praise & yet I feel it is good, that whether the
coming generations in England accept me or reject me, the coming generations in
Ireland cannot but value what I have done. I am writing at the end of the day & when
I am tired, this endless war with Irish stupidity gets on my nerves. Either you or I
could have more prosperous lives probably if we left Ireland alone, & went our own
way on the high seas — certainly we could have more peacable lives. However if the
sun shine in the morning I shall be full of delight of battle & ready to draw my bow
against the dragon.”

The next month, May, he returned to London, after a rather unsuccessful fort-
night with Hyde in Roscommon. wBy’s ineptness with a fishing-rod amused
his host (he hooked a visiting clergyman by the ear) and Hyde’s sister Annette
made, according to Hyde’s diary, an amadan of the poet.*’ A few weeks later
the Bookman carried an extremely equivocal review by wBy of Hyde’s Story
ofEarly Gaelic Literature (too ‘historical’, ‘dry as dust’**). Their close associ-
ation was definitely over.
On 21 August, in Bedford Park, he received his first copy of Poems, to be
published in October. Lily noticed ‘he can’t part from it but sits not read-
ing it but looking at the outside and turning it over and over’.*’ He had good
reason to. For one thing, it was beautifully produced, though the cover was
by H. G, Fell instead of Shannon; it showed St Michael destroying a serpent,
and wBy came to dislike all the art-work. Some shamrocks had crept on to
the spine, but the frontispiece, representing an angelic coronation, carried a
suitable suggestion of the finale to The Countess Kathleen. More importantly,
the contents were received with considerable respect. In an intelligent review
(preserved by wsy) W. P. Ryan analysed this ‘readdressed work’, recognizing
in the obsessive fine-tuning avisionary power and a quest for artistic perfec-
tion; he also noted that the ‘alien’ tone of the first poems, derived from delib-
erately exotic Gaelic imagery, had been replaced by the beauty of everyday
150
 <i |
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Ne XI: PATERNQSTER BVILDINGS : AIDCCCXCY:

6. The frontispiece of Poems (1895) by H. C. Fell. way later came to despise Fell’s art-work
as weak and tired, but it does reflect the Christian-mystic and medievalist preoccupations
evident in his writing at the time and suggests the apotheosis of The Countess Cathleen, which
was included in the volume.

151
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

things.°° Ryan understood that the plays and poetry, placed in careful apposi-
tion to each other, summed up a concrete and integrated achievement. But
it would, more practically, prove a long and steady seller, revised fourteen times
over the next three decades and creating a regular income. In 1929 WBY wrote:
“This book for about thirty years brought me twenty or thirty times as much
money as any other book of mine — no twenty or thirty times as much as all
my other books put together.’*' As a record of his youth, evidence of the road
since travelled, and provider of his middle years, Poems (1895) deserved wBY’s
gratitude. It also symbolized an important stage in the development of his
public self.

V
The summer of 1895 opened a new era in his personal life too. Since the
estrangement with Gonne in 1893, wBy had been attracted to other women,
following his inclination towards the unconventional: not only the alarming
Florence Farr but also the fey and slightly manic Irish artist Althea Gyles,
and the Gore-Booth sisters, for whom he arranged fortune-telling sessions
with Moina Mathers. Sentimental contact was established through the
brokerage of occult interests, but things did not proceed further. Women like
Gyles and Farr were drawn to more experienced and authoritative figures;
his own social as well as personal inhibitions, as he had found in Sligo, kept
him a certain distance from the Gore-Booths, while they in turn looked
elsewhere. Constance found a dashing Polish art student, Casimir Markievicz,
and Eva chose the suffragist Esther Roper. At a dinner for the Yellow Book
on 16 April 1894, however, wBy had noticed the beauty and distinction of Lionel
Johnson's cousin Olivia Shakespear. More decisively, she noticed his dramatic
looks and saw to it that Johnson arranged a meeting. A note in her handwriting
is appended coquettishly to Johnson’s letter of 30 May: ‘I shall be so glad to
see you.©
Shakespear had been to The Land ofHeart's Desire and admired it, but that
June she was also just about to publish her own first novel, Love on a Mortal
Lease. The title, from Modern Love, is apposite; she resembled one of Meredith’s
astringent beauties, trammelled by the expectations of her class and back-
ground. Though involved, if rather tangentially, in London literary life, it
was not her original milieu. Two years and three months older than wsy,
she came from an upper-class military family; her mother was a sister of
Johnson’s father. Like Johnson, she followed intellectual fashion and felt
oppressively isolated within her philistine family; he found her ‘the only
member of my family to whom I can really disclose myself’. Her marriage
in December 1885 to Henry Hope Shakespear, a solicitor from a similar (but
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 LANDS OF HEART'S DESIRE 1894-1896
much less well-off) Anglo-Indian background, is hard to explain; it may have
been a gesture of desperation. He was fourteen years older, and ‘ceased to pay
court to me from the day of our marriage’. One child, Dorothy, was born nine
months later. Her fiction is dominated by the theme of a loveless marriage
to an older man, and the frustration of intelligent women trying to live life
on their own terms. Her cousin Lionel provided a lifeline, and by the 1890s
she was entertaining his circle at her Kensington house. A sad and slightly
detached manner hid a sharp brain and a mind of her own. Her future son-
in-law Ezra Pound fantasized that Olivia had spent her previous life as a
Byzantine: ‘She has a nasty 3rd-century-Christian streak in her nature. That’s
why she hates Christ like the devil.’
To way, struck by her ‘distinction’, she resembled Eva Gore-Booth;
dark-haired and lovely, in photographs of the time she looks slightly like a
more reflective Maud Gonne.® And she was soon told of wBy’s hopeless
attachment. By August 1894 he was writing chatty letters to her about her
next novel (Beauty’s Hour), which Symons would publish in the Savoy in
1896. wBY suggested she reconstruct a character as ‘one of those vigerous
fair haired . . . young men, who are very positive, & what is called manly, in
external activities & energies & wholly passive & plastic in emotional &
intellectual things’. Implicitly, he was declaring that he was the very oppos-
ite: no wonder she later accused him of writing ‘unconscious love letters’. In
November she sent her new novel, The Journey ofHigh Honour, to Sligo, and
wey returned enthusiastic critiques, while pointing out the wooden quality
of her male characters, ‘refined, destinguished, sympathetic. . . because your
own character & ideals are mirrored in them’.®”’ By April he was writing to
her of his regret at having to stay on in Sligo, and expressing impatience to
meet again.
Their friendship was cemented by occult interests and literature. He
explained to her his plan of writing stories that would not be ‘mere phantasies
but the signatures — to use a medieval term — of things invisable & ideal’,
and analysed her visions as well as her novels. ‘I no more complain of your
writing of love, than I would complain of a portrait painter keeping to por-
traits. 1would complain however if his backgrounds were too slightly ima-
gined for the scheme of his art. I have never come upon any new work so full
ofa kind of tremulous delicasy, so full ofa kind of fragile beauty as these books
of yours however.’ This was calculated flattery — he does not praise
Shakespear’s work to other correspondents at the time. After his return to
London in May, she was apparently determined to put these ‘unconscious’
declarations into concrete form. Perhaps it was inevitable that in wBy’s first
love-affair the woman would take the initiative; he presented himself in
his Memoirs as naive, hesitant, almost girlish, and when Shakespear made a

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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

declaration wBy assumed not only that she (like Johnson) ‘loathed her life’
but that she (unlike him) ‘had had many lovers’. He hesitated in a maidenly
way for a fortnight and then agreed to pursue matters, subsequently caught
unaware by the passion of her first kiss (on the train to Kent, visiting her friend
and ally Valentine Fox).”°
This was mid-July 1895. She clarified the conditions of her marriage
and told wsy he would be her first extra-marital affair. Consummation
now seemed an even more difficult matter. According to wBy’s recollection
they decided to wait and elope when her mother died. This would certainly
have made more financial sense — though under the law of the day she would
not have been able to divorce Shakespear and would inevitably have lost
custody of Dorothy. They decided to take advice from experienced female
friends: wBy probably choosing Florence Farr, and Shakespear confiding
in her friend Valentine Fox, to whose house she had brought wy on 11 July.
wey thought they sustained this chaperoned existence ‘for nearly a year’,
possibly from June 1895 until his move into Woburn Buildings the follow-
ing spring.
That summer the literary and artistic circles frequented by wBy were
preoccupied with sex. On 5 April 1895, while he was still in Sligo, Oscar
Wilde had been arrested; the trial began shortly after wBy’s return to Lon-
don. On 19 May, the day before it began, he called at Lady Wilde’s to express
sympathy and relay support from ‘some of our Dublin literary men’; aletter
to Dowden, asking him to write sympathetically to Wilde, survives. Dowden,
unsurprisingly, refused. wBy’s unequivocal support is admirable: compounded
of gratitude to someone who had helped him, solidarity with an avant-garde
Irish writer, and a cosmopolitan determination not to be shocked (after all,
he was aware of the leanings of friends like Lionel Johnson, and had shared
lodgings with Joseph Quinn). Others in the Rhymers circle were less cer-
tain, and more compromised: Wilde had been their patron, and several were
implicated in the homosexual underworld. Symons had a further reason for
sensitivity. He had been trying to place his third volume of poems, London
Nights, which pursued themes of sexual passion and prostitutes too enthu-
siastically for Lane’s Bodley Head or William Heinemann; it ended up with
Leonard Smithers, ex-solicitor, art dealer, bookseller and pornographer (‘Tl
publish anything that the others are afraid of”). It appeared in June, hot on
Wilde’s conviction, and was unsurprisingly panned for its immorality. One
review was headed, succinctly, ‘Pah! wey, just preparing to venture into
his own version of sexual excess, wrote that Symons deserved congratula-
tion ‘upon having written a book which, though it will arouse against him
much prejudice, is the best he has done’.” He went on to stress that this was
because of Symons’s sexual honesty rather than his poetic technique. Within
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 LANDS OF HEART'S DESIRE 1894-1896
a year he would be casually referring to Max Nordau’s work on ‘degeneration’
as related to artistic genius. It was all a long way from Sligo.
Nor was he the only literary entrepreneur who decided it was a good time
to tackle conventional morality head-on. Smithers, in the wake of the Wilde
débacle, approached Symons about editing a new magazine to rival the Yellow
Book. Beardsley, already fired from the latter, was brought aboard, though
his sly obscenities were (with some difficulty) restricted to an illustration in
the prospectus. And the new magazine chose as its title the Savoy, seen by
many as a daring reference to the hotel where, the world now knew, Wilde
had taken his rent-boys. During the late summer of 1895 the Savoy venture
took shape; and wy, whose friendship with Symons was strengthening as
Johnson disintegrated into alcoholism, was brought in at an early stage.
Symons, wy found, had ‘the sympathetic intelligence ofa woman’; his pose
of sexual obsession masked a nature ‘incapable of excess . . . [he] lived the tem-
perate life Pater had commended’. (Symons’s much recorded contemporary
affatre maudite with an amoral dancer called Lydia, though it did happen, does
indeed sometimes read like an elaborate fantasy.) In the post-Wilde fall-out,
wBY's move into the Savoy circle shocked Dublin acquaintances like Russell
and Rolleston (‘I think you should clear out of Arthur Symons’s vicinity, and
come over here. It will be much better for you morally”).
But he was determined on independence in more ways than one. Blenheim
Road was gloomier than ever. Susan Yeats was bedridden, and py making
very little from illustrative work. Jack had moved out after his marriage to a
fellow art student Mary Cottenham White (‘Cottie’) in August 1894. Lily had
left the Morris embroidery workshop, so money was especially short. Though
Lolly was receiving an income from her book on brushwork painting tech-
niques, she was increasingly neurotic and edgy. Lily’s diary for the summer
of 1895 records the comings and goings at Bedford Park: visits from Olivia
Shakespear (‘Willy’s latest admiration, very pretty, young and nice’), uncle
John Pollexfen, who was suspected of carrying mumps into the household
(‘Think of a poet with mumps’), and a traumatic interlude when Susan
Pollexfen’s sister Agnes arrived in a deluded state of manic psychosis, hav-
ing escaped from a mental home: ‘no sleep and unceasing talking’. After five
shillings spent on telegrams, she eventually departed in the custody of two
nurses and her distraught husband.” wey felt guilty at consigning her once
more to the asylum. (Writing his memoirs twenty years later, he agonized
over the point but his sisters made him omit the incident to save family feel-
ings.) Finally, in August By himself succumbed to mysterious stomach pains
and severe depression.
It was at this point that Symons suggested wBy temporarily share his
rooms in the Temple, at Fountain Court; he had lived there since February

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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

1891, having found his lodgings through George Moore, already a Temple
inhabitant.”* The apartment was actually leased by Havelock Ellis (physician,
savant and sexologist), who sublet to Symons and kept some space for him-
self; but he was away, and his room was free. wBy needed little persuading;
the Symons version in later years was that he ‘begged for a winter’s home’ when
he was homeless.’”° He had left Bedford Park by 26 September, when York
Powell wrote to Katharine Tynan:

Mr Yeats is not yet well. We are all anxious about him. He has not yet got out of his
sadness and illness of weeks ago. I wanted him to come down here [Oxford] but he
says he cannot get away from home. He is very pleased with Lily’s letters [from Sligo]
and I think he will get used to Willy’s being away, ifit gets Willy into regular work.”

The family attitude towards wBy’s defection was sceptical. Lily, for one,
was so closely bound to home that a quarter-century later she could still vividly
remember the security and joy of Easter 1894, spent with her brother and father.
jy sketched his son while she read The Prisoner ofZenda. ‘I sat one side of
the fire in Blenheim Road, Papa the other, and Willy between us. The talk
was pleasant. We all had a holiday feeling and Papa did this beautiful sketch
of Willy . . . !would be glad to have a copy in memory of that day of spring
and holiday and youth.”* For her, such moments eclipsed all the insecurity
and frustration of Bedford Park life; but her brother felt differently. After
he left, she missed him and remained uncertain how anyone could make
the break. “What is the “poet” up to?’ she asked yay the next month. ‘Is he
paying his way? — And what is his book doing?’ Paying his way remained a
difficulty; he hoped to manage on ten shillings a week, and a small account-
book in his handwriting records loans and debts to Symons. He periodically
returned to Blenheim Road, sometimes because Symons had borrowed all
his money; he told Lily his new style of life ‘tended to economy’. She noticed
(with implicit surprise) that he ‘visibly and unmistakably enjoyed himself’
and was pleased to see them all. But to the others, by and large, his depar-
ture was a relief. Describing a later return visit, By confided to Lily, ‘He
has the greatest wish to be friendly and peaceable, but he can’t manage it,
and though I was very sorry to see him go, for he is in good humour, both
attractive and affectionate, still wherever he is there is a constant strain and
uneasiness.” For his part, removal from Blenheim Road took him away
from an environment where he was gently but mercilessly satirized (“WB
is reading an article which he has written on Standish O’Grady in the “Book-
man” to Mr O'Leary, who says it is no more like him than the man in the
moon’”°), This was a loss as well as a relief.
But his new rooms suited him. The set occupied the top storey, with a stone
156
 LANDS OF HEART'S DESIRE 1894-1896
balcony looking down ona wide courtyard and a fountain; wBy’s apartme
nt,
connected to Symons’s bya corridor, provided privacy when he needed it.
The
rus in urbe of the Temple, with its collegiate serenity just off the Strand,
appealed to him: as it turned out, Blake too had lived in Fountain Court
in
old age, and in the 1890s the Inns of Court housed many literary birds
of
passage (John Gray, Edward Martyn, Ernest Dowson, George Moore).
Most of all, he could follow through the commitment to Olivia Shakespear.
However, this would not happen just yet.
At this very point, Maud Gonne returned to his life. Unknown to WBY,
she had had a second child, Iseult, by Millevoye in August 1894; but their
relationship was foundering and she wrote to wBy from Dublin in Novem-
ber 1895, asking him if she had been appearing to him in spiritual visions.*!
For her part, she was convinced she had met him astrally; they had even re-
visited Howth together. This bombshell coincided with a disastrous visit
from Shakespear, when wBy went out to buy cakes for tea and succeeded in
locking himself out of his rooms. The omens were hardly good. And on 13
November Gonne herself materialized in London; they dined together. Four
days later she returned to Paris (and Iseult); but she was back in his life.
Their correspondence continued through the winter, with Gonne encour-
aging Irish nationalist links to Mathers’s shadowy ‘Highlander organizations,
and promising to write about wBy’s work for French magazines. (Hardly a
literary critic, or even a proficient writer, her piece was eventually cut down
to a brief biography.) By January 1896 wey was apparently thinking that
some day he might go to live and work in France.
All this, coinciding with the early stages of his affair with Shakespear,
cannot have been easy. But her (and literary London's) claims on him were
reinforced by the great event of 11 January 1896, when the first number of the
Savoy was published in London. Symons’s editorial denied that they sub-
scribed to any movement, including ‘Decadence’: ‘for us, all art is good which
is good art’. This was dangerously close to Wilde’s defence of his love-poetry
in court, six months before. But the contents were Pre-Raphaelite rather
than Decadent. Realism and psychological exploration were represented by
Havelock Ellis’s critique of major European figures; iconoclastic autobiog-
raphy by Shaw’s ‘On Going to Church’; discursive gossip by the first of a series
of ‘Causeries’, an idea lifted from the Speaker. Most striking was wBY’s prom-
inence. The first number included two love-poems, ‘The Shadowy Horses’
(later known as ‘He bids his Beloved be at Peace’) and ‘The Travail of Passion’,
appositely Pre-Raphaelite in tone, anda short story, ‘The Binding of the Hair’.
This provided the setting for another poem, later separately published as ‘He
gives his Beloved certain Rhymes’; all three were probably addressed to
Shakespear, particularly the last. Itis sung to a young, wise, dark-haired queen,

157
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

married to an old, somnolent foolish husband; the singer is a love-sick bard,

whose passion transcends his death.
By then, they were all but lovers; full consummation probably waited until
WBY moved into an independent flat in Woburn Buildings in February. As
he recalled it in his Memoirs, embarrassment and inexperience continued to
dominate the episode. Choosing a bed together in a Tottenham Court Road
shop, where ‘every inch increased the expense’, was an agony, and he was at
first ‘impotent from nervous excitement’. Shakespear’s sympathetic and
tolerant approach eased matters. She met him the next day (for study in the
British Museum) in her usual manner, to his surprise; and it was all right in
the end. His sexual insecurity, fears and longings may be reflected in the very
poems and story so prominently displayed in the Savoy: consummation and
death are inevitably linked, along with images of drowning, smothering and
absorption.® If wBy’s autobiographical recollection really matches his mood
at the time, there is a strong implication of reluctance and ambiguity as well
as inexperience and uncertainty. And Shakespear’s rather world-weary and
sarcastic persona of later years — a Balzacian rather than Meredithian hero-
ine** — may owe something to the uneven course of her first extra-marital
entanglement.
From her lover’s point of view, the beginning of 1896 had established
him anew: equipped with independent living-quarters and a beautiful mar-
ried mistress, he was also the star of a scandalous new journal. In that role he
was observed by Max Beerbohm at a dinner to launch the Savoy in the New
Lyric Club on 22 January, attended by the contributors to the first number.
(The menu-card survives: Bisque décrivisses, Filet de sole au vin blanc, Noisettes
de mouton tomates farcies, Faisan roti et salade, Bombe glacé a la Vénitienne,
Champignons sur crotites.) To Beerbohm, the principal revelation was the
pornographer-publisher Smithers’s wife, ‘brought out from some far suburb
for this occasion only’, and trying gallantly to cope.

Perhaps, if I had not been so preoccupied by the pity of her, Iwould have been more
susceptible to Yeats’s magic. I wished that I, not he, had been placed next to her at
the table. I could have helped her more than he. The walls of the little room in
which we supped were lined with bamboo instead of wall paper. ‘Quite original, is
it not?” she said to Yeats. But Yeats had no reply ready for that; only a courteous, lugubri-
ous murmur. He had been staying in Paris, and was much engrossed in the cult of
Diabolism, or Devil-worship, which appeared to have a vogue there. He had made
a profound study of it: and he evidently guessed that Beardsley, whom he met now
for the first time, was a confirmed worshipper in that line. So to Beardsley he talked,
in deep vibrant tones across the table, of the lore and rites of Diabolism— ‘Dyahbolism’
he called it, thereby making it sound the more fearful. I daresay that Beardsley,
who always seemed to know by instinctive erudition all about everything, knew all

158
 LANDS OF HEART’S DESIRE 1894-1896
about Dyahbolism. Anyhow, I could see that he with that stony commonsense
which
always came upmost when anyone canvassed the fantastic in him, thought Dyahbol
ism
rather silly. He was too polite not to goon saying at intervals, in his hard,
quick voice,
‘Oh really? How perfectly entrancing!’ and ‘Oh really? How perfectly sweet!’ But,
had I been Yeats, I would have dropped the subject sooner than he
did.
At the other end of the table, Arthur Symons was talking of some foreign city,
carrying in his waistcoat-pocket, as it were, the genius loci, anon to be embalmed
in
Pateresque prose. I forget whether this time it was Rome or Seville or Moscow or
what; but Iremember that the hostess said she had never been there. I liked Symons
feigning some surprise at this, and for saying that she really ought to go. PresentlyI
heard him saying he thought the nomadic life was the best of all lives for an artist.
Yeats, in a pause of his own music, heard this too, and seemed a little pained by it.
Shaking back the lock from his brow, he turned to Symons and declared that an artist
worked best among his own folk and in the land of his fathers. Symons seemed
rather daunted, but he stuck to his point. He argued that new sights and sounds and
odours braced the whole intelligence of a man and quickened his powers of creation.
Yeats, gently but firmly, would have none of this. His own arguments may not have
been better than Symons’s; but, in voice and manner and countenance, Symons was
no match for him at all. And it was with an humane impulse that the hostess inter-
posed. ‘Mr Symons’, she said, ‘is like myself. He likes a little change.’ This bathos
was so sharp that it was like an actual and visible chasm: one could have sworn to a
glimpse of Symons’ heels, a faint cry, a thud. Yeats stood for an instant on the brink,
stroking his chin enigmatically, and then turned to resume the dropped thread of
Dyahbolism. I could not help wishing that he, not poor Symons, had been the vic-
tim. He would somehow have fallen on his feet: and his voice, issuing uninterrupt-
edly from the depth of the chasm, would have been as impressive as ever.*

VI
The Savoy, like Florence Farr’s idea of the theatre, found self-validation in
unpopularity with ‘the public’; Symons’s editorial in the second number on
25 April judged the initial reception ‘flattering because it has been for the most
part unfavourable’. This appealed to wBy; so, perhaps, did Havelock Ellis’s
major essays on Nietzsche, the first of which now appeared, stressing his par-
allels with Blake, his attacks on perceived morality, and discussing the Greeks’
pursuit of unityin style as a hallmark of culture. All these ideas would be taken
up by wBy. His own work was represented bya short story, ‘Rosa Alchemica’,
summing up the theme of ‘Moods’ which dominates his work at this time.
He was putting the finishing touches to the collection which would appear
the next year as The Secret Rose; his fiction was becoming more integrated and
coherent, centred around occultism and folklore, using a/ter egos, recurrent
themes and even names.” To his delight, in late February Henry Davray,
a friend of several Rhymers, had approached him about translation into

159
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

French.®” Already a secondary literature was appearing about the Celtic

Revival; in 1894 W. P. Ryan had published (independently in Dulwich) The
Irish Literary Revival: Its History, Pioneers and Possibilities, attempting to
detach the movement from the Yeatsian bandwagon, reassert its origins in
the Southwark Irish Literary Club, and restore a political angle. But through
the Savoy and his Bookman reviews, as well as the success of Poems, wBY
effortlessly possessed the ear of literary London, and could put his own stamp
on the past. In May 1896, reviewing Lady Ferguson's biography of Sir Samuel,
he was able to look back ‘twelve years ago’ to his youthful response to Ferguson;
and he stressed that though a Unionist, Ferguson had been accounted by John
O'Leary ‘a better patriot than himself’ because his writing was rooted in
Irish character and Irish history. Thus Ferguson transcended his background,
that of establishment Dublin, which resembled ‘that fabled stony city of
Arabia’.** The parallel with wBy himself was clearly implied.
At thirty he was at last coming in to his own. A year before, he had care-
fully explained to Tynan the point at which a writer’s reputation attracted satir-
ical attack, and the way it could transcend such adversity through reaching
a general public. Around the same time he confided to Fisher Unwin that
he had reached the stage where having his work selected for anthologies was
no longer a help.*” He was about to negotiate a substantial advance for his
fiction. His plan, he told Joseph Quinn, was ‘to return to Ireland to live in
about two years, as that time will about see the end of my present mass of work’.
This sense of viewing his work as a developing whole is borne out bya letter
to Davray in March. While lofty about his biography (‘I never keep articles
about myself’), he recommended several review articles on his poetry and plays
— particularly John McGrath in United Ireland,
the most important Irish article on my work . . . he says that my criticism &
speaches have made ‘a revolution in Irish literary taste’ — I think this is his phrase.
You must excuse the egotism of this quotation; but the article pleased me, because
I have worked in Ireland for a long time to check the rhetorical writing which our
political necessities have developed & to persuade our own not very well educated
Irish public to accept literature as literature, & not as partly disguised politics.”

Meanwhile, he was moving from Ireland: sending to Dublin for the few
belongings he had kept there and searching for cheap furniture in London.
The destination was a set of rooms on one floor of 18 Woburn Buildings, an
atmospheric but dingy court near Euston Station and the British Museum,
now called Woburn Walk. way found it through Symons’s charlady, the
resourceful Mrs Old, who came in to work for him from Islington and whose
husband held the lease. He paid Symons 43 for the basic necessities which
accompanied him: a bedstead, mattress, bolster and pillow, a table, seven

160
 PLAGE i:

Above, left: John Butler Yeats just

before his marriage, 1863 — still a
student of law.
Above, right: Susan Pollexfen Yeats as
a young married woman, c. 1873.
Left: wBy as a baby, drawn by his
father. ‘I think your birth was the first
great event in my life... I was for
the first time — I suppose — pure
animal. I never felt like that after-
wards at the birth of the others.’
PEAR Ee2

Above: wBy as a child, Sligo, c. 1873.

Facing, above: The older Yeats generation at Sandymount Castle, Robert Corbet’s
house in the Dublin suburbs, c. 1860. From left to right: JBy’s sisters Grace Yeats,
Mary Wise (born Yeats), and Jenny Yeats; Robert Wise and Michael (the man-
servant), in doorway; Uncle Robert Corbet, sitting to right of door; a Beatty cousin,
standing; another sister, Ellen Yeats, sitting beside Corbet; ay’s brother, Isaac Yeats,
on the ground. The flag on the turret was flown when Corbet was in residence.
Facing, below: The Pollexfen house, Merville, as it was when the Yeats children
stayed there. This contemporary photograph conceals the basement level, and the
extensive outbuildings behind, but it was not grand: in Lily’s words, ‘a solid house,
big rooms ~ about 14 bedrooms, stone kitchen offices & a glorious laundry smelling
of soap full of white steam & a clean coke fire with rows of irons heating at it. . .
60 acres of land round it — a very fine view of Ben Bulben.’
PLATE 4
 PLATE 5

Above, left: JBY, c. 1875, when he had embraced the

ife of an insecure artist.
Above, right: George Pollexfen, c. 1906

‘acing, above: Sligo Harbour in the later nineteenth

entury; the Pollexfen fortunes were based on
teamers like the one surrounded by older rigged
hips.
‘acing, below: The Middleton & Pollexfen mills on
ne river at Ballisodare, outside Sligo.
PLATE 6

Above: Sketches made by the Yeats

children at Branscombe, Devon, on
a rare family holiday in the summer
of 1879: wBy’s is on the right. The
children had begged for black paint
but By disapproved of it on artistic
grounds.
Left: wBy about nine years old,
sketched by his father.
 PLATE 7

Above, left: wBy about twenty, still

bearded and not yet in his poet’s
‘uniform’.
Above, right: Jack Yeats, c. 1900.
Left: George Russell (AE’) in 1890,
about five years after he first met wBy.
PLATE 8

:
:
:
 PLATE 9

Above: Lily and Lolly in the

early 1890s.
Right: wBy painted as the
mad “King Goll’ by his father,
reproduced in the Leisure
Hour, September 1887. In later
years wBy regarded this
picture as ‘a pathetic memory
of a really dreadful time’.

Left: 3 Blenheim Road, the

Yeats home in Bedford Park.
PLATE IO

Above: Maud Gonne aged twenty-three in

1889, the year wBy met her.
Left: Gonne, c. 1890-92, perhaps after the
death of her first child in August 189r.
Facing: wByY in the early 1890s, probably
with John Todhunter at the Irish Literary
Society (London). By now the character-
istic sartorial style has been assumed: black
velvet coat, exaggerated tie, cigarette,
beribboned pince-nez.
 A
a t+
nine
a inn eee OR
Pel

s
PAV ASR
eel
PLATE 12

Above: wBy in 1894, probably in

the garden at Blenheim Road.
Left. Samuel Liddell MacGregor
Mathers, self-proclaimed Comte
de Glenstrae.

Facing, above: Farr’s niece Dorothy

Paget in The Land ofHeart’
Desire, from the Sketch, 25 April
1894.

Facing, below: Florence Farr,

around the time of her success in
A Sicihan Idyll and Arms and the
Man.
PLATE 13
PLATE

Above: The sisters Constance (later Markievicz)

and Eva Gore-Booth in the early 18gos, at the
time wBy first met them.
Left: Arthur Symons in 1896, around the time
wey shared rooms with him in the Temple.
 PLATE I5

Above: wBy in his study, as in the Ta¢ler, 29 June 1904:

conclusive evidence of how fashionable Irish things had
become. Where There is Nothing had just been played in
London, and an important exhibition by Irish painters
had opened at the Guildhall. Identifiable objects in the
room include a death-mask of Dante, Blake engravings,
and books on mysticism and magic.
Right: Woburn Buildings, drawn by R. Schurabe. wsy’s
study was the room with the large window directly above
the cobbler’s shop.
PLATE 16

Olivia Shakespear in the Literary Yearbook

(1897), at the time her affair with wBy was
coming to an end. It was accompanied by a
profile (she had recently published her novel
Beautys Hour). wBy was given similar treat-
ment in the same issue.
 LANDS OF HEART’S DESIRE 1894-1896
pieces of tapestry canvas, two pieces of plushette, and two blankets.?! There
cannot have been room for much more. He was in possession of a large, low
sitting-room ‘looking on a raised flagged pavement where no traffic can
come — & the bedroom, very small & draughty, looks out on St Pancras
Church with its caryatids & trees’.”” Dorothy Richardson, who moved in across
the court eight years later, thought the narrow houses ‘retained something
of an ancient dignity, and, with the faded painted ceilings of their main rooms,
a touch of a former splendour’;” but they had come down in the world. Like
the Temple, Woburn Buildings provided an off-beat style at minimum cost:
but the social atmosphere was very different. The attic room above, which
wBy would later take over, was inhabited by a pedlar; below him was an aged
cobbler; opposite, a stonemason. A blind beggar was on permanent station
outside, selling matches and bootlaces. All that was missing, as WBY remarked,
was a pawnshop.
Richardson used to watch his long daily conversations with the cobbler
on his way out of the house: ‘the two stood obviously in an equality of com-
munication, discussing, agreeing, disagreeing, never at a loss and frequently
amused, usually parting in laughter’. Appropriately, wsy brought to the
Buildings a certain Irish sociability. In late February he wrote to Rhys, ‘hence-
forth I mean to be at-home on Monday evening. Please help me to start by
coming next Monday with Mrs Rhys— Any time after 8—I am asking Symons
& one or two others. Tea & whisky & no dress.’ His account-books indic-
ate that Benedictine soon replaced the whiskey, but otherwise it continued
as intended. Richardson used to watch these gatherings from her opposite
window, ‘shadowy forms seated in high-backed antique chairs or standing
clear in the window-space . . . chiefly being talked to by the tall presiding
figure, visible now here, now there, always in speech’. This habit of a regu-
lar ‘evening’, like Mallarmé’s Tuesdays or Dowden’s Sundays, had begun
in Bedford Park; in Woburn Buildings, however, he could entertain on his
own terms, if not elegantly. Years later, he was still offending the fastidious
aesthetes Ricketts and Shannon by the plebeian style of his table: ‘the plates
of soup plumped down - the chops with a knife and fork plumped down,
potatoes in the middle of the table, then pastry, and then a portion of cheese
all set down like an inventory before the guests’.** But to be able to entertain
at all, to live alone on his precarious income, to have gained an independent
purchase in literary London, represented a symbolic victory. Its extent — and
cost — remained known to few.

161
Chapter
7: WAITING FOR THE MILLENNIUM
1896-1898

People should be asked to support the Irish Literary Theatre

on patriotic grounds, but they should first be made to feal that
there is an actual school of Irish spiritual thought in literature
& that their patriotism will support this. Ireland is leading the
way in a war on materialism, decadence, triviality as well as
affirming her own individuality. That is our case.
wey to T. P. Gill, 13 November [1898]

I
THE interrogative tone of wBy’s poetry has often been noted; less obvious,
but more biographically illuminating, is the way he used fiction to ask ques-
tions about his own personality and life. This was most marked from 1896
to 1897, when he embarked upon a long novel and published a collection of
short stories, both reflecting his own recent experience. And, like many of his
contemporaries, he constructed literary a/ter egos to express different facets
of his personality. From his fiction of the 1890s emerge the outlines of two
basic characters, Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne. The names, which
themselves took some time to evolve, are neither English nor completely Gaelic,
but suggest ‘Old English’ — the term used for descendants of the Norman
settlements, who had often intermarried with Gaelic stock and retained the
Catholic faith. ‘Irish’ credentials, and the people’s religion, were combined
with gentle descent. ‘Hearne’ (a name with nationalist as well as occult
associations) would come to have a special resonance for wBY, eventually attach-
ing to the hero of his autobiographical novel.’ A third doppelgdnger, the poet
Red Hanrahan, was more unequivocally Gaelic (and more specifically based
on the eighteenth-century poet Eoghan Rua O Suilleabhain), but Robartes
and Aherne expressed aspects of wBy’s own ambiguous tradition and pre-
occupations. Robartes, inspired by both Mathers and Russell,” appears in wBy’s
stories as a fanatical searcher after occult truth. Aherne, more cautious and
undecided, represented another kind of seeker for supernatural wisdom, prob-
ably based on Lionel Johnson. And from 1896 to 1897, the idea that such a
quest was near its goal was much in wBy’s mind.
The concept of millennialism was widely prevalent in his circle. Blavatsky
had prophesied that the world would pass from a cycle of materialism into a
cycle of spiritual growth some time in 1897. Russell was fervently attached
to this idea, as were the Matherses, and wsy was affected by it too. Paris as

162
 WAITING FOR THE MILLENNIUM 1896-1898
well as London was full of tiny occult societies, arguing frantically about the
advent of a New Age. From the early 1890s he had been preoccupied by pro-
phecy, partly as a way of anticipating his future with Maud Gonne, whom
he apostrophized as an avatar of the coming spiritual era. Forty years later,
he would put The Celtic Twilight firmly in this context: ‘a bit of ornamental
trivial needlework sewn on a prophetic fury got by Blake and Boeheme’.* If
one note dominates his work in the later 1890s, it is apocalypse: the stars dis-
rupted in their courses. And from early 1896 Russell was bombarding him
with calls to immerse himself in the world of Celtic supernaturalism (and recon-
struct the old hermetic fellowship of himself, Russell, Johnston and Weekes):
Ireland’s special idealism must be forged into a new world order for the
dawning century.°
In London wey could retain acertain distance, though at this time (March
1896) he began his long occult correspondence with the illustrator W. T.
Horton. Horton, edgy and manic, was nervously attracted to the Golden Dawn
and to wBy; he made desperate sorties up from Brighton to discuss invoca-
tions and rituals before bolting away from commitment to the Order. He also
attempted to interest wBy in Thomas Lake Harris’s Brotherhood of the New
Life, a sexually obsessed group of Utopians. Horton continued to receive instruc-
tions from wBy at his most hieratic (‘the intellect must do its utmost before
inspiration is possible. It clears the rubbish from the mouth of the sybils cave
but it is not the sybil’), and obligingly sent wy accounts of visions which
indicate how the poet appeared to his more dazzled English acquaintances
(‘I know you'll take it in the right spirit’):
It is night.
Yeats — naked and gaunt, with long black dishevelled hair falling partly over the
face of a deathly whiteness, with eyes that flame yet have within them depths of
unutterable sadness.
He is wearily going on his way following many lights that dance in front and at
side of him.
Behind follows with outstretched arms a lovely girl in long trailing white garments,
weeping.
Within Yeats a knocking is heard & a voice ‘My son, my son, open thou unto
me & I will give thee Light.”
Horton constantly attempted to lure him down to Brighton, but wBy was
ruthlessly prolific with excuses; and though he obtained a ‘not very good’ horo-
scope from George Pollexfen for Horton,’ he was used by wsy as a butt for
his more sceptical friends (‘a mad artist . . . [who] comes from time to time
& I talk to him like a father . . . a kind of turbid Russell only he sees night-
mares instead of Gods’). None the less, he wrote an introduction for Horton’s
mystical Book ofImages, published in 1898.
163
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

London occultism represented a different world from Russell’s increasingly

frenetic campaign for the return of the Gods to Ireland, but there were con-
nections. Dorothea Hunter, a Golden Dawn initiate who had arrived there
by the same route as wBy (Bedford Park and Theosophy), corresponded
closely with him about rituals; her Irish background made her a suitable
sounding-board for his developing ideas about a specifically Celtic form of
occult inquiry. From her side there was more to it, since she was secretly in
love with him, but their relationship remained mediated through magic
alone.’ His occult notebooks show that by December 1897, Golden Dawn
members were attempting Celtic invocations, conducted by wsy. London
life, Olivia Shakespear, contacts with publishers, Monday evenings at Woburn
Buildings” provided a necessary detachment. Yet, through the spring of
1896, Russell’s summonses became more and more impatient. ‘What am I
to understand? Am Ito tell my men to go ahead? . . . Are your fixtures definite
enough for that? Visiting London to galvanize his dilatory friend, Russell
was taken to tea at Olivia Shakespear’s and decided her drawing-room in
Porchester Square was infested with yellow devils. He was by now at a point
of manic excitement where he had become convinced of the birth of an avatar
for the New Age: he wrote excitedly to wsy, declaring categorically that ‘the
Gods have returned to Eri’. Schools must be set up to study the old beliefs,
and a priesthood prepared to assume spiritual authority.
The mage of Woburn Buildings was more restrained, for good reasons.
The affair with Shakespear provided one, though it would run its course by
the following spring. His own contribution to the millennium currently lay
in writing short fictions about the pursuit of old beliefs; from this point he
was able to refuse commissions to write poems for the Sketch or produce
short-order poetic biographies."! His rate by 1898 was 42 per thousand words.
A series of articles on Blake for the Savoy enabled him to write to O'Leary
repaying ‘the moneyIhave owed you for so long’ (£6).!2 Most importantly,
by the end of the year the publishers Lawrence & Bullen would purchase an
unwritten novel for £105 — half to be paid in weekly instalments of £2 over
six months, and half on publication."
This project was well advanced by June 1896, when wsy told O'Leary,
‘I shall pass through Dublin some time in August I beleive on my way to
Tory Island where I go for local colour for a new story.’ What took him to
Ireland in the end was not Russell’s blandishments, but his own conscious
garnering of experience to turn into profitable fiction. Moreover, this would
be a different kind of visit from previous sojourns, spent in obscure lodgings
on Dublin’s north side or living off sceptical Pollexfen relations at Sligo. For
one thing, he was travelling with Arthur Symons, who was determined to
be impressed by Celtic glamour. For another, their first destination after
164
 WAITING FOR THE MILLENNIUM 1896-1898
Dublin was Tillyra (or Tullira) Castle in Galway, the home of Edward
Martyn, where they arrived on 27 July. The castle was surprising enough:
an exercise in Gothic medievalism grafted over the previous decade on to a
medieval keep. Turrets, gargoyles, mullioned windows, stained glass and
coats of arms were all brand-new; wsy’s artistic eye flinched at the ‘mechan-
ical ornament’. However, the scale and vision of it all were undeniably impres-
sive, especially since the owner lived monastically in an austere chamber,
using the great hall only to play the organ.
Edward Martyn was himself a surprising combination of aesthete and
ascetic. Though Irish, he was a contact of Symons rather than wy: he had
had rooms in the Temple in the 1880s, and was known in London salons. He
was an old friend of George Moore (bound to each other, wsy later judged,
‘by mutual contempt’), who probably sent Symons and wey his way, and joined
them at Tillyra on 5 August. But Martyn was also an early enthusiast for the
Gaelic League, and wey could have already met him through Hyde. The con-
descension of wBy’s Autobiographies, and the inspired ridicule of George
Moore, have guyed Martyn for posterity: moon-faced, obese, epicene,
frantically Catholic, from an Old English family intermarried (according to
wBy) with local peasant stock. In excised passages of his Autobiographies, wBY
recorded that Martyn ‘had learned from some priest that almost all lost souls
were lost through sex’, and speculated that his father’s lechery emerged in Mar-
tyn as ‘an always resisted homosexuality’.’* Martyn’s obsession with Palestrina’s
music and Gothic architecture, his violent aversion to the presence of women,
his hair-splitting religious conscience, and his mother-dominated life immured
in his cut-stone fortress lent themselves to malicious caricature. But he was
also a talented minor playwright, who not only possessed financial means and
enthusiasm, but was prepared to put them behind Irish cultural revival.
This connection would make wsy’s visit memorable, though his pre-
occupations were determinedly other-worldly. Already excited by recent
immersion in rituals and invocations, he threw himself at Tillyra into cabbal-
istic experiments and shared visions. Faux-medieval surroundings, millen-
nial intuitions, recent reading, and Symons’s expectant presence all combined
to induce spectacular manifestations. Lunar invocations produced two sep-
arate visions, a centaur with a bow and the goddess Diana; these were conflated
into the image of a marvellously beautiful woman archer shooting at a star.
It was checked with Dr Westcott of the Golden Dawn, who provided an appro-
priate symbolic explanation. wBy believed it also echoed a short story of
William Sharp's, “The Archer’, simultaneously written for the Savoy: but Sharp
had taken the idea from a letter of wBy’s describing the vision, hastily ran off
a story, and announced it as a joint revelation.”
This kind of subterfuge was inseparable from Sharp’s daily existence,
165
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

which now began to intertwine with wy’. In June he had written excitedly
to Sharp about the need to further ‘the mutual understanding and sympathy
of the Scotch Welsh and Irish Celts’; this seemed about to happen. And
Sharp’s creative energies were now released by becoming a mouthpiece for
the mysterious and invisible Celtic-visionary writer called ‘Fiona Macleod’,
who struck a resonant chord with the current vogue for spiritual Celticism.
Fiona, permanently en route to Hebridean islands or mountain crofts, com-
municated through Sharp in soulful letters as well as unearthly stories and
essays. By August she was in close contact with wBy. Thus it was important
to assure him that his ‘Archer’ vision was parallel to her own. ‘In a vague way
I realise that something of tremendous moment is being matured just now.
We are on the verge of vitally important developments. And all the heart, all
the brain of the Celtic races shall be stirred.’
Installed in a castle, surrounded by admiring company, fired by the sense
of a dawning age where his supernatural questions would be answered: wBy’s
sensibilities were honed to a fine edge by 5 August, when he and Symons
set off with Martyn and Moore on an expedition to the Aran Islands. This
was a great inspiration to Symons, who described it in one of his gushing

7. Grace Plunkett’s cartoon

BOWARD MARTIA caricaturing Edward Martyn’s
misogyny, aestheticism and
“RAVING A WEE OG IT" 0M PARIS. figure; though published in
1920, it preserves the image
he had already acquired when
GRACE PLUNKETT WBY met him in 1896.

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 WAITING FOR THE MILLENNIUM 1896-1898
‘causeries’ for the Savoy, and told Rhys that they were determined to return
and spend a week (‘I am getting a vast deal of all kinds of literary material’?”).
As they sailed out to Aran, way read Fiona Macleod’s The Washer of the
Ford: ‘and when I laid down the book, talked with an Arran [stc] fisherman
of the very beliefs and legends that were its warp and woof’. On his return
WBy wrote excitedly to Sharp about fairy manifestations on Aran, and the
‘new-old celtic mysticism’. Plans to return were obstructed by the weather,
and he went on to Sligo instead. But the islands occupied a special place in
his imagination, and in that of his generation. Like those of Greece or the
southern Mediterranean in later years, they provided glimpses of a society
and way of life whose rhythms and dignity suggested classical parallels to lit-
erary-minded visitors. (And, as with those later resorts, the cognoscenti who
‘discovered’ them resented later popularizers; the novelist Violet Martin,
of Somerville and Ross fame, was annoyed when Symons revealed Aran’s
beauties to Savoy readers, and was relieved that the article was not illus-
trated.) One particular exchange with an old islander held a long-lasting
echo for wsy: he was assured that if anyone came to the community for
sanctuary, having killed a man, they would hide him. ‘Which one — you or
Symons — do you think they took for the murderer?’ John Quinn asked
straightfacedly in later years. ‘Symons seemed a very mild-mannered man —
they must have meant you.”
Tillyra was not merely the base for romantic expeditions to Aran. Martyn’s
friends included exotic part-time Galway residents like the Duras-based
Comte Florimond de Basterot (recluse, aesthete and disciple of the racial the-
orist Gobineau), as well as other local notables such as the Morris family at
Spiddal — the acerbic Irish lawyer Lord Killanin and his lively children. The
literary visitors made quite a stir. Martin Morris passed on his impressions
of wBy to Violet Martin, whose report to Edith Somerville economically con-
veys various layers of Ascendancy snobbery:

He is mad about his old legends and spirits, and if someone said ‘Thims fine lob-
sters’ or anything, he would begin “There’s a very curious tradition about lobsters’
and then he was off. He is thinner than a lath — wears paltry little clothes wisped round
his bones, and the prodigious and affected greenish tie. He is a little affected and
knows it — He has a sense of humour and is a gentleman — hardly by birth I fancy —
but by genius. Arthur Symons, who was here with him, was not much liked I
think —just a smart little practical man of letters who knows how and has no genius
at all.”°

It was a new world to wsy, and judging by his recollections decades later
(in Dramatis Personae) his reaction to his host was rather ungracious. By then,
he and Martyn had been sundered by an ancient disagreement; but there
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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

were other difficulties too. Oliver Gogarty put it robustly: “Yeats hated Edward
Martyn because he was a R. C. There was in Yeats, derived doubtless from
his parson grandfather, a bigotry that probably could not have been discovered
in the grand-parent but which brooded in Yeats. This, and of course the jeal-
ousy of the “household of continuance”.”! This last point may have owed more
to wBy’s latter preoccupations that to his youthful self; Dramatis Personae
would be written in order to associate wBy’s ancestral stock with Irish gentry
in a way that Moore and his friends could not aspire to. At the time of his visit,
he described Martyn as the product of long descent from Crusader stock; but
even in 1896 a certain condescension towards the Catholic family in their
rebuilt Big House is discernible. Though Martyn later dropped out of wBy’s
life, he would continue to remain a butt in his correspondence — especially
in his letters to another Galway notable, who was equally dismissive of her
Tillyra neighbour, for much the same reasons.”” She was Augusta Gregory,
the widow of Martyn’s neighbour, friend and patron Sir William Gregory of
Coole. And her friendship with wBy would be much the most lasting and
important result of that visionary Celtic summer.

I]

In 1896 Augusta Gregory was forty-four, and had been widowed for four years.
Born into a Galway county family, the Persses, she had married the much older
William Gregory at the age of twenty-eight. From being ‘on the shelf’ in the
philistine, horsy and hard-line Protestant world of Roxborough, she had
moved to the Gregory milieu of retired colonial governors and liberal Tory
politicians in London and ‘abroad’, with only temporary returns to his estate
at Coole, buried amid plantations near Gort. Plain, decisive and masterful,
she never lost a certain air of the evangelically minded county lady; but this
was only one side of a complex personality. After her death an old Galway
acquaintance, who as a young girl had known her well, wrote:

She was the most complicated woman I can think of... Loving - cold. Womanly
—cold. Patriotic —cold. Very calculating, dutiful, courageous, purposeful, and all built
upon a bedrock sense of humour and love of fun and a bitter sarcasm with a vein of
simple coarseness of thought and simple inherited Protestantism.”

From childhood she had nurtured a romantic literary ambition, as well

as an attraction towards romantic nationalism; as a young bride from 1881
to 1882 she had taken up the cause of the Egyptian rebels, defending Arabi
Bey in a long pamphlet; and the prevalent tendency to describe her even
in the 1890s as resembling Queen Victoria should be discounted. While her
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 WAITING FOR THE MILLENNIUM 1896-1898
husband was still alive, she had had a passionate affair with
the professional
philanderer Wilfrid Scawen Blunt; wild inventions existed
as to Robert’s
parentage, but her diary shows they first met six months after
her son’s
birth.” By the time she met wBy and Symons in 1896, she had alread
y begun
to write. After her husband’s death in 1892 she had written to
de Basterot:
As for myself, each day seems more sad and empty & I dare not
look forward to the
lonely years before me. I have Robert, but only his holidays and
I shall miss more &
more that bright many-sided compassionateness I appreciated so much.
I have no
plans. I am trying to get rid of my homes, but have no inclination towards
any new
one. I must sell this [London] house & if I can let Coole (where
I cd not live alone
except in summer) it wd be a relief to my income which I must make the
most of for
Robert’s sake.?°

But widowhood liberated her too. She had subsequently discovered, like
many others, an interest in ‘Celtic’ folklore; when wBy met her at Tillyra,
she.had begun to learn Irish. Within a year she would begin to publish art-
icles on fairy traditions, folk-tales and language revival in the Spectator,
Nineteenth Century and Westminster Budget, as well as in Irish outlets like the
Kilkenny Moderator and Dublin Daily Express. Her rapid friendship with
wey created suspicion among her old imperialist friends like Enid Layard;
and her political views would (with characteristic independence) change
throughout her life, tending more and more to separatist nationalism —a process
eventually crystallized by the Black and Tan campaign of 1920 to 1g2r. In the
1880s she had opposed Home Rule, and as late as November 1898 she could
privately confess her doubts about joining ‘ruffians’ like Michael Davitt,
William O’Brien and Archbishop Walsh on the council of the Gaelic League;
but, like wBy, she had chafed under the dead hand of conservative Irish Prot-
estant society and was conscious that change was afoot. As she later remarked,
‘we are all born bigots in Ireland & want a great deal of grace to get us out of
bondage’.” In an article for the Cornhill, May 1900, she finally (and cautiously)
‘came out’ as an Irish nationalist. She had found her role.
For wsy, she provided access to local Galway tradition, through the Irish
language but from a Big House perspective; it was a heady combination.
Though mutually impatient with the constraints of their Unionist back-
grounds, they shared acertain Irish Protestant solidarity, in cultural if not devo-
tional terms (he never accompanied her to the local Church of Ireland at Gort,
though other members of his family did’’). Their meeting in August 1896,
which she recorded in a retrospective diary entry a year later, was a landmark
for them both.”* They had actually met already, in the summer of 1894, at the
London house of the Morrises; but from 1896 a long friendship was sealed.
Arthur Symons, who did not like her, claimed to have spotted it from the start:
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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

‘La Strega’ put her ‘terrible eye’ on wBy and he was lost to lyric poetry. He
really meant that wBy was lost to Symons himself. An invitation was issued
to Coole. Though the two poets did not stay there, travelling on to Sligo, stay-
ing with George Pollexfen at Rosses Point and then in a Glencar cottage where
Symons poured out sub-Yeatsian poems during early September,” avital con-
nection had been made. wBy continued to commission horoscopes from
Pollexfen, and organize collaborative visions with Golden Dawn members
through the penny post. But friendship with Gregory would provide an Irish
base to replace Sligo, and a mentor who would in many ways replace his
family.
As with nearly all the women who meant something to him, their friend-
ship quickly coalesced around an idea for collaborative work, in this case a
large-scale survey of folklore and fairy-tale. It was initially conceived as a book
but eventually took the form of six long essays by wBy, published between
1897 and 1902: Gregory provided much of the basic material and placed
the second essay in the Nineteenth Century, a new outlet for wBy. The final
instalment would be Visions and Beliefs in the West ofIreland, published by
Gregory in 1920.” (As far as she was concerned, the substance of the earli-
er articles was as much hers as wBY’s.*?) As with his other collaborators, thgir
mutual log-rolling became notorious.** Moreover, in exploring the mytho-
logical origins of folklore, wBy showed himself less and less chary of offend-
ing Catholic sensibilities. “The Tribes of Danu’, published in November
1897, aroused clerical criticism by dismissing the philistine aspects of mod-
ern Catholicism, and comparing the doctrine of transubstantiation with
sighting fairies; a year later his generalizations about pagan beliefs among the
Irish peasantry would be considered equally offensive. Remembering these
experiences in old age, he recalled:
My object was to find actual experience of the supernatural, for I did not believe,
nor do I now, that it is possible to discover in the text-books of the schools, in the
manuals sold by religious booksellers, even in the subtle reverie of saints, the most
violent force in history . .. when we passed the door of some peasant’s cottage,
we passed out of Europe as that word is understood. ‘I have longed’, she said once,
‘to turn Catholic, that I might be nearer to the people, but you have taught me that
paganism brings me nearer still.’*°

But he learned from her as well. These long essays, offered around to
publishers as they were written, derived from the local lore and idioms of
the Gort area, and combined the folklore collected by Gregory and wsy
with the insights of Max Miiller, James Frazer and other writers on ancient
religion. Many of the beliefs recorded were rationalizations of quotidian tra-
gedies (infant mortality, mental disturbance), though this aspect was resolutely
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 WAITING FOR THE MILLENNIUM 1896-1898
ignored by Gregory and wsy.** Her ability to talk to people was essential;
language apart, he found it difficult to understand the local accent, and
his
stylish black clothes meant he was mistaken for a proselytizing clergyman.*°
She appealed to him, however, as far more than a collaborator, or a ‘county’
benefactor. Rather than a replacement or surrogate for his distraite mother
or improvident father, she provided a satisfactory version of George Pollexfen.
She flattered him with a shared language of caste (though occupying a higher
niche in the Ascendancy structure than he did): ‘the old battle between those
who use a toothbrush and those who don't’. With her knowledge of the world,
Jamesian apercus, and tendency to artistic lion-hunting, she provided a soph-
isticated sounding-board for analysing his complicated relationships with
interesting people. While he encouraged her work, he may not have rated it
as highly as he implied; certainly by the 1920s, when dividing his acquaint-
ances into astrologically derived ‘phases’, he could put her under Phase 24
in the undemanding company of Queen Victoria and John Galsworthy.
“There is great humility — “she died every day she lived” — and pride as great,
pride in the code’s acceptance, an impersonal pride, as though one were to
sign “servant of servants”. There is no philosophic capacity, no intellectual
curiosity.”
How he appeared to her at the outset of their long relationship is more
conjectural. His humour appealed: and wsy presented himself to her,
through letters and anecdotes, in a feline and amusing way. His genius and
charisma were electrifying. And so were his good looks. In his relationship
with Gregory, as with many others (men as well as women), wy used his
gift for fascination to ‘loan himself out’. He slipped easily into the fantasies
of people as diverse as Horton, George Moore and Annie Horniman, rather
like one of the succubi he read about in treatises on magic. But Gregory’s frm
grasp on reality meant that their friendship, unlike many others, never soured
— though it may at the outset have rested on some unfulfilled hopes. Their
relationship quickly stabilized into mentor and artist: while she addressed
him as ‘Willie’, his letters to her remain to ‘Lady Gregory’. The adherence
to formality is surprising even for the time: yet they rapidly became each other’s
closest friend and confidant, and remained so — with only an occasional
slight passage of annoyance — until her death nearly forty years later. Over
that period, while she sustained him in many ways, he helped her to emerge
as one of the most prominent Irish writers of the day. In identifying her
so deliberately by her title rather than by her Christian name, he not only
defined their relationship, he helped create the image and the name by
which she would live, write and become famous.
Yet at first, in the later 1890s, her letters to him carried a certain tentative
air of gaiety and romance. Given Gregory’s capacity for affairs with younger
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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

men, Maud Gonne’s malicious belief that she was in love with wBy may not
have been far off the mark. For his part, he quickly confided in her about Gonne:
possibly as a tactful form of warning. ‘And then there is his love for Miss Gonne
preying on him,’ she recorded in her diary in November 1897. ‘He fell in love
with her ten years ago, & for 2 or 3 years it “broke up his life” he did nothing
but write to her & see her & think of her —’** When she arranged that the
Nineteenth Century take their second folklore article, she later resented that
the money thus earned by wBy was squandered responding to a summons
sent from Gonne in Belfast. “There I had let him take my article to make the
fifteen pounds to keep him in change, and he had gone off and spent it and
“no purpose served, no object to be gained, no work to do”.”” This was an
inaccurate memory (and is all the more piquant as it was made to her own
lover at the time), but the resentment is palpable. When Gregory finally met
Gonne in December 1898, her reaction was revealing: ‘a shock to me for
instead of beauty I saw a death’s head & what to say to him I knew not’.
She rapidly assumed a proprietorial role in his life, with an accompanying
right to disapprove, and he accepted it.
For the moment, in the summer of 1896, the contact had been made. And
that winter would bring another influential friendship. Back in London by
13 October, wBy resumed the threads of his metropolitan life. He continued
to work on his verse play The Shadowy Waters, and he also started to plan a
visit to Paris. This was partly to gather material for his projected novel, whose
advance payment helped to finance the journey; partly to follow up super-
natural Celticism with Mathers; and partly to pursue Maud Gonne, who was
planning Young Ireland Societies in the French capital. Olivia Shakespear,
distracted by her father’s death, was not much in London; wsy’s thoughts
were already elsewhere. By 30 November he was in Paris, staying first at
the Hotel Corneille opposite the Odéon Théatre: a bohemian resort with
Balzacian associations, favoured by O’Leary in exile (and Little Billee in
Trilby"'). Here he met a saturnine young fellow-Irishman, John Millington
Synge.
Synge, like wBy, was a middle-class Irish Protestant (though his fore-
bears were bishops rather than rectors, and the family retained some money
and land); like wBy, he was an apprentice bohemian, setting out on a life as
an artist, though at this stage music appealed to him as much as literature.
Six years younger than wBy, he was in some ways more confident (a Trinity
background, fluent French); their very similarity raised a prickle of mutual
suspicion, never quite dispelled throughout the friendship. Synge was im-
mune to wBy’s variety of occultism, and suspicious of the extreme-nationalist
cabals of Parisian Irish which wy patronized in Gonne’s wake. But dur-
ing this French sojourn wBy and Gonne began to discuss the idea of putting
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 WAITING FOR THE MILLENNIUM 1896-1898
on ‘Celtic’ plays, by the inevitable Fiona Macleod among others, to
whom
WBY wrote setting out his ideas about Symbolic drama. Synge was
in the
background throughout. As wey remembered it later, he also instruc
ted
his fellow-Irishman to seek inspiration in the Aran Islands rather
than in
continental journeyings. Though Synge already knew about the islands
from
family connections there, wey referred to him proprietorially as ‘a new man—a
TCD graduate — I have started in folklore’? But Synge soon showed that
he would go his own way.
However dependent Synge may or may not have been on wsy’s advice,
they became friends and stayed in touch. Meanwhile, wey’s own cicerone
Symons arrived, and they attended the Théatre de l’CEuvre’s first production
of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi: an anti-realist satire which none the less parodied
Symbolist techniques as well. It was greeted with riots, and left wBy as dis-
orientated as the rest of the audience; Symons’s shrewd review concluded that
Ubu Rot ‘is the brutality out of which we have achieved civilisation’. wBY stayed
on in Paris over Christmas, consulting Mathers about ‘what might become
a celtic magic’,** but there were more mundane schemes afoot as well. In Janu-
ary he helped Gonne to found a Paris branch of the Young Ireland Societ-
ies (L’Association Irlandaise). A journal followed, L’Irlande Libre; so did the
gossip, resentments and backstairs organization inseparable from émigré
political intrigues. wBy’s notion that the Paris Young Irelanders could form
an advance-guard of the Celtic theatre movement came to nothing. But the
involvement provided an overture to the turmoil of nationalist politicking into
which she would draw him over the next year.
In all this activity, his affair with Shakespear had necessarily dropped into
the background. Since July 1896 they had coincided in London for a mere six
weeks (mid-October until late November); and after he returned from Paris
in the second week of January 1897, Gonne followed in February. As his
Memoztrs recall, he was forced to admit his continuing obsession. At a tryst
with Shakespear, ‘instead of reading much love poetry, as my way was to bring
the right mood round, I wrote letters. My friend found my mood did not answer
hers and burst into tears. “There is some one else in your heart,” she said. It
was the breaking between us for many years.’ It is a painful passage, reveal-
ing more about the low voltage of wBy’s sexual feeling for Shakespear than
he had perhaps intended. As always, he viewed himself more clearly through
the filtering lens of poetry. A year later he published ‘Aodh to Dectora’, later
titled more revealingly “The Lover mourns for the Loss of Love’.
Pale brow, still hands, and dim hair,
I had a beautiful friend,
And dreamed that the old despair
Might fade in love in the end:

we:
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

She looked in my heart one day,

And saw your image was there,
She has gone weeping away.
Shakespear’s view may be reflected in a vision she described to wBy a few
years later. He appeared as a Greek prisoner-poet teaching Platonic philo-
sophy to his Persian captors. Otherwise, his main activity was to offer incense
at the marble tomb of a beautiful woman
& to lie long in trance communing with her who [was] buried there & my longing
had almost made for her a living body . . . At last the Persian queen, who loved that
man who was myself, became angry because of the woman in the tomb & because
he . . . would have no living love & because he said that no living beauty was like that
marble beauty, & she had him thrust into the tomb & fastened the door upon him
for ever.*°
Their separation marked the beginning of a protracted period of misery
for wBy. Guilt at the failure of his affair with Shakespear, at his own sexual
inadequacy, and possibly at his implicit relief that the liaison was over was
compounded by despair at the unattainability of Gonne. Meanwhile, the tur-
moil of occult expectations did not decrease, and political intrigue festered
in Dublin. He had two refuges. One was the attentive ear of his new friend
from Coole, whom he saw frequently in London during that February. The
other was the expression of his confusion in supernatural fiction.

II]
In December 1896 wy wrote to O'Leary: ‘next week the novel begins’. It
would not be abandoned until May 1903: ‘an impossible novel . . . anovel that
I could neither write nor cease to write’.“° By February 1897 it had acquired
a quintessentially ninetyish title, “The Benizons of the Fixed Stars’, changed
the following year to “The Lilies of the Lord’; The Speckled Bird emerged as
a title only in 1902. He embarked upon it when his other eternal work-in-
progress, The Shadowy Waters, was running into difficulties. Both projects close-
ly reflected continuing themes in his life, notably the attempt to reconcile
spiritual search and actual existence. From the first draft The Speckled Bird
bore the marks of wBy’s life in 1896. Its structure followed the axis from Paris
to Aran which wy prescribed to Synge; architectural detail was supplied
by Tillyra (and eventually Corcomroe Abbey in Clare); the characters seek
revelation through occult training, building a secret Order through trance
and ritual, while the protagonist, Michael, caught in an impossible love,
learns to abandon his old hope ‘that one would be wisest when happiest’. Its
theme was later described by wBy as ‘the antagonism between the poet and
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 WAITING FOR THE MILLENNIUM 1896-1898
the magician’; it tried to outline a reconciliation between religion, art and
sexual love. As fiction (certainly as readable fiction) it was handicapped by
wey’s firm belief that art was not a criticism of life but a revelation of the
realities behind life.*” But its theme was that embarked upon by Proust and
Joyce in the same era: the boy set apart, by sensibility and experience, to be
an artist. And the message was one familiar to those prospectors too. The artist
should give up searching for ‘happiness’; that was for ordinary people. Axé/’s
injunction to let one’s servants do one’s living resounded in the background.
The boy in wsy’s planned novel is reared feudally in the far west of Ireland,
and obsessed by the world of fairy; like John Sherman, he is an only child
brought up by one parent (in this case his father). He progresses to an inter-
est in occult ritual and invocation, and the pursuit of an inspirational love-
object whose character is partly Maud Gonne’s, but whose marital situation
is Olivia Shakespear's. In the version written after 1go1, the hero’s experiences
among London occultists are described satirically, in the tone wBy developed
for his entertaining letters to Augusta Gregory; much later he would define
his failed novel as an attempt to explore the various and confusing paths
open to him at the fin de siécle (‘the way of the chameleon’). The outline and
first draft of 1896 to 1897 were less coherent. As originally conceived, it began
in the Aran Islands; the draft written from 1897 to 1898 shifted to western
Connacht. A still later version would incorporate elements from Golden
Dawn controversies and Maud Gonne’s secret life. But even in its first draft
the transpositions from wBy’s own experiences were obvious. The hero’s
eccentric father was called John, like wBy’s; the son was called Michael, the
name he would give to both Robartes and his own son; the mother was dead.
(The Sligo name ‘Bruen also occurs.“*) ‘Michael’ (first De Burgh, then Leroy,
finally Hearne) is marked for special destiny by family background,
eccentric education, mystical vision and genius.
The draft outline of 1896 is revealing about his creator’s view of his own
life. “He takes a mistress. She soon begins to weary him. Hitherto he has known,
with increasing intensity, the persecution of sex, but its satisfaction ends the
glamour as well as the satisfaction for a time.’ If this derives from his experi-
ence with Shakespear, ‘Margaret’ indicates wBy’s vision of Gonne. She pos-
sesses a legendary, ‘lonely’ type of beauty, inaccessible to the common taste;
‘a face that could only have been moulded out of a passionate ancestry’, but
a nature marked by kindness and self-sacrifice rather than passion; she is a
‘pilgrim’ (brought up, like Gonne, peripatetically) who transcends common
love. No attempt was made to capture Gonne’s romantic and powerful per-
sonality; Margaret remains a vision without a character. In both early ver-
sions she is introduced as a child, a persona wBy would often associate with
Gonne. In the second version she is also the hero’s first cousin. Physically, she

075
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

and Shakespear provided the template for Michael’s and wsy’s idealized
and legendary women: ‘Grania with her fair hair and her grey eyes and her
flesh like an apple blossom, and Deirdre with heavy and dark hair and pale
ivory skin and eyes full of compassion.” In the draft of 1897 to 1898, called
‘The Lilies of the Lord’, she is linked to the Virgin: this includes passages of
hectic and fervent Mariolatry, marking the high point of wBy’s rejection of
his Protestant background and wish to identify with ‘the people’. The drafts
of 1896 to 1898 included nothing beyond Michael’s childhood; but a cancelled
passage indicates that (again like Proust and Joyce) wBy believed that an artist's
childhood profoundly predicted his later life. ‘Children live a fantastic life, in
which there is everything except human love and human pity and human regret.
They weep, like geniuses, tears upon tears for some dead Orpheus of whom they
have dreamt and pass with wondering indifference, like geniuses, among
the sorrows of their own household.”
wey’ life during these years was also transmuted into fiction (though more
alchemically) in the occult stories which he published in the National Observer
and elsewhere from the early 1890s and which came together as The Secret Rose
in 1897. Some dated back to the weeks when he had shared O’Leary’s North
Circular Road lodgings; later stories, like ‘Rosa Alchemica’, were written (so
he said) ‘when I had left Dublin in despondency’.*’ The variation in liter-
ary achievement is considerable, though he tried to remove some of the more
laborious and stilted effects in a frenzy of last-minute proof corrections. The
themes are more consistent. Using frameworks derived from his reviewing
and reading during the 1890s (notably the collections of Lady Wilde, Jeremiah
Curtin, William Larminie and Hyde), he pursued the old theme of the ‘war
of the spiritual with the natural order’; ‘all the history of various quests for
the ideal & very phantastic’, he told Davray.°? Much of the mise-en-scéne seems
inspired by the Parisian prophetic and millennialist fringe culture which so
affected Huysmans, Mallarmé and Villiers. wy (who had read his Golden
Dawn friend A. E. Waite’s work on Luciferianism in France) wanted to
parade ‘all the modern visionary sects’ before the reader, like the temptations
of Saint Anthony.*’ He was already determined to historicize his own era for
posterity. The symbolic cover by Althea Gyles and dedication to AE stressed
their old alliance in mystic quests, but the stories also used the interest in folk-
tale images which his friendship with Gregory had revived. The scale of his
revisions constantly delayed publication (and rewriting would continue
through many new editions). He was attempting to unite so many different
occult preoccupations that his priorities shifted constantly between one secret
tradition and another.
Accordingly, indecision dogged the collection. A. H. Bullen, the pub-
lisher, rejected two stories (“The Tables of the Law’ and ‘The Adoration of
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 WAITING FOR THE MILLENNIUM 1896-1898
the Magi’), then changed his mind and printed them separately; but
not
before the original pattern of the volume had been spoiled. wBy had
wanted
to end with “The Adoration of the Magi’, whose theme of a religious annunci
-
ation relayed through a dying prostitute in a Paris brothel was too blasphemous,
as well as too Decadent, for Bullen’s nerve. The story used what would become
one of wBy’s favourite quotations, Mallarmé’s remark that his generation
saw the trembling of the veil of the temple; it brings together millennialism,
sexual decadence and the search for wisdom in a quintessentially Yeatsian
way. As The Secret Rose was published, however, the final story was just as
emblematic. The opening passage of ‘Rosa Alchemica’ raises the question
of how fara ‘sympathy’ for the occult is ‘but the sympathy of the artist, which
is half pity, for everything which has moved men’s hearts in any age’. Michael
Robartes’s frantic search for occult knowledge is observed by the detached,
studious, essentially impotent figure of Owen Aherne, who has tried the priest-
hood, political revolution, alchemy, and found all wanting. Finally convinced
to follow Robartes into an occult Order, Aherne journeys with him to an
ancient house on the west coast of Ireland (like de Basterot’s): amid symbolic
peacocks, starry heavens and spears, visions are induced through ‘incense’
and dancing. The would-be illuminati finally awake to angry attacks from
the outraged local fisher-folk. Aherne escapes and takes refuge in a devout and
unthinking Catholicism (or, looked at another way, in doctrines of transfer-
ence and supererogation).
This and other stories echoed Huysmans’s preoccupation with the close
relationship between ‘the supernatural of evil and the supernatural of good’,
transposed to Ireland and even to Irish history. way had read Ernest Renan
on the connection between Celticism and the New Age: in the chronology
of The Secret Rose, medieval searchers give way to Elizabethan wood-kerne,
and then eighteenth-century poets (‘Red Hanrahan’) before ending with
‘Rosa Alchemica’, which deals with (vaguely) contemporary times. Aherne
represents wBy's inclination to choose religious authority, but also his attrac-
tion to the heresy attributed to the twelfth-century prophet Joachim of Fiore.
Taught by Symons, Pater, Lionel Johnson and Renan (in translation), WBY
knew that Joachim prophesied a New Age, or Third Reign of Heaven on Earth.
Through Aherne, wsy adapted Joachim’s ideas to claim the existence of
‘Children of the Holy Spirit’, whose work is ‘to reveal that hidden substance
of God which is colour and music’. This chimed with Blake’s vision: the
‘Children of the Holy Spirit’ may stand for poets at large, for whom — in the
antinomian tradition of the visionary sects — divine inspiration enables a
self-made morality. Here, as elsewhere at this time, an echo of Nietzsche sounds
through, probably derived from Havelock Ellis’s Savoy articles. And an
important group of stories in The Secret Rose (later comprehensively rewritten

Li
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from 1902 to 1903 and published separately) concerns Red Hanrahan, a

passionate poet, lover and seer. Hanrahan, besides supplying another alter ego
for wBY, was inspired by actual eighteenth-century Gaelic poets like Eoghan
Rua O Suilleabhain, who had achieved legendary reputations. wBY was
effectively creating his own folklore.”
For all their emphasis on religious heresy and illuminati traditions, the
stories deal with the choices of the artist. Aherne echoes Lionel Johnson's
refuge in erudition and Catholicism; Robartes follows Russell’s and wBy’s
search for enlightenment through vision. The terrain — Dublin, Paris, the
west of Ireland — is that traversed by wy himself in these years; the influ-
ences — Luciferianism, the apocalypse, the Cabbala, Rosicrucianism — echo
writers like Huysmans whom he had encountered through Symons. Moreover,
Blake had taught him that ‘all art is a labour to bring again the golden age’.»°
Revelation is sought, in a milieu dominated by symbols and innocent of
humour. Art is seen as spiritual transmutation, achieved through visions
with a strong application of Celticist top-dressing (a formula rapidly and
efficiently plagiarized by Fiona Macleod). In later revisions the peasantry
become progressively less idealized.*° And it is possible to place these stories
in the distinctive Irish Protestant supernatural tradition of Maturin and
Le Fanu, where uneasy Anglo-Irish inheritors are caught between the
threatening superstructure of Catholicism, and recourse to more demonic
forces still, against a wild landscape which they have never fully possessed.
The Secret Rose reflects another arcane subculture too: it was no accident
that the language was by turns narcotic and hallucinogenic. wBy had learnt
to take hashish with the shady followers of the mystic Louis Claude de Saint-
Martin in Paris, and with Davray and Symons the previous December.” In
April 1897 he experimented with mescal, supplied by Havelock Ellis, who
recorded that ‘while an excellent subject for visions, and very familiar with
various vision-producing drugs and processes’, wBy found the effect on his
breathing unpleasant; “he much prefers haschish’, which he continued to
take in tablets, a particularly potent form of ingestion.** The stories in The
Secret Rose grow out of the underworld of the Savoy as well as the disciplines
of supernatural study.
Reactions to the collection were ambivalent; drug-taking apart, wBy’s
conjunction of Irish ‘paganism’, occultism and spirituality was not universally
popular.*’ He wrote defensively to O'Leary: “The book has on the whole been
very well received . . . Itis at any rate an honest attempt to wards that aristo-
cratic esetoric Irish literature, which has been my chief ambition. We have a
literature for the people but nothing yet for the few.’ The question of an
elite audience would preoccupy him more and more; in the end, he would
find it not through fiction but poetry, and most of all drama.
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 WAITING FOR THE MILLENNIUM 1896-1898

IV
Theatrical enterprise would dominate his ideas by the summer;
already in
the spring of 1897 his frequent conversations with Gregory took
up this
theme, and she recorded in February his idea for a school of ‘romantic
drama’
presenting work by O’Grady, Macleod and himself. Her diary indicat
es
that he was becoming increasingly reliant on her. His income had droppe
d
back after the 1896 injections from the Savoy and his novel advances, and
he
recorded in his Autobiographies that she began early on to lend him money
so that he need not rely on a journalistic income. She wintered in London
and he dined repeatedly with her at Queen Anne’s Mansions, where she
proudly showed off ‘my young countryman’ to her literary acquaintances.®!
She also listened to his troubles about Gonne, now back in his life since her
February visit: he appears not to have confided about Shakespear, perhaps
because that collapsing affair showed him ina more ignominious (and adul-
terous) light. His presentation of Gonne to Gregory unleashed a certain
frustration and irritation, which may have been the obverse of idealization
(as when he remarked that Gonne could be ‘locked up as mad’ if the true extent
of her visionary faith were known). From the beginning of their relationship,
the politics he supported in Gregory’s company differed from those he
embraced while with Gonne. On 21 March 1897, dining with Gregory, Barry
O’Brien and the co-operativist and social reformer Horace Plunkett (who was
still a Unionist), he pressed Plunkett to emerge as Parnell’s successor, by endors-
ing a strong measure of local government.” This represented the language
and expectations of moderate Home Rule and establishment politics. Yet when
Gonne summoned him he could adapt to different company. At this very time
she had drawn him back into the circles of extreme Dublin nationalism; this
was, he told his new friend and admirer, the poet Robert Bridges, ‘an absurd
crusade among absurd people’.*’ He would always emend his presentation
of Irish politics depending on the sympathy of his audience (and Bridges had
no interest at all). wBy would none the less emerge not only as President of
the 1898 Centennial Association of Great Britain and France, but of the
Wolfe Tone Memorial Association. Both organizations were inspired by
the memory of the 1798 Rising, and carried coded references to revolution in
the present: initiating, among other developments, the cult of Tone and the
practice of commemorative visits to his grave at Bodenstown.
In April wey helped Gonne overcome nationalist suspicion and arrange
a fundraising tour in America. This precipitated the kind of intrigues and en-
mities inseparable from Clan na Gael (the American Fenian organization),
as well as a struggle between the Dublin Centenary Committee and the
body chaired by wy in London.® From this point he supported the idea of

Wg
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turning the Centenary movement into a permanent ‘Convention’, set up as

a sort of alternative parliament and controlling delegations to Westminster.
This was at once a neo-Fenian attempt to hijack the Irish Parliamentary
Party and a revival of the ‘withdrawal’ technique urged on Parnell in the
early 1880s. The millennium was apparently expected in political as in spir-
itual affairs. Later, wBy remembered that he adopted this idea in order to cut
out ‘some wild Fenian movement’; at the time it looked like wild Fenianism,
though not quite wild enough for Gonne. But his position in political organ-
ization, part time and ambivalent, could not be decisively influential. For his
part, he exercised more direct power over her through his developing idea of
a mystical Celtic Order. As often before, misery in his personal life was com-
bated by asserting his authority in an organization which he could dom-
inate. The materials for a Celtic Order were ready to hand: not only Russell’s
permanently primed spiritual fervour, boosted by the apocalyptic poems
written by wBy in 1897, but the influence of Fiona Macleod. Sharp him-
self still aroused feelings of ambivalence; later that year wBy vetoed his chair-
manship of an Irish Literary Society meeting, as it ‘would bring ridicule on
the whole movement’. But Fiona was different. wBy had compared her to
the French Symbolists for the Bookman, and praised her in Gonne’s L'Irlande
Libre; Sharp/ Macleod wrote about wBy for the North American Review
and corresponded excitedly about psychic experimentation. The pressure of
this frenetic ventriloquism propelled Sharp into a nervous collapse later in
1897, but wBy moved implacably on. After the publication of The Secret Rose
he escaped to Ireland. He visited Standish O’Grady in Dublin, encourag-
ing him to return to the story of Cuchulain and market it as effectively as
Fiona Macleod; by mid-May he was at Rosses Point with George Pollexfen,
whose inflexible bachelor routines ironed out irregularities ‘as a mangle does
clothes’.®’ wsy set himself to working on occult symbols in Celtic mytho-
logy and firmly refused to become involved in public speaking, telling Alice
Milligan, ‘I have managed to reduce my life into perfect order & am getting
alittle work done . . . if] speak on politics anywhere I will introduce a stream
of alien ideas into my mind which will spoil my work.’
But Gonne’s involvement in counter-demonstrations against the royal
Jubilee dragged him to Dublin: here, she had temporarily joined forces with
James Connolly’s Irish Socialist Republican Party, probably not realizing
that its socialist identification (at this stage) outweighed its republicanism.
The charismatic and brilliant Connolly had emerged from the slums of Irish
Edinburgh to bring the Marxist gospel to the Irish labour movement; a
gifted writer and polemicist, he had already become a key figure in the rad-
icalization of Irish labour politics. Gonne joined his tiny party in January
1897; in June she took a leading part in its preparations to mount anti-Jubilee
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 WAITING FOR THE MILLENNIUM 1896-1898
demonstrations. Anti-socialist though she was, she addressed her first
Dublin
public meeting under Connolly’s auspices on 21 June, attacking the ‘Trish
mer-
cenaries, prison cells and hangmen’ who made the British imperial system
possible; she called for a mass demonstration against the royal Jubilee the
next evening. On 22 June she and Connolly duly headed a protest procession
preceded by a black hearse. This provoked accompanying riots, window
-
smashing and stone-throwing: finally there was a police baton charge, after
which 200 people were treated for injuries and one woman subsequently
died. wey was at Gonne’s side. He later remembered being torn between
admiration for her and fears for her safety; he insisted they remain in the
National Club during the police charge, to her fury. His account to Sharp a
week later conveys his defensiveness and uncertainty:
I gota letter from Miss Gonne saying that she wanted me to help her in some polit-
ical negociations in Dublin &I had to start offina hurry & when there got envolved
in the processions & riots which have been going on there. It was fortunate that I
went as I was able by main force to keep Miss Gonne out of a riot in which one woman
was killed. Miss Gonne had organised the processions & felt responsible & thought
that she should be among the people when the police attacked them. She was very
indignant at my interference. I refused to let her leave the National Club. She showed
a magnificent courage through the whole thing. I dislike riots, & knew that a riot
was inevitable, & went into the matter simply to try & keep her out of harms way.
She is now the idol of the mob & deserves to be.”
He also wrote to Gonne, and her reply, while affirming their friendship,
accused him of making her do ‘the most cowardly thing I have ever done in
my life’. Even more painfully, she told him their destinies were different; he
should not involve himself even in ‘the outer side of politics’, while she was ‘born
to be in the midst of a crowd’. ‘It is therefore impossible for us ever to do any
work together where there is likely to be excitement or physical danger.’ More
bitter still, all her admiration after the event was for Connolly, who was ‘the
only man who had the courage’ to ‘save Dublin from the humiliation of an
English jubilee without a public meeting of protestation’.”” She then retired
to Aix-les-Bains to recuperate.
wBy fled ina different direction: to Tillyra, where Gregory found him ‘white,
haggard, voiceless’, longing for peace to ‘think & write & forget brawls’. By
the end of the month he was ‘getting an odd lyric written’, thus delaying his
projected new collection (The Wind Among the Reeds) yet further. But, troubled
by his eyesight and obsessed by this apparent inadequacy in anything to do
with Gonne, he was at a low point when, after a week or so back in Rosses
Point, he and Russell arrived on 27 July to stay with Gregory at Coole.
wey had visited briefly the year before, but the summer of 1897 was his first
real immersion in what would become the centre of his Irish life. ‘I found at

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last what I had been seeking always, a life of order and of labour.’ Driving
to the small Georgian mansion up its long avenue past woods and lakes, he
felt he had found sanctuary: he would tell John Masefield that it was to him
‘the most beautiful place in the world’,”* thus displacing Sligo. Paths through
woods led down to a mysterious lake; a great walled garden was set with clas-
sical statuary and rare trees. He had always believed that a ‘change of sur-
roundings is necessary to give new ideas’;’* the less dramatic, more ‘civil’
landscape of Coole would henceforth provide (as Sligo once did) the place
where he could write poetry. On his first visit, he later recalled, he did little
work— and then discovered that this was a disappointment to his hostess.”
By the following summer, when he was again at Coole, a routine had been
established and Russell could write to Gregory: ‘he ought to be locked in
his room with a certain amount of work to be done or he ought not to get
dinner until he has produced a specified number of lines every day’.” This
reflected Russell’s own facility (by no means an unmixed blessing). But wBy’s
standard rate at this time was about half a dozen lines a day, produced with
racking effort. The point was, as he put it more than once, to treat the cre-
ation of those five or six lines as hard labour, redrafting them until he could
bear no more; the process passionately outlined in his poem ‘Adam’s Curse’”*
seems to have been an accurate representation. The appearance of the drafts
themselves suggests — in the varyingly legible handwriting, the heavy black
strokes through unsatisfactory words, the jagged scribbles to excise a line —
something of the effort with which he confronted a blank page. Even with
a prose draft worked out already, a lyric was carved, reshaped and adapted;
the process continued even after it had reached its first printed form. Russell
found it hard to forgive his friend’s refusal to leave his work alone, and wBy’s
approach could not have been more different from Russell’s relentless pro-
ductivity. But the fact that one of the ‘odd lyrics’ written during this summer
was ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus illustrates exactly what wBy was cap-
able of, and Russell was not.
Coole may have been a refuge, but even the chance of uninterrupted work
did not make him happy in the summer of 1897, which was (he claimed in a
cancelled passage of his Memoirs) ‘the most miserable time of my life’. ‘I was
tortured by sexual desire and disappointed love. Often as I walked in the woods
at Coole it would have been a relief to have screamed aloud. When desire
became an unendurable torture, Iwould masturbate, and that, no matter how
moderate I was, would make me ill.’ Guilt was thus implicit in his sexual frus-
tration and his attempts to relieve it.” His self-laceration was connected to
his failure with Shakespear as well as to his longing for Gonne, though he
did not tell Gregory as much. A good deal of time was spent in a dejected
daze, probably not helped by the supply of drugs from Paris. But, miserable
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 WAITING FOR THE MILLENNIUM 1896-1898
though he was, the long withdrawal to Coole and the company of Gregory
produced more than poetry. Gregory’s memory of his three months’ stay
was intriguingly different. For all his private unhappiness, he produced ‘bril-
liant conversation’ in the evenings, ‘pouring out his ideas in rapid succession —
hair-splitting, fanciful — full of wit & poetry, deep & subtle thought — his
stories of his London friends wd make us laugh till we cried’.®° Possibly these
swings of mood were accentuated by drugs, but what he brought to Coole
was not illusory. His friends, like Synge and Russell, became regular visitors
too; their conversation and interests illuminated Gregory’s life. That wet

8. George Russell sketching at Coole: a quick self-portrait which the ‘hairy fairy’ did in one
of Gregory’s scrapbooks during the late r8gos.
summer, she and wsy began collaboration on the folk-tale collections which
generated his series of long articles from November. And one afternoon in
August (not in 1898, as Gregory later remembered it), visiting de Basterot with
Martyn, the conversation ‘revived an old project for an Irish theatre’.*!
The idea derived from wBy’s acquaintance with avant-garde French
theatre, a literary enterprise, expressing the ascendancy of the playwright
rather than the actor-manager a /’anglais, like Beerbohm Tree and his ‘vulgar
pantomime’. The early ideas he shared with Florence Farr were still influen-
tial; the newly conceived Irish theatre was intended to begin with a produc-
tion of The Shadowy Waters, in which she would star. The choice of this play
is important. For the purposes of Coole, and the current preoccupation of wBY
and Russell, the new project would be ‘Celtic’, a concept wy had already

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floated to the Young Ireland Societies in January. The original version of

their manifesto, signed by wBy, makes this clear: it is reproduced here as
drawn up in wBy’s handwriting, with many excisions and afterthoughts.

Tue Cettic THEATRE

We propose to have performed in Dublin in the spring of every year certain Celtic
and Irish plays, which whatever be their degree of excellence, will be written with a
high ambition; <we pro> and to make a beginning next spring, with two plays, a play
of modern Ireland and in prose by Mr Edward Martyn & a play of legendary Ireland
& in verse by Mr W B Yeats. <Plays> We expect to follow them <by> with plays by
Mr George Moore, Mr Standish O’Grady, Miss Fiona MacCleod [sic] & others, in
other years; & <to> so to to [sic] build up a Celtic & Irish dramatic school. Dramatic
journalism has had full possession of the stage in England for a century, & it is per-
haps impossible for audiences, who are delighted by dramatic journalism, however
brilliant, to delight in the simplicity & naivety of literature unless it is old enough
to be a superstition We hope to find in Ireland an uncorrupted & imaginative audi-
ence trained to listen by its passion for oratory, & believe that our desire to bring upon
the stage the deeper thoughts & <passions> emotions of Ireland will ensure for us a
tolerant welcome, & that freedom to experiment <without which no man no longer>
which <exists no longer in modern England> is not found in the theatres of England,
& without which no new movement in art <is> or literature can succeed. <We> We
will show that Ireland is not the <locus natura> home of buffoonery and of easy
sentiment, as it has been represented, but the home of an ancient idealism, and we
are confident of the support of all Irish people, who are weary of misrepresentation,
in carrying out a work <which> that is <above> outside all the political questions
that divide us
We have asked for a guarantee fund of £300 <for our first perform I> for our first
attempt, & <of> about half of this has been guaranteed already. <Any> The profit
<that may be made>, if any, will go <towards a fund> to make a fund for the pro-
duction of plays in succeeding years.

Signed for provisional committee by

W B Yeats
<Coole Park, summer of 97>

By the end of July ideas were far enough advanced for wBy to ask Alice
Milligan if the Gaelic League eis could be postponed until 1899 so it would
not clash with the ‘Celtic’ plays he planned (with Gregory and Martyn) for
the next year. In the same month he airily told Ashe King that ‘the money
has been practically all subscribed for a start’. Subscriptions came in readily,
if rather vaguely (T. M. Healy found wsy’s writing illegible, but gamely
added, ‘I gather you ask my support to some Irish project, & as I am sure
you are not connected with anything that is not meant for the elevation of
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 WAITING FOR THE MILLENNIUM 1896-1898
the country put me down for any sum you think reasonable’*’). But there
were
unforeseen bureaucratic difficulties ahead.
The ‘Celtic’ theatre would be renamed the ‘Irish Literary Theatre
’ in
October, as wey, Russell and Martyn thought this ‘less dangerous’; partly
a
political decision, partly because wBy had recently discovered that ‘Celtic
ism’
was a highly problematic concept in historical or cultural terms.*4 But
its ori-
ginal name and inspiration reflected the constellations whirling around
wBy
and Russell at Coole in late July. If wey was depressed, Russell was in
a dan-
gerous state of elation. Since Sligo he had embarked ona psychic binge,
and
at Coole he began firing off drawings of supernatural visitations, shown
to
any locals reputed to possess second sight, who dutifully corroborated their
accuracy. WBY always thought of Coole as a particularly haunted place; in
its
damp and misty atmosphere fairy manifestations appeared as ‘strange visions
after walking in [the] woods’, of ‘immortal, mild, proud, shadows’.®> Russell
was less restrained; his manic energy was inseparable from the project begun
at Coole. When wey returned to London in October he may have felt some
need to distance himself.
Established once more in Woburn Buildings, he bombarded Russell with
questions about Celtic rituals; but he also tried to direct his energy into less
supernatural channels. At Gregory’s London dinner-table wsy had met the
pioneer of Irish agricultural co-operation, Sir Horace Plunkett; Plunkett, after
further meetings at Coole, persuaded wy to address the third annual Irish
Agricultural Organization Society’s (LAOS) conference in November 1897.
There, he discovered Plunkett was searching for an organizer to set up an agri-
cultural banking network for the Society. wBy suggested the unlikely figure
of Russell,*° sending the candidate firmly encouraging letters. Russell was
currently employed as an accounts clerk in Pims’ drapery store; the sug-
gested new career sounded nearly as mundane, but the effort to make it ‘har-
monius’ with his artistic soul would engage his powers, and teach him
concentration, much as wBy’s own work for the Jubilee and 1798 Centenary
Committees had done. ‘When I began speaking on politics first my mind used
to be absorbed for days before & very anxious, & now I hardly think of what
Tam to say until I get to the meeting & when it is over it goes straight out of
my mind.*” Declarations that Russell’s recent literary work was immortal were
accompanied by inconsistent assurances that it did not matter if he were cur-
rently unable to write. wBy’s campaign to press Russell into Plunkett’s ser-
vice was reinforced by telling Gregory to write him similar letters and
producing a Skefch article on the visionary’s work. In the end, bludgeoned by
so much attention and effort, Russell agreed.
It would be a long and successful career, in its way; and wBy’s influence
had decisively brought it about. He told Gregory that he wanted to save Russell
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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

from American Theosophists, with whom he was much taken up:* he had
been invited to their latest dubious venture at Point Loma, California. wBy
may also have wanted to save him from the sentimental English Theosophist
Violet North, whom Russell would none the less marry the following June,
to wBy’s enduring disapproval.® It is also likely that the religious mania grip-
ping his friend had begun to worry him: besides a habit of attacking priests,
and a declared intention to walk through Ireland preaching the return of the
native gods, a strong suicidal element would develop in many of his visions by
1900.9 WBY must have known that the effect on Russell’s writing would be
deleterious; but already he was accusing him of using ‘horrible’ Theosophical
phraseology in his poems, and later he would decide that Russell was creatively
sterile, dissipating his talents in undiscriminating visions. It is possible also
that wBy wanted to make sure that the dominant figure in the planned Celtic
Theatre would be himself.
But he needed Russell for the accompanying project: the Celtic Order. Partly
planned to capture Gonne, it also involved George Pollexfen, Sharp/ Macleod,
Dorothea and Edmund Hunter, Mathers and Annie Horniman. Edmund
Hunter produced an impressive Celtic Tree of Life; later on, detailed rituals
would be worked out for ascent through orders of adeptship. For the moment,
Celtic images were summoned through visionary experiments, in which
wBy was a leading spirit.” Notebooks were filled with evocations and
correspondences. The holiness of Irish landscape, in keeping with the old
bardic doctrine of dinnseanchas, was stressed. The notion of a holy island
with a Temple of the Heroes had been particularly noted by wsy in a book
by Nora Hopper years before; he thought he had seen the mythic site when
he visited Lough Key with Hyde in April 1895.” Irish gods and heroes were
investigated and evoked, including Deirdre, Cuchulain, Conchobar, Fergus
and Lugh (under whose special guardianship Gonne put herself). Aengus,
Irish god of love, was identified by apple blossoms brought by supplicant girls.
Celtic mythology, wBy explained to Russell, ‘will give me an orderly back-
ground to work upon. Ifelt the need of this badly when writing “The Shadowy
Waters”.’ More immediately, he was preparing for the coming Celtic mil-
lennium, and provided a piece for the Irish Homestead in December declar-
ing that, in an impending annunciation, Celtic spirituality would redeem the
world; the international brotherhood of Celts took in Renan, Lamennais,
Chateaubriand and Villiers.” In all this, he was making his own elaborate
claim on Irishness.
Exciting though this was, Russell could (like wey himself) adopt a scep-
tical tone when writing to Gregory; they both had a highly developed
sense of humour, and the expectations and pretensions of the Celtic move-
ment made irony irresistible. This was permissible among true believers, but
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 WAITING FOR THE MILLENNIUM 1896-1898
others were more brutal. When wBy gave a talk, “The
Celtic Movement’, at
the London Irish Literary Society on 4 December, United Irelan
d could not
restrain itself.

His romantic theme was the enduring revelation of the Primiti

ve Pastoral Pagans
of Ancient Ireland who sat watching Golden Sunsets on
Primeval Evenings,
communing with Nature in a seerlike trance of inspiration till
Daisies seemed to
develop into white-limbed Damosels with eyes like the fairy
flax, and the soft
effulgence of the Omnipresent bathed their souls in the Melancholy
Fatalism which
is the fundamental reason why Mr Healy disagrees with Mr Dillon.
”
The lecture was astraightforward polemic about the necessity of being
Irish
in Ireland: Hyde dressed up with references to Renan. It later formed the
basis
for an important essay, ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’. As delivered
in
London, it emphasized the natural magic which Celts associated with their
land and their devotion to the heroic ideal, which meant that love might be
conceived ‘not for the real woman, but . . . for the divinity of one’s real ima-
gination’. Here, as in his contemporary fiction, an autobiographical resonance
is not difficult to hear.
wBy's own life, however, had changed since the summer. Gregory had
by now moved centrally into his world, and into that of his family: she was
commissioning sketches of the poet by jay, who evasively remarked ‘with
him I have never succeeded — some uncertainty of intention always hangs
over my pencil’.”* She plotted to arrange an exhibition for yay. She bought
Jack’s early work, organizing a successful Dublin show during February 1900,
and trying to send him to Paris to perfect his style.” In 1900 she may have
purchased Jack’s poignant water-colour of Rosses Point, Memory Harbour,
and presented it to wsy for Woburn Buildings.” She measured his rooms for
furniture and curtains, which he worried about (‘I wish I saw clearly in the
matter’). Fascinated by his combination of independence and hopeless
ineffectuality, she noted wBy’s routines (the breakfast cooked by himself but
not cleared away, the fire economically raked out whenever he left the room).
When he was ill she turned up morning and evening to care for him. She pro-
vided items like an enormous leather easy-chair; she helped turn his rooms
into something like the stylistic triumph desired by their inhabitant (dim blues,
tall white paschal candles, walls hung with brown paper, painted furniture,
mystic hangings, prints and engravings by Blake, Rossetti, Beardsley"). In
November she sent him Bovril, port, pies and champagne: ona later occasion,
when a bottle blew up, the redoubtable Mrs Old remarked that she would more
readily have sacrificed the neighbouring St Pancras Church.1” Travelling in
Connemara, she ordered him suits from the local tweed. From London he
reported diligently about his health — digestion, eyes, teeth.
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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

Dr Lang says that the eye which has been so bad for years that it has been useless
is worse but that the other is exactly as it was. His words were ‘the eye is going on
very well’. The weakness lately seems to be a matter of general health. I must not try
them too much, &] am to wash them in some borax mixture. He asked me what use
I was making of them. Was I reading too much MSS etc. He tried me with all sorts
of glasses & said that my glasses were all right.’
Before long, friends who worried about his eyesight (and the financial
stringency that exacerbated it) knew to approach her: ‘you have more influ-
ence over him than anyone’. She found jpy exasperating, and at first
gulped hard at his description of ‘the British Empire and the Church of
Christ’ as ‘shams’,’°* but she made it clear to him that she was building
up wBy’s strength, feeding him, eventually keeping him. jpy gracefully
assented. ‘I am so glad you think Willie looking well & that you hope to
make him look better. I feel great confidence in the strawberry & cream reg-
imen.”!° She traced folk-remedies for his eyes (dog-violet, boiled in milk: it
did not work’). And she wrote to him in tones of familial intimacy and
firmness. ‘How bad of you to get illjust when I am not there to look after you.
Do take care of yourself now, & feed yourself properly — & with any threat-
ening of rheumatism you should look to your underwear.”
She also introduced him to a new level of London society; he was soon lunch-
ing with celebrated (if aged) lion-hunters like Lady Dorothy Nevill. From
his side, he provided artistic stimulation: dining constantly in Gregory’s
London flat at Queen Anne’s Mansions, introducing her to interesting friends
like Lionel Johnson (‘he is quite safe at dinner. He does his drinking mostly
in his own rooms’”) and inviting her to Monday evenings in Woburn Build-
ings. And the Theatre project developed, uniting them further. A great cor-
respondence about money-raising and searching for premises accumulated
from November 1897: influential Dublin supporters like Plunkett and Gill
were sounded out; letters were sent to Irish notables (Lecky, Healy, Redmond,
Dillon) about the monopoly exerted by Dublin's few large theatres. A licens-
ing problem intervened: plays could not be produced outside the three Patent
Theatres. The answer seemed to be a temporary licence, in conjunction with
a relaxation in the law, through amending the Local Government Bill cur-
rently under discussion. Merciless pressure was brought to bear on the Irish
Parliamentary Party (normally the butts of wBy’s neo-Fenian rhetoric).
Eventually, thanks to his, Gregory’s and Martyn’s persistence, Timothy
Harrington’s amendment was carried whereby the Lord-Lieutenant was
given powers to license performances ‘provided the profits go to some art-
istic or literary object’, by application to the Privy Council. A blow had been
struck for experimental drama, and against the commercial monopoly of the
Dublin stage.
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 WAITING FOR THE MILLENNIUM 1896-1898
By the autumn of 1898 the way lay open. It had been
cleared by politick-
ing at establishment level in London and Dublin, carrie
d out with Gregory’s
implacable persistence and invincible authority. The
lobbying about the
theatre from 1897 to 1898 came at a time when politi
cal rapprochement was
in the Irish air. A joint campaign to revise Ireland’s financ
ial contribution to
the British exchequer had brought Unionists and nationalists
together; Lord
Castletown briefly appeared as a possible national leader
, followed even
more improbably by Plunkett. The chimera passed, but Grego
ry seized the
moment. In her friendship with wey and his circle, she
had found her meétier,
and Coole would soon be written up as a ‘salon’. ‘Lady Grego
ry is a talented
lady,’ gushed the Independent,
who takes a keen interest in matters literary and artistic, in particu
lar those which
are distinctively Irish. Coole is a rendezvous for the members
of the rising Irish
school. To those acquainted with the rollicking tradition of the
neighbourhood
in the old days, when duels and elopements, hunts and dances, were
the chief joy of
existence, it seems almost incongruous to picture ‘the feast of reason
and the flow
of soul’ in those parts.1
wey had been central in this transformation; but Gregory required adapta-
tion on his part too. The weapons, and the terrain, were markedly differe
nt
from those demanded by Gonne. The contradictions between the two sides
of his life were about to be sharply brought home.

V
Almost as soon as wBy had returned from Coole, Gonne had summoned him
to the north of England for a gruelling series of Irish nationalist meetings
about commemorating the 1798 Rising in its approaching centenary year. She
had evidently decided they could work together politically after all. ‘I find the
infinite triviality of politics more trying than ever,’ he assured Gregory. ‘We
tare each others character in peices for things that don’t matter to anybody’.'°
But this understated his commitment. Since March 1897 the ‘Central Centenary
Committee of Great Britain’ had become a battleground between factions
of the Irish Parliamentary Party, the neo-Fenian rump of Parnellites, the IRB
and the Irish National Alliance (INA). wey was already identified privately
with the last (the “Wolfe Tone Memorial Committee’ was pure Fenian-speak):
in a cancelled passage of autobiographical reminiscence, he stated that the
INA ‘made me President of the’98’ behind the scenes.!" This came practic-
ally ex officio through his presidency of the Young Ireland Society in London.
In early March he was paired as a delegate with someone who (rhetorically at
least) represented the extremist line: Frank Hugh O'Donnell.” O’Donnell
was, however, an ageing eccentric who had adopted many causes and claimed

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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

even more: his autobiography, characteristically concealed under the title4

History of the Irish Parliamentary Party, asserted that he had more or less
invented Home Rule, and inspired and controlled the career of Parnell.
Himself a Castle Catholic of independent means, he had by the late 1890s
come to specialize in vituperative and Anglophobic chauvinism, and to advo-
cate a holy war of extermination against the foreigner (Jews as well as Saxons);
he already had access both to Boer funds and to influential members of the
French Foreign Office. However, his over-compensating vehemence did not
convince everybody, and O’Donnell was more than once accused of being in
the pay of the Castle which he so virtuously denounced.
It is more likely that he was a genuine eccentric, addicted to public rows
and prepared to foment them under a number of guises: in his perverseness,
facility and barefaced cheek there are echoes of George Moore and, as with
Moore, wBy was initially fascinated by him. Unfortunately for wBy, one of
O’Donnell’s strategies in March 1897 was to send letters to the nationalist press
under the pseudonym ‘Fuath na Gall’ (‘Hatred of Foreigners’), claiming to
represent a revolutionary party with an Irish executive in Great Britain, and
cutting across the Central Centenary Committee which he and wey officially
represented as well as challenging the constitutionalist Irish Parliamentary
Party.!"> wpy’s desperate arguments that the Committee was comprehen-
sively representative, ‘believing that the memory of the men of ’98 is a
National and not a party memory’, did not prevent an inevitable split devel-
oping. Much as with the literary societies, a Dublin committee and a London
committee emerged, and an uneasy relationship between them. The fact
that O’Leary was Chairman of the Dublin group, and wsy of the London
committee, did not mend matters: Dublin Castle noted that overall control
rested with the IRB and Fred Allan, who had effectively sidelined the INA.
At a Dublin meeting of the Centenary Committee, O’Donnell violently
accused the local representatives (including O’Leary) of treachery against the
Londoners; O’Leary refused to hear wBy’s explanation, and their long friend-
ship was from that point clouded.
O'Donnell became an increasing liability. The following year he embarked
on a series of scurrilous pamphlets libelling not only Michael Davitt but his
INA associates in London, and he stirred up gossip about Gonne in émigré
circles at Paris. Along with other difficulties, wBy had to write to the ‘Sons
of St Patrick’ in France, denouncing Charles MacCarthy Teeling for spread-
ing rumours that she was an English spy. wBy’s final view of O’Donnell, long
afterwards, was that he was ‘half-genius, half sewer-rat’:

The last picture of him that rises before my mind is seeing him look a little drunk
and very old in a crowded bus, where he was repeating aloud a speech which he had
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 WAITING FOR THE MILLENNIUM 1896-1898
just delivered at the Irish Literary Society: I do not remember what
it was, but his
good speeches were all much alike, English crime and Irish virtue — that
virtue which
he refused to admit in detail — ‘They have oppressed us and ground
us down yet we
taught them their letters and held them over the baptismal font.’ His
imagination
was travelling back to the seventh century.!"4

In 1897 O’Donnell’s capacities for mischief were still undimmed. By the

winter in London, wy was fatalistically involved once more (‘frightful
moon
and mars aspects . . . plunged me into three quarrels’). Gonne departe
d
for America on 17 October, where she attracted much opprobrium from Clan
na Gael. In her absence wey relapsed into London society, dining several times
a week with Gregory and dazzling her friends."* When Gonne returned
in
January 1898, she had allegedly raised £500 for the Amnesty Association and
£500 for the Wolfe Tone fund. (If so, it was practically all they got: by the
end of 1898 only £561 had been raised towards the £14,000 needed.!!”) way
advised her to bank the money rather than incur criticism through distrib-
uting it: perhaps they could meet in London or Dublin to discuss it? He scanned
her letters anxiously to gauge the warmth of her addresses, and reported to
Gregory when ‘my dear friend’ and ‘affectionately your friend’ took over. By
late January Gonne’s ‘visions of alittle temple of the heroes’ had possessed
him: he became obsessed once more with the castle on Lough Key. They
planned to travel in the Irish countryside and commune with ‘the forces of
gods & spirits & too get sacred earth for our invocation’ (if it could be done
ona budget of thirty shillings a week).'"* Later on, a more expensive pilgrimage
was projected to Bayreuth. ‘She seems anxious to make me feel that she will
give me a perfect friendship though nothing else.’
But Russell, after Gregory his chief confidant, knew that wBy’s golden hopes
were dependent upon the political commitment enjoined by Gonne. By New
Year 1898 it seemed to the new agricultural organizer that all the visionaries
were being led astray. Having once ‘knelt at the inner shrine’, he was nowslav-
ing for Plunkett and the IAOS, explaining to hungry-looking farmers the
advantages of buying pigs. O’Grady was editing the Kilkenny Moderator.
And wey was immersed in nationalist squabbles. ‘I can never make out the
ideas of the “98” enthusiasts,’ Russell wrote to Gregory.
Perhaps it is sheer love of a row. I met Willie coming out of a ‘98’ meeting last year
and his face was shining over with delight. ‘Its a jewel of a country! Its a jewel of a
country! We have been fighting like hell for the last five hours and have fixed up noth-
ing. oh it’s a jewel of a country!’ His face could not have expressed more delight if he
had the Beatific Vision before him, or a vision of the Black Pig

This referred to an old folk-prophecy of an apocalyptic battle in the Valley

of the Black Pig, which had inspired wsy’s millennialist poem two years before;

IgI
 jenn? Pireuyhe tie

D prince "fut noise

g. A letter from Russell to Gregory, dated 29 November 1897, satirizes wBY’s preoccupation
with the apocalyptic prophecy of the ‘Black Pig’. “He fondles it in his heart as a lover
the sweetest glance of his girl. I believe in dreams he tucks this weird animal under his
arm and roams through the Vast . . .’Yet simultaneously Russell was sending millennial sum-
monses to wBy and eagerly awaiting the annunciation of a New Age. As with wsy himself,
an ironic tone could be summoned or discarded at will, especially when writing to the sceptical
Gregory.

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 WAITING FOR THE MILLENNIUM 1896-1898
and visions of war were still Preoccupying the inner circles
of the Fenian
movement. However, by February 1898 the quarrels between the
London and
Dublin ’98 Committees were complicated by resentment at
constitutional
nationalists getting in on the act (the National League of Great
Britain under
T. P. O'Connor). wy, as President of the Centenary Committee
grandi-
loquently representing ‘Britain and France’, issued a statement
deprecating
this and regretting that they had not joined individually in his organi
zation.!2!
Given its committee membership and public rhetoric (both strong
ly Fenian
in tone), this was hardly likely. Through February intrigue deepened:
Gonne
issued summonses to Dublin, and then cancelled them. She was now
preach-
ing insurrection to audiences in the west. wBY privately confessed his
disillu-
sionment with it all to Gregory; when he finally departed to Dublin on
9 March
she saw him off at Euston, and told him to stay out of trouble. As to
1798,
she remarked that ifit had worked as intended (instead of turning into
‘a mas-
sacre of protestants’), ‘we shd all now be celebrating it’. wBy acutely contra
-
dicted her. ‘He says he wd not, he wd be against the existing Govt then!”!”?
Finally on 12 March the ‘’98 Convention’ began, with an executive
meeting at which constitutionalists were accommodated. The next day wBY
spoke from the ‘Connacht’ platform in Phoenix Park, emphasizing that the
moment ‘must not be made subservient to any party purpose’. He also
addressed a City Hall meeting in explicitly Fenian mode, eulogizing the
‘high and holy cause’ and attacking English oppression.’”* He then returned,
exhausted but relieved, to London on 18 March. There he collapsed into ill-
ness, only forcibly dragged out by the necessity of entertaining the implacable
George Pollexfen (and dealing with his uncle’s robust hypochondria). But
’98 continued to distract him. On 13 April he spoke at an ‘Inaugural Banquet’
for the ’98 Centennial Association of Great Britain and France, preaching
‘The Union of the Gael’, attacking the Irish Parliamentary Party as ‘the move-
ment that has gone’, and calling for a return to the guidance of Emmet, Tone,
Davis and Mitchel (diluted by the conservative constitutionalists Burke
and Grattan). A ‘more intense national feeling’ had arisen, and Ireland had
learnt to hate English values, not only because they were English, but ‘because
we know they are evil’. For Ireland ‘a day will come . . . though not, perhaps,
in our day’ when — as in the story of Manannan mac Lir, the sea-god — a
foundering ship would be saved by ‘a flaming hand laid suddenly on the
tiller’.* This is the most Fenian of his public utterances; but it is counter-
pointed by the weariness of his private references.
Throughout 1898 wBy’s existence was nearly as divided as that of Sharp/
Macleod. He was press-ganged into Gregory's campaign for a literary
theatre, lobbying establishment figures like William Field, MP, Timothy
Harrington and Adam Findlater, while at the same time tugged by Gonne

193
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

around expatriate Irish cabals on the business of commemorating 1798 and

inaugurating a new age of revolution. He made occasional tentative efforts
to bring the two parts of his life together — suggesting for instance that the
Theatre consider peasant plays written by priests whom he and Gonne
encountered in their journeys around Ireland. But in February 1898 the ten-
sion had emerged into the open, when Gonne (supported, again, by James
Connolly) took up the issue of alleged famine conditions in the west of
Ireland. Her exhortations to provoke a confrontation by attacking the prop-
erty of landlords were denounced to wBy by Russell and Gregory, whose diary
records her appalled reactions.
I was aghast, & spoke very strongly, telling him first that the famine itself was prob-
lematic, that if it exists there are other ways of meeting it, that we who are above the
people in means & education, ought were it a real famine, to be ready to share all we
have with them, but that even supposing starvation was before them it wd be for us
to teach them to die with courage [rather] than to live by robbery . . . He was very
much struck & said he had only thought of the matter as it wd affect her [Gonne] —
not as it would affect the people (which I fancy is her point of view also) but that now
he saw how wrong such a line wd be & he would try to dissuade her from it.'”

None the less, politics and occultism contrived to bind them together. In
late April he travelled to Paris to study Celtic mythology with her, staying
with Mathers at Auteuil. His old mentor and Gonne were ‘at war over the
management of “the Celtic mysteries” now well begun . . . both like true
mystics pride themselves upon never having compromised anything in their
lives’.!*° But they all worked on visions together and anxiously awaited the
unlikely arrival of Fiona Macleod to finalize the ceremonies of initiation.
Despite wBy’s letters to Sharp professing profound supernatural communion,
and hectic replies about Fiona’s ‘intense emotional crisis’, she chose to join
them on the astral plane only.
By 8 June he had been reunited with Gonne in Dublin, planning expedi-
tions to the prehistoric passage-tombs at Newgrange ‘to interview a god or
two’, as he jauntily told Gregory.'”” Russell described him as ‘mysterious and
magnificent’ on the subject of the Celtic Order — a ‘war’ was brewing about
it all.’** More down-to-earth confrontations were already on the way. On her
way to the unveiling of a plaque to the ’98 hero Lord Edward Fitzgerald on
12 June, Gonne broke an arm falling from her carriage. wBy had not been
present, having gone to sit for a sketch commissioned by Gregory from his
father. He postponed his departure to Coole andjoyfully took charge, read-
ing George Moore’s new novel Evelyn Innes (featuring a pen-portrait of him-
self) out loud to the invalid. This impelled her to recover enough to resume
aggressive activities, incensing the Dublin’98 Committee by accusing them
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 WAITING FOR THE MILLENNIUM 1896-1898
of financial extravagance. By the time the foundation stone for the Wolfe
Tone
Memorial was finally laid, she was at odds with most of her colleagues.
By 20 June wsy had arrived at Coole and ‘orderly life again’.'?? He
dis-
cussed visions of fairies and ‘Elizabethan’ ghosts with local people; he
began
to work hard at the current draft of his novel; and he claimed to be ‘gettin
g
on fairly well’ with learning Irish, which his hostess tried to impart in the inter-
vals between reading him War and Peace.'*° Gregory, with her prize regaine
d,
cast the net towards other members of the family; she had already asked jBy
for sketches of Hyde and Russell as well as way, and Jack was now invited
to Coole as well. But even at Coole, Gonne’s presence remained potent: wBY
wrote asking her if she had visited him astrally. From 11 July he began to keep
an occult diary devoted to dreams, visions and ideas about ritual, all directe
d
towards Gonne. His confidants, currently Gregory and George Pollexfen, were
apparently assured that the influences were tending towards a union.
In August he had to leave Coole to join Gonne for demonstrations and
banquets in Dublin and London, where he was embarrassed by “Tom fools’
like an English fellow-traveller ‘who recommended everybody to buy a
breech-loader & prepare for the day of battle & wound up by singing a patri-
otic song apparently of his own making’.!*! But by 15 August he was cheered
by the reception he and Gonne received on returning to Dublin to see John
O'Leary lay the foundation stone for the Wolfe Tone Memorial — the high
point of the Centennial celebrations, and the occasion which drew much the
largest crowds. Once again wey provided a Fenian oration. But the event was
conspicuously attended by several moderate MPs, and the sharp-eyed IRB
doctor Mark Ryan noted that the Fenian founding father, James Stephens,
was excluded from the platform; while Maud Gonne was welcomed less
enthusiastically by the organizers than by the crowd.”
With the autumn, the commemorative frenzy calmed down; but the
urbane tone in which wsy presented it to Gregory, and the antics of Frank
Hugh O’Donnell, concealed a serious underlying agenda. From the perspect-
ive of Arthur Griffith’s United Irishman at least, the ’98 Clubs intended to
continue as nuclei of advanced nationalism and the focus of a new republican
movement. They were the forerunners of the radical-Fenian ‘Dungannon
Clubs’ which would emerge in Ulster and reconstruct the IRB from within.
But the INA had declined to insignificance, and would shortly merge once
again into the IRB. Though a delegate to the USA in 1899 boasted that the
London cell included ‘the brightest lights of the age, literary and profes-
sionally [sic]’, its moment had passed with 1898; serious operators looked
elsewhere.’
It is unlikely that wBy understood this. From 1897 to 1898 the high tem-
perature of extremist politics had been accompanied by feverish personal

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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

antipathies, with much slanderous gossip directed at Gonne; this would

influence a number of wBy’s otherwise gnomic poems in his next collection,
The Wind Among the Reeds (such as those eventually titled “He thinks of those
Who Have Spoken Evil of his Beloved’ and ‘The Lover pleads with his
Friend for Old Friends’). That memory stayed sharp; but the politics of
extremist nationalism filled him with at least as much alarm as excitement,
an alarm exacerbated by Gregory’s disapproval. To him, the chief import-
ance of the’98 movement (as Russell implied) lay outside politics: it brought
him close to Gonne, currently riding on a wave of activity. By making Fenian
speeches in March 1898, at a time when his private opinions were very differ-
ent, he could atone for the Jubilee demonstration fiasco the previous summer.
And if he could support her in politics, she would support him in his dream
ofa Celtic occult order. The first of September saw him at the Galway fezs, an
innovatory festival of Gaelic culture, and the Coole fraternity was once again
joined by Russell. But wBy continued to correspond with Gonne about a pan-
theon of Irish heroes, and to keep his ‘visions notebook’. Communication was
attempted astrally and chemically (mescalin on 16 September, hashish four
days later). Unsurprisingly, visions followed. Since the spring, he had been
involving other Golden Dawn members in visionary experiments, conducted
when geographically apart: the objective was to define Celtic ritual, but ‘these
messages at the worst are messages from ones deeper self’.’**
As he headed for Dublin in late November, the Order of Celtic Mysteries
was taking firm shape, and had — in his mind at least — bound Gonne more
closely to him than ever before. ‘His mysterious Celtic order is I believe
being launched with a couple of members,’ Russell reported to Gregory on
2 December. “He is the most wonderful person. We never had anyone like
him before.’’** To a lover’s self-delusion and an occultist’s sense of power were
added attempts at euphoria through hallucinogenic drugs. At last, he believed,
he possessed the formula which would enchant Gonne and focus his own inter-
ests. The Order of Celtic Mysteries owed much to wBy’s reading in Gaelic
traditions, via Eugene O’Curry and others. From the myths and sagas
researched in the National Library came figures like Gonne’s sun-god Lugh
and Tuatha De Danaan talismans, providing a four-cornered symbolism of
Cauldron, Stone, Sword and Spear. Eventually they would be related, via the
symbolism of tarot and ordinary playing-cards, to Pleasure, Power, Courage
and Knowledge. Pan-Celticism, already aired by way in L’Irlande Libre,
enabled him to claim Bretons, Scots and Welsh for his system. It also led him
to the dangerous argument that Irishness was not necessarily defined by
Catholicism. Celtic belief was far more atavistic. All this drew him closer to
Fiona Macleod, the ‘real voice of the Celt’ (even if worked through ventri-
loquism):'*° and Macleod/Sharp obligingly produced an eloquent Bookman
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 WAITING FOR THE MILLENNIUM 1896-1898
article in late 1898, pressing wsy’s claims. How much he knew of Fiona’s
identity at this stage is doubtful: in the spring of 1898 he had apparently taken
at face value her excuses and evasions, putting off their meeting in Paris. But
in late June he unguardedly told Sharp that a Fiona product (Green Fire)
was not one of ‘your’ best stories, and by rg00 he and Russell were writing to
each other ironically about ‘MacSharp’."” Russell was by then engaged in
full-blown controversy with the Celtic hybrid. Fiona’s political opinions had
come to look suspiciously like Sharp’s Celtic Unionism, and her writing like
plagiarism (‘every time she bobs her head out of the Astral Light I will whack
it, at least so long as it bobs up in connection with Irish things’). In 1898,
however, a curious complicity was still maintained. ‘The one who shares my
life and self is here,’ wrote Fiona to wBy, referring to Sharp. ‘I will talk over
your letter to ws — for to us it is— though you send it to me.’ This admis-
sion of a shared self was carefully phrased. When queried about the nature
of their collaboration, Fiona replied in the language of vision and allegory
(matches, wind, a torch). wBy must have had suspicions this early. But the
concept of an invented doppelgénger is unlikely to have troubled him much,
especially in his exalted mood of late 1898, when all things seemed possible.

VI
December 1898 was also to mark the culmination of another campaign: the
Irish Literary Theatre was to be announced. In July they had the good news
that the legal difficulties over a performing licence had been resolved. From
August, wBy was cultivating and flattering T. P. Gill at the Express, promis-
ing him articles and suggesting contributions; Plunkett’s take-over of the paper
seemed auspicious, encouraging wBy to believe that Trinity College itself was
being won by the Celtic enlightenment. While Gregory was relieved that their
enterprise was to abandon the ‘poor Sharp-ridden identification of ‘Celtic’,
the Pan-Celtic idea was still to be encouraged for purposes of bringing in
respectable supporters.'*° In late 1898 wy launched himself into Dublin lit-
erary life more energetically than at any time since his battles with Gavan Duffy.
As had become usual, his tactic was to stage a public ‘controversy’ ‘to keep
people awake’ until the announcement of the theatrical initiative. He had
been limbering up for such an engagement since May, when he attacked his
old adversary George Savage-Armstrong at the Irish Literary Society on
the subject of ‘the barrenness of the so-called intellect of Ireland’.’“! The
next month his involvement in Rolleston’s poetry anthology for Ward had
started him thinking about a new edition of his own Book ofIrish Verse, as a
salvo in the campaign.” But the orchestrated discussion in the Express
began on 18 September 1898 with an article byJohn Eglinton (W. K. Magee),

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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

‘What Should be the Subjects of a National Drama?’ He accused the new

school of misinterpreting and twisting ancient legends by taking them out
of context. wBy replied, through the medium of reviewing Nora Hopper.
Further exchanges accused him and his followers of escapism, while he argued
for exaltation above utilitarianism. Poetry, he said — as so often — should be a
revelation, not a criticism, of life (as Arnold claimed). Other combatants
included Russell, whose article ‘Literary Ideals in Ireland’ supplied the title when
the ‘controversy’ appeared as a book the following year.
wy was currently in aggressive form, flexing his polemical muscles (and
appalling George Pollexfen) by hissing a stage-Irish turn at a Sligo Masonic
concert. Writing to his father on 1 November, he described his larger strat-
egy: ‘I have tried to provoke a contraversy, as Russell is going to join in, if
“Eglington” takes the fly, & I want to excite general interestinIrish legends
& in the Irish literary attitude in Dublin this month, as a preliminary to the
publication of our dramatic project in December.” But he had not origi-
nated the idea of a public discussion, which had long been in Russell’s mind.
Two years before he had suggested to wBy ‘raising the standard of idealism
in Ireland’, against English materialism and imperialism. At that point, in
1896, he had visualized a book in which Magee, Lionel Johnson, O’Grady,
Hyde, way and himself would declare their principles of heroism and renew-
al; Magee and O’Grady had already been instructed. ‘I propose that you or
Lionel Johnson shall take our Celtic wisdom, our distinct message to the world
as Greece, Egypt, India had their message, and one or other of you could write
about our future, or literature, or poetry, or life, or whatever subject you were
most inspired by . . . You should of course be natural leader having the genius,
glamour, etc.’** This reflected Russell’s manic surge of cosmic enthusiasm
in 1896; by early 1897 he decided public interest had waned. But the idea
remained, and when the Magee—wpy debate opened, Russell firmly claimed
responsibility. ‘I am afraid, he told Gregory, on 12 November,

I am the culprit with whom you must deal for the prolonged Yeats Eglington [sic]
controversy. I thought and still think it a good thing to create public interest in such
a discussion and I carefully fomented the dispute on both sides. I had a little private
joy in this as I have long been battered by Yeats on one side and Eglington on the
other for just those things they accuse each other of and so I have stood aside with
much delight while they went for each other. However as you will see by this week’s
copy I have intervened, perhaps to make confusion worse confounded — for really
they did not know exactly what they were arguing about — Willie thought the Celtic
Renaissance was insulted and Magee did not understand Yeats.'*°

This summing-up was not unfair. Magee’s horizons were self-consciously

cosmopolitan, wBy’s (for these purposes) jealously ‘Celtic’, though he used
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 WAITING FOR THE MILLENNIUM [896-1898
Symons’s tutorials to prove his point. ‘His theory is right enough but he
sweeps in illustrations in the most reckless way, grumbled Russell to Gregory;
‘men whom he has not read like Mallarmé, men who are only third rate like
Gosse, Dowson and Lang are mentioned along with Dante, Shakespeare,
Tennyson and Browning. Would you believe it he only knew two of Mallarmé’s
lyrics! Willie Magee who reads French like a native wonders at Yeats’s ap-
plications of mysticism to such men. I wish Willie would always write
poetry and stories and leave criticism alone.’ This was a vain hope. But,
though wsy invoked Wagner's creation of musical drama, and the French
avant-garde, his message was the old one: local inspiration and national culture
produced pure art, and would raise a new standard against the derivative crass-
ness of popular Dublin theatre. In the campaign for a new Irish drama he had,
as was becoming habitual, assumed the role of public spokesman.
Not all his Irish friends appreciated his Olympian pose, but he had now
acquired an influential new admirer, the avant-garde novelist George Moore,
whom he had met some time before at the Cheshire Cheese and through the
Temple fraternity. Devious, uncontrollable, unable to resist the temptations
of a demonic sense of humour, Moore was deeply mistrusted by all his
acquaintance; but he was a close and influential observer of literary talent,
and he saw wsy’s genius at once. ‘I am your best advertiser,’ Moore had
assured him in October; ‘inside the houses I frequent I cry: lam not the Lord,
there is one greater than I, the latchet of whose shoe I am not worthy to tie.”
Moore assured wey that he would ‘figure conspicuously’ in his introduction
to Martyn’s plays, as well as featuring in Moore’s own novel Evelyn Innes, where
reviewers noted that the moody musician Ulick Deane was a close likeness:
dishevelled good looks, romantic bohemian lodgings, unrequited adoration
of the Wagnerian heroine, and even a certain passivity in the pursuit of
love. This portrait marks the high point of Moore’s infatuation. Flattered,
wBy even provided Moore (in circumstances of great secrecy) with the
text for a letter from Deane printed in the second version of the novel."
The response of wsy’s intimates to this immortalization was equivocal.
jBY worried about Moore’s ‘version of Willie — to me it will be a sort of
complicated insult’. Katharine Tynan’s reaction was no less characteristic.
‘She remained thoughtful for a moment & then quietly remarked “What a
splendid advertisement.” ’!””
Moreover, Moore (an evangelist on behalf of the French avant-garde)
was a devotee of Antoine’s Théatre Libre and a director of J. T. Grein’s little
Independent Theatre. wBy was disposed to listen to the advice which his new
friend showered upon him. “To fully realise yourself you must produce more.
The question arises can you produce more. I think you can. If you don’t your
genius will not perish, it will result in a small gem of great beauty, not a jewel

ie)
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

of the first magnitude like Shelley, but equally pure in quality. I hope how-
ever that you will abandon politics as Wagner did and that you will realise as
he did that his mission was not politics but art’.”°
Later he would learn to fear Moore’s professions of friendship (‘he has what
Talle[y]rand called “the terrible gift of familiarity” *°'). But wBy’s star seemed
set on the ascendant as 1898 came to a close. Magical ritual, Celticism and
the theatre were interconnected; the new drama, he would later insist, meant
‘the preparation of a priesthood’.’* Myth and ritual would be enacted which
stemmed from ‘an inherited subject matter known to the whole people’. And
this assertion of hieratic authority would finally bring Gonne to him. He had
led both Gregory and George Pollexfen to expect news after he joined her
in Dublin in December, staying at the Crown Hotel. They read together in
the National Library; he attended Pan-Celtic meetings and argued with
people like Magee, Lady Fingall, Lord Castletown. His hopes of uniting all
the elements of his enterprise, personal and artistic, had never been higher.
The stars were indeed about to be thrown out of their courses; but not in the
way he expected.

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 Chapter 8: SHADOwy WarTERS
1898-1900

To recover the desert I took refuge in the theatre.

Chateaubriand, Mémoires (Book V), as quoted

in Fiona Macleod, The Winged Destiny

I
In early December 1898 wsy’s Dublin life seemed a sea of tranquillity. On
the 6th he wrote to Gregory, holidaying in Venice, from his eyrie in the
National Library:
Miss Gonne is in Dublin & I see a good deal of her. She is rather deep in occult
science just now — which pleases me. I should have written to you before but since
I have been in Dublin I have been in a ceaseless whirl of activities — dinners, com-
mittees, old friends to look up & the like. My only time of leisure is when I come
here where I am now writing & go toa table away among the private passages of the
National Library. The librarian lets me go & read where I like & so escape draughts
& noise. I am reading Morris's ‘Wood Beyond the World’ a most beautiful dreamy
book reminding one of forest glades & summer flowers . . .!

The chief interruptions were arguments with Magee; their controversy was
still being carefully choreographed, with a view to the oncoming theatrical
announcement. This idyll must have pleased Gregory, who sent him money
from Venice, but it was the calm before a storm which would fundament-
ally alter wBy’s landscape. His next letter, only two days later, records the
stunned reaction of someone staring out at the wreckage. ‘MG is here &
I understand everything now. I cannot say more than that if I am sorry for
my self I am far more sorry for her & that I have come to understand her &
admire her as I could not have done before.”
What had happened in the interim? His occult researches with Gonne,
their close proximity, and an intensive and much discussed dream-life had
peaked on 7 December. The previous night wsy dreamt of their spiritual and
physical unity (and drew up a horoscope for the time when he had been
vouchsafed this vision’). He knew that 7 December saw an exceptional astro-
logical conjunction: for both their natal horoscopes, Venus and Mars were ‘in
close trine’, mirroring each other and suggesting a conjunction of marriage.
When they met on that auspicious date Gonne had been more demonstrat-
ive than ever before, revealing that she too had astrally travelled to him, dressed

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in white, and been joined to him by the god Lugh. They kissed; a commit-
ment had been made. But (he later told Gregory) she ‘begged me to see her
no more’:> and when wBy none the less went to her on 8 December, he found
her depressed. There, in her sitting-room at the Crown Hotel, she told him
about her long liaison with Millevoye and the birth of her two children.
Why she did so is an interesting question. In his Memoirs wBy implies that
the information was volunteered as a reason why she could not marry; but in
a persuasive reading, Deirdre Toomey has suggested that Gonne might just
as easily have told all in order to remove an impediment.’ If she had broken
with Millevoye three months before, this might indeed make sense. Certainly,
in December she needed wsy’s support. The 1798 Centennial had been a damp
squib, Millevoye’s political campaigns were running on to the rocks, she her-
self was an object of reproach and resentment, as well as admiration, in the
circles she had chosen to frequent. She had drawn much criticism during the
Wolfe Tone Memorial celebrations, and neither she nor wBy were involved
in Mark Ryan's successor organization to the Centennial Association, the Irish
National Club.” Whatever her reasons, she threw wBy into utter confusion.
A highly charged seance which he attended at the Sigersons’ on 12 December
cannot have helped. The next day he began to keep a notebook of ‘visions of
old Irish mythologies’, turning for solace to the iconography they had made
their own.® The following day he evoked yet more visions with George
Coffey and his wife. Though Gonne recovered first and set off to the west
of Ireland on 13 December to survey evictions and attend secret meetings, WBY
wrote brokenly to Gregory, ‘my most true friend’:
my letters must have greatly bewildered you with their so contrary nature. The truth
is Ishrank from putting on paper any but vague things but really there is no reason
why I should not write a little of what I will tell you upon sunday. I wrote my first
letter in despair because I was too unnerved to see things truely & unselfishly. ‘The
fact is that M G has told me with every circumstance of deep emotion that she has
loved me for years that my love is the only beautful thing in her life, but that for cer-
tain reasons which I cannot tell you, reasons of a generous kind & of a tragic origin,
she can never marry. She is full of remorse because she thinks that she has in the same
breath bound me to her & taken away all hope of marriage. For years she kept ‘a wall
of glass between us’ as she puts it & the very day before she gave way she begged me
to see her no more. She has changed altogeather since she spoke of her love & is gen-
tle & tender & I am now much happier than I have been for years for I am trying to
see things more unselfishly & to live to make her life happier, content with just that
manner of love which she will give me abundantly. Much more has happened than
I can tell you here for one shrinks from writing many things, but it will be a great
releif to talk to you about much that I cannot write. My nerves are still fealing the
effects; & a restless night has given me a rather bad cold &a little asthma so that I
feal like a very battered ship with the masts broken off at the stump. She has gone

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 SHADOWY WATERS 1898-1900
to Loughrea about some evicted tenants but returns I think to morrow.
I want you
to understand that I am at peace now about my self — for the first time
for many
dreadful years but very troubled about her. When I wrote my first letter
my trouble
was so great that I could not think coherently. After I went back to her
after writ-
ing to you her goodness & her tenderness stilled all that was selfish in my
trouble
or so I think.’
Gregory was already on her way back from Venice; she hurried from Lon-
don and met wsy in Dublin. She also interviewed Gonne, founding a life-
long mutual dislike.’ Her return galvanized him into mounting a publicity
onslaught about the Irish Literary Theatre, working on Gill and Rolleston;
as usual, work provided a refuge. But on Gonne’s return from the west, the
fever still ran high. As wsy recorded it, he once more proposed marriage on
18 December, after yet another shared astral experience, full of sexual con-
notation. But she again refused: ‘I have a horror and terror of physical love.’
The next day she departed. If she had at first unburdened herself to him with
a view to facilitating a proposal, she rapidly retreated to declaring her inabil-
ity to marry. It might be that neither of them knew what they really wanted.
wy certainly took refuge in vacillation, but, in a sense, they both backed off,
and wey’s later interrogations of his behaviour return repeatedly to this theme."
What emerged was an asexual commitment to each other, heavily reliant
on the idea that they had been paired in a previous life as brother and sister:
it was a return to the revelation of 1891. But from 8 December he had to re-
fashion her image, whether as consecrated virgin, or lawless woman with no
home or children. As with Olivia Shakespear, whom he had initially judged
promiscuous and decadent, his first interpretation had to be radically reread.
For many years he had been writing about the idealization of women; from
December 1898 the work inspired by Gonne (notably The Countess Kathleen
and The Speckled Bird) would have to be revised. But in the real world he
remained indecisive. Despite the offer of financial help from Gregory, he did
not pursue Gonne to France until six weeks later; irresolution in love remained
his theme. If it had briefly crossed Gonne’s mind that their relationship
might be resolved by marriage, his uncertain and shocked reaction to her
confidences confirmed her feeling that that their alliance would take no con-
ventional form. She may have felt some reasonable disappointment.
Back in Paris from late December, she soothed herself with suggestive
visions about Celtic Rites initiation ceremonies, relayed to wsy: these involved
grasping spears, while ‘fountains of fire’ rose within her. Initiation ‘purified’
her and ‘sealed her lips for the work’.? ‘Work’ was, once more, her consecra-
tion. She denied that she was lonely and stressed the mystical bond between
them as a barely concealed substitute for sex (‘I have had a partial initiation
of the sword but feel it is not complete. This too we must try together’). But
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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

by Christmas her fellow-initiate had escaped to George Pollexfen and Mary

Battle at Sligo. From there, in between therapeutic evocations of Aengus with
George Pollexfen, helped by hashish pellets, he had continued to write con-
fused and uncertain letters to Gregory. ‘. . . all |have gained through so many
years is staked against all that I have ever hoped for; for certainly things can-
not remain as they now are. My soul takes comfort in many excellent divinations
but my mind doubts & fears. I feal too that her life is at stake. I used to think
that just what has happened would make all the differance, would bring me
content. As it is I find myself too restless for the quiet of Sligo . . .° This too
sits oddly with a scenario where Gonne had categorically refused marriage,
but would fit an alternative situation, where she had given him some hope.
Norwas the story unknown to others. After Gonne’s revelations, wBy moved
briefly to the Rathmines lodgings used by Russell, and the latter wrote to
Gregory on New Year’s Eve:
The whole story of this passion of his I know from the beginning many years ago
and it has the most pathetic and spiritual interest for me. It has wrought alternately
on the noblest and least attractive sides of his character, but on the whole many most
beautiful and human things in him are due to it and they outweigh the rest. Still Ican-
not say that I wish for him what he wishes for himself, nor do I not desire it for him.”

For her part, Gregory soothed wy with a letter on New Year’s Day 1899: ‘I
want you to have all you want, & I believe that suffering has done all it can
do for your soul, & that peace & happiness will be best for both soul & body
now.’ But still he postponed seeking them in Paris.
By g January he had turned up in Dublin ‘in good spirits’, according to
Russell; ‘he has a new theory about a Formorian king whose name pleased
him (“Alathan” [actually Elathan]) and he is building a gorgeous intellec-
tual structure on the strength of sundry visions’. Moreover, Mary Battle had
told him ‘if he was not married when he came next to Sligo he never would
be, an oracular statement which fills him with hope’."® He had restored his
spirits through Sligo and work. The publicity barrage for the Irish Literary
Theatre had to be arranged via Gill; differences in the Pan-Celtic League were
adjudicated; and on 22 December a project was mooted to Gregory, that she
‘collaborate with me in the big book of folk lore’. (The suggested basis for
collaboration was tightly restricted, and she initially refused.) There were also
the diplomatic difficulties which arose when the Chief Secretary’s wife, Lady
Betty Balfour, decided to mount ‘living pictures’ from The Countess Kathleen
in the Secretary’s Lodge at Phoenix Park. The Irish Literary Theatre had to
disassociate itself from the aura of Castle patronage, though wy collabor-
ated so far as to coach the beautiful Lady Fingall for the part. And even from
Thornhill, wsy had been arranging social life for his return to London. By
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 SHADOWY WATERS 1898-1900
mid-January he was back at Woburn Buildings, having announced
the incep-
tion of the Irish Literary Theatre to the National Literary Society.’”
Only at the end of January did he arrive in Paris. Gonne at first was unable
to see him, giving illness as a reason, though she may also have disapp
roved
of wBy visiting Mathers; she was now half-convinced that the self-st
yled
Comte de Glenstrae was an English spy. WBY saw his admirer and transla
tor
Davray, and spent time with Synge, whose austerity and dedication impres
sed
him. Eventually, he and Gonne met and talked at length; but he found
her
withdrawn and rather cold. She had apparently lapsed into depression after
the psychological catharsis of December, and she may have felt chagrin at his
irresolute response. But she had other worries too. Millevoye was deeply
implicated in planning Paul Dérouléde’s attempted coup at this very time, and
was subsequently arrested on 23 February; whatever the state of their personal
relationship, she was committed to her lover’s political causes, and had learnt
much of her language from La Patrieand La Croix, which presented Englan
d
as a conspiracy run by Freemasons and Jews (‘l’ennemie séculaire’'*),
For the moment, however, the forces of evil seemed ascendant. wBy heard
more of her past (‘I do not wonder that she shrinks from life,’ he told Gregory’)
and returned to London in mid-February after ‘a depressing time’; there he
succumbed to the general influenza. A letter from George Pollexfen, accom-
panying a loan of £7, probably rubbed salt in the wound. ‘I was in hopes you
would have required more and for another purpose but suppose affairs did
not culminate favourably. When I told Mary some time back that you had
gone to France she said you were in great form at present (i.e. then) but added
that something you and [had in mind would not come off this time. I made
no remark in reply to this, but wondered whether the prognostication might
refer to the Celtic Rites or to another matter more immediately to do with
your going to Paris.”° The Paris visit had left him determined not to see Gonne
until after the summer, or so he told Gregory. He now stayed in London, too
low in funds to do much but comforted by gifts of food and wine from Greg-
ory, dining out, and recommencing his Monday evenings. The visitors to
Woburn Buildings in late February and early March included Davray, Moore,
Farr, Rhys, Todhunter, Sarah Purser and — inevitably-Gregory. The partial
confidences of December had placed her even closer to the centre of his life.

II
By now, in any case, the theatre project had been announced; and this had
dominated wey’s public life since his return from Sligo in mid-January. The
public was addressed through a series of manifestos. First, at a meeting of the
National Literary Society on g January in Dublin, a ‘fashionable’ audience

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sat through a lengthy amateur concert before listening to wBy explain that
‘all literature and all art is national’ (witness Ibsen and the Greeks), but that
the concept of ‘national’ meant reconciling ‘men of all creeds and parties in
the service of Ireland’.”? This was well gauged for a congregation of Castle
Catholics and university luminaries, who were then told of the plan for an
Irish Literary Theatre, ‘to be conducted under the auspices of this society’:
the Antient Concert Rooms had been engaged (since December) for the sec-
ond week of May. Gill’s Daily Express gave this event a certain prominence,
and was equally helpful in publishing wBy’s letter and article of 12 and 14 January
which made the new departure manifest.
From the beginning the Irish Literary Theatre trod a difficult path between
its claims of ‘national’ politics, its avant-garde ambitions, and the patronage
of the establishment. The guarantors included Lecky, the arch-conservative
ProfessorJ.P. Mahaffy of TCD (who hoped they would avoid any use of the
Irish language), Plunkett, Lord Castletown, Lord Ardilaun, Lord Dufferin,
the Duchess of St Albans, Dillon, Redmond and Healy; Gonne’s name
struck a lonely ‘advanced’ note on the roll-call.”” wBy was acutely sensitive
to embarrassments like the endorsement of Lady Betty Balfour's ‘living pic-
tures’ (‘Imagine Miss Gonne at the Chief Secretaries Lodge’) or the Vicereine’s
attendance at a lecture to the National Literary Society by Margaret Stokes
(there could be ‘no special chairs’). The aid and comfort of the conservative
Daily Express was a similarly mixed blessing.** With such calculations in
mind, wBy made his manifesto for the Irish Literary Theatre an attack on
the Irish establishment for cutting itself off from the life around it; hence the
‘cold and conventional’ imagination of the Protestant/Unionist world. His
long-standing vehemence against Trinity College culture had been fuelled
by the obstructionist stance taken by Trinity dons before the 1899 Commis-
sion investigating the use of Irish in intermediate education. But it was also
tactically important to distance the Irish Literary Theatre from the dead hand
of establishment approval, and his brilliant manifesto to the Daily Express,
‘The Academic Class and the Agrarian Revolution’, should be seen as part
of this campaign. Attacking Robert Atkinson’s disparaging remarks about
Gaelic literature, wBy ringingly asserted that Trinity College’s contempt for
Irish culture stemmed from the class interests of those threatened by nation-
al revival and the agrarian movement. Yet it was this world which, chivvied
by Gregory and wey himself, had backed the new dramatic experiment;
whereas scepticism was expressed by the new voice of advanced nationalism,
Arthur Griffith’s United Irishman. Mr Yeats’s project’, Griffith announced,
was ‘an attempt to produce a really high-class Anglo-Irish drama; but
such plays as he meditates can never be popular. They are too far above the
people’s heads.’”
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 SHADOWY WATERS 1898-1900
Rival theatrical innovation had already appeared in nationalist circles, and
would continue to do so — including Alice Milligan’s Irish-speaking drama
at Aonach Tir Conaill (a Gaelic festival in Donegal) the previous November,
and pageants mounted by Maud Gonne and her associates. This made wBy’s
publicity onslaught all the more important. He was justifiably proud of the
newspaper coverage appearing from mid-January, sending cuttings to both
Gregory and Gonne; after his return from Paris in February, he threw him-
self into the task of finding actors for the May programme. By March, after
lengthy discussions with Florence Farr, he had decided upon professionals
rather than amateurs. After listening to Farr and wey at a Monday even-
ing gathering, jBy sarcastically reported, ‘If all one hears is true, London is
crowded with beautiful & charming actresses & capable actors, the supply
far exceeding the demand —so that if they only search they cannot fail to find
suitable people.”°The journalist H. W. Nevinson met wsy for the first time
on 16 March, on the search in Hampstead society, and left a vivid impres-
sion in his diary: ‘tall, thin, rather stooping, with long, straight topped head
quite black, narrow face, eyes rather close, & the left looking alittle outwards:
clean shaved, showing blue’. Most of all, wBy’s energy, mannerisms, and self-
absorption were impressive; he
talked incessantly, moving his hands a good deal, & sometimes falling into a chant:
says “D’y’ see?’ every sentence. Talked chiefly of himself, his spiritual experiences,
trances, visions and apparitions: sometimes the spirit forbids him to say what was in
his mind & his tongue becomes like a stone. Calls himself a Cabalist, but a sceptic
too. Is as good a typical young poet as could come out of Ireland. Has laughter too,
espec. in gossip about other men.”

He would shortly need this sense of humour: trouble arose before the end of
March over Martyn’s scruples about the blasphemous content of The Count-
ess Cathleen, and it was only quashed with difficulty.” wy and Farr went to
Dublin for a week on 30 March, and returned on 7 April ‘having completed
his arrangements for the Celtic Theatre’, while Russell was left struggling
with posters representing ‘really occult angels.” Rehearsals and publicity were
handled from London, where Nevinson would shortly enlist the Daily
Chronicle in the cause of the poet’s burgeoning reputation.
From mid-April wy extended his theatrical message to the London
public, with an important statement to the Irish Literary Society on 23
April.*° The large audience included family, friends, literary collaborators like
A. P. Graves and Dora Sigerson Shorter, and the antagonistic journalist
D. P. Moran, who had already made wsy a target for his brilliant gibes and
would soon found the Leader, devoted to the same project.*! wBy announced
a future programme of plays by Standish O’Grady and Fiona Macleod, and
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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

said that by playing in small halls, to discriminating audiences, they would

target ‘the exceptional man — he did not mean the man of any class or the man
who read books, though he meant principally the man who reads and loves
the old Irish legends’. Again, ‘national’ was interpreted as safely all-inclusive,
by looking to ancient Greece and modern Norway. “With the Gaelic lan-
guage movement there might grow up every spring about the time of the
old festival of Baltaine [recte Beltaine] a national, perhaps he should say a
racial, festival.’ He and Martyn ‘in all humility’ followed Ibsen, whose liter-
ary theatre was founded on conquering ‘the opposition of a cosmopolitan
and denationalized class’. But while praising Ghosts and The Wild Duck, wBY
contrived to attack realism; his artistic priorities were clearly visible. ‘If we
were to restore drama to the stage — poetic drama, at any rate — our actors must
become rhapsodists again, and keep the rhythm of the verse as the first of their
endeavours.’
wBy’s (and Farr’s) essential plea was for hieratic, lofty drama where words
mattered, not action: and this was a concept received sceptically by the
Irish Literary Society. Todhunter, who must have felt rather embittered
at his exclusion (given wBy’s previous raptures about his plays), asked an
awkwardly specific question. How could The Countess Cathleen be played,
according to wBy’s principles? Would the actors not have to be specially
trained for a year? Norreys Connell was even tougher: ‘he did not think that
Mr Yeats’ idea of the theatre could ever successfully appeal to the people for
support, and as a modern imitation of the old theatre it seemed impossible
(Applause)’. Others stressed the importance of popularity. Every speaker
on record dissented. Most damagingly, Edmund Gosse contradicted wBy’s
entire interpretation of Ibsen’s career: which was, at the outset, firmly based
on commercial drama. But few of these criticisms seem to have taken hold,
at least to judge by wBy’s subsequent lecture in Dublin, ‘Dramatic Ideals and
the Irish Literary Theatre’.*” By now the Irish Literary Theatre’s publicity
was accumulating fast, with their declared intention of putting on an ori-
ginal Irish play every spring (‘Beltaine’, the ancient Celtic summer festival)
and a classic in the autumn (‘Samhain’). For May 1899 the programme was
to be wBy’s The Countess Cathleen and Martyn’s The Heather Field, played
at the Antient Concert Rooms: described by a contemporary as ‘a rather
shabby tenement in Brunswick Street, about the size and proportions of a
moderate Dissenting chapel’, with rows of hard wooden benches and a
skimpy gallery.**
The Countess Cathleen had been much revised since wBy’s original concep-
tion of February 1889 — first for publication in 1892, then for republication
with Poems in 1895. The version played in 1899 had been yet further changed
(and ‘Kathleen’ had become ‘Cathleer), though a new publication would not
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 SHADOWY WATERS 1898-1900
appear until r901.** Two further revisions would follow in 1912
and 1919. By
1899 the character Aleel had come into focus as hopeless poet-m
instrel
attached to a self-sacrificing goddess-figure — a pointer towards the increas
-
ingly subjective direction which the play would take. Other 1899 alterat
ions
had been dictated by Martyn’s worries about the plot. In a famine-stric
ken
Ireland, with demonic ghouls harvesting the souls of starving people
by
offering corrupt bargains, a beautiful countess offers her own soul in return
for the salvation of her people. Though wey would eventually classify it
as
an anti-politics play, his demon soul-merchants must, toa contemporary audi-
ence, have looked like Protestant proselytizers or English oppressors; and
Famine Ireland was, to any reader of John Mitchel, an inescapably polit-
ical mise-en-scéne. But the play’s controversial potential did not lie only in
politics. Although the Countess’s salvation is eventually guaranteed by her
transcendent intentions, Martyn agonized over the religious implications;
on 22 March wey had written desperately entreating him not to back out
and agreeing to refer any problematic passage to a ‘competent and cultiv-
ated theologian’. Favourable reports notwithstanding, the issue simmered
on, joyfully stirred by Moore. Just before the performance Martyn turned up
at the hotel where wey and Farr were staying, tried to change his mind once
more, and had to be firmly talked round.*
But the chief controversialist was an old acquaintance, probably drawn
in by his obsessive hatred of Maud Gonne as well as by his previous passages
with wey: Frank Hugh O’Donnell. With the eclipse of the 1798 Centenary
movement, O'Donnell had become increasingly extremist, at least for pub-
lic consumption. ‘It is time to seek anew the old path of courage and honour,’
he announced in April 1899. ‘Hurrah for the native tongue! Hurrah for native
swords!”*° He deluged the nationalist press with manifestos about every-
thing from the Norman invasion to the Oath of Allegiance; the printed text
of The Countess Cathleen provided a perfect cause, since it contained a scene
in which an enraged peasant assaulted a religious image of the Virgin (excised
from the acting version). First in a letter to the Freeman’ Journaland then in
pamphlets (circulated by late April), O’Donnell denounced the play as a
blasphemous calumny on the Irish nation. wy, ‘a meandering decadent
with a diseased mind’, presented them {just like a sordid tribe of black devil-
worshippers on the Congo or the Niger’.

Going, going, gone! An Irish wife — an unchaste Irish wife — secured for hell for a
hundred crowns! The Celtic Muse of W. B. Yeats is tireless in its flattering appre-
ciations of the Irish nation. Its men, apostate cowards; its women — such as this; its
priests, the prey of demon swine; its shrines, kicked to pieces by its Celtic peasantry;
the awful majesty of the Christian God flouted and mocked by spirits from the pit!

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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

What is the meaning of this rubbish? How is it to help the national cause? How is
it to help any cause at all?*”

‘His object is to get up a row at the performance, Russell assured Gregory.”*

But this was not perceived as disadvantageous. ‘Dublin is improving all
round. Art, music, literature, drama are becoming of more general interest.
The next thing which will happen will be the fight with the priests and the
reformation will reach Ireland in its last & most spiritual phase.’ Russell
added fuel to the flames by writing a skit of the Counéess for the current issue
of the Irish Homestead, the agrarian co-operative journal which was being trans-
formed under his editorship. The Daily Nation joined in by vituperatively reject-
ing advertising copy for the play, and exhorting audiences to demonstrate ‘that
the people of the Catholic capital of Catholic Ireland cannot be subjected to
affront with impunity.”
Thus, when the play finally opened on 8 May, it carried a controversial
advance reputation, as well as a history of tension behind the scenes. The ideas
with which wBy approached rehearsals may be guessed from a long letter to
the Daily Chronicle of 27 January, which outlined the dramatic principles to
which he would, by and large, remain faithful: formalized chanting, simple
scenery altered by light, and a powerful directorial presence stressing that the
function of art was to invoke spiritual realities. Believing a commercial audi-
ence was the enemy of the ideal theatre, wBy had originally wanted the
Countess acted in full hieratic Bedford Park style. But, pressed by Martyn
and others, he rapidly gave in to populism and cast May Whitty instead of
Dorothy Paget, who was consoled with the assurance that ‘you act accord-
ing to a quite new way, & according to a theory of acting which Mrs Emery
& myself alone as yet have accepted’.*” He also had to abandon his plans
for a Bayreuth-style finale, though he continued to dream of a full operatic
Countess Cathleen for years.*’ Having ended up with professional actors, he
was anxious to dispel the belief that the Dublin opening would be an ama-
teur affair: Gill was told emphatically that they were paying ‘a great deal of
money in salaries.” It was, after all, competing not only with the imported
dramas so often excoriated, but also with a tradition of patriotic melodrama
alive and well at the Queen's Theatre.** This ambition did not come cheap-
ly: wBy had stressed to Dorothy Paget that he was risking other people’s money.
Actually the backing principally came from Edward Martyn, so it was
perhaps only fair that the popular success of the Irish Literary Theatre’s first
double bill was not The Countess Cathleen but The Heather Field.“
As to the Countess, }BY’s reservations were probably shared by many. ‘T
hope Willie will go on writing dramas & that sometime he will prove he can
write dramas which are to be acted as well as chanted. A lyric or any other
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 SHADOWY WATERS 1898-1900
out-pouring of musical passion is all the more penetrating if
the personal-
ity uttering it is already familiar to you in story or drama. The
Countess of
[sic] Kathleen is itself such a drama and I cannot agree with Willie
in all his
ideas as to the rendering of it.’ But the audience reaction to both
plays, taken
together, was enthusiastic enough to drown out ambivalence; some
hissing
on the last night was countered by a cry from the gallery: ‘Don’t mind
thim,
Mr Yeats, they're only Tim Healy’s curates.”° The week of theatri
cal per-
formances was celebrated by garden parties, art exhibitions and public
lec-
tures, climaxing in a famous dinner given by the Daily Express at the Shelbo
urne
Hotel, attended by (among others) wy, Moore, Martyn,
Hyde, Magee,
O'Leary, O’Grady and a rather bemused Max Beerbohm. Moore’s memor
y
of it is preserved immortally in Hail and Farewell, beginning, ‘I read an
his-
toric entertainment in the appearance of the waiters . . .*7
The dinner’s /eitmotif was celebration of controversy, and the coming
together of various strains in the theatrical movement. Martyn was awarded
extravagant praise, while wBy combatively rebutted criticism and stressed
the
symbolic construction and setting of the Countess — besides claiming that
two Catholic priests approved of it. This was shrewd, but (as Frederick Ryan
pointed out) ceded the argument of clerical interference in the first place.*
The Irish Literary Theatre’s mission, according to By, was ‘to spiritualize the
patriotism and the drama of this country’. According to Moore, in an embar-
rassing encomium on WBY, it was to introduce a native genius of Shakespearian
proportions. But Arthur Griffith’s recently established and IRB-influenced
United Irishman, sharp for its purposes, decided that the imprimatur of Gill
and Plunkett should be exposed as an attempt to broaden ‘co-operation’ from
the agrarian into the cultural sphere, with obvious and sinister polit-
ical intentions:

Mr George Moore preached to our salvation. Let the Irish Nation grasp the pen of
Yeats for its sword and buckle on the churn of Plunkett and be saved! It is cheering
to know that Mr Moore’s artistic eye can catch the hint of the sun of art in Erin’s
sad, dun sky, and that his temperament now permits him to return to Ireland and
play the critic of her politicians. His keen, logical mind detected an analogy between
the Irish economic struggle of the recent past and the struggle for National existence
of Greece, Italy, Holland and France. Poor Mr Yeats must have suffered agonising
torture while Mr Moore slapdashed him with flattery with the heady vigour of an
honest whitewasher slinging around his limewash. Mr Yeats replied to the critics of
his play, and replied pertly. He was ready to admit, he said, that nobody was ever robbed
in Ireland and that no woman was ever false to her husband. Tommy Dodd would
have uttered a better quip. Dr Shaw revealed himself a Philistine and MrJ. F. Taylor,
who had listened, horrorstruck and indignant, to his one guiding star being rudely
criticised by Mr Moore, gently-savagely reviled that gentleman. Dr Sigerson,

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Dr Tyrrell, Dr Bernard and Mr Max Beerbohm said nothing, in graceful speeches.

Mr Anderson puffed his business. Dr Hyde spoke in Irish, to the utter rout of the
Express reporters, and Mr O’Grady hinted darkly of a military movement, causing
one knight of commerce to murmur to heaven a prayer for his soul. Then Mr T. P.
Gill blessed his guests — and all was over.
Will the union of Butter and Poesy endure? Will their conjugal embraces yield
to the birth of a new Irish Nation? I fear not. Barrenness and incompatibility of
temper, if nothing worse, will lead to a quarrelling and a separation. I prefer poetry
unbuttered and sniff suspiciously at butter idealised. I do not want Mr Plunkett
to wrap me up my pound of butter in the book of the ‘Countess Cathleen’. I do not
feel my heart thrilled as I gaze at the insignia on the invisible-green standard of
symbolic patriotism which our poetic dairymen and practical poets have unfurled.
I prefer the old flag with its harp to the new one with its churn. Also, I prefer my
poetry without cream.”

This attack, like O’Donnell’s, seized on a fundamental point: given wBy’s

recent Fenian profile, the language of ‘patriotism’ surrounding the theat-
rical initiative reasonably led people to expect a nationalist agenda. Yet this
was clearly no part of the Irish Literary Theatre’s brief. Tempers were further
raised bya celebrated letter to the Freeman” from thirty National University
students attacking wBy’s representation of ‘the Irish peasant as a crooning
barbarian, crazed with morbid superstition’, thus allowing England to deny
the national claims of ‘a loathsome brood of apostates’. wBy claimed this
was a sectarian interposition, but once again it arose from baulked political
expectations. The students had been expecting a celebration of national char-
acter and history, and believed them travestied instead. Politics had joined
religion in a classic Irish cause célébre. ‘From the point of view of publicity,’ as
James Cousins put it, ‘the occasion was a howling success.”*"
The implications of the controversy so successfully orchestrated by wBy
and Russell were far-reaching. Current ambiguities were mirrored in the
reaction of the United Irishman. The paper was more or less republican, anti-
Semitic (particularly over Dreyfus) and of advanced nationalist opinions: it
despised Pan-Celticism as a middle-class dilution of pure Irish nationality.”
Correspondents to its columns saw opposition to the Countess as reassuring
evidence of nationalist ‘zeal’, too soon dissipated.** In initially opposing the
play, the journal stressed the fact that it was so Wagnerian as to be ‘un-Irish’:
wey'’s ‘Celtic-named puppets’ were really “Teutonic dolls’. None the less, the
playwright had to be congratulated ‘not as the artist, but as the standard-
bearer of revolt’.°* This reflected uncertainty on the part of Griffith (intuit-
ively antipathetic to wBY, but anxious to remain friendly with Gonne) and
his drama critic Frank Fay (longing for dramatic innovation but unimpressed
by the production values of the Irish Literary Theatre). Long afterwards wBy

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 SHADOWY WATERS 1898-1900
claimed that Griffith, at that stage anti-clerical, had boasted of ‘sendin
g
coal-porters into the gallery to cheer whenever they hear anything the church
won't like’. Accordingly, the paper shifted the ground to the question of the
playwright’s patriotism.

Mr Yeats has proved himself to be an artist; we know him to be patriotic

; never-
theless he has exhibited a startling misconception of the character
of his coun-
trymen. This is a fault which he must correct if he desires enthusiasm
to animate
those who otherwise would uphold him only through a sense of duty. Beyond
this,
for the defects of Yeats the Artist, as Irish Nationalists, we little care. We shall
watch
with real anxiety how he will take his victory over the Ignoramus, the Bigot
and the
Philistine. If he takes the enthusiasm of Monday night solely as the artist’s
tribute
he may be lost to Ireland; if he takes it primarily as the acclamation of the
Patriot he
may grave his name on his country’s heart.

But this was not to say that the forces called up by O’Donnell had been van-
quished, or that wBy had won the argument.
No less prophetically, the ideas which so incensed his antagonists were
built into the framework of his spiritual and occultist life. Beltaine, the occa-
sional journal of the Irish Literary Theatre which was published to coincide
with their first season, preached drama as the ‘preparation of a priesthood’
and referred to theatre as liturgy, using mythic narratives. These ideas may
have come to him via Blake or Frazer’s Golden Bough but they also (in their
references to the Greek theatre of Dionysius) hint at absorption of Nietz-
schean notions at least three years earlier than usually supposed.*° The
theatre would provide a common symbolism and a common meditation.
Crucially, in wBy’s personal quest the theatre would slowly replace the Celtic
Rites on which he had worked with Gonne (he had originally asked her to
play the Countess, and been refused). He continued to draft rituals until IgOI,
but more and more desultorily. The invocations, visionary effects and spir-
itual propaganda that had accumulated in his occult notebooks could now
be transferred to another, more public forum; self-knowledge could come
through the discipline and projection of a dramatic persona. And in the
theatre, as in occult tutelage, he could demonstrate to Gonne a sphere of
mastery. She attended the plays, but shunned the attendant publicity, re-
moving herself to Mayo to unveil 1798 monuments and preach land agita-
tion. Just as predictably, by 21 May wsy had disappeared to Coole, where he
remained, on and off, until September. Gonne’s letters to him, lamenting the
collapse of the anti- Dreyfus case in France, the establishment of the Waldeck-
Rousseau government, and the ascendancy of Jews and socialists, probably
fell on deaf ears, and she soon reverted to their traditional preoccupations of
mystic colours and Celtic rituals. But wBy knew he had had a great success
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in Dublin, and from the peace of Galway he continued to dictate publicly

to Gill. ‘The one thing I most wish to do is drama & it seems to be a way,
the only way perhaps in which Ican get into a direct relation with the Irish
public.”*”

Ill

Where did poetry fit into this programme? wy’s belief in drama reconcil-
ing the enterprise of art and the need to preach, and enabling him thereby
to purchase a claim on Irishness, came just at a time when he had published
a book of poems: but The Wind Among the Reeds signalled his last new col-
lection for several years, and wBy himself saw it as something ofa swan song.
Though its appearance in April 1899 more or less coincided with the un-
veiling of the Irish Literary Theatre, it had been even longer in the making.
From late 1897 wBy had been writing to Elkin Mathews about the design
and appearance of a new volume. His correspondence through 1898 kept up
the refrain, and in July yy cynically remarked that he had been announc-
ing it ‘for nearly six years or thereabouts’.** Proofs had been sent to and from
Thornhill in the autumn, followed by anxious inquiries about binding
and complicated instructions about the notes accompanying the poems —
‘really elaborate essays in the manner of “The Celtic Twilight”’, as he
told Davray, whom he was cultivating for a review in Mercure de France.
‘They have given me a good deal of trouble & will probably make most of
the critics spend half of every review in complaining that I have written very
long notes about very short poems.’ But he hoped to reap ‘the forgiveness
of the philistines’. A cover commissioned from the unreliable Althea Gyles
was still under discussion in January 1899; WBY was simultaneously harass-
ing Fisher Unwin about a new edition of Poems (with ‘a very good sketch
of myself as frontispiece’). His efforts paid off, and both books were on re-
viewers’ desks by the end of April, just before the début of the Irish Literary
Theatre.
The Wind Among the Reeds included several poems which existed in
draft as early as 1892; and as finally arranged the volume carries a distinctly
autobiographical implication.*’ This is evident in the deliberate use of named
personae (Aedh, Hanrahan, Michael Robartes, Mongan), a gallery of char-
acters through whom wsy expressed his moods. In later versions these
names became abstractions (“The Poet’, “The Lover’); in 1899, as wBY made
clear in a celebrated note, they represented specific feelings and qualities.

Hanrahan is the simplicity of an imagination too changeable to gather permanent

possessions, or the adoration of the shepherds; and Michael Robartes is the pride of

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 SHADOWY WATERS 1898-1900
the imagination brooding upon the greatness of its possessions, or the adoration
of
the Magi; while Aedh is the myrrh and frankincense that the imagination offers con-
tinually before all that it loves.
Art-as-priesthood was spelt out, disguising the personal agenda of love-
poetry and the private language of magical ritual —both themes that run through
The Wind Among the Reeds. Love-poems predominated, in intensity if not quan-
tity; and it is tempting to trace two themes, and even two groups, through-
out. One group, usually featuring Robartes, inevitably suggests the doomed
affair with Olivia Shakespear and conveys the regrets of a lover who cannot
quite convince himself, nor lose himself in love: post-coital fristesse occurs
in “The Shadowy Horses’, or ‘Michael Robartes remembers Forgotten
Beauty’, while “The Cap and Bells’ presents the fulfilment of love as the loss
of potency and of life itself. Another group of poems strikes a note of des-
peration, and the longing for total possession in death. These were inspired
by ‘Aedh’s’ commitment to Gonne, and include ‘Aedh wishes his Beloved
were Dead’, ‘Aedh hears the Cry of the Sedge’ and ‘Mongan thinks of his
Past Greatness’:

T have drunk ale from the Country of the Young

And weep because I know all things now:
I have been a hazel tree and they hung
The Pilot Star and the Crooked Plough
Among my leaves in times out of mind:
I became a rush that horses tread:
I became a man, a hater of the wind,
Knowing one, out of all things, alone, that his head
Would not lie on the breast or his lips on the hair
Of the woman that he loves, until he dies;
Although the rushes and the fowl of the air
Cry of his love with their pitiful cries.

If many poems suggest the conventional love-in-death trope of the fin de

stécle, with passion defeated through self-immolation and exhaustion, they
are redeemed by an audacious marriage of simplicity and elaborateness: the
language of Mallarmé is linked to the energy of folk rhythms, as in ‘Aedh tells
of the Rose in his Heart’.
All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,
The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart,
The heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the wintry mould,
Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.
Much revised by this stage, the poems in this volume were rarely changed
again. They reflected the circumstances of his life: political expectations,
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doomed love, mystical faith, the slings and arrows aimed at Gonne by an
uncomprehending world. Another note struck by the collection stressed
Celticism, visions of apocalypse, and what can only be described as flamboy-
ant obscurantism. This quality is most obvious in poems that did not come
quite right, like the much rewritten ‘Aedh pleads with the Elemental Powers’.
Wander-
But it also pervades the hard, mysterious simplicity of “The Song of
ing Aengus’, a near-perfect adaptation of the Gaelic aisling form, where a
visionary woman appears to the dazzled poet — who in this case is also the
god of love. The final arrangement had been sent off in late November 1898,
when he was still expecting some kind of mystic apotheosis, and a final recon-
ciliation with Gonne. This is expressed in what was probably the last poem
written before publication, and destined for immortality: ‘Aedh wishes for
the Cloths of Heaven’.
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Yet the book as a whole (and wy conceived of it as an entity) strikes

an indecisive note between despair and anticipation; both love-poems and
visionary apercus convey a sense of deferred climax, and return again and again
to the themes of exhaustion and silence (subject of a famous 1897 essay by
Maeterlinck, noted by both wsy and Symons). This throws into even sharper
relief the occasional challenging grace-note, like the unaffectedly virtuoso
little ballad “The Fiddler of Dooney’. First published in 1892, the 1899 ver-
sion was shorn of minor folksy archaisms, and it emerged as the kind of poem
which wey could by now handle to perfection. Verbal complexity is lent by
place-names, a dance rhythm is manipulated masterfully, and a sardonic
twist of language leaves a subversive message lingering at the end: finally
affirming the priesthood of art above the pieties of convention.
When I play on my fiddle in Dooney,
Folk dance like a wave of the sea;
My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet,
My brother in Moharabuiee.

I passed my brother and cousin:

They read in their books of prayer;

216
 SHADOWY WATERS 1898-1900

I read in my book of songs

I bought at the Sligo fair.
When we come at the end of time,
To Peter sitting in state,
He will smile on the three old spirits,
But call me first through the gate;
For the good are always the merry,
Save by an evil chance,
And the merry love the fiddle
And the merry love to dance:
And when the folk there spy me,
They will all come up to me,
With ‘Here is the fiddler of Dooney?’
And dance like a wave of the sea.
This Mozartian touch mercilessly exposed the limitations of younger con-
temporaries already attempting the Yeatsian mode. Though wsy temporarily
dropped it from his Collected Works in 1908, in 1909 it was not only read-
mitted to The Wind Among the Reeds but placed as the signature-poem which
ended the collection.
Reactions to the volume were quizzical. In some quarters bewilderment
was expressed at wBy’s deliberate search for obscurity, particularly in his
notes (‘Why did he write them?’, jpy querulously inquired of Gregory”).
Elsewhere, The Wind Among the Reeds was inevitably used as ammunition
in the battles around the Irish Literary Theatre. A front-page article in the
United Irishman regretted wBy’s mistiness and obscurantism, while an im-
portant long review by Francis Thompson in the Academy described him as
a pure poet with an authentic but ‘contracted’ gift: a unique voice speaking
across a narrow range. Above all, the new volume’s reliance on elaborate
magical symbols was worrying.
The only road out is the clumsy expedient of explanatory notes. This is not the true
use of symbolism, and from a purely poetical standpoint is quite inartistic. It creates
wanton difficulty. Mr Yeats should at any rate be clear to the few who understand
the system of mythological imagery. But his arbitrary use of it often leaves even them
in dark. ‘I use this to signify so and so,’ is the formula. But he should not ‘use it to
signify’ anything. He should use it, if he needs it, for what it does signify; and if
he is unsure what it signifies, he should not use it at all. It is wantonness to darken
his poetry by employing recondite imagery, which he confesses elaborately he is
doubtful about the meaning of. Frankly, there is more ingenuity than insight in
much of it.*?
wey rather defensively claimed that George Moore, Edmund Gosse
and York Powell considered The Wind Among the Reeds his best book. (He

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inaccurately thought that York Powell compared it to ‘Sapho’.”’) He put the

usual effort into arranging reviews, advising Symons about his piece in the
Saturday Review,® which duly stressed the technical virtuosity and access-
ibility of the new volume (and incidentally advertised the Irish Literary
Theatre). Equally ‘inspired’ was Stephen MacKenna’s long article in the
Gael, ‘The Personality of W. B. Yeats’, which shows the close identification
of wy’s public persona and the impact of his work (‘strikingly handsome
... he looks like his poems’). The poet had become, according to MacKenna,
‘the first Irishman of the day’, yet remained resolutely other-worldly. MacKenna
wrote as an insider, revealing how wy had arrived at his sartorial style by
working through various affectations. The conclusion could hold true for his
literary work as well. He was much exercised about his inability to learn the
native language. He had now achieved ‘infinite quiet dignity . . . absolute self-
possession’. He was still picturesque, but no longer laughable. He projected
a loveable quality, especially for women, and yet had developed a ‘hard prac-
tical common sense’ on committees and a good business head.
This last quality was much in evidence immediately after the appearance
of the new volume and his revised and reprinted Poems. In May and June he
relentlessly pressed Fisher Unwin for a new financial deal, ‘a greatly increased
royalty etc.’, encouraged by experienced literary friends like Clement Shorter.
This was essential. The two books signed off an era, containing “all of his
published poetry which he cares to preserve’.** He had ceased writing lyric
poetry, and would not return to it for over a year. This meant practical as well
as artistic deprivation. For a single poem he could now demand 45 (though
he accepted less);°° the £40 which arrived from the North American Review
in August for his long article, “The Intellectual Movement in Ireland’, was a
rare bonus, easing his ‘desperate’ financial state and enabling him to pay his
debts and send 45 to yBy. His strategy in the summer of 1899 was to make
sure as much of his work as possible was on sale to coincide with the Irish
Literary Theatre campaign. The Wind Among the Reeds and the second edi-
tion of Poems were both in the shops, and in June he suggested reissuing his
Book ofIrish Verse (with twelve new pages) to cash in on his other sales.°° He
now told Lily that he would ‘review no more books because, though it brings
in money more quickly, it gets me into all kinds of difficulties & quarrels &
wastes my time.””” Solicitations from magazine editors for short lyrics were
firmly refused. His own view, at this juncture, was that his future lay in
poetic drama.
By late May he was at Coole, sketching, painting in pastels® and burying
himself in a rewrite of The Shadowy Waters. His theatrical baptism had taught
him that any hope of an eventual production as play rather than dramatic poem
depended upon radical reconstruction, and he cherished an ambition to see
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 SHADOWY WATERS 1898-1900
it in rehearsal by late autumn. Moore, staying near by with Martyn,
offered
copious advice. The original love-story, set in shadowy Irish prehistory,
had
taken an occult turn 4 /a Villiers de l’Isle-Adam: Moore suggested excisio
n,
simplification and more sex, deeply offending Russell. The results would
be
published a year later in the North American Review, but the poem,
like its
hero Forgael, never reached a final destination. wBy wrote to Russell
that
he now conceived the play as a hymn to ‘the ideal human marriage’. Yet a
central uncertainty remained: were the lovers to end apart or together?
Equally suggestive of his own private life was the theme of Forgael’s insuffi-
cient commitment to love: a passion which simply demanded a reflection,
not a reciprocity. This Tristan and Isolde clung together through uncer-
tainty rather than commitment. And Dectora’s symbol, like Gonne’s, was
apple-blossom. This was closely connected with the visions of apocalypse
and a New Age which still intermittently haunted him. A carefully recorded
dream in early July, brought on by invoking apple-blossom, had wsy career-
ing in a runaway brake, through a city like Paris, flying by workmen prepar-
ing their tasks for the Last Day. He ended at a wide river, with descending
parachutes advertising quack remedies, pushed by a charlatan, and awoke
‘in great terror’ of some unknown horror hiding in the dark. ‘I had been
writing during the day at the part of “The Shadowy Waters” where its hero
curses all visible things because they shut out the invisible peace. It seemed
to me, that this medicine man repeated the curse and that he was the world
which shuts out nature. The apple blossoms are symbols of dawn and of the
air and of the east and of resurrection in my system and in the poem.’
The roots of wBy’s inability to bring The Shadowy Waters to a conclu-
sion lay deep in the inconclusive passages with Gonne six months before,
but the play’s theatrical potential was further limited by his desire for a
poetic, ritual drama of atmosphere — markedly Maeterlinckian, though wBy
elaborately denied the influence. Meanwhile, work on it stopped him writ-
ing anything else, owing, as he explained it, to his slowness in composition,
producing at most ‘five or six good lines a day’. By 19 August only 400 lines
had been written. ‘I dont think it will be a popular poem, but I think it may
be a good deal noticed for it is very wild & passionate.’””! Work continued
through autumn and winter, complicated by Moore’s advice (though Russell
loyally offered to ‘strangle him if necessary’”). Finally a version was dis-
patched to the North American Review in early January 1900; but this too was
fated to a life of revisions.
Thus the composition of The Shadowy Waters involved considerable
stress, psychological as well as financial. As so often, his health broke down
in mid-June, and By wrote anxiously to Gregory about the danger of rheum-
atic fever (‘you are to him as a mother, better than a mother’). She took him

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to a shooting lodge in the hills to recuperate; they returned to Coole to be

joined by Hyde and his German wife, a disastrous acquisition in WBY's view.
A dragon . . . never done abusing the Irish language & Ireland & everything that
Hyde cares about. She is fairly pretty & probably a flirt & certainly a curious narrow
peevish person who is yet always looking about for a sympathy, which she is always,
unknown to herself, repelling. Hyde never shows any sign of temper, or of thinking
her way of talking unusual, but everybody here has been amazed by it, including a
priest who says he would ‘die of it in a week’. Martyn points her out as another argu-
ment against women & marriage.”*
At a public meeting in Gort, where the Kiltartan Gaelic League had
recently been launched, Hyde and wy spoke against Anglicization, and wBY
launched a particularly passionate manifesto about language revival.
For good or for evil he had to write his own books in English, and to content
himself with filling them with as much Irish thought and emotion as he could, for
no man can get a literary mastery of two languages in one lifetime; but he foresaw
without regret a time when what was the work of his life would be in a foreign lan-
guage to a great part of the people of this country . . . The nationhood of Ireland
had been committed to their care by the saints and martyrs of the generations that
had gone before them, and the language of Ireland was necessary to its preservation
... Irish nationhood was like some holy sacrificial fire, and where we stood watch-
ing O’Neill and Sarsfield and Emmett [sic] and Davis had watched before.”

This declaration of Fenian principles was not an isolated outburst to educate

Mrs Hyde. It was asalvo in a battle opened by wzy witha speech ina Trinity
College debate on 31 May, where the motion that an Irish literary movement
would result in provincialism was unanimously rejected. wBy also used the
occasion to reply to the journal of the Gaelic League, An Claidheamh Soluis,
where Patrick Pearse had declared (in English) that the time had come to ‘crush’
the Irish Literary Theatre for daring to suggest a national culture could be
expressed in any language other than Irish.” wBy defended this idea more
unequivocally than ever before, while skilfully rejecting commercialism and
materialism; and he prophetically endorsed the notion of artistic extravagance,
‘far better than that apathy, or cynicism, which were deep-setting sins here
in Dublin’. A bitter reference to the cold welcome afforded Irish writers in
Dublin not only linked his work to Ferguson's, but proved that the gibes of
the United Irishman had the power to hurt. However, the subsequent issue
of Griffith’s paper indicated that the editor was not impressed. ‘“I believe
the work of Ireland is to lift up its voice for spirituality, for ideality, for sim-
plicity in the English-speaking world,” said Mr Yeats. We believe nothing
of the kind. The work of Ireland is to uplift itself, not to play the missionary
nation.”’ Not for the first or last time, wBy’s artistic ambitions were accused
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 SHADOWY WATERS 1898-1900
of diluting authentic nationalism. For his part, Pearse went on to spend
much
of the summer exposing (in English) wBy’s claims to be
‘Irish’ or ‘national’
since he could not speak the native tongue.”* Given the background,
wBy’s
endorsement of advanced nationalism at Gort was unsurprising.
It shows a
line being thrown to the United Irishman and An Claidheamh, a demons
tra-
tion that the theatre movement was sound on the national questio
n, a repu-
diation of Trinity College values, and a consciousness on wBy’s own part
that
he had a rendezvous with Gonne two weeks later.
They met in Belfast in mid-September and travelled on to Dublin. wsy’s
letters show him disconsolately waiting at the Nassau Hotel and anticip
at-
ing a meeting to protest against British policy in the Transvaal: ‘irrelevant
for
me’, but, he told Gregory, Gonne had to be supported as ‘all kinds of intreagues’
might leave her without speakers. ‘A miserable Feniain, among the rest, is
beleived to have destroyed the invitations to members of parliment which
he was given to post, but whether by direction of his particular clique or not
heaven knows.”” After attending a pro-Boer meeting at Beresford Place
on 1 October, chaired by O’Leary, wey returned to Coole. Here he became
involved in Moore’s recasting of Martyn’s play ‘The Tale of a Town’ (to
emerge as The Bending ofthe Bough in the Irish Literary Theatre’s next sea-
son);8° Moore recalled wBy’s literary intelligence, ‘as keen as a knife’, cutting
through the knots Martyn had tied into his play, while the agonized author
sat mutely by. He emphasized wsy’s abstracted but ruthless discounting of
Martyn’s feelings, spending days at Tillyra dismembering “The Tale’, while
Gregory pursued Moore with letters about the poet's dietary and rest require-
ments.*' The idea of Moore’s and way’s co-operation on a play about the
legendary lovers of the Fianna cycle, Diarmuid and Grania, dates from this
time — as does Gregory’s strenuous advice against the project. But in mid-
November wey returned to Dublin, collecting Gonne, and they travelled to
London together. She went on to Paris, after breaking the journey in Woburn
Buildings. Thus they remained like the brother and sister they believed they
once were: interdependent, travelling together, but chaste.

IV
The love-lives of his London friends were less tramelled. wey returned to
the news that his illustrator and friend, the fragile bohemian Althea Gyles,
had taken up with the publisher Leonard Smithers, whom he severely banned
from Monday nights at Woburn Buildings. ‘This may, & probably will make
her quarrell with me for which I shall be sorry as I imagine I am about the only
person who belongs to the orderly world she is likely to meet from this out.’®?
Elsewhere, however, he implied that drunkenness rather than immorality made

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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

Smithers socially intolerable;*’ and where sexual licence was concerned, he

still resented the way Russell ‘bemoralized’ him about his London friends.
‘He & I are the opposite of one another,’ he told Gregory.

I think I understand people easily & easily sympathize with all kinds of charac-
ters & easily forgive all kinds of defects & vices. I have the defect of this quality.
Apart from opinions, which I judge too sternly, I scarcely judge people at all & am
altogether too lax in my attitude towards conduct. He understands nobody but him-
self& so must always be either condemning or worshiping. He is a good judge of
right & wrong so long as they can be judged apart from people, so long as they are
merely actions to be weighed by the moral sense . . . when he speaks of any action
connected with a man like either Moore or Symons he is liable to be equally wrong
because of his condem[nJation of the man. His moral enthusiasm is with him an
actual inspiration but it makes him understand ideas & not human nature. One pays
a price for everything.**

A year later he would visit the ill and increasingly distraite Gyles, aban-
doned by Smithers and fallen under the ministrations of Annie Horniman,
illustrating how the circles of wBy’s apparently far-flung life overlapped.
And Horniman was involved in another sphere where wBy’s ‘stern’ judge-
ment of opinions and ‘easy’ (or lax, or uninterested) attitude towards per-
sonalities came into sharp relief, and which reclaimed him during the winter
of 1899/1900: the occult brethren of the Golden Dawn.
Trouble had been brewing in the Order since December 1896, when
Mathers had quarrelled with Horniman. While wsy had stayed friendly with
Mathers, he had become distanced from him by late 1899, and increas-
ingly suspicious of the Comte de Glenstrae’s obsession with Egyptological
rites. From Coole, wsy had been sharing invocations and dreams with his
correspondents; on his return to London he reread Swedenborg, attended
Golden Dawn meetings, and helped found an irregular debating society
called the ‘Fellowship of the Three Kings’, which combined literary exchanges
with discussions of symbols and mysticism. But, as so often in these years,
the private agenda of spiritual inquiry intended to capture Gonne was inter-
rupted by events in the political world where she imperiously declared her
own authority.
The long-fomented war against the recalcitrant Boers in South Africa
began in October —seen by radicals and nationalists as naked imperial inter-
ference with a noble republic of independent-minded farmers. Gonne, much
involved with ideologues of the French Right, took it as further evidence
that the Jewish-financier conspiracy represented by Dreyfus stretched to
Britain. In November she formed the “Boer Franco-Irish Committee’ with
Arthur Lynch -currently a Fenian pro-Boer, but with a chequered future ahead
222
 SHADOWY WATERS 1898-1900
of him. (Richard Best drily recalled her lecturing at Neuilly ‘to an audienc
e
of six’ about Britain’s iniquity, accepting a bouquet of roses, and sweeping
out
on the arm of Lynch — who, when Best next met him, had accepted
a com-
mission in the British Army.*°) Dublin meetings centred upon the rooms
of
the Celtic Literary Society and involved Connolly, Gonne, Griffith, O’Leary
and the charismatic young Fenian William Rooney, but also constitutional-
ists like Davitt and William Redmond. Gonne pressed wey to join in with
a poem for the cause or articles in the United Irishman, which she was pri-
vately subsidizing with 25s. a week. ‘Its circulation has doubled during the
last month 8cit is really very good, but I don’t suppose you ever see it.’*
By mid-December he had given Gonne a public letter of support for
her Boer victory meeting*’ — though he cannot have been sorry to miss the
meeting itself, since it ended in a riot and the arrest of James Connolly,
charged with the unseditious crime of driving without a licence.** Gonne’s
anti-recruiting plans later developed further: she considered the bombing
of British troop-ships and toured America with incendiary speeches. The
bomb-scheme was to be financed by the Transvaal, but money was diverted
into the pocket of the inevitable Frank Hugh O’Donnell. She further alleged
that he betrayed a French agent sent to make contact with the IRB; though
in actuality O’Donnell himself was acting for the Boers and relaying money
to the IRB, who were determined to cut Gonne out. ‘Her chatter and con-
ceit could jeopardise the freedom and lives of many people’. By the end of
1899 WBY was uneasily monitoring revolutionary activity in Gonne’s circle;
anticipating trouble in the Golden Dawn as Mathers moved towards denounc-
ing more of the London brethren and claiming full powers; and planning the
next season of the Irish Literary Theatre, to begin in February. But at this
point family life intervened: on 3 January 1900 his mother died quietly at home
in Bedford Park.
She had been away in a world of her own for some years; the bad-tempered
outbursts recorded by her daughters had apparently been replaced by a slip-
page into silence and mental feebleness, precipitated by a series of strokes.”
In a composed letter to Gregory the next day wBy remarked ‘it has of course
been inevitable for a long time; & it is long since my mother has been able
to recognise any of us, except with difficulty. I think my sister Lilly & myself
feal it most through our father.’ This was true. A few months later Olivia
Shakespear’s own mother died, and he wrote to her, ‘When a mother is
near ones heart at all her loss must be the greatest of all losses.” The tone is
speculative rather than experienced, and he was honest enough not to com-
pare his own loss to Shakespear’s. But a link to Sligo and the powerful
Pollexfen world was snapped; the ménage at Bedford Park was transformed;
and wey saw the future through his father’s eyes, swiftly pointing out that
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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

with a less expensive household jay could give up magazine illustrations

and paint portraits for exhibitions.” None the less, at the end of the month
he was once more irritating his father by treating him ‘de haut en bas’.”* By
April 1900 the elder Yeats had paid his current debts and gone to Paris to view
the Louvre. wBy’s recourse was less glamorous: a violent bout of influenza
at the end of January. Once recovered, he threw himself into political and occult
activity with an energy galvanized — as so often before — by personal catharsis.

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 Chapter 9: Occutt Potitics
IQOO-IgO1

We who are seeking to sustain this great Order must never

forget that whatever we build in the imagination will accom-
plish itself in the circumstance of our lives.
wey, Is the Order ofR.R. et A.C.
to remain a Magical Order?

I
Tue Irish Literary Theatre’s second programme was announced in Janu-
ary 1900: Edward Martyn’s Maeve, Alice Milligan’s The Last Feast of the
Fianna, and The Bending ofthe Bough, whose authorship was politely disputed
behind the scenes. Martyn at last gave way resentfully to Moore, feeling it
was ‘too ugly’ to claim as his own.! Rehearsals took place in London, where
Gregory tried to keep the peace, noting that wBy implicitly believed every-
thing Moore said about his collaboration with Martyn: ‘all very well, but he
doesn’t believe him when he attacks Miss Gonne’s morality’. The season
opened on 20 February, this time in the Gaiety Theatre. Once again, enter-
tainment was organized by Dublin hostesses, an issue of Be/taine was pub-
lished, and a spice of controversy was added by the drame a clefaspect of The
Bending ofthe Bough. Its theme of local politics and national commitment was
variously interpreted as a satire on the recently reunited Irish Parliamentary
Party, and ‘the rise, fall and extinction of Lord Castletown’. wBY crisply told
George Coffey, ‘You can tell any body you like that O’Brien is not in the play
& that a great deal of patriotism is in it.’ Martyn’s pique was fuelled when
Moore's appropriation of his original play eclipsed the lack-lustre Maeve
and fustian Last Feast ofthe Fianna. In January, when negotiations had looked
ominous, wBy was already calculating where to raise backing if Martyn
pulled out. The potential donor whom he had identified was his ally in the
Golden Dawn, Annie Horniman.*
wy travelled from London with Gregory and Moore.’ As before, the
Theatre’s season was marked on 22 February by an entertainment, this time
at the Gresham Hotel rather than at the Shelbourne. The backing of the Express
was no longer offered since Gill had been removed in a coup the previous
September, to wBy’s chagrin (‘a great blow to all our interests”). No longer
useful, he was ruthlessly ignored. ‘I think Gill feels a little hurt that he has
never heard anything from anybody about the arrangements for the Literary
Theatre this year,’ wrote Russell to Gregory. ‘Considering the part he took

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last time both in the Express & getting up the dinner I think Yeats Martyn
or Moore should have consulted him or let him know what was going on or
if anything similar was to be attempted this time. Nobody here seems to
bother about the Theatre because nobody knew what was to be done, or
what the newspapers were to say & how they were to be worked.” All in all,
the occasion was a good deal more muted than in 1899. The United Irishman
admitted ‘that the audiences have been small, wretchedly small, only goes to
show how low and how far our people have fallen from the appreciation of
true art and sympathy with Irish thought, tradition and sentiment’.* At the
Gresham lunch (menu in Irish and food in English, the Express tartly
remarked) Moore, unreliable as ever, swerved into a manifesto on behalf of
Gaelicization, unexpectedly committing the Irish Literary Theatre to a trans-
lation (by Hyde) of The Land ofHeart's Desire. He had previously alarmed
Gregory by his wish to have The Shadowy Waters translated: she feared ‘“Three
Men ina Boat” talking gibberish’.’ wBy, in line with his speeches of the previ-
ous summer, called for educational reform to build the Irish language into
the syllabus, and instructed the Irish Parliamentary Party to resist ‘any dena-
tionalising system of education’.’° This identified the patrons on whom the
Theatre now relied. Martyn was kept mollified, and remained committed to
meeting all their outstanding debts at the end of the third year.'' But he had
been eased out of the inner circle and would shortly transfer his energies and
his money into a campaign to eradicate women from church choirs.
With the loss of the Express as well, support had to be ensured from more
conventional nationalist quarters. Maeve was taken as a patriotic allegory,
but Gregory was relieved that The Bending ofthe Bough ‘hits so impartially
all round that no-one is really offended’; when wBy announced to the audi-
ence that the Theatre’s future productions would be ‘equally patriotic in
intention’, she privately resolved to ‘keep politics out of plays in future’.’* Mean-
while, indefatigably squaring journalists at tea parties, she put a brave face
on it. But the programme attracted less attention than the previous year, and
disagreements were nearing the surface. wBy had only recently recovered from
influenza; he had no play of his own on the stage; the excitement, barrage of
publications and high exposure of the previous season had been dispersed.
The year 1900 had dawned, with no sign of the expected millennial revela-
tions. Moreover, since the previous autumn he had become involved in
Gonne’s and Griffith's pro-Boer movement. This commitment, allied to the
anti-climax of the Theatre season, pressed wy into a forward political
stance in the spring of 1900.
In the version recollected for his Memoirs many years later, he recalled
drifting into fringe Fenianism through the ’98 commemorations and the
Wolfe Tone Memorial Association. ‘I formed a grandiose plan without
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 OCCULT POLITICS IQOO-IQOI

considering the men I had to work with, exactly as if [I] were writing some-
thing in a story.’ Just like Frank Hugh O’Donnell, his active imagination
constructed more exciting politics than those available from the materials
to hand. The Memoirs then dissolve, strategically, into a series of undated
vignettes: his idea of a secessionist parliament, the Jubilee riots (actually
1897), the Centennial celebrations. Some incidents are probably conflated,
such as Gonne’s and Connolly’s performances in the anti-Chamberlain
demonstration (December 1899) and the Jubilee riots of two years before;
the order of events becomes inescapably confused. In the wBy version,
Fenian activity is improbably seen as the impetus behind the reunification
of the Irish Parliamentary Party in 1900; the threat to its electoral machine
posed by the mass mobilization of the United Irish League was a far more
influential factor. Thus wBy’s own tentative political involvements are placed
at the centre of national events.
What can be established is that Gonne rapidly adopted the movement
against the Boer War as a focus for her various political interests, and wBY
cautiously followed her. They visited Mark Ryan, who had been a key figure
in the shortlived INA, in search of Boer funds — an occasion mordantly
relayed to the Boer agent in Brussels.
‘Millevoye’s young lady’ came to our Chief’s house, quite furious at not having
received what she demanded. She was accompanied by one named Yeats who it is
said is the latest successor to Millevoye, and before this young man she said all she
had heard at your house and further . . . She declared that you had claimed to be in
communication with Irish revolutionaries ‘through a person who did not belong to
their organization’!!! Without doubt, within 24 hours all Dublin will know she has
not had success because, and because, and because etc. etc.
Ifshe is not a spy she is almost one and her bragging is more dangerous than treach-
ery itself.”

Gonne was also involved in the revived land agitation, issuing manifestos
encouraging the tenants to go to jail: “What do they risk?’ It would bring them
‘honour’ and ‘relieve them of the maddening monotony of watching the
land’. Both wsy and Russell were associated with Gonne’s Evicted Tenants
Committee, but a year earlier Gregory had recorded her disquiet, and wBy’s
ambivalence, at Gonne’s extremism.’ Her campaign was more and more asso-
ciated with the United Irishman’s other cult-figure
John
, (‘Foxy Jack’) MacBride,
IRB man and hero of the South African struggle, whose parliamentary can-
didature for South Mayo at this time was presented by the paper as a con-
test of “The Gold of the Jews against the Irish Brigade’..” wey accordingly
weighed in too. On 20 March 1900 he wrote to the Freeman's Journalwith the
idea of a protest against the Queen's forthcoming visit to Ireland. This was
Za,
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

no more than the line taken by the Irish Parliamentary Party in the House of
Commons, but wsy’s powerful polemic indicted the Queen’s advisers with
‘hatred of our individual National life’ and accused the monarch of doing
the work of a recruiting sergeant. He called for a Rotunda meeting, choos-
ing 2 April as the centenary of the introduction of the Act of Union into the
British Parliament —a proposal swiftly put forward by Gregory, as it was less
stridently anti-monarchist.'* O'Leary would chair it, disassociating Ireland
from any welcome offered to ‘the official head of that empire in whose name
liberty is being suppressed in South Africa as it was suppressed in Ireland a
hundred years ago’.
This Fenian language, together with O’Leary’s presence, sharpened
wey’s challenge that ‘all Irish members’ should be on the platform. When
they subsequently came aboard, he tried to make the Parnellite MP Timothy
Harrington stand down in favour of MacBride. In his manifestos wBy aligned
himself nearer separation, and what Pollexfens would have called ‘disloy-
alty’, than the acceptable (if fudging) language of Home Rule. It looked
like a burning of boats; George Pollexfen allegedly cut off a subvention to
his nephew because of it, and Lecky certainly resigned as a guarantor of
the Irish Literary Theatre. wBy took care to point out to Gregory that ‘he
had nothing to resign as his guarantee had not been renewed’. But his own
pro-Boer alignment in March 1900 exposed the implicit contradictions
between the neo-Fenian rhetoric of his political life, and the polite plural-
ism of ‘respectable’ cultural revivalism represented by the backers of the Irish
Literary Theatre.
Having alienated the Pollexfen world, he tried to explain himself to Gregory
(safely in Italy).

I dont think we need be anxious about next years theatre. Moore talks confidently
of finding the money, &I feal sure that our present politics will have done more good
than harm. Clever unionists will take us on our merits & the rest would never like
us at any time. I have found a greatly increased friendliness on the part of some of
the young men here. Ina battle, like Irelands, which is one of poverty against wealth,
one must prove ones sincerity, by making oneself unpopular to wealth. One must accept
the baptism of the gutter. Have not all teachers done the like?”

He would use this argument in his public defence too. But Gregory was not
entirely convinced; certainly her opinion of Moore and his influence was
not enhanced, and a month later she resolutely dissuaded wsy from embark-
ing on a joint American lecture-tour with him to campaign against the
war. Though he assured Gregory that he was relieved not to go, his early
reaction had been enthusiastic: Moore’s polemic against ‘the vulgarity of a
materialism whereon England founds her worst life & the whole life that
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 OCCULT POLITICS IQOO-IQOI

she sends us’ appealed to him, rather than the simple-minded Anglophobia
and anti-Semitism expounded by ‘our extremists’.2? Arthur Griffith and
D. P. Moran liked to fulminate about ‘Trish soldiers sacrificed on the altar of
the Hebrew Moloch’ and ‘the swarming Jews of Johannesburg’;?? Moore, more
subtle and much more sympathetic, continued to fascinate him. wBy even
suggested, later in the year, that his outrageous friend should enter Parlia-
ment ‘if he had a definite offer of a seat without a contest’. But their rela-
tionship remained clouded by Moore’s uncontrollable propensity for saying
scandalous things about Gonne, and wsy’s uncontrollable propensity for
repeating them to her.
The Boer War had aligned Irish nationalism along a broad front, and the
Trish Literary Theatre fell into line. Both Martyn and Moore were promin-
ent pro-Boers, or at least anti-imperialists, and wgy had identified himself
with the most extreme wing. Though his further public letters attacking
government censorship stressed protest within the law, he could no longer
sit on the fence. Ripples from the splash of his letter about the Queen’s visit
rocked the Irish Literary Society in London, where wBy’s election to the
committee caused A. P. Graves to resign as Secretary, in protest against his
political stance. Despite his lofty references to ‘our extremists’ in letters to
Gregory, wBy was by now seen as their mouthpiece.
Publicity was, apparently, inescapable. Sensibilities were intensified by
the royal visit; Gonne became the butt of attacks in a Dublin society maga-
zine, the Figaro, which branded her a government spy. This led to a libel
suit brought by Gonne and a public assault on its editor (Ramsay Colles) by
Arthur Griffith. wey offered tentatively to testify in the court case but
was refused; once more, he watched others around her behave decisively
while he remained irresolute in the world of action. Meanwhile the irre-
pressible Frank Hugh O’Donnell interposed once more. In May wy confided
excitedly to Gregory that their old enemy
has been busy ‘Felon setting’ as we call in Ireland making public the treasonable
acts of others. I have a lot of documents & have accused him & am trying to get a
court of investigation — all this is private of course. The person attacked is Maud Gonne
& he has been driven on by an insane jelousey. I doubt if I shall get my court,
as O Donnell has some people in his powerIam afraid — or rather in his pay. It is a
very unpleasant business and one of which I got first warning curiously enough by
clairvoyance.”

The ‘court’ was evidently an internal Fenian investigation, to be arranged

through Mark Ryan in London. This letter is one of the few concrete pieces
of evidence that wBy was actively involved in the movement, but he was also
lobbying constitutional politicians like Dillon and Davitt.% For much of the
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spring and early summer he was in London, displaying in struggles over the
Golden Dawn the decisiveness which he felt he lacked in other involve-
ments. But Gonne, beleaguered on several fronts, pressed him with inquiries
about meetings on the astral plane. In late June they travelled to Dublin
together: he en route to Coole, she to preside over her ‘Patriotic Children’s
Treat’ (a triumph of publicity) on 1 July.” He evidently pursued her roman-
tically once more, and after they parted wrote her a letter of ‘kind sweet
things’. She replied on 7July:
my dear Friend I do not want you to make up your mind to sacrifice yourself for
me. I know that just now, perhaps, it is useless my saying to you ‘love some other
woman’. All I want of you is not to make up your mind zo¢ to, to put it before you
as a duty, that would be wrong the gods do not want that, & it makes me very sad.
As for me you are right in saying I will be always to you as a sister. I have chosen a
life which to some might be hard, but which to me is the only one possible. Iam not
unhappy only supremely indifferent to all that is not my work or my friends. One
cannot go through what I went through & have any personal human life left, what
is quite natural & right for me is not natural or right for one who has still his natural
life to live — All I want of you is not to build up an imaginary wall of duty or effort
between you and life — for the rest the gods will arrange, for you are one of those they
have chosen to do their work.”

This was what he wanted to hear: consecration for them both, and freedom
to work on their separate paths. Their relationship probably inspired the
new love scene between Aleel and the Countess in The Countess Cathleen, added
later that year. The poet-musician offers himself along with his artistic hom-
age, the Countess affirms her prior commitment to the people. Their exchanges
closely echo his enduring dialogue with Gonne. Cathleen fantasizes briefly
about the life they could have together, far away and at peace, and then
admonishes herself.
... Although I weep I do not weep
Because that life would be most happy, and here
I find no way, no end. Nor do I weep
Because I had longed to look upon your face,
But that a night of prayer has made me weary.

Aleel has been led astray by a vision of Aengus, pagan god of love; she steels
herself against his power to waken ‘the passionate, proud heart’.
Do not hold out to me beseeching hands.
This heart shall never waken on earth,

But when Aleel apologizes for his temerity, she tells him art confers true
aristocracy — and implicitly deplores her own frigidity.
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 OCCULT POLITICS 1900-1901
God's procreant waters flowing about your mind
Have made you more than kings or queens; and not you
But I am the empty pitcher.

And when he has gone, she admits how he has stirred her ‘imagination and
heart’.”” Here, ifanywhere, is an echo of Gonne’s alleged revulsion from phys-
ical love (at least where wByY was concerned), and the hopes he retained
that
her hidden vulnerability would bring her to him in the end. Andina parallel
process of autobiographical transposition, the next drafts of The Speckled Bird
reflected conflicts with colleagues in his search for occult wisdom.

II

Throughout the spring of 1900 wBy was simultaneously involved in a crisis

concerning the politics of the Golden Dawn. By April Mathers’s antagonism
towards the London branch had become absolute. Quarrels about ultimate
authority raised the complicated and dubious story of the Order’s origin-myth,
with Mathers revealing that the letters from the mysterious ‘Anna Sprengel’
had been forged by William Wynn Westcott, and claiming for himself the
authorship of most of the rituals.”* Largely true as this may have been, it was
not what the fratres and sorores could afford to hear. In late March Florence
Farr, now the rather unlikely Chief Adept, had consulted the brotherhood
(including wsy) about Mathers’s pretensions, and on 2 April he attempted
to ‘annul’ resolutions which they had passed reflecting on his integrity and
financial probity. An incidental effect of all this was to rehabilitate Annie
Horniman in the Order. Since she had first clashed with Mathers over mat-
ters of money as well as spiritual authority, her judgement appeared vindic-
ated. Her adoptive name and motto, ‘Soror Fortiter et Recte’, was carefully
chosen; she knew she was right. While her obsessiveness, self-importance
and energy continued to irritate the other adepts, wBy supported her firmly.
He had, moreover, already measured her up as a prospective backer for his
theatrical ventures.
On 17 April 1900 Mathers sent an envoy to break into the Isis-Urania
Temple at 36 Blythe Road, Hammersmith, and take possession of the ma-
gical ‘properties’ there. The emissary was the 25-year old Aleister Crowley.
As yet uninitiated in the Order, he had attached himself to Mathers and
embarked on a career in occultism where both his fame and his fabulism
(as ‘the wickedest man in the world’) would eventually eclipse those of his
mentor. He was ejected when Farr called a police constable, but sent notices
claiming the right to take over proceedings. Guard duty was taken over by
Edmund Hunter, who appealed to wsy (a friend and ally through Celtic
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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

ritualism as well as membership of the Second Order); on 19 April they

changed the locks and awaited Crowley’s next assault. He arrived before
midday, wearing full Highland dress plus the ‘mask of Osiris’. The inhabit-
ants of Hammersmith may have been more surprised than wy, who believed
he had been warned of this intervention by occult divination and astral com-
munications (‘a clear proof of the value of systematic training even in these
subtle things’, he pointedly told Russell’’). Less subtly, Hunter was a profi-
cient boxer and his reputation had gone before him, which may have been
a more decisive factor in the ejection of Crowley. But the wickedest man in
the world was also discomfited to encounter wBy, whom he had met the year
before and cordially hated — an antipathy sealed by wBy’s unenthusiastic
response to Crowley’s poems (their author put it down to ‘bilious’ jealousy).
In the battle of Blythe Road, wBy’s divinations and Hunter’s fists saw off the
satanic incursion. wBy stayed in the building guarding its contents until 25
April, and arranged legal proceedings against Crowley through the eminent
solicitor Charles Russell.
wey had now broken finally with Mathers, his early mentor, and took
the leading part in his suspension. At a meeting of the Order on 21 April he
delivered an address repudiating Mathers’s influence and fanaticism, and
outlining ideas for the Order’s reconstruction: his scheme amounted to a
Reformation, replacing Mathers’s pretensions to papal infallibility with the
individual consciences of a committee of seven, along with the ‘Scholar’s’
approach to occult matters advocated by Horniman and wey. He himself
emerged as ‘Instructor in Mystical Philosophy’. On 23 April wBy heard that
the legal case against Crowley had been won. But he remained intensely
worried about unwelcome publicity, the effect of the farce and scandal on
innocent devotees like George Pollexfen, and the danger that someone
like Crowley (‘a person of unspeakable life’, already embroiled in homo-
sexual scandal) should gain control.
In May the Order passed new by-laws which put wBy on an executive
council with Farr and Horniman, now invited back as Scribe. But the threat
of a Mathers—Crowley takeover was replaced by another kind of struggle.
Horniman, returned to the circle of power, presented herself as the guardian
of probity and began rooting out administrative inefficiency; she particu-
larly rebuked Farr for intellectual sloppiness, and frivolous deviation into
Egyptological studies such as The Book ofthe Dead. Relations became increas-
ingly strained, and wBy was caught between his commitment to an old (and
attractive) friend, and his cultivation ofa potential patron. Once again he was
put in the position of trying to please two women, often by appearing to each
as she wanted him to be. But this was more feasible with Gonne and Gregory
than with Farr and Horniman. He felt worried about breaking with Farr, and
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 OCCULT POLITICS IQOO-IQOI

fragments of draft letters show the efforts he put into explaining. Interestingly,
he connected their struggle back to the wars over the Irish Literary Society
in 1893:

We can make a great movement & in more than magical things but I assure you
that if (through week vitality, through forgetfulness or through any other cause)
you make it difficult for us to reley upon one another perfectly you make everything
impossible. I know through long experience that practical work is an endless worry,
an endless waste of time, unless every body carries out their promises, in serious
matters, with the most scrupulous care for letter & spirit alike. Years ago Rolleston
failed me in the negociations over the ‘New Irish Library’, & he has made all work
in common impossible. We are very good friends but we have never sat on a com-
mittee togeather since & I do not think we ever will. We agreed upon a modus vivendi,
between two contrary projects & he abandoned it, while I was in Ireland, under the
influence of Gavan Duffy flatteries & promises. In the arts, & in social life one can
be tolerant, one can forgive, in public life once can seldom forgive without doing
great mischief.*°

His friendship with Farr survived; in December he introduced her to the Irish
Literary Society, where she chanted ‘Innisfree’ to an appreciative audience.°!
But in occult commitments he had firmly opted for Horniman’s side.
Some relief from the tension was afforded by fictionalizing it in The Speckled
Bird, to which he returned at the end of April 1900. A slightly satirical note
was introduced into his hero’s adventures among the adepts, along with a more
sceptical portrait of Mathers.** A Horniman-figure also appeared, dressed
in ‘a dark blue dress that was meant to resemble more closely than it did the
dress of one of Rossetti’s women, and there were some paint marks on the
dress’; she trembles with intensity and whistles Wagner. The closeness of other
portraits in this circle to Golden Dawn members made it all the more imposs-
ible for him to finish the novel, or to publish it; to the fratres and sorores, sworn
to secrecy about their Order, it would have constituted an odious betrayal.
By the 1902 version, his mockery would be still more overt.
But if the passages of The Speckled Bird inspired by the Golden Dawn
in 1900 are ironical, those which record his and Gonne’s pursuit of ‘Celtic
Mysteries’ are not. Michael attempts to involve Margaret in a spiritual and
mystic discipline devoted to finding the secret of the Grail, through a con-
secrated order of visionaries and the evolution of patterns of ritual. The
letters where he pleads with her are probably modelled closely on those he
sent to Gonne (now lost).

O my beloved is it not right that you who are so beautiful should become the first
priestess of this last reconciliation, the first swallow of this new summer? What
other priestess is there? The beautiful must preach a faith whose preaching shall at

5
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

last be [?] but odours and sweet sounds and sudden emotions and the light among
evening clouds and in drooping hair.*°

But she shatters him by replying in a brief letter announcing her marriage.
Michael goes for solace to his occult mentors and they fail him, the Mathers-
figure by his lack of ‘personal sympathy’, the others by their obsessiveness.
Thus through the spring of 900 wBy had been embattled on two fronts:
anti-war politics and the defence of Gonne in Dublin, and the struggles over
the Golden Dawn in London. In both arenas he struck a firm attitude, but
his private allegiances were divided. He survived the tension, solaced by
friendship as well as by the consolations of art; from about this time he began
to see Olivia Shakespear again. They shared details about dreams and visions,
and in the following year he would write for the Kensington, a magazine in
which she had an interest. Her ironic, sophisticated sympathy became once
more a constant resource for him in London, and remained consistent until
her death. Nor did political and occult confrontations interfere with his
writing life; he never forgot that his professional status depended upon the
London marketplace. The shift from writing lyric poetry to plays, and his
abandonment of reviewing, enforced careful consideration of his literary
income. So did the increasingly inconvenient allocation of his various books
between different publishers. Fisher Unwin still published his early poems,
plays and novels. Lawrence & Bullen possessed his short stories, prose and
the contract for The Speckled Bird. Elkin Mathews had published The Wind
Among the Reeds, and Hodder & Stoughton had taken on The Shadowy
Waters. wBy found Fisher Unwin too frugal (he paid an exceptionally low
royalty), and Bullen erratic (he drank). In early May 1900 he was attracted
by overtures from Macmillan about taking on all his work, but by 20 May,
probably swayed by readers’ reports emphasizing wBy’s dangerous politics,
they had withdrawn.” In any case, by mid-June wsy decided to put ‘all
arrangements about my books in the hands of [A. P.] Watt, the agent’. But
Fisher Unwin tenaciously held on to the Poems, and wBy continued to deal
with him directly (Unwin & Watt are I beleive not on terms™*). Renegotiation
was completed in December, while a long flirtation with Hodder & Stoughton
for an inclusive arrangement came to nothing.** He was also warned by
London publishers that his political reputation counted against him. In the
case of the Dome wBy astutely suspected this was a stratagem to pay him less
money, though it had certainly swayed Macmillan.*’ But he now knew he
could command as much as £40 from American publishers for a long article.
The move to an agent (with whom he stayed all his life) was a recognition of
professional status, and of his own bargaining power, made at a time when
he was decisively taking control in several other areas of his life as well.
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 OCCULT POLITICS IQOO-IQOI

Meanwhile, in a June heatwave, he longed to leave London and jingoist

celebration of victories over the Boers, but lengthy dentistry (advised and pos-
sibly paid for by Gregory) delayed him with ‘stoppings’ and fittings for false
teeth. Even when he escaped to Dublin, Gonne’s difficulties with O’Donnell
kept him from the west until the end of the month. Once at Coole, how-
ever, he fervently attacked his own work — and that of other people. A long
and merciless letter went off to the unfortunate Horton about the ‘monotony
and arridity’ of his recent sketches. Cultural enterprises continued to spark
into life in Dublin, but way, who was becoming worried at Gaelic League
zealots causing trouble in literary organizations, preferred to stay at Coole.
A letter he sent to D. P. Moran’s new journal the Leader on 26 August effect-
ively argued against the pure Fenian line in cultural matters, and provided a
self-defence against the continuing campaign waged against his “West-
Britonism’ in the columns of An Claidheamh Soluis.2? When he did venture
to Dublin in October to preside at a Gaelic League concert in the Gresham
Hotel, he trod very carefully indeed and obviously bore in mind the rancour
aroused by Leaguers in the National Literary Society. After a programme that
included Moore’s Melodies as well as step-dancing, wBy spoke in English on
the Irish language. ‘It was no use disguising from themselves that they had
now going on in Ireland a war of civilisation, and upon that war not only did
the issue ofIrish Nationality hang, but the very greatest issues that a man could
concern himself with.’ He moved on to attack English commercialism and
vulgarity, and to call for a new Irish dramatic movement: short plays in Irish,
without scenery, played all over Ireland ‘in barns’. ‘They should revive the old
Irish drama’ (an undefined concept). This manifesto suggests that theatre might
be the arena which would reconcile the different messages he was constrained
to broadcast. Ironically, it would prove the very opposite. Nevertheless, the
Irish Literary Theatre inaugurated a twelve-year period when he would write
a play a year, often revolving around themes which he had already investig-
ated in his poetry — notably the rival claims of imagination and passive con-
templation versus the world of action.
Thus from the summer of 1900 much of his poetic composition took the
form of ‘writing out in prose the substance of some lyrics’— though some ten-
tative poems emerged, including ‘Echtge of Streams’ (later ‘The Withering
of the Boughs’).** He could provide detailed critiques of his friends’ art, bru-
tally condemning Horton’s drawings and counselling Russell to remember
how “all ancient vision was definite and precise’: ‘if you want to give ideas for
their own sake write prose’.” But the theatre seemed able to supply a form
of art that could be both didactic and beautiful. For the rest of the summer
he lay low while debates about literature and nationality rumbled on in
O’Grady’s newly established A//Ireland Review, though at the blessing of the

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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

cross erected by Gregory on the poet Raftery’s grave in August, wBy spoke
vehemently ‘in support of the Irish language’ on a platform with Douglas
Hyde.* He resisted calls to protest meetings in Dublin, returned to The
Speckled Bird, wrote up fairy lore in collaboration with Gregory, and sent
manifesto letters to journals like the 4// Ireland Review and Moran's Leader,
which — excelling in mordant satire — had adopted him as a prime target.”
But apart from the novel, into which he poured the uncertainties and dissat-
isfaction of his recent passages with Gonne and the Golden Dawn, he devoted
himself to collaboration with Moore on their joint play, Diarmuid and Granta.
The mythic Arthurian story concerned the wife of a legendary Irish
king, who seduces and elopes with a young warrior; after her lover is ap-
prehended and put to death, she returns to her husband. A scenario, and
possibly a draft, had existed since late 1899. In October of that year wBy and
Moore had worked on it at Tillyra, and wBy thought Grania ‘a wonderful
part for a great actress if she can be found’.** Moore’s letters, however, record
an extraordinary kaleidoscope of ideas which dazzled and bewildered way
through the summer and autumn of 1900.* In keeping with Moore’s infatu-
ation with wBy, their reciprocity was perceived as a kind of marriage. Moore
would write Grania’s part (‘the dramatic point is [a] woman offering to a man
a set of sensuous temptations’), and way Diarmuid’s; Moore would create
the structure, wBy the style. Not the least extraordinary aspect of the col-
laboration is the fact that Moore’s version of it in Hail and Farewell appears
substantially accurate. But temperamental incompatibility, and wBy’s ambi-
valence about Moore’s literary effects, meant that they kept encroaching on
each other's territory. wBy altered the structure, Moore invaded the dialogue;
wey wanted ‘poetic words’, Moore longed for the elemental shock of French
Realism. None the less they persevered, and when the summer ended the play
accompanied wsy and Moore to Dublin, where the third act rendered Gonne
‘breathless with excitement’, or so wBy told Gregory.*” But they were on the
search for that ‘great actress’ who could illuminate the part of Grania, and
this brought the two playwrights to Mrs Patrick Campbell’s dressing-room
at the Royalty Theatre, where she was starring in Mr and Mrs Daventry, on
26 October 1900.
Beatrice ‘Stella’ Campbell was then, at thirty-five, in her full-blown
prime; she had just played Maeterlinck and Rostand in Dublin (to a rather
equivocal reaction), and she took to Diarmuid and Grania. She also took to
wy. It was the beginning of a long flirtation, conducted on several levels.
She expressed a desire to play Grania in Dublin in six months time, and indic-
ated that she would do so in style; when Moore told her it could be done for
£250 she replied superbly, ‘I intend to spend more than that on the shields
alone.’“* The plan that evolved, however (at Moore’s suggestion), was that
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 OCCULT POLITICS IQOO-IQOI

the Benson Company mount the play in Dublin the following autumn, and
Mrs Campbell introduce it to London at a later stage (having paid wBy and
Moore £200, which would help finance the Dublin performance). This betrays
uncertainty about whether it was actually ready, and by mid-November rela-
tions between the collaborators were strained. In part this arose from rivalry
over Mrs Campbell, but it was mostly based on sound intellectual grounds.
If Moore told wey ‘collaboration is mutual concession’, wBY icily reminded
Moore that while he himself had given way on questions of dramatic con-
struction, Moore was committed to giving wsy his way in matters of style
and vocabulary: ‘remember that this is the original compact’. Symons was
suggested as an arbitrator, but wsy, while agreeing, feared exactly the kind
of surreal public confrontation which his collaborator loved (‘who knows
but I may have to write a whole number of “Beltaine” about Moore”). By
25 November uneasy co-operation had begun again. By mid-December there
were hopes that the end was in sight, apart from Martyn’s objections on ‘moral
grounds’. Gregory was indispensable, appealed to by both men and enlisted
by wBy to oversee the arrangements made with the Irish Literary Theatre
for Diarmuid and Grania: he at once feared the play being ‘injurious’ to the
Theatre, and hoped that it would be successful enough to play a simultane-
ous London performance.” And over all hung the fear of Martyn’s sensitive
moral conscience and the possible loss of his financial backing: a fear only
allayed in December, when Annie Horniman offered a large guarantee ‘if
Argentine’s securities do not fall more than they have done already’.*! The
fish that wey had been patiently playing was now brought near the bank.
Meanwhile Moore had comprehensively invaded way’s London life,
inviting himself to dinner with the poet’s friends and appearing regularly
at his Monday evenings (‘Mrs Emery may chant something””’). He also set
off an explosion in the Irish Literary Society when wey proposed him for
membership, only to have the suggestion blackballed by ‘respectable’ elements,
led by Barry O’Brien. This provoked agonies of introspection in wBY: would
he seize it as a good resigning issue for himself?°? The Society had become
prey to bourgeois sensibilities; in the same month of December the Vice-
President Richard Henn Collins resigned because of wsy’s intervention in
a discussion on Irish humour. (jBy also thought his son’s vehemence on this
occasion was ‘touched by the revolutionary ardour of the time’.) Feelings
were ‘stormy’ enough for wBy to wonder ‘if the planet Mars is doing any-
thing unusual’, but Moore had created his own astrological weather. Only
the Celtic Rites remained, as a private agenda, and though wsy marshalled
and co-ordinated research across a wide front, ardour was cooling. Fiona
Macleod was now persona non grata. Russell had pursued her in the New Ireland
Review for unsound ideas and derivative pseudo-Celticism, while wBy and

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Gregory had turned down her play The Immortal Hour for the unstated
reason that it frankly plagiarized The Shadowy Waters.** As for Gonne, her
invitation to join a ‘club’ setting up a retreat house ‘in a Gaelic speaking part
of the country with a peasant woman as caretaker & servant’ evidently did not
appeal to wBy as a method of escape: though it might have been the nearest
they ever came to creating a Castle of the Heroes.
But she came to London at the end of December, and asked to spend
New Year’s Eve with him: she wanted him to read The Shadowy Waters to
her. This may be the occasion which inspired a draft for a lyric, never com-
pleted. In its rough state it conveys the irresolution, self-pity and confusion
induced by her presence, as well as isolating a moment in the journey from
experience into art.

SUBJECT FOR LYRIC

O my beloved you only are

not moved by my <sorrows> songs
which you only understand

You only know that it is

of you I sing when I tell
of the swan on the water
or the eagle in the heavens
or the faun in the wood
Others weep but your eyes
are dry.

II

O my beloved. How happy

I was that day when you
Came here from the
railway, & set your hair
aright in my looking glass
& then sat with me at
my table, & <then> lay resting
in my big chair. Iam
like the children, O my
beloved & I play at
<life & > marriage. I play
<at> with images of the life
you will not give to me O
my cruel one.

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 OCCULT POLITICS IQOO-IQOI

III

I put away all the romances.

how could I read of queens
& of noble women, whose
very dust is full of sorrow.
Are they not all but my
beloved whispering to me.

I went into the woods. I

heard the cry of the birds
& the <cry> of the deers, <?& I>
& | heard the winds among the
reeds, but I put my hands
over my ears for were not
they my beloved whispering to
me. O my beloved, why do
you whisper to me of sorrow
always.

IIII
O my beloved what wer verses to me
If you <are> were not there to
listen
& yet all my verses a little t you.
Your eyes set upon far
magnificence
upon impossible heroism
have made you blind and have
made you deaf
you gave your country a flame
<I fear> you hav no thing bu
the s verses, that ar but like
<?rushes> & leaves in the
middle of
a wood. ‘
Other eyes fill with tears but
yours are dry”

That New Year’s Eve which saw out 1900 — once anticipated as a mil-
lenarian year — was a time for reassessment. “The war has made the air elec-
trical just now,’ wBy remarked.* A year before, Gregory had written in the
Spectator about country prophecies of war in the Valley of the Black Pig, and
related them to what was happening in South Africa.*’ As it happened, the
war did not carry apocalypse in its wake, but it revived nationalist politics,
invigorated fringe journalism, and brought George Moore back to Dublin.

239
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

A new mood had been asserted by the first issue of Moran’s Leader in
September, with its scorching attack on pinchbeck Anglicization and its
celebrated call for an Irish Ireland — implicitly challenging wBy’s endorse-
ment of an Irish literature in English. The post-war dispensation had also
reasserted nationalist—Unionist polarities. Horace Plunkett, only a year before
seen as a possible reconciliator between the two traditions, alienated any
potential nationalist constituency through supporting the war (as Gonne
sharply told wBy) and lost his bid to get returned as MP for Dublin in Octo-
ber 1900.°° The anti-war movement had not only inspired Gonne’s friend
and collaborator Arthur Griffith to form the “Transvaal Committee’, later to
become Cumann na nGaedheal, and later still Sinn Féin: she herself became
President of the new radical organization for Irishwomen, ‘Inghinidhe na
hEireann’ (‘Daughters of Ireland’). And through her involvement in the
movement she met the nationalist hero John MacBride, who asked her to join
him on an American tour in February 1901.
As for wBy, he had been forced into a stance which had alienated Union-
ist Ireland and London publishers. His own impatience with ‘respectable’
nationalist Ireland was evident. Simultaneously his polemics in English
journals had begun to irritate Standish O’Grady, who complained at figur-
ing ‘among the other interesting barbarians whom you are exhibiting to the
Philistines’.*’ The press enthusiastically covered wBy’s presence at a Transvaal
Committee meeting which voted to give President Kruger the freedom of
the city of Dublin. But how far he would be comfortable with the believers
of advanced nationalism remained to be seen. Hyde made Moran promise
not to make a practice of attacking wBy, but Russell wrote worriedly to
Gregory at Christmas after a particularly virulent series of onslaughts:

The Leader is getting too absurd in its remarks about Anglo Irish writers. They are
written by Ryan but Moran ought to stop it. The last review of Rolleston’s antho-
logy was too absurd. I am afraid Moran is a ‘priest’s boy’. The book does not ‘appeal
to the heart of the Irish Papist’. The Irish people ‘don’t know anything about art’ ‘don’t
want it’. Yeats ‘never wrote a line to touch an Irish heart’. If Moran does not mend
his ways I will set the United Irishman on him. I prefer the ‘United Irishman’ any
day to the Leader. It is better written, more ideal [sic] there are good poems and real
thought in it and I am sorely tempted to write for it.

wBy wrote dismissively of Ryan’s animus in a letter to Gregory. ‘It is

wonderful the skill with which these people play on subtle hints of heresey
when they review AE or myself; & after all they are right from their point
of view. It is as much their very respectable instinct for heresey, as rage
against something they cannot understand, that keeps them ever harping on
symbols.’ Gregory came to view the persistent attacks in robustly Catholic-
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 OCCULT POLITICS 1900-1901
versus-Protestant terms, and was shortly giving him the kind of advice he was
ready to hear:
It is certainly rather depressing this set being made against you & especially not
having it a fight in the open. If the priests honestly think you a danger they ought to
say so & not shelter behind Moran and Gill. And if your writings are a danger, why
are you so abused for writing in a way hard to understand? There is a sort of stupid
cowardice about it all, for it is this heartbreak in Ireland, the priests are throttling
the people, & yet we are obliged to use them in any effort to get at the people.
Clearly, just now your work is not directly with the masses — which would be the
most directly interesting work — but that matters less as the Gaelic movement has
taken up their education, & any of the beautiful work you do, besides having a direct
influence on the best minds, is there ready for the time when your own countrymen
will dare to praise it . . . it really seems as if in a short time Edward [Martyn] will be
the only recognised man of letters in Ireland!“
By late January, a small volume containing their manifestos was in print,
under the title Ideals in Ireland. Though the Leader was guardedly favourable,
wey still felt his own work would never be accepted by Moran as properly
Irish: he would always be the target of the bigotry of ‘self taught men’,
mystified by unfamiliar intellectual standards and unable to rise above util-
itarianism or piety.” Significantly, in the controversy over Moore’s rejection
by the Irish Literary Society way declared ‘my first duty is to ideas & . . .
toleration is among the first of these’. The controversies of 1901 reaffirmed
this belief, which would only harden with time.

II]
Tolerance of heterodoxy was, however, much less desirable in Golden
Dawn affairs, which preoccupied wBy through January and February rgo1.
While he held his Monday evenings, dined out (forging a lasting friend-
ship with Thomas Sturge Moore) and lived his usual London life, he was
simultaneously locked in struggles with his fellow-occultists. Much as the
study-programme of the Order supplied his need for an academic structure,
the squabbles among the adepts resembled controversies within a university
department: dealing with hierarchies of authority, curricula, workloads and
methods of examination. wBy’s disagreement with Farr revolved around her
desire to admit members at a low level of achievement to the Council. Elitist
as ever, he tried to bring her into line by threatening to withdraw his support
from her theatrical projects, which he had been encouraging throughout
December. He also held out ‘in strict confidence’ the prospect of ‘a theatre
of art’, which had been suggested to him by ‘a group of writers & artists’.%
A copy was sent to Horniman, proving that they were now firm allies; and
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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

on 1 February 1901 the conflict climaxed at a Council meeting. wBy took

Horniman’s side in attacking notions of ‘freedom and individual conscience;
they emphasized authoritative forms of election, and the importance of not
splintering into ‘groups’. Horniman was not merely the ‘Scribe’; she footed
the secretarial costs, and many members apparently suspected her of harbour-
ing ambitions towards a Mathers-style dictatorship. She left a long (and
sometimes incoherent) record of these struggles stressing her alliance with
wey against the unholy. “The Demon [wy] made a speech which by its
beauty enforced silence but it fell on the ears of an audience who were on
a different plane of thought’; Farr ‘energetically enquired from the Demon
“who and what are you in the Order” or words to that effect’. In the end
wey and Horniman fell together, voting in a minority of two against regu-
larizing ‘groups’ and allowing free development. Apparently, all the other
Council members were energetically engaged in ‘group’ activity already.
The next day (2 February 1901) wBy produced the first in a series of open
letters which attempted to salvage the position by taking a high line.®° ‘It would
ill become my dignity to continue longer than my duty towards the Order
requires, an elected member of a Council where party feeling has run to such
extravagance.’ While he would be happy to go on teaching magical philo-
sophy, the ‘ignobility’ of the Council’s behaviour in sacred surroundings
revealed the corruption of ‘well bred and friendly people’. Three further let-
ters followed, for circulation before the next meeting of all members of the
Second Order on 26 February. But, disappointingly, he elicited only indirect
responses. His arguments condemned Farr’s inexperienced and slapdash
approach, and approved Horniman’s zealous, even pedantic commitment. This
endorsement was genuine. While he needed Horniman’s support and resources,
he believed in her carefully constructed and hierarchical approach: all the more
so as the by-laws of the Second Order in May 1900, which were now being
questioned, embodied his beliefs.°’ He was convinced that group activity pro-
duced a composite ‘magical personality’, abandoning integrity and provok-
ing disruption. Suspicion, distrust and corruption could only follow. “We who
are seeking to sustain this great Order must never forget that whatever we
build in the imagination will accomplish itselfinthe circumstance of our lives.’
wpy'’s third letter, drafted on 21 February, stressed that the dangers of
untramelled group activity would lead to Black Magic, and the ‘enchantment
of sensual passion’. The ethos of the Order was to facilitate a religious quest,
and indeed to reconcile ‘Paganism and Christianity’. The tone is that of The
Secret Rose:

Sometimes the sphere of an individual man is broken, and a form comes into the
broken place and offers him knowledge and power if he will but give it of his life.
242
 OCCULT POLITICS IQOO~IQOI

If he give it of his life it will form a swirl there and draw other forms
about it, and
his sphere will be broken more and more, and his will subdued by alien wills.
It
seems to me that such a swirl has been formed in the sphere of this Order
by
powers, that though not evil in themselves are evil in relation to this Order.”

On 25 February Robert Palmer Thomas (‘Lucem Spero’) circulated a counter-

statement, carefully analysed by wey and Horniman. It accused Horniman
of ‘persecuting’ group members for supposed ‘heresy’, retreating into neurotic
obsessiveness, and nurturing a particular animus against Farr. (The copy in
wy’ papers is furiously annotated by the subject of these criticisms.) Thomas’s
accusations against wBy indicate (as George Mills Harper has put it) ‘the
kind of mingled dislike and respect he commanded’:
This frater did you all great service during the Revolution [against Mathers]
as
you know from your printed documents. Since then he has attended the council
meeting at intervals and we all bear him witness that he has talked at greater length
than all the other members put together. His position among us is due to his long
connection with the Order, the originality of his views on Occult subjects and the
ability with which he expresses them rather than the thoroughness of his knowledge
of Order work and methods which is somewhat scant. He is however a shining
example of the help we may get from Members who have no special talent for pass-
ing Examinations.”°

But his opposition to the Council’s decision on groups was ‘a flagrant piece
of audacity before which the little tyrannies of our late Parisian Chief pale’.
wey briefly annotated the suggestions of his opponents: ‘Chaos’. But after
the general meeting on 26 February he, Horniman and J. W. Brodie-Innes
(who had attempted a compromise amendment) resigned their positions on
the Council. There was a general agreement that the rules of the Golden Dawn
needed revision, but not by him. It was a severance from old comrades, such
as Dorothea Hunter, with whom he had planned the Celtic Rituals, and
whom he had known since his youth. But to wsy the larger issue was what
mattered: the fragmentation of an organization which could have formed a
powerful ‘personality’, calling up inspiration for ritual and research purposes.
He decided to remain a member, but not an officer, and began to write his
general apologia. This appeared as a private pamphlet under the title Is the
Order ofR.R. et A.C. to remain a Magical Order? in March 1901.
Thus he adopted a strategy he had learnt in his struggles over the Irish
Literary Society, and would often embrace in the future: after a political
setback, he attempted to regain authority through a powerful written state-
ment. He produced an argument for exclusivity, hierarchies and a compul-
sory oath — written in the hope that constitutional revisions might enable him
to regroup his forces, fight the battle through written manifestos, and win in

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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

the end.”' Is the Order ofR.R. et A.C., however, went beyond the immediate
necessities, developing into a wide-ranging consideration of the position of
magic in the cosmic order. It holds, therefore, an important place in wBy’s
canon; but it was written for adepts, probably with the conscious intention
of asserting the Christian, Cabbalistic and Rosicrucian traditions of the
Golden Dawn against the Egyptological deviations of Farr and her friends.”
wBy argued that symbols and evocations could work only in the Order's
traditional system of carefully observed degrees (just as he was secretly plan-
ning for the Order of Celtic Mysteries). Diversity could be blended into
unity only through symbolic ritual, constructed around an image of ascen-
sion (like the Cabbala’s Tree of Life). By following the route advocated by
Farr, the ‘Organic being’ of the Golden Dawn would be fractured; its ‘ancient
units’ would succumb to ‘anarchic diversity’. As so often, he presented a
Blakean (or Neo-Platonic) view of the ‘real’ world as merely a symbolic
image of the invisible order; there are several references to Plotinus, whose
future translator, Stephen MacKenna, was now a friend. To his antagonists,
this seemed like mysticism. But (following his early Vedantic influences)
wey also preached the actual results of spiritual concentration. Almost in the
same words as his letter to the adepti, he stressed that the ‘Magic of Power’
could bring about real changes in the circumstances of everyday life, if for-
mulated strongly enough in the imagination. This was the belief that had sus-
tained him through the struggles of his own life. And his spiritual communion
with Gonne was certainly in his mind when he mentioned ‘lovers or friends’
using similar meditations to intensify their affection. Above all, he reiterated
a strong argument against supposed ‘freedom’. ‘In our day every idler, every
trifler, every bungler cries out for his freedom’. The only meaningful freedom
is ‘the right to choose the bonds that have made them faithful guardians of
the law’. Many of these beliefs lie behind the play he was to write in the very
near future: Where There is Nothing.
Farr’s strong disagreement with this pamphlet prompted a ‘postscript’,
written on 4 May 1901. But by now the reorganization of the Order had been
commandeered by others, though wBy managed by dint of sheer energy to
impose his influence on some of the revised by-laws.”* His conflict with Farr
did not, after all, prevent them collaborating on simultaneous enterprises, like
her verse-chanting performances,” and several of his opponents themselves
resigned from the Council a year later. By then the Order had been plagued
by Frank and Edith Jackson, or ‘Mr and Madame Horos’, two shady American
opportunists. They pulled off the remarkable achievement of hoodwinking
Mathers, who at one stage believed that Madame Horos might be Anna
Sprengel herself, or — just as likely—a reincarnation of Blavatsky: she explained

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her large figure by the revelation that she had absorbed Blavatsky’s astral
self.
The couple infiltrated Golden Dawn circles in London but were expose
d
as frauds, and worse was to come: in December 1901 they were convicted of
raping a sixteen-year-old girl at a spurious Golden Dawn initiation ceremony.
Unjustified as it was, the Order suffered irredeemably bad publicity and had
to change its name (to the Hermetic Society of the Morgenréthe).”5 Splits,
persecution-complexes and mutual recriminations vindicated many of wBy’s
prophecies, and his satiric darts in the 1902 version of The Speckled Bird owe
much to these events. The Golden Dawn, however, survived — after a further
split in 1903, which produced the Order of the Stella Matutina. wey con-
tinued his association with this branch at a remove, acting as an authority
on ritual, and corresponding with members. But his ambition to dominate
its administrative councils was over.”
He managed to reap, as so often, a literary profit. The previous October
he had begun his long essay entitled simply ‘Magic’.’’ It was substantially in
existence by 4 May, when he delivered it as a lecture to the Fellowship of the
Three Kings in London. H. W. Nevinson, whom wey as usual mistook for
someone else, sourly described the audience as ‘many dull, patient women,
letting words pour over them, hopefully as only patient women can’.”? wey
told them ofa ‘great mind’, into which all minds flowed, with a memory which
could be evoked (or triggered) by symbols; this owes something to the notion
of the Golden Dawn as a composite ‘magical personality’. In ‘Magic’ he
allows visions (of, for instance, past lives) not to be literally true, but to be
‘symbolical shadows of the impulses that have made them’. In other words,
psychological representations of the unconscious mind. It was an inter-
pretation he had previously applied to fairy lore, and would in future use in
relation to psychical research. The creative imagination is related to a spiri-
tual communion lost to most of the materialist, post-industrial world. Blake
is an obvious inspiration here, but wBy also stresses the secrecy of the sub-
ject, anda central uncertainty. Frater D. E. D. I. may have become detached
from the inner circle of the Golden Dawn, but the approach he had preached
to his erring brethren permeated the thoughts which he shared with the
world at large. And upheavals in the Golden Dawn impelled him back to the
long-planned Order of Celtic Mysteries. In his determination to produce a
‘whole fabric’ he had produced a hierarchy of colours, symbols and grades of
degree, finalized by the end of May.” This, he believed, would shape his work
for the foreseeable future. ‘I have hesitated for a long time about throwing
myself into it, as Iknew it would turn fealing against me, he told Fiona. ‘But
the growing Catholic party in this country is already so suspicious of me, that
I will lose nothing by saying all I have to say. I will indeed rather gain.’®°

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IV
His expectations were not far off the mark. Visionary articles like ‘Magic’,
bad publicity for occult societies and unbridled Celticism in general laid
him open to snide attacks from journalists in alleged ‘interviews’ during the
early summer of 1901; he complained continually of misrepresentation in
the papers.* First of all an interlude at Stratford for Shakespeare’s ‘history’
plays, and then an escape to Sligo provided relief. But on his way through
Dublin he was told by Bullen, who had been trying to place wBy’s books with
booksellers, that there was a strong clerical prejudice against him, affecting
even Gill (who may also have been smarting at being ‘dropped’ by the Irish
Literary Theatre). George Pollexfen also made clear that Sligo conservative
opinion was antipathetic to his nephew since his stance against the royal
visit, WBY wrote to Gregory from Thornhill that he was ‘in rather low
spirits about my Irish work’.** Even when they managed to enjoy a series of
joint visions of a ‘tall fair beautiful Queen-like figure’, George had to be dis-
suaded from asking her questions about his health.** His uncle’s selfishness
and miserliness depressed him, with his refusal to make the Rosses Point
house comfortable in case the rent was raised. But wy stayed on, finishing
two long essays, ‘Ireland and the Arts’ and ‘What is “Popular Poetry”?”** and
working on his increasingly autobiographical novel (currently called Michael’).
In late June he went to Dublin, and pursued his autobiographical theme
by making a sentimental return to Sandymount Castle, once the home of
his disgraced uncle. He was moved by the experience, and wrote about it
to Lily. On the way out the owner showed him ‘a house where he said the
neighbours said I had been born’.® It was confirmation that he had become
famous: as was the fact that a lost copy of the first pamphlet edition of Mosada
was valued, for the purposes of a lawsuit, at £5.°° His early life was now
incorporated into a public reputation.
Coole held him for most of the summer of 1901; the guests included Synge,
Russell, Hyde and Violet Martin, who as usual reported back to her cousin
in Cork.
Yeats looks just what I expected. A cross between a Dominie Sampson and a starved
R.C. curate — in seedy black clothes — with a large black bow at the root of his long
naked throat. He is egregiously the poet — mutters ends of verse to himself with a
wild eye, bows over your hand in dark silence — but poet he is — and very interesting
indeed — and somehow sympathetic to talk to — I liked him — in spite of various things
— and I got on well with him, so far . . . It is strange to talk of ‘deep subjects of
life and death’ without any selfconsciousness, and I must say he induces that, and
does it himself. He is not at all without a sense of humour, which surprised me. He
thinks The Real Charlotte very big in the only parts he has read, which are merely

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quotations in reviews . . . But he doesn’t approve of humour for humour’s sake— (here
Miss Martin said beautiful things about humour being ahigh art)... Today Augusta
made me add my initials to a tree already decorated by Douglas Hyde, AE and more
of the literary crowd. It was most touching. wey did the carving, I smoked, and high
literary conversation raged and the cigarette went out and I couldn’t make the matches
light, and he held the little dingy lappels of his coat out and I lighted the match
in his bosom. No one was there, and I trust no one saw, as it must have looked very
funny.*”

For all the attractions of Coole he travelled to Dublin to see Alice Milligan’s
plays in August and spoke at the rather genteel Pan-Celtic Congress, choos-
ing an appropriate tone to stir things up. ‘Mr W. B. Yeats, referring to the
language movement, said it had created a revolution, the whole thought of
the nation had been changed by the movement; and if it went on as it had
been doing it would be shaking governments.’ His line was deliberately
nationalist: ‘throughout the entire British Empire there were not at the pre-
sent day ten thousand persons whose opinion was worth anything in any art
. . Not even the healthy and happy had the art; they had the Horse Show.’**
But this did not convince everybody. At the same gathering, Russell asked
Moran of the Leader why he attacked wey when he was doing good work
for Ireland; ‘he put it on religious grounds’.* The object of criticism enjoyed
himself greatly amid Druidic ceremonial, ‘traditional chanting’ and argu-
ments about the Celtic credentials of Cornwall. He enthusiastically entered
into the debate on ‘a national costume’, advocating an authentically Irish
evening-dress as well as day-wear. If some two or three people in Dublin who
were accustomed to entertain a little among their propagandist people were
to institute a custom, urging them to come to periodical entertainments
in national costume, they would find this number of nine people [allegedly
already appearing in Celtic costume at Dublin parties] would soon increase
rapidly.”° He admitted they would have to face the ridicule of ‘the small boy’;
since saffron kilts were in question, Violet Martin would probably have had
something to write about too. Nor is it difficult to see why the scholarly
Celtophiles and their Ascendancy patrons were looked at askance by Gaelic
Leaguers, who boycotted the proceedings.”! But wBy was now privately
determined to begin initiations into his own Celtic Order that autumn, as
the first round in the coming battle ‘between the Church and the mystics’.”
All could be incorporated: joint visions with Russell, symbolic colours
sketched by Gonne, Gregory’s forthcoming work on sagas. A great system
would emerge to transcend all petty politics, provide protection against
enemies, and herald a new era.
These expectations sustained him through the saga of Diarmuid and
Grania, which continued at Coole. Moore wrote suggesting that music be

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10. WBY, Synge and

Russell fishing on Coole
YW Lake, sketched by Harold
;/ Oakley, an art school
ene == friend of Robert Gregory,
y
‘cares,

perhaps in September
q3
19OI.

introduced at the end of the play, an idea that bore fruit. But he had also real-
ized by now that his ‘psychological explanation of the legend’ by means of
Grania’s character was incompatible with wBy’s vision:” ‘a play written by
one man and corrected by another would not be better in the end than a care-
fully corrected Latin essay, a repainted picture or a stuffed animal’. None the
less, the summer of 1901 at Coole was remarkable for another collaboration.
Gregory had been assiduously turning her folklore collections into a book;
wy had guided her to the John O’Daly translation of the Cuchulain legend
in the Royal Irish Academy, and provided much help in what was to become
Cuchulain ofMuirthemne.”* She was now well embarked on a career as a cre-
ative writer, and during the summer she worked with wBy ona short drama
— almost a morality play — which arose directly from the disappointing ’98
Centennial movement. The original inspiration was allegedly a dream of wBy’s
in which an old woman entered a cottage where a marriage was in prepara-
tion; the play’s development revealed that she represented Ireland (as ina tra-
ditional Gaelic azs/ing) and led away the bridegroom to fight with the French
invasion force in 1798. The symbolism, however, was anticipated by Martyn’s
Maeve; and the nationalist moral was a response to a direct challenge. On 4
May 1901 Frank Fay of the United Irishman had attacked The Countess Cathleen
and The Land ofHeart's Desire in highly specific terms:
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 OCCULT POLITICS 1900-1901
They do not inspire; they do not send men away filled with the desire for deeds. . .
before he will be even on the road to achieving greatness as a dramatic poet, Mr
Yeats must tackle some theme of a great, lasting and living interest. In Ireland
we
are at present only too anxious to shun reality. Our drama ought to teach us to face
it. Let Mr Yeats give us a play in verse or prose that will rouse this sleeping land.
There is a herd of Saxon and other swine fattening on us. They must be swept into
the sea along with the pestilent crowd of West-Britons with which we are troubled,
or they will sweep us there. This land is ours, but we have ceased to realise the fact.
We want a drama that will make us realise it. We have closed our ears to the pierc-
ing wail that rises from the past; we want a drama that will open them, and in no
uncertain words point out the reason for our failure in the past and the road to suc-
cess in the future.

Within the month an answer would come from Coole but not, perhaps,
from the corner expected. Textual evidence suggests that Gregory wrote
most of the play; her own diaries, and contemporary rumour, bear this out.
wey always gave her due credit for providing the language, but implied that
plot and construction were his. This annoyed her in later life but at the time
she accepted that his was the name that would sell. Later that year she would
write to him, with a certain impatience, ‘I cannot think of anything but “the
Daughter of Houlihan” for the play, I am sure anything is better than
athlesnc7°
Cathleen ni Houlihan, as it became none the less, bears the hallmark of
the other plays Gregory came to write. It is straightforward, rather heavy-
handed, reliant on predictable dramatic by-play, and — for all its mechan-
ical construction — dramatically very powerful. It is also directly propagand-
ist, on the lines of the article ‘Felons of Our Land’, which she had published
in the Cornhill the year before. It would be played to maximum political
effect the next year,” but by 1904 wBy expressed a distinct discomfort with
this aspect.
It may be said that it is a political play of a propagandist kind. This I deny. I took a
piece of human life, thoughts that men had felt, hopes they had died for, and I put
this into what I believe to be a sincere dramatic form. I have never written a play to
advocate any kind of opinion and I think that such a play would be necessarily bad
art, or at any rate a very humble kind of art. At the same time I feel that I have no
right to exclude, for myself and for others, any of the passionate material of drama.”

This suggests unease, as well as collaboration. But in 1gor the ‘message’ of

Cathleen was compatible with his preoccupations: the peasant family is
preoccupied by material gain, until the spirit of Ireland redeems their son by
promising him a glorious death. A critique of money-grubbing and utilitar-
ianism is thus combined with the Fenian ethic.

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In 1901 wBy and Gregory also collaborated ona short play, The Pot ofBroth,
which, like Hyde’s Casadh an tSugain, relies on one extended (and ancient)
joke; here again Gregory provided local colour, and wBy some lyrics. Other
poetry written in the summer included much of ‘Baile and Aillinn’, which
was his first essay at a poem about ‘the Irish heroic age’ since The Wanderings
of Oisin. This was part of a projected series or cycle in lyrical and narrative
verse, which, he told Bridges, ‘I have always ment to be the chief work of my
life — The giving life not to a single story but to a whole world of little stories,
some not endeed very little, to a romantic region, a sort of enchanted wood.””
The enchanted woods of Coole had concentrated his mind. Gregory’s trans-
lations suggested a weaving together of tradition, place and story, in the
manner of ‘the old Irish poets’, but with the vigour and vitality of Balzac’s
Comédie Humaine. He wrote to several correspondents about the greatness
of her projected book, and the way it had liberated ideas and techniques
which he had wanted to tackle ‘since I was twenty’.
But drama remained in the ascendant. ‘I know that to almost every artist
& poet too, perhaps to almost every craftsman, there comes a time when he
grows weary of his own craft & longs for some thing else,’ he wrote to Horton
that summer.’ “Then comes the deceiving voices & he is lost if he obey them.’
To many, wBy himself seemed to be obeying a deceiving voice as he plunged
further into drama and away from lyric. Despite their occult differences he
pressed the claims of Florence Farr’s poetry-chanting performances, accom-
panied by a twelve-stringed ‘psaltery’ made specially for her by Arnold
Dolmetsch, and during the summer wrote excitedly of their efforts to strip
poetic expression back to its vocal elements. Gregory’s work inspired his
own short play about Cuchulain, begun at Coole and finished in the autumn.
The success of an American production of The Land ofHeart's Desire encour-
aged him further, though it brought no money. He told Thomas Sturge
Moore that it proved ‘if one writes actable little plays now, without too many
characters they will find there way on to some stage’. By mid-July he was
thinking of another collaboration with George Moore, who had taken up
residence in Dublin and thrown himself into local controversies in a ‘reli-
geous spirit of impartial hate’; they thought of ‘a religeous Don Quixote’.
This would become Where There is Nothing, and create yet another contro-
versy between them.
For the moment, though, they looked to the first public performance of
their current collaboration. This marked the Irish Literary Theatre’s last, rather
subdued season, which opened in the autumn. There were few accompany-
ing celebrations, apart from an exhibition of ‘sketches of life in the west of
Ireland’ by Jack Yeats, resolutely publicized by Gregory. An attempt to lure
Shaw over ‘to stir things up’ failed. After a summer of rewriting, the current
250
 OCCULT POLITICS 1900-1901
version of Diarmuid and Grania was performed on 21 October 1901 in the Gaiety
Theatre." During the summer wey had cast a horoscope which showed there
would be a ‘row’ on that date, but was cheered by the fact that the auguries
were much better than for The Countess Cathleen. He was wrong on both counts.
There was no row, but the play was a disaster.
This was not for want of effort. In March wey had been transfixed by a
Gordon Craig production of Dido and Aeneas for the Purcell Society, played
before a backdrop illuminated by coloured light-projections: ‘It was like
watching people wavering on the edge of infinity, somewhere at the Worlds
End.”°° This was how he envisaged The Shadowy Waters as well as Diarmuid
and Granta, and he turned excitedly to the possibilities inherent in avant-garde
production. Shortly afterwards the Benson Shakespeare cycle at Stratford
had provoked an ecstatic article from wsy, arguing against the half-round
theatre and in favour of Wagner's ‘half-closed fan’.1% But for Diarmuid and
Graniain Dublin that autumn, a more old-fashioned approach obtained. The
costumes, allegedly researched from illuminated manuscripts, were impress-
ively dreadful. Even Elgar’s music for the death of Diarmuid, and his song
for the nurse Laban, failed to raise the tone. The audience indulged in some
cruel mockery and an unfortunate line of Diarmuid’s to Grania, ‘The fools
are laughing at us’, brought down the house. Critical reaction was no more
favourable; a famous quip had it that in the first act the players fell asleep
and in the last, the audience did. O’Grady roundly refused to go near it, and
his All Ireland Review rejected it as ‘a coarse English society play in fancy
dress . . . a heartless piece of vandalism on a great Irish story’.1” The Leader
objected to the concentration on ‘degenerate and unwholesome sex prob-
lems’,’** and the modernity of Grania’s conception was generally condemned
(“Mrs Tanqueray B.C.’). This was a direct result of Moore’s input. Whatever
form the play had eventually taken, the audience expected Frenchified smut
from the notorious novelist; the theatre management had at one stage tried
to conceal the authorship of Moore and wey for fear of scaring away a
‘respectable’ audience.’” Violet Martin, sufficiently intrigued by her recent
exposure to the Irish literary renaissance to attend on 25 October, sent the
inevitable report to Somerville in Cork. She found the play ‘a strange mix of
saga and modern French situations’ — the latter being Moore’s responsibility,
while wey had presumably contributed ‘beautiful writing here and there’ as
well as ‘the peculiar simplicities that arose’. Her résumé of the plot illumin-
ates why so many people found it offensive.
In the first act [Grania] is on the verge of an enforced marriage to Finn; she states
without any contemptible subterfuge her reasons for objecting to this, and finally
deludes Finn’s friend Diarmid into falling in love with her and taking her away from
the marriage feast a la young Lochinvar. He only yields after much lovering on her

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part — then curtain. The next act is sometime afterwards, and the really novel posi-
tion is that she has become tired of Diarmid. I give George Moore some credit for
that. Never was anything like her ecstacies of love for him in the first act. She then
falls in love with Finn, which she might have done in the beginning and saved the
writing of the play — and the curtain is Diarmid’s discovery of them in howlts
[embracing], and his resolve to go and hunt an enchanted boar, which a family witch
(a stout lady in a grey teagown and conversational English accent) has prophesied
out of her spinning wheel is to be the death of him. The last act is Grania’s noble
endeavours to dissuade him from the hunt, amid much thunder and lightning out
of the woods. He makes one or two as backhairy [dubious] remarks to her on her
conduct as George Moore could wish and retires to hunt the boar. After interludes
there is a banging and roaring at the back, and Diarmid is carried in to make dying
speeches to Finn and Grania and to be carried off to a funeral march, with Grania
striking attitudes all round the place. Finally the court humourist, alone on the stage,
says ‘grand will be the burning of Diarmid, but grander will be Grania’s welcome to
Finn’, If this is the lofty purity of the Irish drama I am indeed mystified."”°

But the play’s hostile reception was provoked by more than its contents.
Unionist Dublin still resented wBy’s objections to the late Queen’s visit — as
the Chief Secretary George Wyndham warned him through Moore." And
in nationalist circles the use of an English troupe — the Benson Company —
was bitterly resented. They had been engaged with a view to creating a box-
office draw, faced with the withdrawal of Martyn’s subsidy, but the strategy
backfired. The Bensons had objected to the suggestion that they play Hyde’s
Casadh an tSugdin as well, though threatened by Moore with popular dis-
approval (caught ‘between the Gaelic League & Alexandra College’, as wBy
caustically put it'’’); this had probably got out. How they would have man-
aged the Irish-language dialogue is not revealed. In the event it was acted by
Hyde himself, with some Gaelic Leaguers coached by William Fay, who had
already collaborated on tableaux mounted by Maud Gonne and Inghinidhe
na hEireann. Audiences had been small, reviews restrained, and the general
effect gloomy (‘Can't one be cheerful and Irish at the same time?” grumbled
Holloway"); but Fay’s capacities as producer were impressive.
Moreover, his brother was the influential drama critic of the United
Irishman, Frank Fay, both a Gaelic enthusiast and an ambitious actor, who
had intelligently criticized both The Countess Cathleen and The Land ofHeart’
Desire. wey had discussed collaboration with both Fays in the summer, but
felt unable to guarantee the level of political sympathy they demanded."* From
every point of view, Frank Fay was determined to castigate Diarmuid and
Granza, and he was not short of easy targets. The use of a vulgar English
company was ‘intolerable’. “That Mr Benson should bring a lamb, or a kid,
or whatever the animal was, on the stage did not astonish me (nothing that
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 OCCULT POLITICS IQOO-IQOI

he could do would astonish me), but I think that the authors might at the
rehearsals have insisted on his not doing so.” In a curtain speech after the
single performance, wy tried to reclaim the moral high ground by saying
that they were trying to get away from the ‘vulgarity’ of English commercial
theatre, and implicitly apologizing for the Bensons, but this succeeded only
in infuriating them as well (Mrs Benson was doubly insulted since she hap-
pened to be three parts Irish). ‘She volubly protested that we were an English
company, recalled her husband, ‘that at his invitation we had crossed the stormy
St George’s Channel, and had done our best, according to our capacity, for
his play. We could not possibly allow him to step forward on our stage and
insult us and our nation.’!"°
Diarmuid and Grania gave Dublin much innocent and malicious pleas-
ure. WBY retained a certain affection for it, suggesting its revival as a dance
play to Frederick Ashton as late as 1930.!"” But the disaster of October IQOI
precipitated the end of his collaboration with Moore, as well as other enter-
prises. By November Moore was giving astounding tongue-in-cheek inter-
views calling for clerical censorship and announcing that the Irish Literary
Theatre was looking out for plays by priests;!!® wy could only disassociate
himself. ‘I suppose we would both be more popular if] could stop from say-
ing what I think & he from saying what he does not think,’ he remarked
wearily to Gregory.’
A young National University student, James Joyce, reacted more decisively:
in a superb polemic, “The Day of the Rabblement’, he announced that offens-
ive parochialism had taken over the Irish Literary Theatre.
But wsy had anticipated him. Even before the production of Diarmuid
and Granta he had declared that the Theatre had run its course.'”° This was
announced in Samhain, the Irish Literary Theatre’s magazine published to
coincide with the performance. Moore, Martyn and Gregory also contri-
buted. wey cast his eye back over the Irish Literary Theatre, welcomed the
controversy aroused, and took credit for the fact that experiments in Irish
theatre were happening in other quarters. Moore analysed the faults of the
Countess Cathleen production — the wrong kind of scenery, insufficiently
trained actors, wBY’s insistence on chanted verse. The attitude to Diarmuid
and Grania (not yet played when Samhain was written) remained evasive. But
the editorial message was clear: the experimental Irish theatre must be
European rather than provincial or English-derived, and subsidies from
bodies like Dublin Corporation were essential. This did not appeal to Frank
Fay and the United Irishman. ‘People who present addresses to the rulers of
England would certainly not permit our money which unfortunately they
control to be devoted to an institution whose principal object would be to act
plays holding up to opprobrium England and her methods.”!!

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Whatever wsy’s aesthetic intentions, politics were inseparable from Irish

theatre. In Samhain he returned to the idea ofa cultural ‘war between an Irish
Ireland and an English Ireland’, and William Fay’s idea of a touring com-
pany devoted to Irish works, but he concealed his own stance. ‘I am not
going to say what I think . . . Iwant to get back to primary ideas. I want to
put old stories into verse, and if 1 put them into dramatic verse it will matter
less to me henceforward who plays them than what they play, and how they
play it.”?? For him, political confrontation meant reacting against the dead
hand of the Irish establishment. In Samhain he quoted his father (not by name)
on how ‘petty commerce and puritanism’ had brought about English decline.
wey then moved on to denouncing Pollexfen values among ‘the Irish upper
classes’, who ‘put everything into a money measure’.

The poor Irish clerk or shop boy, who writes verses or articles in his brief leisure, writes
for the glory of God and of his country; and because his motive is high, there is not
one vulgar thought in the countless little ballad books . . . All Irish writers have to
choose whether they will write as the upper classes have done, not to express but to
exploit this country; or join the intellectual movement which has raised the cry that
was heard in Russia in the ’seventies, the cry, “To the people’.
Moses was little good to his people until he had killed an Egyptian; and for the
most part a writer or public man of the upper classes is useless to this country till he
has done something that separates him from his class. We wish to grow peaceful crops,
but we must dig our furrows with the sword.!”

His considered views had been assembled over the summer in the two
important essays ‘Ireland and the Arts’ and “What is “Popular Poetry”?”!”°
Yet again he preached the message of the artist as priest, and the ancient con-
nection of art to religion, through ceremony. Modernity had brought a loss
of integument, a disruption, which must be repaired. William Morris had
tried to restore it by bringing art into the objects of everyday life; in Ireland,
artists could use the national passions, ‘love of the Unseen Life and love of
country’. A strong autobiographical theme runs through ‘Ireland and the Arts’, -
published in the United Irishman and therefore necessarily carrying the tone
of an apologia. wBy looked back to his art school apprenticeship, and his
early writing ‘some sixteen years ago’ in 1885, when he had believed ‘that art
is tribeless, nationless, a blossom gathered in No Man’s Land’. Now he
believed that Irish art, like Greek art, must stem from the people — the whole
people. ‘I would have Ireland recreate the ancient arts, the arts as they were
understood in Judaea, in India, in Scandinavia, in Greece and Rome, in every
ancient land; as they were understood when they moved a whole people and
not a few people who have grown up ina leisured class and made this under-
standing their business.’ Tentatively, he suggested that the sculptor John
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Hughes should create Aengus and Etain rather than Orpheus and Eurydice,
and academics should look to local history and traditions instead of con-
tinental literature or classical history. Thus far, his United Irishman readers
could agree. But, he went on to argue, this did not mean trying to make one’s
work popular: the prime duty was to please oneself. The artist ‘must comfort
himself, when others cry out against what he has seen, by remembering that
no two men are alike, and that there is no “excellent beauty without strange-
ness”. In this matter he must be without humility.’
This too was autobiographical. At this very time he was careful to contradict
the report of an interview in which he allegedly claimed to be ‘acquiring my
native tongue by degrees [in] hope that I may live to see Irish become the
language of the artistic and intellectual world in Anglo-Saxondom’.’”° His
actual argument was both more honest and more realistic. I could not now
write of any other country but Ireland, for my style has been shaped by the
subjects I have worked on. .. . now Ithink my style is myself. I might have
found more of Ireland if] had written in Irish, but I have found a little, and
Thave found all myself,’ In both these essays he surveyed his beginnings, his
movement from cosmopolitan to local inspiration, and the tension between
patriotism and artistic imperatives.’”” And he interrogated his own relation
to ‘popularity’. Popular taste, in the sense of accessibility and convention-
ality, must not be indulged; true ‘popularity’ meant striking a chord which
reverberated in the unconscious memory of the people. Gregory’s trans-
lations and Fiona Macleod’s versions of Gaelic provided his examples, but
the argument implied a defence of his own ‘unpopular’ art, and a hardening
elitism. ‘Indeed, it is certain that before the counting-house had created a
new class and a new art without breeding and without ancestry, and set this
art and this class between the hut and the castle, and between the hut and
the cloister, the art of the people was as closely mingled with the art of the
coteries as was the speech of the people that delighted in rhythmical anima-
tion, in idiom, in images, in words full of far-off suggestion, with the unchang-
ing speech of the poets.””8
His own style deliberately strove for these last qualities, and he would
search for them with the readiness for experiment, and toleration of deviance,
which he had (in true nineties style) adopted on his masthead. ‘A society that
was a court of morals,’ he had told the Irish Literary Society in March,
would be of necessity governed by the average thought, the thought which exhibits
itselfin the newspapers, and it would not be able to do its proper work, which is to
find occasions when thought that is too sincere, too personal, too original for gen-
eral acceptance, can express itself courageously and candidly . . Good writers are
in their work, and often in their lives, discoverers and experimentalists and for this
a large freedom is essential.’”’

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The contemptible ‘new class’, as well as suggesting the materialism of dec-

adent English values, could also stand for Irish philistinism. He had argued
the same case in the A// Ireland Review a year before, disingenuously describ-
ing Moran’s concept of a ‘Battle of Two Civilizations’ as ‘a quarrel of two
traditions of life, one old and noble, one new and ignoble’: the intellectual
Irish tradition versus the ill-educated bourgeoisie. This was not what Moran
had meant; wy had carefully refined the journalist’s crude polarization of
Irish civilization versus English. The revision allowed way himself to
appear on the side of the angels, as long as he emphasized his own enmity
to the Protestant middle classes whence he sprang.'*° Russell com-
plained to Gregory that ‘Willie by his theories has lain upon men burdens
grievous to be borne and departs from them himself whenever it is con-
_venient’,'*' but this missed the point. By late 1901 wBy had identified his
approach to the next phase of cultural enterprise — through drama — in Ireland;
he had also intuited its potential enemies.
 Chapter 10: NATIONAL DRAMAS
IQOI-1902

Everything he does seems to stir up some rancour, and he is

nearly always doing things.
Southern Cross, 16 January 1903

I
Just before Christmas 1go1, a detective shadowing Maud Gonne recorded
that she was seen off at Euston Station ‘by a man of theatrical appearance
and glasses, presumably W. B. Yeats of London’.! The description is unin-
tentionally apt. From late rgor a new phase of theatrical activity began for wBy,
but it was not restricted to Dublin alone. Samhain 1901 sounded an envoi to
the Irish Literary Theatre, and wy accordingly transferred some energy to
the London arena. After his return from Ireland he revived his contacts with
a group of like-minded artists and littérateurs from Bedford Park and
Hampstead with a view to creating a “Theatre of Beauty’. Since early in the
year they had been absorbing wsy’s theories of musical speech and dra-
matic purpose, through meetings of the Fellowship of the Three Kings. They
would eventually call themselves the ‘Masquers’.’ This initiative involved Farr,
Gordon Craig’s sister Edith, Laurence Binyon, Thomas Sturge Moore,
Pamela (‘Pixie’) Colman Smith and others; an important late arrival was the
artist Charles Ricketts, just converted to wBy’s theatrical qualities.
In November he was seeing much of Farr and planning joint performances
with Arnold Dolmetsch’s newly constructed psaltery. This was a musical in-
strument derived from a single-string lute. wBy first heard Farr use it in her
Egyptian play on 16 November and he instantly contacted Dolmetsch, whom
he probably knew through Moore; the Dolmetsch ménage at ‘Dowlands’,
Dulwich, provided the musical background for Evelyn Innes. Shaw thought
it created ‘a nerve-destroying crooning like the maunderings of an idiot-
banshee’, but for wsy the sound of the psaltery seemed a perfect accompani-
ment to the way poetry should be intoned on stage, and he devoted himself
to publicizing the fact. This campaign brought him into strange company,
such as the super-imperialist poet Henry Newbolt. way, scourge of the
Empire and the ‘Famine Queen’, discovered an admiration for Newbolt’s ‘pat-
riotism’ and placed a rapidly written essay, ‘Speaking to the Psaltery’, in
Newbolt’s Monthly Review the following March.* By mid-December 1901
he was ‘working every day with Dolmetsch at the chanting’ and engaged upon

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magic experiments at Woburn Buildings, described in the usual deprecat-

ing way to Gregory. (If an alchemist friend succeeded in experimenting on
rabbits with a new recipe for the elixir of life, ‘we are all to drink a noggin
full — at least those of us whose longevity he feals he could honestly encour-
age’.°) He was also using his publishing contacts to further the publication
of Gregory's Cuchulain ofMuirthemne, writing a preface for her and study-
ing Gaelic mythology in the British Museum for an expanded version of The
Celtic Twilight. A. P. Watt was now negotiating for him, trading in the long-
standing novel contract for a book of essays which would become Ideas ofGood
and Eviland arranging for a new edition of The Secret Rose, with the Hanrahan
stories rewritten in Gregory mode. wy described his mood as cheerful,
despite constant eye trouble and financial crisis; he warned Gregory he might
need £3 or £4 down for the commissioned preface to her forthcoming vol-
ume of Cuchulain stories, and £10 obligingly arrived.
When in London, none the less, the circles of ninetyish aestheticism
continued to engross him: an artists’ freemasonry preoccupied with the
revival of poetic drama, contributing to the Dia/, the Pageant, the Vale
Press, Laurence Binyon’s Artists’ Library, and shortly to possess their own house
journal in Pixie Colman Smith’s art magazine the Greensheaf.° Thus wry’s
cultural enterprise was still centred on London as well as Dublin, and theat-
rical reform was in the avant-garde air in both cities. But the Dublin dramatic
movement would, in the end, predominate. Its organization was already in
place; audiences were prepared; journalistic coverage was guaranteed; and
Gregory’s attentions were firmly concentrated on that side of the Irish Sea
(she had always disapproved of wsy’s dissipation of theatrical energies into
the London scene). There was also the question of funding. wsy had targeted
Annie Horniman (who was probably sending him money privately’) as a
potential Maecenas; not that he was alone in this. Gregory caustically com-
pared her to a shilling lying at the bottom of a tub of electrified water, with
everyone trying to scoop it out. While the London Masquers may have
intended to try their luck in this game, the Dublin enterprise promised more
immediate returns. And in late November wBy was discussing with Gregory
the plays which the Fays’ company might put on in the spring —‘the Irish play’
and “The Poor Old Woman (a working title for Cathleen ni Houlihan). He
was, moreover, clear about the importance of publicizing it as ‘the first attempt
at a permanent Irish company’.* This did not rule out bringing both Farr and
Gordon Craig to Dublin. He also planned to persuade the drunken Bullen to
set up in Dublin and specialize in Irish writers; and in March he visited Stratford
again, to absorb ideas from the Shakespeare cycle. Still energetic, he confided
a new plan to Gregory:

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I am going to surprize you by an idea that has been in my head lately. I never until
yesterday spoke of it to anybody. I have an idea of going on the stage in small parts
next autumn for a few months that I may master the stage for purposes of poetical
drama. I find I could get on quite easily, & that with the exception of rehersal times
it would only take my evenings. Does the idea seem to you very wild? I should make
about 42 a week, & learn my business, or at any rate never have to blame myself for
not having tried to learn it. Iwould not of course go on in my own name & I would
tell people exactly whyIdid the thing at all. I beleive that I construct all right — with
wild confusions which Iget out of — but Ihave a very little sense of acting.”

In the event, she dissuaded him. But it proves how stage-struck he had
become; nor was he the only one. Olivia Shakespear, now firmly back in his
inner circle, was co-operating with Florence Farr in writing ‘Egyptian’ plays:
The Shrine ofthe Golden Hawk was put on with The Beloved ofHathor on 20
January, faithfully reviewed by wzy. Both plays were written by two women
central to his life. Though he had referred to The Beloved ofHathor as ‘very
amateurish’ on its first peformance the previous November, his review stressed
the ‘unearthly’ quality of the drama, and its originality. ‘One understood
that something interesting was being done—not very well done, indeed—but
something one had never seen before and might never see again.” This
summed up the attractions of the avant-garde, for others as well as him-
self, Monday evenings at Woburn Buildings in January and February were
dominated by chanting, and by wBy’s developing theories, reverently re-
corded in the diaries of his admirer Nevinson."? On 24 February the compa-
ny included Lady Margaret Sackville, a 21-year-old poet who would begin
editing the Ce/ta year later; to the delight of the surrounding tenements, she
left the family carriage, complete with liveried footman, standing at the door
of Woburn Buildings for the duration.”
Meanwhile, by the spring of 1902, fringe theatrical activity was rife in Dub-
lin: much of it revolved around the Fay brothers and their amateur ‘Ormond
Dramatic Company’. The previous August wsy had seen them direct and act
in Alice Milligan’s The Harp That Once, The Deliverance ofRed Hugh and Eilis
agus an Bhean Dhétrce at the Pan-Celtic Congress. The brothers, five and
seven years younger than wBy, were passionately committed to the theatre.
William Fay, expansive and a ‘character’, was a comedian with professional
experience; Frank, more agonized and intellectual, was an actor and critic who
knew the European theatrical scene and had a special interest in ‘dramatic
recitation’. Their collaboration with Inghinidhe na hEireann meant that an
amateur company lay to hand which was emphatically not English (though
they were still rehearsing cross-channel comedy farces with titles like His
Last Legs). A difficulty was posed by Frank Fay’s Griffithite nationalism, but

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wey and Gregory had, after all, written Cathleen ni Houlihan in response
to his challenge, and theatrical ambition would prove more potent than
political rectitude. In June 1901 wBy, James Cousins and Sarah Purser
had discussed plans for a national theatre company, without the Fays, but
by November an alliance was on the cards, pressed forward by publicists
like Frederick Ryan, asking (as ‘Irial’ in the United Irishman) ‘Has the Irish
National Theatre Failed?’ The Irish Literary Theatre had been too ambitious,
recondite, elitist; the obvious solution lay to hand. Russell was already com-
mitted to the Fays and had offered his Deirdre to them, working with actors
from Inghinidhe na hFireann. wey turned up at rehearsals and tried unsuc-
cessfully to interfere with Fay’s direction.’ By the end of the month, as has
been seen, wBy and Gregory were discussing what plays they could perform
with the new combination.
It would never be an easy collaboration. In later years the Fays claimed that
they had been written out of Irish theatrical history by the determination of
wey and Gregory to annex the movement forthemselves; a union of equals
was misrepresented as the Irish Literary Theatre taking the Fays on board
and giving them a chance."* Russell would not have disagreed. In 1914, read-
ing Gregory’s memoir of these years, he wrote:

She centralises herself a great deal too much, and I think she gives too little credit to
the Fays. Yeats Martyn and Moore started the romantic movement so far as the writ-
ing of plays is concerned in modern Ireland, but the two Fays are entitled entirely
to the credit of starting an Irish school of acting. Without them it could not have
been done. They trained the actors, they established the tradition, and they worked
at it for years without aid from Yeats or Lady Gregory. It was with a good deal of
difficulty Iinduced Yeats to give them Kathleen [sic] ni Houlihan . . . It was at their
suggestion, not Yeats or Lady Gregory’s, that the National Theatre was formed.*°

Russell admitted that without the backing and plays of wBy, Gregory and
Synge, the Fays and their theatrical energies would have remained obscure
and unsung. They had, however, more to offer than Gregory or wBy allowed
in later years.'° The performance which launched them into real prominence
was Gregory’s and wBy’s Cathleen ni Houlihan, the 1798 aisling play they
wrote together at Coole, in which an old woman summons a young man to
fight for Ireland (in the guise of herself) instead of getting married. Russell
recalled, ‘Maud Gonne got it out of him by promising to play Kathleen her-
self.” But this arrangement owed as much to Willie Fay’s connection with
her Inghinidhe na hEireann (as their producer and stage-manager) as to her
friendship with wBy.
On 13 January 1902 Gonne and wy met in London, and she committed
herself to appearing in his play, though she had categorically refused, on
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 NATIONAL DRAMAS IQOI-1I902

principle, to act The Countess Cathleen three years before.’ Her advent as a
star of the production filled Willie Fay with forebodings, which he afterwards
felt were justified.” From Dublin she wrote imperiously to wBy about plans
for the production. Her movements between Paris, London and Dublin
complicated attendance at rehearsals, though she was able to alter the plot
by insisting on a more decisive and committed nationalist gesture at the
end.” (George Moore’s attempt to highjack the direction of rehearsals was
firmly repulsed.) The programme also included Russell’s Deirdre, which had
been privately performed at the Coffeys’ on 2 and 3 January. wBy resentfully
found it thin and faint, like ‘wall decoration’; he would shortly afterwards
embark upon his own version which, Moore-like, attempted to reintroduce
primitivity and sex. But, creaky as it was, Russell’s play was a favourite with
the company, perhaps because it allowed for a wide range of acting input. By
contrast, it rapidly became clear that Cathleen ni Houlihan — called for this
production ‘Kathleen’ — was a vehicle for Gonne.
Both plays were performed in St Teresa’s Hall, Clarendon Street, from
2 to 4 April 1902, under the auspices of the Fays’ ‘Irish National Dramatic
Society’; Inghinidhe na hEireann’s banner hung by the little stage. It was
a modest enterprise. Frank Fay recalled six years later, ‘The company by
which these two plays were acted consisted of my brother, myself, Mr
Digges, Mrs Digges, Mr P. J. Kelly, and some others, principally young poets
and writers. Both plays were rehearsed by my brother, W. G. Fay; the scenery
was painted by him and by AE, and the dresses were designed for Deirdre by
AE and made in Dublin by lady friends of his.’ The contribution of wBy and
Gregory was played down, and before the production they seem to have
remained deliberately in the background. Gregory attended a rehearsal, but
slipped away to Venice well before the first night on 2 April. wey remained
in London until late March, turning up in time to give an interview in the
United Irishman, stressing that ‘my subject is Ireland and its struggle for
independence’. Apparently, neither of them anticipated the response to their
joint production.
Each night 300 people crowded into the inadequate hall, packed to stand-
ing room; and it was not Russell’s attempted evocation of other-worldly
beauty that galvanized them but the propaganda of Gregory and wsy, and
the fame — or notoriety — of Gonne. At thirty-six she was no longer the great
beauty of ten years before; Violet Martin, seeing her at Diarmuid and Grania
the previous October, had found her looks terrifying (‘the features still hand-
some the nose salient and short but the badness of the expression was start-
ling. A huge mop of curled yellow hair crowned her big fat body. One look
at her would be enough for anyone to form an opinion’). But her stage pres-
ence and her fiery reputation elevated the part of Cathleen from polemic to
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dramatic grandeur. The resonance of certain lines struck echoes from the
pure Fenian tradition: “They shall be remembered for ever, They shall be
alive for ever, They shall be speaking for ever, The people shall hear them for
ever.’ The A// Ireland Review saw it as a political meeting rather than as a play,
‘Maud Gonne, the well-known Nationalist agitator, addressing not the actors,
as is usual in the drama, but the audience’. Stephen Gwynn’s reaction is more
often quoted, and probably more typical of the audience: ‘I went home asking
myself if such plays should be produced unless one was prepared for people
to go out to shoot and be shot.’””
As for wBy himself, he rapidly joined in with an article for the United
Irishman a week later, stressing aesthetics rather than politics, and deliber-
ately bidding for long-term collaboration. ‘Perhaps I was stirred so deeply
because my imagination ignored, half-unconsciously, errors of execution,
and saw this art of decorative acting as it will be when long experience may
have changed a method into a tradition, and made Mr Fay’s company, in
very truth, a National company, a chief expression of Irish imagination.”
Immediately after the performances, on 5 April, discussions opened with
the Fays. There seemed to be enough common ground to overcome political
differences, since their style, like wBy’s, stressed control of dramatic effect
through voice rather than movement, and a ‘method’ approach to living the
part. By 21 April, from London, wsy was holding out the promise of back-
ing from ‘a wealthy friend’. But in the first place he suggested that a year be
spent gaining more theatrical experience, and then broadcasting an appeal
to backers. ‘I think we must work in some such way, getting all the good plays
we can from [James] Cousins and Russell and anybody else, but carrying
out our theories of the stage as rigorously as possible . . . Iwill do my best
to do a good deal of strong dramatic work in the immediate future.’ He
had already assured Fay, ‘I see no serious difficulty before you but the getting
of good plays in sufficient quantity at the start. In the autumn I had better
write a new Samhain, you had better start formally with a proper blast of
trumpets.’
The phrase ‘our theories’ implied a collaboration. However, the expecta-
tion that he would not only provide plays but produce a publicity journal which
would be a direct successor to that of the Irish Literary Theatre showed a
certain assumption of control as well as continuity.” The Fays, moreover,
needed careful handling; in the view of Joseph Holloway, a Dublin archi-
tect with a passion for the stage, ‘it is mighty hard to pull with them, their
tempers are vile and they treat those under them like dogs’.*° Frank was
especially spiky, and simmered with suppressed rage. Though there would
eventually be plenty of difficulties between wy and the brothers, these did
not initially arise in the anticipated arena of political propriety: the Fays
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rapidly adopted wsy’s attitude, placing artistic independence and experi-

ment above the expectations of nationalist audiences. There was still a degree
of friction between them. wBy liked to think of the Fays (especially in retro-
spect) as enthusiastic amateurs in the mystery-play tradition, while they
thought of themselves as professionals, and disliked the intellectualism, the-
ories and mistiness inseparable from wBy’s idea of the theatre. Only a year
before their collaboration at St Teresa’s Hall, Frank Fay had been deriding
WBY'’s ‘oratorical statues’ in favour of ‘things of flesh and blood’; he had also
called on wsy to write in Irish, and inveighed against ‘Saxonism’ as furiously
as D. P. Moran himself. In many ways Hyde rather than wsy would have been
his ideal Director of a National Theatre.””
By the spring of 1902 wsy’s ideas of theatrical production were firmly
fixed, owing much more to avant-garde circles in London and ideas derived
from Wagner and Maeterlinck than to the strictures of the United Irishman.
From May his London lectures with Farr and Dolmetsch made this clear
(‘Recording the Music of Speech’, ‘Poetry and the Living Voice’, ‘Speaking to
Musical Notes”*). His lecture series ‘Speaking to the Psaltery’, with demon-
strations from Dolmetsch, Farr and others at Clifford’s Inn on 15 May and
10 June, attracted every prominent theatre critic and theorist in London.
William Archer produced a lengthy and favourable review in the Morning
Leader, which was followed by other respectful notices, though Shaw derided
the whole enterprise explosively, in public and private. This was unsurpris-
ing; besides his irritation at Farr’s defection into ‘nonsense’, wBy’s dramatic
theory was the opposite of Shaw’s. It revolved around the expression of ideals,
not the discussion of ideology, stressing formal personalized gesture, and
the delineation of character through action, often in a heroic mode. Hence
his dislike of bourgeois realism on the stage; the theatre should reflect the
unities of life, not its surface manifestations. Indeed, his much worked upon
essay ‘Magic’ provided a key: tragedy as the expression of unity. This approach
conceived of theatre as a religious experience, with the audience as a con-
gregation. It is no coincidence that wBy’s immersion in this aspect of drama
followed closely upon his setbacks in the Golden Dawn.
Little of this was original: the theory of ‘total’ theatre, integrating song,
dance, mime and acting, owed much to Symons’s mediation of European
ideas.” Also, by early 1902 wBy was deeply affected by the stagecraft of
Gordon Craig, dreaming of importing him to Ireland (would Martyn pay?).
And wsy shared Maeterlinck’s commitment to indefinite settings, and
reliance on the music of the voice. Though he usually disclaimed the Belgian’s
influence, he joined a campaign in June 1902 to protest against the banning
of Monna Vanna. Here too there was common ground with Frank Fay, who
admired Maeterlinck: his 1902 staging of Russell’s Deirdre was influenced by
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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

Aurélien-Francois Lugné-Poé’s 1895 production of Pedléas at the Opéra-

Comique, and wy rather to his surprise was impressed by it.
The success of the performance at St Teresa’s Hall had sent him back to
London full of energy, despite continuous eye trouble. He even returned to
his novel, finding to his delight that he could dictate at high speed to a typ-
ist.°° This concentrated burst of activity was brought to an end by a bout of
influenza in early May, when his eyes were also diagnosed as suffering from
‘muscular strain’.*? But he continued to work through dictation; signific-
antly, the amanuensis for many of his letters was now Annie Horniman.
And he continued to spread the message of the new theatre, travelling to
Oxford to address about thirty students ‘in some Don’s room’ (actually the
St John’s College Essay Society) on 18 May. Robert Gregory, now at New
College, reported that ‘his visit and lecture were I think a great success,
though a large part of the audience at the latter were rather unappreciative,
and the dons who asked questions were terrors’; wBY agreed.”
That same month of May 1902 saw Gregory’s own apotheosis: her Cuchulain
of Muirthemne had appeared at the end of April to a gratifying reception, helped
by wsy’s hard work among the review editors. Quibbles would later arise
about the high claims made for stories essentially derived from the work of
others,** and Gregory’s excruciatingly arch dedication to “The People of
Kiltartan’, describing herself as ‘a woman of her house, that has to be
minding the place, and listening to complaints, and dividing her share of
the food’, may have raised a few eyebrows. Above all, wsy’s hyperbolic
preface, privately commissioned by Gregory ‘on business terms’, certainly
alienated some readers.** Its sonorous (and self-absorbed) first sentence was
much repeated: ‘I think this book is the best that has come out of Ireland
in my time.’ The Leader was provoked to a hilarious piece, “Kiltartan, Mr
Yeats, and Cuchulain’,® and the Freeman weighed in by accusing him of
blasphemy in his remarks about Ireland as a ‘Holy Land’. The sarcasms of
Irish reviewers drove him to draft a long letter to the United Irishman, defend-
ing his view of Cuchulain as ‘a book of the National Stories of Ireland, a book
meant for everybody, the Iliad of a people’. Unlike his own deliberately eso-
teric writing, Gregory's work represented an accessible national literature which
would ‘restore the spirit of the eleventh and of the twelfth centuries which
were also the centuries of perfect learning’. His peroration returned firmly
to the twentieth century, with a bitter attack on Irish reviewers — ‘common
hacks’, dependent on popular prejudice. “Too craven to praise but in con-
ventional meaningless sentences, they come into their courage when igno-
rance cries them on.’ This may have been fair comment, but it was unwise to
compare them to English literary journalists, ‘men who have made some
study of literature, who have given some proof of good taste’.*° He sent the
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 NATIONAL DRAMAS IgOI-1902
draft to Gregory; it may have been intended to console her rather than for
publication, and in any case he took her advice not to publish it. ‘They [the
Dublin reviewers] are only untaught children.’3”
But in June his name was suggested as a director of the United Irishman:
a dividend from the success of Cathleen ni Houlihan. He refused, ‘as I con-
sideredIcould not make myself responsible for their attitude towards the Irish
members [of Parliament]. To my surprise my name was put forward as one
that would be satisfactory to the extreme element. They would have found
me anything but satisfactory but Iam pleased at the compliment.* The nation-
alist credibility gained over the last two years was carefully guarded; he con-
currently refused to donate some work to a publication under royal patronage
because he could not ‘mix myself up with English royalties . . . considering
that I am nothing of an imperialist and very much of an Irish “extremist”’,
So he was, when approached by this kind of enterprise, and to English friends
he was proud and proprietorial about incidents such as Maire Quinn’s assault
ona Unionist with a soda-water bottle, during Gonne’s anti-loyalist demon-
stration against Edward VII's visit in July 1903.3 However, the audience
on each side of St George’s Channel required different descriptions, and,
as his own fame increased and his social circle widened, the ambiguities
multiplied. Thus the next year, writing to the Freeman's Journal to protest
against the King’s visit, he implied that he himself was ‘a Nationalist who
considers what is called the “link of the Crown” inevitable’, and his reaction
to the United Irishman’s invitation shows that he felt a residual commitment
to the Irish Parliamentary Party. On 22 March 1902 Nevinson was surprised
by his sympathy for the parliamentarians. ‘Much talk about Irish politics and
the gap of ro years when young men turned to letters and the old men cut
themselves off. He regrets all this, which surprised me.’ But faced with a
dinner-table of complacent English imperialists, a tougher line was neces-
sary, as he described to Gregory in May 1903:

I dined with the Lawrences (Indian Lawrences) last night, & [it] seemed to me that
our Irish movement has for a chief privilege that it has all the platitudes against it.
Somebody said ‘what does Ireland want. Why does she not tell us what we are to do.
She cries out & yet though we are anxious to do what ever is right she does not tell
us.’ I said ‘nothing simpler, clear out’. The conversation languished after that for a
little until somebody began saying how bad politics were for a country & so on. Then
somebody spoke of the poverty of the Irish people being caused by their large pay-
ments to the priest. I said that the land laws & over taxation had something to do
with it but the speaker, who was Lady Lawrence stuck to the priest because she had
once known a butler who came in for £300 & she concluded he gave it to the priest
‘because nobody ever found out what he did with it’. Ibehaved well but would not
have been able to do so much longer.”

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II
By the early summer of 1902 wBy was no stranger to grand houses, but his
connections there were firmly artistic — as with the glamorous Wilfrid Scawen
Blunt, aristocrat, poet, friend to Irish and Egyptian nationalism, and ex-lover
of Gregory (twenty years before). In June 1902 wBy spent a weekend at
Newbuildings with Blunt, who wanted to write ‘a Cuchullin play’ for the Irish
theatre; fellow-guests included Lord Alfred Douglas and the influential
printer Sydney Cockerell, whom wey rapidly adopted as an arbiter for book
design. But he was impatient to get to Ireland and Coole, and from late May
was making preparations, asking Russell to find him lodgings in Rathgar. ‘He
brings over two psalteries,’ the latter gloomily warned Gregory,
and is going, he says, to start the new art in Ireland if he can. I am sorryIever turned
his mind on the subject for I foresee he looks upon me as the proper person to use
the psaltery in Ireland. I am like Willie in not knowing one note from another, and
I am less adventurous and dread going out of my depth in strange arts. He has been
worrying me to send him over ‘chants’.*

To wy himself, Russell wrote (rather unfairly), ‘speaking in unison is done

[in] every church, and is no discovery. I do not suppose you, or any of your
audience, ever were in church, but it is done there constantly to a fixed nota-
tion, and is very impressive as a mere piece of sound.”
wey, however, remained enthusiastic about spreading the word; he had
realized, he told William Archer, that his early ‘folk’ poems conformed to
‘actual little tunes’.*” The prospect of Coole, where he could write lyrics and
talk about cantillating, excited him, but he told Gregory that he was delayed
by sheer poverty. ‘I am sorry to sayIam desperately hard up. I have paid my
rent &everything up to date except type writing, but unless Elkin Matthews
to whom I have written owes me something I shall get away with diffi-
culty.’ Whether or not financial help was directly forthcoming from Coole,
Gregory provided the useful idea of subletting Woburn Buildings during his
absences, and Sturge Moore’s sister took the rooms for the summer. There was
subsequently some trouble with bed bugs, but wy had got safely away on 21
June, armed with the dreaded psalteries for Fay and Russell, and a working-
model theatre constructed for him by Gordon Craig.
He did not delay in Dublin, merely spending a few days at George Moore’s
— though long enough to join with Moore, Hyde and Griffith in a protest about
excavations at the Hill of Tara, a particular cause of Gonne’s in which she
involved many exotic foreign aristocrats.*” By 27 June he was at Coole;
within a month he was sending drafts of plays to Willie Fay,** as well
as writing some lyrics. At the fezs of traditional music held locally he heard
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singing of a kind which seemed to him unique. He pursued Hyde obsess-
ively for information about it: the possibilities of the psaltery remained
fixed in his mind.” The workshop atmosphere of Coole generated further
collaborations too. The revised and extended new edition of The Celtic
Twilight, finished in the spring and published later that year, embodied much
of what Gregory had taught him. And this summer also saw a venture which
both consummated his writing-relationship with Gregory and decisively
ended that with Moore.
wBy's notion for a play about religious iconoclasm may have originated
the previous November, when he had seen Bjornson’s Beyond Human Power,
then playing with Mrs Patrick Campbell. wsy was struck by it as ‘an unbeleivers
account of beleif’, and criticized the unconvincing portrayal of a visionary
clergyman.” This may have reacted with another, more concrete inspiration:
a transcendentalist friend of Russell, Philip Francis Little. Beside him, Russell
appeared an earthbound rationalist. From the sea-wall at Bray, Little harangued
the passing bourgeoisie about vision and reality, attacking the assumptions
of respectable life; he wanted to live, Diogenes-like, in an overturned truck
at Kingstown. The subject of Little and his mission to save the world had
occurred to both Russell and wy as a good literary theme — probably to be
handled in fiction.*' The title was ready-made, first used by wsy in a short
story of 1896, “Where There is Nothing, There is God’. It is probable that
he and Moore (to whom such a subversive theme was instantly attract-
ive) discussed the idea in April 1902 and also when wsy stayed in Ely Place
during June. Moore wanted another collaboration, and wey was apparently
meditating a play about a young man who rejects respectability and tries to
turn the world upside-down. On 3 July 1902, however, Moore produced a
draft scenario about a young intellectual who adopts the life of a tinker,
spurns civilization as barbaric, attempts to found his own religion, endures
many vicissitudes (including an attempt to revolutionize a monastery) and
is eventually killed by outraged villagers.°? On 31 August he met wey at
the Galway feis. The idea of a Little play came up, and wsy (who had been
elected President of the Fays’ Irish National Dramatic Society on 9 August)
told Moore he could no longer collaborate with him, as he was committed to
the Society. In early September Moore allegedly wired wsy that he was now
writing a novel on the theme, and ‘will get an injunction if you use it’. wBY
frantically set to writing, and by 26 September had completed the play, Where
There is Nothing. It is the story of Paul Ruttledge, a landowner who becomes
a tinker, subverts the accepted norms of life, enters a monastery, preaches
disorder, and is eventually killed by villagers. Throughout, eccentricity and
drunkenness stand for spiritual vision and ‘the irresponsibility of the saints’.
There are echoes here of the Joachimite antinomianism in his own Secret Rose
267
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stories, and further aspects of his anarchist hero were inspired (and developed)
by London acquaintances like Stepniak and Prince Kropotkin; but the family
resemblance to Moore’s July scenario is undeniably close. (Strangely, the name
of Moore’s land agent was Tom Ruttledge.) Gregory’s input was consider-
able, as wey always admitted: the dialogue used the inversions and painstaking
constructions which were coming to be called ‘Kiltartan’ (Oh! Paul, Paul, is
it to leave you we must? And you never once struck a kick or a blow on me
this time. Not even and you in pain with the rheumatism’).”°
Moore accordingly felt peeved and continued to issue legal threats. Russell
wrote rather doubtfully to Gregory that Moore would not carry them out unless
the plot and idea were actually his own: in which case wBy should of course
‘invent something else, and put the idea in another shape . . . I don’t know
what part each took in shaping the thing. Willie I dare say knows his own
inventions.”°* Whatever about this, he was determined to stake his claim to
the plot, enlisting his new American friend John Quinn to copyright the play
in New York and arranging publication in the United Irishman. Moreover,
at least in the first flush, wey thought he had written a good play. ‘I have
enlarged and enriched it in the last couple of weeks,’ he wrote to Quinn on
22 October. ‘And I will probably make a few more alterations before it comes
out in its final form here. It was written in a fortnight and a day, and I will
not know what it is really like till I have talked it over with my friends. At
any rate it will serve one good purpose, it will give our little theatrical com-
pany in Dublin the long play they are beginning to feel a necessity.’
Ten days later it was published in the United Irishman, with a rather dis-
ingenuous introductory note.
Where There isNothing is founded upon a subject which I suggested to George Moore
when there seemed to be a sudden need of a play for the Irish Literary Theatre; we
talked of collaboration, but this did not go beyond some rambling talks. Then the
need went past, and I gradually put so much of myself into the fable that I felt Imust
write on it alone, and took it back into my own hands with his consent. Should he
publish a story upon it some day, I shall rejoice that the excellent old custom of two.
writers taking the one fable has been revived in a new form. Ifhe does I cannot think
that my play and his story will resemble each other. I have used nothing of his, and
if he uses anything of mine he will have so changed it, doubtless, as to have made it
his own.”
Whoever owned the original inspiration. wBy’s accompanying article,
“The Freedom of the Theatre’, showed how preoccupied he had become
by the subject of controversial themes to do with law, the Church, the state,
sobriety and custom. Thus early, he was anticipating the kind of troubles
which Synge’s plays would bring a year later. It was not the business of Art,
he argued, to set good examples: ‘the reign of the moralist is the reign of the
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 NATIONAL DRAMAS IgOI-1902
mob, or of some Jack-in-office’. Strikingly, he admitted the personal relevance
of his anarchistic play.
We are interestéd in religion and in private morals and personal emotion, and
so it
is precisely out of the rushing journey of the soul through these things that Ibsen and
Wagner get the tumult that is drama. Doubtless, the character must always have some-
thing of the dramatist when it is a character that is pictured from within . . . Ireland
is, suppose, more religious than any other European country, and perhaps that is
the reason why I, who have been bred and born here, can hardly write at all unless
I
write about religious ideas.

Thus he cleverly used Where There is Nothing, which would inevitably be accused
of godless cosmopolitanism, to stress his own Irishness. ‘I only know that I
want to upset everything about me,’ Paul tells his friend the friar. ‘Have you
not noticed that it is a complaint many of us have in this country? and whether
it comes from love or hate I don’t know, they are so mixed together here.’°”
The play written hastily at Coole in the autumn of 1902 carries an autobio-
graphical message, reflecting his experiences with the Golden Dawn and
Parisian occultists, and his recent reading of Spenser (Paul struggles with
allegorical Beasts) as well as Blake and Tolstoy. Nietzsche’s part is less clear.
Gregory wrote to Quinn on 9 October, ‘Iam glad Yeats had finished it before
your Niedsche [sic] (for which he is very grateful) came, for it is the more ori-
ginal’, but wBy had at least a second-hand knowledge of the philosopher
already.** The play's hero— dominating, eccentric, magnetic—is a true Yeatsian
alter ego; A. B. Walkley saw Paul as ‘a poet wanting to live poetry’.*° Like the
hero of The Speckled Bird, he gives himself to aspiritual idea, and when the
play was rewritten five years later, Paul’s name was changed to that of the auto-
biographical novel’s hero, ‘Hearne’.
The play’s subtext is revealing, but opinions were divided as to whether it
was any good. Russell hated it as ‘merely clever’ and utterly disagreeable.
Nevinson, who helped Farr with the copyright reading in London on 20
October, thought it ‘too Fabian or anarchist in doctrine, too preachy, much
too undramatic and obvious. Some of the satire excellent, some too obvious
& common, as of a man who approaches social questions for the first time.”*!
John Quinn extravagantly approved of it—as well he might, since it reflected
many of the ideas he had discussed with wsy that summer. wBy himself con-
tinued to revise and reshape it in his mind after its precipitate publication;
on 18 November, for instance, he told Gregory that he had reformulated
his hero as a Pan-like figure, persuading people to live in the moment (a Blakean
resonance, as so often). It had already been much reconstructed when he
rejected it for his Collected Works six years later, in favour of the version called
The Unicorn from the Stars. His comments cast some light on its inception:
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No I can’t have ‘Where There is Nothing’ in the edition. Though ‘The Unicorn’ is
almost altogether Lady Gregory’s writing it has far more of my spirit in it than
‘Where There Is Nothing’ which she an [sic] Iand Douglas Hyde wrote in a fort-
night to keep George Moore from stealing the plot. Hyde forbid me to mention his
name for fear of consequences and you must not mention it even now and for the
same reason I did not mention Lady Gregory except in that old Preface which you
know. There is certainly much more of my own actual writing in “Where There Is
Nothing’ but I feel that this new play belongs to my world and that it does not.

But in the conditions of 1902 the play as written reflects the arguments of
wy, Hyde and Gregory for being ‘king and priest in one’s own house’,™ against
ruling Catholic pieties — a fight shortly to be waged by Synge. Copyrighted
by a small New York printing arranged by Quinn,® it could now be played,
but it was not very dramatizable. The avant-garde Stage Society in London
expressed interest, and wBy devoted much effort to ideas for its production,”
but it did not come off until June 1904; an enterprising devotee wanted to put
it on in Ballyhaunis, County Mayo, but got no further than an inquiry; and
the Fays stayed clear. For the moment, in 1902, it created an utter rift between
wsy and Moore. When they next met, at Symons’s house two years later,
Moore refused to shake hands and left without a word. As for Russell, who
probably provided the original spark, he had written resignedly to Gregory
in August:
I am not going to touch Little. I leave him with a protest to W. B. Y. and Moore. I
am sure when they have both written no-one will recognise any similarity between
their work or will trace the fantastic original. I thinkIwill try this young man look-
ing for a Messiah, who is quite as good a man as Little. The play might end by his
discovery of himself.°”

As it happened, the young man was James Joyce, embarking on an odyssey

which would echo in many ways Paul Ruttledge’s determination to tear down
the veil of the temple.

II]
The summer of 1902 introduced new players to the cast of wBy’s life, and rang
down the curtain on some long-established scenes. The friendship of John
Quinn did more than midwife Where There is Nothing; it helped transform
life for the whole Yeats family. Quinn was a 32-year-old Irish American
lawyer, enormously talented and energetic, about to start his own Manhattan
firm specializing in financial and corporate law and already making money.
He was closely involved in Tammany Hall politics, and, though a deter-
mined bachelor, pursued an active and colourful love-life. None of this was
270
 ILL BE HELD AT KILLEENEEN, CRAUGHWELL,
On Sunday, August Bist, 1902,
© Perpetuate the Memory of RAFTERY, the Connacht Poet, and aid
Revival of the Irish Language.
SSUSTITITIEETALTIELESATT
TAETALASGAEATINAAAA

Prizes will be given for Irish Singing, Dancing, Story-telling, Flute-playing,

POTEETTIOTTILELIELETTATSLIEETTATIALILESSEIIEIIELIIED

President: J. KEANE, D.C., Kilmeen, Loughrea;

Vice-President : V. Rev. J. O'DONOVAN, Adm., Loughrea, |SS
v4N1
GOUTIEETIELTISELIGIOLISOBEILLOSETVESESILOGLEOEIIELOIIIELED

: Committee :-
Rev. ee OF DISTRICT M. HALLINAN, D.C. T. O'HYNES, Arpraman
LADY GREGORY P. T. CAWLEY J. O'SHAUGHNESSY
MISS REDINGTON M. CLASBY TERENCE FUREY
ED. MARTYN, Totryna J. O'LOUGHLIN, T.C. P. JORDAN, CLarexsaipce
C. H. FOLEY, M.B. T. CORBETT, Co. C. M HENCHY
J. CRONAN. J. KEANE, Kiteexeen YP. HOLLAND
M. O'FABRELL, D J. KEANE, D.C.. AnpnaHan R. P. NOLAN, D.C.
J, STRATTON
{
H. WALSH, Killeeneen, Craugh wo
on. Jreasurers |
M. WARD, Church St., Loughrea.
le FAHY, Loughrea; p>
‘(T. CAWLEY, Craughwel
<4 HE, yaa R T/ f d)PCR mite etin

Subscriptions will be received by any of the above.

It is hoped our little Feis will do something to keep alife
the language of Patrick, Brendan, and Colman MacDuagh, of |
Owen Ruadh, and Sarsfield, and to drive from our homes th
Henry VIIL, Elizabeth, and Cromwell. P.T.O.

Mi.

11. John Quinn’s copy of the programme for the Killeeneen feis, held in homage to Raftery.
He attended from Coole with Gregory, Hyde, Jack Yeats and wy, who all appear in Jack’s
sketches: himself as “The Artist’, Gregory in a wicker chair, wey with arms folded, Hyde
heavily moustached, and Quinn at the bottom below an unidentified Irish dancer.

271
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

unusual; what was remarkable was the way he employed his resources. Quinn
possessed an uncanny eye for avant-garde art, and would buy an astonishing
number of Post-Impressionist masterpieces at a very early age. He was also
fascinated by the new wave of Irish literary culture gathering around wBy.
Ripples had reached New York, though Quinn’s first contacts had been
through his interest in the paintings of jay and Jack. By the end of rg01 wBy
was corresponding with him, thanking him for sending William James's Human
Immortality. When Quinn came to Ireland for the first of three consecutive
annual trips in August 1902, he made his way to Coole, and was present on 31
August at the Killeeneen fezs organized to commemorate the poet Raftery.
His companions there included Jack Yeats, Hyde and Gregory, but the focus
of his interest was WBY. WBY, like his father and brother, realized he had met
a patron of apparently infinite resources and goodwill; Quinn, with his eye
for the first-rate, knew that he had encountered a genius.
Many of Quinn’s attitudes echoed wBy’s own. Impatient with the pieties
of Irish life, he was notably anti-clerical and fiercely individualistic; he
satirized Arthur Griffith and Irish American ‘pathriots’, believing in the
ultimate sanctification of the artistic conscience. At his worst he could be
a wordy, didactic bore; but his quick intelligence and enormous energy were
put at the disposal of the Yeats circle. He quickly took responsibility for
copyrighting wBy’s plays in America, and dealing with Macmillan in New
York on the poet’s behalf. And he pursued a still closer intellectual relation-
ship. Famously, he is supposed to have introduced wBy to Nietzsche, send-
ing him Thus Spake Zarathustra shortly after he returned to New York, and
subsequently other volumes. wBy himself gave Quinn the credit, writing to
him a year later that he had been ‘the first to introduce me’ — though when
acknowledging the arrival of Zarathustra, he remarked, ‘I have long desired
to have it’, having bought an abridged version in London.® Certainly from
1902 to 1903 he read the German philosopher intensively for the first time.
But in letters about his new passion, wBy makes the connection between
Nietzsche and Blake which had been specifically stated by Havelock Ellis nine
years before in the second number of the Savoy: a journal dominated by
wBy’s own work and certainly read by him.® Symons had written an essay,
‘Nietzsche and Tragedy’,’”” and wBy’s own theorizing about drama, and the
phases of ancient Greek culture, used Nietzsche’s formulations before he
met Quinn. These were probably acquired second-hand through Symons and
others. Quinn thought he introduced wBy to Nietzsche, and wey flattered
him by confirming the diagnosis. But oddly, years later, Oliver Gogarty
believed that he had been the first to introduce wBy to Nietzsche as well.”!
In any case, if Quinn was going to assume a proprietorial role, nobody
felt like contradicting him. From 1902 he devoted his considerable (and
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 NATIONAL DRAMAS IQOI-~I902

increasing) resources to Irish art: commissioning Russell to paint wBy ‘with

the creatures of his imagination round about him’,” subsidizing an ambitious
series of Irish portraits from the astonished sy, subsidizing the Irish National
Dramatic Society with an annual subvention (£2 5, later raised to £507°). And
from the autumn of 1902 there was anew repository for his munificence, focused
on the Yeats family and located in Dublin.
The gathering pace of cultural excitement in Dublin impelled émigré
intellectuals to return. Moore had already set up house in Ely Place; ‘Everyone
is SO anxious to get you to come & live in Dublin,’ Gonne told wsy in May.”4
But his own ambitions remained divided between the two countries, and in
the end it was his family who returned instead. sy had continued to gather
little moss, but a Dublin exhibition of his work arranged by Sarah Purser in
October 1901 marked the beginning of a new phase.” It amounted to a retro-
spective of his paintings over two decades, and suddenly the dramatic, impres-
sionist quality of his portraiture looked self-willed and confident instead of
raw and unfinished. The show was a considerable success; it re-established
ysy in Dublin’s eyes, and began the long connection with John Quinn. Local
commissions, however, were less forthcoming. yBy confided to his eldest son,
“We Yeatses have such bad characters the people who live in good society and
have their feet on the rock of ages and order their portraits disapprove of us,
so that I am likely to starve for my sins.” Quinn and Gregory both com-
missioned portraits, but others did not follow; through the summer of 1902
JBY was borrowing small sums from his children, as well as pressing them to
drum up commissions. Russell had been similarly employed, lobbying to get
yBy a job at the School of Art. In June 1902 Russell confided to Gregory:

I really think, between ourselves, that Willie and Jack between them should come
to some arrangement to provide their father now growing old with a home. I think
Willie wastes endless time and he has a duty to his father which no sophistries about
genius can get over. I continually hear comments on his heartlessness in allowing
his sister Lolly to support his father and other sister Lily who cannot owing to her
asthma do very much. MrJ. B. Yeats borrows endlessly until some of his best friends
simply had to pull him up very sharply. Now Willie could very easily send his father
one pound a week. It is preposterous nonsense to say he could not. He could very
well afford to give less time to the G. D. and similar matters. Ifhe only did three hours
work every day he could earn about three hundred a year. He may object to doing
ephemeral work but he still could do all the poetry he does at present, and if the work
he occupies his time with at present is not ‘ephemeral’ work Idon’t know whatis . . .
“The good man is merciful to his biographer’ and I think if Willie heard some of the
comments made by people who have known the Yeats’s for years he would get red
all over. And frankly, again, though I do not talk of these things myself, I have little
or nothing to urge on the other side . . . It is hardly a pleasant matter but I think

273
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this flight from the disagreeable is taking a good deal of the moral character out of
Willie’s work which really loses by his isolation.”

He had overstepped the mark. A scorching letter came back from Coole, accus-
ing Russell of listening too much to Sarah Purser; its tone may be surmised
from Russell’s cowed rejoinder. ‘I think it is better not to discuss Willie. lam
sorry I wrote about it at all. It is really no business of mine to discuss his rela-
tions to his family. I knew all you said already and a good deal more on both
sides as well.’”*
Help, however, was indirectly on the way. Since early 1902 Lily and Lolly
had been negotiating with Evelyn Gleeson, a well-off woman of Irish extrac-
tion who wanted ‘to find work for Irish hands in the making of beautiful things’.
This took the form of a manufacturing and retailing centre for fabrics, rugs,
embroidery and, eventually, printing. With a Dublin friend, Augustine
Henry, finance was arranged: too vaguely, as it turned out. But Lily’s train-
ing at William Morris's, and Lolly’s enterprise with brushwork and graphic
design, had found an outlet at last. By July arrangements had been made to
set up ‘Dun Emer Industries’ in Dublin. Lily would take responsibility for
embroidery work, and Lolly for printing, with firm encouragement from JBY.
“You have every bit as much intellect as Willie,’ he told Lolly, ‘only you have
not his serene self-confidence. And [not] having this you have not his patience.
Lily and Willie both have a talent for making phrases — but Lily has not your
power of reasoning, power of intellect. You are here quite as strong as Willie,
only you don’ exercise it.””
These very likenesses would bring Lolly and wsy into conflict over
many aspects of the Dun Emer business — which he would subsidize in its
future incarnation as the Cuala Press, just as Russell wanted him to bankroll
his father. The undertaking appealed to him, especially in its printing enter-
prise, which he discussed with Cockerell as early as May:* the very opposite
of Gavan Duffy’s old Library of Ireland, it would produce expensive and beau-
tiful limited editions not only of wBy’s work but of his favourites (Lionel
Johnson, just dead,*’ and Allingham) and his circle (Russell, Hyde). By the
autumn the Yeatses had left Blenheim Road, with its shabby, sunny rooms,
painted bedroom ceilings, sunflowers in the garden: the backdrop to their
youthful memories of material deprivation and artistic ambition. Back in Ireland
at last, Lily felt restored to a culture which spoke her language. Even the brick-
layer mending the hearth in her new house remarked, when he ‘made a big
hole . . . “that would do for Mr Yeats’s play “Where there is nothing’”’.** But
the values of Bedford Park were exported to the house in Dundrum where
the ‘industries’ were begun, and the Yeatsian domestic atmosphere — soci-
able, volatile, relentlessly self-analysing — was transposed to ‘Gurteen Dhas’,

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 NATIONAL DRAMAS 1901-1902
the Churchtown bungalow where jsy and his daughters set up house on
1 October 1902.
From the beginning wy was involved — slightly to the consternation of
those backing the venture. ‘He is a genius, Augustine Henry warned Gleeson,
‘and his ways in society are to be excused completely — and you must not blame
him, he is probably in the clouds. Of course he is much spoiled by admiration
of women.”* These women did not include his younger sister. jBy entreated
him to make his peace with Lolly, though in Lily’s view (years afterwards)
the fault was not on his side. ‘WB was also working very hard for very little
and had ail the troubles over the theatre, such bitter disappointments, and
the infernal Maud through it all.’*4
For all the disagreements, the business was under way by October. Long
before, wBy had stipulated ‘if ever a first rate publishing house arise in
Ireland I must needs publish in part with them’.®° With the majority of
his books he kept his word, giving his sisters the first publication in a lim-
ited edition, followed by a commercial press edition a few months later. In
November he refused John Lane the rights to his next book of verse, which
Lane wanted as a condition for publishing Where There is Nothing: his poems
were ‘already promised’ to his sisters.** Though he had been writing very few
lyrics during these years of theatrical excitement, by December Lolly was print-
ing trial proofs of In the Seven Woods, her brother’s first collection since 1899
(bulked out by the play On Baile’ Strand). Working at Dun Emer became a
way-station, almost a rite of passage, for many young women involved in
nationalist cultural enterprises: future writers, painters, Sinn Féin activists
and Abbey actresses served their time there. ‘100 years ago [Lolly and Lily]
would have wanted to make them loyal & Protestant,’ zy remarked ironic-
ally to Elkin Mathews, ‘now they only seek to make them happy & rational
& healthy, sleeping with their windows open & not knuckling down to brothers
or anybody else or anything else — this marks the “Progress of the Ages”.’®”
Dun Emer was one proof of cultural self-confidence taking root in the cynical
world of the Irish metropolis by 1902. Another was provided by the brief
irruption into wBy’s circle of the man who would immortalize that metro-
polis, in that era: the youthful James Joyce.
In August Russell had written excitedly to wBy about ‘an extremely clever
boy who belongs to your class more than to mine and still more to himself.
But he has all the intellectual equipment, culture and education which all our
other friends lack.’ He wrote even more ecstatically to Gregory; Joyce had
presented himself at the Russells’ house (haranguing him about avatars, a sure
way to Russell’s heart), and they had spent a hectic summer night of talk.**
Russell was now well known for his undiscriminating adoption of young
hopefuls, and wsy had learnt to be wary about swans who invariably turned

27)
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

out to be geese. But both he and Gregory rapidly saw that this was some-
thing different, and the attention they paid the twenty-year-old student was
remarkable. So, in its way, was the lack of attention he paid them.
Joyce had already made his mark with a clear-sighted attack on the Irish
Literary Theatre in “The Day of the Rabblement’, but he passionately admired
wey’s literary achievement: he could recite “The Adoration of the Magi’ off
by heart and the mesmeric beauty of certain poems (notably “Who Goes with
Fergus? from The Countess Cathleen) remained canonical for him.” After a
glamorous but slightly scandalous career at the Royal University, he was
following a haphazard course as a medical student. In October Russell told
him that wBy would be in Dublin the following month and would like to
meet him (he had already dined at the Nassau Hotel on 4 November with
Gregory and ysy). There was accordingly a rendezvous outside the National
Library, followed by an awkward encounter in an O’Connell Street café. It
was an intense occasion, much recapitulated and mythologized; Ellmann has
compared it to the meeting between Goethe and Heine, a symbolic conjunc-
tion in the history of world literature. More immediately apparent was the
mutual suspicion between an established Irish Protestant aesthete and a Jesuit-
educated Catholic Dubliner with a preternaturally mordant eye for social
pretensions. Soon afterwards wBy wrote (but never published) a slightly
fictionalized account of their meeting. ‘He asked me “Why did I make
speeches? Why did I concern myself with politics? Why had I given certain
of my stories and poems a historical setting?” . . . all these things were a sign
that the iron was getting cold.’ Joyce’s own affiliations and energies were
strange to him; wey realized that he was dealing with a new force, something
that could not be predicted. His version betrays the wistful tone of a man near-
ing forty, confronted by the ruthlessness of youthful genius. ‘Presently he got
up to go, and, as he was going out, he said, “I am twenty. How old are you?”
I told him, but Iam afraid I said I was a year younger than I am. He said with
a sigh, “I thought as much. I have met you too late. You are too old.”’ Joyce
in later years denied this, but at a stage of life when good manners meant more
to him than they did in 1902.” Their disagreement was inevitable. One of
the points wy recalled making to Joyce involved a defence of folklore against
the ‘sterility’ of urban culture, Great Memory against individual conscious-
ness. Joyce’s lofty and laconic reply rankled enough for wy to repeat it more
than once. ‘Generalizations aren't made by poets; they are made by men of
letters. They are no use.””!
Still, he showed wBy some of his ‘Epiphanies’ and verses, which intrigued
the older poet. After their meeting wry sent Joyce an important letter from
London: in it he subtly reproved Joyce for condemning wey’s ‘treacher-
ous instinct for adaptability’ in his critique of the Irish Literary Theatre,
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asserted his own authority as an established literary figure with a base in
England, and hinted at his autobiography.
Remember what Dr Johnson said about somebody ‘let us wait until we find out
whether he is a fountain or a cistern.’ The work which you have actually done is
very remarkable for a man of your age who has lived away from the vital intellectual
centres. Your technique in verse is very much better than the technique of any young
Dublin man I have met during my time. It might have been the work ofa young man
who had lived in an Oxford literary set. However men have started with as good promise
as yours and have failed & men have started with less and have succeeded. The qual-
ities that make a man succeed do not shew in his work, often for quite a long time
They are much less qualities of talent than qualities ofcharacter — faith (of this you
have probably enough), patience, adaptability, (without this one learns nothing), and
a gift for growing by experience & this is perhaps rarest of all.
Twill do anything for you I can but I am afraid that it will not be a great deal. The
chief use I can be, though probably you will not believe this, will be by introducing
you to some other writers who are starting like yourself, one always learns one’s busi-
ness from one’s fellow-workers, especially from those who are near enough one’s own
age to understand one’s own difficulties.”

wey lived up to this; Joyce was not the only apprentice writer who received
thoughtful letters of advice from him at this time.” Nor did his help stop there.
On 2 December, forewarned by Gregory, he met Joyce off the Irish Mail at
six in the morning, gave him breakfast, brought him to the review editors of
the Academy and the Speaker, and finally to Arthur Symons’s flat.* Joyce
went on to Paris that evening, to stay at wBy’s old haunt the Hotel Corneille,
armed with the address of Maud Gonne (which he did not follow up, a loss
to literary history). wBy sent him several long letters, showing that he milked
what contacts he could onJoyce’s behalf, and entertained the young man again
en route back to Dublin on 23 December. But Joyce’s failure to approach
Gonne was emblematic. His interests, his paths, his art would all diverge from
wpy’, despite his half-resentful admiration of the early poetry. At the end
of his life Joyce admitted that he lacked ‘pure imagination’, which wy pre-
eminently possessed: ‘no surrealist poet can equal it’. But in 1902 he was, as
he would famously put it, flying by the nets of an enveloping national cul-
ture, just as WBY was trying to fashion such a phenomenon. Proof that way
was jolted by the opinions of this merciless young prodigy lies in the preface
he wrote for his essays Ideas ofGood and Evil, but suppressed. He related his
initial worries about the ‘reckless opinions’ of the essays, and his anticipa-
tion of being thought a ‘disturber who carries in his hand the irresponsible
torch of vain youth’. And then he met Joyce, whose relentless questioning
‘exasperated and puzzled him’, who told him his work was ‘deteriorating’,
and that he was, in the end, ‘too old’. Approaching forty, this rang like a knell.

“o7,
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

A year later, reissuing his stories The Tables ofthe Law, he added a note to the
preface. ‘I do not think Ishould have reprinted them had I not met a young
man in Ireland the other day who liked them very much and nothing else at
all that I have written.’””*

ry
By the time wsy and Joyce sat down suspiciously together in the O’Connell
Street café, the Irish National Dramatic Society had performed its first
season in its new incarnation, with wBy as President. It had emerged during
the summer from the chrysalis of the old Fay company (whose name appeared
for the last time at the October 1902 season), but it was not an easy con-
ception. Of the old Irish Literary Theatre connection, Martyn had become
alienated through the cavalier treatment he had received; Moore had fallen
out over Where There is Nothing (and was persona non grata with nationalists
because of squibs like Parnell and His Island). Gregory and wsy alone sur-
vived. From the Fay—Inghinidhe side, Maud Gonne came uneasily aboard,
but firmly allied herself with the guardians of nationalist rectitude; in
September she vetoed rehearsals of Gregory’s first solo effort, Twenty-five,
because it presented an optimistic view of emigration, advancing instead
Padraic Colum’s anti-recruiting play The Saxon Shillin’. Politics were heavily
involved in the choice of plays, but so was straightforward dramatic competi-
tion. Willie Fay, for instance, withdrew wsy’s Te Hour-Glass from Inghinidhe
na hEireann in September, because he wanted it for the Irish National
Dramatic Company; from early on Gonne made it clear to wBy that the
constituency attracted by the connection with Inghinidhe and Cumann na
nGaedheal was far more ‘national’ than the elite tendency of the redefined
Fay company. By midsummer 1902 the United Irishman was in deep finan-
cial trouble, totally dependent on IRB subventions arranged through John
MacBride to keep going, and therefore tied to a hard separatist line.”” But
both the Fays knew where their artistic future lay, and abandoned the nation-
alist societies with relief. Gonne’s eventual severance was inevitable. Her
own view of this history was given in an angry letter to wBy a year later:
You forget the existence of the National Theatre Society [formed from the Irish
National Dramatic Society in January 1903”'] was originally due to Inginide na
hEireann & Cumann na Gaedhal. If these Societies had not taken Fay up he would
still be contentedly playing vulgar English farces in the Union Jack Coffee Palace.
It was after Inginide na hEireann passed a resolution forbidding any of their mem-
bers to act for Fay in his English farces & for the Coffee Palace that he came to me
& said he would rather act for Nationalists if he could get National pieces & we intro-
duced him to Russell who gave him or rather gave us his ‘Deirdre’ to act. Have you
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forgotten how both Russell & I urged you to let us have your ‘Kathleen’ how you
said Lady Gregory thought you should not — & how at last to make things smooth
I consented to act Kathleen. It was Inginide na hEireann & Cumann na Gaedhal
who financed each of Fay’s first attempts at National performances. On each occa-
sion we not only gave him the dresses & scenery we had paid for, but also gave him
more than the fair share of profits & even when there was a loss made up something
for Fay, not for himself naturally but with the idea of helping the formation of a National
Theatre Co—- Members of Cumann na Gaedhal personally gave money & collected
money for the Company & all this because we wanted a NATIONAL Theatre Co to
help us combat the influence of the low English theatres & music halls.
It is absurd for you to say you did not know all this from the beginning though
I will believe you have forgotten it now & have grown to think that it is you &
Lady Gregory & her friends who started the National Theatre Co.%?

For the moment, the nationalist'societies continued to co-operate. When

‘W. G. Fay’s Irish National Dramatic Company’ presented a ‘Samhain’
season at the Antient Concert Rooms it was organized (according to Fay)
‘by Cumann na nGaeheal [sic], a Dublin political body’ and hailed on
the front page of the United Irishman as the birth of a potential Irish national
theatre, ‘a powerful agent in the building up of a nation’. None the less, the
opening reception was attended by several prominent Unionists — O’Grady,
a Bourke of Clanricarde, Captain John Shawe-Taylor. Even the ironic nation-
alist journalist William Bulfin thought it symbolized a new spirit of cul-
tural co-operation.’ The plays ran from 28 October to 1 November and
included Russell’s Deirdre, Cathleen ni Houlihan (with Gonne), James Cousins’s
Connlaand The Racing Lug, Fred Ryan’s The Laying ofthe Foundations, wBy’s
(and Gregory’s) Pot of Broth, and P. T. MacGinley’s Ex/is agus an Bhean
Dhéirce. At the second night James Cousins felt an ominous ‘twinge’ at wBY’s
attitude ‘that we were contributors to him and not he to us’.
Further performances followed in early December and January. Though
wy’ plays were not over-represented, his presence was dominant, notably
in editing a new issue of Samhain. This stressed the patronage of Cumann
na nGaedheal, and reviewed the dramatic activity of the past year, criticiz-
ing Hyde’s ‘carelessness’ and elevating ‘personality’ above propaganda in
literature. He also published Where There is Nothing in the United Irishman
on 30 October, and gave the lecture (before a matinée audience) ‘Speaking
to Musical Notes’, with Florence Farr and the inevitable psaltery. Frank Fay
produced a noticeably grudging review, mentioning that he himself had
‘been reading and thinking about rhythmical recitation for years’. He con-
demned Farr’s performance and wsy’s emphasis, while other Irish critics
were even more dismissive.’ But wBy was inevitably prominent, as was noted
by Bulfin at the opening reception on 24 October:

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[Mr Yeats] pervades the hall. He wanders about like a troubled soul in spiritland or
elsewhere. He is not dressed like anyone else, nor does he look like anyone else. And
if he were dressed like anyone else he could simply be grotesque, for he was not meant
for ordinary clothes. He is an original character. He has many enemies and many
friends. Everything he does seems to stir up some rancour, and he is nearly always
doing things. I have done my best to find out from my conversations with him
whether he unconsciously goes around driving poles into beehives or whether he does
it purposely, simply for the sake of notoriety. I have not been able to convict him of
doing it purposely. He wanders in the realms of the mind, just as he does in the phys-
ical world — taking little note of where his steps are leading him. He just goes on and
on, treading on corns, and hitting up against prejudices, and cannoning against
scruples, and wondering greatly why there is anything in the Universe but him-
self. He is intellectually proud, possibly without knowing it. He is a man whom you
cannot judge by any conventionality, or any ordinary standard. He evades analysis.
You may think you have him proved beyond yea or nay to be a great original thinker,
when he will gravely and gracefully deliver himself of some oracular absurdity, which
causes you to reconsider his case. He will then proceed to blow soap bubbles of fancy
into the air until the sky is paved with them, and he will sportively pursue one bubble
after another until he is tired of the sport. Then when you are on the point of
convicting him of being a tuneful trifler and a melodious ninny-hammer, he will
suddenly change his mind and talk with amazing brilliance and force on the
most elevated themes — talk with intense earnestness and sustained eloquence, with
correct and accurate fluency and with measured poise of thought which cannot be
art, and must be something higher. Take not the book by the cover or by the dog-
eared leaves. Judge not a man by his neck-ties or by his way of brushing his back
hair. And furthermore if you are looking at the merits of any person, place or thing
through a mist of irritation, wait until it gets off your nerves.’

His great talent for managing publicity now had a new focus, and he had
learnt how to manipulate the collusive antagonisms of Dublin life. According
toa later recollection, ‘if they had a play coming on which was likely to prove
controversial he could call round to The Leader office, tell D. P. Moran the
editor and [his] ostensible enemy about it, and ask that, if the play had to be
attacked it should be on some, to W. B., unimportant ground, rather than
the one that might prove damaging to the theatre effort as a whole. Always
D. P. would see what he could do about it and no harm would be done.” On
another level he cultivated London theatrical contacts like Edith Craig and
gleaned much about staging techniques, lighting and costumes — ‘more than
[Gordon] Craig likes’, he reported gleefully to Gregory.!°° He was
a highly active President of the Irish National Dramatic Society. The pub-
lication of Where There is Nothing, together with his public pronouncements
on artistic freedom, struck his thoughtful critic Thomas Kettle as a deliber-
ately nihilist and amoral stance: wBy’s ‘rationalistic whimsies’ prevented him
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from understanding ‘the sanctity and compulsion with which the Catholic
religion has established itself in the imagination of Ireland’. It was debat-
able whether or not wBy realized his offensiveness; Paul Ruttledge-like, he
made enemies unintentionally.
By early December, for instance, wey was telling Frank Fay that the sooner
they had James Cousins as an adversary, the better. Yet Cousins had provided
two plays for the company’s first season; he had introduced the Fays to
Russell; he saw himself as a founding father. Nor was he a hostile Griffithite,
being a moderate nationalist, aTheosophist, and an intimate of Russell’s. This
may have been part of the problem, since wy was currently furious with his
old friend for reprinting some early Yeats poems, now despised by their
author, in the Irish Homestead. Faced by wBy’s outspoken condemnation of
his new plays So/dand The Sword ofDermot, Cousins left. Another new play-
wright stayed longer in favour—the gauche but talented Padraic Colum, who
had visited wBy and read him his [bsenite play about the United Irish League
the previous April. But from the Society’s inception, the choice of plays
presented problems. When Colum’s The Saxon Shillin’, recipient of aCumann
na nGaedheal prize, went into rehearsal in December, Fay wanted revisions;
Gonne and Griffith, on behalf of the nationalist societies, objected. Griffith
(whose paper had been sniping at wBy through November) eventually
resigned and Russell was brought in as peacemaker, suggesting new proced-
ures for choosing plays. But the evaluation of appropriate material remained
an electric issue. WBy’s own one-act play, The Hour-Glass, was probably
constructed with this in mind: supernaturalism was expressed in language
of conventional religiosity, stressing the power of mystical belief over the
arrogance of free thought.'°* When the idea first occurred to wBy the pre-
vious April, he had written to Gregory: ‘It cannot offend anybody & may
propitiate Holy Church.” The wrangles of November and December
1902, however, demonstrated that no detail was too small to escape Cumann
na nGaedheal’s hawk-like eye for national impieties. By late December wBy
was privately preaching apostasy in the form of non-Irish plays. The Fays,
he told Gregory, should ‘play foreign masterpieces. I find I can get through
Miss Horniman a translation of a fine play of the heroic age of Sudermans.”"°
A clause in the Society’s constitution had allowed for the playing of such
‘dramatic works of foreign authors as would tend to educate and interest the
public’, but to Gonne this would be an unforgivable breach of the principles
upon which the various elements had united to form the Irish National
Dramatic Society. By now, however, her own personal drama was embarked
on a course which, to wBy, would constitute a worse betrayal by far.

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1902-1903

As long as ten years ago I said to myself ‘I must not commit

the mistake of the political revolutionists, which, as far as I
can see, every theatrical reformer is ready to commit. The
political revolutionist always thinks “The people are uncor-
rupt, and noble, it is only the Governments that are corrupt.”
He stakes his life upon that belief, and loses it. On the con-
trary, the people are no wiser than their education. Let us have
no faith in the people. The people have to be converted very
slowly; they have to be taught their A.B.C. painfully. Let us
believe in ideas and our friends.’
wey to Gordon Craig, 16 November 1911

I
WHEN Wey returned to London in November 1902, he was blissfully un-
aware that Gonne was preparing yet another shock to rock his life to its
foundations. ‘I am in the best of good spirits, he wrote to Gregory on 18
November. ‘Last year I began the winter in black gloom.’ His good humour
enabled him to savour the resentments aroused among ‘all my psaltery
people’ by Farr’s indolent, gossipy ways, and to mock the ‘grateful and happy’
Horniman, lashing out money for ‘six new psalteries’. In November he
received a proof of his new poem ‘Adam’s Curse’ from the Monthly Review
—a lyrical but sharp- edged evocation of his conversation with Gonne and
her sister the previous May, lounging in a Kensington drawing-room as the
moon rose. It would be the central poem of his next collection, and stands at
the balancing-point between the romance, mistiness and elevated ‘beauty’
of his nineties poetry, and the new, toughened diction which he had con-
sciously begun to seek. The poem itself hinges on the contrast between the
two voices:
We sat together at one summer's end
That beautiful mild woman your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said ‘a line will take us hours maybe
Yet ifit does not seem a moment’s thought
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement or break stones
Like an old pauper in all kinds of weather;

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 THE TASTE OF SALT 1902-1903
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.’

That woman then

Murmured with her young voice for whose mild sake
There’s many a one shall find out all heartache
In finding that it’s young and mild and low.
“There is one thing that all we women know
Although we never heard of it of it at school
That we must labour to be beautiful.’
I said, ‘It’s certain there is no fine thing
Since Adam's fall but needs much labouring.
There have been lovers who thought love should be
So much compounded of high courtesy
That they would sigh and quote with learned looks
Precedents out of beautiful old books;
Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.’
We sat grown quiet at the name of love.
We saw the last embers of daylight die
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon - moon-worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell
About the starn and broke in days and years.
I had a thought for no one but your ears;
That you were beautiful and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy and yet we’d grown
As weary hearted as that hollow moon.

It was written, and published, at the very time when the relationship it
invoked was to take a traumatic new direction. While he was cheerfully
settling down to a winter in London, reviving his interest in spiritualist
experiments at Woburn Buildings and negotiating about the arrival of ‘a gass
oven’, she was in Paris with the IRB man and Boer War hero John MacBride.
‘You are so good writing to me even when I am silent,’ she told way on
28 December. “Thank you, you are a kind friend always.’
By then, her mind was made up. At thirty-five, MacBride was a year
younger than Gonne, and from a dramatically different background (small
Catholic shopkeepers in County Mayo). Like her, he had joined the INA split
in the mid-1890s, and they were brought together in the anti-war campaign
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of 1900. Red-haired, heavy-drinking, physically brave, rather inarticulate

and utterly unmystical, he incarnated the authentic and uncompromising Irish
nationalism to which she had dedicated her life. More than a year before, in
America during the spring of 1901, he had asked her to marry him; though
it was against her feminist principles, she eventually consented. Her own posi-
tion after the break with Millevoye had become more and more difficult, and
MacBride was now based in Paris, scraping a living as secretary to an Amer-
ican journalist.! ‘Marriage I always consider abominable but for the sake of
Iseult, I make that sacrifice to convention,’ she wrote to Kathleen.” In June
1902 she told her disapproving sister: ‘Ist Iam to become Catholic, 2nd I am
to get married to Major MacBride, this last is not public yet.’ She added, more
defensively, that she was ‘getting old and oh so tired and I have found a man
who has a stronger will than myself and who at the same time is thoroughly
honourable and who I trust . . . As for Willie Yeats [love him dearly as a friend
but I could not for one minute imagine marrying him.” None the less, she
may have worried about his reaction. From this time, hints can be discerned
in her letters to him — about her inclination to Catholicism, her meetings with
MacBride’s family in Mayo, her own increasing ‘decrepitude’ and rheumat-
ism.‘ And through these very months of late 1902, she was also becoming more
and more estranged from him on theatrical matters, perhaps a reflection of
her deliberate desire to make a break.
But nothing could prepare him for this. Since December 1898 his great
powers of rationalization had been directed towards convincing himself
that their ‘spiritual’ relationship was the better part of passion. Time and time
again his folklore stories concern a countryman (sometimes a ‘poet’) who is
offered knowledge or pleasure by a fairy queen. When he chooses pleasure
and becomes her lover, he is left bereft, making mournful songs until he
dies.” Renunciation brought the reward of artistic achievement and continu-
ing inspiration. Gonne was, however, about to shatter the understanding on
which this compact was based.
Her alienation from wBy over theatre matters proceeded in step with this.
In January 1903 she was in Dublin, complaining during rehearsals of the
changes to Colum'’s play; ‘Griffith declares it is spoiled from an artistic point
of view &all openly say it is because Fay fears to vex the respectable.’* But Fay
by this point had lost all patience with the ‘absolutely fossilized’ approach of
the nationalists.’ She and wy were on different sides in the dispute, though
he remained in London. It was there he heard about her engagement, in early
February. His later recollection of receiving a telegram just before address-
ing a public meeting probably refers to his lecture “The Future of Irish Drama’,
given in London on 7 February.* It was, for him, not only a private trauma
but a public humiliation; his poems had solemnized their relationship before
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his reading public as well as his friends. Ricketts’s reaction was probably
fairly typical. ‘Have you heard the news that Maud Gonne has gone and left
Yeats and the future of Ireland for matrimony and comfortable Catholicism?
Yeats is unconsolable in sonnets of the Oh thou! type to various little lilts
and tunes.”
The first three letters he sent her have been lost, but the fourth survived,
a passionate plea to her to remain the inviolate self he had so often celeb-
rated. ‘In the name of 14 years of friendship’, he implored her to think again.
For all his anguish, his arguments were coherent and compelling. First, their
ancient bond: he quoted from his diary of 12 December 1898, recalling their
spiritual marriage in a dream and implicitly accusing her of a bigamous
betrayal. ‘I claim that this gives me the right to speak.’ But his subsequent
arguments stressed the danger of debasement — religious and social. Mar-
riage with MacBride would make her ‘fall into a lower order & do great
injury to the religeon of free souls that is growing up in Ireland, it may be to
enlighten the whole world.’ ‘The priests will exult over us.’ ‘You possess your
influence in Ireland very largely because you come to the people from above.
You represent a superior class, a class whose people are more independent,
have a more beautiful life, a more refined life.’ Above all, ‘thrust down . . . to
a lower order of faith’ and society, she would destroy the persona she had cre-
ated for herself. ‘It was our work to teach a few strong aristocratic spirits that
to believe the soul was immortal & that one prospered hereafter ifone laid
upon oneselfan heroic discipline in living &[? to] send them to uplift the nation.
You & I were chosen to begin this work & <just> just when <you> I come to
understand it fully you go from me & seek to thrust the people <down> fur-
ther into weakness further from self reliance.’ She must not betray her pride,
her solitude, her inspiration. He stressed the unworthiness of Catholicism
rather than of MacBride himself — the priests had truckled under to the
government over the Act of Union and had betrayed the Fenians. ‘When the
day of great hazard has come’, they would tell the people, ‘Be quiet, be good
cristians, do not shed blood.”
Thus he tried to show that revolution and mysticism, both essential to
Gonne’s being, were threatened by this mésalliance. What is not stated is the
question: why him, and not me? His own position as lover (and MacBride’s)
went unmentioned, though it may have been expatiated upon in the earlier
letters. Possibly it was too bitter an issue to be articulated, though it would
powerfully affect wBy’s self-image from now on. His hard-won confidence
was jolted. As recently as December he had confided to Edith Craig, ‘I
seldom get credit for an absurd amount of timidity and shyness, which has a
way, when I meet any body for the first time or practically for the first time, of
hiding embarrasment under a brazen manner.” In the aftermath of Gonne’s
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bombshell the brazen manner was shaken, but then adopted all the more
resolutely.
In any case, she was unmoved. She had retired to a French convent for
instruction; from there she replied soothingly that their friendship need not
change. As to Catholicism, ‘<my>our nation looks at God or truth through
one prism, The Catholic Religion’. In other words, to be Irish required
being Catholic, the very conclusion wy had devoted years of concentrated
activity to disproving. And as for social superiority: ‘You say I leave the few
to mix myself with the crowd while Willie I have always told you I am the
voice, the soul of the crowd.” This indeed was the kernel of the ancient dif-
ference between them. It was now exacerbated by her adoption of Catholicism.
Farr’s version to Nevinson put it tersely: ‘[Gonne] hates marriage & all sex.
They had a sort of understanding to be together in old age. Now he con-
templates an onslaught on the Church.’”
On 21 February Gonne married MacBride at the Church of St-Honoré-
d’Eylau in Paris, attended by nationalist delegates from Ireland (one of whom
read a long poem in Irish) and old comrades from South Africa. Like her stage
performances, the ceremony was transmuted into a new form of political
theatre.'* She assured wy three days later that when called on to abjure all
heresies, ‘I said I hated nothing in the world but the British Empire which
I looked on as the outward symbol of Satan in the world . . . in this form I
made my solemn Abjuration of Anglicism & declaration of hatred of
England.”* The marriage of the two ‘irreconcilables’ was viewed by their friends
with grave misgivings. Arthur Griffith, Violet Russell, Ella Young all feared
the worst, partly because of MacBride’s conventionality (though he had his
own illegitimate family in South Africa). Those who were principally inter-
ested in wBy, however, thought it might be a turning-point. Gregory sent
‘amost kind & thoughtful letter’ to Gonne, advising her to keep her own money
by marrying under English law;’* Annie Horniman, who had moved firmly
into his life as amanuensis, and wanted more, sent him flirtatious accounts
of Tarot divinations which were scantily veiled summonses to a partnership
(‘work for love brings Divine Wisdom’”’).
Their hopes were quelled by the disastrous course of the Gonne—-MacBride
marriage. As early as the honeymoon (in southern Spain, allegedly recon-
noitring assassination arrangements for an impending royal visit to Gibraltar),
the couple’s incompatibility and MacBride’s drunkenness were spectacu-
larly evident. Gonne returned to Paris alone, and significantly headed for
London, where wzy met her, as so often before, at Euston." Though a son
(Seaghan, later Sen) was born the next year, there was little hope for the union;
and by a terrible irony, the precipitating cause for its dissolution would be
MacBride’s molestation of his step-daughter Iseult, for whose protection
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Gonne had sought refuge in marriage. As for her attitude to wsy, they
continued to quarrel about the theatre, to collaborate on Celtic rituals, and
to disagree about religious philosophy (‘Neiche [sic] is not Celtic, she admon-
ished him). She shrewdly chided him for manipulating the Celtic Rites to
express his repugnance at her conversion to Catholicism, finding no difficulty
in adapting their old symbols of spear, cauldron, stone and sword to Christian
archetypes. ‘Why Willie it was you yourself who taught me these things.’ By
early May, less than three months after the wedding ceremony, she was
confessing that she had made a terrible mistake. As for him, his distant prin-
cess was now unattainable in a different way: a Catholic wife and mother
of two children.

II
These upheavals had accompanied a period of equally frantic literary and
theatrical activity. In December 1902 the Irish National Dramatic Company
had revived Cathleen ni Houlihan; chanting performances had continued,
in wBy's absence schooled by Sturge Moore, though Farr was becoming
ominously restive in her role and turned in a mutinously inadequate per-
formance on 5 January for wBy’s theatrical friends (‘there are times when she
makes me despair of the whole thing’). But his London associates, currently
calling themselves the Literary Theatre Club, planned an ambitious Craig
production of The Countess Cathleen, financed by Ricketts — ‘a much bigger
thing than I had foreseen’, wBy told Gregory, ‘[which] will enormously
strengthen my position’. And his new book of lyrics and plays, In the Seven
Woods, was planned by Dun Emer as ‘a specially beautiful and expensive first
edition of some of my best things’, followed by a cheaper Bullen edition.
In the process wsy informed Gregory that he was ‘full of new thoughts
for verse though all thoughts quite unlike the old ones. My work has got
far more masculine. It has more salt in it.” This growing taste for salt was
important; it presaged a new theatrical departure, which would shape the
nascent Irish National Theatre Society irrevocably. On 21 December 1902 wBY
had written to Synge (last seen in Coole the previous October, en route to Aran)
that they would meet in London ‘&] will get you to show me your play’. On
20 January Synge read Riders to the Sea to some of wBy’s and Gregory’s
London acquaintances at her London flat in Queen Anne’s Mansions.
By early February the play had been read three times, the audiences in-
cluding Gonne, Chesterton and Arthur Symons; on 3 March, Synge’s far
more controversial In the Shadow of the Glen was read at Gregory’s flat to
Masefield, Farr, Symons and wsy.” It was clear that a new voice had been
raised, using Irish idiom in an uncompromisingly poetic but earthy way, with
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a real sense of dramatic language and pace. Through 1902 wBy had been dir-
ecting Synge towards reviewing opportunities, and giving him advice. But
with his earliest plays Synge achieved what wBy knew his own drama lacked:
unstagey heroics, real passion, the expression of combative individuality.
‘Saltiness’ was here in full measure. As with Joyce (and, later, Pound), wBy
at once recognized a special voice, and he knew too that this would take the
Irish National Dramatic Company ina new direction. ‘Foreign masterpieces’
were no longer necessary. By mid-March he was pursuing his plans with Greg-
ory at Coole. Their relationship had become even closer. From mid-December
1902 he addressed her as ‘Dear Friend’ (‘I need not tell you that I am always
wishing for the time to pass swiftly until we are together again’). With Gonne’s
defection, he turned to Coole more than ever. Gregory had already adopted
Synge into her cénacle (though he always maintained a certain detachment);
he was now to become part of the inner circle who would direct the Irish
National Dramatic Society the way they wanted it to go.
Simultaneously, the Society was reorganized following the disagreements
over production, and dwindling audiences during December. Russell helped
draft the constitution in late January 1903, and it was formally adopted in early
February, with Fay’s Irish National Dramatic Society giving way to the ‘Trish
National Theatre Society’ (INTS). wBy was President, with Gonne, Russell
and Hyde Vice-Presidents; William Fay Stage-Manager and Fred Ryan
Secretary. His presidency was not a foregone conclusion. Russell was first un-
animously elected, but declined and (as he later remembered it) ‘had great
difficulty in getting the members to elect Yeats’.”? All members had voting
rights; plays were nominated by the executive, and a vote of 75 per cent in favour
determined their ratification. Crucially, a Reading Committee was consti-
tuted, of way, Russell, Gregory, Ryan, Colum, Griffith and Gonne.”? All this
was hammered out when wBy was in London, but he testily denied that he
was annoyed or had ever desired a veto, though he ‘certainly disapproved of
a democracy in artistic matters’.
This would shortly become all too plain. And already he had confided to
English friends like Gordon Craig ideas about the theatre and its audience
which might not have appealed to all his Irish associates.
Our movement too is a real movement of the people. We don't play for the merely
curious or for people who want to digest their dinners in peace, but for zealous brick-
layers and clerks and an odd corner boy or two. That is to say we have a thorough-
going unruly Elizabethan audience. The poor parts of the house are always full.”4

Craig annotated the letter ‘does the bricklayer go in for indigestion, but the
point was clear. Padraic Colum noted acidly that Reading Committee meet-
ings were held in Gregory’s sitting-room at the Nassau Hotel because wBy
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 THE TASTE OF SALT 1902-1903
suggested it would be warmer; the centre of decision-making thus shifted
to her sphere. In moving from the Royal Hibernian Hotel to the Nassau (a
gloomy set of apartments on the corner of South Frederick Street) she not
only turned her back on Anglo-Ireland, but invaded the territory of Gonne,
who lodged there too. And the Reading Committee was the arena where
battle over the theatre’s directions was waged. wy used it to block Cousins’s
Sold once and for all, to get The Saxon Shillin’ temporarily withdrawn, and
to restore Gregory’s Twenty-five.” This, with wsy’s own Hour-Glass, con-
stituted the INTS programme at Molesworth Hall, Molesworth Street,
Dublin, on 14 March. Robert Gregory, now an art student at the Slade, pro-
vided the set designs for his mother’s play and costumes for The Hour-Glass
(with sets by Sturge Moore). A small profit was made, paid into a general fund;
the actors were still unsalaried. The Hour-Glass, written as a prose play, was
melodramatically acted, and not much liked; wBy would later rewrite it in
verse, with a subtler ending.” But the season was, all in all, a success. For wBy
it marked his return to the public forum after Gonne’s marriage. He gave a
lecture, “The Reform of the Theatre’, and explained Craig’s theories in the
intervals, though Russell was amused to notice that he forgot to produce the
model stage ‘entrusted to me as a sacred charge’.””
The prominence of the wBy—Gregory axis did not go unnoticed, and his
ambitious ideas about lighting effects and dramatic staging gave ample
fuel to Dublin wits (not least the stage-manager William Fay and his long-
suffering assistant Shaun Barlow). But he was pleased with The Hour-Glass.
‘It proved itself indeed as I always foresaw the strongest of the little plays,’
he wrote to Quinn.

It is the first play in the production of which my ideas were carried out completely.
The actors were dressed in purple with little bits of green here & there, & the back
ground was made of green sacking. The effect was even more telling than I had ex-
pected. Everything seemed remote, naive spiritual, & the attention, liberated from
irrelevant distractions, was occupied as it cannot be on an ordinary stage with what
was said & done.” ;

The INTS subsequently performed on Easter Monday at Loughrea,

County Galway, where Father Jeremiah O’Donovan was building a church
that would be a memorial to Irish arts and crafts; near by at Coole, wy began
to plan rehearsals (at last) for The Shadowy Waters. He was back in Dublin in
late April, attending the Contemporary Club, talking theatre, staying up late.
A prospectus was produced for the INTS, stressing the need for ‘a perman-
ent home’; the usual venues (Antient Concert Rooms, Molesworth Hall, St
Teresa's Hall) were only episodically available and none was really suitable.
Currently, rehearsals went on in a room behind a Camden Street butcher’s,

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rented for ten shillings a week and partly sublet to the Gaelic League. The
INTS’s early account-books show the tiny scale of payments, cost of props
and general outlay (including complimentary tickets for the Yeats family).”
wBy, as President, had his sights fixed higher.
Resourceful as ever, he had recovered strikingly well from the blow dealt
him by Gonne two months before, though this may have owed something
to determined bravado. He now chose to publish the vision of four years before,
when her symbol of apple-blossom brought on a dream of the World’s End
(set in her city, Paris), with visions of wickedness, unworthiness and cant; his
fear when he awoke, that an armed thief was hidden in his bedroom, must
have seemed like a rueful prescience of MacBride.*° However, on Gonne’s
marriage day wBy had written cheerfully to Russell that he had just had
‘rather a good time’ lecturing at Cardiff, mentioning her quite casually. And,
despite the new constitutional arrangements, Gonne and he were set on a
collision course over the INTS; resignations were threatened by those actors
suspicious of wBy’s intentions, and by late April he suspected (approvingly)
that Fay ‘would like to abolish the democrisy’.*?
Meanwhile he kept his London options open. His “Theatre of Beauty’
associates were evolving into a short-lived ‘Masquers Society’ involving
Symons, Walter Crane, Edith Craig, Sturge Moore and other aesthetes.
wy was the first signatory to a circular issued on 17 March 1903, proposing
‘a society for the production of plays, masques, ballets and ceremonies, which
convey a sentiment of beauty’.*” Plans for a production of The Countess
Cathleen were still in the air, though in the end they would come to nothing.
wBy's correspondence with Gilbert Murray of the Stage Society proves that
he took this enterprise very seriously; much as with the Literary Societies
ten years before, he visualized a dual movement, with one arm in London
and another in Dublin. His speaking-tours with Farr and the psaltery in the
spring and early summer of 1903 were intended to popularize ‘the New Art’
in London as well as the new theatre in Dublin. G. K. Chesterton, in a piece
entitled ‘Mr Yeats and Popularity’, expressed disingenuous surprise that
the two evangelists for Beauty did not take their psaltery message to ‘third-
class carriages and respectable public-houses . . . and combine ecstasy with
emolument’.*?
Undaunted, way and Farr kept up their close association, travelling to
provincial venues together. It seems likely that this is when their relationship
at last became more intimate. Farr told Nevinson that wsy was ‘not personally
attractive to her, not as a lover, nor she thinks to other women’,** but this may
have been strategic, since Nevinson admired her too. What evidence there
is suggests the affair was ‘very brief’ and happened after Gonne’s marriage.
Both were lonely and unattached; wBy ‘decided to read sensual literature to
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 THE TASTE OF SALT 1902-1903
her to see what would happen’. The liaison ended in equally hard-headed
fashion, with Farr — true to form — saying, ‘I can do this for myself.’5
Like the love-affair, the Masquers never quite took off, though wsy
was anxious they should touch Charles Ricketts for the £150 which he had
earmarked for ‘a dramatic experiment’. Subscriptions were disappointing
and several committee members uncooperative; wBy returned to London for
an inaugural meeting on 6 July, where Gordon Craig’s defection was the
final blow. By late July, though wey was drafting ‘The Opening Ceremony
for the Masquers’ for the new Society, he was simultaneously warning Murray
that his own interest must be concentrated elsewhere (leaving his corres-
pondent, as Gregory remarked, in the position of someone asked to hold a
baby and seeing its mother vanish in the crowd). ‘The only thingIsee quite
clear in the business is that the £150 ought not to be allowed to go adrift.’2”
This was pure Pollexfen, right down to the metaphor, but by November the
Masquers had run irredeemably aground.**
The involvement serves as a reminder, however; that wBy remained wary
about Dublin opinion. The ridicule of local journalists still rankled, and in
April he asked Bullen not to send the reissued Ce/tic Twilight or (still more)
his essays Ideas ofGood and Evil to the Dublin papers. [They] sell no copies
& I don't see whyI should give them the opportunity of attacking me.’ As
ever, his London circle proved more appreciative, particularly his Golden Dawn
associate Annie Horniman. She was now writing many of his letters, and would
soon start trying to usurp Gregory in the domestic arrangements at Woburn
Buildings. And he commissioned her to design costumes for his new play The
King’s Threshold, initially for a planned Masquers’ production in London.
It was a year since wBy had dangled ‘his wealthy friend’ and her possibilities
before Fay. This was beginning to take concrete form and would culminate
ina solid offer in October 1903 — after wBy had abandoned his London theat-
rical ambitions.
But the Dublin enterprise would remain bedevilled by political prop-
rieties, spearheaded by the new Mrs MacBride, and wBy was determined to
set his face against this. Asked by the Chicago Daz/y News to define ‘what
Ireland needs’ in March 1903, he produced a deliberately anti-propagandist
manifesto:
The greatest need is more love for thoughts for their own sake. We want a vigorous
movement of ideas. We have now plenty of propaganda and I would not see less. For
now the agrarian movement seems coming to a close the national movement must
learn to found itself, like the national movement of Norway, upon language and his-
tory. But if we are to have an able nation, a nation that will be able to take up to itself
the best thoughts of the world, we must have more love of beauty simply because it
is beauty, of truth merely because it is truth. At present if a man make us a song, or

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tell us a story, or give us a thought, we do not ask ‘is it a good song, or a good story,
or a true thought?’ but ‘will it help this or that propaganda?”

This did not mean political apathy. In the summer he could poke fun at the
Maynooth seminarians welcoming Edward VII by hanging out his racing
colours, and the Unionist assumptions of establishment Dublin continued
to incense him.*° But at the same time he repeated to Quinn the need for
artistic free thought. ‘One must be able to express oneself freely, and that
is precisely what no party of Irishmen Nationalist or Unionist, Protestant
or Catholic, is anxious to permit one . . . 1 am often driven to speak about
things that I would keep silent on were it not that it is necessary in a coun-
try like Ireland to be continually asserting one’s freedom if one is not to lose
it altogether.”*?
Quarrels with his theatrical colleagues were, therefore, inevitably com-
ing to a head. In the early summer of 1903, however, wBy was able to assert
his authority still further within the company, by using his influence to make
their first English season a dazzling success. The critical arrangements, as
Frank Fay was careful to recall, were really made by Stephen Gwynn, who
prepared the way with a Fortnightly article, ‘An Uncommercial Theatre’, and
set up a series of matinées through the London Irish Literary Society. But
wey's name and Gregory’s contacts drew in reviewers like William Archer
and Max Beerbohm, and a fashionable audience (Lord Monteagle, Wilfrid
Blunt, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, ‘Michael Field’, Henry James, J. M. Barrie
—and Annie Horniman), who flocked to a performance of The Hour-Glass
at Queen's Gate Hall, South Kensington, on 2 May 1903. (wBy noted acid-
ly that the ILS members themselves did not turn out to support their fellow-
countrymen.*”) The company were still amateurs with day jobs (‘typists,
electricians, book-keepers, shop assistants’, according to Fay) who had
snatched time away from their employment; they were excited and over-
strained, and resignation threats began to multiply. None the less, they scored
a great success. Reviewers like William Archer in the Morning Leader, A.B.
Walkley in The Times, and the faithful Nevinson hailed their naturalness,
gravity and containment (Archer singled out William Fay for especial praise).
The Daily News said all wBy would have wished about ‘the expression of the
aspirations, the emotions, the essential spirit and movement of the people’.
Lady Aberdeen (once and future Vicereine of Ireland and indefatigable
do-gooder for all things Irish) suggested that the company play for six months
at the St Louis exhibition the following year, as part of the ‘Irish Industry’
presentation.** As wsy saw at once, professionalization loomed, and his
idea of a dramatic movement that would bridge both London and Dublin
seemed a step nearer. He tactfully wrote to the press ceding all credit to
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 THE TASTE OF SALT 1902-1903
Willie Fay as ‘founder of the Society’, and to Frank as the expert in dramat-
ic speech; but public attention was inevitably concentrated upon himself.
He had further reasons for satisfaction. During their time in London,
Gonne spent two hours with him confessing that she had ‘married in a sud-
den impulse of anger’ against Millevoye, and was now regretting it. To Greg-
ory, he affected a certain detachment. ‘I feel somehow that the Maud Gonne
I have known so long has passed away; I had the feeling that a time of bit-
terness & perhaps of self-distrust & of fading life had begun for her.’ For
him, on the other hand, life was exceptionally full: receiving compliments on
the Theatre Society’s success, looking after George Pollexfen (in London for
an operation), and delivering another series of lectures, this time on heroic
and folk poetry, accompanied by Farr. These were timed to coincide with the
publication of Ideas of Good and Evil, also in May. It contained a number of
trumpet-blasts on behalf of the new drama, as well as the texts of important
recent essays, introductions and lectures since the late 1890s — ‘What is “Pop-
ular Poetry”?’, ‘Magic’, the Blake essays, ‘The Moods’ and ‘The Celtic Ele-
mentin Literature’. This last included, as a coda, a blatant puff for Gregory’s
Cuchulain; but not all his friends were so favoured. All references to Horton’s
work were dropped from ‘Symbolism in Painting’, though it had originated
as an introduction to his Book ofImages; Horton's sense of grievance became
permanent, unassuaged by wsy’s tactless explanation that his work was not
‘mature’ enough to be mentioned.** Despite the familiarity of some of the
pieces, reviewers treated the book as a unity: it was seen as a manifesto for
wBy’s idiosyncratically spiritual idea of poetry’s function. Nevinson, well
briefed, discerned a Blakean theme throughout and stressed wBy’s commit-
ment to passionate utterance. English criticism was reserved for his airy
citation of writers with whom he was not closely familiar, and his chancy
quotations (‘Mr Yeats shares with Coleridge a memory of unfailing and often
enlightening inaccuracy’**). The Irish reception was, as he had anticipated,
unfriendly. The Irish Times emphasized his insincerity and affectation, while
Magee in the United Irishman questioned wBy’s contemptuous repudiation
of the common man.” The Leader, as usual, struck a rebarbative note,
denouncing wBy as ‘a prosperous charlatan’:
What after all is Mr Yeats? He is one of the most complex personalities we
have. There is a touch of the real poet in him, and a spice of the amateur (but not
insincere) politician. Added to these, he is a sort of quaintly-comic man, who con-
fuses matters for us by letting on to let on that he takes himself seriously. Added
to this again, he is as handy a man as any under the sun at successfully ‘planting’
his literary wares: ‘no flies on him’ shere! As to the spook business and the seeing
of visions, probably nobody but Mr Yeats himself could tell how far he is in earnest.
Indeed, he has been so long posing in that peculiar spiritual line now, that probably

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not even he himself could tell if he really sees anything — and in any case it doesn’t
matter.

Stephen Gwynn took up the cudgels on the mystic’s behalf, but ‘Imaal’
responded vigorously. “Twice is too much to read any of Mr Yeats’s prose
writings; once is too often to read most of them, I should say. Mr Yeats is at
home in The Dome; he should abide there, “and all such men as he”.’** This
argument would be heard again: wBy’s decadent qualities belonged in
decadent England, and there he should stay.
Combative in public, wy felt some private doubts about Ideas of Good
and Evil. While he still held by the opinions in it, he wrote both to Russell
and Quinn that the book no longer reflected his current mood. It was lyrical,
yearning, remote, but he wanted to express himself “by that sort of thought
that leads straight to action, straight to some sort of craft’.*” In Nietzschean
terms, Apollo was to replace Dionysius. But once again he had brought off
an accomplished coup, synchronizing performances, lectures and book. He
would retire to Ireland for the summer and reap the benefits — spending a few
days with Hyde and then visiting George Pollexfen at Rosses Point before
settling at Coole in late June. (Here at long last he caught his first trout, which
was ceremoniously cooked for his breakfast; but By was staying there too and,
true to form, managed to eat it by mistake.*°) He could also plan the next
phase of theatrical experiment, which would revolve around the plays unex-
pectedly produced by Synge.

II]

Back in Dublin, Gregory took the plunge and read In the Shadow ofthe Glen
to members of the INTS in her Nassau Hotel rooms. The long-threatened
split was precipitated by Synge’s portrait of a heroine who deceives her old
husband and then abandons her mercenary lover to take to the roads with
a tramp. The fact that her name was Nora served to confirm that ‘Ibsenity’
had finally arrived in Dublin. There were murmurs about an ‘insult to Irish
womanhood’; ominously, Gonne decided it sounded ‘horrid’ before she
read it.’ This was followed by a crisis on the Reading Committee, when
Cousins’s play So/d resurfaced. Russell and Colum wanted it (Cousins had,
after all, provided them with two successes); wBY, who had already blocked
it the previous December, was implacably opposed (‘rubbish, and vulgar
rubbish’), and told Russell that ifit was accepted he would resign from the
Society. The Fays supported him, to the fury of the Inghinidhe connection.
Inevitably, Cousins went instead. His plays went too, to the Cumann na
nGaedheal Theatre Company — which, like Martyn’s ‘Players’ Club’ at the
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 THE TASTE OF SALT 1902-1903
Queen’s Theatre, was offering a refuge to the growing number of those
unable to co-operate with wBy and the Fays.
Russell stayed, but unhappily — all the more so as he felt In the Shadow
of the Glen had been adopted through an irregular procedure of private
readings, rather than through evaluation by the Reading Committee.
The fundamental difficulty lay in wsy’s implacable determination that the
Society should choose plays according to his own priority: a literary theatre.
Gregory loyally supported him, but more and more equivocally as her own
facility for writing simple dramas increased. Twenty years later she would
tell the founders of the Chicago Little Theater that the Irish mistake was
‘to confuse theatric with literary values . . . poetry must serve the theatre
before it can again rule there’.** But this was a lesson which she would take
time to learn.
wBy's own theatrical (and political) ideas were demonstrated in the play
he wrote at Coole during these difficulties: still called ‘Seanchan (pronounced
‘Shanahan’) after its poet hero, but later The King’s Threshold. Derived from
a story in Lady Wilde’s Ancient Legends, it was set in medieval Ireland and
concerned a bard who elected to go on a near-fatal hunger-strike in order to
assert the priority of cultural over political authority. wy thought it at the
time ‘the best thing I have ever done’, and promised Fay that the part of
Seanchan would give him ‘the highest opportunities’ and ‘establish all our
fame’. Thus the Fays were to be bound ever more tightly to him. Russell was
originally asked to speak a prologue, representing the thoughts of the hero’s
sceptical old uncle. Gregory’s hand is apparent in the Kiltartan dialogue of
this addition, and a fragment of the draft is in her handwriting.*° Russell was,
however, reluctant, and wBy wooed Fay for this part too (‘I hope you won't
mind being your own uncle. I have an uncle but I cannot sacrifice him, as he
is my only wealthy relation, and may be in the theatre besides, nor is he so
unlike my old man that he mightn’t find himself in it’**). But the prologue,
unperformed though it remained, stressed the central theme: the necessity
for temporal authority (king and mayor) to recognize the poet’s power. This
—as Max Beerbohm mischievously pointed out when the play reached London
a year later—was directly applicable to wBy himself. In Beerbohm’s sparkling
analysis, wBy had recognized he was ‘not taken seriously enough’, and, being
Irish, demanded his due in a play rather than through writing letters to the
papers or pompous articles (as William Watson had just ineffably done). Dub-
lin reached the same conclusion, the Leader construing ‘Plays With Mean-
ings’ to represent ‘Mr Yeats’s creed of revolutionary sentiment ministered to
by poetic imaginings’.””
From August, the rift within the Society became irreparable. The Shadow
ofthe Glen provided the issue for Gonne, Hyde and some actors to leave the

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INTS over its abandonment of ‘National and propagandist work’.** In the

same month Griffith founded an organization called Sinn Féin (Ourselves
Alone’), a strongly Anglophobic grouping which subordinated all criteria to
the Irish-Ireland ideal. The new issue of SamAain in early September carried
(as well as the text of Synge’s Riders to the Sea) a reprint of wBy’s ‘The Reform
of the Theatre’, which directly challenged the Griffithites by inveighing
against ‘mere propaganda’, defended the Society’s English tour, and prepared
the ground for the announcement of subsidy from an Englishwoman.
wey was ready for a fight. He had, after all, supported Gonne’s campaign
against the royal visit that summer, through letters to the Freeman’ Journal
(concocted with Gregory at Coole).® And he had Frank Fay, Griffith’s erst-
while drama critic and chief anti-Saxonist arbiter, firmly on his side. Fay wrote
to him, that there could be no question ofa ‘friendly’ split with the secession-
ists. ‘Our society has been blackguarded up and down Dublin ever since we
refused “The Saxon Shilling” and the blackguarding has been done by one
of our own people [Cousins].’ Fay further argued that they must play any-
thing well written (so long as it did not ‘uphold the Unionist idea’), and not
hide in ‘the shelter of the church’. wBy could not have put it better himself.
And Rule 64 of the reconstructed INTS stressed that ‘no sectarian discus-
sion shall be raised, nor shall any resolution which deals with irrelevant and
contentious subjects be proposed at a General Meeting of the Society’.
Unsurprisingly, to Gonne and Cumann na nGaedheal, Fay appeared a
turncoat, having sold out to ‘anti-national’ interests and ‘select’ audiences;
and wBy was tainted with Unionism. She told him this in furious letters,
berating him and Gregory for their ruthless takeover of the Society and the
theatre movement; she was fiercely determined to retain the performing
rights to Cathleen ni Houlihan for ‘the National Societies’, only lending back
the vital wig for the name-part with extreme reluctance.*! But, in possession
of the Fays, Gregory, most of the actors, all the public réc/ame and the pro-
spect of Horniman’s money, the INTS could ignore all secessionists. From
7 October 1903, at the Molesworth Hall, they presented their most electric
season yet, starting with The King’s Threshold, followed on 10 October by In
the Shadow of the Glen. The controversial costumes for the former were
designed and made by Annie Horniman. ‘Do you realise that you have given
me the right to call myself “artist”?’ she wrote to wBy. ‘How I do thank
you!’ That ‘right’ would not be cheaply bought.
For the moment, all attention was directed on Synge’s play. The mal-
contents had done their work, which created great publicity; even before
it was played, an article denouncing it had appeared in the Independent,
which articulated middle-class Catholic respectability, and wBy had impli-
citly defended it in his open letter to the United Irishman. That defence was
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 THE TASTE OF SALT 1902-1903
reiterated in his speech to the audience after the curtain on 10 October: ‘his
usual thumpty-thigh, monotonous, preachy style’, according to the jaundiced
Holloway,” but delivering an important message. He defended the artist’s
right to ‘show life, instead of the desire which every political party would sub-
stitute for life’. It has been claimed that he was trying to ingratiate himself
with Horniman’s non-political strictures,“ but this is to anticipate the con-

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ditions of 1906 to 1907; it is consistent with all his arguments in 1903, and was
more likely aimed at Griffith, Sinn Féin and Gonne. At any rate, Horniman
made her offer of a theatre that night.
From this point too United Irishman denounced the INTS on anti-
national grounds. Even their successful English tour betokened Ibsenite
corruption: ‘Some of our friends, I fear, now tour Connemara and see —
Scandinavia.’ ‘Cosmopolitanism never produced a great artist nor a good
man yet and never will.’ The paper also attacked The King’s Threshold for good
a9]
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

measure, affecting to believe that the audience’s sympathies were on the side
of the sensible king and his faithful soldiers, and would have approved the
execution of the tedious, sulky, self-important poet hero. This kind of pointed
gibe at the author was inevitable, given wBy’s prologue. Though the theatre
audience was spared it, it was printed in the United Irishman on 9 September
and made clear the identification of Seanchan with his progenitor.
The controversy over Synge’s play, however, attracted far more attention.
His story of marital infidelity amd financial calculation presented a view
of Irish rural life which was too much even for the Irish Times. Enormous
public interest had been generated. On 17 October, George Wyndham, the
aesthetically inclined Chief Secretary, took six seats — one of them a red
armchair, which gave an unwelcome air of Castle patronage. This was all the
nationalist critics would have expected. Griffith began a lengthy campaign,
accusing Synge of lifting the old story of the Widow of Ephesus and using it
to slander Irish womanhood. This formalized his separation from the Society.
The United Irishman carried, in succession, Gonne’s manifesto ‘A National
Theatre’, jBy’s defence of Synge and the principle of self-examination, and
wBy’s ‘An Irish National Theatre’, which would be reprinted in the 1904
Samhain and laid out the principles upon which Horniman parted with her
money. Thus the controversies of October helped define the terms on which
the INTS would go forward.
That stormy season also pushed the nationalist societies out to the fringe
again, where they continued to play politically uplifting dramas to tiny audi-
ences.® The issue of Samhain, published to coincide with the performances,
once again included the texts of some plays, and wBy’s random thoughts about
the year’s dramatic activity. Those who read between the lines could see that
Hyde was now out of favour, and the INTS was being deliberately distanced
from Cumann na nGaedheal ‘propaganda’; here wBy struck on a ringing phrase,
‘the pure joy that only comes out of things that have never been indentured
to any cause’. Russell, while not a Sinn Féiner and still attached to the INTS,
was increasingly unhappy about the split, especially when wBy brought pres-
sure on him to retract his offer of Deirdre to the secessionists. WBY himself,
to judge by a private memorandum, would have liked to keep the Gaelicist
element at least within the INTS; he feared the power of the language
lobby as an alternative focus, and the splits in the literary societies of the
1890s provided an ominous precedent.®’ But once the breach was made, he
was unswerving. Much that happened in the autumn of 1903 presaged later
confrontations; the Synge issue distilled all the difficulties wBy had already
experienced with the ideologues. The self-assertive tone of Samhain was
sharply attacked by Thomas Kettle in New Ireland. ‘Can it be that these
petulant sayings, this fashion of pitting himself against “the mob”, spring from
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the consciousness that the ideas which underlie and direct his art are essen-
tially antagonistic to the ideas which underlie and direct the lives of the great
majority of his countrymen?’ Kettle meant, apparently, Catholicism as much
as pious nationalism, and his warning was all the more clear because it came
from someone usually construed as intellectually sympathetic, if conservat-
ive. ‘A philosophy, like an animal, can maintain itself only as long as it abides
in harmony with its environment. Mr Yeats will no doubt follow the path of
his intellectual development whithersoever it leads him. But there is this
danger: that his reading of life may diverge so widely from ours that all his
fine artistry will not save his work from automatic extinction — in Ireland at
least.’
Gonne weighed in too, less subtly, with the old accusation of cosmopol-
itan corruption. “The best and truest writings of our greatest living poet,
W. B. Yeats, are understood and appreciated by the people; the poems and
essays they do not understand are those touched by foreign influence from
which Mr Yeats has not altogether escaped, having lived long out of Ireland
... Mr Yeats asks for freedom for the theatre, freedom even from patriotic
captivity. Iwould ask for freedom for it from one thing more deadly than all
else — freedom from the insidious and destructive tyranny of foreign influ-
ence.” But with financial backing assured, and liberated by Gonne’s defec-
tion and (in his eyes) diminishment, wey stuck firm. As usual, he summed
up the situation (from his side) in a series of manifestos: three combative
articles for the United Irishman.
The final piece, appearing in the same issue as Gonne’s attack, bore the
challenging title “The National Theatre and Three Sorts of Ignorance’.
Ostensibly, this was his answer to the sustained abuse of Synge in the
Independent, but he flung down a gauntlet to the United Irishman itself as well.
‘Extreme politics in Ireland were once the politics of intellectual freedom also,
but now, under the influence ofa violent contemporary paper, and under other
influences more difficult to follow, even extreme politics seem about to unite
themselves to hatred of ideas.’ Anglophobia would inhibit ‘the imagination
of highly-cultivated men, who have begun that experimental digging in the
deep pit of themselves, which can alone produce great literature’. This must
be taken to refer to the author of The King’s Threshold as well as that of
The Shadow ofthe Glen. He then listed the “Three Sorts of Ignorance’. There
was that of ‘the more ignorant sort of Gaelic propagandist’, condemning
anything not written in ‘country Gaelic’ (including Plato). Then there was
‘the more ignorant sort of priest, who, forgetful of the great traditions of his
Church, would deny all ideas that might perplex a parish of farmers or
artisans or half-educated shopkeepers’. And finally the ignorance of ‘the
politicians, and not always of the more ignorant sort, who would reject every

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idea which is not of immediate service to his cause’. Irish nationalism must
allow ‘ideas, and beauty, and knowledge’ as an ‘Ark of the Covenant more
valuable even than victory’.
He had rarely put it more clearly, and never with such hauteur: the battles
of 1902 to 1903, his self-discovery as a playwright, his enthusiasm for Nietzsche
and the fellowship of Coole lent his polemic an unequivocal edge, while his
quarrel with Gonne and Griffith at last allowed him to identify the enemy.
For a liberal Protestant to refer to Catholicism this way in public broke one
of the taboos which sustained the uneasy collusions of Irish life; if to some
his stance seemed self-regarding and amoral, to others his language smacked
of the Protestant Ascendancy at its most contemptuous.” And for the United
Irishman these arguments always implied closet Unionism. ‘Obviously, if
politics are dropped, Ireland’s connection with England will not be en-
dangered.’”’ wBy’s conscience was clear on this point: he had lent his name
to enough anti-royalist demonstrations, argued at enough dinner parties,
addressed enough nationalist societies, kept enough Fenian company. Only
the previous May he had been instrumental in founding the ‘National Coun-
cil’, or ‘People’s Protection Committee’, to protest against the manipulation
of the King’s visit by the Irish authorities.” But in the furore over Synge’s play,
and the associated argument about the direction of the INTS, he was sure
where he stood; and the fact that he confronted Maud Gonne MacBride was
— now — no inducement to shift his ground.

IV
Confidence had also been imparted by the publication (in August) of In
the Seven Woods, a short collection of poems bound with the play On Baile’
Strand. It was Dun Emer’s first book, and wBy’s first collection for four
years. Lolly’s press had worked on it since February, with wy as dictatorial
as ever. To judge by surviving pulls of preliminary pages, he wanted to change
everything from the wording of the publisher’s name to his sister’s choice of
press-mark (‘impossible’) and dictated ‘no title page & all information at
end’. He was also importunate about the colour of the endpapers and cover
— evidently demanding blue or grey, though this was not mastered until later
volumes. ‘Surely all you have to do would be to put paper in solution of
indigo. I know nothing about paper dyes, but I thought the process simple.
They die cloth at Lady Gregory’s gate house.’”? In some desperation, Lolly
protested to a correspondent, ‘I have done the whole printing of it myself
with the help of two young village girls whom I have had to teach (as well as
learn myself).’”*
Despite imperfections, it was a credit to her. She printed 325 copies;
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 THE TASTE OF SALT 1902-1903
booksellers were rather chary, but subscription copies brought in £135,
taken up by an eclectic range of family (George Pollexfen, Isabella Varley),
old friends (including Tynan and York Powell) and recent followers (Gogarty,
Ella Young, Father O’Donovan).’° It rapidly sold out. Quinn arranged a
copyright edition in America, interceding energetically with Macmillan.”
wey had thought the collection, subtitled ‘Being Poems chiefly of the Irish
Heroic Age’, was ‘much more likely to please Irish people than any I have
done’.” The medievalism of Baile and Aillinn, ‘The Old Age of Queen
Maeve’ and On Baile’s Strand carried through the promise of the title; ‘The
Withering of the Boughs’ echoed a ninetyish dreaminess; and the collection
also included the near-final version of ‘The Song of Red Hanrahan’, a paean
of sacrificial nationalism which would remain Gonne’s favourite of all his
poems. But the volume marks, rather uneasily, a transition. The title-poem,
written the previous August, celebrated the peace of Coole and the restora-
tion of a sense of proportion in escape from public agitation, with the threat
of apocalypse introduced ironically at the end.
I have heard the pigeons of the Seven Woods
Make their faint thunder, and the garden bees
Hum in the lime tree flowers; and put away
The unavailing outcries and the old bitterness
That empty the heart. I have forgot awhile
Tara uprooted, and new commonness
Upon the throne and crying about the streets
And hanging its paper flowers from post to post,
Because it is alone of all things happy.
I am contented for I know that Quiet
Wanders laughing and eating her wild heart
Among pigeons and bees, while that Great Archer,
Who but awaits His hour to shoot, still hangs
A cloudy quiver over Parc-na-Lee.

Three poems about Gonne struck a new note, not simply because they
dealt with ageing and imperfection. In “The Arrow’ he was pierced by the
memory of her
... when newly grown to be a woman,
Blossom pale, she pulled down the pale blossom
At the moth hour and hid it in her bosom.

But in “The Folly of Being Comforted’ he described the decay of her phys-
ical beauty. He had originally written of ‘crowsfeet’ around her eyes, but she
objected on the disingenuous grounds that readers would assume he meant
Gregory (‘It was the first time that I realised that she was human’’’). All the
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same, the ageing of the siren meant no release; as so often, he saw her as a
phoenix, forever re-created to trouble his peace.

But heart, there is no comfort, not a grain

Time can but make her beauty over again
Because of that great nobleness of hers;
The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs
Burns but more clearly; O she had not these ways,
When all the wild summer was in her gaze.
O heart O heart if she'd but turn her head,
You'd know the folly of being comforted.

Here, and most of all in ‘Adam’s Curse’, the direct, personal colloquialism struck
home. He would shortly write to Russell that he had been fighting an ‘exag-
geration of sentiment and sentimental beauty’ in his early work: ‘I have been
fighting the prevailing decadence for years & have just got it under foot in
my own heart — it is sentiment and sentimental sadness, a womanish intro-
spection.”” The newer poems of In the Seven Woods were introspective in their
own way, but the autobiographical note, diffused and distant in his early
lyrics, sounded here with a new confidence, expressed in a harder diction. More
than half the book was taken up by the play On Baile’ Strand; an introduct-
ory note stressed that its much rewritten form foreshadowed ‘a change that
may bring a less dream-burdenend will into my verse’. Thus his poetry was
beginning — if unevenly — to reflect his achieved personality. He was grow-
ing into his life.
He was also about to embark on another new departure. In the spring Quinn
had negotiated with Macmillan in New York about taking over wBy’s poems
and plays in the USA,” and since the early summer he had been planning a
lecture-tour of America. This had long been pressed by the indefatigable
Quinn, who had founded a short-lived New York branch of the Irish Literary
Society.*’ Its President, oddly, was wBy’s old High School friend Charles
Johnston; three of wBy’s plays (Cathleen ni Houlihan, The Pot ofBroth and The
Land ofHeart’s Desire) had been played at the Lyceum Theater under their
auspices from 4 to 5 June (with jBy’s portrait of his son, bought by Quinn,
displayed in the lobby). When wy was proposed as honorary Vice-President
of the New York Society, however, the Catholic Archbishop Farley quietly
resigned from the committee on undefined grounds of ‘propriety’. The Countess
Cathleen cast a long shadow. But the Lyceum plays were a success, and Quinn
believed that American audiences were ready to hear wBy in person. From
the poet’s point of view, the performance of his work by the Irish abroad was
a landmark. He wrote emotionally to Quinn, ‘I suppose it was some thought
of this kind that made Keats’s lines telling how Homer left great verses to a
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 THE TASTE OF SALT 1902-1903
little clan seemed [sic] to my imagination when I was a boy a description
of the happiest fate that could come to a poet.’ Quinn, possessive as ever,
had made all the arrangements: on 4 November wsy sailed on the Oceanic
from Liverpool. In the last year he had found atheatre company, lost Gonne,
met Joyce and presented Synge to the Irish public, and he was discovering a
new, assertive voice in drama and poetry. For all the grumbling, his fame
was firmly established in Dublin and London. He was ready and able for a
new world.

393
Chapter 12: FROM AMERICA TO
ABBEY STREET 1903-1904

20 May 1904. Yeats and Rothenstein to grub . . . Character

and personality in art were discussed. They were both rather
struck by the obvious fact that great natural talents and ability,
or natural gifts, are fairly common: what constitutes the super-
iority of the really talented man is his own sense of the impor-
tance of his gifts; that he persists in them, husbands them, and
is never discouraged. He survives almost by persistency.
Charles Ricketts, Self-Portrait

I
‘Mr Yeats seems to be making frantic efforts to interest the American
public in himself, in advance of his lecture season here,’ wrote a sarcastic
reader at Macmillan in New York, in the course of turning down The King’s
Threshold.’ John Quinn must have fumed, but he privately admitted to Russell
that from the summer of 1903 enterprises like the New York Irish Literary
Society looked like a design ‘to boom the works of Yeats’. This, Quinn in-
sisted, was not the case: ‘a Yeats “boom” . . . is precisely what should be
avoided, if possible. Kipling was killed by Doubleday, McClure and com-
pany and by a few alleged friends. Yeats needs no boom and wants no boom
and a boom is of all things the thing that is most to be feared.”
None the less, Quinn spent the weeks before wsy’s arrival in a storm of
preparations. Antagonistic ‘Gaelic Society members had to be dealt with,
demanding ‘whether you spoke Irish or not and why you were selected to speak
on the Irish revival’; unsuitable would-be critics of wBy’s work were merci-
lessly choked off; most of all, a strenuous schedule had to be arranged with
itineraries, fees and a photographic portfolio (‘the less retouched the better’).
Arrangements had been set in train the previous May, and were firmly in place
by July.* The tour was to cover the East, Mid-West and California; lectures
were to be given largely to educational institutions, for a fee of $75 each or
$240 for four. Quinn arranged the rates and saw off colleges who tried to
bargain it down or wanted to charge at the door, though $50 might be enter-
tained from very small institutions. Complications arose. Princeton claimed
poverty (alleging that Hyde had paid ¢4em in order to lecture there); Columbia
wanted sole rights to wBy in New York (Quinn had to threaten them with the
trustees); Californian colleges had to be charged $125 to cover the high costs
of travel; and some disingenuous strokes were pulled.’ But in the end an

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intensive programme was agreed, and Quinn deluged editors with promo-
tional material which sold the Irish poet as ‘comparable only to Maeterlinck’,
Private contacts were assured ‘he is not a boy, as some people imagine, but is
a man of mature age — 38 or 39 years — and is as sincere and courageous an
Irishman as lives and one of the most charming men I have ever met’.
The lecturer arrived on 11 November 1903, armed with four basic pieces,
typed out by Gregory: ‘The Intellectual Revival in Ireland’, ‘Heroic Literature
of Ireland’, ‘The Theatre and What it Might Be’, ‘Poetry in the Old Time
and in the New’.” However, he was also prepared to deliver occasional causertes,
and to change material employed in the lectures (he was still amending them
at Christmas). ‘I trust to the inspiration of the moment when speaking to a
college,’ he explained to Lily, ‘but Ihave to elaborate everything for a great
audience.”* The effect of his own performances, he discovered, varied from
place to place.
And there were many places.* At first he spent a few days in a hotel but
then moved into Quinn's lavishly equipped apartment, hung with paintings
by Russell and both Yeatses; he also had the run of his host’s office facilities.
Introductions from O’Leary brought him to Irish American nationalist
leaders like John Devoy and William Carroll, but he also contacted the more
moderate William Bourke Cockran (a Sligo man), and a circle of New York
journalists whom he had known in his youth — Frederick Gregg, Charles
Johnston and Charles Fitzgerald. Johnston (Protestant and Theosophist
that he was) wished to direct Irish Americans towards Irish culture rather than
‘shallow American society’;’ but hostile echoes from advanced nationalism
had already been picked up by Quinn, and wey expected trouble from people
like Father Peter Yorke in San Francisco (a cousin of John MacBride). Care-
fully set-up pieces like a long article in the New York Morning Sun by James

* There is a copy of some of

the planned itinerary in NLI MS 30, 539. As it worked out, it was: 16 Nov.,
Yale; 17 Nov., New Haven Literary Society; 18 Nov., Smith; 19 Nov., Amherst; 20 Nov., Trinity College,
Hartford; 23 Nov., Philadelphia (with Ezra Pound in the audience); 25 Nov., CCNY; 28-30 Nov., Wellesley;
1 Dec., Harvard; 3 Dec., Bryn Mawr; 4 Dec., Vassar; 5 Dec., Brooklyn; 7 Dec., Bryn Mawr (again); 8 Dec.,
Philadelphia (again); 16 Dec., Science and Art Club, Germantown, Pa.; 17 Dec., McGill University, Montreal;
19 Dec., Twentieth Century Club, Brooklyn; 20 Dec., Sligo Men’s Association Dinner, New York, with
Bourke Cockran; 27 Dec., Washington; 28 Dec., lunch with Roosevelt at the White House; 29 Dec., Press
Club Reception, New York; 30 Dec., Arts Club, New York; 31 Dec., at Parsifal, then Authors’ Club recep-
tion, New York; 3 Jan. 1904, Carnegie Hall lecture; 4 Jan., leaves New York for the West; 5-8 Jan., at St
Louis; 9 Jan., Indianapolis; 11 Jan., Purdue, Lafayette; 13 Jan., Twentieth Century Club, Chicago; 14 Jan.,
Women’s Club, Chicago; 15-17 Jan., Notre Dame; 18 Jan., Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana; 20
Jan., St Paul; 27 Jan., San Francisco, Berkeley, and a Celtic evening at the Alhambra Theater; 29 Jan.,
Stanford; 30 Jan., Alhambra Theater (again); 31Jan.—3 Feb., visits, dinners, clubs; 7 Feb., Chicago (again);
8 Feb., Hull House, Chicago; 9 Feb., University of Wisconsin; ro Feb., Beloit College; 11 Feb., Chicago
(third visit); 12 Feb., Toronto, Queen’s University; 13 Feb., University of Toronto; 14 Feb., Niagara Falls;
15 Feb., New York; 16 Feb., Baltimore; 18 Feb., Brooklyn (again); 19 Feb., Wells College; 21 Feb., CUA,
Washington (again); 24 Feb., Newark, NJ; 25 Feb., Bridgeport, Conn.; 26 Feb., Paterson, NJ; 28 Feb., Emmet
Lecture at Academy of Music, New York.

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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

Gibbon Huneker anticipated criticism and tried to head it off”? (‘There is

no pose about Mr Yeats. He does not come to make money or to assume
superior attitudes’). Huneker was later lined up by Quinn to defend wy
against charges of ‘decadence’.!’ Another journalist announced that wsy had
come to America ‘to escape the surveillance of the English police’.”* This con-
troversial reputation ensured heavy press coverage and necessitated painful
judiciousness on wBy’s part — as he found when he idly gave one journalist
the impression that he would be glad to see Kipling dead.”
But he learnt fast, smoothly telling interviewers, ‘I love Ireland first of all
things, but I dislike to be interviewed on the subject’, the Irish being passionate
and therefore ‘quick to misunderstand’.'* Once they had overcome their pre-
conceptions about fairies, interviewers were surprised by his energy and
humour. He talked indefatigably about the theatre, publicizing the work of
the Fays, recalling Gonne’s effect as Cathleen ni Houlihan, describing the
new playwright Padraic Colum inaccurately as ‘the not very lettered son of
an unlettered farmer’. But he had to provide opinions on issues of the day,
such as feminism — producing an endorsement of women’s education so long
as it did not ‘masculinise’ them, which would mean an end to art and civil-
ization.”
By and large, during his first weeks in New York he made a favourable
impression. Socially, not everyone appreciated his oracular remarks about
fairies or his congenital inability to remember names;"* non-Irish audiences,
like the New York Arts Club, were less impressed than Irish America. But
the emigrant Irish, basking in the reflected glory of his fame, suspended their
reservations about the depth of his nationalism. Arriving at a time when
they wanted respectability above all, wBy’s sophisticated Celticism, and high
claims for Irish culture above English materialism, struck a satisfying chord.
The Catholic backlash, which Quinn had feared from the ‘Protestant-heresy-
hunting’ elements of the New York Irish Literary Society, never transpired,
partly because of Quinn’s own assiduous cultivation of Clan na Gael contacts
as well as his determination to explain wBy to ‘the thinking people’.’” His
agenda was clearly stated ina letter to T- J. Shahan of the Catholic University
in Washington: ‘No-one is better fitted than Yeats to place before the young
Irishman of today an ennobling idea of the ancient dignity and ideals of
Ireland, in place of the truculence and servility that is too often seen among
our people in Ireland and this country.’ To upwardly mobile Irish Americans
this carried weight, even if some disappointed locals wanted to make him more
authentically Irish by ‘putting cuffs on him and sprinkling him with holy
water’.’8
For wsy himself, the American tour coincided with the emergence of his
differences with advanced nationalism in Ireland; he was determined to avoid
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 FROM AMERICA TO ABBEY STREET 1903-1904

politics by stressing the roots of Irish intellectual revival in the ancient saga
literature. Outside the college circuit, his audiences were diverse: drama
clubs and literary societies, as well as Irish American groups. But much of
what he said was directed at the last. To Aran Islanders, he told them, America
was nearer than England. He spoke passionately against the dilution of
Irishness and the importance of locale to audiences who probably never real-
ized he lived in London. The structure of his lectures stayed much the same
(they would be recycled for the next five years). Local sensitivities were
observed, and targets he had attacked in Samhain were praised in his lectures.
Oratorical flourishes grew as he gained confidence. He often ended his
‘Intellectual Revival’ lecture by comparing the different roles of different
nations to so many stops on the organ of the world: at Carnegie Hall he gave
it an extempore brio by pointing to an actual organ that happened to be on
stage.'” Gaelic legends, heroic traditions and the role of a national theatre in
reviving them provided the general theme. ‘The Intellectual Revival in
Ireland’ stressed the roll of heroes and martyrs in Irish history (including Parnell,
‘that astute and lonely spirit’), but generally he avoided politics for literature.
According to wBy’s thesis, Parnell’s political unifying of Ireland was injuri-
ous to intellectual individualism, which burst out afterwards — a theory he
would later develop into a central thread in the interpretation of his own life.
The Gaelic League, the theatre, the revival of language and literature were all
located in the post-1891 period, and presented ina kaleidoscopic whirl which also
took in Russell’s mysticism, agricultural co-operation, O’Leary’s inspiration,
the stained-glass industry and the excavations at Tara. It was, in a way, an essay
in precocious autobiography.
But everything revolved around the theatre, which, he claimed, supplied
a national language to those who, like himself, had lost Gaelic. They could
erect on the stage a civilization to combat that of England. In a rather
idealized picture, he told American audiences about country theatre groups
invading Dublin from all over Ireland, preaching Gaelic League values like
the wearing of Irish clothes. His lecture ‘Poetry in the Old Time and in the
New’ carried through the theme of the battle of two civilizations — in this
case, implicitly arguing for an elite culture based on a Morrisite rejection of
modern debasement in applied arts, and a return to the essential aristocracy
of folk tradition. Medieval ‘serfdom of the body’ was less degrading than
modern ‘serfdom of the soul’. ‘Out of the written book has come our dec-
adence, our literature, which puts the secondary things first. It is because
of the written book, in which we speak always to strangers and never with a
living voice to friends, that we have lost personal utterance.”°‘Thank God,’
he remarked in an unguarded moment, ‘in my country no-one reads books.’
wey’ account of the search for an uncorrupted culture in Connacht relied

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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

on the resonance of personal reflection: “When one comes upon some-

thing that a man has said straight out of the mind in a moment of frenzy,
one finds that among these country people there was [sic] an almost incred-
ible refinement.’ Throughout, tradition was set against imitation. The idea
of an integrated culture led, unsurprisingly, to the illustration of music and
poetry combined in his and Farr’s performances with the psaltery. His lec-
ture ‘Heroic Literature of Ireland’ allowed an opportunity to press the claims
of Gregory’s work, while “The Theatre and What it Might Be’ described
wey and his associates ‘training the shop-girls and shop-boys’ of Fay’s
company back to the assumptions of an age where ‘culture came to a man
without effort; it came to a peasant bending over the scythe or to the wife
rocking the cradle’.*!
Thus the content of wBy’s lectures repeated the preoccupations of his
essays and reviews over the past two years or so, but the far-flung schedule
arranged by Quinn enabled him to extend the crusade to provincial American
aesthetes, clerical students, New York clubwomen and the children of the Irish
diaspora. All had their own reasons for welcoming his message, and most
warmed to the force, charm and other-worldliness of his persona. wBy began
his lecture tour in the Eastern colleges — starting at Yale, and taking in
Harvard, Trinity College Hartford, Williams, Amherst, Wellesley, Mount
Holyoke, Smith, Vassar and Bryn Mawr. By 27 November he had given nine
lectures in as many days and was tiring, but he told Russell doggedly that ‘a
couple of weeks will make me a really good lecturer’. He was particularly suc-
cessful at women’s colleges like Bryn Mawr and Wellesley, where a certain
cult developed around his looks;” for his part, he delighted in the admira-
tion of unargumentative women, as he privately admitted to Gregory. At
Harvard he met William James and made a particularly successful trip south
to Philadelphia, where he had a long-standing admirer in Cornelius Weygandt.
In mid-December he ventured north to Canada, where the Montreal Daily
Star hailed him with a classic torrent of Ossianic gush: “The man, who has
won for himselfaunique place in the literary world is a true type of the old
Keltic bard, tall, thin, flashing deep-set eyes, sensitive mouth and masses
of black hair, it takes but a little stretch of the imagination to picture him
wandering from castle to hut, singing the songs of old Ireland.
After Christmas in New York, the wandering bard set off to Washington,
where a lunch on 28 December with Roosevelt had been arranged by Quinn.
The President was already a firm supporter of the Irish literary movement,
and a particular admirer of Gregory’s work. A fellow-guest’s assertion that
wey astounded his host by discoursing on ‘the little people’ is probably den
trovato,”* but Quinn evidently felt some nervousness about the encounter. ‘If
he invites you to go horseback riding, decline,’ he unnecessarily instructed
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 FROM AMERICA TO ABBEY STREET 1903-1904
his protégé, ‘because he is a rather vigorous rider and a jumper.”° wBy made
contacts among the Catholic establishment of the city, returning later to lec-
ture at the Catholic University; the clerical audience appreciated his ‘unique
idea of accomplishing national independence, not by force of arms nor
radical politics but by the gradual weaning of Irishmen from English custom
and the English tongue.’ Despite Quinn’s efforts to protect him from ‘irrel-
evant lectures and dinners’,”* he spent the final days of 1903 being lionized at
the Press Club and Authors’ Club, and speaking to the Arts Club, though
he apparently did not (as on later visits) try to meet American fellow-poets.
On 3 January he gave a much heralded lecture at Carnegie Hall, before
departing to the West.
Here he delivered ‘The Intellectual Revival in Ireland’, chaired by Bourke
Cockran; in an excited letter to Gregory he described practising in the
deserted auditorium, with his histrionic final flourish (the organ again)
applauded by the Irish caretaker. Quinn had 600 flysheets pasted up and sent
out 2,000 circulars, though in the event a freezing night kept the audience
below 600. Those who came, however, were not disappointed. wBy was
well rehearsed by now and Quinn had impressed on him the importance of
this particular audience. The speech stressed a Moranite line on the Irish—
English conflict as ‘a war between two civilisations’, and Devoy shepherded
an admiring Clan na Gael deputation to signify full approval afterwards.
Privately, Quinn was rather put out by the disappointing attendance, and the
lecture did not break even financially. He kept this quiet, fulminating only to
close friends about the opposition from priests and ‘bullet-headed Firbolgs’
and redoubling his efforts to get profitable college bookings.” None the
less, by this point wey had been won over to America at its elegant best, even
considering that the architecture ‘in what they call here their “old colonial
style” would have been a delight to Morris’.* The cultivated, unshowy side
of American society appealed to him; and, most important of all, his self-
confidence soared. ‘Good news still comes from Willie,’ jpy told Gregory on
7 January, ‘a popular success and money in his pocket. It will be interesting
to see him on his return, but the critics will remind him that he is mortal.’2?
For the moment the traveller was ready to embark on further conquests.
On 4 January he left New York for six weeks to take in the Mid-West, the
West Coast and Canada. Though he told Gregory he had begun to be home-
sick, he was determined to give twenty more lectures, calculated to bring in
£400 to £500. He was closely instructed by Quinn to pace himself, conserve
his energy and refuse dinners. Further details were given of people to avoid,
excuses to make, even where to sit on the train. In Quinn he had found a tem-
porary substitute for Gregory: someone who could deliver unstinting admira-
tion, close affection and peremptory instruction about changing his clothes
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and not bolting his food. In this, as in other needs, the effects left by his uncon-
ventional upbringing continued to reverberate through his adult life.
On 5January he arrived in St Louis, and stayed there till the 8th, discuss-
ing arrangements for the Irish pavilion at the World’s Fair; he then moved on
to Indianapolis and Purdue (an unsuccessful performance for engineering
students, whose reaction was ‘like wet sand’) before addressing the Twentieth
Century Club at Chicago on 13 January. There, to Quinn’s fury, a pretty girl
persuaded him to give an impromptu lecture at the University of Chicago,

ce.

iyTeWadeBele ee Roblin
13. wBy in America, as seen by Jack Yeats in a letter to Quinn, 15 December 1903. ‘This is Willy
lecturing on Speaking to the Psaltery in the wild and woolly West.’

where the Dramatic Club was performing The Land ofHeart’s Desire. Here
too a journalist claimed that he spoke unguardedly about the ignorant and
materialist aspects of American life, corrupted by ‘the degradation of indus-
try’ common to all modern countries. ‘But I want to repeat,’ he allegedly added,
‘that America is great, great even in its ugliness. As your aristocracy grows
the passion for beautiful things will grow. In the growth of that aristocracy
lies your hope.’ wy assured Quinn that this was an invention, but he cer-
tainly gave some hostages to fortune. Here, and later in San Francisco, he let
slip ideas which anticipated later, more considered reflections — as when he
hypothesized that England’s literary greatness was due to its Norman—French
component; only after Saxonism gained the ascendant under Cromwell, he
claimed, did race-hatred between England and Ireland develop. As he moved
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 FROM AMERICA TO ABBEY STREET 1903-1904
on from Chicago through Notre Dame, Bloomington and St Paul, his fame
grew. An evening with Irish priests at Notre Dame, like ‘big children & all
over six feet’, was particularly treasured and entered his canonical store of
memories. Here wsy could talk about Ireland as he knew it and exchange
fairy and folklore stories; he remained deeply impressed by the Notre Dame
clerics’ lack of bigotry, and the way that, when Irishmen encountered each
other abroad, common Irishness cancelled out religious prejudice. He was now
turning down invitations to Pasadena and Oregon, as the travelling was too
expensive. On 27 January he arrived in San Francisco to full-page press cover-
age. Quinn had a useful contact in the Irish American ex-mayor, James Phelan,
and a Celtic evening was arranged at the Alhambra Theater for the benefit
of the League of the Cross; even Father Peter Yorke, John MacBride’s fire-
breathing cousin, was favourably disposed, to Quinn's secret disappointment.
Instead of the anticipated fireworks, Yorke benignly remarked that ‘in one week
[wBy] has done more for the Irish name and the Irish cause in the centers of
culture than could be done in years’.*° Even in this quarter, the cachet lent by
wBy’ss glamour to Irish identity far outweighed the questionable propriety
of his political opinions.
wey stayed in San Francisco until 3 February, speaking at Berkeley and
Stanford, and disobeying Quinn by accepting invitations to dinners, visits
and clubs: a long newspaper interview captured him at the top of his form.*
He made one lasting friendship with a local writer named Agnes Tobin,
whose translations of Petrarch he would help edit, and loyally praise. Slightly
older than wsy, she was well-off, intense and determined to enter the
European artistic milieu. Like Quinn, she used contacts made through wBy
to become a regular fixture in the lives of writers she ‘took up’ across the Atlantic.
She may have wanted more from the poet himself, but they remained (as he
later put it with relief) ‘best of friends & likely to remain so & at that only’.*!
Though one newspaper recorded his reading of a poem called ‘The Lake
Idol of Innisfree’,*” he was by now a well-known and established lion. This
caused some resentment, particularly among representatives of Plunkett’s
Irish Agricultural Organization Society, also attempting to raise money in
the USA but with far less success; sniping by Father Tom Finlay and others
was repeated back to him, and the ensuing resentment cannot have helped
relationships back in Dublin.*°
By 7 February he had returned to Chicago, where he lectured at Hull
House and made forays to the University of Wisconsin and Beloit College.
He was starting to flag and his distrait manner offended at least one hostess,
who declared ‘she would not again expose herself to “being bruised by Willie

* See Appendix.

3II
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

Yeats” ’.** On 12 February he was in Toronto, where he expressed the essence

of his message. ‘Americans’, he said, ‘knew something ofthe public, passionate
life of the island in its struggle for self-aggrandisement; ofits inner, subtle,
picturesque, intellectual life they knew but little. Yet this latter aspect of the
Irish lite was infinitely more important and the basis on which depended the
future of Irish national life.°* This was deliberately echoed in his admoni-
tion at Washington a week later, against armed force and radical politics, and
in favour of cultural self-assertion. On both counts, he was using American
audiences to present his arguments against advanced nationalists at home.
But, like every Irish celebrity on tour in the USA, he tailored his message to
his audience, and this would become plain when he returned in triumph to
New York.
He arrived back there (via Niagara Falls) on 15 February, having stayed away
longer than intended. There were engagements at Baltimore, Bridgeport,
Brooklyn, Newark, and a return visit to Washington; but he was, unsurpris-
ingly, tired, ready for a break and feeling homesick. He was also beginning
to speak less carefully. His speech at the Catholic University on 21 February
endorsed language revival in hard-line Gaelic League terms, forecasting
‘a complete recreation of the land of Erin’, with ‘the hills and the valleys
echoing once more with the sweet music of the gaelic tongue . . . the time
is coming when the English tongue will have been expurgated’.** Even
considering the University’s recently founded Chair in Celtic Languages,
this was strangely at odds with his remarks on this sensitive subject at home.
But he was tired, and perhaps careless. Quinn had to woo him intensively
to accept these late engagements; and when he proposed that wBy give a
major speech to mark the centenary of Robert Emmet’s death, at the invitation
of Devoy and Daniel Cohalan, wsy at first refused. Exhaustion was one
reason; but he was equally concerned by the political implications. Quinn's
opening argument, that it would be ‘the same place [the Academy of Music]
and the same sort of audience that Maud Gonne and MacBride first spoke
to when they came here together’, was at best an ambiguous inducement. Quinn
tried further arguments: it would scotch rumours that wBy had criticized the
United States in his Western speeches, besides making him $200, or £70. But
wey refused. The money no longer seemed so vital (‘what’s £70 now that I
am fealing so rich’) and he longed to return and see the INTS productions
of On Baile’ Strand and Riders to the Sea. And the theme was disquieting.
Emmet, executed leader ofa doomed uprising against the British government
in 1803, was a sacred icon of advanced nationalism: as it happened, the actors
who had resigned from the INTS from political scruples had put on a spe-
cially written centenary play about him, with Cathleen ni Houlihan, at the
Molesworth Hall just before way departed to the USA.*’ ‘My mind is not
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full on politics,’ he told Quinn; he preferred to stress ‘general national prin-

ciples’ rather than nationalist rhetoric about the destiny of the Irish race.#
But Quinn, seeing a chance to redeem the disappointment of Carnegie Hall
a month before, insisted. The fee was raised to $250; the date was brought
back to 28 February; and even wBy’s misgivings about the subject were over-
come. At the same time he was preoccupied with Gonne’s attack on him in
the United Irishman and had written to her defending his stance on intellec-
tual freedom vis-a-vis nationalist conventions. As he got down to work on
his speech, he confided to Gregory: ‘I had no idea until I started on it of how
completely Ihave thought myself out of the whole stream of traditional Irish
feeling on such subjects.”
Clan na Gael, he thought, would ‘ask for Irish-Ireland thoughts rather
than politics’. This, as the event would prove, was very far from the case.
However, wey used the basic framework of his ‘Irish Revival’ speech, and
grafted on to it an account of Emmet’s career. A Leckyean view of the late
eighteenth century stressed the iniquity of the Act of Union ‘destroying the
nation’; Emmet emerged, like William Tell, as a ‘saint of nationality’, imbued
with the ‘ecstasy of self-sacrifice’. His revolutionary gesture was compared
favourably to the constitutional evasions of O’Connell, and even of Parnell;
this led into the ‘Irish Revival’ thesis, and gave him an opportunity to revile
the creation of ‘bribes’ like the Irish legal establishment, created to ‘draw away
the Irish intellect to other purposes than Irish ones’. As far as wBY was con-
cerned, the emphasis fell on cultural independence rather than on advanced
politics; his 4,000-odd listeners (by the Gaelic American's computation) may
not have heard it that way, especially when he called for a nation ‘like a great
tree [to] lift up its boughs towards the cold moon of noble hate no less than
the sun of love’. In support of preparation for ‘the necessary battle’ he read a
poem that ‘went through Ireland like a fire’ during the Boer War — twenty
quatrains cursing England.” As in Washington, he was giving an audience
what he assumed it wanted, in terms that bear little relation to his private
opinions as recorded at this time. For this reason, the Emmet speech was
certainly the success Quinn hoped for; it was the great climax of wey’s Amer-
ican tour, and when he died thirty-five years later the front page of Devoy’s
paper was devoted to recollections of the address as — implicitly - wey’s
greatest achievement.*' To the Clan na Gael mind, this may well have been
so. But in 1904 the occasion had an importance for Devoy and Cohalan
which had little or nothing to do with Irish intellectual revival, or even with
the Emmet centenary. The event in the Academy of Music was planned, and
used, as a great opportunity to make a public statement against Washington's
pro-British foreign policy, and to demonstrate support for Russian aims in
Asia. The Gaelic American's headline said it all: ‘Emmet the Apostle of Irish
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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

Liberty: Memorable and Significant Meeting. Irishmen Sound the Tocsin

against English Alliance and Proclaim Friendship for Russia’. A Russian flag
hung on the platform behind wsy; ‘a delegation of noted Russian ecclesiastics
— something before unheard of at an Irish meeting — occupied conspicuous
places on the platform’; and resolutions were passed supporting Russia and
denouncing the State Department's proposed Arbitration Treaty with England.
For Clan na Gael, wey’s peroration served as the curtain-raiser for a high-profile
Irish American demonstration against the foreign policy of Roosevelt and
Secretary Hay.
This instructive involvement showed that wBy’s own priorities could
be hijacked for the purposes of local politics. He devoted his remaining
days to social occasions, receiving glad-handing and unwanted free drinks
from Irish American hoteliers* and a final reception from the New York
Irish Literary Society on 6 March, described in detail by Francis Hackett.
The affectations of fame, in Hackett’s opinion, were becoming evident;
but ‘the poet of the Irish race’ was an inspirational figure, offering apostolic
benedictions and invoking a national ideal ‘more enduring than those of
Brunnhilde, Siegfried, Parsifal: the spiritual destiny of the Celt’.** This, at
least, was familiar territory, far more congenial than confounding the Asian
strategies of Secretary Hay. ‘I am setting a good many people reading our
Celtic books,’ he had written to the Duchess of Sutherland, ‘& it was for that
I came here — & our Celtic books mean to me not in the end books but in the
end a more passionate kind of life.’
He arrived back in London on St Patrick’s Day, after ‘a beautiful pas-
sage’ (much of it spent in discussions with William Strang, the Scottish
painter, who had done an etching of him the previous year). He had good
cause to be satisfied, and not only because Americans had been introduced
to ‘Celtic books’. Quinn’s boast to Gregory that no Irishman since Parnell
had made such an impression in the United States was probably true, despite
‘the coldness and studied neglect of many of our Catholic papers’. He had
spoken to sixty-four gatherings, possibly to 25,000 to 35,000 people; he had
earned $3,230.40.*° The spectacular difference this made to his usual finan-
cial state may be gauged from the fact that in the subsequent two months
he brought in exactly £2. 135. od. By June 1904 the total income made by The
Celtic Twilight and Ideas of Good and Evil was less than £100, swallowed
by advances; similarly, his plays had not yet earned out the meagre £34-
odd which wy owed on advances. Only the faithful Poems produced an
unencumbered 43r1. 155. 1d., and this was over three years.*” Suddenly, he
seemed rich. Tentatively, he decided to invest £400: ‘I have never had a penny
to invest before.”* This brought its problems too; by October the income
tax authorities were trying to assess him on estimated earnings of 4500
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 FROM AMERICA TO ABBEY STREET 1903-1904
per annum, largely due to his public prominence, and he had to prove his
penury to an inquiry.
But the dividends reaped in America were more than financial. ‘What
has pleased me so much,’ he had written to Gregory from Bryn Mawr, ‘is
getting this big audience by my own effort.”? Hearing him both at the
beginning and at the end of his tour, Cornelius Weygandt thought he
had transformed his mastery of the art of public speaking.°° His success
emboldened him for public debate with Griffith and other opponents, and for
‘vehement’ exchanges with Gonne. He had become an orator; the articulacy
and energy of utterance, which he had only intermittently discovered before,
had been liberated. Alone on a new continent, admired by strangers, he had
been able to reflect upon his personality, public and private, while constant
attention made him assess himself anew. He was cheerful, decisive, engaged.*!
Quinn reported proudly to Gregory:
He was always on time and made the entire Western trip alone and never missed a
train and did it all just as planned very successfully — Mrs Jack [Yeats] to the con-
trary notwithstanding. She ‘felt he must have been so helpless’ and was ‘so sure he
could not have got on unless everything had been planned’ whereas I took care to
assure her that he gave a good account of himself, was always on time, and was eager
and alert to do the correct and right thing always. His self-helpfulness was really remark-
able. The person who says he cannot always be relied on to do and say the right thing
and is not keen and alert to the facts of a situation, simply does not know Yeats.”

Physically too there were changes. He was on the edge of forty: his black
hair was slightly silvered; he had put on a little weight. He wore a long chin-
chilla fur coat, purchased for the Mid-Western winter and much mocked by
George Moore.*’ Age was becoming a preoccupation; his description of
Cuchulain to Frank Fay for On Baile’s Strand carries a strong autobiograph-
ical implication.
Ihave also to make the refusal of the sons affection tragic by suggesting in Cuchullains
character a shadow of something a little proud, barren & restless as if out of shere
strength of heart or from accident he had put affection away. He lives among young
men but has himself outlived the illusions of youth. He is probably about 40, not less
than 35 or 36 & not more that 45 or 46, certainly not an old man, & one understands
from his talk about women that he does not love like a young man. Probably his very
strength of character made him put off illusions & dreams (that make young men
a womans servant) & made him become quite early in life a deliberate lover, a man
of pleasure who can never really surrender himself. He is a little hard, & leaves the
people about him a little repelled — perhaps this young mans affection is what he
had most need of. Without this thought the play had not had any deep tragedy.
I write of him with difficulty for when one creates a character one does it out of
instinct & may be wrong when one analyses the instinct afterwards. It is as though

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the character embodied itself. The less one reasons the more living the character. I
felt for instance that his boasting was necessary, & yet I did not reason it out. The
touch of something hard, repellent yet alluring, self assertive yet selfimmolating is
not all but it must be there.”

Above all, in America the lyric gift began to return to him, if not with
particularly distinguished results. He began the poem ‘Old Memory’ at
Bryn Mawr in early December, finishing it on the train from Canada ten
days later, and wrote ‘Never Give all the Heart’ while staying with Quinn in
Manhattan. His new-found confidence enabled him to take a high line with
his American publishers, Macmillan; in January he firmly requested a new
royalty arrangement and demanded speedy US publications of The Countess
Cathleen and The King’s Threshold.°° By March he was emphasizing the new
market created in the wake of his American success, and the need for a
regular future arrangement leading towards a collected edition. He was also
able to use a counter-offer from Scribner against them. On his return to
London, he got the deal he wanted: Macmillan had first refusal on all his
books in America, and remained his publishers there for life.
wey knew he owed America much, but his feelings about the country stayed
ambivalent. The criticisms he had allowed himself on his first Chicago visit
hinted at a real reservation. Like most of the impressions he formed, his
reactions combined uncanny prescience with predetermined ideas derived from
his imagination; irrelevant intrusions, like the Russian ecclesiastics who
shared the stage with him in New York, apparently left no impression. The
article ‘America and the Arts’, written after his return, preserved some of his
thoughts. He liked the vividness and immediacy of American life, but deplored
a certain crudeness. He ostentatiously praised American women, in public
and private,”° and Jack Yeats’s wife heard that college girls had developed
crushes on him en masse; she fantasized that he might come home married.*”
He thought that education was ‘a national passion’ and college teaching
exemplary in its imaginativeness (though he was probably comparing it to
his father’s idea of Trinity College, Dublin, a distinctly limited standard).
In ‘half-Latin’ California ‘one could almost hear the footsteps of the Muses’.
But America needed an aristocracy, to build on the elegance and culture he
intermittently glimpsed in certain houses and institutions. His own predis-
positions towards authority and tradition, setting more and more firmly, made
him happy to be back in Europe.
All his friends noticed the increased self-confidence, along with the fur
coat and the slight paunch, while his family noted with relief the increased
bank-balance. Already in early February, Lily was asking him to put money
urgently into the embroidery enterprise at Dun Emer — which he saw as
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 FROM AMERICA TO ABBEY STREET 1903-1904
a riskier venture than Lolly’s printing, sending back a short but much re-
written letter. ‘I have forseen this moment all the while but it is anoying,’
he confided to Gregory. ‘If I give much it will go without effect (for it
will not be enough) & if I give little I shall be blamed always. I dont know
whether it is selfish of one, but my sisters have for so many years written me
so many complaints.’* As it happened, the crisis at Dun Emer passed — but
not for long. And there was an even more predictable request on the way.
Though claiming merrily he ‘hardly had courage to write’ the words, JBY
rapidly required one of his ‘loans’: £20, marking a new level of ambition. wBy
was home with a vengeance.

I]
Throughout his absence he had remained preoccupied with what he re-
peatedly referred to as ‘my little theatre’. In America he had perfected the
version of recent Irish theatrical history which would later infuriate the
Fays. The origins of the Irish National Theatre Society lay in the Irish
Literary Theatre begun by Gregory, Martyn and himself. They then, in
WBY'S version,
realised that we must take some of our own countrymen and educate them for the
stage. This at first seemed impossible, because in Ireland there are extremely few who
have the leisure for such an experiment. After all, our project at that time was only
an experiment. ‘Let us go to the clerks and the shop girls,’ one of us said, ‘and train
them for the stage after their work hours. Let us try.’ We found the task far easier
than we expected. It was only another evidence of the spirit of intellectual interest
which pervaded all classes. We formed a company and rehearsed at night.°?
The contributions of Fay’s training and Inghinidhe na hEireann’s enterprise
were sublimely ignored. And much as wy claimed the history of the Irish
theatre for himself, he asserted control over the dramatic present. When
Colum’s Broken Soil had a success in December, he wrote to Lily:
Columb’s success has overjoyed me. I was more nervous about that play than any-
thing else, for my position would have been impossible if I had had to snuff out the
work of young men belonging to the company. It would have always seemed that I
did so from jealousy or some motive of that sort. Now, however, one can push on
Columb and keep one’s snuffers for the next. One man that we did snuff out, Cousins,
has been avenging himself on Columb in the United Irishman.

While he had to accept the Reading Committee’s decisions taken in his

absence (such as their rejection of his and Gregory’s justifiably forgotten
Heads or Harps*'), he kept an eye on the theatre’s development and tried to
influence the choice of plays. The Irish National Theatre Society was now

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an established presence in Irish life, its position cemented all the more
firmly by the United Irishman’s opposition; Dublin Castle attempted to woo
them into giving a performance before the King on his next visit (offering
portrait commissions to JBY as an extra blandishment). But wpy’s direct con-
tribution to the repertoire was disastrous. The latest version of The Shadowy
Waters was played in January: reviewers found it vapoury and incoherent, and
patrons stayed away (or came to laugh). At a late stage Frank Fay was still
desperately seeking guidance as to what the play was about, and it showed.”
Synge thought it ‘the most DISTRESSING failure the mind can imagine, — a
halfempty room, with growling men and tittering females’.* Tiny audiences
were now aserious problem. And by early February wBy was more and more
worried about the choice of plays for the theatre (‘of which I am the head’)
and was determined to hurry back to take control.
He arrived in time for the INTS’s London season which, arranged by
Stephen Gwynn,” began on 26 March 1904; wBy’s Plays for an Irish Theatre,
containing The Hour-Glass, Cathleen ni Houlihan and The Pot ofBroth, was
published simultaneously by Bullen. The programme included wsy’s own
King’s Threshold and Synge’s Riders to the Sea. Horniman enthusiastically
intervened wherever she could, selling tickets to friends, firing off letters about
costumes and props, and chivvying others for not pulling their weight.®
Once again critical opinion had been well prepared, and a fashionable audi-
ence poured in, including many Liberal politicians. The simplicity and intens-
ity of the INTS’s acting style was hugely effective. John Masefield reported
to Jack Yeats that Synge’s play had the house in tears (enough handkerchiefs
‘to make a topsail’), while wBy got ‘a great call’ and had to make a curtain-
speech.*° The King’s Threshold was received with some reservations, but
Walkley in the TLS, Beerbohm in the Saturday Review and most of all Archer
in the World blew resounding trumpets. Beerbohm astutely noted that the
Irish used ‘simplicity’ as a form of exoticism:

One could not object to them as to the ordinary amateur. They were not flounder-
ing in the effort to do something beyond their powers. With perfect simplicity,
perfect dignity and composure, they were just themselves, speaking a task that they
had well by heart. Just themselves; and how could such Irish selves not be irresist-
ible? Several of our metropolitan players are Irish, and even they, however thickly
coated with Saxonism, have a charm for us beyond their Saxon-blooded fellows.
The Irish people, unspoiled, in their own island - who can resist them? But footlights
heighten every effect; and behind them unspoiled Irish people win us quicklier and
more absolutely than ever. And behind London footlights! There they have not merely
their own charm, but that charm also which belongs to all exotics. Many people went
many times, lately, to ‘In Dahomey’, fascinated by the sight of a strange and remote
race expressing through our own language things most strange to us and remote from
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 FROM AMERICA TO ABBEY STREET 1903-1904
us. Well, we are as far removed from the Irish people as from the negroes, and our
spiritual distance seems all the greater by reason of our nearness in actual mileage. I
admit that it was, in a way, more pleasant to see those negroes than to see these Irish
folk. When we contemplate negroes, one clear impression comes through our dim
bewilderment: we are assuredly in the presence of an inferior race. Whereas he must
be a particularly dull Saxon who does not discern and confess (at any rate to him-
self), that the Keltic race is, spiritually and intellectually, a race much finer, and also
much more attractive, than that to which he has the honour to belong.®

The Times warned the Irish players about becoming too fashionable; Shaw,
won over at last to this kind of avant-garde, offered to write thema play. wBy,
still buoyed up by American confidence, seemed to some of his acquaintances
too full of himself;** but he deeply impressed a stage-struck young Australian,
Louis Esson, who attended an evening gathering at Gregory’s London flat.
wey urged him to forgo cosmopolitanism, make an Australian theatre, ‘keep
within your borders’ and create a tradition. This was the voice of authority,
and Esson never forgot it.
Tt was a heady return to the Old World. After the London triumph, wBy
went to Coole in early April and spent a peaceful fortnight there, fishing
for pike (an enduring craze). He then inspected theatrical preparations in
Dublin before travelling on to London, where he attended an Irish Literary
Society meeting to hear Stephen Gwynn talk about the poetry of Tom
Moore, whose early nineteenth-century combination of Irish soulfulness and
English Romanticism provided an easy target for uncompromising nation-
alists. wBy’s response was to call for an oral culture rather than Moore’s
drawing-room ballads, in tones which echoed his new self-assertiveness. ‘He
thought he was the first man who had stood up to the printed book and had
told it what he thought of it.’ Events in America since his departure had
stiffened his backbone still further. At Coole he had heard the repercussions
of the visit by the seceding Irish actors to the St Louis exhibition, led by
Dudley Digges and Maire Quinn. They wanted to play Cathleen ni Houlihan,
The Land of Heart's Desire and Diarmuid and Grania: wey had refused permis-
sion, and expected Russell to withhold his Deirdre as well. But Russell, who
thought the INTS took too high a line about permissions, gave them the
right to perform his play and, when wBy remonstrated, offered to resign
from the INT'S.”” Meanwhile, the Digges troupe spread confusion by appear-
ing in America as ‘National’ players, profiting by the original company’s
recent London publicity; John Quinn sent violent exhortations to Coole about
the St Louis ‘fakirs’, blaming John MacBride for supporting them.”! Others
too were seen as enemies on this issue. T. P. Gill had fallen from favour, P. J.
Kelly was formally expelled from the INTS for agreeing to accompany Digges
to St Louis, and wsy threatened legal action if they pirated his plays.”

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Above all, his relationship with Russell, increasingly uneasy, shifted further
into antagonism.
But there were more positive developments afoot too. After the Lon-
don triumph, Horniman’s offer to provide a theatre premises materialized
decisively. On 8 April wy sent Horniman’s proposal to Russell (as Vice-
President); on 9 April he saw the Under-Secretary, Sir Antony MacDonnell,
about the question ofa patent, before other theatrical interests tried to block
them; on ro April the Dublin theatre-fanatic and architect Joseph Holloway
was approached about adapting a theatre.” For a premises had been found:
the hall of the Mechanics’ Institution, just north of the Liffey, which had
had a previous existence as the ‘Prince’s Theatre’, specializing in variety
entertainment. Horniman obtained it, along with some adjacent buildings
(including, to the pleasure of Dublin’s wits, a defunct morgue). It was to
be adapted and let rent-free to the INTS, under several conditions (notably,
that seat-prices be kept up, and 4o1 polloi kept out). It was, in other words, to
be a high-class venture.
Horniman herself was in Dublin during April, excitedly overseeing the
preliminary arrangements, and taking wBy to see the future theatre on
11 April — where they had to retreat before the abusive outgoing manager
(‘May you and your morgue have luck!’”*). wBy continued to move between
Dublin and London; a reaction to recent excitements was beginning to set
in, and he blamed a lowering of his spirits on the horoscope. But there were
more tangible reasons. The patent hearings for the new theatre dragged on
into the summer, sarcasms about Gregory’s new book irritated him, and
rival theatrical ventures continued to threaten. The nascent Ulster Literary
Theatre put on Cathleen ni Houlihan without permission, encouraged, to
wBy’s especial annoyance, by Gonne; he formally withdrew her right to
license performances of a play she believed she owned. And Russell, yet
again, annoyed him by allowing the Ulster group to perform Deirdre—‘some
nice boys who wanted to constitute themselves the Belfast branch of the
society’, Russell complained to Gregory, ‘and who never realised the lofty
skyreaching dignity of the Theatre Society until they got an indignant letter
from [the Society’s Secretary, George] Roberts putting them in their “proper
place”’.”
Writing at length to Roberts on 18 May, wsy revealed his worries about
the growing resentment of the INTS directorate in nationalist circles — and
his acute sense that their choice of plays for the coming winter would be
crucial. Shaw still promised a play, but tortured wsy with hints about its
scandalous contents. “That it will be amusing is certain, but whether it
will be possible or not I don’t know. It probably will for Mrs Shaw is doing
her best to keep him off dangerous subjects.’ More immediately, wy was
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passionately committed to Synge’s The Well ofthe Saints: ‘a really astonish-

ing play’, he told Quinn, ‘one of the masterpieces of our time as I think’.
Posterity might not agree, and nor would much contemporary critical opinion,
but wsy prepared the way by writing about it indefatigably, especially to
correspondents with newspaper connections.
There remained the question of his own dramatic output. From 26 to 28
June the Stage Society put on Where There is Nothing, to an uncertain crit-
ical response — though some reviews were surprisingly good. wsy’s rather
Meredithian curtain-speech about the ‘spirit of mischief’ did not clarify
matters, and privately he agreed with the hostile critics, telling Quinn that
it now seemed ‘a patchwork, not an organism’.’”° However, it attracted a fash-
ionable audience (in marked contrast to the Stage Society’s regular clientele),
one of whom, the Countess of Cromartie, subsequently asked wBy to tea.
Here he bumped into Queen Alexandra at a children’s party, an encounter
drolly recounted to Quinn: “The whole scene was very unexpected and curi-
ous and seemed to me not unlike a scene on the stage. I never saw so many
beautiful people together.’ His friends Ricketts and Shannon found the
meeting of this equally unworldly pair hilarious: ‘out of innocence he dis-
regarded all the conventions and spoke to her in the Yeats way. She knew
nothing of course of Yeats’s disloyal manifestos when royalty was in Ireland,
knew his poems, and wished to hear when next he gave one of his plays.”
He declared his impatience to shock Maud Gonne with this intelligence as
soon as he could; and this London visit enabled them to meet again, and attend
the Guildhall exhibition of Irish art together. These various attractions held
him in London until mid-July, when he returried to Coole, the pike in the
lake, and the affairs of the new theatre.
Once there he threw himself not into lyric poetry but dramatic construc-
tion: reworking the unsatisfactory Where There is Nothing, and beginning a
play on the theme of the tragic Irish heroine Deirdre, which preoccupied him
throughout the summer. The subject was resonant: already treated by Russell
and Rolleston, wBy was apparently anxious to put his mark on the story of
Treland’s Helen’ (or, as Dublin would have it, ‘The Second Mrs Conchobar’).”
Given that On Baile’ Strand had been his most successful play so far, he had
also decided that myth and saga were more dramatically effective for him than
the medieval allegory of The King’s Threshold or the Nietzschean modernity
of Where There is Nothing. And here, as ever, Gregory’s influence was vital.
wey spent all summer and much of autumn 1904 at Coole; their collabora-
tion became even closer. His eyes were especially troublesome, and she typed
most of his letters; her own voice sounds through them, in the archness of
language and modulation of tone for different correspondents (high-flown
and arty to Quinn, but self-consciously ‘country’ to Synge, with much about
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saving the hay). As for his own family, the instructions from Coole about
their several careers were peremptory enough to annoy even Lily, who in-
structed JBY:
I don’t like your writing to Jack. You say too much. He is all right and knows what
he is doing. He never drifts. Willy and Lady Gregory are both too ready to critize
[sic] and direct. They forget Jack is at the beginning and is seven years younger than
Willy. What of Willy’s technique seven years ago. They all forget this and from their
pedestal direct and order others a great deal too much. Willy was full of “Do this,
you must do that, etc.’ A press man is absolutely necessary and so on to us this time
last year. He even threatened us and bullied generally. But Lolly and I are hardened
and know him and stood our ground. Jack does not show fight. He is only wounded.
Jack knows what he is doing and doing well.
Why Willy looks upon himself as an authority upon needlework and a kind of design
necessary in particular, I was not to get designs from either Jack or Cottie but go to
his pets, young Maclagan, Mrs Traquair and Mr Gethin. The first send [sic] me a
ridiculous design, the second promised me one a year and a half ago. It has not come
yet. And the last send [sic] me one, quite commonplace and the wrong size. He is
such a great man I must not say anything. In reality no one ever heard of him but
Willy and his mother. Don't worry Jack. He wants encouragement and his work is
beautiful and his own. When we are all dead and gone great prices will be given for
them. I know they will.”

In the matters that most closely concerned them, the artist’s children all
knew their own minds: this was their inheritance.
One of wsy’s involvements with Dun Emer this summer concerned a
selection of Lionel Johnson's poems. His choice drastically under-represented
the Fenian mode which distinguished Johnson's ‘Irish’ verse, and he had
his reasons. wBy was not only deliberately distancing himself from advanced
nationalist propaganda but also simultaneously working on a long memor-
andum for Horace Plunkett to use in the battle for the new theatre’s patent,
which would stress the non-political nature of the venture. The very name
chosen was carefully neutral: “The Abbey Theatre’. The memorandum, com-
pleted in July 1904, is an absorbing document: it gives a Yeatsian description of
each play produced since the days of the Irish Literary Theatre, emphasizes the
Irish, artistic and uncommercial nature of the enterprise, modestly deprecates
his own plays, and administers some sharp digs in the ribs ({(Russell’s] Deirdre
is by a dear friend and a charming writer, but Ido not consider it a good play’).
Cathleen ni Houlihan is interpreted in as unpolitical a fashion as possible.
Throughout, he projects a sense of continuum:
I claim that, leaving aside my own work, we have done a great deal for the intellect
of this country — discovering and training into articulateness J. M. Synge, whom I
believe to be a great writer, the beginning it may be of a European figure . . We have

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caused a great deal of intellectual discussion, and we have done all this without
playing to any party. We have pleased and affronted all in succession.

The manifesto reflects an intense concentration on the new theatre in July;

Synge and Russell were also at Coole, followed by a spectacularly unsuccessful
visit from Horniman, at her most edgy and obtrusive, in August. On wBy’s
trips to Dublin witnesses were dragooned for the patent hearings, and the
importunate George Moore was mercilessly squeezed ever further to the
sidelines. In retaliation Moore circulated an article denouncing the Fay style
of production and direction, but wBy was by now a veteran of these skirmishes.
He sent Fay a masterpiece of advice, which also hints at how closely he iden-
tified Synge’s developing style with the Society’s dramatic ethos.
If I were you I would make your article an attack on realistic stage management.
The position of attack is far stronger than the position of defence. Put Moore on the
defensive and you will win. Be just to Antoine’s genius, but show the defects of his
movement. Art is art because it is not nature, and he tried to make it nature. A realist,
he cared nothing for poetry, which is founded on convention. He despised it and did
something to drive it from the stage. He broke up convention, we have to re-create
it... We must grope our way towards a new yet ancient perfection . . . We desire
an extravagant, if you will unreal, rhetorical romantic art, allied in literature to the
art on the one hand of Racine and [on] the other hand of Cervantes. We can no more
learn from Antoine than a writer of verse or a writer of extravagant comedy could
learn from a realistsic novelist. Moore once said to an interviewer ‘nobody will ever
write a realistic novel again. We are all gone now, Zola is dead Huyssmans is in a
monastery, and I am in Dublin.’ Moore knows that his kind of novel is obsolete, but
because he is an amateur in plays and stage management, he does not understand
that his kind of play and his kind of stage management is equally obsolete. Our move-
ments are clumsy for we are children, but we are a devil of a long way farther from
our coffins.*°
The patent hearings were an unqualified success; all the opposing counsel could
do was allege that wsy’s drama was immoral, without being able to remember
the names of any of his plays.
The new theatre was safe. This was just as well: workmen had been on
the site all summer, furniture ordered, and stained glass commissioned
from Sarah Purser’s workshop, though Horniman had been intensely worried
about the dangers of symbolism, settling in the end for safely non-committal
Celtic nut trees, symbolizing knowledge. Queen Maeve and her wolfhound
were already featuring on the notepaper. The longed-for permanent home
of the INTS was in the making. Those excluded were accordingly resentful,
but they had lost the contest: while the Leader fulminated against the ‘intol-
erable air of superiority in mind and culture’ projected by wBy’s ‘set’, Maud
Gonne was driven to recycling Gregory's work into articles on ‘Emer’ for the
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United Irishman and producing — in Dawn — a play uncannily reminiscent

of Cathleen ni Houlihan.

Ill
Meanwhile the inspiration of all this envy, based at Coole, was still trying
to define the nature of his own theatrical ambition. Writing to Ricketts that
summer, he described the hallmark of his plays as ‘a cry for a more abundant
and a more intense life’; the notion of ‘tragic exultation’ was lodged firmly in
his mind, perhaps best expressed in the poem that became the Musician’s
song in Deirdre, proudly sent both to Quinn and Farr in late September.
Echoes of Nietzschean philosophy chimed with resentment at the attacks
of Dublin quidnuncs and reservations about the power of industrial big
business to vulgarize culture, as seen in America. His correspondence dur-
ing the summer reverted to the topic of ‘plebeianising’, and a mordant note
to Russell about the Leader's attacks spoke for Gregory as well: ‘Neither your
character nor the character of any of us need defence. We should not dis-
cuss such things with any but our equals.’*' wsy’s increased consciousness
of class difference at this time also reflected the social nature of the acting
profession, still regarded in many circles as ‘unsuitable’. In constant contact
with people he described as ‘clerks’ and ‘shop-girls’, his supposed hauteur may
often have been absent-mindedness (or myopia); but it was not moderated
by the influence of Coole, and it was resented. And there was a definite sense
of difference, reflected oddly in his comment to Synge that women of Maire
Garvey’s or Maire Walker’s ‘class’ did not ‘have sensitive bodies’, however high
their ideals, and that this made the dramatic transmission of intense emotion
problematic. The thought was expressed with such uncharacteristic awk-
wardness that he himself may not have been comfortable with it. But it indic-
ated a firmly held sense of difference, unremarkable for the age but, in the
Irish context, reinforcing resentments and divisions which reached below
the crust of social class, down into the lava of religious and political tensions.
Meanwhile the rehearsal season drew on, and wy was thinking hard
about the procedure for choosing plays by committee; the terms of the patent
now provided a useful rationale for insisting on an airtight procedure (‘I have
had a long experience of societies, and I have never known a society that was
lax about its rules without getting into trouble sooner or later’). Arrangements
about a quorum, proxy voting and Chairman’s casting vote were closely
argued; this bore fruit a month later, when by-laws for the Reading Committee
were adopted.* Not all the directors were happy. Synge anticipated trouble
about choosing plays, convinced that the ex-Griffithite Frank Fay repres-
ented a ‘neopatriotic-Catholic clique . . . which might be serious’. He was
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mistaken: Fay had long ago attached himself to the way bandwagon and
attacked the continual sniping at the poet (‘What did we Irish do that the
gods put so much bitterness & jealousy into our hearts?’**). This was a course
he would later regret. But the question of plays for the new theatre was
highly sensitive. And it was about to be inflamed by one of Shaw’s most
unerring darts.
By mid-September John Bull’s Other Island had arrived at Coole. As long
ago as March 1900 he had agreed to write a play for the Irish Literary Theatre,
but by the time he delivered it circumstances had changed and, as Shaw
himself remarked, ‘like most people who have asked me to write plays, Mr
Yeats got rather more than he bargained for’. Long out of Ireland and utterly
opposed to returning, Shaw had none the less built up a reservoir of exasper-
ated reflection. Now it burst. Reading the sprawling, inventive, sarcastic text,
wBy must have wondered at once what Dublin would make of it. All stereo-
types were reversed, the Irish characters being hard-headed and calculating,
the English woolly and sentimental. ‘Standing here between you the English-
man, so clever in your foolishness, and the Irishman, so foolish in your clever-
ness,’ remarked Shaw’s protagonist, ‘I cannot in my ignorance be sure which of
you is the more deeply damned.’ The Gaelic League was heartlessly mocked
(the only genuine Gaelicist was a romantically minded English developer).
Public pretensions and religious pieties were exposed. There was a sharp
Moranite dig that ‘calling the unfortunate island Kathleen ni Hoolihan . . .
saves thinking’.® The brilliant ‘Preface for Politicians’, which makes the
play a key text in understanding Anglo-Irish relations, was yet to come; in dra-
matic terms it was wildly over-long; but even in first draft John Bull’s Other
Island raised serious questions. Could the new theatre open with such a sus-
tained blast of iconoclasm?
Ina letter which was obviously a joint concoction with Gregory, wBy told
Shaw: ‘You have said things in this play which are entirely true about Ireland,
things which nobody has ever said before . . . It astonishes me that you should
have been so long in London and yet have remembered so much.”® He added,
disingenuously, that he thought it would not be ‘dangerous’; there would be
indignation, but they could survive it. Privately, its great length gave an
excuse to stall, though Synge, predictably, wanted to press on with it, after
cuts. There were also technical difficulties; a motor accident, for one thing,
had to be represented on stage. GBS wrote straightfacedly to wBy on 31 Au-
gust, asking about modern machinery: ‘It occurs to me that as you will deal
in fairy plays you may have involved yourself with hydraulic bridges.’®” Fay
was worried about casting it, but wBy held his counsel. Shaw cannily kept
his options for an English production open throughout, and when wBy
returned to London he was able to see it done experimentally byJ.E. Vedrenne
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and Granville-Barker at the Court Theatre. He admitted to Gregory that

he disliked it. Even though it acted ‘very much better than we cd have fore-
seen’, it was ‘fundamentally ugly and shapeless’. He never found Shaw easy.**
Old rivalries persisted, and in nearly every way John Bull’s Other Island was
the antithesis of a wBy play. The difficulty of casting an English actor to
play Broadbent was made much of; the length was considered intractable;
by r May 1905 wy, with relief, allowed Shaw to give ‘that green elephant’ to
Calvert for an English production.
Meanwhile, the company prepared for their first season at the Abbey
Theatre. wBy was in Dublin when rehearsals began on 31 October, along with
John Quinn, who was fitting in a briefand much postponed visit —in the course
of which he also met wBy’s London circle and tried to persuade Charles
Shannon to paint a portrait of the poet.” For his host, however, the theatre
subsumed all. The new locale seemed to provide an opportunity to express
his theories about abstract sets, and he conceived the idea that Jack should
paint backdrops of Synge’s play: Jack will mass colour and form and treat the
whole thing decoratively.’ Many of his colleagues had reservations but wBy,
recently horrified by Beerbohm Tree’s pantomimic Tempest in London, was
inexorably anti-commercial. ‘Even if an artist’s work prove to be less effective
than the ordinary stage scene to ordinary eyes, it will soon grow even to ordin-
ary eyes much more effective, as the artist learns his business, and from the
first it will show an individual mind.” Other ideas for visual innovation
at the Abbey included bringing in Robert Gregory; looking at the work of
‘Madam Macrovitch’ (his old friend Con Gore-Booth, now married to the
dilettante Polish artist Casimir Markievicz, who had taken all too readily to
Dublin's bohemia); and searching for inspiration among the Japanese prints in
the British Museum. ‘One must have a complete asthetisism,’ he told Synge,
‘when one is dealing with a synthetic art like that of the stage.’
Not everyone agreed. His old friend, artist and Masquer Pamela Colman
Smith, ‘alone seems to understand what I want to make a design’, and Jack’s
ideas were regretfully rejected. But wBy remained at the centre, convinced of
his own indispensability (‘the moment I am gone the old business will begin
again”). And there were ominous portents: a long struggle had commenced
with Horniman over the seat prices, pegged at a shilling in the Abbey but
sixpence at other Dublin theatres. Relations with his benefactor were fur-
ther threatened by public disagreements over the ‘archaeologically correct’
costumes which she designed for On Baile’ Strand. And Dublin’s cultural life
was further enlivened (or envenomed) that autumn by the first engagement
in the long-running campaign by Hugh Lane, Gregory’s connoisseur nephew,
to bring a permanent collection of modern painting to the city. Hostilities
were declared when the Royal Hibernian Academy crassly terminated Lane’s
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show of Modern French art from the Staats-Forbes collection in order to

prepare for the Decorators’ Guild exhibition. This was aimed as a body-
blow against Lane’s and Gregory’s campaign to found a gallery, based on the
purchase of the pictures at the Academy. Lane, who could be both outrageous
and ruthless, occupied a sensitive position. It was sharply remarked that he
was a notably successful art dealer who turned famous profits; but he had already
bought a number of the paintings himself and was prepared to donate them.
wey, who had visited the show ‘almost every day’, played a leading part in
the campaign, writing to influential friends and lobbying journalists. Both
the Freeman’ Journal and the Irish Times opened subscription lists, and by
January 1905 enough money had been raised to buy 160 of the Staats-Forbes
paintings for £160,000.
Given Gregory’s involvement, wBy’s commitment was inevitable. He
even appeared on the same platform as George Moore at the latter’s lecture
promoting the paintings.” But the issue of Lane’s gallery held a broader
importance for him, since the scheme’s opponents were exactly the elements
in whom he discerned his own enemies. On the one hand, Lane was assailed
by the bourgeois Dublin establishment, who thought the pictures worthless
and wrote to the papers saying so; and on the other, by the United Irishman,
which harped on Lane’s own art dealing and insinuated he was lining his
pockets. wBy eventually forced an apology from Griffith (their ‘first serious
quarrel’, he told Quinn). On both wings, the philistines were massing: ‘the
political question is giving a lot of trouble’, he told Shorter.** He brought to
the battle his post-American confidence, his heightened consciousness of
class and tradition, and his long history of struggling with Dublin opinion.
For all its inspired malice and free-wheeling chronology, George Moore’s
recollection of his former friend’s public intervention indicates as much:

As soon as the applause died away Yeats, who had lately returned to us from the States
with a paunch, a huge stride, and an immense fur overcoat, rose to speak. We were
surprised at the change in his appearance, and could hardly believe our ears when,
instead of talking to us as he used to do about the old stories coming down from
generation to generation, he began to thunder like Ben Tillett himself against the
middle classes, stamping his feet, working himself into a great passion, and all
because the middle classes did not dip their hands into their pockets and give Lane
the money he wanted for his exhibition. It is impossible to imagine the hatred which
came into his voice when he spoke the words ‘the middle classes’; one would have
thought that he was speaking against a personal foe; but there are millions in the
middle classes! And we looked round asking each other with our eyes where on
earth our Willie Yeats had picked up such extraordinary ideas. He could hardly have
gathered in the United States the ridiculous idea that none but titled and carriage-
folk can appreciate pictures. And we asked ourselves why Willie Yeats should feel

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himself called upon to denounce the class to which he himself belonged essen-
tially: on one side excellent mercantile millers and shipowners, and on the other a
portrait painter of rare talent .. . We were led to understand that by virtue of our
subscriptions we should cease to belong to the middle classes, and having held out
this hope to us he retired to his chair and fell back overcome into the middle of the
great fur coat, and remained silent until the end of the debate.”
When the Abbey opened on 27 December 1904, wBy had spent months
of intrigue in Irish cultural wars; and he received a victor’s reward. Not only
the luxurious little theatre, but the programme and the publicity were
identified as his and Gregory’s enterprise. The lobby was hung with jBy’s
portraits; the season was dominated by their plays On Bazle’s Strand, Spreading
the News and Cathleen ni Houlihan (with Maire nic Shiubhlaigh [Walker],
thought by some to be better in the part than Gonne). Synge’s Shadow of
the Glen completed the list. Publicity had been carefully arranged; Masefield
attended and wrote a rave notice for the Manchester Guardian. Gregory
was kept in Coole, ill with influenza, which directed the spotlight solely
on wBY. He gave endless interviews, showed journalists over the theatre, and
announced forthcoming productions (Gregory’s Kincora, Synge’s Well ofthe
Saints, his own Deirdre, Gregory’s versions of Moliére). His persistence about
stage-effects paid off: On Baile’ Strand featured a curtain of untreated jute,
flooded with golden light, while Cuchulain’s son stood revealed in silhouette
against brilliant blue backlighting. Even Willie Fay admitted the effect ‘could
never be obtained by paint’.”° Horniman’s idea of an Irish Bayreuth seemed
near achievement, though wsy had humiliated her during rehearsals by
telling the company that her costumes made them look like Father Christmases
and fire extinguishers.” And on the evening of 27 December he was able to
telegraph to Gregory: ‘Your play immense success. All plays successfully
packed house.’
He had had a triumph, but there were clouds on the horizon. Audiences,
apart from the first nights, stayed very small. And, considered as the climax
of Irish theatrical experiments since 1899, the Abbey opening was as remark-
able for other absences too. Actors like Dudley Digges and Maire Quinn, play-
wrights like Moore and Martyn, were no longer in the picture, while Maire
nic Shiubhlaigh, Russell and others still aboard were feeling increasingly
mutinous. People like the Walkers had come into the theatre for political
self-realization as much as for stage-struck dazzlement. The old esprit de
corps of Inghinidhe na hEireann or Sinn Féin lent them ‘the solidarity and
intensity of a sect, and the high spirits of a social club.”* But the Fays were
professionals who wanted to build a solid enterprise; other recruits, like the
Allgood sisters, were out for a career anda good time; and wsy saw himself
as a dictator in the cause of art, ready to dominate, divide and rule. Those who

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worked for the Abbey directors would see the old ideas of a political co-
operative increasingly threatened; their memoirs in later years would try
vainly to stress that the theatrical movement which entered its apotheosis in
the newly opened Abbey on 27 December 1904 was the product of more than
one man’s genius.” But as far as posterity was concerned, they were irretriev-
ably swept aside into subordinate roles by wBy’s increasingly powerful sense
of his own history.

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Chapter 13: DELIGHTING IN ENEMIES
1905-1906

Mr Yeats had done more than anybody else to create an Irish

Theatre, and he had also done more than anybody else to pre-
vent anybody going there [laughter].
Tom Kettle at the Irish Literary Society, 5 February 1906

Durinc the summer and autumn of theatrical preparations and cultural pro-
paganda in 1904, WBy’s emotional life remained quiescent; he had reason to
cultivate detachment, since the nature of Horniman’s obsession with him was
more and more obvious. She showered him with unwanted gifts from con-
tinental watering-places, and wrote of her desire to take him travelling with
her. In June she even presented an indirect proposal via JBy, assuring the poet’s
father of a prophecy ‘that she wd marry a man from overseas, tall, dark and
very thin, with some foreign decorations’; the reason (perfectly calculated
to appeal to her prospective father-in-law) was ‘to make him a comfortable
home’. While wsy had no intention of fulfilling this fate, he knew how much
he owed his benefactor. Accepting the jaunty tone of her frequent letters (often
a jarring combination of flirtation and threat) was a small price to pay, but
he had become a pastmaster at witholding himself. Dublin opinion watched
it all with pleasure, and Joyce’s friend Gogarty produced a limerick:

What a pity it is that Miss Horniman

When she wants to secure or suborn a man
Should choose Willie Yeats
Who still masturbates
And at any rate isn’t a horny man.”

However, almost from the very moment that Horniman’s theatre came
into being, wBy’s emotions were suddenly magnetized elsewhere. In January
1905 the insecurely stitched-together MacBride marriage finally began to
unravel in public. Gonne, told by a London solicitor to discuss her position
with ‘some friend’ who could offer advice, asked her cousin May to contact
wy. He wrote to her, and she replied gratefully. As always, in adversity she
needed him; as always, he responded to her twitch upon the thread.
He had long been hearing rumours about the marriage — some true
(MacBride’s drunkenness), some not (their baby Sean’s epilepsy). But the truth

BSS
 DELIGHTING IN ENEMIES 1905-1906

was spectacularly shocking. On 9 January, having had an interview with May

Bertie-Clay, wBy wrote to Gregory. He was still reeling at the catalogue of
MacBride’s crimes: violence, sexual abuse, threats to the children. Two days
later he wrote in even greater shock, having heard details about MacBride’s
seduction of the seventeen-year-old Eileen Wilson (Gonne’s half-sister’) and
his molestation of the eleven-year-old Iseult, ‘the blackest thing you can
imagine’. wBy felt accordingly bitter at the refusal of nationalist politicians
to support Gonne: Barry O’Brien earned his particular contempt for attempt-
ing to hush it up. ‘For the sake of the country . . . the MacBride legend must
keep its lustre.’ Fortunately for herself, Gonne had retained control of her
fortune;* she had already offered a separation settlement to MacBride, but
both May Bertie-Clay and wsy wanted her to withdraw it. A divorce must
be sought, even at the risk of the Millevoye liaison coming out. wBY was con-
scious that his own relationship with Gonne would also be dragged into
public view. MacBride frequently complained of the friendship, and had
already removed wBy’s books from Gonne’s Paris house (their ‘presence had
always annoyed him considerably”’). He had even threatened to shoot him
‘some while back’ — ‘the only cheerful piece of news I have had in days’, wBy
told Gregory; ‘it gives one a sense of heightened life’.° His hands were tied,
as he was implicated in the counter-charges threatened by MacBride —
though the latter was mollifyingly told by Barry O’Brien ‘that kind of thing
never seemed to interest Yeats’.’
Just as with her revelations about the Millevoye liaison in December 1898,
Gonne had completely thrown wy off course; and as before he attempted
to carry on a normal life, organizing his Monday evenings, consoled by
astrology, and sustained by confessional outpourings to Gregory, still ill at
Coole. There was also the support of Nietzschean philosophy. “The whole
thing has made me very wretched,’ he told Gregory, ‘but has awakened
nothing of the old feeling — a little to my surprise — no feeling but pity and
anger... I feel, as |always feel about these things — that strength shapes the
world about itself, & that weakness is shaped about the world — & that the
compromise is weakness.’ He also set himself to help where he could: Quinn
was immediately told the outlines of the case, emphasizing MacBride’s ‘eroto-
mania from drink’, and was eventually asked to find supporting evidence from
the hero’s activities in the USA. From January, Gonne’s correspondence with
wBy returned to its former frequency. Her tone was dependent, appreciative
and gentle. ‘Of men friends’, she told him, ‘I have found few who cared or
troubled & I have asked help of none.’ In February proceedings were entered
for a French divorce, at hearings attended by an alternately tearful and aggress-
ive MacBride. Given the nature of the evidence, Gonne’s religious advisers
did not oppose the idea. In February wsy was in Dublin, waiting to hear how
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matters went in Paris, and his letters to Gregory suggest an obsession get-
ting out of hand:
I cannot bear the burden of this terrible case alone — I know nothing about lawyers
&so on. I see that I shall have to do a great deal —I have had aletter today from Mrs
MacBride, which shows that she is utterly broken down at one moment she asks
me about lawyers, at another she begs me ‘to keep out of this horrible affair’ she
‘brought this trouble on herself’ she should ‘fight it alone’ & so on. Her cousin, who
is a very charming woman, does not seem to know what to do. You alone can help
us all, I think. It will probably be legal seperation but that is for the lawyer to say
— Mrs Clay is anxious that it should be divorce as she thinks MacBride will be on
the watch, for any imprudence of Mrs MacBrides to trump up a case against her
~ she thinks she will never have any any security, especially, I dare say, because of
her habitual imprudence. Mrs MacBride seems indifferent as to whether it is
seperation or divorce. There is another reason why it may be necessary to prepare a
case of divorce - MacBride may be got to leave the country & let a seperation suit
go by default if threatened with the whole scandal. I think Mrs MacBride should
proffess a readiness to go into the whole case then the whole case would involve him
ultimately in a criminal prosecution. I have, what is perhaps a wild project, for the
getting of MacBride out of the country & about this I rather want to see you, in Dub-
lin. When you know the story you will feel that if she were the uttermost stranger,
if ones bitterest enemy one would have none the less, even to the putting aside of all
else, to help her. You will be a protection to me, though I need hardly sayIam not
thinking of that.®
In early March he returned to London, continuing to try to marshal evid-
ence against MacBride from Quinn in New York (against Clan na Gael’s
implacable opposition) and from old United Irish League enemies in Mayo.
‘I do not think much of ordinary morals,’ he told Quinn, ‘but this man has
beena drunken cad from the first.” Even Horniman offered to help —a mixed
blessing at best. But legal wrangles and MacBride’s procrastination kept
matters in limbo. By winning alibel case he had brought against the Independ-
ent, MacBride hoped to keep reports of any trial proceedings out of the Eng-
lish and Irish papers, and nationalist opinion supported him rather than his
wife. “The trouble with these men,’ wsy complained to Gregory, ‘is that in
their eyes awoman has no rights. I could see that he [Dixon] thinks that Mrs
MacBride’s objection to drunkenness a morbid peculiarity. I feel at every turn
that by turning Catholic she put herself in their hands — she accepted their
code and that is for women a code of ignoble submission.’ By, revelling in
the gossip, wondered if feminism would claim her: ‘if Miss Gonne, when this
is over, raises the standard of revolt among the ladies here, Dublin is ripe for
a revolt’.’? But Gonne remained withdrawn in Paris, immersed in painting,
coming to terms with her disastrous mistake. By the end of June wsy confided
to Quinn his own hopes, which echoed his father’s:

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 DELIGHTING IN ENEMIES 1905-1906
She seems to be quite easy in her mind and to have recovered her old serene courage.
I imagine that this case will break up the old United Irishman group and I cannot
say Iam sorry. I am hoping that by the mere force of circumstances she will be
put
into the centre of some little radical movement for personal freedom. The women’s
question is in a worse state in Dublin than in any place I know, and she seems
nat-
urally chosen out by events to stir up rebellion in what will be for her a new way...of
course I dont know in the least what she is thinking in this matter.”
Gregory, realistic as ever, threw cold water on the notion of Gonne lead-
ing the women of Ireland to liberation. ‘I hope she, & every woman with a
drunken husband, may succeed in getting free. Where I don’t quite agree with
you is the probability of her being able to do any more work in Ireland. I think
that is over for her.” But wsy felt that she was ready for action again, and
that this cause might divert her from sterile politics; he had heard from Fay
about conditions in working-class Dublin, where a woman would be enslaved
by religion to keep bearing children to a drunken husband ‘who hands his
besottedness on in the blood’. His own preoccupation with descent, breed-
ing and aristocracy was taking firm root, and the MacBride case helped to
HxitS
Gonne was not, in the event, going to give up her political faith; by now
she was consoling herself that ‘English agents’ were to blame for MacBride’s
intransigence. None the less, wBy’s commitment to her cause moved her deeply.
‘I have given up thanking you,’ she told him. ‘I have always counted on your
friendship, ever since I knew you &it has never failed me. In the terrible time
Ihave been through it was a great comfort & a great support to me, it helped
me in a wonderful way — one does not thank for help of this kind, only one
can never forget it.”* It took her back to the black days after the death of
her baby son: her affection for wy had been forged in that time of desola-
tion, and now it returned in another. As for wBy, he wrote to Quinn that
his feeling for her was ‘affection of the most lasting kind . . . Ido not say that
it is any kind of passion, but it is the feeling one has for some near and dear
relative.”
When the divorce suit was heard in Paris on 26 July, Russell’s fears that ‘it
will end in a bad scandal and everything will be public’ proved right. Much,
though not all, of the squalid detail was reported.'° Gonne reserved most of
her annoyance for the ‘allegation’ that she was English, not Irish. MacBride
continued to receive the support of O’Leary and others. Finally, in order to
acquire a status recognized in Ireland, Gonne settled for a judicial separa-
tion under Irish law administered by French judges, rather than an outright
French divorce. The case would not be settled until the summer of 1906;
in the process MacBride was allowed to return to live in Ireland, despite his
interlude fighting for the Boers. Gonne would therefore maintain her family

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based in France, for the children’s protection. She kept wBy informed about
her efforts to keep Iseult’s name out of court, and the allegations mounted
against her by MacBride’s friends, ranging from promiscuity to morphine
addiction. By now she was arguing against her old friend with her accustomed
vigour: ‘there is more good than you admit in the unconscious thought of the
masses of the people’.'” But the separation brought about by their quarrel over
advanced nationalist politics versus the demands of individual art had been
healed.

II
That same quarrel, however, continued to simmer in the new theatre. The
Irish renaissance was now a well-established phenomenon: the Bookman of
January 1905 devoted itself to “The New Irish School’, with a brooding por-
trait of wBy on the cover and a reverent lead article by Annie Macdonnell,
‘a Scottish Gael’ who had been favourably reviewing him for years. She fol-
lowed his own prescription in dating the movement back to ‘the break-up of
the Nationalist Party and the death of Parnell [which] let loose forces which
had hitherto been absorbed by politics’. wBy, ‘Irish of the Irish’, was ‘yet the
most fastidious artist, the most undoubted and the most magical poet among
English writers today’, speaking in many voices, mediated through a gallery
of characters (Oisin, Cuchulain, Hanrahan, Ruttledge). From the point of
view of the shape-changer himself, the time was ripe for the Abbey to branch
out: writing to commission a translation of Oedipus Rex, he told Gilbert
Murray ‘the country is in its first plastic state and takes the mark of every strong
finger . . . |believe we are going to make a great dramatic school here’.*® And
this mould was not necessarily going to bear the stamp of nationalist propri-
ety. At this very time wBy was revising The King’s Threshold to make it more
of a political satire, portraying the Mayor as a United Irish League politi-
cian muttering about grazing land, and making the poet express still more
clearly the voice of individual artistic conscience.
However, when the theatre put on Synge’s Well ofthe Saints in early Feb-
ruary, the reaction was disappointing. According to Moore’s recollection, it
‘very nearly emptied the Abbey Theatre. We were but twenty in the stalls:
the Yeats family, Sarah Purser, William Bailey, John Eglinton, AE, Longworth
and dear Edward [Martyn], who supported the Abbey Theatre, though he
was averse to peasant plays. All this sneering at Catholic practices is utterly
distasteful to me, he said to me. I can hear the whining voice of the proselyt-
iser through it all.” way admitted the audiences were thin, but claimed
Moore was a champion of the play;” he subsequently defended Synge in a
lecture to the Catholic College, where he was warmly applauded, and took
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 DELIGHTING IN ENEMIES 1905-1906
a forward part in the discussions of national drama which galvanized Dublin's
literary circles that spring.”! The reaction of his old adversary Dowden to the
new season was interesting. ‘As far as the Gaelic movement cultivates a taste
for what is good in Irish literature,’ he wrote to Tynan,
it will surely help towards an appreciation of what is good in a// literatures. As far
as it is illiberal & inhospitable of [sic] what is good in other literatures, it is acting
injuriously also towards Irish literature. The Irish National Theatre seems to me
rather cosmopolitan in spirit. It might, for instance, deal with an Irish subject, but
under the influence of Ibsen or Maeterlinck. But I think its influence at present is
very limited.”

Ironically, wBy would probably have agreed.

On 25 March Gregory’s Kincora opened — a historical play with ‘decor-
ative’ sets which was well reviewed. Though audiences were well below
capacity, it made a profit of £50. Gregory presided over a rather bizarre tea-
party on the stage afterwards, enlivened by what Violet Martin described as
wBy’ss ‘very high-class conversation’.** The Abbey was starting to generate
its own traditions, shaped by Yeatsian theory and the relentless paternalism
of Coole. Accordingly, it diverged more and more from the original ideals
of those who wanted a co-operative nationalist society. Brigit O’Dempsey,
who joined the company at this time aged eighteen, arrived at her audition
in a star-struck state: to her wBy was ‘a god’, and his initial appearance im-
pressed her deeply. However, as she remembered it, his constant ‘posing’
became an irritation — ‘striding up & down a room, or in the stalls ofa theatre,
with an eye on the incoming audience, tossing back his dark forelock and
handling a flapping butterfly tie, wearing his unconventional black jacket. All
this nonsense was swift to destroy any admiration I may have had for the
man, while my appreciation of his work increased.’* More particularly, she
was struck by how his patience with neophytes alternated with ‘insufferable
rudeness’ to actors who failed to understand his wishes: one of the gentlest
members of the company was driven to saying, ‘Mr Yeats if you speak once
again like that, P’ll knock you into the footlights.’ O’Dempsey thought
that if this had happened, no one would have pulled him out. ‘However the
knock-out blow did not occur for W. B. drifted off the stage moaning for
Lady Gregory who waddled along and led him by the hand to have a cup of
cottees?
Other enterprises were in train too. wBy was much involved in the nego-
tiations between George Roberts, Joseph Hone and James Starkey which would
finally produce an Irish publishing house: Maunsel & Co. His publisher
Bullen was wooed as a backer, since wBy foresaw the importance of his own
work having an Irish imprint: ‘the one reproach against me in Ireland is — that

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I write for the English market’. At the same time he wanted to eliminate
Russell (he ‘would get all the bad poems in Dublin printed”*), and replace
Starkey with Stephen Gwynn. He succeeded in this; but Maunsel & Co.
remained a small outfit, and wBy’s next major book (Poems 1899-1905) was
published in England, while Dun Emer brought out the revised Stories ofRed
Hanrahan in mid-May (bravely printing 500 copies, though subscriptions
were unenthusiastic). Russell felt accordingly ill-treated: ‘I should trust my
own judgement about the kind of books which would sell in Ireland more
than Gwynn’s and W.B.Y’s.”” Meanwhile, the Abbey had a success with
William Boyle’s The Building Fund and Colum’s The Land in April and June
1905, though wsy felt that (like Kincora) these productions lacked the trans-
forming genius of Synge’s drama.”* By early June he was able to look back on
a season of twelve plays that had aroused considerable public interest and
created a following (though in true Dublin style the Irish Times tended to
review them without entering the theatre, since their drama critic confessed
‘plays depress my spirits”).
It remained true that wBy’s own work apparently consisted of rewritings
and revisions. He returned to On Baile’ Strand, refining the characters of
Cuchulain and Conchobar, and pointing up the tension between heroic pub-
lic style and private, personal fulfilment.*° Defending himself to Holloway,
he claimed that a new work could take a year to write, and that ‘he was gain-
ing new knowledge each day’ in dramatic craft so could put the old works right
in a few weeks. Though he felt his lyric capacities were now accomplished
enough for his recent poetry to need no alteration, Dublin opinion speculated
freely that his poetic inspiration had reached its end.*! His reading, eclectic
as ever, looked towards the cosmopolitanism advocated by Dowden: in May
he bought forty volumes of Balzac from Bullen (a taste formed by his father’s
recounting stories like La Peau de Chagrin thirty years before), continued to
preach Nietzsche, and discovered Ben Jonson’s plays with delight. Most
significantly of all, for his fortieth birthday in June, Gregory organized a pre-
sent from a group of friends: William Morris’s Kelmscott edition of Chaucer,
costing £40. wBy would spend the summer reading it at Coole and extolling
its qualities of vitality, flexibility and ‘masculinity’.
Perhaps because of this, he turned yet again to the eternally unsatisfact-
ory Shadowy Waters. Its production, as he remarked to Quinn, was ‘hardly
suitable for more than about fifty people who know my work well’:*? but the
Theosophical Society wanted to perform it during their London convention
from 8 to 9 July, starring Florence Farr as Dectora. wy affected detachment,
but he was separately involved in negotiations with Farr about playing Emer
in Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’s Fand (a poetic play which proved even more un-
actable than The Shadowy Waters). Farr’s prompt-copy shows that he advised

336
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her closely, as well as providing programme notes for the performances.*
When he returned to London in mid-June for rehearsals, their relationship
took on a heightened intimacy; his letters to her at this point begin ‘Dear
Friend’, and there was much anxious comparison of horoscopes, always a sign
of erotic intensity. By the end of the production, however, his dictated let-
ters were briskly addressed to ‘Dear Mrs Emery’. Uncontrollable as ever, she
may have responded to him romantically but resisted his staging-ideas,
and his attempts to smuggle in Robert Gregory for the sets. And for wBy the
whole enterprise was sabotaged by Robert Farquharson’s epicene playing of
Forgael — ‘the most despicable object I ever set eyes on— effeminate, constantly
emphatic . . . ridiculous with a kind of feeble feminine beauty. The very
sign and image of everything I have grown to dispise in modern English
character, and on the English stage. He is fitted for nothing but playing the
heroine in Stephen Phillips’ plays, a sort of wild excited earth-worm of a
man, turning and twisting out of sheer weakness of character’.4’ To Symons,
he railed further against Farquharson’s effeminacy: ‘for the first time in my life
I shuddered as I suppose the ordinary man shudders at everybody & every-
thing that is called decadent’.>°
This extreme revulsion may be connected with his determination to
pursue ‘masculinity’ in his reading, and in his own work; more prosaically, it
was also a reaction of jealousy against Farr’s leading man, with whom she sus-
tained one of her ironic flirtations. Either way, it helped propel him into yet
another bout of rewriting. When he returned to Coole the summer of 1905
was devoted to The Shadowy Waters, largely reconstructed by mid-September.
While the original impetus came from his interest in stagecraft, in the pro-
cess he had learnt much about poetry: he now saw it had to ‘come out of the
fundamental action’, not from some vague notion of beauty.*° By late Octo-
ber Gregory was inviting actors to attend a reading,” and the rewritten play
would be put on in the Abbey in December.
The summer at Coole was energetic, with even Gregory worn out by
self-invited guests such as wBy’s aristocratic admirers, the Countess of
Cromartie and Lady Margaret Sackville, and left speechless by Horniman’s
demanding visit. And while he worked on The Shadowy Waters wBY was
simultaneously preparing a coup in the theatre itself. As early as May he had
confided to Blunt ‘we believe that the company very shortly will have to
become a regular paid company, and this will give us much more time for
rehearsal’.** To Synge and other intimates, he pressed the argument that the
whole future of the theatre (especially looking to English tours) depended
upon professionalization. His letters to Gregory aggressively advocated this
course as the only way to eradicate the malcontents, and assert the directors’
full authority. On 12 June Horniman was primed to send him a formal letter

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offering to guarantee salaries: thus her continuing power was assured.”

The strategy was described in terms of ‘freeing’ the actors to commit them-
selves to the theatre full time: but it was inevitable that some of them would
see it as instituting a form of servitude rather than liberation.
The matter was doubly sensitive because the arrangements whereby the
co-operative society would become a salaried company were handed over to
Russell, who had resigned from the INTS in April 1904; and during 1905 he
had become still further estranged from wBy. There had been the matter of
Maunsel & Co., where wsy had argued against his involvement. There was
the controversy over Lane’s projected gallery, where Russell believed that
wey’s influence had been thrown against his nomination as curator. And there
was the MacBride separation case, where wBy had conflicted with Russell
and Ella Young over their desire to arrange arbitration between the warring
couple.*° When Gregory and wsy asked Russell to draft a new constitution
for the Abbey, he obeyed: under the new arrangement the Irish National
Theatre Society would be comprised of authors and other nominees; the actors
would cease to be Society members and give up their votes; and there would
be a paid secretary and book-keeper. Crucially, real power would be vested
in an executive committee of three, to be kept separate from the Reading Com-
mittee. As wy later wrote to Quinn, it was putting ‘an end to democracy in
the theatre’.
Although Russell drafted the form of the new arrangement, he was deter-
mined to sever all links with the Abbey when it was completed. ‘Remem-
ber’, he told wy, ‘that this dramatic society started among these people who
came together & invited you in as President and you will see the thing in their
point of view.’ He himself, punch-drunk from years of conflict with wBy,
became increasingly disenchanted as he worked on the new rules through-
out August; even the tone of his letters to Gregory changed. He was tired
of ‘continual rows & appeals to me to intervene’. For his own part, wBYy was
acutely conscious of the need to keep up ecumenical appearances, retaining
vital token Catholics and nationalists like Colum: ‘I dont want good taste to
be suspected of a theological origin.” Russell stressed that the business and
acting sides of the theatre should be kept apart; Fay’s tyrannical propensities
should be restricted to the sphere of stage-management; absentees should have
Society membership revoked. wBy must be on the three-person executive com-
mittee, ‘not because you are a good business man but you would act on it as
conveying to the other two the general policy & they would keep you to hard
facts about money & business’.** Inevitably, the triumvirate that emerged was
Gregory, Synge and wBy.
Accordingly, the actors’ independent status was gradually whittled away.
Russell had wanted those who did not accept salaries to remain full members
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 DELIGHTING IN ENEMIES 1905-1906
of the Society, but wBy argued against it: he worried about uncommitted
and uneducated people filling up vacancies, and argued for candidates like
Robert Gregory instead. As for the business committee, despite Russell’s
views about his friend’s commercial inability, wBy wanted to be a member
of a small group: Starkey, Gwynn, Keohler and himself. By mid-September
Russell was at the end of his tether. ‘I dont care,’ he wrote to wBy at Coole.
‘lam only suggesting rules for the future work of a society I shall have no
further part in and it is for you to consider whether you want the rules to be
practical or not . . Why the devil do you talk of the new rules as a compro-
mise? What do you want. If you want anything else why don’t you say so at
once ... Who onearthis there to oppose you? Can the general members carry
on the Society without you or Synge or Lady Gregory?’ In their final
exchanges, bitterness was unconcealed.
By now wsy had his head, but Gregory was less certain. She worried that
the new arrangements would tie them into a framework inherited from the
old Society, making the triumvirate committee responsible for aspects they
could not control. More covertly, she worried about the continuing import-
ance of Horniman, whom she now loathed. But a meeting at Coole from 16
to 17 September with Synge committed her to the plan; and on 20 September
the idea of a limited liability company publicly emerged. On 22 September
the momentous general meeting ‘ending democracy’ took place. wBy’s speech
denied they had become a commercial company, praised the devoted service
of the actors, and detailed the personal investment in the company made
by Quinn, Gregory and himself:* had the ‘present directors’ really adopted
a commercial approach, he claimed, there would be a huge deficit because of
paying them commensurately. The money earned by the old Irish National
Dramatic Society had sustained the Fays’ efforts, and been returned many
times over. What was not stressed publicly was the backing from Horniman
which made the new step possible. As wBy told Gregory privately, she had
offered ‘enough money to run the company & give us full power . . . her
money will be given as a personal matter which will she says free her from
the responsability for our acts which she would feel, if she was herself a
shareholder.” As to joining the directors herself, she rather pathetically
told wsy, ‘You have had experience of me on one society is not that enough.’
She had played along with his strategy and enabled him to emerge hold-
ing all the cards he needed. He tried to convince Gregory that Horniman
had been ‘angelic’ (‘I think she must have been ill at Coole’), and deserved to
be humoured (‘her nerves seem to be all right, she is merely weak, but one
never knows’).*” He allowed her to draft the programme for forthcoming
London performances, which caused predictable difficulties. For public pur-
poses, however, Horniman’s contribution was played down, and wBy’s own

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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

assertion of authority correspondingly emphasized. In the long run Gregory's

misgivings about Horniman’s behaviour would prove better founded than wBy’s
reassurances.
All this infuriated Russell, who later recorded his view of the theatre’s
history in a letter to Gregory:
The facts are the society was not started by Yeats but by the actors, that I drew up
the rules and thatIhad considerable difficulty in inducing the members to elect him
as president. These members subscribed a certain sum every week for some time towards
the use ofa hall. No doubt Yeats was the best known member but the plays produced
by Colum, Ryan myself & others and contributions made by persons like Miss
Purser and other friends were entitled to be considered when deciding whether
the sum belonging to the society at the time about £90 I think should be alloc-
ated altogether to those who remained with Yeats as being solely created by them.
The members opposed to Yeats were as you may remember in a majority and it was
important to him to get them to resign and as I recognised his right to control the
theatre which Miss Horniman gave him I took a great deal of trouble in arguing
& persuading those members opposed to Yeats to go. They felt aggrieved that a
society for which they worked hard & which they conceived would be run best on
democratic lines should be captured by one person but I induced them to promise
to resign on terms which if not absolutely just were at least reasonable considering
everything . . . Itis very unfortunate that Yeats should arouse such savage enmities
among people who long ago had every inclination to serve him and it would do him
no good to have this matter made public.**

But he had long accepted that he had been out-manoeuvred, and was by now
completely alienated from wBy. ‘He would wreck anything he is concerned
with,’ he told Gregory,
by his utter incompetence to understand the feelings or character of anybody he is
dealing with. With you or Synge anyone might arrange a compromise but if W.B.Y.
is to act as diplomatist then I see nothing for it but a row & publicity of the whole
business — and it will certainly do neither W.B.Y. or the drama any good. Pack
W.B.Y. off to London, Coole or America & settle the matter yourself or let Synge
do it if you cannot stay on. Every time I meet W.B.Y. I feel inclined to throw him
out of the window when he talks business. He has no talent for anything but writ-
ing and literature or literary discussions. Outside that he should be fined every time
he opens his mouth. IfI was autocrat of Ireland, Iwould give him twenty thousand
a year if at the end of a year he had written two hundred lines of poetry—if he opened
his mind [sic, for ‘mouth’] on business or tried to run any society Iwould have him
locked up as dangerous to public peace.“

From late October wy was safely ‘packed off’ to London, but he left fes-
tering discontent behind him, and continued to take the high line which Russell
and his friends found so offensive. ‘I simply don’t know what your friends want,
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 DELIGHTING IN ENEMIES 1905-1906
he wrote to Colum in November. ‘I made an offer to them ata general meet-
ing which might have been a basis for discussion. They said nothing at all.
Tasked if they had anything to suggest. Dead silence. asked if they had any
complaints. Dead silence. Life cannot stand still & we have gone on with
our work,”°
He was in particularly ebullient form; John Masefield, dining at Woburn
Buildings, found his host ‘very well and merry & wore a black velvet coat
that must have cost pounds’.*! (He also straightfacedly advised Masefield to
abandon poetry in favour of singing ballads in music-halls.) Furthermore, what
had brought wsy back to Britain was a very successful Abbey tour to London,
Oxford and Cambridge at the end of November, accompanied by a series of
lectures given by wey himself on Irish drama. Though there was some resent-
ment among the players at the prices charged for the distinctly up-market
venues, and at Horniman’s increasingly assertive role, the glamour of an
English tour, which would make a clear profit of £150,°* helped sweeten the
bitter pill swallowed in September.
But the realities of the coup were more and more obvious. Horniman, less
angelic by the day, now wanted voting powers commensurate with her invest-
ment. And the position of a limited liability company under the Friendly
and Industrial Societies Act gave way, Gregory and Synge a hundred shares
each, while the actors each possessed only one. More and more, the malcon-
tents felt fettered rather than ‘freed’. Politics simmered below the surface.
wey's dislike of the IRB Dungannon Clubs distanced him further from the
more Fenian-minded members of the company. He was also suspicious of
the Gaelic League, which was moving away from the non-partisan, unpolit-
ical stance advocated by Hyde; certain branches were becoming, in effect,
IRB recruiting cells. However, he remained acutely conscious of the need to
keep some kind of nationalist profile. The composer Herbert Hughes began
‘drifting into violent politics of the United Irishman sort’, through his mem-
bership of the Dungannon Clubs; wsy, who early on identified ‘the clubs’
as inimical to his kind of theatre, saw at once that such associations ‘would
be rather a help to us than otherwise’ so long as the music was right.°? He
also remained preoccupied by Colum’s importance for the Abbey’s credib-
ility, encouraging Horniman to write him soothing letters. But by Decem-
ber 1905, when wBy returned to Dublin, resentment boiled over. Maire nic
Shiubhlaigh caused a crisis by endlessly procrastinating about signing the
new contract, and arguing about her salary. wBy’s strategy of offering her the
additional post of wardrobe-mistress backfired badly at Christmas, with nic
Shiubhlaigh furiously rejecting it as a menial task. He lost his temper with
her; she fled to sanctuary with Lily and Lolly at Churchtown; Gregory sent
long letters to Lolly, ‘taking no notice at all of the attacks on you [wBy] but

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trying to show her what a perfect idiot Maire has been’;** wy sent ‘a delib-
erately bloodcurdling letter to my sisters, in hopes that it may get round’.
jBy, who took the actors’ side, gleefully reported everything to Rosa Butt.
According to him, Lolly ‘always sees Willie’s meddling behind Lady Gregory’,
and Lolly stoutly said as much to Gregory herself:
[nic Shiubhlaigh] finds just as Lily and I (and even Papa feels) that it is quite use-
less trying to talk reason to Willie, who can never see any side of anything but his
own & who if at all opposed at once becomes overbearing and rude. I know — we all
know — this from our own experience . . . Iwish you had been in Dublin & then I
don’t really think there would have been all this upset for everyone. I do not think it
was so much what Maire was asked to agree to, as all the various offensive things said.
I know Willie came out here & wasted his & my & Maire’s afternoon to no purpose.
His manner was sneery & offensive & Maire would discuss nothing. Willie kept on
telling her that she was ‘a beginner’ & had much to learn & so on, &at the same time
spoke the whole time of Mr Fay & Miss Allgood & the others as if they were finished
actors & actresses . . . |know what harm he would have done here if he could have
baulked us in our own work. He does not understand practical life. Since he was a
small boy he was always too easily led to make a good leader himself & instead of
learning to control a naturally disagreeable temper, of late years he has indulged him-
self in fits of temper. I have indeed heard Miss Horniman speak of his bad temper
as if it were a feather in his cap. Just as stupid people would speak of a child of two,
showing self will by kicking & screaming for what he wanted.”

But ‘bad temper’ was by now an inseparable part of wBy’s managerial armoury.
He continually told Gregory and Synge that one of the directors, at least, must
be seen to ‘have an awful temper’ (‘I shall have to be very delicately managed,
you understand’*’). Driven by a rather artificially sustained outrage, he con-
tinued to plan strategy for seizing control of the business committee and to
proclaim his intention to sue nic Shiubhlaigh (often in letters dictated to
Horniman). He backed down only when Gregory and Synge categorically
refused to support him, and finally admitted privately to Gregory that he had
been too hasty.** T am rather tired of acting as drag on his impetuosity,’ wrote
Gregory to Synge, ‘but am comforted by the thought that it means vigorous
health.”
None the less, the upheavals of New Year 1906 did much to cement
together the three directors. The solidarity of class as well as aesthetic pri-
orities was implicit in many of wBy’s arguments, and Gregory at least was
not deaf to it. This helped precipitate a general walk-out in early January, when
several key players deserted the company. They included George Roberts,
Maire Garvey, James Starkey, Helen Laird and Frank Walker; Gregory heard
they ‘had struck because we were “not national enough, did not have six-
penny seats or [?] longer plays by Irish authors”’.°° On 5 January Willie Fay
342
 DELIGHTING IN ENEMIES 1905-1906
reported ‘from the front’ to way in London, telling him that the seceders
were secretly rehearsing Colum’s play The Land, intending to perform it as
‘The Irish National Theatre Society’. Colum was also being seduced; Fay was
already wondering about legal action.*! From London wy used Horniman
to try and win back Colum; from Scotland (after discovering the weakness
of the directors’ position under the terms of the patent) he wrote mollifying
letters on his own account, assuring Colum that he had ‘ina spirit of perfect
aimability been playing at tiger’, but he lost the argument. The seceders were
eventually compensated with £50 and some costumes, and left — in the course
of time to start a theatre company of their own.
Horniman was once more enlisted to send a supportive letter to wBy,
Synge and Gregory as directors of the new limited liability company. ‘I
highly approve of this, for I have spent so much time and money on my side
I consider it to be fair that every precaution should be taken by the mem-
bers towards carrying out the objects as announced by you.’ The gift of the
theatre was, momentously, transferred to the limited liability company.
‘Those members who have not followed you have completely ignored me &
so I have no reason to believe that they wish for any further help in any way.
They have never formally protested to me against your new plans & so under
whichever name they may choose to call themselves, I can have nothing to
do with them.” The seceders’ tactic of trying to capture the name of ‘Irish
National Theatre Society’ thus misfired: Gregory wrote to Synge on 12
January ‘if we could bribe them to resign & start a new soc. — it wd be best —
& I think not impossible’. This is essentially what happened.
But the Fays, crucially, stayed with the Abbey. Frank Fay was now a fully
committed Yeatsian. In mid-January he sarcastically relayed to wey Colum’s
criticism that the company ignored the popular voice of the country (‘I asked
him if he was ever introduced to the Popular Voice or would know him if he
met him. No reply’*’), and appealed to Gregory: ‘I fear if some of the Directors
don't come to my rescue I shall be found some morning knocking loudly on
the door of the Richmond Asylum asking, What is Nationality? What is a
Nationalist? And do two Nationalists make one Nationality? It’s the straight
road to lunacy trying to talk to these people.’** Colum, now fully alienated,
wrote angrily to wBy disputing Gregory’s statement that ‘“the theatre was
given to Mr Yeats to carry out his dramatic projects”. This is disclaiming the
notion that the Abbey Theatre is the theatre of a society aiming at the cre-
ation of a national drama. It is altogether a personal adventure.’ This meant
he had to resign in order to keep faith with ‘the aims of the society to which
we first belonged’.
While wey lectured in Scotland and visited Lady Cromartie, the Abbey
rehearsed Boyle’s The Eloquent Dempsey, which was put on later in January

343
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

despite wBy’s hatred of its ‘vulgarity’ and Horniman’s preference for Moliére.
Compromises evidently still had to be made, and he was prepared to woo
Moran by telling him it was ‘a Leader play’. Horniman (who calculatedly let
wBy know she had a further £25,000 earmarked for artistic purposes) had
to be humoured: her antipathy to Irish nationalism was by now explicit, and
vociferously articulated on every possible occasion. But in essential matters
he had lost Russell, driven out the nationalist malcontents, kept the Fays,
and retained executive power in the hands of the directorate. The United
Irishman broadcast the cause of the disaffected. wBy had ‘absorbed for his
own personal ends the disinterested work of a large number of people given
on the undertaking that they were aiding in a work which was devoted
primarily to the development of the highest interests of nationality in the
country’.®° Tempers had run high, and old antipathies resurfaced along with
yet deeper tribal attitudes. Discussing Martyn’s scruples, Gregory wrote to
wy, Edward isa joy—and will give you new notes for your diary. These RC’s
haven't the courage of a mouse, and then wonder how it is we go ahead’.*”
Finally, at the annual general meeting in May, wBy marshalled all forces
(including his sisters) to vote out the dissidents. They included some of the
best actors, such as nic Shiubhlaigh and Maire Garvey, the latter a particu-
lar béte noire of the Gregorys (‘Robert thinks it was worth the whole row to
have got rid of Miss G and that she embodies all that is most odious in Irish
life’**). The seceders, forced into the position of Dudley Digges and Maire
Quinn before them, formed the “Theatre of Ireland’, an explicitly national-
ist company; nor would they be the last to leave. From January 1906 the
Abbey was set on a different path, controlled by its triumvirate. Gregory
reminded wy ofa country saying: three yew trees planted in a row ‘will wear
out the world from its beginning to its latter end’.

Ill
The path had been cleared by wsy’s determination to assert himself. His
comments to Russell are revealing, for their self-consciousness as much as
for their actual content.
I desire the love of a very few people, my equals or my superiors. The love of the
rest would be a bond and an intrusion. These others will in time come to know that
Tam fairly strong & a capable man & that I have gathered the strong & capable
about me, and all who love work better than idle talk will support me. It is a long
fight but that is the sport of it. The antagonism which is sometimes between you
& me comes from the fact that though you are strong & capable yourself you
gather the weak & not too capable about you, & that I feel they are a danger to
all good work. It is I think because you desire love. Besides you have the religious

344
 DELIGHTING IN ENEMIES 1905-1906
genius to which all souls are equal. In all work except that of salvation that spirit
is a hindrance.”

The ideas of ‘masculinity’ generated by his American triumph, his read-

ing of Nietzsche, and the cataclysmic change in Gonne’s circumstances
dictated a new view of himself. Throughout the crisis in the theatre he had
determinedly stressed his own belief in autonomy, his ‘dangerous’ qualities,
his ‘intolerable tongue’, his ‘delight in enemies’: he pointedly told Gonne
that he ‘revelled in his unpopularity’. His sense of self-presentation had
always been acutely developed, but since America it had taken a new and
more aggressive form. In early December 1905 he was already considering
another American tour, involving performances from Farr and the Abbey
players.”’ He remained secretly less certain than he claimed, admitting to
Gregory that he often did not know why he acted decisively, and that he found
it hard to recapitulate afterwards the circumstances which made him do so.”
But his old, uncertain self would become more and more deeply buried
beneath the armour of the quarrelsome, self-proclaiming public man.
His older friends fell back into the past as well. Despite their differ-
ences, the death of William Sharp in December came as a wrench; though
he hardly mentioned the event in his correspondence, he wrote a moving let-
ter to Sharp’s widow.” “Thousands will feal his loss with a curious personal
regret.’ He himself sensed that he had lost someone who, for all his ridicu-
lousness, could communicate with a rare intimacy: ‘a strange mystery &
also a dear friend. To talk with him was to feal the presence of that mystery,
he was very near always to the world where he now is & often seemed to me
to deliver its messages. He often spoke to me of things of my personal life
that were unknown to him by the common channels of sense.’ Carefully
choosing his words, he told Mrs Sharp ‘that one, who was so often at [recte
as] it seemed out of the body which he had, cannot have undergone any
unrecognizable change or gone very far away’. Indeed, Sharp bequeathed him
a posthumous message — ‘I, and I only, am the author — in the /itera/ and
literary sense — of all written under the name of Fiona Macleod.’ wBy had
known this for years, but he hardly cared. Their correspondence about sym-
bolic colours, mystic correspondences, and the voices of fairies seems to have
petered out after 1902. The immediate affairs of the theatre had claimed
him, though a few years later he would write to Elizabeth Sharp regretting
his inability to ‘return to what are still to me the supreme interests’.”* Dreamy
Celticism was dissolving behind him. Not coincidentally, his reading through
the summer of 1906 concentrated on Elizabethan drama. He had finished his
selection from Spenser (an old love) and written an important introduct-
ory essay; now he immersed himself in Dekker and Jonson.” The taste for

345
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

salt, and the idea of himself as a violent and combative leader of men, had
taken over.
This new approach necessarily affected his volume Poems 1899-1905.
Completing the draft introduction at Coole in July, he wrote of his dissat-
isfaction with the imitation of ‘trivial and conventional’ nationalist models
in his early poems. ‘Perhaps,’ he concluded, ‘one can explain in plays where
one has so much more room than in songs & ballads, even those elaborate
emotions that are oneself.’”° Accordingly, he held up the Poems while he
rewrote large sections of On Baile’ Strand — to be mounted and restaged
with full Yeatsian colour effects by Robert Gregory, at the Abbey on 16 April.
He was also preparing a short lecture-tour to Liverpool and Leeds, aided and
abetted by Farr, and living an ever-grander weekend-life at houses like Lady
Cunard’s, Lord Howard de Walden’s, and the Horners’ at Mells — though
his own finances had returned to a perilous state, and by late March he was
borrowing from Gregory again.”’ Further delays were imposed by his efforts
to wrest back The Wind Among the Reeds from Elkin Mathews, since wByY was
now possessed by the wish to bring all his works together under Bullen’s
imprint.”* Poems 1899-1905 eventually appeared in October 1906: by the end
of the year they would sell 800 copies, ‘the quickest sale I have had’.” As to
the summer at Coole, he prepared himself for yet another bout of rewrit-
ing. Probably with an eye to directing his energies elsewhere, Gregory sug-
gested he return to the becalmed craft of The Speckled Bird, refloating it as ‘a
sort of framework for opinions, a setting for ideas, sermons and conversa-
tions’ like Marius the Epicurean or Wilhelm Meister. wey dubiously assented,
but thought it more likely that he would complete it as planned, publish it
as a novel about ‘Michael’s mystical life, and then start another book about
his literary life; it will become a kind of spiritual autobiography’.*!But the
world reflected in his unfinished novel belonged to his youth, and it stayed
behind him. None the less, Gregory’s idea of a prose setting for brief ‘sermons’
appealed, and probably inspired his idea of ‘getting rid of my opinions by every
afternoon for half an hour (say) dictating to you a certain number of detached
paragraphs if you can make time —I have a great many odds and ends to say.’
The literary form of connected pensées would prove particularly well suited
to his eclectic intelligence, forever preoccupied with the pattern of things.
By late June he had accumulated about 12,000 words for a ‘Book of Impres-
sions’, offered to Bullen but not, in the event, published as such. Bullen saw
the potential of these concentrated reflections, and serialized them in the
Gentleman'’s Magazine, which he edited; later they would appear from Cuala
under the title Discoveries.
wey was in Dublin for the revised On Baile’s Strand at the Abbey in mid-
April; later performances in Irish provincial towns were planned but came

346
 DELIGHTING IN ENEMIES 1905-1906
to little. Undaunted, he thought the performance of his play and Gregory’s
adaptation of Moliére’s Médecin malgré lui ‘have shown our people at their
very best’. At last his verse plays seemed to be receiving the handling they
deserved.*’ Meanwhile, the Abbey players prepared for British performances
in Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds in late April, where their success led to
along tour in the north of England and Scotland from late May to mid-July.
Claiming her reward for backing wsy’s recent coup, Horniman acted as
promoter, using contacts in Theosophical and society circles. The company
made a particular impression in Leeds, where Golden Dawn contacts may
have clinched the booking, and the free-thinking circle around Alfred Orage
and the Leeds Arts Club also prepared the ground. Farr was much involved,
writing for the New Age and giving psaltery recitals. Audiences were small
and they lost £50, but the inspiration of the drama helped confirm Orage in
his Nietzschean mission; he launched himself on the London world as a
result. The Irish avant-garde seemed to be conquering provincial England.
For all the dynamic effect of his players, wBy struck one observer in Leeds
as ‘a ghostly wraith’ who avoided contact with people. He had good reason.
He was distracted by Gonne’s affairs, with the MacBride libel hearing fixed
for early June and the divorce case coming on in July: he suggested visiting
her in Paris during April, encouraged by Gregory (who sent him 410 for the
purpose™). But he threw himself instead into rehearsing the players, often
to their incomprehension (“Well, Mr Yeats says I’ve got it: what it is I’ve got,
I couldn't for the life of me tell you; but I hope to God I don’t lose it’). Another
actor, complimented by wey on the emotional intensity with which he
declaimed the names of old Irish heroes, replied, ‘Sure I thought they were
mountains.°°There were always minor problems to do with the theatre (a
draughty skylight, wigs to be collected in London, disobedient smoking
backstage), and Horniman’s determination to design ‘artistic’ costumes
remained a sore trial. But after the late April performances in England, wBy
was convinced they were on the right track. ‘Deliberate effort’ and profes-
sional commitment were creating a great acting school. ‘If we can get enough
of an audience here to keep our players and our playrights busy with the
expression of Irish life,’ he told Quinn, ‘we shall make a great movement
in the end even if it turn out that we get our best welcome in your country
or in England.”*’ As this implicitly admitted, audiences were still a problem.
On first nights wBy could be seen looking through the curtain and count-
ing the audience, under the impression he was invisible.** The withdrawal
of Colum and his friends ‘has set the little gossipy barren group who look
upon themselves as the official supporters of everything Irish of an intellec-
tual sort, mewing after us’.® Still, he had by now committed himself fully to
the Irish theatrical enterprise. ‘I have made a general rule by confining work

347
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

to Ireland for the present & also of never making myself nominally respons-
ible when I cannot give the time to work at a thing properly,’ he told Sturge
Moore. ‘My Irish work gets every day more exciting.”? An out-of-town
engagement in Dundalk on 15 May was only fairly successful; wBy breezily
told Synge, “The country towns in Ireland are mainly animal, but can some-
times be intoxicated into a state of humanity by some religious or polit-
ical propagandist body, the only kind of intellectual excitement they have got
used to.””?
Further extending its ambitions, the company launched itself on Scot-
land for its major tour from 26 May. wBy’s ideas for the programme had
been eclectic: ‘comedy must make the ship sail, but the ship must have other
things in the cargo’. They played, therefore, Riders to the Sea, Cathleen ni
Houlihan, The Pot ofBroth, The Shadow ofthe Glen, Hyacinth Halvey, Spread-
ing the News and Boyle’s The Building Fund, the last being the only play not
written by one of the directors. The programme stressed the authenticity of
style and sets, with ‘unique fac-similes’ of original properties taken from
Aran cottages: a young islander had been imported to check all dress details.
Reviews ranged from respectful to highly favourable; the Manchester Guardian
(already a patron of Synge’s work) hailed Riders to the Sea as a classic in the
making.” As they progressed into Scotland, they were met with unqualified
praise. Frank Fay thought that the Irish avant-garde ‘appealed to the Scottish
brains’, and wBy’s contacts like Lady Cromartie and the artist Phoebe Anna
Traquair provided strong support.
But within the company trouble was yet again brewing. Horniman had
seen much of wsy in London during the spring, and her mood was swing-
ing towards manic excitement. More and more determined to take an active
part, she decided to travel with the players, and their uninhibited behavi-
our jarred with her every preconception and preoccupation. Away from
Dublin the company felt liberated. They were young, and they were féted.
They came from a class which the socially conscious Horniman viewed with
ill-concealed suspicion. And, released from everyday work, romance was
blooming; on this tour Willie Fay’s relationship with the much younger
Brigit O’Dempsey (whom he later married) became evident, as did Synge’s
love for another girlish actress, Molly Allgood.
All of this was anathema to Horniman. Any question of sexual impro-
priety upset her; the social differences which she conceived to exist between
herself and the players became an obsession. Synge reported to Gregory
about Horniman’s interference, over-sensitivity and obtuseness, while
Horniman logged obsessive complaints about Fay’s book-keeping, in-
efficiency and ‘vulgarity’. Her letters descended on wy in an avalanche,
alternately angry, cajoling and bitterly flirtatious (‘you really might at any rate
348
 DELIGHTING IN ENEMIES 1905-1906
pretend that my return to London would be convenient to you”). The fact
that the tour, while a critical success, actually lost money (just under £200)
was thus a doubly sensitive point. wBy was summoned to Edinburgh to set-
tle arguments. He ended by taking Hornimans side, writing to Gregory
in defence of her attack on the company’s indiscipline, while implicitly admit-
ting that his support was part of the Faustian bargain upon which the the-
atre’s fortunes rested.%
Mephistopheles-like, even before the tour ended, Horniman was im-
placably trying to renegotiate the financial provisions once more. On 4July
she offered a subsidy of £60 a year and gave the directors the right to fix
prices of seats — and thus the freedom to open the theatre to a broader audi-
ence, as Gregory had long wanted. But wBy was uncertain about lessening
Horniman’s commitment to the Abbey. The £25,000 still glittered, and even
if Horniman was reserving it (as she hinted) for an English National Theatre,
he wanted such a theatre to ‘grow out of our work and take its tradition from
us’.”° As the provincial tours showed, cultural imperialism could be reversed
with a vengeance. However, their benefactor also wanted to impose limita-
tions on the Abbey about touring. She had decided the management as it stood
was not competent, telling wey that in six months she had spent 41,070,
nearly half her annual income, and stressing that Fay must be stripped of his
business role.” By early August, at her insistence, a business manager was
engaged: W. A. Henderson from the National Literary Society, ‘a nervous,
quiet creature’ still shocked by The Countess Cathleen, according to Synge, while
wey remarked that he ‘sucked up vulgarity like a sponge’. His evasions about
agreeing terms were masterfully dealt with by wBy, and the company was still
more tightly brought under the directors’ control. They now possessed,
according to Horniman, ‘Home Rule and a subsidy’.
More ominously, Willie Fay was given cause for resentment. Furious with
Fay’s happy-go-lucky attitude and obsessed with the belief that George
Moore had spread scurrilous allegations about her, Horniman thought she
had now handed all powers over to the directors and taken a back seat. ‘You
have often blamed me for taking things to heart & being too much in earnest
— being middle-class in fact,’ she wrote sadly to wBy.

But if I had been otherwise I could never have held out for so long. Everything
was made as hard & unpleasant as possible in ways that to you seemed to be of no
importance & I am thankful to feel that it is over. I hope that it will be a long, long
time before Iam obliged to go to Dublin again, to be snubbed & affronted by snarlers
and sulkers & always feeling the insult of being forced into George Moore’s pres-
ence. You imaginative people are like mirrors, all passes away from you happily,
you don't take any permanent impressions like the unemotional people who care &
feel seriously. I’m not writing at all crossly, but you must believe me.”

349
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

By the summer of 1906 wBy was involved in other controversies as well,

including the by now annual row with his sisters and Dun Emer, this time
over a projected second volume of Russell’s poems. Lolly knew it would be
a commercial success in Ireland but wy vetoed it, taking his usual high
line. An exchange of bruising letters aligned him against Jack and Lily as
well as Lolly and ypy.’ In mid-August he actually resigned as their literary
adviser, and had to negotiate his way back by briefing Katharine Tynan to
ask for him as editor of her own proposed volume. He played on their ancient
friendship, confiding that his dream of an Irish theatre might have origin-
ated in the days when he visited her father’s farmhouse, and took shape in
the early 1890s. “You will remember my old battles in Dublin,’ he reminded
her, ‘and you will understand that this is vital to me, vital to keep a series that
is associated with my name, if it were nothing else, from drifting into the
amateurish Dublin way.” Tynan, for all her dislike of the Abbey and resent-
ment of the Gregory circle, agreed. But while her brother was still estranged,
Lolly poured out her rage against wBy in a long letter to Bullen.

He felt himself of immense importance before and your letter made him worse...
My father and brother Jack (who has just come from Coole) are also very anxious
for me not to agree at once (if at all) to Willie’s proposals — as they say that the only
result would be I would be bound to do everything he liked, but he would not be bound
at all. The whole thing began by his quarrell [sic] with AE so he writes these kind of
brow beating letters at intervals to me. I have had much more disagreeable letters
from him than this one — but the others annoyed me so much that I burnt them
... He has quarrelled with all his friends in Ireland (but Lady Gregory and the little
mutual admiration society down there).

She added bitterly that in financial terms ‘he does nothing at all for his
family & never has, while demanding excessive royalties for his work and
forcing Robert Gregory’s designs on them (‘he thinks or thinks that he thinks
so much of them that he speaks as if he was in a Cathedral when he speaks
of them’).'°? Her suspicions would have been confirmed if she had seen
Gregory’s careful presentation of wBy’s case to Quinn. ‘It isa real griefto him,
he tooka pride in the Press and would have made a great success of it . . . But
his sisters think Russell popular and prefer trusting to him.’ Gregory pri-
vately hoped that the press would fail altogether and be taken over by ‘some
capitalist’; Lily and Lolly ‘have taken the Dublin craze for inefficiency as
opposed to efficiency and it makes their brother fight the harder’ .1°°
By mid-November he had indeed fought his way back on board, though
the press was determined to limit his authority (‘don’t have WB on top what-
ever you do’, Lily warned her sister, comparing his attitude to that of the British
government during the Boer War™). Lolly, asking Quinn to look at the terms
350
 DELIGHTING IN ENEMIES 1905-1906
of the agreement, insisted on keeping some control ‘over my own press. Idon’t ©
want Robert Gregory’s masterpieces. And I do want the editor to have the
books ready for me at the time Ifix.’ In the end Russell, the inevitable broker,
drew up brief terms, binding wsy to work as editor within designated sched-
ules, and leaving the choice of authors to mutual agreement. wBy ‘signed it
like a lamb’ and went on to edit Tynan’s book with a dictatorial hand, in one
case taking the first and last verses of a poem only.'° Gratitude for her tac-
tical help was not allowed to interfere with editorial ruthlessness.

GopTsHons Septast t766

14. Robert Gregory performing epic feats on ‘Sarsfield’ at the Gort Show, 25 September
1906, sketched by Jack Yeats — an episode which entered local mythology and would be built
by wsy into his elegy many years later.

By December 1906 he was at loggerheads with Lolly once more, over

her reluctance to pay sufficient royalties — a traditional difficulty for author—
publisher relations.'°° But he was equally determined to keep the standards
up, and to prevent Dun Emer from sinking to ‘the sort of thing you may see
coming out in the Tower Press and read in the Celtic Christmas (in other
words, the work of Russell’s derivative disciples). He saw the disagreement
over the Dun Emer list as part of a general struggle against Russell-style ama-
teurism, low standards and uncommitted work, affecting the theatre too.”
For all jBy’s pleading, this mattered more than keeping the family peace. And
wey'ss relationship with his family, as with the world in general, had settled
into a new mould since America and the Abbey wars. His father now wrote
carefully constructed and rather respectful letters to him, and even his sisters,

351
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

for all their resentment, recognized his inevitable dominance. Only Jack,
secure in his emotional and artistic resources, went his own way unaffected.

IV
Not even the Abbey directorate were exempt from the tension insepar-
able from wsy’s relationships. Both Synge and Gregory were extending
their range as playwrights and promising new developments in comedy and
drama for the theatre; meanwhile wsy struggled with Deirdre and end-
lessly redrafted On Baile’ Strand and The Shadowy Waters. But no verse plays
had been included in the 1906 tour, and by mid-August wBy was writing to
Synge in terms of ill-concealed threat.
You and Lady Gregory and Boyle can look forward to good performances of your
plays from the present Company and from people who will join it in the natural course
of things. I am getting them, of course, for my prose plays. But Iam essentially not
a prose writer. At this moment in spite of Frank Fay’s exquisite speaking I could get
a much better performance in England ofa play like Deirdre . . With a proportion
of say one romantic or verse play to every three peasant plays, and that one play
passionately played, we shall sweep the country and make enough money to make
ourselves independent of Miss Horniman. We have also to think of playing several
weeks in London each year. The alternative to this is the giving of my plays to
English companies, for if I am to be any use ever in Ireland I must get good per-
formances. Till I get that I shall be looked on as an amateur.

This was part of his campaign to make a big splash with Deirdre by putting
a celebrated tragedienne in the role. Mrs Patrick Campbell would star in
London and Florence Laetitia Darragh in Dublin; the latter would have to
be brought over from England. wsy always claimed Darragh as Irish, and ‘a
great tragic actress’ to boot: she had performed Wilde’s Sa/omewith Farr, and
was an established figure on the London stage. Though Ricketts admired her,
Darragh’s personality was problematic. Even Ricketts admitted frankly that
his own liking for her might be no recommendation, since he generally ‘dis-
liked all women’.’” But she had aspired to run a theatrical company of her
own, she was a friend of Horniman’s, and she would, wey calculated,
play a part in linking the Abbey to a nascent English National Theatre and
to Horniman’s £25,000.""° She also kept wBy informed about Horniman’s
fluctuating moods, and the state of the weather regarding future financial
support for the theatre."
But in Gregory’s view Darragh had designs on the Abbey and wanted to
infiltrate it with her friends from the English theatrical world. Her style
filled Gregory with foreboding; Willie Fay resented dictation about casting;
352
Augusta
2 Gre 50
PLATE 18
 PLATE 19

Above: George Moore leaves Coole, probably

5 October 1902, while wy, rather proprietorially,
stays on.

Facing, above: Edward Martyn’s house, Tillyra

Castle, recently built when wey stayed there in 1896
but undeniably impressive for all its brand-new
castellation and ‘mechanical decoration’.
ss
Facing, below: Lady Gregory’s Coole Park around
the same time — a total contrast. Its Georgian plain-
ness was relieved only by the Diocletian window in
the facade (and two Victorian bows added to the
garden front), but the great glory of the demesne
lay in the rare trees, walled garden, and ancient
surrounding woods.
PAE: 2.0.

PES
Tas
Spee
 PLATE 21

Above: Maud Gonne’s entrance

in Cathleen nt Houlthan, 1902.
Right: Riders to the Sea, 1906,
the acme of naturalistic Abbey
style (but still preserving the
‘Trish Literary Theatre stare’).
From left to right: Honor
Lavelle (Helen Laird), Sara
Allgood and Emma Vernon
(Vera Esposito).

Facing, clockwise from top left:

Robert Gregory, June 1902, the

year before he left Oxford and
went to study art at the Slade.
Margaret Gregory in 1909, two
years after their marriage, with
Richard.
Willie Fay.
Frank Fay as Cuchulain in On
Batle’s Strand, 1904.
JPL NIENS, 12)92

Above: Annie Horniman’s

costumes for The King’s
Threshold, 1903. She thanked
wey for giving her the right
to call herself ‘artist’, but he
said they made the cast look
like “Father Christmases and
fire extinguishers’.
Right: Charles Ricketts’s
designs for a 1914 revival of
the same play could not have
been more different, and
were far closer to wBY’s
imagination; as were the
Ricketts costumes for the
Blind Man and the Fool in
On Baile’ Strand, 1915,
illustrated here.
 PLATE 23

The foyer o f the

<< sSS 2 Ss
Abbey The atre,drawn by
Raymond M cGr ath
Left: The Abbey stage.

Rhea spe
PLATE 24

iy He eeke)

rel,
Prantl
"

Pate
fAuk?
; i,
ay

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Above: Vhe Abbey Theatre in an embroidery by Lily Yeats, much as she described it to yBy in a
letter of 30 October r9r0: ‘Motors carriages and cabs in a string outside — Willy has won his fight —
a hard fight.’
Facing, above: Maud Gonne MacBride, John MacBride, their son Seaghan (later Sean), and
assorted firearms, featured in the 7z//er, February 1904, as “Three Irish Irreconcilables in Paris’.
 PLATE 25

Above: John Quinn at the time wBy

first knew him.
Left: wBy arrives in New York,
11 November 1903.
PLATE 26

Printingg at Dun
4 Emer,My 1903.
MONO so From
A left to right:
8 Esther Ryan
) correcting8
proofs; Beatrice Cassidy at the ink-roller; Lolly Yeats at the press.
 PLATE 27

Above: JBY in the St.

Stephen’s Green studio,
1906.

Left: wBy as seen by

Augustus John, 1907. ‘One
looks a gypsy, grown old in
‘wickedness and hardship.’
PLATE 28

Above: Ruth Pollexfen’s wedding, St Columba’s College

Chapel, 20 July 1911: Jack Yeats, ‘Cottie’ Yeats and wy,
while Sara Allgood kneels in homage to the poet (and his
new clothes, designed by Hugh Lane).

Facing, above left: Ezra Pound, probably at Stone Cottage,

¢. 1913.
Facing, above right: George Hyde-Lees, c. rg10, aged about
eighteen. Dorothy Shakespear told Pound in 1911 ‘Georgie’s
face is square: but she is very handsome, I think, as well.
She is awfully intelligent.’
Facing, below: A postcard photograph of Stone Cottage
sent by wy to Pound.
PLATE 29
PLATE 30
 PLATE 31

Above, left: A spirit photograph of wsy,

perhaps taken at Mme Juliette Bisson’s;
she specialized in these, but they were
discovered to be faked from illustrations
in Le Miroir.
Above, right: Julia’s Bureau’, the psychic
communications centre set up by W. K.
Stead at Cambridge House, Wimbledon.
Right: Etta Wriedt, the celebrated
American medium often consulted by
wy, through whom ‘Leo Africanus’
announced himself.

Facing: Rabindranath Tagore.

PLATE G2

Above: Iseult Gonne photographed by Reutlinger of

Paris, c. 1906. Right: Maud Gonne photographed by
Reutlinger in rgot.

Below: wey photographed by Lena Connell, c. 1910.

 DELIGHTING IN ENEMIES 1905-1906

and Frank Fay reacted violently to wBy’s idea of her replacing Sara Allgood
as Dectora in The Shadowy Waters. Through the summer of 1906 wBy con-
tinued to argue that while the company could handle ‘peasant work’ perfectly
well, they needed larger, tragic pieces, with acting on acommensurate scale.
Drafting the contents of a new occasional magazine on Samhain lines, to be
called the Arrow, gave him a forum for these ideas'!? and an announcement
made at an Abbey ‘At Home’ and concert on 13 October was aimed at a wider
audience than those present. He stated ‘they had decided deliberately to take
up, first, Irish legendary and historical plays, just as our national theatre had
todo .. . Ina few years they hoped to place upon the stage plays that would
represent a higher phase of life, in which may be found something truly char-
acteristic of Ireland’; but the winter would be devoted to training actors for
historical and romantic work. Thus the public was prepared for Gregory's The
Canavans and his own Deirdre.‘
As he juggled the programme for the 1906/7 season (which would prove
a turning-point for wBy’s theatre), preoccupied by the need for special light-
ing effects in The Shadowy Waters and arguing for the place of verse drama,
the company were rehearsing for the winter season. Horniman, fresh from
Bayreuth and laden with gifts for wBy, continued to deluge her Irish client
with letters: ‘T'll try and find you a cigarette-case in Prague or Dresden worth
losing... ’ma scratchy sort of cat, but that’s good for your sort sometimes.’
Darragh condescendingly came to Dublin to star in wBy’s Deirdre and The
Shadowy Waters and the playwright haunted the rehearsals, at his most
intense.” Deirdre had been written with great difficulty (the manuscript
amounts to a thousand pages) and it showed. He had begun working on it
two years before, as part of a planned heroic cycle; by 1906 it had been refined
(in line with his own changing priorities) to an emblematic story of passionate
love subverting the codes of medieval courtly society. Darragh fitted his idea
of an Irish Isolde, but her performance on 24 November displeased the
Dublin critics (and everybody else except wBy). Within the highly charged
atmosphere of the company, her propensity for repeating unpleasant re-
marks and her Duse-like airs of grandeur created furious resentment. Frank
Fay believed her ascendancy was the result of wBy’s ignorance about acting,
which meant he judged performances according to some arcane idea of ‘dis-
tinction’; Gregory, more concretely, decided to force his eyes open by tell-
ing him that Darragh had boasted he was infatuated with her. But during
this stormy autumn his feelings were fully engaged elsewhere. For Gonne
chose this time to reappear in Dublin life. When she visited the Abbey on
20 October, accompanied by wBy, some of MacBride’s supporters in the audi-
ence hissed her. She paused deliberately and glared back at them with a fine
contempt, but it was a painful moment. This, as nothing else could, helped

353
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

crystallize his antagonism to the narrow-minded nationalism of ‘the clubs’;

it also put him in the public position of Gonne’s escort and protector.
The frenzy of rehearsal, argument and rewriting over, wBy might have
been able to collect his thoughts but for a constant stream of complaints and
threats from Horniman. Still seething from the effects of the summer tour
and obsessed by enmity to Willie Fay, she was now incensed by Gonne’s return
to centre-stage. Driven beyond endurance, she unwisely told wBy that ‘Mrs
MacBride deserved what she got’ when she visited the theatre. But for the
moment he had to accept even this scourging. The reasons appear in WByY’s
long memorandum to the Irish National Theatre Society, dictated to an
increasingly doubtful Gregory on 2 December 1906 and not, for the moment,
widely circulated."!* It was inspired by the mixed success of his verse drama,
Darragh’s failure in Dublin and the prospects for popular theatre at the
Abbey; over all hung the prospect of the end of Horniman’s subsidy in four
years’ time. WBY’s strategy was thus aimed at ensuring further investment from
Horniman, even at the price of alienating the Fays. According to wBY’s argu-
ment, Boyle and Gregory alone drew audiences. The theatre ‘could not run
indefinitely on peasant comedy’. The actors it had lost through secessions
had — he now admitted — been among the best. The Abbey must widen its
capacities by performing ‘foreign masterpieces’ and importing foreign stars
‘as opportunity offers’. The theatre, as he had dreamt of it, ‘must if it is to do
the educational work of a National Theatre be prepared to perform even if
others can perform them better representative plays of all great schools’, and
be eventually supported in this by a national endowment.” wy argued
therefore that new capital must be sought, to buy in ‘efficient teachers’ who
would broaden the Abbey’s range while preserving and protecting their spe-
cialities of Irish comedy and Yeatsian verse plays. Thus he explicitly criticized
Willie Fay’s limitations, called for a new star who could handle ‘romance and
tragedy’, and a new post of ‘paid managing Director to correlate all [the
Theatre’s] activities’.
But at the same time he admitted that Horniman would probably not
pay for all this. (“I can see William Fay’s face as he reads this sentence. It
will brighten like the face of a certain old Fenian when Mrs MacBride’s
Italian revolutionist [Cipriani] wound up a detailed project for a rising in
Connacht with the sentence “I see no chance of success before this course.”’)
What should be done immediately was to restrict Willie Fay’s role to act-
ing and producing comedy: ‘the business side of the theatre and the non-
artistic side of the stage work must be put into other hands’. Behind this lay
WBY's conviction that his own verse plays were not served well by the Fays,
that Farr should be brought over from London to teach elocution, and that
an actress like Darragh must be enlisted to play tragedy. As if this were not

354
 DELIGHTING IN ENEMIES 1905-1906

enough, the memorandum criticized Frank Fay’s lack of passion in speak-

ing, claiming that his performance were actually disimproving. Moreover,
‘from the first day of the Theatre I have known that it is almost impossible
for us to find a passionate woman actress in Catholic Ireland .. . I must
therefore have the right to bring in a player or players from without when
I can do so without burdening the finances of the Company more than my
work is worth. To do this it will be necessary that he or she sometimes play
in other work than mine.’
This could only be read as an attack on Willie Fay’s authority, with
Horniman behind it. The manifesto loftily ignored the thoughtful argu-
ments about the theatre’s direction addressed to him by Frank Fay since the
summer, and it clearly presented wBy’s wish to impose Darragh on the com-
pany. Here, he stood alone because Gregory found her style particularly
repellent. Where wey interpreted ‘passion’, Gregory saw ‘something mean,
ignoble & sensual, something never seen in any play of yours over here’.1"8
On 29 December she wrote him a long and worried letter from Coole, un-
happy at the prospect of Fay’s humiliation, arguing against importing either
Darragh or Farr, and ‘fretting at ever having to go against you’. She sent him
money to buy a new travelling-rug at the Army & Navy Stores (‘I haven't given
you anything “worthwhile” for a long time except annoyance, obstinacy,
exasperation & thin skin’) and ended with a moving tribute: ‘I was thinking
last night how much you have done for me. Without you I shd be a useful
helper of Agricultural Organizations, a writer of the rank of Stephen Gwynn
(at best). You gave me faith in myself (following faith in you) and you have
done much (very much) towards making these years past very full & very happy
ones.” The elegiac note reflected more than a sense of the year’s ending:
wBy's proposals had precipitated a serious crisis. As so often, he was caught
between strong-minded women. Though his benefactress objected to the idea
of involving Farr because of her ‘carelessness’ (not to mention her enduring
attractiveness to wBy), Horniman was aware of wBy’s controversial pro-
posals which in essence repeated a brief memorandum of her own.!?° From
the outset she, after all, would guarantee the new Managing Director's salary,
and she insisted Fay give up executive authority and all control over the
‘international masterpieces’ which she longed for the Abbey to produce: thus
Dublin would rival Bayreuth. Though Synge pointed out to Gregory that Fay
had ‘in reality built up the company’, this was accepted neither by Horniman
nor by wsy.’? Through late December he worked on Synge and Gregory
to agree; Horniman, it now transpired, was prepared to pay the large sum of
£500 a year for ‘a thoroughly good man’,” but she continually evoked ‘the
principles of Samhain 1904’ — in wBy’s words — like ‘the books of the Early
Fathers’? To wy it was all unpleasantly like the Golden Dawn struggles

355
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

precipitated by Farr, whose careless temperament and Fay’s were ‘very

similar’.'”* As before, he was in the position of mediating between the bene-
factor’s stipulations and his colleagues’ doubts, assuring them that he had done
his best to protect Fay’s interests against Horniman’s opposition. ‘When I am
talking to you and to Lady GregoryIput Fay’s limitations (when I have a point
to carry), he told Synge, ‘butIassure you I put even more strongly his genius
when talking to Miss Horniman.” By early January, however, his letters
about Fay were almost as extreme as Horniman’. As a final blandishment,
a non-acting Executive Manager would liberate all the directors from time-
consuming organization and correspondence: ‘Many and many a time we have
had to go to the typewriter the first thing after breakfast with the result that
our imaginations were exhausted before we got to our play-writing.’
In the end, after much cliff-hanging and many threats of resignation the
other directors tentatively agreed to consider the proposals. They continu-
ally passed back and forth to each other the unpalatable task of telling Fay,
who reacted with predictable anger. Relations within the company were set
for another storm. Gregory’s agonized explanation of her position to Synge
did little to help relations:

I would not for a moment think of accepting this ‘fancy man’ but that I think Yeats
wants a new excitement, a new impetus, or will tire of the theatre, and I feel myself
very much bound to him, besides personal friendship, because we are the only
survivors of the beginning of the movement. I think his work more important than
any other (you must not be offended at this) and I think it our chief distinction. I
think on the other hand it will suffer rather than gain by the new element, but he
must have experiments, and it would be a very great pity if he had to go to England
for them. . . Idont think any compromise is possible with Miss Horniman but that
wouldnt matter if we could arrive at an understanding with Yeats.!6

Synge’s relationship with wBy was soured not only by Gregory’s tactless
comment, but also by Synge’s stout defence of Fay (who excelled at his
plays) against wBy (who resented Fay’s inability to handle Yeatsian themes).
‘I am annoyed with Synge’s assumption that I am doing all this for the sake
of my own plays, wey told Gregory — adding waspishly ‘he judges us by
himself’.'7”
From London in early January 1907 wsy fired off angry letters to Gregory,
snowed in at Coole, and to Horniman, sunning herself at Tunis; but a thun-
derbolt struck when Gregory learnt that wey had promised Horniman the
rights to his plays after the current patent expired in 1910.1° Gregory felt that
the whole structure was cracking around her. Their joint authorship, and the
suppressed emotion in her own feelings towards wy, lie behind an outburst
in early January:
356
 DELIGHTING IN ENEMIES 1905-1906
You will have given Miss Horniman one of our strongest possessions or weapons.
She can take your plays from Ireland altogether or force you to put them into some
movement opposd [sic] to your views. You will have betrayed those who have been
working for you. You will yourself be in a humiliating position, seeing your friends
and comrades dictated to and not being able to [to] take their side.
Synge and I have a right to protest because we were never told of this supposed
bargain at the same time we accepted the subsidy. I certainly should not have done
so at that price . . . 1am taking it to heart very much — Those plays were our own
children, I was so proud of them, & loved them, & now I cannot think of them with-
out the greatest pain. . . Ifyou agree with me you might perhaps send a line, for I
am wretched.”

Gonne had once referred to his love-poems as their joint children; but
Gregory's sense of possession was even more heartfelt. In wBy’s compli-
cated and highly charged friendships with women, his genius for collabora-
tive work created bonds of union which replaced more conventional kinds
of attachment, which is why Gregory’s plea comes nearer to a declaration
of love than any other letter in their vast correspondence. It also served a
tactical purpose: wBy hastily clarified that no ‘promise’ of his plays had ever
been given to Horniman, whose own recollection was that she had asked to
be allowed produce the plays if the INTS collapsed. On 1 January Gregory,
Synge and Fay finally agreed to appoint a new Managing Director, with
certain conditions (and a salary rise of £100 for Fay).'° The arrangement so
uneasily put in place would last only six months.
Once again the company had come through a potentially bitter struggle,
and wsy had imposed his will on his colleagues. To compensate, he even
admitted Darragh’s shortcomings to Gregory, and amity seemed restored.
(He also confronted the actress with her reported comments about him, re-
ceiving, unsurprisingly, ‘passionate denials’). But the desire for ‘new excite-
ment’ discerned by Gregory was about to be met from a different quarter. The
impetus came from Synge at his most saturnine. He firmly opposed wBy’s
wish to import any ‘foreign masterpieces’ other than those few which illu-
minated the Abbey’s own work, and, though ‘nearly in distraction’ with the
play he had been gestating for months, by 13 November it had been read (by
Fay) to Synge’s fellow-directors.’” By the time of the directors’ arguments
over theatrical policy during Christmas 1906, it was well advanced in rehearsal.
The Playboy of the Western World forcibly altered wBy’s view of the Abbey
Theatre’s needs. Both his artistic judgement and his intellectual honesty left
him in no doubt that this was not only Synge’s masterpiece, but a master-
piece of a new sort. While perfectly adapted to the Abbey style of acting, it
far transcended ‘peasant plays’, providing exactly the kind of wild poetry
which wBy’s own verse drama strove for, and which the Abbey desired above

357
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

all to produce. In a circular of ‘advice to playwrights who are sending plays

to the Abbey’, wzy had laid down that
a play to be suitable for performance at the Abbey should contain some criticism of
life founded on the experience or personal observation of the writer, or some vision
of life, of Irish life by preference, important from its beauty or from some excellence
of style; and this intellectual quality is not more necessary to tragedy than to the gayest
comedy. We do not desire propagandist plays, nor plays written mainly to serve
some obvious moral purpose: for art seldom concerns itself with those interests
or opinions that can be defended by argument, but with realities of emotion and
character that become self-evident when made vivid to the imagination.’

Synge’s tale of a pretend parricide and the passions he arouses among the
women ofa sardonically observed Western village was mocking, eloquent and
heroic, turn by bewildering turn. wBy saw that this kind of play could answer
the needs of the theatre; it could also answer the critics who thought the Abbey,
having lost Colum and his associates, was already growing stunted. At the
height of the row over secession, in a National Literary Society debate about
“The Irish Peasantry and the Stage’, Tom Kettle had put the case against wBy’s
drama more subtly than most of his opponents:
He was afraid Mr W. B. Yeats had constructed his own views of Irish life. Mr Yeats
had done more than anybody else to create an Irish Theatre, and he had also done
more than anybody else to prevent anybody going there [laughter]. He thought the
fundamental mistake into which Mr Yeats had fallen was that he had mistaken life
for literature. Inside the seas of Ireland there were roughly two millions of Irish
peasants; and amongst these they would find every virtue and every vice. And if any-
body called up a type to which everybody must conform under pain of blasphemy
against the national idea then he (Mr Kettle) did not think anybody could profess
to understand him.}%*

Through the brilliant kaleidoscope of the Playboy, the Abbey Theatre would
confront this criticism, and present Irish life at its most authentic when at
its strangest. wBY was ready to seize the tide. His own plays had on many
levels been less than satisfactory. But by 1907 he had learnt much. The
confidence discovered in America had been put to good purpose in dealing
with Gonne’s marriage crisis, in reorganizing the Abbey, and in construct-
ing his latest canon for Poems 1899-1905. He had discovered too that both
poetic and dramatic inspiration could be rooted in the fundamental realities
of life expressed through ‘common idiom’."* And Synge’s play would now
give him this very issue to defend in public, with the combative powers he
was learning to wield so well.

358
 Chapter 14: SYNGE AND THE IRELAND oF His TIME
1907-1909

We are beginning once again to ask what a man is, and to be

content to wait a little before we go on to that further question:
what is a good Irishman?
wsy at the Playboy debate, 4 February 1907

By the beginning of 1907 the Abbey Theatre was in the throes of recon-
struction. WBY was in search of a. new Managing Director with a business
mind rather than an artistic temperament. Englishmen were allowed to
apply, andJ. E. Vedrenne of the Court duly found them the youthful Ben Iden
Payne (‘avegetarian . . . Bernard Shaw says that vegetables are wonderful for
the temper”). Gregory remained worried about the experiment, and want-
ed Willie Fay placated by a less arrogant approach: ‘I feel sure you should talk
to him as you would to me (only with more of the harp-strings in your
voice)’.” wBy’s relations with Synge, while less high-handed, remained slight-
ly uneasy: Synge begged him not to bring the new man over until the Playboy
had been got through, and wey resented the implication that Payne had been
imposed for the sake of Yeatsian verse drama.’ But it was true that he expect-
ed the new Managing Director to extend the range to ‘classical and roman-
tic work’, with Fay restricted to Irish dialect plays, and his letter to Payne made
this absolutely clear.* Moreover, Horniman had convinced wey by telling him
the new man would ‘help his plays to worthy representation’: it was ‘an effort
made by me on your behalf and that of your work’.» Gregory was no less
anxious to protect wBy’s drama, arguing strongly that The Pot ofBroth should
not appear as a curtain-raiser for the Playboy, since that would be ‘an injustice
to Yeats’. ‘I know you don’t consider your own plays enough,’ she chided
him, ‘and you have never looked like a tiger with its cub as Synge did last night
with the Playboy.”
Thus by mid-January the reception of Synge’s forthcoming play was
already an issue. Should ‘objectionable sentences’ be excised? Should the
directors ‘make a sort of a compact with The Peasant’ in advance? Nervous
as they were, the directors hung on grimly, but embarked on some judicious
pre-production censorship. The violence of Pegeen, the frustrated heroine,
was toned down, though she never became the ‘decent likeable country girl’ Fay
begged for. Though they ignored pleas to remove the threatening torture scene

ope)
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

in the last act, Gregory and wy cut out some of the ‘bad language’.’ Almost
fortuitously, the Playboy arrived at the climax of wBy’s campaign of baiting
pious nationalism represented by Griffith’s new organization Sinn Féin; and,
immediately following Horniman’s attempted seduction, it also provided
the ideal opportunity to reassure Gregory of his real commitment to the
Dublin theatre. He seized the chance with both hands. When the play
opened the puritanical Holloway (who had been excluded from rehearsals and
smelt a rat) set the tone by denouncing ‘Synge the evil genius of the Abbey
Theatre and Yeats his able lieutenant’.*
The play opened on Saturday, 26 January, with gallery and pit well filled
but the stalls sparsely attended. The first two acts were received quietly, but
(according to contemporary notes scrawled by Sara Allgood) catcalls began
when the hero attacked his father — well before the celebrated uproar at
Christy Mahon’s invocation of Mayo girls arrayed in their ‘shifts’. Cries of
‘God save Ireland’ alternated with “Where is the author? Bring him out and
we will deal with him’ and — significantly — ‘Sinn Féin for ever’.? wBy was in
Scotland at the time, trying to improve his precarious finances with a lecture-
tour. His dazzled host in Aberdeen, Professor Herbert Grierson, remembered
his arrival much as Hazlitt recalled Coleridge’s — ‘he began to talk and so far
as I know has continued to do so ever since’ — and was struck by the fact that
his visitor launched straight into the importance of Sinn Féin, the need for
a coming fight with the Church, and the power of Synge’s new play. Thus it
cannot have been entirely unexpected when, after a triumphant lecture, the
Grierson household was woken in the small hours by Gregory’s famous telegram
telling wsy of the riot and summoning him to the scene: ‘Audience broke up
in disorder at the word shift.’”?°
Arriving back in time for the second night, on Monday, 28 January, he noted
that ‘about forty men who sat in the middle of the pit succeeded in making
the play completely inaudible’: he rapidly identified them as Griffithites.
On 29 January he gave the first of many controversial interviews. Sitting
beside a more or less silent Synge, he cited the tradition of exaggeration
in art and remarked that ‘so far as he could see the people who formed the
opposition had no books in their houses’. The commonplace and ignorant
were attempting to exercise a dictatorship.’ ‘With the coming of Yeats,’
W. P. Ryan remarked gloomily to Henderson, ‘I knew that the trouble would
be aggravated.’
Already newspapers were calling for the play to be withdrawn. wBy
was determined to run it for the intended seven nights, and for longer if
it did not receive a hearing. On 29 January the police were summoned to
the theatre. This was partly to deal with ‘a Trinity College c/ague’ led by a
nephew of Gregory’s, who drunkenly sang ‘God Save the King’ and
was subsequently arrested for assaulting a policeman. Hugh Lane was also
360
 SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME I907-I909

present, ‘pointing out to the police members of the audience for ejection’. All
was blamed on wey, though he had little to do with either initiative, since
Fay summoned the police in the first instance on the Monday night; none
the less the Independent delightedly described wy ‘making his appear-
ance at the head ofa force of policemen’. Disturbances continued throughout
the week, reported at gleeful length in all the Irish papers. On several occa-
sions wByY harangued the audience from the stage. There were several arrests
and fines. By the end of the week he believed ‘opinion had turned in our
favour’; on 4 February he celebrated with a public debate in the theatre — an
idea he had announced, to Synge’s evident surprise, as soon as he returned."4
This, together with his readiness to give newspaper interviews, proved his
appetite for public confrontation. Gregory’s line was that people who came
to the theatre ‘must take what is provided for them; Synge’s, equally char-
acteristic, that he ‘didn’t care a rap’.!° But for wy the issue was one of artis-
tic freedom and liberation froma censorship, not imposed by the Church but
by dictatorial ‘societies, clubs and leagues’*° — in other words, by Griffith’s
Sinn Féiners.
Sinn Féin was the movement arising out of Cumann na nGaedheal,
advancing from 1905 a nationalist programme stressing self-reliance in

15. Synge raptly watching

a late rehearsal of the Playboy
on 15 January 1907, caught
by By: Gregory described
him as looking ‘like a tiger
with its cub’.
 YU
flit

The Amateur Chucker-Out.

16. The Abbey Row, a

speedily produced
Dublin pamphlet, im-
mortalized the actions
of the principals in the
Playboy controversy.
The elegant connois-
seur Hugh Lane, who
had allegedly ‘pointed
out to the police mem-
bers of the audience for
ejection’, appears as an
unlikely bouncer; wBY
is caught addressing
the audience from the
stage, in regulation
pince-nez and artistic
bow-tie; while Synge is
identified by his con-
temptuous dismissal of
public opinion.

The Poet addressed the Audience.

 SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 1907-1909

culture, economics and politics, and preaching a robust line in Anglophobia

without endorsing violent separatism; it bore strong similarities to con-
temporary continental right-wing nationalist organizations. Griffith, at the
outset friendly towards both wsy and the theatre movement, had hardened
into enmity since The Shadow ofthe Glen — an antipathy exacerbated by his
support of MacBride in Gonne’s separation case. To wBy and his friends, Sinn
Féin’s overtones of Catholic confessionalism and cultural chauvinism were
ominous (even Quinn was reduced to incoherent rage by their ‘vaporings’!’).
For the Sinn Féiners the Playboy came at exactly the point when the move-
ment was organizing various groups into a ‘League’ on the basis of their 1905
programme. From their point of view the enterprise of Synge, way and
Gregory represented the corruption and decadence of modern Ireland. The
way the political issue was seized upon by Coole is reflected in a letter from
Robert Gregory:

We have won a complete victory over the organised disturbers — Sinn Fein men to
a great extent. It was quite necessary that someone should show fight and we are the
only people who have done it. Judge Ross said to my mother last night “You have earned
the gratitude of the whole community — you are the only people who have had the
pluck to stand up against this organised intimidation in Dublin.”*

This helps explain why feelings ran so high: the opposition was interpreted
far more politically than in the days of Frank Hugh O’Donnell’s and Cardinal
Logue’s attacks on The Countess Cathleen. The support of the Dublin Metro-
politan Police was unfortunate, especially when they targeted people like
Padraic Colum’s innocent father as well as the zealot Piaras Béaslai: and wBy
was universally castigated for their intervention (as well as for not speaking
Irish, and bearing ‘a Saxon name’).? But with the Church staying out of it,
he could wrong-foot Sinn Féin by appropriating their language (‘the coun-
try that condescends either to bully or to let itself be bullied soon ceases to
have any fine qualities”°). Griffith’s journal, which had for some time been
booming the Theatre of Ireland at the Abbey’s expense, contemptuously
attacked the play as ‘a vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language
we have ever listened to from a public platform . . . the production ofa moral
degenerate, who has dishonoured the women of Ireland before all Europe’.
Other opponents included unexpected figures like Dr Sigerson and Alice
Milligan, who attacked wsy for courting censorship in the interests of self-
advertisement. Stephen Gwynn, while recognizing the play was nota ‘social
document’, worried that it would effectively justify anti-Irish stereotypes.”
Russell also abandoned them, publishing a satire on wBy and Synge in Sinn
Féin and refusing to chair the public meeting of 4 February, choosing to appear

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in the gallery instead. There was, however, a good deal of public support, espe-
cially in letters to the papers.”
The meeting of 4 February, considered unwise by Synge and ‘dreadful’ by
Gregory,” provided wBy with his apotheosis. Majority feeling was clearly
against the play. Even those temperamentally sympathetic, like Francis
Sheehy-Skeffington and Francis Cruise-O’Brien, opposed the theatre man-
agement for having called in the police. Few defences of Synge were offered.
One came from a Kerry medical student (and friend of Joyce’s), Daniel
Sheehan, who announced that the play was about ‘sexual melancholia’ and
spoke so frankly about rural frustrations that several ladies hurriedly left.
‘Mr Synge had drawn attention to a particular form of marriage law which,
though not confined to Ireland, was very common in Ireland. It was with a
fine woman like Pegeen Mike and a tubercule Koch's disease man like Shaun
Keogh — and the point of view was not the murder at all, but when the artist
appears in Ireland who was not afraid of his life and his nature, the women
of Ireland would receive him.” By was at his most mischievous. After
announcing that ‘in this country people cannot live or die behind curtains of
deceit’, he guyed the notion of an isle of saints and scholars by slyly adding
‘plaster saints’ —a line readily seen as anti-Catholic, and featured in headlines
as ‘MrJ.B. Yeats’s Sneer’. (“Kill your father!’ wBy was advised by the audi-
ence.) Synge stayed away, ill at home, and determined to sustain the Olympian
stance he had taken since In the Shadow ofthe Glen. ‘On the French stage you
get sex without its balancing elements: on [the] Irish stage you [get] the other
elements without sex. I restored sex and the people were so surprised they saw
the sex only.”° Gregory withdrew from public engagement too, probably influ-
enced by their recent disagreements over theatre management. Thus the
spotlight rested on wBy, occupying the Abbey stage in evening dress.
He was determined to be confrontational, reminding the audience that
he had called in the police during The Countess Cathleen as well, but also
proclaiming his nationalist past. At that time, he remarked, he was ‘Pres-
ident of the Wolfe Tone Commemoration Committee of Great Britain’
(laughter and applause); he also presented himselfas ‘the author of Cathleen
nt Houlihan’. This was rapidly immortalized. Sinn Féin responded with a
parody whose refrain ran “They will be respectable for ever, The police will
protect them for ever’, and the Leader raised this boast against wBy for the
rest of its life. Moran described the riots as a reasonable response on behalf
of ‘Ireland’ for being libelled by way and Synge — who then invoked the
police ‘with a cry of “freedom of judgment” ’. As it happened, constabulary
were always in attendance at the big Patent Theatres; but the ethos (and
supposed politics) of the Abbey made it different.”” Gregory gave a jaundiced
version of the evening (‘we had hardly anyone to speak on our side at all but
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 SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME I907-I909

it didn’t much matter for the disturbances were so great they wouldn't even
let their own speakers be well heard’). But wBy’s speech, carefully reprinted
in the Arrow, crystallized his feelings about a confrontation which he wel-
comed in every way. The attack on the play was ‘an annihilation of civil rights’;
he contemptuously instanced a Liverpool priest who had withdrawn a play
when the audience objected and— apparently speaking for the Abbey’s Prot-
estant directorate — added ‘we have not such pliant bones, and did not learn
in the houses that bred us a so suppliant knee’. (‘“Oh”, groans and hisses.’)
His peroration, addressed to the ‘gentlemen of the little clubs and societies’,
threw down a challenge on behalf of the new generation, who ‘wish again for
individual sincerity, the eternal quest of truth, all that has been given up for
so long that all might crouch upon the one roost and quack or cry in the
one flock’.”* Finally, even though he had not been the first to summon the
police, he deliberately took the responsibility for this controversial action:
it was ‘right and manly to go to the full length’ and charge people like Béaslai.
‘No-one would say he flinched from his fight.’ And as an envoi he described —
as Synge’s alleged inspiration — that incident ten years ago, when he him-
self and Symons had stepped ashore at Inishmaan and been told that a man
had killed his father and been sheltered by the community. This may have
been irresistible, but it sabotaged the argument that the play’s force depended
on metaphor and exaggeration” (Irish country people did, apparently, admire
murderers after all). He had never been so deliberately offensive to a Dublin
audience.
wBy emerged from the confrontation convinced that the directors had won;
the other side were quiescent, and his own curtain-call after Cathleen ni
Houlihan on 9 February was taken as vindication. Audiences had increased;
all that worried him was the threat to the Abbey’s country tours and his own
Irish American lecturing.*° To Quinn, who had warned him about the out-
raged reaction from Devoy and other Clan na Gael stalwarts in the USA, he
wrote, ‘It has been for some time inevitable that the intellectual element
here in Dublin should fall out with the more brainless patriotic force, and come
into existence as a conscious Force by doing so.”*! “The mob’ or ‘the conven-
tional public’ constituted the enemy; and they were now identified with the
Sinn Féin brand of nationalism, ‘obscure members of the Gaelic League’,
inflamed by Griffith himself. To Farr, he speculated that Griffith’s inveterate
hostility arose from ‘some fancied wrong in connection with Maud Gonne’.”
But there were more than adequate ideological reasons as well.
From this point on wBy was preoccupied with ‘opinion’ and its disastrous
effect upon art. The theme was addressed in a passage suppressed from
Discoveries, and dominated the Samhain published in December 1908. It is
unlikely that he yet saw matters with the bitter clarity recorded in his later

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essay ‘Synge and the Ireland of his Time’: ‘I stood there watching [the pro-
testers], knowing well that I saw the dissolution of a school of patriotism that
held sway over my youth.’ But the fall-out of the explosion reached rural dis-
trict councils, who passed resolutions against the theatre, and led to formal
condemnations of Gregory from old enemies on the Board of Guardians at
Gort.** From other quarters too the controversy ignited long-standing resent-
ments: William Boyle, who had not seen the Playboy, none the less took the
occasion to vent an old animus against Horniman and wey by withdrawing
his plays from the Abbey. Gregory was glad to see him go, but wBy correct-
ly anticipated that he would return in contrition.»
In some ways life apparently returned to normal with surprising ease. By
early February wBy was immured at Coole, once more revising On Baile’
Strand, within a month he felt capable of writing lyrics again, though there
would not be much evidence of this for another eighteen months.* He was
also excited by a new play, The Piper, submitted by Norreys Connell (Conal
O’Riordan) — grotesque and ‘pretty dangerous’.** Back in Dublin, Synge
continued to nurture resentment against his fellow-directors for favouring
their own work; the advent of the new manager, Payne, did not improve his
humour, with the production of Blunt’s troublesome Fund appearing ‘a bas-
tard literary pantomime, put on with many of the usual tricks of the English
stage’. Invoking the ‘Samhain principles’, he threatened to walk out.*” At this
dangerous point, the Playboy became controversial once more, this time in
connection with the company’s English tour, planned for mid-May. Synge,
though he deliberately stayed out of all public controversy, bitterly resented
wBy's removal of his masterpiece from the programme for Glasgow and
Birmingham, for reasons of possible objections from ‘slum Irish’ as much as
from the Lord Chamberlain;* it certainly contradicted his public boasts
about the Abbey’s readiness to confront censorship.*? But it was pragmatic.
The players themselves were reluctant to put on the play in London, though
it eventually scored a considerable success.” And wy continued to worry
about endangering the chances of an American tour, now a financial necess-
ity, as Horniman threatened to end her subsidy. He was meditating a
special introduction for the American edition of the Playboy, ‘explaining
that the Play means that if Ireland goes on, loosing [sic] her strong men by
emigration at the present rate, and submitting her will to every kind of
political and religious dominion the young men will grow so tame that the
young girls will prefer any man of spirit, even though he has killed his father,
to any one of them’.”’
Though the Playboy row ebbed away, it left behind an immovable deposit:
wBy’s determination to separate art from political content, reiterated in pub-
lic over the next years with increasing frequency. He ‘did not write Kathleen
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 SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 1907-1909

ni Houlihan to make rebels’; ‘in our theatre we have nothing to do with

politics: they would only make our art insincere’; ‘a literature freed from
political objects is a Muse escaped from the pots and pans’.” ‘Opinion’ had
joined ‘rhetoric’ in his personal devil’s dictionary. If the Synge fracas had
separated him from Russell’s circle, it had also aligned him further than
ever from the Griffithites — a process made easier by their espousal of John
MacBride’s case against Maud Gonne’s. Symbolically, at this very point —
mid-March 1907 — John O'Leary died. wey, though in Ireland, did not
attend his funeral: in Irish society, a notable and deliberate gesture. Later,
he would explain this as a reflection of his contempt for the hangers-on who
tried to associate themselves with the old man’s nobility:
Ishrank from seeing about his grave so many whose Nationalism was different from
anything he had taught or thatIcould share. He belonged, as did his friend John F.
Taylor, to the romantic conception of Irish Nationality on which Lionel Johnson and
myself founded, so far as it was founded on anything but literature, our Art and our
Irish criticism. Perhaps his spirit, if it can care for or see old friends now, will accept
this apology for an absence that has troubled me.

But his own links with O’Leary had loosened, particularly since O’Leary’s
determined support of MacBride against Gonne; and wBy’s invocation of
Johnson is striking, because in both cases their actual friendship had lapsed
well before death ended the connection, though it would later be brilliantly
resuscitated for the purposes of autobiography.

II

Perhaps just as emblematic as his refusal to attend O’Leary’s funeral was his
decision to join Gregory and her son in Italy three weeks later: ‘They’ve
made Ireland too hot to hold them for the moment,’ remarked Farr irrever-
ently.** Oddly, little record is left of his first visit to a country, and a culture,
which would inspire his imagination from this time on. wBy told his Scots
friend, Grierson, that it was the latter’s recommendation to read Edmund
Gardner’s work on Ferrara that sent him to Italy,** and Gregory concurred
that he had ‘set his heart’ on seeing it. However, she was the impresario; she
visited Venice every year, and seems to have made all the arrangements.
Gogarty later remarked that seeing Italy with her must have been like see-
ing it from inside a Black Maria;* a certain constraint may explain the lack
of evidence about the expedition itself, or about wBy’s immediate reactions.
On to April he left London to join Gregory and her son for the journey south.
They drove over the Appenines to Urbino, then down to Ravenna, Ferrara
and eventually Venice, where she brought him to the Piazza San Marco and
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left him ‘entranced by the rich colouring, the strange beauty of the joyous
Venetian night’.*° By 2 May he was at the Palace Hotel, Florence, still fret-
ting about the low turn-out at the theatre, sending copy back for the Arrow,
and receiving ranting letters from Horniman about arrangements for the
Abbey’s tour of England. After the initial aesthetic impact, it was not an
entirely successful visit. wByY was struck down by colds and rheumatism, and
spent his days sightseeing (the Baptistry, the Duomo), disapprovingly read-
ing novels by D’Annunzio, and writing yearningly to an unreceptive Farr.
Deprived of romantic responses, he attempted to woo her pragmatically:
since his collected edition would retail at four guineas and large orders were
coming in, ‘you see I am worth being nice to, even to the extent of occasion-
ally being written to’.*’ The party went on to Rimini, and then returned again
via Ferrara to Ca Capello, San Paolo (Lady Layard’s house), in Venice. wBy
complained that ‘I cannot be certain of anything, in this hurried life — going
from place to place.’* Though they left prematurely on 22 May, summoned
by the crisis over licensing the Playboy for performance in England, he does
not seem to have been sorry.
But he had stored up a great treasure-trove of visual memories from the
galleries, churches and towns of northern Italy. Not only would the architec-
ture of Venice inspire suggestions for Abbey stage-sets; more profoundly, he
formed his ideas about the reflection of civilization’s development through
painting, supplying images that resound through Discoveries. The artist’s
son began to react against the 1890s symbolism which had held him for so
long. The progress of culture and ideas of beauty, from Titian (long famil-
iar, but now for him the supreme master) down to the confusion of Post-
Impressionism, would preoccupy him for years.” Just after his return he
added a passage to The Tables ofthe Law recording ‘Owen Aherne’s’ devo-
tion to Sienese painting:
The pictures that I knew best, for they had hung there longest, whether reproduc-
tions or originals, were of the Sienese school, which he had studied for a long time,
claiming that it alone of the schools of the world pictured not the world but what is
revealed to saints in their dreams and visions. The Sienese alone among Italians,
he would say, could not or would not represent the pride of life, the pleasure in
swift movement or sustaining strength, or voluptuous flesh. They were so little inter-
ested in these things that there often seemed to be no human body at all under the
robe of the saint, but they could represent by a bowed head, or uplifted face, man’s
reverence before Eternity as no others could, and they were at their happiest
when mankind had dwindled to a little group silhouetted upon a golden abyss, as if
they saw the world habitually from far off.°°
Here too began his interest in Byzantine art, notably after visiting Ravenna.
And above all his Italian journey conferred the inspirational notion of a great
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 SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 1907-1909

culture which had been sustained with patronage — an ideal of Renaissance

courts, where the life of the mind was cultivated in miniature city-states on
windy hills. One image of a poet’s perfect life came to him outside Urbino,
when the sight of a medieval tower reared up against a stormy sunset sum-
moned up the vision of Ariosto’s life dedicated to artistic perfection: the
notion of the poet in his tower, long ago suggested by Milton and painted by
Samuel Palmer, now took on a vibrant reality. Like much else about Italy, it
would feed into the personalized imagery of his overwhelming imagination.
Castiglione, the ‘grammar school of courtesies’, a life of artistic order and labour
became central to his ideal. But the idea of artistic dedication usurping even
adeptship, and a small, intensely cultivated audience replacing the wider
world, had already been sown in the battles over the theatre just before the
Italian journey. Both experiences predisposed him all the more to accept-
ing Gregory's pronouncements de haut en bas. ‘I have an open mind myself,
& not the timidity created by logic,’ she told him. ‘Taste, like every other
attribute of aristocracy, requires daring.’ This too was a lesson he would derive
from his idea of Italy.
The journey there, however, had not restored him, and he returned to
various crises sparked off by the Abbey’s English tour. In the following
weeks he reported ‘a slight breakdown from overwork’, and a month after
their return he told Gregory, ‘I feel that I have lost myself - my centre as it
were, has shifted from its natural interests and that it will take me a long
time finding myself again.”*? While he was determined to shrug off external
pressures and commitments, he was involved in yet another confrontation
with Horniman. Angry at being left — as she saw it — to handle the Abbey’s
English tour, and annoyed at wBy’s lengthy absence, she decided to transfer
her energies and her money to a theatrical enterprise in Manchester, and to
take Payne, the new Abbey manager, with her. wBy’s last-ditch suggestion
of starting a second company in Dublin, to play the kind of drama close to
his heart and hers, was not enough to stop her.°? But this was not all. Once
again she asked wBy to allow his plays to be assigned to the new venture.
Now, strengthened and counselled by Gregory, he refused outright, in a
statement that was both honest and eloquent: it is, in its way, one of the best
letters he ever wrote.
I have thought carefully over your proposal of yesterday and have decided that it is
impossible as far as Iam concerned. I am not young enough to change my nation-
ality — it would really amount to that. Though I wish for a universal audience, in
play-writing there is always an immediate audience also. If I am to try and find
the immediate audience in England I would fail through lack of understanding on
my part, perhaps through lack of sympathy. I understand my own race and in all my
work, lyric or dramatic, I have thought of it. If the theatre fails I may or may not

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write plays — but I shall write for my own people — whether in love or hate of them
matters little — probably I shall not know which it is. Nor can I make any per-
manent allocation of my plays while the Irish theatre may at any moment need my
help. At any moment I may have to ask friends for funds with the whole mass of
plays for a bait.**
From this point, knowing she had lost her prize, Horniman was finally dis-
illusioned with the Abbey directors. She condemned Gregory, Synge and wBy
not only as victims of the ‘vampire Kathleen ni Houlihan’, but as grasping
and exploitative (thanks to an ill-received suggestion that she hand over the
outstanding subsidy as a lump sum). Without her support, a financial crisis
loomed. During the remaining two and a half years of the subsidy, the donor
imposed more and more conditions, particularly regarding issues which she
deemed ‘political’. She also withdrew the extra salary granted to Willie Fay
six months previously, which required painstaking explanations from wBY.”
But Payne, after his brief administrative reign, had gone; he declared that
as an Englishman his position had inevitably been a difficult one, though
wey added privately to Gregory that Fay had driven him away by persuad-
ing the other actors not to speak to him.*® Henderson was given notice, and
in the end Fay had to return as manager, to wBY’s chagrin. ‘I am the one who
will suffer, as his little evasions and bits of temper exasperate me more than
the rest of you,’ he told Synge. ‘I tried every kind of device in my imagina-
tion but none seemed possible.’ They were, inevitably, headed for another
crisis. “The theatre is now a desperate enterprise, and we must take desperate
measures.”
His own work, as ever, provided both a resource and a refuge. Consolingly,
Mrs Patrick Campbell was again expressing interest in producing Deirdre
(though she wanted backing from Horniman)** and once settled at Coole
in July wBy began to recast his plays for Bullen’s projected collected edition.
The changes he made reflected the difficulties of the past months: he took
the ‘conventional religiousness’ out of The Hour-Glass,” and with Gregory
reshaped Where There 1s Nothing into a new version, eventually called The
Unicorn from the Stars. Vhe hero’s name was changed to ‘Hearne’, a literary
descendant of the autobiographical protagonist in The Speckled Bird, the
bizarre title concealed a reference from the Order of the Golden Dawn;
while the setting was specifically eighteenth-century and dealt with mil-
lenarian ideas of rebellion against Britain. But even more strikingly, the
theme of a visionary who owes his temporary status to the misapprehensions
of a local community bore a marked resemblance to the Playboy.
Staying on into the autumn, with occasional departures to Dublin and
London,* he found distractions at Coole. Robert Gregory and his new
fiancée, a fellow art student Margaret Parry, were ‘fighting for mastery’, and

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 SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 1907-1909

WwBy enjoyed the spectacle. ‘Pretty, very clever, and with beautiful manners
’,
Margaret at first impressed him: but she would with time become a com-
mitted enemy, absorbing and exacerbating her husband’s resentment of
his mother’s semi-permanent guest. The autumn of 1907 at Coole was also
enlivened by Augustus John, summoned by Gregory to produce a portrait
of wBy asa frontispiece for the planned collected edition of his works. John,
not yet thirty, was already notorious: his vivid, innocent, libidinous bohemi-
anism fascinated wy, though he had deep reservations about the sketche
s
(‘one looks a gipsy, grown old in wickedness and hardship’). Much later he
would decide John had divined ‘an outlawed solitude’ in him. John himself
was equally amused by wsy. ‘He has a natural and sentimental prejudice
in favour of the W. B. Yeats he and other people have been accustomed to
see and imagine for so many years. He is now 44 [actually 42] and a robust,
virile and humorous personality (while still the poet of course). I cannot see
in him any definite resemblance to the youthful Shelley in a lace collar. To
my mind he is far more interesting as he is.’ Everybody hated the sketches
of wsy, for different reasons: both wey and John knew that it was because
they jarred with a public image that had fast become fixed into an icon.
Behind all this activity — the rewriting, the sitting to portraits, the fren-
zied communications to and from Bullen at Stratford through 1907 and 1908
~ lay the project of the Collected Works. Since January 1907 discussions had
been under way. As always with Bullen, expense was originally a difficulty,
but money was eventually guaranteed by, of all people, Annie Horniman,
an arrangement which made wey slightly uncomfortable. Even as she
detached herself from the theatre, she bound him to her by another golden
thread. By February the project was clearly going ahead, and wBy was
wondering how to reclaim The Wind Among the Reeds from Elkin Mathews
and Poems 1899-1905 from Fisher Unwin; the latter brought in 435 a year, and
the popular demand was for the kind of lyrics included in the former.
Money was obviously a priority. wBy’s taxable earnings for 1907 were com-
puted at £161. 2s. 134., compared to £181. 195. od. the previous year (and £207.
125. 11d. in 1908). Though he still had some stocks from his American wind-
fall, he was privately borrowing money from Horniman. But what else led
him to such a precocious step? He was certainly impelled by a developing sense
of pattern and form in his work. Around this time he began to file rough papers,
and to keep the drafts of a particular poem in the same manuscript book, so
work can often be followed through from the first prose draft. He was also
starting to accumulate pensées in large notebooks, some for publication. And
he was possessed by the idea of correcting and revising the texts of his plays,
probably to bring them into line with the priorities of the post-Playboy aes-
thetic, moving away from elaboration towards clarity of personal utterance.

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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

The near daily letters fired off to Bullen through the summer preserve the
intensity of his vision. ‘I withdrew from active work in the Abbey Theatre
with the purpose of devoting myself for a year to making afinal text of all my
works. But for this I would never have consented to a collected edition at this
moment, as I believe that an edition containing so much that is immature or
inexperienced as there is in my already published works would do me a very
great injury.’’’ But here was the chance to repossess and reformulate his
eeuvre — to provide variant versions of The Shadowy Waters, to rewrite Where
There is Nothing, to eliminate The Pot ofBroth (Gregory's input into his dra-
matic work, vindictively revealed by Horniman to Bullen, had become a sen-
sitive issue®), to print music with the plays (‘it gets its meaning from the
method of speaking and is a necessary record of that method. It is important
to me that people whom I cannot personally teach and who may produce my
work shall know my intention’). He was particularly anxious that the pop-
ular early work should not eclipse his later experiments, recalling grimly how
he had repositioned The Wanderings of Oisin at the end of his last collection
to stop people saying ‘it was such a pity Mr Yeats had fallen off so after writ-
ing it’.”? Deirdre and The King’s Threshold were emphatically defined as ‘my
most mature work’ and therefore of especial importance in the canon.”
But Bullen, nightmarishly disorganized, had to be kept in order — some-
times by invoking Watt, more often by direct and reproachful letters. As far
as the publisher was concerned, wBy was to get the order of poems right, to
revise his texts, and if possible to extend the schedule in order to accommo-
date new work (two new plays and two new stories were envisaged during
that creative summer at Coole). The complexity and variety of his early output
left room for endless confusion. Bullen failed to understand why wsy rejected
his own early criticism (such as the articles for the Bookman), and believed that
‘practically nothing’ of his prose before Ideas of Good and Evil was worth
including, except the reflections on Axé/.” For reasons not entirely aesthetic,
wBy was also worried about the jumbling of material from Samhain into a
projected section called — resonantly—‘Friends and Enemies’; he complained
about ‘fragments of letters reprinted from the United Irishman (just where
mistakes are most likely & mistakes that might be very injurious to me for I
have quarrelled with the paper & its party)’.” The collected edition was
intended to declare a stage in his life when he had broken with several of the
identifications and alliances which had marked his youth.
By the end of September copy had been sent for four suggested volumes
— The Celtic Twilight and Red Hanrahan, Ideas of Good and Evil, Poems and
Verse Plays. At least three further volumes were projected. The proof-stage
would be an educational process for wBy, sparring with Bullen, who acidly
pinpointed anomalies and, for instance, condescendingly advised the author

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 SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 1907-1909
to read Aristotle and Plato on ‘magnificence’ before generalizing
about that
quality in Spenser. (wsy snapped back: ‘I know what Aristotle says
& what
is in the Decameron on that subject, but not Plato. I will look it up.””*)
The
question of self-presentation in frontispiece portraits was less easily
resolved,
and throughout the summer it was discussed, mediated and argued about
by
the women and patrons in his life. The Augustus John etching, comple
ted
in mid-December, seemed to wsy ‘a translation of me into tinker languag
e’;
perhaps bearing Paul Ruttledge in mind, he rather admired it, but it was
dis-
liked by Gregory and utterly condemned by Horniman (which, given her
finan-
cial input, effectively ruled it out’5). wBy’s idea had been to have ‘Augustus
John’s melancholy desperado conducted by some four or five quite respectable
persons’ —in other words, for each volume to contain a different portrai
t, ‘bal-
lancing’ John’s image.” The old project of a Charles Shannon portrait was
revived, while Gregory, resourceful as ever, lined up Sargent for a charcoal
drawing, hoping Quinn would purchase it. (The finances were becoming
complex: Bullen paid John 418 for the undesirable etching; Gregory paid
Sargent £42 for a charcoal drawing, hoping to recoup from Quinn; Shannon
agreed to do an oil for £100, one third of his normal rate, again expecting Quinn
to buy the original’’.) wsy wrote a philosophical description of the odyssey
to Quinn in January 1908:
I have had strange adventures in trying to get a suitable portrait. My father always
sees me through a mist of domestic emotion, or so ] think, and Mancini who has
filled me with joy, has turned me into a sort of Italian bandit, or half bandit — half
cafe king, certainly a joyous Latin, impudent, immoral, and reckless. Augustus John
who has made a very fine thing of me has made me sheer tinker, drunken, unpleas-
ant and disreputable, but full of wisdom, a melancholy English Bohemian, capable
of everything, except of living joyously on the surface. Iam going to put the lot one
after the other, my father’s emaciated portrait that was frontispiece for the ‘tables of
the law’ beside Mancini’s brazen image and Augustus John’s tinker, to pluck the nose
of Shannon's idealist, nobody will believe they are the same man, and I shall write
an essay upon them and describe them as all the different personages thatIhave dreamt
of being, but have never had the time for. I shall head it with this quotation; from
the conversation of Wordsworth: — ‘No, that is not Mr Wordsworth, the poet, that
is Mr Wordsworth, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.’®

II]
The autumn of 1907, however, was not entirely devoted to revision and
organization of his work, for the Abbey was still in a critical state. Unwill-
ingly, wBy found the company had to rely on the popular success of plays like
George Fitzmaurice’s The Country Dressmaker, a ‘harsh, strong, ugly comedy’

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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

which he personally disliked. Financial pressure meant that there was little
alternative, but wBy’s own priorities were expressed in a rather high-flown
letter to Florence Darragh — still kept waiting in the wings. The post-
Playboy theatre, he wrote, must ‘turn knowledge into instinct, and both alike
into personality. I am feeling the same difficulty in my own work. I have got
to the point now of having knowledge but if Icannot find an audience and
players it must remain knowledge, and perhaps help others, by criticism, to
more popular forms of creation. We can make something of ourselves always,
but it is our age that decides whether it is to be our best or not.” On the same
day he wrote a more depressed letter to Sturge Moore about the lack of
appreciation for his verse drama, but insisting on ‘the dramatic poet’s right
to educate his audience as a musical composer does his’.*° His sense of
insecurity was well founded. Synge was simultaneously writing privately
to Frank Fay that a wBy—Gregory theatre would be of no use to anybody,
nervously adding that he should tear up the letter.*
In late October, however, wBy’s faith was rewarded by a hugely encour-
aging bouquet. Mrs Patrick Campbell swept into Dublin, was honoured by
a special matinée performance at the Abbey on 25 October, and announced
from the stage that she would return a year later and perform Deirdre by ‘my
dear friend and your great poet’. wBy acidly noted that Dublin newspaper
reports omitted the word ‘great’; Horniman, demented by jealousy, warned
him ‘she admires your poetical powers & very likely she has taken a fancy
to you too although you are much too old for a woman of forty who might
well go in for someone young’. (Though wsy and Mrs Campbell were
exactly the same age, Horniman was proved right; she subsequently married
George Cornwallis-West, ten years her junior.) At a late-night supper-party
in Mrs Campbell’s honour an unpleasant altercation developed with Casimir
Markievicz over the terms on which the Theatre of Ireland had seceded.**
But even these snide reactions could not mar the golden prospect. At last he
would achieve popular acclaim with one of his verse plays — and broaden the
theatre’s reputation by presenting a major international star. The old mirage
of attracting both a ‘respectable’ and a popular audience with one of his own
plays came alluringly into view. Thus fortified, he could withstand even the
utter flop of The Unicorn from the Stars. When it opened on 21 November, Frank
Fay actually fell asleep on stage, and newspapers like the Maz/ could barely
contain themselves. ‘““Where There Is Nothing, there is” - Mr Yeats. The
whole thing is an essay, a sermon, a preaching, as someone said to me, “the
gospel of lunacy” .. . The comments one heard and overheard were all in
one key .. . A few days of it would kill the Abbey Theatre, and naturally.’
Buoyed up by Mrs Campbell, wsy took everything in his stride. “You who
love London will not understand me,’ he wrote to Farr, ‘but it is this narrow

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 SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 1907-1909

imbittered in many ways stupid town that touches my imagination. Elsewhere

we become like other people, here perhaps because other people are rather
disagreeable we remain ourselves.’®
Accordingly, he was becoming interested in the traditions of the caste
and family background which he had been elaborately repudiating for twenty
years. In early December he took Gregory to visit his Yeats aunts in Morehamp-
ton Road. By triumphantly reported the occasion:
Apparently they were both greatly impressed, finding something very satisfactory
ina salon of old-world courtesy. Isaac was there, and two other Aunts. Willie, though
he remembered their faces, did not know their names. This visit will perhaps soft-
en their hearts as regards Willie. It is curious, but I find Willie with all his faults more
lovable than Jack. The latter was too long in Sligo and so is full of ill will towards all
his fellow creatures and suspicion and contempt. It is the way with commercial people.
Willie thinks well of his fellow creatures except when he is fighting them, at any rate
has a high opinion of human nature and believes it has a noble destiny. Jack of course
sticks manfully to duty which makes him an admirable fellow citizen, but then it
makes him a little cold and a little self complacent.**
Even the high-minded Yeatses, however, were realistic about their black-sheep
brother. wBy subsequently told Gregory that Morehampton Road had not
produced its greatest treasure, a silver cup presented to an ancestor in 1515. ‘It
should have been my father’s but they were afraid he might pawn it.’®’
But Dublin continued to send slings and arrows his way. The Leader
in November attacked him for allegedly attending a ‘God Save the King’
dinner at the Corinthian Club, sitting between W. M. Murphy and a Castle
ADC; Casimir Markievicz joyfully weighed in, gossiping widely about wBy’s
‘delight’ at being asked to meet viceroyalty. Since Yeats family lore held that
the Markievicz radicalism stemmed from the Count’s being banned from Castle
functions for ‘rowdyism’, wBy sent him an accordingly contemptuous rebuke,**
while the Leader received a dignified letter explaining that he had attended
under a misapprehension. He added carefully: ‘I have long ceased to be an
active politician, but that makes me the more anxious to follow with all
loyalty the general principles defined by Mr Parnell and never renounced
by any Nationalist party’ — to ignore crown representatives ‘until a sufficient
National independence had made possible a new treaty’.®”
Politics also lay behind rehearsals for the Abbey’s next production, Norreys
Connell’s new allegorical play, The Piper. Fay hated it, and said so; Annie
Horniman obligingly told Connell; wsy had to excuse Fay to Connell as ‘teally
an excitable, hot-tempered, grown-up child, whose moods change with the
weather, with the receipts of the last performance, with whatever other trivial
accident moves him at the moment’.”” On 4 December the directors convened
a meeting about Fay, and decided to refuse him the right to re-engage players

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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

on his own authority; they further insisted on improved discipline and re-
quired ‘that it be explained to the Company that this Theatre must go on as a
theatre for intellectual drama, whatever unpopularity that may involve’. This
was a clear victory for wBy, who was also infuriated at the new Managing
Director, Ernest Vaughan, for choosing a touring programme without con-
sultation. He succeeded in bringing up yet again his commitment to putting
on more ‘foreign’ work — though his position was not helped by tactless
encouragement from Horniman, declaring that the theatre was ‘in the pub-
lic eye an Irish toy’.
The company went off on tour to Scotland in early December, but a
confrontation was obviously on the way. By 18 December wBy was writing
tentatively to Gregory that Fay must be faced down. This was sensitive,
since, as wBY knew, she depended on Fay for the successful playing of her
own work. She turned against Fay only when he put on her Fenian play The
Gaol Gate for performance in Galway without asking her — thus overbalanc-
ing the delicate equilibrium she sustained between her position as local great
lady and nationalist playwright. Finally, she came out, sadly confiding to wBy
that ‘class distinctions’ and ‘Romanism’ made even-handed dealings with Fay
impossible.”! Synge also fell in behind wy for his own reasons, as Fay was
pursuing a vendetta against Synge’s fiancée, the young actress Molly Allgood.
With actors like Allgood andJ. M. Kerrigan up in arms against Fay, the dir-
ectors could pose as arbiters rather than open enemies— much to wBy'’s relief.
By Christmas Eve, he could outline his strategy to Gregory: ‘I want the com-
pany & not the directors to shove him out if he is to go.” Working through
Synge, wBy painstakingly orchestrated the chorus of complaints emanating
from the actors;” his long letters, anticipating difficulties and preparing
positions, show that he had learnt much in the long-ago struggles over the
Golden Dawn. The case was broadened out to influential people: Quinn was
told that the recent poor season was the fault of Fay’s insistence on more
popular work, the players being ‘all scared out of their wits by the “Playboy”’,
and consoled by the success of ‘two rather unintellectual plays’. The brothers
were clearly marked for the axe.
Throughout, a political agenda lurked in the wings. Horniman’s dislike
of Fay was certainly influential, but his ousting should be seen against the
background of Gregory’s worries about a nationalist programme in Galway,
the enmity of Sinn Féin, the Leader's attacks on wBy, and his own growing
inclination towards the values of a cultural elite in Ireland. Synge, indeed,
interpreted the struggle in terms of an Ascendancy problem of governance,
warning his dictatorial colleague that ‘coercion has never been a success in
Ireland’.** Matters were also complicated by the worsening relationship
with Horniman, to whom wpy had to paya soothing visit in London in mid-
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 SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 1907-1909

December. On 13 January 1908 Fay resigned, bringing with him his brother
Frank, already discontented, and his wife, Brigit O’Dempsey.”°
The directors evidently felt that the Fays had something of a case. A year
before Synge had told wsy that Fay must be accommodated to a certain degree,
‘as he has in reality built up the company’. Public statements stressed that
the parting was amicable. wsy lent them his rooms at Woburn Buildings when
they left Dublin to seek their fortunes, and they were allowed to take The Ris-
ing ofthe Moon and The Pot ofBroth for a projected season in the USA. Fay
wrote to wBy in a friendly tone about these arrangements, offering whatever
royalty was appropriate.*” When the Fays took refuge with William Boyle
in Camberwell, he gathered ‘the quarrel was more between the other mem-
bers of the Abbey Co. and Fay, than between the latter and the directors’.”8
This was just how wey had wanted it to seem. But Fay’s letters to Boyle and
others made clear the extent of their bitterness. They were now persona non
grata with the Yeats circle — an enmity that was compounded when the Fays,
playing in New York later that spring, were billed as the ‘National Theatre
Company’ (they were still members of the Irish National Theatre Society).
They were thus seen as emissaries of the Abbey; the New York press even
alleged that wBy was accompanying them. From this point it was open war-
fare, waged on the spot by John Quinn, while wBy implacably pursued the
Fays and their promoter Charles Frohman, accusing them of bad faith and
worse. He was only persuaded to withhold his most violent letters because
of an unpropitious horoscope. ‘I have never advertised myself in my life,’ he
told Quinn inaccurately, ‘but I am always ready to advertise my cause, especi-
ally if one can do it by attacking where attack is a pure pleasure.” In early
March Frank Fay wrote bitterly to a friend:
We wanted plays that would bring the public in & free us from the ignominy of
having to live always out of Miss Horniman’s pocket, & we did not care whether
such plays had parts that suited us or not. Had we consulted our ideas of what
suited us or not, we would have appeared in very few of the Abbey plays. We aimed
at & succeeded in getting ensemble. Both of us played many a rotten part. If the
Abbey directors would engage a professional company, they'd hear the truth about
many of their plays & that truth would surprise them.’

He claimed that only way and Gregory were allowed to veto plays. As for
the American row, neither he nor his brother had wanted to be advertised as
the Irish National Theatre Company, preferring to be known as ‘The Irish
Players’, but had given in to Frohman's insistence. None the less, the Fays bore
the brunt of the directors’ wrath. On 13 March ‘all 3 Fays’ were suspended from
the Irish National Theatre Society.
It was a sad ending to an association which had formed the basis of the

377
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

great theatrical experiment. Without wBy, there would have been no Abbey,
but without the Fays there would have been no Irish National Theatre Society.
Both brothers blamed wsy for the rupture. Frank wrote bitterly that he was
‘an impossible creature to head a theatre; his complete ignorance of acting is
in itself sufficient to incapacitate him & his impish faculty for making mis-
chief in a small place like Dublin is another reason’.’* This was to forget the
enthusiasm with which Fay had abandoned Griffith and enlisted behind
wey’s banner of pure art — and to ignore the impetus of avant-garde produc-
tion which wBy had brought to the theatre movement. But when Fay claimed
that he ‘helped put Yeats in the saddle’, he had a point. Without wBy, in any
case, the Fays’ future was bleak; they inevitably joined up for a time with the
earlier secessionist exiles Dudley Digges and Maire Quinn, but American
tours did not follow, and they returned to comparative obscurity in Britain.
Frank Fay, after small parts in touring companies, eventually went back to voice
coaching. He remained savagely angry with wy, Gregory and Synge, and
reverted to attacking them on the Griffithite basis of their ‘alien creed’.’°
What he really resented, however, was the way they monopolized the pro-
gramme with their own plays, and the insensitivity with which they treated
the lower ranks. By rg10 he was sounding out the Abbey about returning, but
to no avail. There was no real contact for nearly twenty years, when wBy’s
remarks at Stockholm about the Fays’ part in the early Abbey Theatre drew
an angry response.” But by then, history belonged to him.
In January 1908 the immediate effect of vanquishing the Fays was a great
boost to wBy’s morale. He heard in the recently founded United Arts Club
that ‘Yeats-baiting’ would now stop;™ he faced down public criticism of the
Abbey’s choice of plays, issuing a foolhardy public challenge that he would
put on any rejected play which was subsequently recommended by ‘three Dublin
men of letters’; he appointed Kerrigan in charge of voice production and
handed over stage-management to Sara Allgood (with mixed results), while
he declared his intention to handle ‘all romantic and tragic work’."°° He even
began once more to think of putting on Sudermann’s Teja. The next play that
was produced, however, was Connell’s controversial The Piper, which opened
on 13 February. A hostile reaction from the pit necessitated a speech from the
stage bywy on 15 February, explaining it as a Parnellite allegory, which attacked
those who failed Robert Emmet and celebrated ‘the ceaseless heroic aspira-
tions of the Irish people’. Though the playwright nervously disagreed, wBy
considered this a great triumph, reminiscent of the Playboy debate; accord-
ing to newspaper reports, “The play was given a respectful hearing although
there were some occasional expressions of disapproval, at its conclusion there
was a great outburst of applause and loud cries of “Author”.’"”” He felt more
and more in control and began to plan a Craig-like production of The Well of

378
 SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME I907-1909

the Saints (though Robert Gregory, dilatory as ever, let him down
over the
scenery and he engaged Ricketts instead"),
This excitement took its toll. wsy’s exhaustion may be measured
by a
celebrated incident on 10 February, when he joined some acquain
tances at
dinner in the United Arts Club. ‘Presently they got up to go & I was startled
to see a clean glass & port & no plate before me. I appealed to the attenda
nt
to know whether I had eaten my dinner or not. One said yes & one no.
Pre-
sently they came to me & said they had both come to the conclusion I
had
not. I then eat [sic] my dinner & was rather late at rehearsal —I am not yet
certain on the point however.” He was further distracted by the financial
implications of Horniman’s alienation. The position was summed up byyBy
in early December:
Miss Horniman is losing money as fast as she can over a theatre venture
of her
own in Manchester, scanty and scantier audiences, and her expenses
over £100 a
week. Willie has consulted the stars and sent her the results, which are all
disastrous.
And still she goes on obstinately, although she knows all about the stars and accepts
them.
Willie has just crushed her in a letter war they have been waging, and for that
reason he is making every effort to get to London that he may see her and make
some arrangements now while she is humble. He is the only one belonging to the
Theatre with whom she has not quarrelled. She has of course long ago quarrelled
with all her own friends.1"°
But she continued impossible. In February way found himself giving a
signed copy of his Poems from the collected edition to Helena Molony of
Inghinidhe na hEireann in order ‘to buy offa possible libel action against Miss
Horniman’, who had sent them an insulting letter."!1 Nor was she his only
difficulty. Intrigue buzzed around him; friends of the Fay connection like Helen
Laird placed letters in the Dublin press about their quarrel, audiences fluctu-
ated worryingly, his own pace of work was racked up to breakneck speed (‘every
moment of my time marked out”).
Through the spring he immersed himselfin all aspects of theatre business,
desperately conscious of the need to make money in preparation for Horniman’s
defection and to remedy the deficiencies left by the Fays. Only his feline
humour, and his ability to see social relations in terms of a comédie humaine,
sustained him. ‘Peace in the Abbey,’ he later reminisced, ‘varied with the size
of Sara Allgood’s waist. When she did herself well, this increased, and it was
no longer necessary to cast her for all the young heroine parts: instead she
would readily play the old peasant women for whom she had especial genius.
But whenever she was ill, and returned with a waist reduced, immediately
there was turmoil and confusion.” There was, however, a price to be paid.
The Piper survived, and brought the best three days’ takings ever. But after

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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

his speech on 15 February wBy collapsed with influenza, unable to move or

even write letters for nearly a fortnight. “He is really working himself to
death,’ Gregory told Quinn, ‘and is of course not able to write a line, and I
hope he will soon get away and leave things to Synge, who was really respons-
ible for the break-up, and is now not at all inclined to take his share.”*"* By
27 February he was shakily back at rehearsals; by early March he was again
working eight-hour days in the theatre, despite hopes that management
would eventually be handed over to Norreys Connell."° Gregory continued
to complain about the dissipation of his energies. ‘His creative work is worth
a good deal more to us all than the settling of a dispute between Miss Allgood
& Miss O’Donoghue or the extinguishing of the stage carpenter’s pipe, but
he really enjoys this administrative work for a while. I am keeping outside,
to be able to come in at the next split.’""°
Despite his recovery, his letters to Gregory in March are long, frantic
rambles. The Fays’ sharp practice in New York obsessed him, since it seemed
to spoil the chance of a lucrative Abbey tour before the subsidy ran out; this
quarrel seemed one more landmark struggle in the drama of his life, with
Willie Fay playing the part of MacGregor Mathers, and the Abbey’s integ-
rity representing the ark of the Order of the Golden Dawn. He pursued them
as inexorably as those deviant mages who had opted for ‘groups’ in 1901. And
as ever, the struggles of his life were reflected in his work. Amid all the
frenetic theatre business, he was impatient to write: since early in 1907 he had
wanted to settle down to a year’s composition of lyrics. There were also the
attractions of Mrs Campbell, who had gratifyingly announced to journalists
that wBy was ‘an Irishman of truly cultured taste’ compared to Shaw, ‘who has
no taste’.'’” In November her offer had inspired him to begin an appropriately
passionate play for her (‘when I saw her in the Modern Plays she was doing
here I told her that she was a volcano cooking eggs’"”*). This would become
The Player Queen, fated to be nearly as long in gestation as The Shadowy Waters.
For all these reasons, he longed through the spring of 1908 for a summer of
writing at Coole.
Meanwhile, the idiosyncratic pensées, which had appeared in the Gentle-
man’s Magazine and elsewhere, had been gathered into Discoveries, the last
Dun Emer Press book before his sisters split from Evelyn Gleeson to form
the Cuala Press (a move fraught with even worse financial insecurity’).
Published in mid-December 1907, it was essentially a series of musings about
communication — beginning with a memory of bringing the players to
Loughrea at Easter 1903 and seeing Father O’Donovan’s arts-and-crafts
church: ‘the worst of the old & the best of the new side by side without any
sign of transition’. His ill-humour had been compounded by the players’
insincerity, the audience's reaction to the play, the crudeness of provincial life,
380
 SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME I9O7-1909

the obscenities scrawled in the visitors’ book of the hotel. Finally

all his
impressions coalesced into ‘a single thought’:
If we poets are to move the people, we must reintegrate the human
spirit in our
imagination. The English have driven away the kings, and turned
the prophets into
demagogues and you cannot have health among a people if you have
not prophet,
priest and king.
This key insight marks the whole collection: the integrity of nationa
l art
depends upon the intensity of the artist’s personal vision. Taken with the
pat-
tern of references to Villon, it is clear that Synge and the Playboy lie behind
these allusive, concentrated reflections. Equally significant is the way that
so
many of them are cast in the direct tone of personal experience, even auto-
biography, ranging from his hashish experiments in 1890s Paris to his recent
visit to Italy. He was also prepared to declare frankly his reservations about work
like Russell’s Deirdre.1*° Remembering his youthful visit to Verlaine, he wrote:
It was not till after his death that I understood the meaning his words should
have
had for me, for while he lived I was interested in nothing but states of
mind, lyrical
moments, intellectual essences. I would not then have been as delighte
d as Iam now
by that banjo-player, or as shocked as I am now by that girl whose movemen
ts have
grown abrupt, and whose voice has grown harsh by the neglect of all but external activ-
ities. I had not learned what sweetness, what rhythmic movement, there is in
those
who have become the joy that is themselves. Without knowing it Ihad come to care
for nothing but impersonal beauty. I had set out on life with the thought of putting
my very selfinto poetry, and had understood this as a representation of my own visions
and an attempt to cut away the non-essential, but as I imagined that vision outside
myself my imagination became full of decorative landscape and of still life. I thought
of myself as something unmoving and silent living in the middle of my own mind
and body, a grain of sand in Bloomsbury or in Connacht that Satan’s watch fiends
cannot find. Then one dayIunderstood quite suddenly, as the way is, that Iwas seek-
ing something unchanging and unmixed and always outside myself, a Stone or an
Elixir that was always out of reach, and that I myself was the fleeting thing that held
out its hand. The more I tried to make my art deliberately beautiful, the more did I
follow the opposite of myself, for deliberate beautyislike a woman always desiring
man’s desire. Presently Ifound that I entered into myself and pictured myself and
not some essence when I was not seeking beauty at all, but merely to lighten the mind
of some burden of love or bitterness thrown upon it by the events of life.

IV
Yet he continued to struggle against the waves: for all the ill-feeling in the
theatre, it is hard to believe he ever intended to carry out his many threats
of resignation. Now, at last, there seemed a chance of using the Abbey to
project his own ideas of drama. The Fays were gone and his own control

381
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

asserted. But the theatre had less than two years left of Horniman’s subsidy,
and time was running out. The programme that opened on 19 March reflected
these ideas rather awkwardly: his own The Golden Helmet, Fitzmaurice’s
The Pie Dish, and a Kiltartanized Teja. The reviews were mixed. He pinned
his hopes on Norreys Connell’s management, on Mrs Campbell's promise,
on the plays of his own yet to be written; his vision of the Abbey’s future involved
extending the company’s range so they could play a wider repertoire in other
countries. ‘It is this ambition that really keeps me at work here,’ he told
Connell. ‘So far as I am personally concerned, I would do much better
elsewhere. I have the greatest longing to write lyric before all my fires are
gone as well as one more play at any rate. And that play when I write it will
be beyond the capacities of this company.’
Unsurprisingly, considering this bleak view and his own combativeness,
he was lonely in Dublin. Discoveries gave old enemies a point of attack: ‘the
trivial tattle of a soul, so self-absorbed as to think the meanest of its thought-
impulses worthy of record’, wrote Seamus O Conghaile in the United Irish-
man. His sisters’ house at Dundrum, Gurteen Dhas, provided no refuge: it
was a kind of rival court to Gregory’s headquarters at the Nassau Hotel, and
those resentful of the Abbey directorate tended to congregate there. More-
over, there had been a family upheaval. jBy’s hopes of commercial success in
Dublin had receded again, since the final payment on the Thomastown lands
had come through — £411 — and been swallowed by debts. Undaunted, he
embarked on yet another experiment in living. In August 1907 Hugh Lane
had organized a fund among jByY’s well-off friends (Jamesons, Pursers) to
send him to Italy. The object of this munificence accepted, hesitated, pre-
varicated and then plunged off in another direction altogether. For at the
same time Lily was planning to visit an Irish exhibition in New York, if
only to stop herself being driven mad by her sister (she announced that she
now remained undecided only ‘whether it would be melancholy or violent
madness’).!”? By swiftly determined to spend the Italian money on going
with her. He was not encouraged. wy refused to help him by casting a horo-
scope, Sarah Purser objected to the misapplication of the testimonial fund,
and John Quinn (correctly foreseeing a long period of importunacy) desper-
ately tried to dissuade him. But By was implacable: armed with introduc-
tions from the Jameson family, he expected to get commissions and, like
his eldest son, return temporarily rich. He and Lily arrived in New York on
29 December 1907.
He did not become rich, but he did not return. “To leave New York,’
he wrote insouciantly, ‘is to leave a huge fair where at any moment I might
meet with some huge bit of luck.’ In a less optimistic mood he remarked,
‘Why do birds migrate? Looking for food — that’s why I’m here.’ But by and
382
 SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 1907-1909

large he loved America, which seemed an Elysium where ‘the women

have
no affectation and can talk seriously, and the men have no pretension,
and
people meet together to talk’.129 Relying on Quinn, well-off friends
and
his own merciless charm, he worked out a bohemian life which
suited him
~ sketching, painting, talking and calling in favours. And his relatio
nship
with his elder son entered a new phase. Linked by long, discursive curious
ly
abstract letters, they now reversed the usual balance of father and son: JBY
looking for approval, complaining that wBy denigrated his ideas, sending him
drafts for short stories and setting up theories to be shot down. ‘No I do not
understand your dramatic ideas,’ wrote wBy a year after his father’s departure,
‘any more than you understand the ideas of my generation, more than I shall
understand in a few years’ time the generation now at school, Even Shaw, as
I know, begins to find the young unintelligible. Here and there I already meet
a young man who represents something which I recognise as new, and which
is not of my time — he is very often a sort of Catholic by the by.’
This betrays a certain alienation from his theatrical colleagues. Rather
than discuss matters with them, he sat in his hotel room consulting horoscopes
about the next row.'?° He spent his time between the Nassau Hotel and the
Abbey, ‘where I have no friends only business associates — for Synge is always
faint & far off.” He also joined the United Arts Club, recently founded by
Lane’s friend Ellen Duncan, located in Lincoln Place behind Trinity (and
from 1910 on Stephen’s Green). The club was to be one of the bridgeheads
for Lane’s infiltration of Post-Impressionism into Dublin through a celebrated
exhibition in 1911; but it was primarily a meeting-place for the city’s respectable
bohemians (Russell, the Markieviczes, Rolleston and Dermod O’Brien were
all founder members).'?’ Living in Dublin more consistently than at any time
since his youth, wey made some new acquaintances — including Horace
Plunkett’s cousin Lord Dunsany, who wrote fantasy-tales from his appropri-
ately fairy-tale castle outside Dublin. He also stayed with the enlightened
(and plutocratic) Lord Dunraven at Adare.'2 Fences were mended too with
some old adversaries. He accepted a play from the Sinn Féiner Thomas
MacDonagh, and agreed to lend the Abbey to the Theatre of Ireland. And
it was at this time too that he became friendly with a stage-struck but well-
connected young woman called Mabel Dickinson.
A sense of loneliness had persisted since the excitements of the spring:
he had written Farr from Italy in May 1907 using the tones of a wistful lover
(‘do you know I find it very hard to find out how to write to you. I want
you too [sic] understand that I am sorry you are away & I am afraid to say,
because you get cross if one says such things & yet after all I shall be very
glad when you return”). At the end of the year Quinn had congratulated
him on the forthcoming collected edition but warned him ‘successes of that

383
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

sort don’t make all of life. One wants affection and friendship and some-
times love too. If one doesn’t care for a legal wife he should be entitled to a
“visiting wife”.’°° Though wsy remarked in March 1908 that he was keep-
ing ‘tolerably virtuous’ in ‘virtuous Ireland’, it was from about this time that
Dickinson moved into the position of ‘visiting wife’. Like wy she was amem-
ber of the United Arts Club, and occasionally acted at the Abbey, where she
also gave exercise classes. Born in 1875, she was thirty-three when they met.
She came from a level of Dublin society akin to wBy’s own, rather than that
of the Allgoods or the Fays. Her father (who died in May rgos) had been the
much loved vicar of St Ann’s, Dawson Street, and Dean of the Chapel Royal
at Dublin Castle, as well as Professor of Pastoral Theology at Trinity;'** her
brother, Page Dickinson, was a neurotically snobbish Dublin architect and
aesthete (and a pioneer in the appreciation of Dublin’s Georgian heritage).
Family connections included the Lytteltons, and Irish-Indian families like
the Lawrences. When wsy knew her first, she was living with her widowed
mother on Marlborough Road, but in 1908 she conveniently moved to rooms
on Nassau Street, where she practised as a ‘medical gymnast and masseuse’.
By April he was scribbling her brief notes, with assignations appended:
Last night I said ‘you were very nice’ as I thought that was quite the most unre-
vealing remarkIcould make and then hurried to the United Arts to say what I did
think; and found there Madame Markiewicz and argued with that steam whistle
for an hour expecting you to arrive at every moment with a sort of Comus rout of
amateur players.
You can act. You have dignity without stiffness and emotion without insincerity
and movement without artifice — and deserve a better part.
Your ever
W B Yeats
4 to-morrow (Monday)
Ob 4.15

Her acting interests meant he could write to her as an ‘artist’; her social back-
ground meant she would be presented to Gregory as someone who might run
bazaars and drum up support for the Abbey among the ladies of Dublin. But
she also provided a more elemental form of release to wByY, and by the sum-
mer he was writing to her as ‘yours always’. On subsequent visits to Paris he
wrote meaningful letters about the effect that the great neo-classical nude
studies in the Louvre had on him, since he had known her. However, her sta-
tus would remain ‘visiting’. She insisted he burn her letters, and the affair,
‘purely amorous’, was unknown even to his best friends.’** Unremembered
by contemporaries, it is impossible to analyse her appeal for him. But sexual
fulfilment and a sympathetic ear were not enough to meet his ideal —an ideal
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 SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 1907-1909

which now owed something to ideas of class as well as aesthetics. ‘I some-

times think that the combination of joyous youthfulness with the simplicity
and conscious dignity that makes up what we call the great lady is the most
beautiful thing in the world,’ he had told Quinn the previous October.
Many a high born woman has it not, though most have something of it. The form
at any rate without the substance. Maud Gonne had it, especially in her young days
before she grew tired out with many fools, and the little Countess of Cromartie has
it more than anyone I have ever known.!4

Measured against this exalted company, a statuesque young physiotherap-

ist from the upper middle classes of Protestant Dublin would inevitably be
found wanting.
In April he had returned to London, in order to be painted by Shannon
and sculpted by Kathleen Bruce. Ricketts had to be seen about Abbey stage-
sets, and he shuttled back and forth to Stratford — not only to check Bullen’s
progress with the collected edition, but to see Sara Allgood triumphing in
William Poel’s production of Measure for Measure. But ons May he was sum-
moned back to Dublin by the ominous news that Synge was ill once more.
The recurring trouble was in fact Hodgkin’s disease, producing lymphomas
that were no longer operable. While this was not yet generally known, and
Synge would live on for months, wy now expected the worst. [The thought
of ] Synge’s illness has for the first time in my life made death a reality to me,’
he told Mabel Dickinson (forgetting for the moment Dowson, Wilde,
Johnson and O'Leary). ‘My mother was so long ill, so long fading out of life
that the last fading of all made no noticeable change in our lives. But Synge’s
illness, & the almost inevitable stopping of a mind I have been so near to, is
almost unbelievable. I am fond of Synge, but not a little to my wonder (con-
sidering how intimate we have been) it was the death of his imagination that
set me sorrowing. Will you take this as proof thatIhave no heart?’
After picking up the pieces at the Abbey he returned to London in early
Juneto see a new play by Masefield and to have an audience with Mrs
Campbell at her most dazzling. She had, it turned out, her own ideas about
speeding up the gestation of The Player Queen, pressing money and two
dozen bottles of wine on him ‘to write it on’. Knowing the value of withhold-
ing himself from importunate women, and conscious that more strings
were attached to these gifts than to Gregory’s Bovril, way refused. ‘I wish I
liked Mrs Campbell as much as I admire her,’ he told his father. ‘She is kind,
generous & a great artist, but she leaves one exhausted after a few minutes
conversation. She is always at some height of intensity, or rather jumping
from height to height. One follows gasping.’ He had other reasons too for
evading Mrs Campbell’s blandishments: since March he had been planning

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to go to Paris, and to Gonne. He spent a week there, clearing his mind to

begin The Player Queen and writing letters to Mabel Dickinson. It was as if
his interest in a new woman required exposure once more to the flame of the
spirit, which Gonne would always represent, and against which he still meas-
ured all romantic experience. This set the tone for ‘a strange summer full of
surprises and bewilderment’."*”
From the beginning of that year, 1908, wBy’s thoughts had been pre-
occupied by Gonne. Their correspondence had stayed friendly through-
out 1907, with even the Playboy issue not dividing them as much as might be
expected. Gonne was firmly on the side of its critics (“it would be a mis-
fortune if the crowd began worrying over subtleties for it would be an end of
action’!**), but since the very same people had supported MacBride against
her, she did not play a prominent part. In late September, however, she told
him ‘for years I wore blinkers so as to never cease working for the cause &
only see the one end & object. Now I have taken them off & find so much
to look at.’ It was what he had hoped to hear for nearly twenty years. Their
mystical interests remained a bond: they shared visions by post; in the autumn
he worked hard on her horoscope, ostensibly to forecast the outcome of her
latest legal imbroglio with MacBride, but probably with some private hopes
of his own. He wrote to her confidante Ella Young that Gonne’s horoscope
revealed ‘a climacteric period about every 14 years — this period is due at
opening of next year’, anda French astrologer was consulted about Gonne’s
prospects for 1908, responding in encouraging terms. “Two unions are clearly
indicated by your stars: the second seems to me likely to be rather /zre que
legale. It can take place this very year (I mean to say from the 21 December
next to the 20 December 1909). The year 1908 will be for you, dear friend, a
period of struggles and triumph.’!“° In November 1907 they had been briefly
reunited in Dublin. As with Shakespear years before, as soon as WBY turned
towards another woman he found himself interrogating his feelings towards
Gonne: he wrote in his diary a year later that she unconsciously made his other
love-affairs ‘but as the phoenix nest, where she is reborn in all her power to
torture and delight’. Meanwhile she poured out letters describing visions of
him, and astral communications, implicitly laying the claim which only she
could impose. Even as his involvement with Dickinson got under way in April
1908, he had been planning to visit Gonne, with financial help from Gregory."*"
From 19 June he was there at last, established opposite her house in the Grand
H6tel de Passy. He visited art galleries — ‘thanks to Hugh Lane I now find
all kinds of pictures delightful that Ionce could understand nothing of’— and
rediscovered Paris.'*” Moves were even made, through an intermediary, for
a reconciliation with MacGregor Mathers (who superbly demanded total
repudiation of all wBy’s statements made at the time of their quarrel’).
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 SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 1907-1909

He found Gonne oddly subdued, tentative, taken up with her painting and
her children. She was educating her four-year-old son Sean to know only French
and Irish, since this would ‘set the barrier of language between him and his
father’, who could speak nothing but English —a ‘patriotic’ irony relished by
wey. An authentic note of Dublin was briefly introduced when the vinegary
Sarah Purser came to lunch, shuddered at the caged birds’ racket, and finished
‘by looking steadily at little Seaghan Mac Bride and saying to his mother
“Aren't you afraid he’ll grow up to be a murderer?” Sean’s half-sister Iseult
was now a charming and precocious fourteen-year-old, appealing particu-
larly to wBy through her passion for the classics (notably the ‘Ilead’): ‘she all
but set the house on fire by making a burnt offering on the mantlepiece to
Artemis a few days ago’. The atmosphere of Gonne’s Parisian retreat, with
its sunshine, floor-length mirrors, Russian embroideries, oriental rugs, singing
birds and charming, fey children, sealed their rapprochement. The day after
he arrived, she ‘said something that blotted away the recent past & brought
all back to the spiritual marriage of 1898’.
By the time he left on 25 June, their relationship had come nearer to a
conventional resolution than ever before. He wrote in a notebook she gave
him that though her new-found Catholicism prevented her remarrying,
and ‘the old dread of phisical love has awakened in her’, she ‘seems to love
more than of old’.**° She wrote to him with deep affection after he had gone,
though telling him not to give up his London life or to immerse himself
too completely in the theatre, which ‘has made you take up old class preju-
dices which are unworthy of you, & makes you say cruel things which sound
ungenerous .*” But mystically she felt they were attuned to each other once
more, and so did he. It was demonstrated to him as powerfully as possible.
He dreamt of her every night, and on 25 July, he recorded in his notebook,
he tried to evoke a union with her. On the 26th she wrote him an ecstatic
letter about a dream experienced the night before, when (he recorded) he
had ‘made evocation & sought union’ with her. Her response could not have
been more vivid:
You had taken the form I think of a great serpent, but I am not quite sure. I only saw
your face distinctly & as I looked into your eyes (as I did the day in Paris you asked
me what I was thinking of) & your lips touched mine. We melted into one another
till we formed only one being, a being greater than ourselves who felt all & knew all with
double intensity — the clock striking 11 broke the spell & as we separated it felt as if
life was being drawn away from me through my chest with almost physical pain. I
went again twice, each time it was the same — each time I was brought back by some
slight noise in the house. Then I went upstairs to bed & I dreamed of you confused
dreams of ordinary life. We were in Italy together (I think this was from some word
in your letter which I had read again before sleeping). We were quite happy, & we

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talked of this wonderful spiritual vision I have described — you said it would tend to
increase physical desire - This troubles me a little — for there was nothing phys-
ical in that union — Material union is but a pale shadow compared to it — write to
me quickly & tell me ifyou know anything of this & what you think of it— 8cif Imay
come to you again like this.’

Farr, always sharp for her purposes, noted how silent wBy had fallen
since going to Paris: ‘I imagine that the long years of fidelity have been re-
warded at last.” In August or September he wrote ‘Reconciliation’, which,
as published in The Green Helmet, read:
Some may have blamed you that you took away
The verses that they cared for on the day
When, the ears being deafened, the sight of the eyes blind
With lightning you went from me, and I could find
Nothing to make a song about but kings,
Helmets, and swords, and half-forgotten things
That were like memories of you — but now
We'll out for the world lives as long ago;
And while we’re in our laughing, weeping fit,
Hurl helmets, crowns and swords into the pit.
But, dear, cling close to me; since you were gone,
My barren thoughts have chilled me to the bone.

An original version stated more explicitly

but now
That you have come again I'll throw
Helmet and crown and sword in a pit

and celebrated the way that the lovers had ‘remade the world’.’°° It seems
clear that their reconciliation went beyond the spiritual. Yet throughout he
wrote love-letters to Dickinson: he had reproached her for not accompany-
ing him to London (‘my big settle looks cross & harder than usual because
it has of a sudden remembered that you have never sat on it’). He told her
that his romantic feelings for Gonne were over: ‘she will not make another
attempt to get rid of her husband (as she can in three years) unless he makes
more trouble. She is content and I think happy. We have talked over the old
things sadly perhaps but always as old things that have drifted away.’ Even
more pointedly, he insisted that Dickinson had made Dublin ‘pleasant to
me’, and stressed how he had changed since his youthful visits to Paris, when
he had worshipped Moreau and the Decadents.
... now I am all for David and above all Ingres whose Perseus is all classic romance
— the poetry of running feat & clear far sighted eyes — of a world where you would
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 SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 19907-1909

be perfectly happy & have innumerable pupils. Ten years ago when I was last in
Paris I loved all that was mysterious and gothic & hated all that was classic & severe.
I doubt if I should have liked you then —I wanted a twilight of religeous mystery in
everybodies eyes.1>!
By 4 July he was at Coole, after calling on his sisters who found him ‘very
nice, brotherly and affectionate & not at all “the great man”’.°? Here he
settled to writing lyrics and working on The Player Queen, though he con-
tinued to cast horoscopes about Gonne’ and enjoy passionate visions where
they were crowned together with emeralds and rubies, symbolizing day and
night; he also had (for the first time) straightforwardly erotic dreams about
her which left him ‘wretched all day — wishing to be with her’. He was still
weakly, and Gregory’s solicitude was noted (and mocked) by lan Hamilton,
staying there at the time. Her familiar regimen accomplished more than Mrs
Campbell’s money and wine, and a prose version of his play was completed
by 29 August. In the meantime, there had been plenty of distractions: his
imagination was stirred by avisit to the Burren, that unique tract of limestone
country in Clare, where the Gregorys took up residence from 11 July. Here
wy worked on a second series of Discoveries, redrafted The Player Queen,
and wrote to Dickinson describing — in distinctly unidyllic terms — the prim-
itive conditions of the people. Visitors included Jack Yeats, who surprised his
brother by revealing a matter-of-fact belief in visions, and Evans Wentz, an
American folklorist, who had pursued way from California, and would
eventually produce a huge book (The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries) dedicated
to wBY in gratitude for bringing ‘the first message from fairyland’ to America’s
West Coast.’** Wentz (a friend and pupil of William James) was a euphoric
true believer in irrationalism: Neo-Platonist philosophy, psychical research
and theories of the daemon figure largely in his book, deeply influenced by
The Celtic Twilight. Both wey and Russell were required to produce sight-
ings and fairy lore during the summer of 1908: an exhausting business, from
which wsy escaped to Dublin, where Poel had been brought over to rehearse
the players in Calderén’s Life is a Dream. This latest attempt to put on a ‘for-
eign masterpiece’ was fated to be as unsuccessful as the rest.
Nor was this the Abbey’s only difficulty, since Horniman had not relaxed
in her determination to cut them off. She remained obsessed by wsy, let-
ting herself into Woburn Buildings during his absences, and haranguing
him about dust on his books and moths in his underwear drawers. But with
a codicil to her will she now revoked a legacy of money and property origin-
ally designed to ensure the Abbey’s continuance. wBy hoped for money from
a London tour, but Norreys Connell tactfully disassociated himself from
managing sucha venture. A Galway programme was also planned, to coincide
with an industrial exhibition. The Abbey’s money problems were mirrored

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by his own (‘I am poorer than I ever was in my life, he wrote to Dickinson
from the Burren. ‘I was plunged in misery the other night by dreaming |
had spent 3/6 on strawberry ices — only my collected edition can lift me into
opulent air again.”°) But despite the impending financial crisis, wBY was
grimly determined to impose his own dramatic vision. He took the oppor-
tunity of a visit from the British Association in early September to make this
clear in a public speech:
When we wish to give a remote poetical effect we throw away realism altogether, and
are content with suggestion: this is the idea of the Japanese in their dramatic art: they
believe that artificial objects, the interior let us say of some modern house, should be
perfectly copied, because a perfect copy is possible: but that once you get to sea and
sky you should only suggest.*°
He had stayed in touch with Gordon Craig, to whom he complained about
theatrical difficulties over the summer, while the ‘respectable’ stayed away
from the Abbey stalls: ‘we have recreated the world-old alliance which made
the arts flourish in past times between the peerage and the gutter’. The
September performance of The Hour-Glass was, thankfully, a considerable
success, and at the first night ‘Willy spoke well and was very well received’, Lily
reported to her father.'*” But the theatre, like his own poetic work, had reached
a crossroads.
Since the early summer he had been keeping notebooks recording his re-
action to theatrical productions like Poel’s: the notions of ‘abstract musical
energy and ‘passion and energy’, flowing unchecked to create their own
rhythm, suggest the trend of his poetry at this time, as he searched for a dra-
matic pulse. In his revision of The Tables ofthe Law he made Owen Aherne
express a key insight: ‘I know nothing certain as yet but this— I am to become
completely alive, that is, completely passionate, for beauty is only another name
for perfect passion. I shall create a world where the whole lives of men shall
be articulated and simplified as if seventy years were but one moment, or as
they were the leaping of a fire or the opening of a flower.’°* Other autobio-
graphical jottings stress the inadequacy of the ‘vague immensities’ which his
art school generation had imbibed from second-hand Indian philosophy
twenty years before.'*? And by mid-September he had recovered enough of
his own creative impetus to write poetry. That summer at Coole produced
not only the meditative lyric ‘At Galway Races’, buta short cry from the heart
about the distractions he had suffered over the past months: the first draft,
sent to Craig on 15 September as ‘a poem I wrote this morning’, spoke in the
direct, personal tone which he had quarried out of daily experience.
All things can tempt me from this craft of verse
One time it was a woman's face, or worse

39°
 SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 1907-1909

The seeming needs of my fool-driven land;

Now nothing but comes readier to the hand
Than this accustomed toil. When I was young
Thad not given a penny for a song
Did not the poet carry it with an air
As though to say ‘It is the sword elsewhere’!
I would be now, could I but have my wish,
Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish.’
Ons October he left his ‘fool-driven land’ to meet Gonne in London. Taking
the first tentative steps from her self-imposed French exile, she seemed ‘sad
& gentle’ as if after a religious conversion, and told him of her gratitude to
Gregory for the advice to marry under English law, which had enabled her
to keep her property out of MacBride’s clutches. Best of all, she spoke ‘of
her old politics of hate with horror’.!*! He confided to Gregory: ‘I think
she wants to marry me, but she has practically no chance of divorce & as that
seems impossible she wants merely friendship, she cried while she was telling
me these things. I think she is probably lonely. I am trying to hit on a more
tranquil occupation I could help her in.’ This suggests a certain evasion,
reminiscent of their passages in 1898. She was never more attractive to him
than in these transient moods of affectionate submissiveness. However, she
continued to argue for a union in a world ‘where desire is unthinkable’ and
(on 20 October) she wrote in his notebook a message which connected this
abstinence directly with his creative energy, and made her identification with
the Countess Cathleen absolute:
I saw Aleels love for me lighting the years like a lamp of extraordinary holiness
& voices said “You did not understand so we took it from you & kept it safe in the
heart of the hills for it belongs to Ireland. When you were purified by suffering so
you could understand we gave it back to you. See that you guard it safely for poems
of great beauty may be born.’

His own sense of vulnerability was suddenly brought home by the news
of Arthur Symons’s collapse into a manic psychosis which would last for
years, and from which his creative talent would never quite recover. Everyone
assumed (as it turned out, inaccurately) that it was the stage of syphilis known
as general paralysis of the insane: wBy thought overwork precipitated the break-
down and bitterly blamed Symons’s demanding wife Rhoda (who was inde-
pendently wealthy but refused to use her own money). His friend’s collapse
struck afinal death-knell for the nineties generation of Rhymers, and helped
confirm his view of them as doomed by their own excesses. ‘He was the only
man I think with whom I have had an entirely intimate and understand-
ing friendship. With Lionel Johnson even there was always a slight veil. He

Sot
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

had the subtle understanding of a woman & his thought flowed through
life with my own, for many years, almost as if he had been one of the two or
three woman friends who are everything to me,’ he wrote to Gregory.’ He
visited Symons, and corresponded for a while with Rhoda about the worth-
less verses which the deluded poet was producing in reams; but, as she sarcas-
tically noted, wBy’s inquiries soon lapsed, and Symons, like Johnson and
Dowson, was consigned to the ranks of those who had lost their souls through
a lack of artistic coherence. As it happened, Symons, like Tiny Tim, did no
die: his therapy took the idosyncratic but effective form of drunken binges
in the Café Royal, organized by his new object of adoration, Augustus John,
and accompanied by wBy’s other admirer, the rich Californian Agnes Tobin.
Symons eventually recovered, though Tobin (less accustomed to the pace,
and liable to collapse when exposed to Wagner) eventually succumbed to ner-
vous exhaustion herself.
For the moment wBy was hard hit; but he was consoled by the fact that
Gonne travelled back to Dublin with him on 14 October. A police report
recorded sourly: ‘During her stay there she was not observed to associate with
any suspects here but was much in the company of Mr W. B. Yeates [sic] of
the Abbey Theatre.”®’ They saw MacDonagh’s play (which he thought a fail-
ure),'°* and he escorted her to the mailboat on 27 October, where George
Roberts noticed him standing with his head uncovered among giggling girls
and huckster shop-women, as the boat drew out: ‘he can carry off any scene
with dignity’.’® He needed all his sang-froid for a brief visit to Mrs Campbell
at Liverpool, where she was playing Electra with Florence Farr. (‘Are you
afraid of me?’ she demanded. ‘Not in the very least,’ he replied, ‘you merely
fill me with alarm.’°°) She was still preparing herself to play Deirdre, and,
though according to Lily her brother ‘felt as if a fiery serpent had invited
herself to tea’,’®” he was determined to go ahead with it. Her extravagant
bravura would be misapplied to a role he had created with the more restrained
Darragh in mind, but that was a secondary consideration. The point was that
she would make a great impact, and tempt the elusive ‘respectables’ to the Abbey
stalls.
He was not disappointed. On 9 November Mrs Campbell delivered a
triumph in Dublin: even the grudging Douglas Hyde thought her Deirdre
the greatest tragic acting he had seen. She fitted in surprisingly well with the
Abbey company and promptly bought the English and American rights to
the play. ‘I am now accepted as a dramatist in Dublin,’ wey told Quinn;!*
and the Abbey had at last turned the financial corner and begun paying its way.
The December 1908 issue of Samhain proudly trumpeted these successes. As
well as giving the Abbey side of the Fay imbroglio, and superbly dismissing
the efforts of other theatrical societies, wey also took up the theme of opin-
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 SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 1907-1909

ions in art, and daringly suggested that ‘that pleasure in the finer culture of
England, that displeasure in Irish disunions and disorders which are the root
of reasoned unionism, are as certainly high and natural thoughts, as the self-
denying enthusiasm that led Michel Gillane [in Cathleen ni Houlihan] to prob-
able death or exile’. By 22 November the company were rehearsing Deirdre
in London and prepared to scale new heights. Entering Mrs Campbell’s
glamorous circle turned even the indolent Sara Allgood into a fashion plate,
recalling to wBy the transformation of Balzac’s provincials when they hit Paris.
When the play opened on 27 November, there were curtain-calls for way —
though the audiences liked it more than the critics.
As for the author, he was back where adulation came easier than in Dub-
lin: and he established himself once more in Woburn Buildings. A dazzled
admirer, who visited him unannounced on a Saturday evening in early Decem-
ber, found ‘a room in darkness save for a low fire which threw a fitful light
upon books in great disorder, papers tumbled anyhow upon the floor, a crys-
tal gazing-glass, two tall green candle-sticks, some Beardsleys, a Rossetti and
the poet’s pastels of Coole Park’.’® wsy explained the darkness because ‘I
have a dread of going blind’, and showed him some favourite books — includ-
ing an 1827 Ballantyne Club edition of Gavin Douglas’s Palice ofHonour (1553),
whose definition of poetry as ‘pleasaunce and half wonder’ he thought best
of all. Warming up, he told stories of de Nerval and Baudelaire, and recited
lyrics from The Countess Cathleen following the musical notes as printed for
the play— subsequently producing the manuscript, along with tarot cards and
astrological calculations.’”” He was back in the world which he had made.
There were other victories too. Maud Gonne had come to London to see
Deirdre: and he followed her back to Paris, where he stayed a month, writ-
ing The Player Queen, reading Balzac (in English), taking French lessons. He
was from time to time infuriated by Gonne’s adoring hangers-on, notably his
béte noire Ella Young, who ‘talks elementary text books all day, when she is
let, with an air of personal inspiration’.'”’ But it was pleasant to be out of Dublin,
to be once again in Gonne’s magical presence, to be able to reverse his rela-
tionship with Gregory by sending a box of exotic Algerian fruit to Coole for
Christmas. And from the tone of his correspondence with Gonne (as well
as evidence given by wBy’s widow long afterwards and hints in his astrolo-
gical calculations), it seems that now they finally became lovers.’ If poetic
inference is admissible, the lines in ‘A Man Young and Old’ nearly twenty
years later might also be invoked; using the Homeric imagery always asso-
ciated with Gonne wy would proclaim

My arms are like the twisted thorn

And yet there beauty lay;

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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

The first of all the tribe lay there

And did such pleasure take —
She who had brought great Hector down
And put all Troy to wreck —
That she cried into this ear
Strike me if I shriek.

Pleasurable or not, final consummation does not seem to have heralded a

new phase in their relationship; instead, it confirmed Gonne in her belief that
their love must take the form she had decreed. The day after they parted she
wrote something more like a conventional love-letter than anything else in
their vast correspondence. ‘Dearest — it was hard leaving you yesterday, but I
knew it would be just as hard today if I had waited. Life is so good when we
are together & we are together so little — !’ She then told him she had gone
to him astrally the night before (‘I think you knew’). But the conclusion of
the letter indicates that, while a physical consummation had been reached,
she felt it could not continue:

You asked me yesterday if Iam nota little sad that things are as they are between
us—I am sorry & 1 am glad. It is hard being away from each other so much there are
moments when I am dreadfully lonely & long to be with you, — one of these moments
is on me now — but beloved I am glad & proud beyond measure of your love, & that
it is strong enough & high enough to accept the spiritual love & union I offer —
I have prayed so hard to have all earthly desire taken from my love for you &
dearest, loving you as I do, I have prayed & I am praying still that the bodily desire
for me may be taken from you too. I know how hard & rare a thing it is for a man to
hold spiritual love when the bodily desire is gone & I have not made these prayers
without a terrible struggle a struggle that shook my life though I do not speak
much of it & generally manage to laugh.
That struggle is over & I have found peace. I think today I could let you marry
another without losing it — for I know the spiritual union between us will outlive this
life, even if we never see each other in this world again.
Write to me soon.
Yours
Maud?”’.

By mid-January she was sending him bracing letters about the advantage
conferred on artists who abstained from sex. For wBy, however, inspiration
had returned through Gonne, and out of their union in December grew a
series of poems, originally grouped under the (mistaken) names ofa medieval
alchemist and his wife. For all this elaboration, they are direct, interrogative
and employ deliberately plain diction. They included “Words (first titled ‘The
Consolation’), written on 22 and 23 January 1909.

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 SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 1907-1909

I had this thought awhile ago,

My darling cannot understand
What I have done, or what would do
In this blind bitter land;

And I grew weary of the sun

Until my thoughts cleared up again,
Remembering that the best I have done
Was done to make it plain;
That every year I cried at length
My darling understands it all,
Because I have come into my strength,
And words obey my call;
That had she done so who can say
What would have shaken from the sieve?
I might have thrown poor words away
And been content to live.

Here, he immortalized the idea that her inability to understand him was
irrelevant, since that very failure was what galvanized him to produce his
best work. And ‘No Second Troy’ fiercely celebrated her uncompromising
politics, probably recalling that Jubilee riot eleven years before when she
accused him of failing her.
Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

As for Gonne, after a torrent of letters in January she became more evas-
ive again; in May she would reiterate her renunciation of physical love. In
December 1909 he wrote “King and No King’, which — placed in the same
alchemical-marriage group — takes as its trope the consummation of a love
previously forbidden by fear of incest. Their old brother—sister reincarnation
fantasy must lie behind this, and the poem comes back to his recurrent wish
for the consolations of a more conventional relationship:

See)
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

... Whereas we that had thought

To have lit upon as clean and sweet a tale
Have been defeated by that pledge you gave
In momentary anger long ago;
And I that have not your faith, how shall I know
That in the blinding light beyond the grave
We'll find so good a thing as that we have lost?
The hourly kindness, the day’s common speech,
The habitual content of each with each
When neither soul nor body has been crossed.

But this was no longer on offer; they would remain separated geographic-
ally but united astrally. From wBy’s point of view this certainly left room
for Mabel Dickinson's ministrations. But how much Dickinson knew of
this, let alone understood, is not recorded.

Thus December 1908 set a milestone in wBy’s life, and it was not the only
one. At this point too Bullen finally reported to Watt that the collected edi-
tion was now complete (adding an ominous proposal that wy should take a
lump sum rather than royalties’”*). Financially, it was not a great success; over
the next four years only half of the thousand sets printed were sold. Macmillan
declined to take it for America, while Chapman & Hall proved inefficient
distributors at home. There was also the competition of much cheaper and
readily available Yeats works from Fisher Unwin, whose Poems was still in
demand; over the year 1909/10 it sold 447 copies, earning £28. tos. 2d.’ But
the Collected Works meant something different to its author. wBy felt able to
tell Farr, ‘I think nobody of our time has had so fine an edition — I believe it
will greatly strengthen my position — for my work is far stronger when put all
together. I have been myself surprised by the unity of it all & by its general
elevation of style, as I think.’"”° Volumes had been appearing since the summer,
and reviews had been mounting up: the attention was uniformly respectful,
though it was generally noted that the enterprise was a daring one. As Lytton
Strachey put it, a collected edition ‘implied a claim to a recognised and per-
manent place in the literature of a nation’.'”” The nation in question was, by
inference, England rather than Ireland, and the tradition that of romantic
introspection. wBy’s claim was seen to rest soundly on his early poetry, with
his prose given less than its already considerable due. An exception was a re-
view by Bullen’s influential assistant, Edith Lister, writing pseudonymously
in the Fortnightly: emphasizing the new preface to John Sherman, she judged
its conclusion ‘with its story of the homecoming of the awakened man is more
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 SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 1907-1909

beautiful, because it is more true, than the ending of any other book Iknow’.
Her special knowledge extended not only to the edition which she had seen
through the press, but to wBy himself, whom she held in deep affection.'”
As for the author himself, he was determined that such juvenilia be labelled
‘early work’, and no sooner was his achievement immobilized in canonical
form than the old dissatisfaction crept in. On 12 January 1909 he secretly
confided to Quinn that he was already filing away ideas for rewriting sections
that did not quite please him.
For wey, the publication of his collected edition fixed him into the his-
tory of his time. Noting that English art was developing into two camps,
with the followers of Augustus John challenging the romanticism of Ricketts
and Shannon, he felt his instinct and intellect both went with Ricketts: that
was, he might have said, his generation. The deaths of Johnson and O'Leary,
Symons's collapse, his rapprochement with Gonne, sharpened his preter-
natural sense of the pattern of personal experience. He was conscious that
George Moore was already working on a memoir, ‘a novel with real people
in it’, and obtaining advice from libel lawyers.'” In Paris he had met a stu-
dent doing a thesis on his own work (which meant, he was told, that people
in the Sorbonne must think he was dead). Critical appreciation of his poetry
and plays was accumulating, often advancing interpretations from which
he cautiously disassociated himself.'*° Allan Wade’s bibliography of his
writings, assembled for the Collected Works in 1908, astonished him by its
completeness. At the same time he was rediscovering his family history. He
was struck by the Pollexfen likeness in Shannon’s portrait of him; he became
interested in the ‘ancestor-book’ kept by Lily; and in March he would invest-
igate the family’s alleged coat of arms.'*' The year r909 would mark a vital
stage in the public construction of that literary personality which he had been
developing since the publication of The Wanderings of Oisin exactly twenty
years before.
With New Year of 1909, he set off from Paris for Dublin. In London
en route he saw Farr and Agnes Tobin, and then, when passing through
Manchester, had the misfortune to be afflicted with rheumatism and nursed
by Horniman. at her most rapacious. Not fully recovered, he was back in
Dublin by 4 January and immersed in theatre crises. Sara Allgood’s stage-
management was erratic; Henderson, back in employment, wanted more
money, and further annoyed him by bowdlerizing an article about Allgood
carefully planted out in the Freeman by wBy;'*” mornings had to be spent
dictating letters and supervising rehearsals instead of writing. Overall, money
problems loomed. The theatre’s reserve fund contained just over £600, but
to be able to continue when the patent expired the following year they had
to count on at least £1,100 in hand. Though wey carried on doggedly with
oo7,
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

his French lessons, his life was being taken over once more by everyday
Dublin matters. And his health suffered. His smoking habit (adopted on
and off through his life) had produced headaches and palpitations. Synge was
back in hospital; way begged Gregory to come from Coole and help out.
But surprise at her silence was replaced by severe chagrin and genuine con-
sternation when Robert Gregory wrote on 4 February, telling him that she
had herself been at death’s door, having suffered a cerebral haemorrhage
and — as she put it in a pencilled note — ‘nearly slipped away’. Robert’s letter
carried an implied rebuke about the ‘excitement and worry’ his mother had
been subjected to, and told wsy that he and others would have to manage
the theatre as best they could. The crisis further soured relations between them.
(None the less, filial solicitude did not stop Robert and Margaret abandoning
their new baby at Coole as soon as his grandmother was convalescent, and
removing themselves to an artistic life in Paris— much as Robert himself had
been left for a year as a baby while his parents had travelled abroad.)
For wsy the shock of Gregory’s critical illness was intense, bringing on a
wave of chronic insecurity and fear (‘like a conflagration in the rafters’).
Without her, the structure of his life would collapse. All the confusions of
his recent experience were put into proportion, and he expressed it in a poem
sent to her ‘with love’ two days later.

Sickness brought me this

Thought, in that scale of his:
Why should I be dismayed
Though flame had burned the whole
World, as it were a coal,
Now I have seen it weighed
Against a soul?'8°

For her part, she told him she was ‘glad of the illness that brought you
nearer to me’.’** A week later he was himself at Coole: still feeling too
fragile to write The Player Queen but keeping a notebook of aphorisms and
reflections, many too deliberately controversial to print. Some thoughts were
inspired by his father’s letters from New York (‘Genius vanishes at the first
breath of ambition’), others by his current reading — especially the crash
course in Balzac to which he had remained committed.'® But all, like his
published Discoveries a year before, revolved around the expressed need to base
his work on real life.
His own private life continued complex. In late February he had planned
to join Gonne in London, though she was detained in Paris; but he was still
seeing Mabel Dickinson, dining with her in early March, reading her parts
of his diary, and considering her for a part in The King’s Threshold.'** His own

398
 SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 1907-1909

combative feelings towards Dublin adversaries stayed strong. In early March

he wrote a note comparing ‘Griffith & his like to the eunics in Rickett’s pic-
ture watching Don Juan riding through hell’,"*” which would find its way —
like many of his jottings — into poetry. Unashamed sexual desire was associated
with creative power; “Those that hated The Playboy’ were impotent in every
way, staring at the legendary lover on his stallion, ‘maddened by that sinewy
thigh’.
Politics on stage continued to release highly charged feelings. When Sara
Allgood agreed to act in an entertainment where ‘God Save the King’ was
to be played, Lady Lyttelton had to meet wey secretly and warn him, so a
diplomatic illness could be planned. Possibly influenced once more by Gonne,
he was also taking care not to alienate the new generation of nationalists whom
he had described to his father. When P. S. O’Hegarty asked him in December
to speak to a Sinn Féin group in London, he was careful to agree, choosing
the title ‘Ireland and the Arts’, though the crisis over Gregory’s illness meant
the occasion was continually postponed.'** When it took place on 13 June
1909, Gregory noted the opposition to the Playboy had died away, and the
audience approved of their commitment to it. He remained on cautiously
friendly terms with Thomas MacDonagh, writing a testimonial when he
applied for a job at the National University.’*” He persuaded Horniman to
allow the Theatre of Ireland to put on performances in the Abbey. And he
supported theatrical initiatives at Patrick Pearse’s experimental nationalist
school St Enda’s, ‘one of the few places where we have friends’. Perhaps this
was easier because he was conscious of ‘a sinking of national feeling’: both
political and artistic movements seemed at a low ebb. After attending a per-
formance of O’Grady’s The Coming ofFinn put on by the boys at St Enda’s,
he wrote to Gregory, ‘the waiting old men of the defeated clan seemed so like
ourselves’."”° The impression must have been made all the more poignant
because he and Gregory were themselves waiting for a death: and it came only
two days later.
Synge’s passing was no less traumatic for being so long anticipated.
Months before wsy had written to Dickinson about the effect on him of
that expected event; though the word ‘cancer’ was avoided, a full year
before Synge died Gregory had realistically noted that there was little hope."!
The previous May Synge had entrusted wBy with the disposal of his writ-
ings in case of his death, forbidding the publication of his early prentice
work.'”” In November 1908 wy had worked closely with him over a book of
poems in preparation for Cuala.’”? Through February and March 1909 wBy
visited the gloomy nursing-home off St Stephen’s Green, closely observing
the unique, laconic, uncompromising personality as his strength faded. Synge
too knew exactly what was happening: on 23 March he sent a message through

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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

Molly Allgood that he wanted to see wBy and ‘make arrangements’. But he
died the very next day, and wBy’s ‘arrangements’ involved closing the Abbey,
organizing newspaper notices, and giving an address in Synge’s memory at
the United Arts Club — where, to his surprise, Markievicz ‘spoke like a gen-
tleman’ about all wBy had done for the dead playwright. The same note was
struck by Gregory. Emotionally closer than ever to wsy since her own illness,
she told him in a characteristic letter what would console him most.
You did more than any for him, you gave him his means of expression — You have
given me mine, but I wld have found something else to do, tho not anything com-
ing near this, but I dont think Synge would have done anything but drift but for you
& the theatre — I helped him far less — just feeding him when he was badly fed, &
working for the staging of his plays and in other little ways — & I am glad to think
of it for he got very little help from any other except you & myself — I wonder if he
was ever offered a meal in Dublin except at the Nassau?!

The great triumvirate of Synge, Gregory and wsy was broken. At the fu-
neral wBy’s wreath was inscribed ‘In memory of his gentleness and courage’,
with a quotation from Plotinus: “The lonely return to loneliness, the divine
to divinity.’ More prosaically, as he walked from the grave in Mount
Jerome Cemetery he remembered Synge’s remarking he could never look at
a daffodil after enduring Annie Horniman’s hectoring letters on yellow
notepaper: unconsciously maladroit to the end, she had sent in his memory
a large wreath of daffodils.”
The emblematic meaning of Synge’s death would haunt wsy for the
rest of his life, inspiring a continual elegy in prose and verse. After the deaths
of O'Leary and Johnson, the collapse of Symons, the emigration of his
father, and the publication of his own Collected Works, Synge’s death fell as
the final curtain on an era. But since Synge had also stood for the freedom
of the artistic imagination against the middle class of (largely Catholic)
nationalist Ireland, his loss was enormous. It was easy, in retrospect, to see
Synge as the victim of Dublin philistinism rather than of Hodgkin's disease.
Moreover, these struggles would continue. Not only was there Synge’s own
unfinished Deirdre to produce, ‘a magnificent sketch of what would have
been his greatest work’,’”” but wBy rapidly came into conflict with the fam-
ily and the publisher (George Roberts of Maunsel & Co.) about including
his early journalism in a posthumous edition. And his personal bereavement
would be distilled over and over again, in prose as well as poetry.’
And yet the loss was, in some ways, curiously abstract. Synge was vital to
wsys sense of himself; his genius had marshalled the lines of battle and
driven the enemy out into the open. But his detachment, his solipsism, his
unclubbability, his certain sense of self had always sustained a gulf between
400
 SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF HIS TIME 1907-1909

him and his fellow-directors. Discussing wBy’s projected essay, Gregory

(who had never liked the Playboy) honestly articulated the reservations they
both felt.
As to writing about Synge, I should not like to do it — I have nothing to say that
you are not saying. We knew him together so much. Indeed, I wd like you to give
some impression of that, of the theatre years in Dublin when none of us saw any-
one from outside, we just moved from the Abbey to the Nassau & back again, we
three always, & the Fays or Colum or 2 or 3 others sometimes. I like to think that he
stayed here also, I suppose the only country house in Ireland he came to.
Also, we don’t want a series of panegyrics, & we cant say, & don’t want to say
what was true, he was ungracious to his fellow-workers, authors & actors, ready in
accepting praise, grudging in giving it — I wonder if he ever felt a moment’s gratit-
ude for all we went through fighting his battle over the Playboy? On tour he thought
of his own plays only, gave no help to ours — if he repeated compliments they were
to his own. I sometimes wondered if all my liking for him came from his being an
appreciative listener.’”

Paradoxically, Synge possessed a certain saturnine self-centredness reminis-

cent of George Pollexfen: wey would later render it as ‘a furious impartial-
ity, an indifferent turbulent sorrow’.*” With Synge gone, the friends of wBy’s
youth dissipated, and his own career apparently entering on mid-passage, these
were the qualities which he would cultivate in his own solitude: a solitude which
he would more and more locate in a sense of Anglo-Irishness.

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Chapter15 : SEVERANCES
IQO9-IQIO

Mr Yeats reserves his fiercest attacks for politics. The nation-

alist movement, he tells us — and we suppose that he would
include the Unionist movement —~ is destroying the national
imagination. The process began with the Young Ireland group,
and has been going on ever since. A political party connotes the
agreement of a large number of people in one conception, and
‘when a group of people are organised about a conception, the
result must be commonplace’. . . Mr Yeats says, truly enough,
that most of our political conceptions are based on hatred,
whereas literature and all other good things are only created
out of love. At this point we begin to hope that Mr Yeats has
thought out apractical and national policy of love — but he has
done nothing of the sort.
Trish Times, 5 March rg10, leading article on wByY’s
lecture “The Theatre and Ireland’

I
BereEFT of Synge, wBy haunted Dublin through March 1909. Lily was
struck by his telling her he ‘had no near friend left’, and their father com-
miserated (‘people say Willie is not human but these people have not had
a tete-a-tete with him’). His own position as unofficial literary executor
quickly led to arguments with the Synge family and Maunsel.” Therapy was
provided by escaping to London for a week, seeing Ricketts, Shannon and
Mrs Campbell, but with Gregory convalescing in Venice, he had to bear the
brunt of Abbey organization. Synge’s directoral chair was filled by the play-
wright Norreys Connell, employed on a salary. wBy dreamt of relinquishing
control to him and and returning to The Player Queen, but Connell required
advice about everything from production technique to costumes (“Remember
new clothes are the company’s passion. There is no crime they are not cap-
able of to get them”). Poverty also kept him in Dublin, though Gregory tried
to tempt him to Venice, writing elegiacally from the Layard palazzo ‘it often
seems as if the last 10 years had been a dream & Cuchulainn & the theatre
had never existed’.*
WBY’s mind was turning the same way. ‘He is very anxious to get free of
the theatre,’ Lily reported,
& to get to his own work. The theatre, he says, doubles his expenses & takes his
writing & thinking power. It, the theatre, is really fairly started now, but the papers
here are so dishonest. They seem to have no honour, any vulgar musical comedy
402
 SEVERANCES I909~-I9IO
from London they give glowing notices to, while original work at the Abbey they
mock at or do not notice at all. I see the reporters here on the first nights — a set of
whiskey-sodden half-sirs, full of jealousy and ignorance.

These reactions were reflected in the essays on Synge’s work already pre-
occupying him, and exacerbated by sickness and constant headaches. With
Gregory away, and Dublin unfriendly, wy took refuge at Dunsany Castle.
Its owner, now thoroughly stage-struck, was described by wy as ‘a man of
genius . . . [with] a very fine style . . . a handsome young man with a beauti-
ful house full of pictures’. More defensively, and more realistically, he summed
up Dunsany’s work to Gregory as ‘very nearly very good’.’ In London, Dunsany
was launched on Ricketts and Shannon, and introduced to the glamorous
Mabel Beardsley. Finally, wy would ‘claim him for Ireland’ by publishing
Dunsany on the Cuala list.’ For his part, Dunsany became a generous bene-
factor to the Abbey appeal. But this new swan was not entirely perfect: intense
and fidgety, he could occasionally drive wBy ‘to distraction’. In unguarded
moments wBy admitted that he himself provided Dunsany with the scenario
for his play The Glittering Gate,* and a more restrained estimate of his talent
was eventually given to Gordon Craig:
He isa man in whose genius I believe, though I am very doubtful whether it will ever
come to anything. He is one of the few English speaking men today, who have a gift
for style, style like that of Baudelaire in the Prose Poems. J am trying to make a dramat-
ist of him. But he doesn’t know how to revise his work, and he has little patience. He
is splendid for a scene and then all goes to pieces. But what is good in his work is
nearly as good as it can be. It is all worked out of time and out of space. Impossible
cities and impossible wildernesses, and people with wonderful names, invented
by himself, but alas! it is a great misfortune to be born in the Peerage, life is to[o]
pleasant for him. Fifty pounds a year and a drunken mistress would be the making
of him.’

And even Dunsany’s motor-car and castle could not exorcize Synge’s ghost
— nor the idea that he had, as yBy put it in a memou, died of Ireland.*° He
had left a lively inheritance. Productions of The Well ofthe Saints and the Play-
boy (now the Abbey’s most valuable possession) were planned for spring
and summer; his unfinished Deirdre was pieced together, with a production
scheduled for January 1910; negotiations with the recalcitrant Synge family
took a long time to establish who owned the copyright. When the Playboy
reopened at the Abbey on 27 May, it was received respectfully. Even George
Mootre’s repeated visits, and his declaration that it was the greatest play
written for two centuries, failed to arouse controversy.’’ A London produc-
tion was planned for June, along with performances of wBy’s own Deirdre;
judging Connell over-sensitive and too lenient with the actors, wBy continued
403
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

to involve himself with every facet of theatre management, though plagued

by headaches. Even in London, irritations pursued him, such as the irrepress-
ible Aleister Crowley’s threat to publicize the rituals of the Golden Dawn
(which wey tried to circumvent by establishing a copyright through pub-
lication in Latin’”). And when the ex-Abbey actress Maire nic Shiubhlaigh
had a success in the rival Theatre of Ireland with Seamas O’Kelly’s play The
Shuiler’s Child, Sinn Féin celebrated by publishing a front-page attack on
wey’s drama — all the more hurtful as it was written by an old family friend,
Susan Mitchell.

Oh Yeats, Yeats! with your broken-kneed heroes and barging heroines, even your
drawing-room Deirdre, tender, appealing, complex as she was, did not save you, who,
with all your talk of tradition, have only succeeded in producing on [sic] Kiltartan
French and pigeon English some few passably competent comic actors and ac-
tresses. I feel very sad for you and for your loss in the possibilities that your futile
dictatorship flung away, certainties now, and you have lost them . . . Give us no
heroics any more: your heroic actors haven't in any case a leg to stand on! Cultiv-
ate Lord Dunsany if you will. I will foresee something big in the empty bottles and
the picklock at the door of heaven, but get him an audience, man, get him an audi-
ence. The ‘Glittering Gate’ is no farce, and the empty bottle deserves more than an
empty laugh. Pull yourself together, Man of Genius, save your theatre. There is
yet a little time.”

This was part of a general campaign on behalf of those who had seceded
from the Abbey — particularly actors who had gravitated to Casimir and
Constance Markievicz and the Theatre of Ireland, currently drawing large
audiences. Gregory’s Kincora had already been similarly condemned ‘for
hopelessly flat acting and deplorable stage management . . . the thing beat
all Abbey records. The degeneracy of the Abbey Theatre is painful.”* For this
onslaught, the Yeats circle blamed Russell, who angrily denied the imputa-
tion in a letter to John Quinn — incidentally confirming WBy’s loneliness in
the Dublin of 1909.

I have never at any time in my life depreciated Yeats genius either publicly or
privately. I have never at any time been in opposition either publicly or privately to
the Abbey Theatre . . . W.B.Y. has made a great many enemies among the younger
writers in Dublin and there are many, all members of the rival theatre Seamus O
Sullivan, Colvin, Stephens, Keohler & others. These are all friends of mine and every
Sunday evening they come to see me. I know they feel bitterly to W.B.Y. but for
this I am not responsible . . . None of my friends George Moore John Eglinton
Colum O Sullivan Stephens are on what could be called friendly terms with W.B.Y.
Tam not myself but I can assert truly Ihave nothing to reproach myself with in my
relations to him.”

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 SEVERANCES 1909-1910
wBy's refusal to conceal his contempt for Russell’s acolytes, combined
with the struggle for control of the Theatre Society, had driven a deep wedge
between the two friends. Also, though Russell’s politics remained those of
moderate nationalism, many of his protégés were more ‘advanced’. It was no
accident that Sinn Féin so readily published attacks on wsy; the spectrum
that took in Griffith and advanced nationalism, the IRB Dungannon Clubs,
the Theatre of Ireland and Constance Markievicz, with her recently formed
boy-scout militia ‘Fianna na hEireann’, represented a political culture from
which he was deliberately distancing himself. Over the next five years the soul
of Irish nationalist politics would be contested between these small groups
and the more ‘establishment’ Home Rule agenda of the Irish Parliamentary
Party, whose star rose as the Liberal government was driven to rely more and
more on their support at Westminster. wBy’s political instincts were mov-
ing to this side — and proportionately further from the Fenian commitments
of ten years before.
It was thus all the more ironic — and infuriating — that at this very point
Horniman chose to precipitate another row on the grounds of ‘politics’. With
the Abbey company playing the Court Theatre in London during the sum-
mer, their stars were much in demand, and Sara Allgood was produced by the
society hostess Edith Lyttelton to entertain what wsy described as ‘a Unionist
suffrage meeting’ at her house in late June.° To general astonishment,
Horniman seized this as an issue to break on, declaring her intention to
withdraw her subsidy from a company which took up political stances, against
the express terms of their contract. Ominously, she had already become
restive about continuing her subsidy until the end of rg1o, and had recently
suggested that the directors buy her out.’”
Through early July a series of increasingly manic letters from Horniman
fired thunderbolts in all directions — notably to Mrs Campbell, who had
engaged the sublimely apolitical Allgood for the occasion. Mrs Campbell’s
bemused reply provoked Horniman to exceptional heights of invective,
revealing the abiding resentment of wBy which lay beneath. “You are most
generous, a woman in your position to defend a mere amateur dramatist, and
it was very brave of Mr Yeats to risk annoying you, a rea//y important person
... L have always intended to stop all help, if ever politics was dragged in,
in an undeniable way.’’* The storm broke on wsy’s head as he wasjourney-
ing to Coole, and he was unable to stop Norreys Connell from resigning
with alacrity on 2 July.’” Gregory’s reaction was to welcome the chance of
a break, a course in which she thought wsy concurred. But this strategy
was short-circuited by a rather bewildered apology to Horniman from
Edith Lyttelton on 7 July; wsy extracted an angrier response from Allgood,
who none the less agreed ‘for the good of the theatre’ not to take on recitation
405
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

engagements ‘without permission of the directors’.”” The day after Lyttelton’s

apology Horniman wrote to her ‘Dear Demon’ more revealingly than ever
before:
But the root of all this is deeper — I know that you hold the Nietschian doctrine that
you have no duties towards those who have neither Genius, Beauty, Rank (race or
family) nor Distinction, that there are ‘Slaves’ & that Iam one of them & that no
arrangement nor pact with me is of any importance. On my side I firmly hold that
what I truly am is not affected by your opinion, & that you have as good a right to
hold it as I have to resist it. If you can get people to take my place with whom you
can feel on terms of Nietschian equality the position would be much simpler. They
would have no delicacy (such as I feel) in insisting upon what they might think fit.
On my side I should aid in every way the arrangements to buy me out & I should
only take a sum of money on the clear understanding by all concerned that it should
be made public that I had been got rid of completely so as to rid you of what seems
to be an incubus &a stigma.
You know quite well how I have tried my best to serve Art in your country & other
people say that I have been very patient. Perhaps you will see some good points in
the despised ‘slave’ when you look back on the last six years when you are an old man.
That remark you may label as ‘sentimental’, but that does not affect the fact to label
anything does not alter its nature in reality.
Ifyou get those guarantors together & they object to paying me £500 for freeholds
costing £1,500, I'll take less; even a ‘slave’ can avoid being greedy, but something must
be paid so as to impress the ‘Sinn Fein’ and “The Leader’.
It is very sad that it should have come to this between us (another bit of ‘slave’
sentiment;) but you have chosen your own course & I accept fully that you have a full
right to it, in contradistinction to your contention that we poor ‘slaves’ should dow
to everything said by a superman.
May be you may still in the ‘back of your mind’ (my dear friend) come to value me
a little in the ‘future’.””
In the end, the tone of imperious offensiveness faltered; this is, like so many
of her communications, a love-letter by other means. And as always, his
reply to her was implacable: asserting that the theatre had done all it had
promised, in creating a disciplined company and ‘a remarkable body of plays
of a new kind’; yet again, the promise was held out of ‘foreign work well
played’.”* In any case, pushed by Gregory, he would use Horniman’s more sub-
missive mood to negotiate their way to freedom. By the end of August the
issue was narrowed to the £800 subsidy outstanding, and a sum of £200 for
upkeep; Gregory and wsy calculated they needed at least this 41,000 plus
£500 to keep going. The story was not over. Money wrangles would contin-
ue throughout, and there would be further crises at the Abbey before the
Horniman subsidy and the old patent expired in December s910. But the terms
for their liberation had been set. All that was needed was money.
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 SEVERANCES 1909-1910

II
There was one obvious reason for wBy’s distraction, and for Horniman’s
resentment and volatility, during the summer of 1909. Maud Gonne came
to London in May and stayed on, visiting Symons, making friends with
Agnes Tobin, and seeing much of wey. When she left, Florence Farr re-
ported sardonically to Quinn: ‘He is very apt to go to Paris to see M. Gonne
& they are thinking of Italy with the cousin Mrs Clay as chaperone. But I
know he will go to Coole now in a fortnight because he has to write “The
Player Queen” for Mrs Campbell.’ She was right. As to wsy’s relationship
with Gonne, it now seemed clear that she was determined not to pursue
their physical affair. He recorded in his diary that she had told him in May
this must be so: ‘we are divided by her religious ideas, a Catholicism which
has grown on her’, as well as by what he believed to be her aversion to sex.
On 21 June he wrote:
What end will it all have —I fear for her & for myself— she has all myself. Iwas never
more deeply in love, but my desires, always strong, must go elsewhere if I would escape
their poison. I am in constant terror of some entanglement parting us, &all the while
I know that she made me & Jher. She is my innocence & I her wisdom. Of old she
was a phoenix & I feared her, but she is my child more than my sweetheart . . .
Always since I was a boy I have questioned dreams for her sake & she herself always
a dream of deceiving hope, has all unknown to herself made other loves but as the
phoenix nest, where she is reborn in all her power to torture and delight, to waste &
to enoble. She would be cruel if she were not a child, who can always say ‘you will
not suffer because I will pray’.

By now, he believed her repressed desire was diverted into extreme politics,
and her Catholicism provided a self-justifying rationale for both.
Other sexual tensions too emerged from his visits to Paris the previous
year. John Quinn’s mistress Dorothy Coates had also been holidaying there
in June 1908: a pretty, intelligent Virginian (with a Native American grand-
father and an Ulster mother) but neurotic and, as time would show, litigi-
ous. Under her influence, jBy ruefully remarked, Quinn ‘becomes a tiger and
gives you the life of a dog, and if you say anything resenting such treatment
he does not hesitate to remind you of what he has done & of your dependent
position.” Meeting wBy at Gonne’s, Coates spoke freely to him and pos-
sibly over-interpreted his response. ‘It was she herself who told Willie that
she had been Quinn’s mistress,’ according to jBy. ‘She herself told me that
she was a bachelor girl, which is an American institution, and means a woman
leading the kind of existence that is led sexually by the bachelor man.”° In
Coates’s case it would lead to a lengthy claim against Quinn's estate, and
in older age — it was alleged — to a career as a Mayfair consultant for those
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afflicted by sexual problems. From references in letters, it is evident that wBY

subsequently spoke about her round Dublin with his habitual indiscretion;
she responded (or retaliated) by telling Quinn that he had attempted to
seduce her. Quinn took her word for it, and despite a Dublin meeting with
wey in mid-August 1909 where they ‘had the whole thing out’, there was no
communication between them for several years.
Thus one more name was added to the growing list of estranged friends —
and one who had helped wsy to combat the financial exigencies of a writer’s
life. In the summer of 1909, however, a new possibility came into view.
After decades of negotiation, a National University of Ireland had just been
founded, embracing the provincial Queen’s Colleges and the Catholic
University in Dublin; the latter institution, reborn as University College,
Dublin, would become the powerhouse and forcing-ground of a new Cath-
olic elite. It would also sustain a powerful clerical influence. Possibly in an
attempt to circumvent this, some of the younger intellectuals associated with
it (notably Thomas MacDonagh) mounted a campaign to appoint distin-
guished outsiders to well-paid teaching-posts (lectureships worth £400 a
year). The suggested candidates included the German philologist and Celtic
scholar Kuno Meyer, Douglas Hyde and wsy.?’
This carried radical implications, as MacDonagh fully recognized. He
was a talented poet, an astute critic and an apprentice playwright, but his
relationship with wBy remained edgy. In 1903 he had dedicated a book of
poems to the older poet, who had advised him about publishing strategy,
and the next year he submitted a play to the Abbey. But though they main-
tained a mutual intellectual respect, MacDonagh’s politics were Sinn Féin,
and his cultural affinities lay with Russell’s circle and the Theatre of Ireland
rather than with wsy. The forthcoming revival of the Playboy on 27 May had
swiftly raised exactly the kind of problem implied by wsy’s appointment,
as both men saw. ‘I cannot withdraw the Play Boy, wrote wy tersely to
MacDonagh, ‘though I see of course quite well the effect it may have on my
chances of that Chair. No, if they wont give it to me because I am myself I
shall be well out of it.”* Privately he confided he ‘should much sooner accept
an invitation | got some time ago from Gordon Craig to join his “circle” of
ne’er do wells and Bohemians in Florence’.” By 7 May it emerged that the
bandwagon had been set rolling too late, and another appointment had been
made. wBy expressed his relief; to Gregory he added that ‘ancient incom-
petence’ would rule in the new University as in the old College. He rapidly
convinced himself that it was his own decision not to go forward, and Dublin
was in any case ‘an unendurable place to live in’.*° Meanwhile he joined the
Gregorys at Coole and took refuge in The Player Queen and his episodic
diary of reflections. But he was not done with controversy yet.
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 SEVERANCES 1909-1910
While wey was being sounded out about academic posts in Dublin, his
old rival George Bernard Shaw was battling English censorship. In May
his new play The Shewing-Up ofBlanco Posnet (a morality-farce set in a pecu-
liarly Shavian Wild West) was refused a licence by the Lord Chamberlain.
Simultaneously, the evidence Shaw gave to the Joint Select Committee on
Censorship was suppressed. He was looking for a row. He had unfinished
business with the Abbey ever since John Bull’s Other Island, and was build-
ing a friendship with Gregory, who daringly but unsuccessfully suggested
that he take Synge’s place as an Abbey director. When he offered Blanco to
the Abbey in July 1909, it was an unmistakable challenge. Although wy was
cautious (as in all matters to do with Shaw), Gregory instantly seized on its
potential. She privately thought the play ‘a little sentimental & not very
good’ but since the censor had banned it in London, a golden opportunity
was presented for an Abbey coup. The point was that English censorship law
did not run in Dublin; letters patent for Irish drama derived from monarch-
ical authority, so any gagging would have to be specifically ordered by the
Viceroy, Lord Aberdeen (a passionate Home Ruler). And even a brief read-
ing of the play showed that it contained nothing to offend Irish nationalist
opinion, and hardly anything inimical to the Church: Shaw’s forensic skills
were played over a fairly straightforward story of the operation of providen-
tial grace, and the humbling of an atheistical cowboy. It was the perfect issue
on which to flaunt the theatre’s independence of official Ireland, and allay the
suspicions of Sinn Féin.**
The Irish administration walked into the trap. Once the play was ac-
cepted, official disapproval was conveyed through the Under-Secretary at
Dublin Castle, ironically a Liberal, Home Ruler and Abbey supporter, James
(later Sir James) Dougherty. As he expressed it, the issue involved misuse of
the Abbey’s patent, which forbade (among other things) ‘profanity or impro-
priety of language’ and ‘misrepresentation of sacred characters which may
in any degree tend to expose religion or bring it into contempt’. (This legal-
istic line rapidly collapsed into the much vaguer claim that Blanco was not
the kind of play which the Abbey was supposed to present, since the only Irish
thing about it was its author.) Gregory, as patentee, was summoned by
Dougherty on 12 August and took the main part; but wBy travelled up from
Coole with her for three further visits to the Castle on 13 and 14 August, and
one to the Viceregal Lodge on 20 August. As Gregory described her ‘fight with
the Castle’ in great detail a few years later, the theatre directors faced down
royal authority; Dougherty and Aberdeen, fundamentally sympathetic, had
been put in a corner by the low-brow English censor (an ex-bank manager,
as Dougherty apologetically explained) and the equally uncultivated King.
(wsy thought the monarch was taking a leading part, inspired by hatred of
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Shaw.) In point of law, the Castle could not ban the play; all it could do was
rely on persuasion and, failing that, revoke the patent. The Abbey, in fact,
held all the cards—so long as the play provoked no public unrest. This involved
squaring Sinn Féin, and behind the scenes wBy and Gregory prepared Irish
journalists before releasing to an entranced public the Castle’s warning let-
ter. The day before this appeared, Russell wrote to Gregory that, acting on
wBy’s instructions, he had ‘got at’ Griffith to prevent any demonstration against
the play.*”
The worst Griffith did was to make snide remarks about the Abbey curry-
ing cheap favour with anti-Castle elements;* this referred to wBy's letter to
the press on 22 August, which took the deliberately nationalist line of defend-
ing an Irish playwright against the English censor. He was, at the same time,
genuinely concerned. The issue of censorship would preoccupy him more
and more. He saw it as the chief target to be aimed at by the new Academic
Committee of English Letters, which he would shortly join, and he first
thought of staging Oedipus Rex in Dublin to demonstrate how much ‘we are
better off so far as the law is concerned than we would be in England’.** To
oppose censorship on nationalist grounds killed two birds with one stone. Even
habitual opponents like Patrick Pearse in An Claidheamh Soluts got the point:
while discounting the Anglicized Shaw as one of ‘the legion of the lost ones,
the cohort of the damned’, he hailed wpy and Gregory for ‘making a fight
for Irish freedom from an English censorship’.
To Dublin, it was an extra spectator sport in Horse Show Week. During
August, Shaw, the unlikely nationalist martyr, stayed immured in a Kerry
luxury hotel, but Lily observed her brother running around Dublin ‘in great
spirits, snorting fight’ accompanied by Gregory ‘in quite a becoming hat’.*°
Rehearsals continued, under Gregory (her son felt that wBy only joined this
bandwagon at the last minute, and scooped undeserved credit®”). Small
changes were made to the text, though not those required by the censor.
Shaw was annoyed, as he wanted the message rammed down the audience’s
throats.** But just before opening night, on 25 August, wBy issued a classic
and prophetic statement:
To-morrow night Blanco Posnet will have a triumph. The audience will look at
one another in amazement, asking what on earth did the English Censor discover
objectionable. They will understand instantly. The root of the whole difference
between us and England in such matters is that though there might be some truth
in the old charge that we are not truthful to one another here in Ireland, we are cer-
tainly always truthful to ourselves. In England they have learned from commerce
to be truthful to one another, but they are great liars when alone. The English
Censor exists to keep them from finding out the fact. He gives them incomplete
arguments, sentimental half-truths, and above all he keeps dramatists from giving
AIO
 SEVERANCES I909~I9I0
them anything in sudden phrases that would startle them into the perception of
reality.*?

His sister’s reactions bore this out. With Jack and his wife she sat in the
audience ‘and waited to be shocked and no shock came... God and the
invisible powers are spoken of and to in strong terms and even criticised. This
we dont mind over here as we do it every day and are not afraid or struck
down. In England they keep things invisible for wet Sunday evenings, a sort
of bogeyman.’ It was none the less a great first night, jammed with ‘Horse
Show people hoping to see something improper’.”” Ticket sales realized
£100, all seats were sold, and fifty people turned away; even Lord Dunsany
only managed to get in because an aunt of Shaw’s was too intoxicated to claim
her place. The British press were there in force and the Trieste Piccolo della
Sera was represented by James Joyce, as bewildered by the play’s ‘flimsiness’
as everybody else. wBy’s predictions came exactly true: he reported to Farr
that ‘Shaw’s play went enormously & [Chief Secretary Augustine] Birrell swore
& stamped & said Lord Aberdeen had made the whole Irish government
ridiculous.’ By an adroit stroke, Cathleen ni Houlihan was played in the sup-
porting bill (much as it had been wheeled out in the wake of the Playboy),
making their nationalist credentials all the more obvious. wBy received a warm
letter from Gonne in Paris, congratulating him on rediscovering his prin-
ciples. As for Shaw, he had enjoyed yet another succés de scandale (and one far
beyond the play’s merits). From now on he was a firm friend to the Abbey
and to Gregory, advising her about matters such as the right proportion of
takings to pay to authors,” while waiving all charges to himself for Blanco.
And Castle dignitaries continued to attend the theatre; a certain discreet
collaboration may be hinted at by the attendance of Dougherty’s wife and
daughter at Gregory’s ‘At Home’ entertainments a year later.*°
She stayed on in Dublin, supervising theatrical affairs, while he went to
Coole, where he struggled with The Player Queen and his perennial summer
task of reading Balzac. To wy, Gregory’s authority, integrity and style had
been demonstrated at their best. He felt, therefore, all the more incensed when
several Coole tenants applied to the Land Court to have their rents reduced,
at a time when landlords were already complaining of the new impositions
laid on them by recent financial legislation. On 7 August he drafted the idea
for a poem which took ‘personal utterance’ into unashamedly controversial
politics:

Subject for poem. ‘A Shaken House’. How should the world gain if this house failed,
even though a hundred little houses were the better for it, for here power [has] gone
forth or lingered, giving energy, precision; it gave to a far people beneficient rule, and
still under its roof living intellect is sweetened by old memories of its descent from

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far off? How should the world be better if the wren’s nest flourish and the eagle’s house
is scattered?“

The resulting poem was eventually printed at the end of the following
year (“To a Certain Country House in Time of Change’, later ‘Upon a House
shaken by the Land Agitation’). The original idea was not softened nor made
more palatable; not only Gregory’s plays and Cuchulain ofMuirthemne, but
even her husband’s imperialist career were celebrated and exalted as admir-
able attributes of aristocracy and ‘Big Houses’, while the idea that such priv-
ilege might be redistributed was scouted as pointless. It was true — as WBY
knew — that Coole was a poor estate, run on the margin, and that Gregory
had spent twenty years in retrenchment trying to pay off debts; but this was
not the public perception of landlords and colonial governors in the Ireland
of 1909 and 1910. The poem necessarily read like a deliberate challenge to con-
ventional nationalists, and symbolized how much he had distanced himself
from their opinions since the death of Synge.
wBy knew about Ascendancy penury at first hand; he stayed on into
October partly because he had hardly any money left. Relief did not come
until Fisher Unwin sent 432 for a year’s sale of Poems.** The Player Queen
remained recalcitrant, by 10 October, reading it to Robert and Margaret
Gregory, he knew that his summer’s work had been wasted, and he bought
a loose-leaf file in order to start again (a prospect that gave him a sleepless
night from excitement“). In mid-October he could afford to return to Dublin
and take lodgings in an old house at Glasnevin where Swift had stayed,
which provided peace and a writing-table in his bedroom for fifteen shil-
lings a week.*” But his move from Coole had been dictated by a traditional
summons. In late October Gonne appeared at the Abbey on wsy’s arm,
‘fine and majestic in black, walking in a cloud of heavy perfume’.** Only a
forthcoming Abbey tour to Manchester (engaged by Payne for Horniman’s
theatre on a half-profits basis) brought him unwillingly back to England in
November.
Once again he was enmeshed in the complications of the players’ love-
lives, the calculation of percentages, the exigencies of Mrs Campbell over
the eternal Player Queen. In London his social life continued to burgeon.
Though constantly worried about the state of his dress clothes, he dined
with the Prime Minister at Edmund Gosse’s, on 29 November. He sat beside
Asquith, and their host was grateful that wBy ‘kept things going’ — though
in a typically Yeatsian way. Lloyd George’s epoch-making budget was just
about to be thrown out by the Lords, precipitating constitutional crisis, and
wy was warned not to talk politics. He tried, therefore, to reassure Lord Cromer
by telling him, ‘ “I look upon English politics as a child does at a race-course,
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 SEVERANCES 1909-1910
taking sides by the colour of the jockies’ coats, and I often change sides in
the middle of a race.” This rather chilled the conversation & somebody said
to me presently “Lord Cromer is interested in nothing but politics.” “”
But he continued to feel frustrated by theatrical work, and alienated
from life in general. Before leaving Dublin he had been greatly struck byJohn
Martin Harvey’s Hamlet, and wrote to him in terms which hint at emo-
tional identification:
A performance of Hamlet is always to me what High Mass is to a good Catholic. It
is my supreme religious event. I see in it a soul jarred & broken away from the life of
its world, — a passionate preparation of sanctity. I feel that the play should seem to
one, not so much deep as full of lyric loftiness & I feel this all the more because I am
getting tired of our modern delight in the Abyss.°°

II]
In early January 1910 he was back in Dublin for the first night of Synge’s Deirdre,
intending to spend six weeks there; Lily thought him ‘well, cheerful and
hard up, and full of plans and hope’.*' The critical and popular success of
Synge’s last play vindicated his optimism, and made him feel that there was
hope for avant-garde work, since much of his recent demoralization had
been due to the theatre’s reliance on the popular realism of Casey and Boyle.
His energies galvanized once more, he dreamt of performing Oedipus Rex
‘against a great purple curtain’ — and committing the Abbey to a new obses-
sion, Gordon Graig’s experimental all-purpose columnar screens, designed
to create geometric illusions of depth and shade by abstract effects. To his
delight, a working model arrived in Dublin in January. As usual, however,
success brought its problems. Much of the effect of Deirdre had been due to
Molly Allgood’s haunting performance in the part written for her by her dead
lover. (She was much improved, in wBy’s opinion, by Mabel Dickinson’s
instruction in Swedish drill.**) One result was the enduring jealousy of her
sister Sara Allgood. Another was an embarrassing overture from Frank Fay,
who wanted to return to the company. And, in the wake of the Abbey’s recent
success, the directors’ plans to buy out Horniman led to long and embittered
negotiations.
By mid-December Gregory was firmly convinced that they must mount
an ‘appeal’ to purchase the theatre from Horniman, writing to wBy that ‘it
would be a fine dramatic thing for someone to do’.*? The very same day wBy
began to calculate what kind of an offer might be acceptable, and by 21
December an audit of the accounts convinced him they were in a position to
move forward. South African magnates were wooed to Abbey performances;
wsy considered selling the Canadian Pacific stock in which he had invested
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his American earnings; and, above all, the sum needed to buy out Horniman
had to be agreed. Pollexfen-like, while admitting that she had spent about
£5,000 on the buildings, wy had no intention of offering so much. Not only
was there the question of the subsidy due until December rg10, which would
be deducted, and the cost of replacing the electric lights, but in mid-January
he got the buildings valued at the advantageously low sum of £2,000-42,300.4
After deductions, he decided to drop their offer to £1,000 from the 41,500
originally envisaged. Lily gleefully told sy, ‘Willy had it valued by an expert
. . His valuation was some hundreds under Miss Horniman’s own valuation.
Bernard Shaw says he always thought there was a Jewish droop about Willy’s
nose. Willy says “Shaw has no sense and no knowledge of life and this is seen
in all his plays.”
Shaw had offered to act as broker with his old friend and patron, but in
the end it was Gregory who had to face Horniman alone, telling her she and
wBy wanted to form a limited liability company and offering her less than
the £1,428 minimum she demanded. At a terrible meeting in London all
their latent antipathy flared up, with Horniman accusing the directors of fraud-
ulence and threatening jail. Still shaken, Gregory wrote to wBy afterwards:
I had no quarrel with her — wolf and lamb! — but I will never if I can help it see her
again and hear her insane accusations against my friends, dead and living.
Tam glad now I went through that dreadful visit, for I am pretty sure it would have
been. a mistake letting her have that proposal to show against us. She got into Shaw’s
mind that we (or you, as he said) were beating her down . . . I was so thankful I kept
even good humour with Miss H — of course if she was sane one would have turned on
her, but it was the performance of araving lunatic. I could not keep her to the point.
I was not even angry, it was like looking at some malignant growth. One won-
dered how she came to be there, and felt a desire to be away and clear of it.*°
Relations were not helped by Shaw telling Horniman that she was giving them
a bargain (which was true). As usual with Horniman, wBy was ina sensitive
position; Gregory later claimed that she had to force him to write an angry
remonstrance to Horniman by threatening that otherwise she would close
Coole to him. He did so, reluctantly, but she released him from sending it.°”
But by 18 February wey could report to Gregory that Horniman had agreed
to take the £1,000: the agreement for sale dated two days later committed
Horniman to paying the two final subsidies in June and September r910
(£400 in toto) and receiving 41,000 from the directors. To the patron herself
wsy wrote, ‘do not think that I am not grateful for all you have done — yes I
am even when you write to Maunsell accusing me by implication of bad
faith. I conclude you do not mean it & remind myself of other days.’ They
still had the rest of rg10 to get through, with Horniman angrier than ever;
but the arrangements for a succession were in place.

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 SEVERANCES 1909-1910
Throughout, wy’s creative energies were as remarkably engaged as ever:
designing sets for Gregory’s Goldoni adaptation Mirandolina, terrifying the
actors at rehearsal by imposing fines for late attendance, and completing his
own short verse play The Green Helmet. He was, however, relieved in March
ofsome theatrical duties by a new manager, Lennox Robinson, first encoun-
tered as a playwright in April 1908. His controversial one-act drama The
Clancy Name was played that October, and others rapidly followed. Robinson,
a lanky young Protestant nationalist from Cork, appealed greatly to wy:
‘he is a serious intellect and may grow to be a great dramatist’. In February
1910, to fill the gap left by Connell, way sent Robinson off to learn the pro-
duction business from Shaw and Granville-Barker in London — comparing
himself to the man who took Ibsen from behind the chemist’s counter in
Bergen. Robinson spent six weeks staying in Woburn Buildings. He did not
follow through Gregory’s idea that he learn boxing from Robert in order to
eject troublemakers from the theatre, but he duly took over management of
the Abbey and stayed there, on and off, for most of his life.
Gregory had her reservations, especially about Robinson’s taste for Cork
realism rather than verse drama: from her perch backstage she sent WBY
beady-eyed progress reports on his protégé’s development. Despite this, wBy
left more and more to Robinson, and the Abbey programme reflected this
change (‘a strange ending to the poetic playhouse Yeats wanted’, Russell re-
marked to Quinn”’). Receipts accordingly increased threefold by June 1910.
As for Robinson, unworldly, absent-minded and eventually alcoholic, the stress
of dealing with the players nearly reduced him to a nervous breakdown at the
end of his first season; by September 1911 wBy wanted him to run the busi-
ness side, and produce only the plays he was interested in. None the less, he
wanted to retain his young acolyte, ‘the only person we have ever found who
could keep order in the company’. And Gregory probably thought the
price worth paying, if it released wBy for his own work. On 11 February 1910
he sent her his draft of the last (and best) lines in The Green Helmet:

And I choose the laughing lip

That shall not turn from laughing, whatever rise or fall,
The heart that grows no bitterer although betrayed by all,
The hand that loves to scatter, the life like a gambler’s throw;
And these things I make prosper, till a day come that I know
When heart & mind shall darken that the weak may end & the strong,
And the long remembering harpers have matter for a song.’

The ruthless tone reflects his own life, spent between the Abbey and his
secluded writing-room at Glasnevin. He no longer saw sundered friends
like Russell® and newer acquaintances like MacDonagh never became
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intimates, though he advised them as generously as ever about their work.

His irritation with Dublin cliques remained unabated; Gregory, always
alert to threats and distractions, worried that he was becoming too inter-
ested in Gertrude Kingston's attempt to set up a London art-theatre, which
reassembled many of the old troupe (Sturge Moore, Ricketts, Masefield,
Craig). But his energies were monopolized in February by planning lec-
tures for the Abbey’s fundraising drive, and in the course of this he would
clarify much about his own life.®
He had outlined a lecture-series in January, “The Fall of Romance’, accord-
ing to Lily — ‘but since then he says he is in better spirits so he is going to
call it “the rise of romance”’.® As the lectures emerged and were delivered
to fashionable London audiences in March 1910, however, they synthesized
literary commentary with autobiography. A dry run at the United Arts Club
on 8 February showed him that he had to know exactly what he meant to
say. He delved back into the books of the Rhymers Club for material, and by
mid-February he had decided to concentrate in his poetry lecture upon
Dowson, Johnson and the connection between poetry and personality — an
odd reversion to some of the ideas preached by yBy, as his son acknowledged
in a graceful letter.
I have just finished dictating a first sketch of my lecture in London, it is on the
dialect drama with Synge as the principal figure. All three lectures have worked
themselves out as a plea for uniting literature once more to personality, the person-
ality of the writer in lyric poetry or with imaginative personalities in drama. The only
ground on which I differ from you is that I look upon character and personality
as different things or perhaps different forms of the same thing. Juliet has person-
ality, her nurse has character, I look upon personality as the individual form of our
passions (Dowson’s in his poetry or Byron in ‘Manfred’ or Forbes Robertson in a
romantic part have all personality but we do not necessarily know much about their
characters). Character belongs I think to Comedy, but all that’s rather a long story
and is connected with a whole mass of definitions.
I probably get the distinction from the stage, where we say a man is a ‘character
actor’ meaning that he builds up a part out of observation, or we say that he is ‘an
emotional actor’ meaning that he builds it up out of himself, and in this last case —
we always add, if he is not commonplace — that he has personality. Of course
Shakespeare has both because he is always a tragic comedian.
In the process of writing my third lecture I found it led up to the thought of your
letter which I am going to quote at the end. It has made me realise with some sur-
prise how fully my philosophy of life has been inherited from you in all but its details
and applications.®
He had been meditating on definitions of personality in art and relat-
ing them to his Rhymer colleagues since the previous summer. As always, a
general argument was inferred from personal experience — not always to his
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 SEVERANCES I909~-I9I0
audience’s liking. The youthful William Carlos Williams, who attended
wy 'slecture at the Adelphi, was appalled when Gosse as Chairman cut the
speaker short — in Williams's view, because wy defended the decadent lives
of 1890s figures like Dowson and Johnson and condemned contemporary
England for denying them an audience. Shaw, chairing the final lecture, tried
to sabotage his old sparring-partner in his summing up, warning the audi-
ence not to get the impression that they had to be Irish in order to be artists.
‘I am so anxious that the peculiar impression Mr Yeats makes in coming
from a strange land and a strange people should not discourage you.’ But
what mattered was the fact that wBy was placing the companions of his
youth firmly in a past which he had left behind him, while defending the ‘reck-
less courage’ of any artist ready (like many of the Rhymers) to ‘enter into the
abyss of himself’. And the conflict between the lessons of art and the neces-
sities of everyday Irish politics was spelt out clearly by a Dublin lecture to
the Gaelic League on 3 March, ostensibly on ‘Ireland and the Theatre’. To
an eclectic audience (including MacDonagh, Colum, Dunsany and Patrick
Pearse) wBy spoke passionately about art, propaganda and the writer’s per-
sonality. Irish literature must seek the uncompromising, vigorous simplicity
of personal utterance, not the second-hand pieties which the Young Ireland
movement had to peddle in order to create national consciousness half a cen-
tury before. His current attitude was reflected by an evident determination
not to trim his sails to the Gaelic League’s sensitivities. ‘Mr Yeats fears that
Ireland is going to be de-Irishised by English Victorian commonplace being
translated into Irish and spread through Ireland at secondhand,’ wrote one
disgruntled reviewer. ‘Early in the night he acknowledged that he did not know
Irish. So he was not himself in a position to judge.’®*
The Irish Times noted that wBy, ‘always interesting because he is so splen-
didly impatient of what we common people regard as the realities of life’, was
interrogating the growth of a new spirit of national co-operation in Ireland.
“We are all trying to discover where we agree with one another rather than
to accentuate the points on which we differ’, but wBy had decided to high-
light disagreements and to reject practicalities.°’ He had his reasons. This
lecture, with its attack on the ‘perpetual apologetics’ of the long nationalist
argument founded on hatred of England, its denunciation of hack journal-
ism, and its celebration of Synge as the uncompromising voice of the real
Ireland closely reflected the long essay he was gestating in March and April
1910, which would be published in July of the following year as ‘J. M. Synge
and the Ireland of his Time’.
Thus throughout the spring wBy’s thoughts were running on autobio-
graphy, as well as on the raw wound of Synge’s death. Working up his fundrais-
ing lectures for the Abbey appeal, ‘Synge and the dialect drama’ were much
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on his mind, and the necessity to produce a long introduction to Synge’s

Collected Works concentrated his attention. Gregory supplied him with let-
ters and other material from Coole; he also canvassed friends like Masefield,
who astonished him by telling him how much Synge had revered wBy’s own
writing.” He retired to Dunsany Castle at weekends, where he found —as at
Coole — his lyric gift could return. In mid-March he turned aside from the
Synge essay to draft a brief and lapidary poem about creative work, “The
Fascination of What’s Difficult’,”’ blaming his obsession with ‘theatre busi-
ness, management of men for harnessing the winged horse of creative imag-
ination. The tone bears out his advice to MacDonagh at this time: ‘I often
ask myself when I have written a poem, could I have said this or that more
simply in prose, and if I could | alter the poem.” But his great effort went
into the prose of the Synge essay, which he was writing ‘rather elaborately
and certainly very slowly’. Gregory received progress reports (‘I am at pre-
sent attacking Young Ireland’), and in May he could tell her that ‘some of [it]
seems to be as good as any prose I have written . . . an elaborate peice of work
which will however enfuriate the anti-Play Boy people. I begin with the row
& then go on to account for it.’
As so often, he was a good critic of his own work: J. M. Synge and the
Ireland of his Time’ is not only a crystallization of wBy’s thoughts on art and
nationalism in rgro, but a powerful implicit statement of autobiography. It
charts the development of his own mind, starting with deceptive simplicity
at the point when he was called back from Aberdeen to the riotous opening
of Synge’s play, and realized that he was set on a different path from the ori-
ginal inspiration which had guided his early work. ‘I stood there watching,
knowing well that I saw the dissolution of a school of patriotism that held
sway over my youth’ —a sentence drafted over and over again, in what is usu-
ally a fluent manuscript.” It had not happened as instantly as that, since the
Playboy riots came as the climactic battle of a war which had been raging since
at least 1903, when wBy opened hostilities with “The National Theatre and
Three Sorts of Ignorance’.” wy had already isolated ‘[Synge’s] bitter mis-
understanding with the wreckage of Young Irelandism’, as early as January
1909 — before the playwright’s death.” But by rgro he was able to connect this
process into his already complex autobiography, recapitulating upon the
lessons taught by O’Leary, the arguments with J. F. Taylor and Arthur
Griffith, and the inadequacy of Young Ireland’s approach to national iden-
tity. The final version reached a level of compression, allusiveness and sub-
tlety which he had not achieved before.

Thomas Davis, whose life had the moral simplicity which can give to actions the
lasting influence that style alone can give to words, had understood that a country

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which has no national institutions must show its young men images for the affec-
tions, although they be but diagrams of what it should or may be. He and his school
imagined the Soldier, the Orator, the Patriot, the Poet, the Chieftain and above all
the Peasant; and these, as celebrated in essay and songs and stories, possessed so many
virtues that no matter how England, who as Mitchel said, ‘had the ear of the world’,
might slander us, Ireland, even though she could not come to the world’s other
ear, might go her way unabashed. But ideas and images which have to be understood
and loved by large numbers of people, must appeal to no rich personal experience,
no patience of study, no delicacy of sense; and if at rare moments some Memory of
the Dead can take its strength from one, at all other moments manner and matter
will be rhetorical, conventional sentimental; and language, because it is carried
beyond life perpetually, will be as wasted as the thought, with unmeaning pedantries
and silences, and a dread of all that has salt and savour. After a while, in a land that
has given itself to agitation over-much, abstract thoughts are raised up between
men’s minds and Nature, who never does the same thing twice, or makes one man
like another, till minds, whose patriotism is perhaps great enough to carry them
to the scaffold, cry down natural impulse with the morbid persistence of minds un-
settled by some fixed idea. They are preoccupied with the nation’s future, with heroes,
poets, soldiers, painters, armies, fleets, but only as these things are understood bya
child in a national school, while a secret feeling that what is so unreal needs con-
tinual defence makes them bitter and restless . . .
Even if what one defends be true, an attitude of defence, a continual apology,
whatever the cause, makes the mind barren because it kills intellectual innocence;
that delight in what is unforeseen, and in the mere spectacle of the world, the mere
drifting hither and thither that must come before all true thought and emotion.
A zealous Irishman, especially if he lives much out of Ireland, spends his time in a
never-ending argument about Oliver Cromwell, the Danes, the penal laws, the re-
bellion of 1798, the famine, the Irish peasant, and ends by substituting a traditional
casuistry for a country; and if he be a Catholic yet another casuistry that has pro-
fessors, schoolmasters, letter-writing priests and the authors of manuals to make the
meshes fine, comes between him and English literature, substituting arguments
and hesitations for the excitement at the first reading of the great poets which should
be a sort of violent imaginative puberty . . .
How can one, if one’s mind be full of abstractions and images created not for
their own sake but for the sake of party, even if there were still the need, make pic-
tures for the mind’s eye and sounds that delight the ear, or discover thoughts that
tighten the muscles, or quiver and tingle in the flesh, and so stand like St Michael
with the trumpet that calls the body to resurrection?

The reception of Synge’s play had become an epiphany, expressing wBy’s essen-
tial recognition of himself; the essay delivered a sweep of prophetic vision which
forecast much of his own art and life for the next three decades. This stressed
brutal and astringent truths, the need for Irish literature to admit some Eng-
lish models (notably the Elizabethans), and the denial that Irish history was

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a parade of pasteboard heroes. Synge (described with deliberate inaccuracy

as ‘by nature unfitted to think a political thought’) was recruited to the cause,
defiantly rejecting reassuring pieties and the platitudes of journalists. ‘A mind
that generalises rapidly, continually prevents the experience that would have
made it feel and see deeply, just as a man whose character is too complete in
youth seldom grows into any energy of moral beauty.’
Here, if anywhere, was pure autobiography: he was to say of his own youth,
compared to Gonne’s, ‘she was complete, I was not’. And the uncompleted
essay travelled with him to France in the early summer, where he stayed in
Gonne'’s seaside house. ‘It has been a great help to the Synge essay my com-
ing here,’ he wrote to Gregory. ‘I have talked out all the political part & partly
by differing from Maud Gonne & partly by agreeing with her have revised
it all in my mind. I have made it double the force it was. I think it will be the
most elaborate thing I have written.” It must have been at Colleville that
he wrote a passage about ‘the morbid persistence of minds unsettled by some
fixed idea . . . They no longer love, for only life is loved, and at last, a gener-
ation is like a hysterical woman who will make unmeasured accusations and
believe impossible things, because of some logical deduction from a solitary
thought which has turned a portion of her mind to stone.’
It is true that he also referred (a year later) to Annie Horniman’s obsessed
mind as ‘a piece of stone’; but he had written in his journal of March 1909
that ‘the soul of Ireland has become a vapour and her body a stone’,”* and in
this image he conflated — yet again Gonne and her adopted country. In 1916,
in a much more famous work also written in Gonne’s house, he found once
more the image of a heart turned by fanaticism to stone, fixed in the fluvial
stream of life. As so often, when he wrote about individual freedom versus
nationalist commitment, he thought of her.”
The publishing history of J. M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time’ was
as complex as its gestation. Intended as an introduction to Synge’s Co/-
lected Works, it was completed in mid-September 1910. Only at this point
did way discover that George Roberts at Maunsel had already printed the
Manchester Guardian essays and other unapproved material, slipped in at
a late stage after being left off the proof contents-page. Complaints to the
Synge family were unavailing; ‘Roberts has deliberately deceived us both.’
Maunsel defied Edward Synge and wsy on the strength of a clause in the
contract with the executors which could be interpreted as allowing them to
include journalism. wsy’s efforts to mobilize Maunsel’s financial backers, and
to invoke Synge’s own deathbed wishes, came to nothing, though he pursued
Roberts mercilessly and persuaded Gregory to withdraw her works from him
too." This quarrel helped estrange him from yet more of his Dublin acquaint-
ances.*? In July r91t Cuala published the essay as one of their beautiful — and
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 SEVERANCES 1909-1910
expensive — little books: it was out of print by September, but resurfaced in
The Cutting of an Agate, a collection initially produced for the American
market (and to protect his Cuala copyrights there) in 1912.
It remains one of the most revealing of wByY’s early autobiographical ven-
tures, though reviewers were bemused by its ‘lack of orderly sequence . . .
a kind of diary, as though its author had unpacked his ideas concerning
much that had engaged his thoughts in the literary history that Ireland is
now achieving for herself . . . with only a secondary interest in Synge himself.
Often it reads as though the thought of Synge suddenly crossed his mind,
with the result that he penned down some sentences concerning Synge that
are startling in their illumination.’ The composition of the essay shows that
this apparent randomness was artful in the extreme: but the critic was astute
in defining it as an instalment of wBy’s own literary and political testament.

IV
For wsy, the summer of 1910 began with an idyll. In late April he suddenly
decided to join Gonne and her family at their house on the Normandy coast
—using this departure as an excuse not to escort Gregory’s grandson and his
nurse from Victoria to Euston (besides, ‘I rather doubt my recognising either
Richard or his nurse in a crowd at a railway station”). Instead, on 30 April
he took the ferry to Cherbourg, on a calm sea and under sunny skies; after a
rail journey through Calvados, Gonne swept into Le Molay station yard on
a cart and drove him to Colleville, ‘a big ugly house on the sea beach’ near
Vierville.®° There was ‘no-one to speak to, even if one did know French’; but
May Gonne was present as chaperone and they were soon joined by Iseult,
now sixteen, ‘tall and very pretty’. Gonne was in tranquil rural mood, osten-
tatiously pious, continually arranging masses for those ‘who died for Ireland’ to
release them from purgatory. In this frame of mind she brought wsy to the
neighbouring Mont-Saint-Michel on 11 May. The combination of austerity
and magnificence astonished him, as well as an atmosphere of sanctity and
romance in a sea-girt fortress which must have recalled his own Speckled
Bird. As usual, he and Gonne found something to disagree about — in this
case, her insistence that priestly control created a high and severe art. But the
visit helped to release poetic energies, already finding a voice after his long
silence. He not only refined the political arguments in his Synge essay; lyrics
came easily, including some of the poems to Gonne which would appear in
The Green Helmet at the end of the year.
At this distance, and in this company, the news of the death of Edward
VII on 6 May must have made very little interruption. However, it would pre-
cipitate the last great battle with Horniman. With wsy in France and Gregory
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at Coole, Lennox Robinson was left to decide whether the Abbey should
be closed as a mark of respect. He wired to Gort for advice; the telegram did
not reach Gregory in time, so the Abbey, alone of Dublin’s theatres, remained
open, despite Gregory's eventual advice to close for courtesy’s sake. Horniman,
already embittered by the negotiations apparently concluded in February, took
violent umbrage and demanded a full public apology for what she interpreted
— yet again — as a deliberately political act. Gregory’s rather offhand state-
ment simply regretted that the theatre had stayed open ‘owing to accident’
(which pleased neither Horniman nor Sinn Féin). wsy refused to sack
Robinson; Horniman withheld the subsidy due in June; the directors for their
part refused to pay her the £1,000 agreed in February. All was back at an impasse,
while the issue about a ‘political’ gesture eventually went to arbitration.
wy and Gregory, however, were by now in a strong position. They had
been fundraising assiduously since the beginning of the year, helped by an
initial £4300 from Dunsany, and the goodwill of Dublin’s elite; the campaign
now moved into top gear. Gregory, in particular, felt it would be worth
sacrificing Horniman’s £400 subsidy in order to be free of her, and resented
having to make even a half-hearted apology. ‘I know the greeting in London
will be — “so Miss Horniman made you apologise!” I want to change it to “so
you have thrown over Miss Horniman.” I believe that we shall get more than
the £400 for showing independence.’**
wey publicized the Abbey’s position in a letter to The Times, placed to
coincide with the company’s season at the Court Theatre. They were taking
three times the amount of last year; unlike the Moscow Arts Theatre, they
could soon be solvent; £2,000 was already subscribed (from luminaries like
Barrie, Birrell, Hutcheson-Poe, Lord Pirrie, Lord Iveagh, Blunt, Dunsany,
the Duke of Leinster and the Duchess of Sutherland — several of them
staunch Unionists, but none put off by ‘politics’).*” The target of £5,000
remained elusive, but money continued to come in. In September wy was
still looking for a rich patron to take over the lease, and trying to control his
annoyance at Martyn’s convoluted reasons for not coming to their aid.®* On
21 September, however, he was able to make an encouraging statement to
the players.
. . [I] told them how much money we had got as the result of our appeal, described
the finance Committee, said we might be able to arrange a system of profit shar-
ing but did not make a definite promise. I then urged them all to remain with us and
pointed out how very nearly the Theatre was paying, described to them the advant-
age for an artist even though he got less money in the year of not having to be anxious
about it or to give much thought to it. I then showed them the Craig design which
you sent on to me, I think his beautiful design for ‘The Hour Glass’ excited them.
Then I went up into the office to receive the complainants.

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 SEVERANCES 1909-1910
So he and Gregory had worked out a new arrangement, based on a lim-
ited liability company composed of themselves, with no public share sub-
scription and no published accounts.” Subscribers would be donors, not
shareholders. The remains of the Irish National Theatre Society were to
be dissolved, though wy worried that the Fays might materialize, Lazarus-
like, and block it. Players’ contracts would henceforth include a commitment
to sign an attendance-book. The last vestiges of the old, uncommercial co-
operative were gone. With all this in place, a reversal of the old patent was
applied for on 19 November 1910; the new patent was granted a week later.
The sum of £2,139 had been raised. Gregory was still convening highly social
‘At Homes at the theatre, where the Dublin plutocracy and their well-dressed
wives (including the famously philistine W. M. Murphy of the Independent)
were appealed to for money by wsy.”' A final symbol of victory was pro-
vided by the return to the company of the independent-minded Maire nic
Shiubhlaigh, duly warned by Gregory that she would have to put up with
a lot from the Allgood sisters, which turned out to be no less than the
truth. While nic Shiubhlaigh’s chief duties were to be with the second Abbey
company and acting school planned for the new year, the theatre rapidly
mounted a production of her great success, The Shuiler’s Child, in November.
Thus Susan Mitchell’s criticisms of the year before were, eventually, taken
to heart: the “broken-kneed heroes and barging heroines’ of verse drama
were to be leavened by injections of popular realism.
The disagreement with Horniman over the purchase terms went to
arbitration with C. P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian, who in May 1911
decided in the directors’ favour. wBy had already decided to be magnan-
imous, and release Horniman from the terms if she felt they were unfair.””
He promptly sent her a generous letter, much redrafted, implicitly apolog-
izing for ‘giving her pain’ in defending himself and his fellow-workers, and
regretting their estrangement: ‘let us restore our old friendship by remem-
bering the thousand other things that we agree upon’.”’ But her only reply
was a long and violent telegram. The old friendship was finally over. Soror
Fortiter et Recte did not meet her Dear Demon again until twenty-eight
years later, shortly before her own death. Socially obsessed to the end, she
wrote bitterly to Joseph Holloway: ‘My initial mistake was simple — it took
me a long time to learn that there was no room for an educated middle-class
woman who loves the arts in Dublin. Commercial Manchester is a very dif-
ferent city.”* But her emotional investment had run far deeper than that.
Either way, wBy had won all along the line. The theatre had survived, aided
by the support of such unlikely bedfellows as Lady Ardilaun and T. M. Healy,
and audiences were flocking in. “The Abbey would cheer you up to see it,’ Lily
wrote to JBY.
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Motors carriages and cabs in a string outside — Willy has won his fight —a hard fight.
I asked him the other night how the company was getting on together. ‘The usual
quarrelling,’ he said. “But then,’ said he, ‘the founder of the Christian religion had
the same trouble with his Company and had to invent the parables to keep them in
good humour.”

The theatre may have been solvent, but wBy’s own finances remained
perilously uncertain. In 1909 and 1910 his annual income hovered around £180.
His Cuala books brought in very little — less than £30 for The Green Helmet
in 1910; though American sales were steadily increasing, the low dollar rate
worked against him. Poems 1899-1905 had been replaced in March by Poems:
Second Series, which sold 650 copies over the next two years, bringing a
royalty of just over £30.” Poems were appearing irregularly and his lectur-
ing earnings had been donated to the Abbey appeal. In the summer of 1910
he was rescued from penury only by an offer of £t00 from Chappells for the
rights to The Countess Cathleen, which Franco Leoni wanted to adapt into
an opera. wBy agreed, with the inevitable condition that Craig do the stag-
ing. His commitment to Craig also appears in a scorching letter of resigna-
tion from the Council of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, which he
condemned for appointing only respectable ‘excellent persons’ who ‘would
neither do nor allow to be done anything I could take pleasure in’; he
demanded they elect to supreme authority an artist like Craig, or some Euro-
pean innovator. ‘I have always thought that men who love the arts in England
unlike those in Latin countries —are poor spirited and I wish that your com-
mittee had done something to give them more Continental minds.” But,
ironically, he was about to join the ranks of the respectable himself.
During the spring and summer of 1910 a number of steps were taken to
bring him into the paths of the literary establishment, where rewards might
accompany influence. In April he was elected to the Academic Committee
of English Letters, an organization dominated by Edmund Gosse and con-
sisting entirely of ‘excellent persons’. It was developed by a subcommittee
of the Royal Society of Literature, which it was expected to supersede —
playing for literature the part that the Royal Society played for science, the
Royal Academy for art and the British Academy for scholarship. As it turned
out, it did not; its business tended to concentrate on matters like excluding
Mrs Humphry Ward. Henry James described the committee as ‘a pleasant
and a plastic, elastic, aspiring thing’; putting it another way, the ruthless
younger generation saw it as ‘a terrible and solid phalanx of A. C. Benson-
ism’, while Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells shunned it as ‘grotesque’.”®

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Other members included Arthur Balfour, Charles Lyell, John Scott Haldane,
Laurence Binyon, Conrad, Hardy and Kipling. But for wBy it served a pur-
pose, which Gregory spotted with her usual perspicacity:
It is just what will be of service to you in two ways, one with the stupid public who
only recognise names they are officially ordered to accept, and one, the placing of
you in terms of equality in a distinguished body . . . even if they dont meet often,
you will take your proper place there.”
wy disapproved of omissions from the membership, but he thought it
might do some good in the current battles against censorship. So he dutifully
returned to London for meetings, lobbying assiduously about elections. Just
as importantly, Gosse made it clear that this recognition might help towards
another, more concrete advantage for wBy. This was currently taking the
specific form of a Civil List pension — which could provide a modest guar-
anteed income for life.1°
The idea had been floated since late 1909, with Gosse playing a leading
part, and support offered by the nationalist MP and littérateur Justin McCarthy.
Membership of the Academic Committee, Gosse told Gregory, ‘gives him
a claim which cannot be put by’; he issued further advice about the letter she
should send to the literary-minded Chief Secretary (and Abbey supporter),
Augustine Birrell. Asquith, who had met wsy at Gosse’s house, was already
prepared; supporting signatures might include Ian Hamilton, George
Wyndham, Lord Crewe, S. H. Butcher, Austin Dobson, Lord Cromer, and
Gosse himself.
This was the Establishment in full force. The campaign reflected the
changes in wBy’s social life, moving from bohemian Mondays at Woburn
Buildings to weekends with Lady Katharine Somerset and her Cabinet
Minister guests.'°’ But in terms of Irish politics, taking a pension in the royal
gift immediately raised awkward questions. When first sounded out by
Gosse, through Agnes Tobin, wsy told him ‘if the French land in the West
of Ireland I won't undertake not to join them when if [sic] they want me so
there will be no deceit in the matter’."” Now that things had moved ona stage,
Gregory put the position clearly.
About the Civil List, it is very important, for that sum would make a great differ-
ence for all your life, & help you to arrange it. I have never been under the impres-
sion that it was impossible for a Nationalist, but I have never gone into the matter.
I think you should, if Gosse speaks of it, get the lists & see what revolutionaries, if
any have had it in the past. Standish O’Grady is the only one I know of who has it
now. And he cd tell also whether your freedom wd be in any way bound by it, whether
for instance it cd be taken away ifyou shouted against a royal visit or tore up any more
carpets. If there is any honourable obligation as to abstaining from these things, of
course you could not take it.’

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But, reassured on this point, they went ahead. Gosse wrote to Gregory at Coole
on 23 July, sending a draft petition and asking her to showit to Birrell: ‘I feel
that, if we do anything, we ought to make use of his important sympathy.’
Gregory replied by return, in a letter now lost. As later recounted to Birrell
himself, she asked Gosse to collect some signatures for a draft petition of her
own, which he resented, ‘especially the allusion to the Academic Committee
wh he takes the credit for’.'* Possibly she also felt Gosse’s changes to the peti-
tion emphasized wsy’s loyalty too effusively and told him so: he had already
stressed that ‘Yeats’s genius as a poet and the disinterested character of his
work ought to be the two prominent points, I think.’* Gosse was famously
touchy, and responded with an astonishingly offensive letter: I am lost in won-
der at what can have induced you to interfere in an affair when your opinion
was not asked, and when you seem to intend neither to give any help nor take
any trouble.” This letter apparently refers to the official petition to the King,
which Gosse had been handling. He was proprietorial about wBy, whom he
had been cultivating since the mid-nineties— not only entertaining him con-
stantly but (like Gregory) lending him money.’” Gregory’s own campaign
was aimed at her friend Birrell in Dublin Castle, and perhaps Gosse mistook
this point, believing that she was trying to dictate to him how to go about
the kind of elevated string-pulling which was, to him, the very breath of life.
Later, she told Quinn that she took the initiative by writing to the Chief
Secretary and ‘arranged Yeats’s pension with Birrell in a box at the Court
Theatre in fifteen minutes’; whereas Gosse claimed that it ‘was settled by
the Prime Minister in an immediate reply to my letter to him’. In any case,
as Gregory saw the matter, once Gosse rejected her co-operation she had to
continue the campaign to pressurize Birrell alone. Through early August she
collected signatures from luminaries such as Hamilton, Lord Dunraven,
Lord Lytton and Thomas Hardy.’® By then, in any case, Gosse’s petition had
gone to the King, with a fair wind from the Prime Minister.
Gosse’s letter created storms at Coole. As far as Gregory and her son were
concerned, she had been insulted: what was wBy going to do? He should,
of course, take up the cudgels on behalf of his old and devoted friend, and
Robert apparently made this clear. As wsy recorded in his intermittent diary,
he drafted a stinging letter to Gosse, breaking off the friendship between them;
but it was not sent, and Gregory did not press the point. She later told Quinn
that this was a second draft; at first she ‘told Yeats that she expected him to
reply’, and when she saw his first draft, ‘a milk and water thing’, ‘said that if
he hadn’t any sense of dignity or self-respect he should remember that he was
her guest, and she insisted on a stronger reply’. He produced one, but was
miserable and unhappy about it; she kept it for a fortnight and returned it
to him. The whole affair consumed pages of his diary. In accounting for his
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 SEVERANCES I909~I9IO
own behaviour, he tried to rationalize it as the result of his efforts since his
youth to ‘destroy in myself, by analysis, instinctive indignation’ — which
meant giving in to ‘vanity’. In a letter drafted to Robert Gregory, but really
‘trying to put myself right with myself’, he explained:
As I look back, I see occasion after occasion on which I have been prevented from
doing what was a natural and sometimes the right thing either because analysis of
the emotion or action of another, or self-distrustful analysis of my own emotion
destroyed impulse. I cannot conceive the impulse, unless it was so sudden that Ihad
to act at once, that could urge me into action at all ifit affected personal life. All last
week the moment that my impulse told me I should demand with indignation an
apology from Gosse, my analysis said, “You think that from vanity. You want to do
a passionate thing because it stirs your pride.’ . . . In impersonal and public things,
because there this distrust of myself does not come in, I have impulse. I would have
explained it by saying that it is the world I have been brought up in— you have always
lived among defined social relations and I only among defined ideas — but then my
family seemed to me to have more than enough of the usual impulses. I even do my
writing by self-distrusting reasons. I thought to write this note in the same way as I
write the others."

The address to Robert Gregory is a fiction; there is no evidence that this

or other explanatory missives were ever sent, and (appearing as they do in
his diary) they resemble his dialogues with an imaginary a/ter ego like Leo
Africanus or Owen Aherne more than anything else. And however high-flown
his reasoning, in other entries he lacerated himself. His abstract reasoning
about ‘impulse’ and ‘passion is inconsistent with the ‘personal’ criteria which
he admitted existed (Gosse’s kindness to Symons, his own indebtedness to
Gregory, and above all — though barely mentioned — the risk of endangering
the pension). He knew he had behaved inadequately.
As I look back on the whole thing, I come to see that Lady Gregory and Robert
expected me to act at once, on a code. Instead of asking “Why has Gosse done this?’
instead of being, what is worse really, interested in his character and motives, I
should have been in a very simple state of mind. I should have spoken of him with
contempt, or written to him with contempt — there was nothing else to do... Since
I was fifteen and began to think, I have mocked at that way of looking at the world,
as if it was a court of law where all wrong actions were judged according to their legal
penalties. All my life I have, like every artist, been proud of belonging to a nobler
world, of having chosen the slow, dangerous, laborious path of moral judgment. And
yet the moment the code appears before me in the personality of two friends, I am
shaken, I doubt myself. I doubted because I talked. In silence I could have thought
the whole thing out, kept my vacillation to myself. I could have appealed to what
is best in Gosse, perhaps reconciled those who will be enemies, or at any rate I
could have recalled him to his better self. My father would have done this because
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he would have been himself. I neither dealt with the matter like an artist, nor as a
man of the world."

In the end he deduced — as he always did — a lesson for himself. “Why do I

write all this? I suppose that I may learn at last to keep to my own in every
situation in life; to discover and create in myself as I grow old that thing
which is to life what style is to letters: moral radiance, a personal quality of
universal meaning in action and in thought.’
But none of this interrogation was passed on to Gosse. As often before,
he had been able to separate internal agonizing from public action. Gosse wrote
a friendly note to him on 29 July, to say the petition had gone to the King;
on 5 August the Prime Minister’s letter was sent to Coole, awarding wBy the
annual pension of £150 available through the death of John Davidson. As wBy
wrote to Birrell, this set him ‘free from anxiety and from the need of doing
less than the best Ican’; Birrell gracefully replied that the Prime Minister had
been ‘at least as eager as I was’, and compared the award to Dr Johnson’s —
‘the money best spent in England during the whole of my beloved eight-
eenth century’.'* wBy wrote into his journal a stern letter which he records
was sent to Gosse on 6 August, rebuking him for his inadequate apology;
but there is no indication that it was sent, either in Gosse’s correspondence
or in the tone of their subsequent exchanges. (This is probably the second
letter which Gregory told Quinn she made him write, and then witheld
from the post.) It is easy to condemn wsy for pusillanimous behaviour,
but, as Gregory herself realized, a great deal was at stake. With the pension,
his annual income was nearly doubled. Gregory, mollified, set herself to
persuading him that his next act should be to join a London club. Regarding
the pension, she had warned him, ‘some screechers may screech, but that
needn't trouble you’.
This proved all too true. Those who had become alienated from him took
the news sourly. Quinn thought it would be ‘pathetic’ to see wBy become
‘a prop of throne and constitution’, while Russell replied loftily, ‘All radical
youth ends in Toryism in the [sic] old age and he would gradually like
Wordsworth have become a prop of throne and constitution before he died.”
More vituperatively, the Leader and Sinn Féin journalists took to pillorying
‘Pensioner Yeats’ as a lackey of the British government, and continued the
assault until he died. “The Pensioner is, of course, a pure-souled patriot; in
payment for his patriotism Emmet got the rope but Pollexfen Yeats, the
author of “Cathleen ni Houlihan’, gets three pounds a week from the British
Government.’ wey believed the price worth paying. He had seen — as he
thought — Symons driven mad, and Masefield into mediocrity, by writing for
money in order to meet their wives’ expectations. Long ago, in Blenheim Road,
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 SEVERANCES I909~I910
he had decided that the same would not happen to him. (This may have
influenced his own inclination towards independent or unattainable free
spirits, such as Farr and Gonne.) While he accused himself of cowardly
behaviour over the Gosse—Gregory affair, she forgave him, and on the
matter of artistic conscience, his mind was clear. Whatever lay beneath the
surface, Coole in August still exerted its charm. Shaw came to stay, and wBy
felt their old antipathy begin to moderate; each thought he was beginning
to know the other at last. He resumed relations with Dickinson, visiting her
on Dublin trips, writing to her once more as ‘My Friend’, and telling her she
had inspired a lyric (“The Mask’) for The Player Queen.
And there was always the theatre, Sara Allgood’s threats to leave, and the
excitement of Craig’s new ideas for a shifting proscenium. At this time he
completed his essay “The Tragic Theatre’, published in Craig’s journal, which
summed up theories of dramatic art in terms of his own developing taste. In
the process he coined some of his most ringing aphorisms about the theatre:
‘tragedy must always be a drowning and breaking of the dykes that separate
man from man, and it is upon these dykes comedy keeps house’. The distinc-
tion between ‘character’ (the foundation of comedy) and ‘passion’ (the basis
of tragedy) seemed to him symbolized by the difference brought into mod-
ern art by Manet’s style of portraiture (character incarnate). This replaced
the debased models of nineteenth-century academicism, but also signalled
how far modern consciousness had departed from the passion expressed
by Titian. The argument for abstract scenery, using light rather than paint,
develops from this distinction: drama, like modern painting, must liberate
itself into ‘a noble, capricious, extravagant, resonant, fantastic art’. These were
key words, and much in this essay reflects his own artistic development.
Tragic pleasure is defined as the ‘intensity of trance’ which he felt watching
his own plays, constantly reinterpreted (and rewritten), dependent on the most
fragile illusions. He identified this state as ‘reverie’ — the word he would
eventually choose for his autobiography.
Another delicate negotiation was also getting under way, with the object
of providing an income — and from almost as unlikely a source as the largesse
of the English crown. wsy’s old adversary Dowden had been stricken by
ill-health, and Trinity College was sounding out possible successors to the
Chair of English Literature. The prospect was not as strange as it would once
have appeared. wsy was mellowing towards Trinity (though he remained
resolutely opposed to recruiting actors from its ranks). On 15 March he had
spoken there, and been praised by the redoubtably reactionary Vice-Provost
Mahaffy — now equally famous in Dublin as a wit and a snob, and a central
figure in the Unionist pantheon which wsy had spent his youth reviling. In
the summer, as Dowden showed no sign of recovery, Robert Tyrrell approached
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wey, who wrote to Mahaffy (misspelling ‘professorship’). Mahaffy, pos-

sibly for mischief’s sake, was surprisingly encouraging. By September Gogarty
could tell Gregory that all but two Senior Fellows were favourable towards
wey, though By warned him ‘they are a very astute people — like the Vatican,
their ideas are ignoble, but they make no mistakes in carrying them out’.'"
wBy'’s nationalism was no disadvantage, ‘rather in his favour’, in view of the
existence of the rival new university. The Civil List pension (not yet public
knowledge) made him appear all the more desirable; if it created difficulties
about the salary, it could be temporarily assigned elsewhere.
As for wsy, the thought of Dowden’s rooms (‘very lofty and large —
Georgian’) and his £600 a year was irresistible. At the same time he ‘feared
the effect on my imagination of any regular critical work’, one day telling
Gogarty that he would press for it, and changing his mind the next.!’”7 A
couple of months spent lecturing for agencies in England might be a less
distracting way of supplementing his income. But rumours began to cir-
culate. Gregory assiduously cultivated Mahaffy, telling him to read wBy’s
Spenser and Shakespeare essays,'® while Dunsany brought his influence
to bear with Lord Iveagh, Trinity's Chancellor. In December wy himself
saw Mahaffy, an encounter described by Lily. ‘Willy spoke of his own bad
sight and hoped it would not come in the way of the work. “Oh” said Mahaffy,
“that is all right. There is no work to do. Dowden never did any.” How mad
the Dowdens would be.”
Indeed, Dowden’s opinion was the one variable left out of the calculations,
and, as Ezra Pound put it, he ‘rose from the grave’ to prevent this bizarre
succession, living on until 1913.'”° In a silky dismissal a year later, he told the
importunate JBy that his son might be ‘a very inspiring Professor of Poetry,
such as they have in Oxford, who may choose his own themes, and give a
few annual lectures’, but he was no scholar. For wBy’s own sake it would be
a calamity if he had to undergo the labour of teaching through the year.
Besides, ‘the process of appointment is usually to become first an assistant
to some Professor & teach Anglo-Saxon, to publish some piece of scholar-
ship, & show one’s capacity in scientific research, & then to climb to a Pro-
fessorship. One must accumulate a vast quantity of knowledge, & keep
abreast with German, French & American publications.’ This obvious
snub was followed by a bland denial that there was any thought of canvass-
ing for a replacement in any case, which — when the day came — must be done
through official channels.” A quiet but decisive revenge was exerted for
wey’ fierce assaults in the 1890s.
As the prospect receded, wey felt some relief, though he did ask Sydney
Cockerell to find out about the Oxford Chair of Poetry. He confided that
the idea of having to live in Dublin for much of the year dismayed him and
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 SEVERANCES 1909-1910
eventually concluded that his ‘wandering life’ was probably best. ‘I long
for a life without dates and without any settled abode. If I could find that
I could write lyrics again.” But his life was more peripatetic than most
people’s, and had evolved into a pattern where certain kinds of writing were
creatively associated with particular locales. A set of Trinity rooms and an
annual lecture-schedule would have changed all this, probably not for the
better. And in his inimitable Pollexfen way, an unsuccessful project was
turned to profit. In November 1910, when still feeling favourably disposed
to the idea, he began to think about his lectures. He fixed on ‘Chaucer and
his Age’, bought some books, persuaded Farr and Dickinson to read aloud
to him, and became ‘excited by the change of method that came when poets
wrote to be read out not to be sung’.’ The new rhythms and colloquial dic-
tion of his work from this point may owe something to his thrifty prepara-
tion for a job which he never actually got, and which he could never have found
fulfilling.
Nevertheless, the fact that he would have considered entering an institu-
tion which he had for so long attacked as the musty abode of intellectual death
indicates some kind of reconciliation with the Irish Protestant world. The
end of September 1910 saw another kind of reckoning, which, like much else
this year, brought him sharply up against the forces and influences that had
shaped him. George Pollexfen died slowly from stomach cancer. As wBy noted,
in the face of real calamity the great hypochondriac was heroically uncom-
plaining. Lily nursed him throughout in his uncomfortable Sligo house,
surrounded by racing mementoes, Masonic regalia and astrological dia-
grams. On 1 September wy wrote worriedly to her: should he come? Would
he be any help? Would George simply fear that his advent, after so long, could
only mean the worst? In the end, he stayed away. News of the imminent end
reached him as he wrote the last words of his Synge essay. On 26 September
George died, heralded by a banshee shriek outside the window, heard by both
Lily and the nurse. With him went — for the Yeatses — the last vestige of
Pollexfen Sligo.
wy arrived in the town the next day, for the great funeral. Hundreds of
Middleton & Pollexfen workers lined the streets for the procession, eighty
Masons marched in full regalia (the two Prince Masons threw white roses
into the grave, the rest acacia leaves), a wreath arrived from Jack in the old
racing colours of primrose and violet, and Catholics were admitted into the
Protestant church for the first time. Such strange people turned up that it was
‘like the dredging of a pond’, wsy remarked to Lily.’* From the Imperial
Hotel he sent an emotional letter to Gregory, building up a picture of George
as the paternalist, class-free gentleman employer, knowing everyone in the
firm personally, preferring to travel by public transport because he ‘liked
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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

talking to the old women on the car & helping them up & down’. Under the
inheritor Arthur Jackson ‘it will be a harder rule now— Belfast rule’.1% ‘How
strangely the death of those we have known in childhood moves us,’ he
reflected. “They seem in the first shock of loss the stronger part of our-
selves.’'*° The idealization of George was prompted by this reaction. The real
George was expressed in his very carefully drawn will: an estate of £50,000
left in equal divisions to his siblings or their heirs. Of Susan’s share Lily and
Lolly got one third each, Jack and wy one sixth — about £920. jBy, to his
consternation and fury, got nothing.
To wsy it seemed ‘characteristic and just’: the girls needed more. ‘I have
my pension, & Jack has Cottie & the comic papers.’ JBy’s resentment
took the form of peremptorily requiring ‘loans’ from his children and wBy
wondered whether his father should be summoned back from his penurious
exile. “But Jack wont have him back,’ he told Gregory.
He says Lily wants him back just as a mother always wants her worst child to be brought
home . . . that he is so ‘wilful’ Lily would be worn out & so on. So I have sent the
‘loan’ — £5 & Jack has done the same. I thought Jack was really alarmed at the idea
of my father’s return. I wanted him to write to Quinn & arrange it, he & I to pay.
He says he always fought with my father after a week.'78
For wsy too his father was better at a distance. Their relationship, con-
ducted by letter, had already become more reciprocally appreciative.'°
Rapprochement with JBy was further eased by the loss of George Pollexfen,
one of the vital surrogate parents wBy had adopted in his troubled youth.
Essentially, he inherited more than the £920; more even than George’s aston-
ishingly large collection of occult materials — Tarot divinations, horoscopes,
clairvoyance records, Golden Dawn rituals — not, in the event, returned as
directed to ‘Sapere Aude’ (W. W. Westcott) in the Camden Road. ‘How much
of the past has broken from me in these last three years,’ he wrote to Lily in
rgit.'*° Synge’s death had already made him confront the conflict between
art and nationalism. After George’s funeral wy embarked on his own pond-
dredging: the re-evaluation and recovery of his past, and all that had made
him what he was.

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Chapter 16: TRUE AND FALsE IRELANDS
IQIO—IQII

I have been driven into public life — how can I avoid rhetoric?
wey, speech at Poetry banquet, Chicago,
t March 1914

I
AFTER his sad return to Sligo, wBy moved between Coole, Dublin and
London ~a pattern made possible by the precious refuge of Woburn Build-
ings and all it stood for. If the death of Synge, the loss of Pollexfen Sligo, and
the sniping about his pension combined to turn him away from Ireland,
his London life always lay alongside: a parallel but invisible existence (like
that of Swedenborg’s ghosts) into which he could slip with ease. And as
always, he retreated from personal dislocation into work. He found dis-
traction through supervising the Craig designs for a revival of The Hour-Glass,
where the use of masks and dominoes, along with the first use of the famous
screens, excited him greatly. Renegotiating the Abbey patent also required
attention, but he still found time to interview a new Belfast playwright, St
John Ervine, whose devotion to Northern dialect appealed to him, and to
consider how Molly Allgood’s engagement to the Manchester Guardian jour-
nalist G. H. Mair might help their publicity. Farr’s wedding-present to them
was a characteristic piece of advice — ‘only to meet now & again like sensible
people: that is the only endurable kind of marriage’.' For Molly, seen in
Abbey circles as something of a good-time girl, the suggestion was probably
not uncongenial.
Resentments, alarms and excursions continued to bedevil the company,
and by the end of the year wBy was wondering about a new three-tier salary
structure, marking the manager Henderson for the axe and engaging in
bruising encounters with Sara Allgood over her contract. There were also nego-
tiations with Farr, who was to play in Deirdre in the New Year: wy offered
her expenses only, but she trumped him by straightfacedly demanding a spe-
cial payment ‘because of the watchfulness she will have to keep up at Euston
& Holyhead to keep the porters from breaking the psaltery’.* However, at
least the trivia of theatre business no longer involved Horniman. Life became
easier on other fronts too. An English lecture-tour during November, where
large audiences were treated to disquisitions on theatrical theory and jpy-style
generalizations about writers, brought him 4120.° The Green Helmet had
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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

been bought by the English Review for their September issue, at a price of
£20. He could firmly resist his father’s suggestion that he make money by writ-
ing for Harper's Weekly. And when wey received his five-year horoscope from
Charles Dumas late in rgr0, it showed a generally favourable aspect for early
1911, even if his inquiries about moral struggles, spirituality and marriage were
answered by the advice to avoid women with too intense a psychic nature.*
In December The Green Helmet and Other Poems appeared, containing the
verse play and a distillation of the lyrics written over the difficult last three
years. WBY expected a hostile response to these poems, and admitted they
might be thought obscure — except for ‘His Dream’, which, he claimed, was
‘merely the exact record of a dream’.° Reviewers were uncertainly attuned to
the new voice breaking through. Some noted his ability to be both ‘modern’
and ‘wild’: the perceptive Ulster writer Robert Lynd appreciated the power
with which he expressed anger.° All the /eitmotifs which appear in his next
major collection, and are often attributed to the influence of Ezra Pound, were
there to be read in 1910. Pound himself noted the transition from “dolce stile’
to ‘stile grande’, and proudly identified their aims as the same. But the sharp
new edge had been honed for some time, and so had the tone of undisguised
autobiography. The collection featured a group of poems celebrating Gonne,
which delineated her in all but name, though reviewers fought shy of mak-
ing the identification: her Homeric beauty, her betrayal of him, the effects
of age, the achievement of peace. No one, however, could know that ‘Against
Unworthy Praise’ might be read in the light of the consummation of their
affair in 1908.

Oh, heart, be at peace, because

Nor knave nor dolt can break
What’s not for their applause,
Being for a woman's sake.
Enough if the work has seemed,
So did she your strength renew,
A dream that a lion had dreamed
Till the wilderness cried aloud,
A secret between you two,
Between the proud and the proud.

What, still, you would have their praise!

But here’s a haughtier text,
The labyrinth of her days
That her own strangeness perplexed.
And how what her dreaming gave
Earned slander ingratitude
From self-same dolt and knave;

434
 TRUE AND FALSE IRELANDS I9IO~I9II
Ay, and worse wrong than these.
Yet she, singing upon her road,
Half lion, half child, is at peace.’

Dickinson was there too, but represented in the slightness of ‘A Drinking

Song’ and “The Mask’ rather than in the ringing grandeur of the poems
inspired by Gonne.* Shafts were fired at Russell and certain Dublin enemies.
And, strikingly, two poems celebrated the side of Irish life which afforded him
escape from that world, and declared an unashamed elitism. ‘Upon a House
shaken by the Land Agitation’ argued for the superior values of Coole; ‘At
Galway Races’ celebrated a unity of culture ‘Before the merchant and the
clerk/Breathed on the world with timid breath’. wBy’s covert sympathy with
an Ascendancy Ireland now irretrievably in decline was sharply noted by
Russell in a letter to Quinn:
Some of the verses to Maud Gonne were beautiful, ‘Another Troy’ [sic] especially.
I laughed over the “Threatened House’. W. B. Y.’s affection for the aristocracy
increases & he will slip into the reputation of Professor Mahafty who never speaks
without reference to ‘his friend’ the king, princess, duchess, duke, lord or whoever
the rank may be. I think even the Peers would be amused over Yeats “Threatened
House’. W. B. Y. believes he is the Duke of Ormond. He told me he was once but his
ancestors so far back as can be traced were good tradesmen just as mine were good
farmers. The basis of this family tradition I believe is the fact that a great great grand
aunt was called Butler & got a pension from the Lord Lieutenant.’

None of this would have surprised wBy, who in the New Year of 1911
found Dublin increasingly tedious. Gregory’s new play The Deliverer
was put
on with the revived Hour-Glass on 12 January 1911, and caused an immediate
coolness with Dunsany, who was convinced she had plagiarized his own
King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior, which opened a fortnight later (a
first night not attended by wsy or Gregory). Though the Dunsanys prin-
cipally blamed the ‘Bad Old Woman In Black’, their relationship with way
never really recovered." When Gregory’s next play Fu// Moon was generally
condemned, wsy reflected, ‘it is melancholy the way the Dublin press &
Dublin leaders generally dislike all that is strange or distinguished. They talk
the others round . . . lam planning a lecture on the Irish democrasy &its love
of coarse logic.’!! To Dickinson, who provided refuge from the Arts Club,
he confided untactfully, T find less and less in Dublin to give me pleasure, adding,
‘Dublin seems always the same except that it seems always alittle further away
from one’s thought. It seems to sink slowly as if into dim water, as one grows
older. It has not changed in twenty years —I mean the Dublin one dines with
or could dine with if one would. The other Dublin has events enough.’”
The London he dined with was very different. At Reigate Priory for the
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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

weekend with Lady Katharine Somerset, he met Winston Churchill: ‘T liked

what little Isaw of him. He seemed to me a mixture of ungraciousness and
geniality . . . very obviously the most able man there’ — and, he later added,
‘much the worst bred’. With Lady Desborough he encountered Balfour,
‘gentle & modest’, very far from the ‘Bloody Balfour’ of nationalist demono-
logy. Before their rupture the Dunsanys had entertained him with the mil-
lionaire Lord Howard de Walden (who ‘said that one should never lose an
opportunity of listening to Yeats though one should forget what he said”).
He was now invited to dine at Downing Street, and seated beside Margot
Asquith. Meanwhile, his own entertainments at Woburn Buildings were
still limited by his cutlery (which at least enabled him to turn away Masefield’s
wife, whom he cordially loathed"*). But he had become a prize lion in the
Edwardian social safari. His cachet in London was heightened by a brilliant
Abbey season there in February 1911; his plans to bring Nugent Monck over
and set up an acting school were further encouraged by seeing Monck’s pro-
duction of The Countess Cathleen at Norwich, done ‘like a page of a missal’.®
Social life came easily to him but, as always, serious friendship was
central to his existence, especially friendship with women. And his disillu-
sionment with Dublin was compounded in March by a rumour that Gonne
was to be blackballed at the Arts Club; wBy wrote forcefully to Constance
Markievicz calling for a mass resignation of Gonne’s friends in support.
Political opposition might be explicable, but this was personal, ‘most cruel
as well as most unjust’.'° The commitments of friendship inspired a ‘little
set of very personal poems’ which he worked upon through January 1911, cen-
tred around a lyric celebrating the three women who had made him what he
was — Shakespear, Gregory and Gonne. He wrote to Gregory that these
first-draft lines referred to her:

... her hand

Showed me howI could unbind
The weight that none can understand
Youth’s bitter burden, & would give
Every good gift that may be
Could I copy her & live
In a laborious reverie.!”

The language seems so implicitly sexual that the passage (as it finally ap-
peared) has not unreasonably been taken to refer to Shakespear; but, even as
adapted in ‘Friends’, its theme of the restorative power of work must refer to
Gregory's gift. Meanwhile, the power of his imagination could still transform
reality. The day he finished this poem, which took three exhausting weeks,
he allowed himself'a walk on Hampstead Heath. ‘I saw an old man flying a

436
 TRUE AND FALSE IRELANDS I9IO~IQII

kite which was lost to view in the mist. One thought of some eastern magi-
cian as one watched the string vanish in the sky.’!8
Thus wey spent early 191 alienated from Dublin and deeply preoccu-
pied by the pattern of his life and relationships; casting horoscopes involved
detailed ‘rectification’, playing back crises and traumas in his past in order
to relate them to astrological movements. As always, involvement with the
supernatural encouraged psychological self-exploration. His own past pre-
sented itself in other ways too. He was now firmly installed once more in
the orbit of Olivia Shakespear, and through her he discovered a new circle
of acquaintances. Sundered as lovers, it is possible that a sexual relationship
had been restored at some point; in any case, they were now firmly reunited
as friends.’? Shakespear was still beautiful, still impatiently married to her
unsatisfactory husband, still presented an alluring blend of sarcasm and
sympathy; her literary interests and occultist dabblings brought congenial
company to her Kensington house in Brunswick Gardens. Here wsy met
Eva Fowler, a German-American married to a Leeds businessman; she
organized seances and wBy took to visiting her country retreat, Daisy
Meadow near Brasted in Kent, where he found it easy to write. And here too
he met Shakespear’s friend Edith Ellen (‘Nelly’) Hyde-Lees, who married
Olivia’s brother Harry on 1 February ror.
She was a pretty, vivacious woman in her early forties, with two children
and an unsatisfactory marriage behind her. Born Ellen Woodmass, she had
married Gilbert Hyde-Lees in 1889 but left him shortly thereafter. Having
been adopted by a well-off uncle, he had presumably been able to keep his
estranged family in a certain style. Nelly and her children lived the peri-
patetic life of the rentier classes, taking houses in pleasant parts of the Home
Counties and travelling on the Continent. The background on both the
Woodmass and Hyde-Lees side was that of upper-middle-class county fam-
ilies, well-off and independent, with an inclination to the bohemian and
slightly rackety: Nelly’s position had for long been the uncertain one of a mar-
ried woman without a husband.” When wsy became friendly with her in
1911, after “knowing her vaguely for years’,”’ she was about to enter a more
settled phase of her life, as Mrs Tucker. Gilbert Hyde-Lees had died in 1909,
and when she married Shakespear’s art-collecting brother they moved into
16 Montpelier Square, Knightsbridge, not far from Olivia’s Kensington
home. Her children by Hyde-Lees were now nearly grown up: Harold was
twenty and his sister George, whom he called ‘Dobbs’, eighteen.”
Before 1911 George had not met her mother’s famous poet friend: she
had been away at school (seven different establishments in all), and he had
in any case been estranged from Shakespear and her circle until about two
years before. Probably on 8 December 1911 George was introduced to wBY
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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

in Shakespear’s drawing-room: she had noticed him in the British Museum

that very morning. The encounter was inevitable. Even before they became
linked by marriage, Olivia’s daughter, Dorothy, was inseparable from George
Hyde-Lees, and they lived in and out of each other’s houses. The girls had
much in common, being intelligent and independent-minded, artistically
ambitious, and resentful of their worldly mothers. Though Dorothy was
older by six years, George was well up to her; ‘awfully intelligent’ and
‘alarmingly intuitive’, as Dorothy put it.?? Her unsettled upbringing had
made her a good linguist, and she was an omnivorous reader with a taste
for the unconventional and risky (Lombroso at seventeen; all George Moore
before then). Tall, sun-tanned, with a face described by Dorothy as ‘square’
but very handsome, she knew her own mind: her breadth of reading and sharp-
ness of intellect would continue to strike all who met her, along with a mock-
ing and iconoclastic sense of humour.” Like the fey and beautiful Dorothy,
she was impatient with convention, and her mother’s plans for her; but
George also shared the Shakespear—Tucker circle’s interest in occult and
psychic phenomena, joining the Order of the Golden Dawn in 1914 as well
as attending seances and lectures at the Society for Psychical Research.”
Moreover, for anyone of literary tastes Olivia’s salon possessed compelling
advantages. It was the matrix which brought together not only wBy and
George Hyde-Lees, but introduced into the circle the extraordinary young
American poet and literary entrepreneur Ezra Pound, with whom Dorothy
fell quickly and irretrievably in love.
Pound had arrived in England in 1908, aged twenty-two, fresh from an
abruptly terminated teaching career in Wabash College, Indiana. He was
fizzing with manic genius, hungry for experience, and single-mindedly
determined to meet writers. In April 1909 Elkin Mathews published his
well-received collection Personae. His pretensions, extremism and over-
weening arrogance alienated many, but he had quickly found his way to
Shakespear, and through her to wgy — for Pound ‘the only living man whose
work has more than temporary interest’. This homage was carried through
in Pound’s own poetry of this period, as well as in his adoption of a Yeatsian
poet's uniform — brimmed hat, pince-nez, even an earring donated by Agnes
Tobin. Determined to meet the Irish poet, he had laid siege almost since his
arrival: sending wBy his first book, spotting him at theatres, and cultivating
the circle around Elkin Mathews’s bookshop. An acquaintance with Eva
Fowler and a friendship with Olivia Shakespear did the trick. By the sum-
mer of 1909 he was frequenting Woburn Buildings, to the irritation of some
Monday-night regulars: no one could be further from the ideals of literary
good behaviour as prescribed by Edmund Gosse. But for wsy ‘this queer crea-
ture’, as he described Pound to Gregory, came along at exactly the right time,

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 TRUE AND FALSE IRELANDS IQIO~IQII

and he seems to have picked him out at once. wBy was conscious of encroach-
ing middle age, and the admiration of the young people in the Shakespear
circle was a tonic. Pound possessed that air of demonic charlatanry which always
attracted wBy, but there was substance beneath. His friendship with the
young American — bumptious, enthusiastic, but gifted with an uncanny
editorial sense and a useful knowledge of European literary tradition — came
when wey had already determined to colloquialize his language, to strip
away redundant prettiness, to strive for the uncompromising effects achieved
by Synge. And beneath his affectations, Pound too was in search of tautness,
precision, the elimination of redundant archaism, the rediscovery of a clas-
sical hardness.
In January 1910 wy had privately reflected that ‘the strange thing is
that the literary imagination has become dramatic in our time, while the
stage has refused its opportunity to learn’. From about this time he began to
channel dramatic effects into his poetry, and to turn aside from the con-
centration on play-writing which had taken so much of his energies since
the turn of the century. In the same letter he added, ‘I always try for the most
natural order possible, largely to make thought which being poetical always is
difficult to modern people as plain as I can.’ Pound similarly declared that
poetry should have the virtues of good prose — ‘nothing that you couldn't
in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say’.”’ Their col-
laboration was yet to come; but Pound’s company already provided a vital counter-
acting influence to the respectable literary world of Gosse, the Academic
Committee, the pension, the sounding-out for university chairs. Olivia
Shakespear, who had brought wy so much, was the unintentional conduit
for this new influence as well.
Shakespear herself probably had mixed feelings about it. She disapproved
of her daughter’s obsessive love-affair with an obscure and erratic young
American, who had initially paid court to herself, and tried to dissuade
them. Her strictures convey very clearly the assumptions and tone of the
world she now inhabited (‘she has modelled her social life quietly on mine —
but she has not the sense to see that what is suitable for a worn out woman
of my age, &a girl of hers, is very different’; ‘if her father died . . . I should
probably marry again, & she wd be very much de trop ~ raison de plus for
her marrying’*). But Pound was not to be put off. By May rg11 he was
back in Europe, and his friendship with wBy was cemented by daily meet-
ings when they were both staying in Paris that month. Gregory was also
there, working with wBy on what he described as ‘the big book on Fairy Belief
that we have been doing for years. My part is to show that what we call Fairy
Belief is exactly the same thing as English and American spiritism except that
fairy belief is very much more charming.” For wsy this synthesis of psychical
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research and fairy lore was now firmly established, and fused the interests of
the Tucker circle with those of his most constant collaborator: the result, Visions
and Beltefs in the West ofIreland, would appear in 1920, but preoccupied him
for years before.
Stimulated by Pound and disciplined by Gregory, wey devoted the summer
of 1911 to a last, sustained burst of dramatic activity — as if he were reorgan-
izing and revising the theatrical ewvre which had meant far more to him than
to his public, before launching himself into other waters. His revised and
extended volume of Plays for an Irish Theatre, to be published by Bullen and
illustrated by Craig’s stage-settings, was being put into final shape; he stressed
to Bullen that the volume must include the stage version of The Shadowy
Waters to ‘show that I understand my trade as a practical dramatist’.*° The
introduction, written in Paris, summed up the evolution of wBy’s ideas over
the past decade, and the whole production was intended to stand as a testa-
ment. It would include Deirdre, The Green Helmet, On Baile’s Strand, The Kin e's
Threshold, The Shadowy Waters, The Hour-Glass and Cathleen ni Houlihan. He
also returned to The Countess Cathleen, adapting it for Leoni’s operatic pro-
ject and adding new lyrics (such as ‘Lift the White Knee’ in the second scene,
which he proudly told Gregory took him only twenty minutes to write*).
In Paris he met Leoni himself, who now wanted to take over the opera from
Chappells and stage it at Covent Garden with Clara Butt. This rather non-
plussed wey, who gathered that Butt had a wonderful voice but no artistic
standing. Still, he authorized Leoni to see Craig about the production, which
remained in the realm of enthralling might-have-beens.”
Theatrical production continued to obsess him, as his enthusiastic cor-
tespondence with Craig shows; even Craig began to wilt under the barrage
(affecting at one point not to know who wy meant by ‘Dunsaney’, and to
assume that he was the stage-carpenter). In June along newspaper interview
was planted out, in which wsy declared that he would never stage any of his
verse dramas in the future without using Craig’s revolutionary screens. At the
same time he emphasized that the Abbey was now comfortably in profit, attract-
ing large audiences, and presenting realist drama by Robinson, T. C. Murray
and George Fitzmaurice.** With the arbitration about the Horniman affair
decided in his favour, firm control established over actors’ salaries and organ-
ization, and financial insecurity receding, he was beginning to sense the end
of a chapter. The Player Queen would remain, rivalling The Shadowy Waters
as a permanent work in progress. But he knew that the theatre’s future could
not be built on his own verse drama; accordingly, he felt an inclination to leave
that form and return to lyric. In this way the reordering of a decade’s dramatic
work and the final break with Horniman chimed with the stimulus of Pound’s
admiration and the discovery of a younger generation. By the summer of III,

440
 TRUE AND FALSE IRELANDS I9IO~IQII

with his uncanny sense of an impending change in the wind, wBy was pulling
up his anchor.

II
As so often, a change of creative orientation was paralleled by reconsidera-
tions in his personal life. Later, he would describe his feelings towards the
Dublin world, and Irish life in general at this time, as ‘estrangement’. The
loss of Pollexfen Sligo, the resolution of the theatre’s affairs, the everyday
spite of Dublin life, all conspired to keep him distant. Personal links could
not be broken, and when his cousin Ruth Pollexfen was married from Lily’s
house in July, wy was proud to be asked to give her away. (She had been
brought up by Lily, since virtual abandonment by her parents; her father
Frederick’s only contribution to the bridal pair was an abusive telegram,
luckily intercepted.) On 20 July way was in Dublin for Ruth’s wedding,
splendidly dressed in a new suit which he had saved for the occasion (thus
wearing old clothes for a previous engagement with the Asquiths and
the Duchess of Sutherland). He made a brief speech, pleased everybody,
and received an accolade from Sara Allgood, who was photographed kneel-
ing in playful homage to him at the reception. But he saw it as his ‘one civic
act’** that summer and kept clear of other commitments — lying low at
Coole or Dunsany Castle, only occasionally tempted out by admirers like
Gogarty, who entertained him to expensive meals and good champagne,
which made him feel uncomfortably like Molly Allgood.* His reputation for
stand-offishness, and over-fondness for grand company, was by now firmly
established in certain sections of Dublin opinion, and he was not bothered
to combat it.
But if he had entered high society, and acquired a taste for country-house
life, he had never prostituted his art in order to do so. Nor, in his own view,
had he compromised his politics. He explained clearly to his father why
he even refused to chair a dinner in Craig’s honour that July, when he dis-
covered it would mean proposing the King’s health:
Lady Gregory and I have only held our movement together by insisting that nobody
in England even thinks of proposing such a toast at a gathering which has an exclus-
ively artistic object. At last we have got all parties to accept this and Unionist and
Nationalist are quite peaceful with each other, and various viceroys have very good-
humouredly accepted the fact that there was no God Save The King at the Abbey.
We both, for Lady Gregory was even more urgent about it than I was, felt that it would
be impossible to go back to Ireland having admitted the contrary. If the fact gets into
the papers I am quite certain to have no chance for the Trinity professorship, but I
am not sure that I want it.°*°

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Given the political conditions of 1911, this statement carries great weight. The
battles of the previous decade had proved that eternal vigilance was needed
if he were to keep one step ahead of condemnation from Arthur Griffith and
other guardians of advanced nationalist purity. Through the collusion behind
the public row over Blanco Posnet, and the repudiation of Young Ireland simpli-
cities in ‘J. M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time’, wBy’s political antennae
had been tuned towards a change in the pitch of Irish politics, as Home Rule
inexorably moved on to the immediate agenda. Since the Liberal landslide
victory of 1906, Conservative strategy had used the House of Lords veto to
block legislation. Lloyd George’s daring budget of 1909, the peers’ ill-starred
resistance and the two general elections of 1910 had brought matters to a
crisis. By the summer of 1911 the Parliament Act had removed the Lords’
veto — and with it, the last apparent bulwark against Home Rule legislation
for Ireland. The Liberals were formally committed to it, and since 1910 their
majority depended upon the votes of Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party
at Westminster. Even in Dublin Castle, Home Rule opinions had long been
held by officials like MacDonnell and Dougherty. A Home Rule bill was
promised for 1912. Expectations of an agreed, autonomous Irish future were
expressed even by leader-writers in the Irish Times. Such beliefs were also
subscribed to by enlightened landowning gentry like Lord Dunraven, John
Shawe-Taylor and Colonel Hutcheson-Poé: supporters of the Abbey and Hugh
Lane’s projected modern art gallery, believers in tenants’ land-purchase
schemes, acquiescent to the imperially minded nationalism represented by
Redmond now that Arthur Griffith and Sinn Féin were articulating the stri-
dent alternative. More and more, these were the kind of people with whom
wey spent his time in Ireland: apart from the bohemian cliques of the United
Arts Club, who —if their politics can be defined at all — represented an equal-
ly moderate nationalism. Convergence seemed the order of the day, and
Home Rule the inevitable future.
Events from 1912 would show that the political agenda might be dictated
bya different drum, beaten from the North, and the easy expectations of wBy’s
new Liberal acquaintances, like Asquith and Haldane, would waver and dis-
solve in the face of such intransigence. At the same time advanced national-
ism would move into the vacuum and rediscover a radical voice. In 1910 and
1911, however, this was not evident. wBy’s occasional diary makes it clear that
he shared the general supposition of impending Home Rule, and felt that the
opposing shibboleths of old-style polarities had served their purpose. His essays
and lectures repeated the message, preaching that independent nationality
would depend on artistic radicalism, since the days of oppositional politics had
gone by. The implicit elitism of this approach was exacerbated by his growing

442
 TRUE AND FALSE IRELANDS I9IO—IQII

distaste for the strident tones of new journalism and new money in Edwardian
Ireland. But Home Rule remained the desideratum, even if the price was
accepting Catholic triumphalism, and an elite educated by Clongowes Wood
College and the National University. He had set himself against the house-
hold gods of ‘Trinity College and know-nothing Unionism, when they had
been in the ascendant; twenty years on he was prepared to scourge the Cath-
olic Establishment which was apparently succeeding to their place. He was
clear in his mind that their institutions represented the faith and assump-
tions of the majority of the country, and therefore enjoyed a legitimacy not
possessed by their predecessors, but he was equally convinced that — for all
the rhetoric of nationalist rectitude — they shared many values founded on
the debased intellectual currency of Victorian materialism, and its denial
of ancient tradition. Moran, Griffith and others saw wsy’s opinions as the
simple product of galloping snobbery and the original sin of Protestant des-
cent. His social life, and his developing preoccupation with his own family
background in these years, helped to lend substance to this view. But snobbery
is never simple, being founded on an insecurity that can be psychological as
much as social; and preoccupation with family is a natural response to enter-
ing one’s late forties childless, with the landmark figures of the last genera-
tion crumbling away.
wBy's powerful sense of personal history, which never deserted him, was
especially strong in these years, when he consulted astrologers to establish
patterns past and future, and watched his country enter a new phase in its
own history. Though the politics of Westminster divisions and national
elections are rarely discussed in his correspondence, he moved socially in
London among people for whom they were the breath of life; and his polit-
ical astuteness is reflected in a suggestion to Gregory in September r911
that they should include in their programme Falsely True, a play by John
Redmond’s daughter Joanna. Not only would its conventionality balance
the Playboy for their projected American tour; it would ‘show that we are
accepted by the recognised authorities of nationalism and that we have no
particular bias. Redmond got a great reception I am told when he came in
[to the House of Commons] last night, I don’t think that we have perhaps
realised the value that has been given to his name by recent events.’ Through
necessity, he had developed a finely tuned sense of the way politics conditioned
his complex public life — dictating the tone ofa letter to the papers, the avoid-
ance of giving a toast at a dinner, the choice of a play at the Abbey. And pol-
itics would affect the decision he took in the summer of 1911: to undertake a
major tour of the Abbey Company through America, playing the controversial
Playboy as ‘the completion of our work’.**

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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

II]
For wy this tour would mark not only the culmination of their project, but
his own gradual disengagement. He was determined not to commit him-
selftotouring with the Abbey, simply travelling out for the advance publicity,
spending a month at most, and leaving the players to complete the tour until
the following spring. The company were in good heart, after a successful sum-
mer tour to Stratford, and elsewhere, ending up at the Court Theatre; Nugent
Monck’s second company would fill the gap in Dublin during their absence
and train a new generation of actors, though Gregory had severe reservations
about it.*” When the overture came from the theatrical agents Lieber & Co.
via James Roche, an ex-nationalist MP, wy was advised to ask for a lot of
money, take the Playboy to Irish America, ‘fight it out & win that fight
again’.*° Lieber not only insisted on the Playboy as a condition of the engage-
ment, but offered good terms (all expenses and 35 per cent of the profits).
True to form, the company was racked by last-minute crises, rows and
threatened defections. Molly Allgood was behaving as prima donna assoluta
and wy decided privately that Maire nic Shiubhlaigh, returned to the fold,
was unfortunately no longer able to act. The young actress Cathleen Nesbitt
was recruited for the American tour, and was struck by wsy’s ‘great weariness
and remoteness’; she was also bewildered by the company’s assumption that
she was a spy‘ “put in by the management”, as they called Lady Gregory and
Yeats’. wBy disliked her acting style, and she did not last. But as she became
accepted by her fellow-actors she noted how Gregory and wsy tried to pre-
serve the illusion that the actors were simple peasants: ‘pretending they caught
us all wild off the trees like monkeys’, as Kerrigan whispered to her at a party."
Relationships were tense and backstage crises continued to erupt. None the
less, on 8 September wBy was able to come before the curtain at the conclu-
sion of his Deirdre and make an announcement in the inimitable style which
Dublin loved to mock:
We feel that we must seem to many of you to be neglecting our principal work by
going so far from Dublin and for so long a time, for on Wednesday next we leave
Queenstown for America. From the very start of our theatre we have desired to take
our plays to Irish America. Some seven years ago I lectured to a great school of Irish
boys in a religious house in California. As I went to that house I passed under palms
and all kinds of semi-tropical vegetation, and yet these boys were thinking almost
the same thoughts that young Catholic boys would have thought in Dublin. The Irish
imagination keeps certain of its qualities wherever it is, and if we are to give it, as we
hope, a new voice and a new memory we shall have to make many journeys.”
Nugent Monck’s newly established drama school at the Abbey was offered
as consolation. As for wBy, he embarked with the players on the Zeeland at
444
 TRUE AND FALSE IRELANDS I9IO~IQII

Queenstown on 13 September (having booked a stateroom to himself, though

he had to share it at the last minute with Robinson).
He needed his comforts. He knew he was heading into storms; jBy fore-
cast that there would be a fight ahead — and that it might make his fortune.
News of his pension had reached Irish America, and been much criticized,
while the Abbey’s reputation with the expatriate political organization Clan
na Gael was distinctly ‘anti-national’. Moreover, the part played by John
Quinn in the MacBride marriage separation had alienated John Devoy,
Joseph McGarrity and other leaders of Irish American nationalism, and
Quinn was closely identified with the Abbey. A contest was inevitable, and
WBy was determined to dictate the terms. In late July he had suggested putting
together a book of essays for the American market, to capitalize on the tour (and
protect the copyright of his Cuala material in the USA): the material would
include Discoveries, the Spenser introduction and~—significantly—J. M. Synge
and the Ireland of his Time’. Although it came out (as The Cutting ofan Agate)
a year after the American visit, it shows his readiness to draw up battle lines
and declare his position. Above all, his priority was to clarify how the Abbey
stood in Ireland: one disgruntled observer noted, ‘I had never seen a visitor to
America more oblivious to the country he was visiting.’
This is borne out by his pronouncements from the moment he arrived in
Boston. His public lectures were less painstakingly prepared than in 1903; no
typescripts survive, and his addresses owed much to the autobiographical pieces
delivered in March 1910, and to the Synge essay not yet published in America.
But some off-the-cuff interpositions can be gleaned from newspaper reports.
In a discussion at the Poetry Society of America he sharply denied that the
supposed dreaminess of Irish poetry had anything to do with national char-
acteristics,* and the emphasis of his lectures fell on Synge and his uncom-
promising importance for an independent Irish culture. He also took care to
assert the Abbey’s political credentials. On arrival in Boston he publicized a
story about their actresses refusing to stand for ‘God Save the King’ (‘which
in Ireland resolves society into its original elements’) on board ship, though
nic Shiubhlaigh denied such an incident ever took place. He stated further
that the theatre movement, unlike Young Ireland, did not feel it could advance
Irish independence, ‘but we can prepare for the day after it has been obtained’.
His expectation of a consensual Home Rule future was reaffirmed in his
statement that the Gaelic revival had led to the unity of various elements in
Irish life. Most of all, though, he stressed the Abbey’s pride in unpopular-
ity, their commitment to presenting the ‘kernel of reality’, their achievement
in making drama rather than song the vehicle of the Irish spirit. He was care-
fully preparing for the inevitable controversy when the Playboy opened three
weeks later: thus he presented the Blanco Posnet affair as ‘a national question,
445
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

the defending of Irish freedom from English authority’, when Dublin's

‘streets [were] crowded with people waiting to see whether England or Ireland
would win the battle’.*”
The Boston streets may not have been crowded when the company opened
their American season at the new Plymouth Theater on 23 September, but
the auditorium was. Deliberately, the opening programme did not include
the Playboy, scheduled for 16 October; it was cautiously composed of The
Shadow ofthe Glen, Birthright and Hyacinth Halvey. Before the performance,
wBy lectured on the history of the theatre movement, elaborately providing
pointers towards interpreting what was to come. The audience was led to expect
close observation of local accents, folkcraft and —in Synge’s play— an approach
once considered controversial but now (they were assured) completely accept-
able. The Boston audiences were not fully convinced (when Riders to the Sea
was played, it drew contemptuous laughter from the gallery). But, by and
large, the company was received attentively by audiences and rapturously
by the critics, even though a campaign was mounted against it in the local
Irish American press.
wBy's effort to educate American audiences was best expressed in a speech
to the Drama League, later released to the newspapers. He stressed the trans-
formative effect of good modern theatre (Galsworthy was approvingly
instanced) but asserted Ireland’s unique access to a more ancient dramatic
strength: a Homeric note which England could not conquer. This assertion,
well calculated for Irish American ears, was swiftly followed by an emphasis
upon the Abbey’s avoidance of patriotic politics, and its commitment to chal-
lenging conventional Irish ideas. The sensitive question of portraying Irish ‘types’
was related to the Punch cartoons of fifty years before, and he explained how
O’Connellite nationalism had provided a compensating image of ‘national
glorification’. This, according to wy, was no longer needed, and his subsequent
argument was derived closely from his Synge essay:
Every kind of enthusiast, political, religious, social, had endowed some section of
Irishmen with the virtues he most admired, and national song and national novel —
we used the word constantly — was [sic] expected to show Ireland in the best pos-
sible light. We were not a people curious about life, looking at it with disinterested
contemplation, but a kind of army organized for offence and defence. We understood
nothing but propaganda.

Synge’s work exploded the unreality of Irish life, through the theatre of
exaggeration. Like the work of Cervantes, the Playboy was now a national
treasure. Other Abbey characteristics were explained: Gregory’s work was
briefly (and rather condescendingly) outlined, the new school of Robinson,
Murray and Ervine was explained as a reaction ‘against us older writers’,
446
 TRUE AND FALSE IRELANDS I9IO~IQII

and Craig’s symbolic scenery described — a theme returned to in wBy’s

Harvard lecture, ‘The Theatre of Beauty’, on 5 October. Here the meretri-
cious nature of realistic scenery was condemned, the use of light rather than
paint extolled, Japanese-style symbolic effects invoked, ‘the shock of new mater-
ial’ apostrophized. He talked knowledgeably of experimental stagings by
Kermendy, Reinhardt, Fortuny, and the Moscow Arts Theatre’s plans for
Hamlet. The lecture as reported in newspapers differed considerably from the
later, printed version;*’ he related theatrical experimentation to a change in
Irish mentality after the Boer War, ‘when all thought of a general revolution
[in Ireland] had vanished from the minds of the people, the interest in Irish
history and romance which it had sustained also flagged’. Here, he was re-
turning to his own autobiography, remembering the disillusionments of the
millennium that never came. Synge, with his explorations of ‘the distinctive
and bizarre’, had shown a new path instead.
By the time Gregory arrived on 29 September, wy had painstakingly
opened the way and could slacken his efforts; he celebrated his liberation
by a visit to an impressive Boston medium, probably Mrs Chernoweth.*°
But in some quarters opposition was implacable. The Catholic weekly
America attacked the players every Saturday for ‘Gallic decadence’, Ibsenism’
and paganism. By 4 October Irish American political organizations were
denouncing Hyacinth Halvey as anti-nationalist. The case was summed up
by Dr T. J. Gallagher of Boston:

Nothing but a hell-inspired ingenuity and satanic hatred of the Irish people and their
religion could suggest, construct and influence the production of such plays. . . I
first thought Mr Yeats was playing a grim joke on Boston audiences. Next I thought
him insane. But there is a method in his madness. Through every play one purpose
runs, and that is to show that the Irish people are too savage, too crude and unreli-
able to be trusted with Home Rule; in fact unfit for anything but fettered slavery.
Secondly, to show their boasted morals and religion are a myth, for contempt of both
is expressed many times in every play I witnessed Saturday night.”

wpy'’s reply was deliberately mild, concentrating on the issue of ‘pagan-

ism’ and explaining Synge yet again. However, in an interview with the
Boston Pilot (a patron of his own work twenty-five years before) he was
sharper. ‘It is not asking too much that what Irish Dublin accepts ought
not to be rejected by Irish America without too much thought, nor is it,
perhaps, saying too much to suggest that Dublin might know its Ireland
better than those for whom Ireland is but a memory or a tradition.” And
from this point his arguments became more aggressive: it was part of the
theatre’s business to admit the evil that existed in the Irish as in all people. A
speech on 6 October to the John Boyle O’Reilly Club (named after the
447
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

patriotic editor who had published his own early work) praised the Pi/ot and
struck some appropriately nationalist notes, but continued the exploration
of his own past which marked his lectures since 1910. The fall of Parnell in
1890 initiated a cultural revolution: ‘everything became individual’. This
meant recognizing the distinctive harshness as well as graciousness of Irish
artistic individuality — related, daringly, to ‘the spirit of Goldsmith and the
spirit of Swift’ rather than to more conventional Irish models. Ireland’s sal-
vation must lie in ‘a passion for truth’ that would enable them to build on the
basis of reality, not sentimentality.°* The message, yet again, was that of the
Synge essay: the clarity of artistic vision must replace the pasteboard pieties
of Young Ireland traditionalism.
In a parallel argument, this could be translated into an appeal for the re-
conciling vision of Home Rule. Not only did wy make much of the theatre’s
support from Redmond, Gwynn and other nationalist MPs; at the Twen-
tieth Century Club a day later he spoke about the bringing together of Prot-
estant and Catholic Ireland, and gave the cultural movement the credit. “We
had to bring out of these really warring elements a national consciousness.’
Catholics had to be educated mentally, and Protestants emotionally (a fre-
quent refrain of his father’s). In this too Synge played his part; and yet again
wBy compared him to Swift. These speeches helped turn the tide in the
players’ favour, eliciting declarations of support from Massachusetts Gaelic
League branches and John Boyle O’Reilly’s sister. But wBy’s patience with
Irish Americans was becoming strained, and in New York he finally accused
them of being thirty years behind what was really happening in the country
they still spoke of as home. ‘It is far more honour to Ireland to have produced
a dramatist like Synge than to fill every theatre in the world with a thousand
green-coated clog-dancers.’ This raised the question of the place of Protestants
in the broad church of cultural nationality, a nettle he was ready to grasp. Asked
to define an Irish play, he said it was as hard as defining a nation, but ‘a play
that is written today by an Irishman who has grown up past the formative
period under Irish influences might be a definition’.°* The Abbey’s great vic-
tory, he asserted, lay in attracting people (including priests) who came to see
what they liked, even if it meant also sitting through what they hated ‘with
our fierce Irish hatred’.
By now, he was making overt connections with the politics of the day.
He stressed his own work for Home Rule, and the improved conditions in
Ireland since the settlement of the land question. (The opinions in his
poem about the Coole tenants were suppressed for American audiences.) The
national spirit had not lessened; but a Home Rule bill was on the way, if not, as
he expected, from the Liberals in this Parliament, then from the Tories in the
next. In along interview published in the New York Times after his departure,
448
 TRUE AND FALSE IRELANDS I9IO~IQII

he spoke of the breadth of culture and tolerance in modern Ireland; England

had taught the Irish to hate and the lesson been learnt too well, but with self-
government his fellow-countrymen would achieve self-discipline. The Irish
future must turn away from materialism and industrial values. The next great
need was not revolution but education.*»
Thus his American speeches not only reflected and refined opinions about
culture and politics arrived at in the aftermath of Synge’s death, but expressed
wsy's belief in an impending Home Rule future. During his brief stay in New
York, he did not meet Quinn but dined at the Petitpas boarding-house to meet
his father’s friends (and froze out one of them who asked him to give his father
money); he was back in Boston for the Playdoy’s long-awaited opening on 16
October.*® Devoy’s Gaelic American was campaigning hard against the play,
and the Central Council of Irish County Associations of Boston condemned
it as ‘the foulest libel that has ever been perpetrated on the Irish character’,
but wBy’sseries of pre-emptive propaganda strikes paid off. The Boston papers
by and large obediently reproduced the Yeatsian version of the play’s his-
tory, and its importance; the legendary Mayor Fitzgerald endorsed it; the
audience allowed itself some mild hissing, but that was all. wsy departed
on the Lusitania two days later, still giving interviews that stressed Synge’s and
Gregory’s connection with real Irish people, unlike the deluded views of Irish
American expatriates, embalmed in a Boucicault version of Ireland fifty years
out of date.
He left Gregory behind, and she bore the brunt of future difficulties until
the tour ended the following March — exasperated by Robinson's vagueness,
infuriated by American press reports that she held permanent court at the
Petitpas restaurant (‘Quinn wants me to contradict it as it is not a very re-
spectable place’) and finally facing the wrath of incensed Irish America dur-
ing the New York run of the Playboy, when the audience rushed the stage and
— Yeats-style— she harangued them before the curtain.** Her conduct was all
the more admirable, since her heart was not really in it. She later admitted
to WBY:
I dont think you will like it, but Iwant to put down even if I dont publish what Ifeel
in touring Playboy round. I have grown to detest it, I have so much that is painful
associated with it, and I shall some day get the more credit for this. If 1was fighting
for Countess Cathleen it would be another thing. And though it is not the fault of
the play, I do feel rather indignant at the Synges never saying one word of thanks or
acknowledgement, but writing to Curtis Brown to demand an increased Royalty!°”

Her great spirit saw her through, and the American tour was in several ways
her liberation — even setting the seal on a brief and secret love-affair with Quinn
that Christmas, which would have astonished those who persistently likened
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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

her to Queen Victoria. Quinn was still disenchanted with wy, though she
did her best to reconcile them, and made some headway.” But she defended
him from accusations that he had run away before the fight got going (‘it
doesn’t take a man to fight a few priests and potatoes, a woman is good
enough for that’).*! A delegation of ‘prominent Catholic’ women (‘the stu-
pidest set I ever met’) drove her beyond endurance — ‘to the extent of telling
them that the Box Office has got a collection of “stink pots” and rosaries lost
in the fight!’ Abusive anonymous letters followed (‘I seen ye where [szc] got
slated in New York. Howis the Pensioner? Yours, Mike’®’). Worse was to come
after Christmas. At Philadelphia the Clan na Gael politician Joseph McGarrity
co-ordinated full-scale opposition to the performance on 18 January, the police
and the District Attorney supported him, and the players were actually arrested
for sacrilegious and immoral behaviour. The finale was provided by Quinn's
triumphant defence in their celebrated court appearance.
From Dublin wsy watched closely. He was delighted with the contro-
versy (and the profits), dreaming of future American tours with his own
verse dramas acted before Craig screens, and telling the Irish Times that the
American opposition was composed of ‘half-educated men’ and mendacious
priests.°* For Quinn’s part, the affair made him more anti-‘pathriot’ than ever.
His cultural entrepreneurship was redirected from Ireland to French Post-
Impressionist painting, with his organization of the historic Armoury show,
featuring his own Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh. But wey felt vindicated,
and repeated the argument presented over and over again in his American
speeches: the Abbey, represented by himself, Gregory and Synge, for all their
Protestant background and avant-garde culture was more Irish than the
transplanted Irish American reactionaries who opposed it. “We are the true
Ireland fighting the false.’®°

IV
By this point he needed reassurance. The news from America coincided
with his reactions to the first appearance of George Moore’s memoirs, in the
shape of an extract from Ave which appeared in October. The Irish renais-
sance of the 1890s was already being built into literary history, and all the prin-
cipals were beginning to look to their autobiographies. wBy’s lectures of 1910
had sketched out some of his own territory, and in May 1911 he had encour-
aged Gregory to put down her own version (which became Our Irish Theatre):
‘the more you make it a personal narrative the better’.* Moore followed the
same advice, and — being Moore — took it beyond the limits.
Hail and Farewell, as the completed trilogy became, is its author’s mas-
terpiece: a fantastical autobiography which reverses the story of St Patrick,
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portraying the author as a missionary called to Ireland to deliver it from

Christianity by means of high culture. Its great strength, and beauty, is the
re-creation of the seductive atmosphere of a certain place and time: Irish
light and shade, the alternate sublimity and seediness of Dublin, the lurches
from grandiose gesture to sarcastic sneer. Much of this is conveyed through
recollected conversation, necessarily inaccurate, but the voices which echoed
down from the summer of 1899 were instantly recognizable and horribly
funny. Hyde, Gregory, Plunkett, Gill and most of all Edward Martyn achieved
instant and merciless immortality. Most of those betrayed, like Gill, were deeply
hurt. Gregory thought Moore’s treatment of his love-affair with ‘Stella’ (the
painter Clara Christian) was inexcusable, and that ‘no-one ought ever to
speak to him again, though I suppose we shall all do so’. As for Coole and
herself, she bravely found ‘some charm in it’ and ‘shook with laughter’ over
the portrait of Martyn. ‘I resent his description of Hyde most.” Russell took
a generous line: “Yeats, Hyde, myself and other literary folk will never get so
vivid an account of ourselves and our follies written by some more sympath-
etic critic.’
wey bitterly remarked that Russell could afford to be indulgent, since Moore
presented him as ‘a mixture of Shakespeare and Mohammed’. His own
portrait was very different. Moore’s revenge for the débacle of Diarmuid and
Granza, and the march wey stole over Where There is Nothing, had beena long
time coming, but here it was at last. The admiration and attraction Moore
had felt towards the young wBy was lightly sketched in, but quickly over-
shadowed by the hilarious picture of the sage of Coole, relentlessly fussed over
by Gregory — vain, vague but preternaturally sharp to seize his own advant-
age. Above all, the snobbery which many of wBy’s enemies had come to see
as his Achilles heel was delineated to deadly effect. The portrait was all too
superficially recognizable; but, written without affection, it misses the uncer-
tainty beneath wsy's affectations, the dazzling charm of manner, the humour,
the loyalty to his friends, for which so many forgave him so much. And it did
much less than justice to a literary genius which was still developing untold
powers. Reading this portrait of himself in late 1911, all wBy’s hard-won
achievements and solidly established fame provided scant comfort. ‘At first
I was relieved to find it no worse,’ he confided to Gregory, ‘but when I have
taken it up since it has always seemed to me a dreadful thing, ill bred & often
spiteful & yet he is trying to be just. Fifty years hence it will be one of those
indispensable distracted [?] books that go to the making of the history of every
epoch that has vigour.” On the same day Lily visited him, bringing some
copies of family portraits he had requested, and subsequently wrote to their
father: ‘I think he naturally resents Moore’s book. He laughed about it but when
I was standing up to go away he said, looking at the copy of Uncle Pat’s

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portrait and the General “After all they are finer than Moore’s squireens and
their low gate lodge loves.”’”
This reflection is significant, and so are the portraits. He was already col-
lecting inspiration for his own autobiography, which would consummate
the efforts made in these years to understand pattern, purpose and origins in
his life. His feelings about Synge’s importance, the continuing battle with
the inheritors of Young Ireland nationalism, the apparent imminence of a
Home Rule Ireland dominated by the Catholic middle class were all clarified
by the publication of Moore’s skewed history. The process led him back to the
lost domain of his youth and his family. His journal for 1909 had continually
reverted to the parallels between the artist and the aristocrat, and the vital
need to resist ‘ill-breeding’, but this was a private reflection. Now that the
Ascendancy world was going, he would more and more unashamedly proclaim
his fellowship with people who, like George Pollexfen, knew how to behave.
His identification with the Gregory ethos was soldered through the sense ofa
disappearing past, acquiring as it receded the enhanced and idealized allure
of nostalgia.

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17:GHOSTS
IQII—1913

I have begun to feel that I belong to a romantic age that is

passed away. I am becoming mythical even to myself.
wey to Edwin Ellis, n.d., but probably 2 August rgr2

I
FRoM the late autumn of 1911, alone in Dublin, wsy confronted his history.
The shock of seeing himself through the silky veil of Moore’s malice brought
home the realization of middle age and the recognition of a change in his own
work. He had long been a compulsive rewriter, but now he redrafted more
comprehensively than ever, particularly his early plays. He was also inspired
to remember old friends, and to seek supernatural guidance. From that point
can be traced the long gestation of his Autobiographies. More and more fre-
quently, the poet’s ruthless search for a theme ended in himself.
Meanwhile, he was immersed in day to day Abbey business, while Gregory
stayed with the players in America. Independence had not eliminated all their
problems. Horniman continued to haunt them from a distance, since her
influence in the Manchester Gaiety Theatre was cast implacably against
the Abbey, and forced them to give up their practice of playing a lucrative
season there. At home, Nugent Monck’s ‘school’ caused resentment among
the actors left behind; nor, perhaps, did they relish the prospect of a pro-
gramme made up almost entirely of Gregory’s plays. For her part, Gregory
did not share wey’s high opinion of Monck, or her fellow-director’s roseate
expectations of the ‘second company’.' And Monck’s instability and careless-
ness would cause considerable problems before he, like so many other managers,
abruptly left.
None the less, wBy retained his old skill at handling publicity: he spent
Christmas and New Year manipulating journalists on the Abbey’s behalf,
and trying to frighten off a flattering Times Literary Supplement profile of the
rival Theatre of Ireland by telling the journalist about Constance Markievicz’s
ominous military boy-scout movement.* The Abbey was costing £100 a
week, leaving no leeway for salary rises. But wBy’s enthusiasm overrode all,
particularly where the new Abbey ‘school’ was concerned. Out of sixty ori-
ginal applicants, ‘a second company’ of seventeen had emerged, several of
them, in wBy’s view, able to understudy or even supplant the established stars.
Fascinated by the process of seeing actors taught, he decided that this clarified

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the distinction between those who acted from ‘experience’ and emotion
(Molly Allgood) and those who created character from observation (her
sister Sara).° ‘All good art is experience,’ he had written in his 1910 diary, ‘all
popular bad art generalization.’ Theatrical form and style provided a language
for interpreting the importance of ‘personality’ in artistic expression — a pre-
occupation reaching back to his father’s table-talk decades before. The path
of connection was becoming clear between the artist he had become and the
long apprenticeship of his youth.
In the frantic present there were the usual problems with those actors (like
Arthur Sinclair) popular enough to be tempted by music-hall engagements,
and with playwrights whose work was exposed to wBy’s inimitable critiques.
(Seamus O'Kelly, author of The Shuiler’s Child, must have chafed when his
subsequent play was returned with the comment that the next season must
be ‘devoted to two very important plays, which have taken precedence, a work
of mine as well as a work of Lady Gregory’s’.*) All this was retailed in long
letters to Gregory through the winter and spring of 1911/12, along with light
relief such as an application from an unsuspected transvestite to join the
school (‘he or she as a young woman would have been perfectly charming’).
During January the vicissitudes of the company in America necessitated
firm action on wsy’s part in Dublin too — all the more so as his own early return
had left Gregory to bear the brunt of the transatlantic Playboy controversies.
The first he heard of it was when journalists descended on the theatre looking
for quotes: wBy issued a series of statements breathing defiance, deriding
the time-warp inhabited by Irish Americans, accusing Catholic societies of
spreading lies and slanders, and superbly dismissing the opinions of ‘half-
educated publicans in Phildelphia’.° The fact that the staunchly conservative
and Unionist Irish Times editorial agreed warmly with his analysis may have
given him pause for thought; but he carefully related the Playboy to the
existence of ‘an educated patriotic Ireland . . . insisting upon its standards
being recognised, and upon having life put as freely at the service of the artist
as it is in all other countries’.
But this represented wBy’s own agenda rather than any recognizable
Irish reality, as was neatly demonstrated by a series of attacks on the Abbey
emanating from ‘educated patriotic Ireland’ itself. Patrick McCartan in Irish
Freedom denounced Gregory, wsy and Synge for their ignorance of ‘the
genuine peasant’;’ the Irish Catholic and the Leader revived their cam-
paigns against the dead playwright (with the embellishment of an allegation
that he had died not of cancer but venereal disease®); the general attack on the
Abbey’s drama was echoed in England, with a violent onslaught in the New
Age. Here, a dismissal of wBy’s ‘vague, pale, gaping drama’ became afull-scale
condemnation of his influence at large. “The future critic, searching for the

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 GHOSTS I9II-1913
causes of English literary impotence, will probably be inclined to rest upon
the works of Mr Yeats. He is one of the many revenges Ireland has taken upon
us.’ (Intriguingly, Ezra Pound was reviewing anonymously for the New ge;
at this time he was quite capable of mounting an attack on wBy’s plays, and
the style is suggestive.°) To wBy’s pleasure, this was rebuffed by the rising
poet and fantastical novelist, James Stephens, and he could now be philo-
sophical about twenty years of attacks from journalists. ‘We are free men &
they bound,’ he reminded Stephens. He also affected not to mind a steady
stream of anonymous letters (‘the Leader being pious is read by women who
are much given to them that I suppose is the reason”). Later in the year he
confronted the Abbey’s unpopularity in verse, publishing ‘At the Abbey
Theatre’ in the Irish Review: a direct challenge to Hyde to explain why the
theatre could put on nothing that pleased the Dublin audience (and implying
that Hyde himself knew how to manipulate popularity).
You've dandled them and fed them from the book
And know them to the bone; impart to us
We'll keep the secret — a new trick to please.
Is there a bridle for this Proteus
That turns and changes like his draughty seas?
Or is there none, most popular of men,
But, when they mock us that we mock again?

There was an edge to this, since Hyde had infuriated Gregory and wBy
by publicly disassociating the Gaelic League from the Abbey during the
Playboy troubles in America." ‘An Craoibhin Aoibhinn’, adroit as ever,
replied smoothly in verses which claimed that he thought as one with the
Irish people, while wBy ‘bewildered’ them:
A narrower cult but broader art is mine,
Your wizard fingers strike a hundred strings
Bewildering with multitudinous things,
Whilst all our offerings are at one shrine.
Therefore we step together. Small the art
To keep one pace where men are one at heart.’

But taken with Ernest Boyd’s denunciation of the Abbey’s decline in the
same paper, and the letters to the New Age supporting the attack on wBy, the
controversy was bad for business. A series of mystery plays adapted by Colum
and put on from January were surprisingly contentious, and Gregory’s work
attracted small houses. Something new was required.
wy devoted himself in January 1912 to meeting this need by adapting
the Jebb version of Oedipus: ‘making it very simple’ and putting the chorus
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into ‘rough unrhymed verse’. It was a doubly attractive project, since the
play had been censored in England, and wy wanted to build on the Blanco
Posnet precedent by performing a version at the Abbey. This meant rather
cavalier cuts, inflicted without going back to the original Greek (unless a con-
venient helper managed to be around). wy remained very critical of existing
translations, which ‘won't speak’, but his own free-style approach would
equally appal others.’ However, when the English ban was lifted, he lost
interest in the project; it would not be revived for fifteen years. His routine
through January allowed him to work at poetry in the mornings, then to go
to the theatre and dictate letters to Raven Byrne; he pursued his own writing
after business. On occasion he journeyed to London to keep up with involve-
ments like Gosse’s Academic Committee, though he now accepted that ‘it
will be 10 or 20 years before [it] matters so far as anyone’s public position is
concerned, the one advantage of it is that one gets to know writers and to
find out one’s friends and enemies’."* Principally, though, his effort went into
rewriting his plays. Not only did the Abbey need new material (and since 1910
playwrights received a royalty); the revision process represented an attempt
to review and reconstruct his own artistic autobiography.
This went right back to The Land ofHeart’ Desire, which he found dis-
likeable and wanted to change radically —‘it is as though another man wrote
it’. As with The Hour-Glass (rewritten partly in verse to embody far more
complex philosophical ideas) and The Countess Cathleen, he set to pruning
sentimental and flowery effects; his return to these particular early plays
echoed other explorations into his past at this time. They also lent themselves
to the analysis of folklore and the supernatural which he had embarked upon
with Gregory. Most ofall, they adapted well to the new stagecraft of Gordon
Craig and Max Reinhardt.'* Craig had shown him the eloquence of light,
colour and abstract sets, while Reinhardt demonstrated the dramatic use of
sound, now worked into The Hour-Glass by having the strokes of a bell coun-
terpoint the Wise Man’s dying speech. ‘I conceive of a play as a ritual,’ wBy
told Craig. ‘It need not give all to the first hearing any more than the Latin
ritual of the church does so long as the ultimate goal is the people.” One of
his criticisms of Seamus O’Kelly’s play had been its propagandist bias, lack-
ing ‘the disinterested curiosity about human life out of which good plays are
made’. The latest version of The Countess Cathleen embodied this approach,
and when it opened (first on 14 December 1911, and again in February) it not
only made money but impressed even the Markieviczes.'® It was performed
in a Nugent Monck production, pageant-style, with Monck himself play-
ing Aleel; wsy supervised the lighting cues from the balcony, while Craig’s
screens came briefly into their own. Both plot and characterization were
more intensely personalized: Cathleen and Aleel became legendary lovers

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 GHOSTS I9gII-1913
doomed to part, the poet offering retreat from the public world, the Countess
dedicating herself to her destiny and making her house, like Gonne’s, ‘a
refuge/That the old and ailing, and all weak of heart/May escape from beak
and claw.’ The opera project had apparently subsided, but there was new inter-
est in an Italian translation of the play— mediated throu Jamesgh
Joyce, who
reappeared in wBy life that July, bringing his little son to visit him in Woburn
Buildings (“for a wonder he was polite: gave me tea and Georgie fruit”’).
Translations, however, like collected editions, kept coming up against the
obstacle of wBy’s determination to revise his work until it stood all of a piece,
conforming to the latest standards which he had set. In 1912 this meant not
only simplicity but a deliberate denial of consciously ‘poetic’ diction. Writing
about Masefield’s new poems that year, he commented, ‘I feel that the very
reality of their contents, the superficial resemblance to prose, requires great
precision in the style, research in the epithet.’””° This was an implicit instruc-
tion to himself. Both his poems and early plays were to be subjected to this
process; Bullen’s Collected Works, in wBy’s view, already needed revision after
only four years, and he plagued his publisher with demands for addenda or
— better still — revision of the sheets which were not yet bound. At the same
time he was as conscious as ever of his markets. At Fisher Unwin’s sugges-
tion the new-look plays were to be published two by two in a series of short
volumes and sold for a shilling through the theatre, which would augment
his exiguous royalty income. Though the Fisher Unwin Poems brought in
£36 in rg11 (compared to the 420-425 of previous years), he was happy to sell
manuscripts to commercial dealers when necessary: £30 thus acquired went
to carpets, curtains and a newly papered ceiling at Woburn Buildings in the
summer of1912.”

II
For all the time wy spent in Dublin, his London retreat and his English
life were never far from his mind. And by 1912 the question of the connection
between Ireland and England monopolized public debate. The Liberal gov-
ernment had faced down opposition in the House of Lords, and since 1911 the
new Parliament Act was law; there was now, apparently, no insuperable con-
stitutional obstacle to the introduction of a Home Rule bill for Ireland. The
legislation that was brought forward in April showed very little advance on
the abortive bills of 1886 and 1893, being in some ways less radical, but the
important thing was that, unlike previous efforts, it would pass the Commons
and could not be thrown out by the Lords. Since it was actually viable, even
Griffith welcomed it as a step forward, while mainstream nationalist opinion
was wildly enthusiastic. And this concentrated the mind of Protestant Ireland.

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In the north-east, during the spring and summer of 1912, concentration

took the form of dogged Protestant resolutions against anticipated rule
from Dublin by Roman Catholic bishops and fire-breathing Fenians, assert-
ing that Asquith and Lloyd George were exceeding their powers and manip-
ulating an unrepresentative Parliament in order to betray loyal Ireland. This
analysis was readily seized upon by an opposition Conservative Party already
committed to the idea that the Liberals were acting u/tra vires, and tradi-
tionally prepared to encourage Ulster Unionist intransigence. Unionist and
Protestant reactions elsewhere in the island were less extreme, but even among
Dublin intellectuals with an inclination towards cultural nationalism, a certain
unease was evident. This reflected not so much fear at the onset of Catholic
ascendancy, as scepticism about the tolerant credentials of advanced nation-
alism. For since the foundation of Sinn Féin, and the activity of the IRB
Dungannon Clubs commandeered by advanced men like John MacBride,
the prospect of Home Rule threw into sharp relief the Ku/turkampf symbol-
ized by the conflict between Arthur Griffith’s or D. P. Moran’s exclusivist
rhetoric and the pluralist arguments of Magee, Russell or wBy himself.
The notions aired thirteen years before in the Dublin Daily Express and
Literary Ideals in Ireland gained new relevance now that the Home Rule
future was apparently at hand, and by 1912 several voices from the liberal
Protestant tradition were questioning the probable form of cultural nation-
alism in the new Jerusalem. wBy’s old sparring-partner W. K. Magee wrote
bleakly to jay:

You ask me whyI dislike the Irish language movement so much . . . & on the whole
I have to acknowledge that I do. It is an instinct, and though I might struggle with
it as with a besetting sin, and endeavour to root it out, I see no reason for doing so,
as the fact of my having this instinct, in common with probably the majority of the
more rational (forgive me) of my fellow-countrymen, is its sufficient and unanswer-
able vindication. The claim for the Irish language seems to me only a new form of
the old impossible claim of one race and tradition to extirpate its rival in this country.
So far from meaning any real national distinction, the victory of the Irish language
(which by the way is inconceivable — a sufficient argument in itself!) would remain
always or indefinitely what it is, only more so, and this prospect would be by no means
pleasing to my imagination. It represents the stick-in-the-mud element in Irish life,
not that which I (and you too!) would prefer to see prevailing — initiative, and a gen-
eral aspiration of social and individual development as human beings . . . Whether,
however, it is the Protestant or the bigot in me (I suspect it is both) I do object to the
sentiment underlying the language movement as illiberal as well as insincere, for
really Irishmen have no intention of learning the language. If the choice is between
vulgarity and intellectual squalor on the whole I choose vulgarity. But there — I am
at it again!”

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WBY was formally committed to the language movement, but many of Magee’s
reservations would have struck aringing chord. By now distinctly ex-Fenian,
his nationalism was of a more conventional stamp. He was closely interested
in the progress of the Home Rule legislation mooted from early rg12, pass-
ing on political gossip to Gregory, relaying the plan for temporary exclusion
of some Ulster counties, and hearing from journalist friends that Home Rule
might incorporate a ‘senate’ in which he himself, along with Russell, Hyde
and Dermod O’Brien, would be asked to serve as representatives of arts and
letters.” He was responsive to the emphasis on common Irishness, and on
‘a change in the mind of the country’ declared in the first number of
MacDonagh’s and Colum's Irish Review. But in January 1912 he told Gregory
that the chief danger to Home Rule came from extreme-Catholic claims to
control legislation in any Home Rule parliament, encouraged by cabals at Rome
and aggressive papal pronouncements: Cardinal Logue was thought to be con-
spiring against Home Rule, at least until Catholic control of education was
assured. “The hands that struck Parnell at work again.”
Thus wsy was not immune to Protestant fears about Catholic ambitions
to control free thought in an independent Ireland. He was none the less well
aware that this could be manipulated for purely political ends, and in April
he put his name to a public letter from Irish Protestants who supported
Home Rule and contradicted the claims of Unionist politicians that they
feared for their future in an independent Ireland.” The signatories were not,
in general, members of any nationalist associations: their names were drawn
from Dublin’s professional middle class. Although wsy signed along with
them, his private comments do not indicate an implicit faith in Catholic tol-
erance. His contemporaneous campaign against the censorship bill in Britain,
for instance, stressed that in Ireland the Catholic Church would use it to keep
out of the newspapers everything they considered anathema — not only
Divorce Court reports but the socialism of Reynold’s News and the anarchist
opinions of the fringe radical press. ‘It is an attack on opinion pretending to
be an attack on morals.” And by the end of 1912 he would no longer find it
possible to give automatic assent to public statements avowing Protestant trust
in the liberality of Catholic opinions. When Stephen Gwynn invited him to
attend a Protestant Home Rule meeting convened in London, and propose
a motion affirming faith in the tolerance of the Catholic Church, he received
(significantly, from Coole) a distinctly dusty answer:

I cannot abide the circular of the Protestant Home Rulers. It is ungenerous in feeling
and untrue in fact, I have no desire to protest against ‘efforts in North-east Ulster to
drag religion into political controversy’. Iwould gladly take part in any meeting that
might help to lighten their fears and to show them that if danger to their freedom

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came, others would confront the danger at their side. Nor can I go to a meeting that
is to prove ‘that there is no shadow of foundation for the charges of intolerance
which have been hurled against our brothers of the Roman Catholic Church’. There
is intolerance in Ireland, it is the shadow of belief everywhere and no priesthood of
any church has lacked it. Iwould have gladly have had my part in any declaration
that the great majority of Irish Catholics are tolerant and easy, and that intolerance
can be fought and crushed after Home Rule as it cannot be now, or in any declara-
tion that the danger to religious freedom is not in the granting of Home Rule but in
its continued refusal, but how can I who have been denounced by Cardinal Logue
for a romance, and seen lying leaflets based on material sent from Dublin distrib-
uted at chapel doors in America during the tour of the Abbey Players, or how can
any man who has read the ‘Irish Catholic’ and can take the pains to know the mean-
ing of his words, affirm that there is not both shadow and substance? I daresay that
politics will not in our time escape from statements that have but temporary value,
but I believe that a man of letters should have no part with them, for his life if it has
meaning at all is the discovery of reality.”

He promised his support on any occasion ‘not against my conscience’, and

was as good as his word. At the meeting on 6 December he lent his name to
a resolution ‘that this meeting — whilst sympathising with those in N.E. Ulster
who apprehend that they may suffer in consequence of the bestowal upon
Ireland of self-government, is convinced that their fears are groundless’. And
at a further meeting in Dublin he proposed a motion ‘that the responsibi-
lities of self-government and the growth of political freedom are the most
powerful solvents for sectarian animosities’.”” But by then, the promised
land of Home Rule was receding like the Gaelic otherworld of Hy Brasil: Ulster
intransigence and Liberal pusillanimity had interacted to exacerbate national-
ist impatience in the South.
At this meeting wsy produced a testament. Looking back to his youthful
nationalism, he affirmed the need for a national legislature in order to release
the nation’s potential and draw the best of its energies back from England.
Strikingly, he returned to the theme of bigotry:
I often see the life of Ireland today (so full it seems to me of prejudices and ignor-
ances in all matters of science, politics and literature) under the image of a stagnant
stream where there drifts among the duck-weed, pieces of rotting wood, a dead dog
or two, various rusty cans, and many old boots. Now, among the old boots drifting
along there are a very objectionable pair, Catholic and Protestant bigotry. Some
Irishmen object to one or other of those boots so much that they can think of noth-
ing else, and yet we have merely to make the stream move again to sweep them out
of sight.

But he admitted (as in his letter to Gwynn) intolerance did exist in Ireland;
Ulster Protestant fears were genuine, and therefore ‘it is their duty’ to protest.
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 GHOSTS I9II-I913
Those who think as I do differ from them — not because we deny the bigotry (we
have had the stench of that stagnant stream too long under our nostrils for that)
— but because we believe that the danger to religious freedom is not in the giving
but in the refusing of Home Rule.
A country divided into two polarized parties, in permanent postures of
defence and attack respectively, had no choice but to be bigoted. But this must
evaporate with independence. wBy’s subsequent argument would not have
pleased all Home Rulers, attractive as it might have been to his Irish Protestant
audience:
I know many Catholic young men who believe upon the contrary that almost the
first event of a self-governing Ireland will be the rise of a most powerful anti-
clerical party and of much continental irreligion. I should be sorry to believe this, to
believe that we can but exchange one form of intolerance for another. No, the best
minds of Ireland have been tolerant from the beginning, priest and layman alike —
It is the worst minds and the mediocre minds that make up that stagnant stream.

Ina peroration he recalled (yet again) the kindness he had received in America
from the seminarians at Notre Dame, at a time when Catholic authorities were
denouncing him as a pagan mystic; common Irishness, encountered in exile,
transcended religious division. Perhaps more realistically, he remarked in
conclusion that if Irish Protestants could not ‘fight for our own land through
any form of persecution known to modern times, and win, we are poor creatures,
and the country will be well rid of us’.
This hit the mark with his audience, as wBy reported to Gregory. ‘I had
a great success last night . . . everybody congratulated me. The meeting had
followed Hyde’s lead & insisted on Catholic tolerance until the audience had
become a little uneasy. I therefore rather strengthened the insistence on intol-
lerance in my speech.”° By then (January 1913) his patience with delicate
susceptibilities was running low: he had become involved, as will be seen, in
campaigning which had aligned him against ‘respectable’ Irish opinion over the
question of Hugh Lane’s modern art gallery. But he had long before estab-
lished his refusal to follow what Moore (writing of Hyde) called the ‘Catholic
Protestant line’ — insisting (through over-compensation and wishful think-
ing) that Catholic social and political teaching presented no threat to Protest-
ant consciences. WBY was a veteran of too many Irish struggles to subscribe
to that. His commitment to Home Rule was unquestioned, but its apparent
advent coincided with wBy’s own rediscovery of family tradition, his bury-
ing the hatchet with the Trinity College culture, his friendships in great
houses from Adare Manor to Dunsany Castle, and his assumption into a kind
of artistic establishment in England. This could not but affect his response,
and his identifications. On his holiday with Maud Gonne in France during
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the Home Rule summer of 1912, wBy read Whitley Stokes’s redoubtably
Protestant study of the Celtic church, and drily noted how it marshalled an
anti-Catholic argument for Irish identity.
Even more notably, through the Home Rule upheavals of 1912 he refined
his view of Parnell. Mosaic prophet, son of the Ascendancy, dissident against
conventional sexual morality, cast out by the people at the behest of their priests,
the Uncrowned King’s downfall inspired, in wBy’s epical construction, the
cultural revival led by himself and his generation. Gregory also spread this
interpretation, probably inspired by wBy.*' In the introduction to a Cuala
volume of Dunsany’s writings which wBy wrote at Colleville during that
summer of 1912, Parnell emerges as ‘that lonely and haughty person below
whose tragic shadow we of modern Ireland began to write’.* In this intro-
duction wsy repeated his assertion that for twenty years the Irish imagina-
tion had been ‘entangled in a dream’, following the popular culture of Davis
and Young Ireland, enshrined in badly printed books of ‘emerald green’.
These were symbolically set against the elegant dove-grey productions of
Cuala, with their font of eighteenth-century type (Caslon Old Face, by now
traditional for fine printing): books ‘intended for few people & written by
men and women with that ideal condemned by “Mary of the Nation” who
wished she said to make no elaborate beauty but to write so as a peasant could
understand’. By contrast, this new ‘library of Ireland’ was dedicated to the
few. Dunsany was aligned with Synge and Gregory, and a resounding claim
was made on the Georgian tradition of ‘our grandfathers’. wBy’s assertion of
Protestant civil rights and his unashamed claim on the Ascendancy contribu-
tion to Irish life is usually related to his speeches on divorce legislation in 1926;
but all the elements are articulated in his pronouncements on Home Rule
fourteen years before.

Ill
In other ways too wBy was reverting during 1911 and 1912 to past connec-
tions and preoccupations. Supernatural studies were always with him: despite
his unhappy experiences in Dublin in the mid-1880s he from time to time
frequented seances, mediums and the murky waters laboriously charted by
the Society for Psychical Research. But from 1909 he had begun to experi-
ment consistently in this area, encouraged by his friendship with Everard
Feilding, an Honorary Secretary of the Society (which way himself joined
as an associate member in 1913).°? At first, while he used the language of ‘sci-
entific’ investigation favoured by the SPR, his inclination was towards the
more ‘spiritist’ school, believing in supernatural survival rather than looking
for psychological explanation. Later he moved towards a more questioning
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approach, in line with SPR orthodoxy. But the years just before the First World
War saw a fashionable craze for mediums, despite a series of exposures and
the irritation of rationalist intellectuals like Samuel Butler (who threatened
‘if ever a spirit form takes to coming near me, I shall not be content with trying
to grasp it, but, in the interest of science, [ wi// shoot it’**). WBY’s joint studies
with Gregory into the connections between folklore and spiritualism impelled
him to seances in 1909; his friendship with Eva Fowler, Nelly Tucker and
others in Olivia Shakespear's circle brought him into a mediumistic ambience;
and his September rgr11 visit to the celebrated Mrs Chernoweth (a trance
medium specializing in dead poets) led him further along the path. System-
builder that he was, he determined upon a general theory. The connections
between folklore, psychic communion and a generalized anthropological
approach had long been debated by writers well-known to wBy.*° The non-
mystical language of the SPR, testing detail and accumulating evidence,
appealed to him, but he was prepared to speculate and — where necessary — to
suspend disbelief. Reviewing his own occult experiences, and his long-established
habit of analysing dreams, wBy moved towards a synthetic idea.
For years the Journal ofthe Society for Psychical Research had been publish-
ing material on dreams and the subconscious; several of Freud’s comment-
aries appeared there, and his work was exhaustively discussed. By 1916 at the
latest wBy was familiar with the reputation of both his work and Jung’s.*°
Speaking to the British Association on 4 September 1908, he had described
The Hour-Glass as ‘a parable of the conscious and the subconscious life’,
invoking Frederic Myers’s work, but through his Neo-Platonist training he
had long ago come to believe that abstract reasoning was of limited value com-
pared to intuitive visions and mystical union. wBy was familiar with current
ideas about the unconscious — a concept explored by many of his intellectual
guides, including Boehme, Nietzsche and Plotinus (whose doctrine of the
soul had recently been popularized by Bergson, as well as by MacKenna’s trans-
lations).°” The notion that geniuses, especially writers, had a special connection
to their subliminal stream of consciousness had long been with him. More
recently, he was impressed by the recent work of Theodor Flournoy and
Myers on evidence of existence beyond the grave; it brought him back to the
ideas of Swedenborg, another name familiar to the SPR, frequently cited by
spiritualist writers like James Hyslop.** On 12 January 1912 he gave the lec-
ture ‘A New Theory of Apparitions’ to the United Arts Club, summed up
rather ironically by the Irish Times:

The burden of the flesh alone keeps men from dreaming. Dreams come when death’s
twin brother sleep has released us from the body. Disembodied souls, wandering about
the universe, and thirsting for incarnation, find us in the semi-freedom of sleep. They

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rush into our dreams, and there find a temporary incarnation. People under the
influence of hypnotism are in the receptive state of dream, and so become media
for the incarnation of the wandering ghosts. Dreams are irresponsible things and
the medium is, therefore, an irresponsible person. Strange promptings to wicked-
ness invade him. He is capable of devilish deceits. Mr Yeats’s theory, it would seem,
explains the notorious fact that much of the history of modern spiritualism is a
record of trickery, deception and even uglier things.*”
More suggestively, the reporter inferred that spiritualist mediums and every-
day dreamers were ‘in the same state as ghosts . . . ina state in which the pas-
sions of life reproduce themselves in dream’. This lecture was a dry run for
subsequent addresses to the SPR on 25 January (an audience of ‘lady novel-
ists and psychical researchers’, he told Gregory”) and to the Quest Society
a week later. And these ideas would by 1914 coalesce in the commentary on
Gregory’s Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland and in his long essay
‘Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places’ — bringing together his early
occultist reading, the search for ancient wisdom in folklore, and his current
quests up Soho staircases for voices from ‘the other side’.
By the end of January 1912 he could write to Gregory, ‘Iam deep in my ghost
theory ... I have now found a neoplatonic statement of practically the
same theory. The spirit-body is formless in itself but takes many forms or
only keeps the forms of the physical body “as ice keeps the shape of the bowl
after the bowl is broken” (that is the metaphor though not quite the phrase).
From 1912 he read widely about supernatural happenings, pursued his acquaint-
anceship among the SPR and consulted mediums ‘controlled’ by familiars.
Eva Fowler’s cottage, where he stayed for a week from 24 May 1912, became a
frequent resort. Always the autodidact, wBy set himselfan agenda of intens-
ive research through his rediscovery of spiritualism, with its accompanying
cloud of self-referencing witnesses.
With Gregory’s return from America in March 1912, he was released
from the Abbey’s bondage, and returned to London. Here, however, he
was afflicted by acute digestive illness and severe rheumatism, which meant
days fasting in bed, restricted to a milk diet. He was already, therefore, in an
enervated and edgy condition during May and June when he was exposed to
a series of unsettling experiences at seances in London. The first occurrence
was on 9 May, when he went to W. T. Stead’s psychic centre at Wimbledon,
Cambridge House, for a sitting with the famous American medium Etta
Wriedt.” The occasion was recorded not only by wBy himself but by Stead’s
secretary Edith Harper. Mrs Wriedt identified her spirit controls by read-
ing out names ‘written up’ in the dark: ‘when a name was recognised the
voice was immediately heard from the trumpet’. Here, wy was convinced,
a spirit made itself powerfully evident, calling for ‘Mr Gates’ ina strong Irish
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accent, and introducing himself as wsy’s appointed guide ‘Leo’. From
other hints (‘you will find me in the encyclopaedia’) his identity was pieced
together as “Leo Africanus’ (more properly Al Hassan Ibn-Mohammed
al-Wezar Al-Fasi), a Spanish Arab explorer, historian and poet from the
sixteenth century whose image would provide wsy with an imaginary alter
ego for years.*°
‘When you first came to me,’ wrote wBy some time later, ‘I had to the best
of my belief never heard of you or your work.’ Actually, at an earlier seance
on 3 May 1909 a supposed ‘Leo’ had materialized, offering obscure hints
(‘African name . . . a Pope’) and been interrogated; and ‘Leo’, like most dis-
embodied souls who turn up at seances, was not only an exotic foreigner but
also a distinguished and well-attested figure. His work had come back into
circulation over the previous fifteen years or so, and would have been famil-
iar to, among others, wBy’s friend in the Golden Dawn, R. W. Felkin, who
was both an Arabist and an authority on African anthropology.* His entry
in Chambers’s Biographical Dictionary, first port of call for mediums and their
researchers, immediately precedes that of Leonardo da Vinci and was famil-
lar to WBY, since he owned the volume. His story also raised a resonant echo
from the long-ago fantasy of reincarnation dreamt by Gonne to account for
her affinity with wsy (and keep him at brotherly length): for Leo had been
sold into slavery in the desert, ending up in the Rome of Pope Leo X.** Much
of this suggests a certain subliminal preparedness. But even in his account of
the happenings of 9 May, wey still wondered whether his disembodied
visitor might be a symbolic being — the constellation Leo, perhaps. He also
decided Leo represented a ‘solar’ influence (oddly, since he would come to see
his own astrological influences as lunar). But the inspiration of an exotic
guide, who had himself written poetry, travelled afar and investigated the
witches, cabbalists and astrologers of Fez, was sustaining. And at further seances
with Etta Wriedt, on 5 and 18 June, Leo came through again, minus the Irish
accent, giving further details and obligingly revealing a full understanding
of (modern) Italian, which for wBy seemed proof positive.*° wBy’s revela-
tion to the seance that in early 1899 Charles Williams had materialized a form
who was his guide, called “Leonora’, gave Mrs Wriedt some further help.”
Still, the seance of June was all the more potent: because through Mrs Wriedt’s
trumpet, to wBy’s shock, came a voice which (he later recorded privately) was
that of Maud Gonne. ‘She used phrases which I have heard her use at a
moment of great emotion & with the intonations of this moment.’
While telling himself that it all might be ‘a dream fabrication of the sub-
liminal consciousness of myself & the medium’, this was deeply unsettling:
it seems to have been a specific reminder of their brief sexual affair.** There
was, further, a materialization, as a bunch of violets was seized and pressed

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into his hands (‘apporting’ flowers was a speciality of Mrs Wriedt’s). wBy later
asked Olivia Shakespear to use her powers of divination and ~ as he put it —
‘psychoanalyse’ them: her reading of their aura, delivered by automatic writ-
ing, survives in disjointed notes dated 6 June 1912. Possibly suspecting why
they meant so much to wBy, Shakespear (who had old scores to settle with
Gonne’s astral influence) decided they came ‘from some dead person’ and
carried ‘some fundamental insincerity’.””
But wsy slowly convinced himself that Leo was sincere, ‘sent to give you
confidence and solitude’. He only ‘adopted’ him fully in 1915, writing both
sides of an exchange of letters to actualize his guide, and inventing a personality
for him which would, by contraries, define his own. It owes a good deal to
Robert Brown’s introduction to his edition of Leo’s Description ofAfrica,
which contains a long section on the author’s character, and the dialectical
construction had long been a favourite form of his.°° But it also carried wBY
back to the invented personae of Robartes and Aherne, through whom he
had discovered a voice to write occult fiction. Essentially, the “Leo Africanus’
script closely resembles the stories written for The Secret Rose. In this ‘letter’
he would write:
You wish me to [tell] you what leaves me incredulous, or unconvinced. I do not doubt
any more than you did when [among] the alchemists of Fez the existence of God,
& I follow tradition stated for the last time explicitly in Swedenborg & in Blake, that
his influence descends to us through hierarchies of mediational shades & angels.
I doubt however, though not always, that the shades who speak to us through
mediums are the shades they profess [to] be. That doubt is growing more faint but
still it returns again & again. I have continually to remind myself of some piece of
evidence written out & examined & put under its letter in my file. How can I feel
certain of your identity, when there has been so much to arouse my suspicion.*!
wey analysed the reasons for scepticism, the case for auto-suggestion, for
Leo’s being a ‘secondary personality’ of his own, the suspicious alacrity
with which the medium picked up some clues and discarded others. Yet he
accepted ‘proofs’ of the medium’s veracity with a certain credulity.” wsy’s
records of seances, inscribed at vast length and carefully kept, indicate a
struggle between the spirit of inquiry enjoined by the SPR and a powerful
emotional wish to believe. But, if only as a strategy of intellectual discip-
line, the appearance of Leo was a potent inspiration. At a time when wBy
was ill, uncertain and alone, he had summoned up a voice from the void.
Synge and George Pollexfen might be dead, but not gone; all the rituals and
self-exploration of his long occultist apprenticeship might have been leading
in the end to this. Since childhood, he recalled,
I have always been conscious of some being near to me, & once when I was a child
I heard its voice, as though someone was speaking in the room, but something in your

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[Leo’s} tone, which was a little commanding [and] boisterous, always prevented me
from recalling that faint voice.

Yet recall it he did; and the unsettling seances of the summer of 1912 brought
him back to the visions of his Sligo youth, his sense of amission, his mystic
bond with Gonne, the world he had tried to re-create in The Speckled Bird.
Most potently, these keys helped unlock his lyric energies. On 2 August he
departed to Gonne’s Normandy house, exhausted by excitement and illness
but determined to work on what he already conceived as ‘a new volume of
verse’.?
His fortnight there was spent in an intense frenzy of writing. The
weather was unseasonably cold, wet and blowy. He was still convalescing
from his stomach troubles. They were visited, to wBy’s discomfiture, by
James Cousins and his wife, old Dublin opponents whom he always found
ineffably tedious. But he could play with the children’s menagerie, observe
the disturbing Iseult (now eighteen), fly kites with Seaghan, and visit Bayeux.
He worked on prefaces for collections by Dunsany and Tagore, but princip-
ally he wrote lyrics; Cousins heard him rhythmically murmuring for three
hours on end. By 8 August he had written a poem about Father Rosicrucius
in his tomb and one ‘on a child dancing, one of the best I have written’. By
13 August he had added ‘Love and the Bird’ (later called ‘A Memory of
Youth’) —a coda to ‘Adam’s Curse’, where his attempt to distance himself from
his love for Gonne was in the end confounded by her power to mesmerize
and enchant.*°
The moments passed as at a play,
I had the wisdom love can bring,
I had my share of mother wit;
And yet for all that I could say,
And though I had her praise for it,
And she seemed happy as a king,
Love’s moon was withering away.

Believing every word I said

I praised her body and her mind,
Till pride had made her eyes grow bright,
And pleasure made her cheeks grow red,
And vanity her footfall light;
Yet we, for all that praise, could find
Nothing but darkness overhead.
I sat as silent as a stone
And knew, though she'd not said a word,
That even the best of love must die,

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And had been savagely undone

Were it not that love, upon the cry
Of a most ridiculous little bird,
Threw up in the air his marvellous moon.

One result of this concentrated burst of creativity was that he collapsed

again with illness when he returned to London on 16 August; but by the
23rd he was at Coole, where he described his routine to Edwin Ellis. ‘I read
from ro to 11. I write from 11 till 2, then after lunch I read till 3.30. Then I go
out into the woods or fish in the lake till 5. Then I write letters or work a
little till 7when I go out for an hour before dinner.*° He was working on
the long narrative poem which eventually became “The Grey Rock’, as well
as shorter lyrics. To his excitement, his creative energy showed no sign of
abating. He returned to London in October to meet Gordon Craig, visit the
Tuckers (and George Hyde-Lees) at Lynton in north Devon, and stay with
Eva Fowler, ‘partly drawn by an automatic writer who was there from whom
I am getting wonderful material’ for the essay which became ‘Swedenborg,
Mediums, and the Desolate Places’.*” And back in Dublin between 26 and
30 October he sat for four seances at the Cousins’ house with the medium
Alfred Vont Peters, one of which was also attended by Gonne. Peters gen-
erally dealt in oracular psychological generalizations about his sitter; still,
for wBy he managed to bring in not only a sulky Leo Africanus but also
Blake, Synge and Parnell. As to the latter, ‘the people he had worked for had
not been known as a people, they were a crowd, that is all. He had worked
for the country people, their traditions and their rights,’ but been brought
down by ‘the white dog’ of religious hypocrisy.** Here, looking forward
to ‘Parnell’s Funeral’, is proof that what was heard at seances might be echoed
later in WBY’s art.”
These sessions (carefully recorded by way) prove that his mediumistic
obsession had taken firm hold. But he returned to Coole until late November,
far longer than was usually the case — not a cause of unmitigated pleasure to
the younger Gregorys, but necessitated by his constant stomach trouble,
now ominously resembling severe ulcers. He was helping to plan an exhibi-
tion of Craig’s work, arranged by Ellie Duncan of the United Arts Club, and
working on a new set for The Countess Cathleen with designs by Jack and an
appliqué backdrop by Lily. And he required the peace of Coole, since his poetic
inspiration continued unchecked. By mid-November he had completed along
poem which he described as ‘an epic for me’, probably “The Grey Rock’.® His
own reading helped concentrate his activity: immersed in his friend Grierson’s
edition of Donne, he recorded that now at last he understood how ‘the more
precise & learned the thought the greater the beauty, the passion’. But at
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the same time the voices in his head, the presences around the mediums table,
the memories of his youth, were being forged into a poetic statement which,
if often obscure, spoke in a new voice. In this process two further influences
were brought to bear in 1912: one from America and one from India.

IV
In June 1910, irritated at the prevalent condescension and ignorance where
Indian culture was concerned, wsBy’s artist friend William Rothenstein had
founded the India Society, along with several of wBy’s acquaintances, includ-
ing Rolleston. January 1911 found Rothenstein in Calcutta, where he visited
the wealthy and sophisticated Tagore family. This was a level of Indian soci-
ety different from that of wBy’s early guru Mohini Chatterjee; the Tagore
ancestors included the ‘Oriental Croesus’ who was entertained by Queen
Victoria and fascinated Dickens,” and the current generation numbered a
leader of the Brahmo Samaj movement for religious reform and a translator
of Moliére and Maupassant. The member of the family who made least
impression on Rothenstein was a handsome, silent man of fifty, Rabindranath
Tagore, who was by then a well-established literary figure in Bengal. But it
was Rabindranath who came to England in the summer of 1912, arriving in
London in mid-June. Rothenstein found him lodgings in Hampstead, and
launched him on the literary world. On 27 June he introduced the Indian
visitor to WBY.
WBY was immediately struck by Tagore’s distinction and charm, and still
more by the translations he had made of his own lyric poetry. On 7 July there
was a gathering in Tagore’s honour at Rothenstein’s house, where wBy gave
a reading, and the Indian poet was introduced to Pound, Rhys, Nevinson,
May Sinclair, Alice Meynell, Charles Trevelyan and others; he had already
met H. H. Fox-Strangeways of the India Society and the Times, as well as
Sturge Moore. Others were enlisted at a distance, like wBy’s friend and
translator Davray of the Mercure. This influential circle presented Tagore to
the world at large. Sinclair and Pound wrote him up, for the North American
Review and the Fortnightly respectively. Three days later there was
a Trocadero dinner sponsored by the India Society and the Nation, with wBY
as host. Now completely devoted to Tagore’s work, he described the Indian
poet’s advent as ‘one of the great events of my artistic life . . . Iknow of no
man in my time who has done anything in the English language to equal these
lyrics’, and compared him to the medieval troubadour poets, and Thomas
a Kempis, whose love was redirected towards invisible nature. To connois-
seurs of wByY’s enthusiasms, the note was familiar, but it was more extreme
than anything since his endorsement of Gregory’s Cuchulain.
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Why did Tagore’s work and personality inspire this reaction? Sturge Moore
produced a maliciously detached account for his friend R. C. Trevelyan:
Yeats and Rothenstein had a Bengalee poet on view during the last days I was in
London. I was first privileged to see him in Yeats rooms and then to hear a transla-
tion of his poems made by himself read byYeats in Rothenstein’s drawing-room. His
unique subject is ‘the love of God’. When I told Yeats that I found his poetry pre-
posterously optimistic he said ‘Ah, you see, he is absorbed in God.’ The Poet him-
selfisa sweet creature beautiful to the eye ina silk turban, he likes Keats & Wordsworth
best of English poets, has read everything including my work. It is a pleasure merely
to sit beside him, he reposes the mind & the body. Speaks very little, but looks bene-
ficent and intelligent. The poems read were little pieces. Dealing each one with some
image in a narrative biographical way.
(To his wife, Sturge Moore added that ‘Yeats read them abominably as usual
so that it was very difficult to hear the last word of each retch of his parson’s
kaw.”®)
Tagore’s impact is slightly reminiscent of Mohini Chatterjee’s on Dublin
followers a quarter-century before, but his philosophy had little connection
with the Vedantic beliefs preached by his predecessor. As Sturge Moore
ironically indicated, his poems were lyrics in the Vaishnav tradition, express-
ing the yearnings of the heart towards Vishnu and his incarnations, leading
eventually to a rather woolly doctrine of universalism. (Sturge Moore, again:
‘God appears under the image of King, Friend, or Thou, whose big feet are
on the footstool of the world, and the rest somewhere else, unspecified. The
Soul was I.’**) In the original they were intricately rhymed; in translation they
appeared as gnomic prose-poetry, and appealed to the popular taste that had
already made Nietzsche’s Zarathustra a cult book (and would later deify
Khalil Gibran). They also struck a chord with the kind of late Romantics who
venerated Asian wisdom, oddly coinciding in their taste for the exotic with
apprentice modernists and veteran Theosophists. For wpy, Tagore’s poetry
not only reminded him of the Indian aesthetic fusion of sensuous and spiritual
love, so influential in his own early work; it seemed linked, like Synge’s art, to
a noble and ancient tradition binding together aristocrat, peasant and poet.
Unity of being arose from unity of culture. Even more relevant was Tagore’s
relationship with Indian nationalism. The Bengali poet was culturally self-
confident, and told wsy of his ambition to restore ‘India’s faith in herself’ after
‘insults at the hands of the west’;°’ India, like Ireland, would reconquer the
conqueror by force of spiritual power. But, coming from an influential family
and living on the cusp of the Bengali and the English worlds, Tagore disliked
nationalist chauvinism, would later oppose Gandhi, and remained unpop-
ular with more vehement Indian anti-imperialists. To wy, the parallels
with his own position were obvious. As he later put it to Rothenstein, he was

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biased in favour of Tagore’s work (in this case his autobiography) because
it ‘pointed a moral that would be valuable to me in Ireland’.
Published in 1913 as Gitanjali (‘song-offerings’), Tagore’s poems achieved
great success. Though their author would later prove rather sensitive on the
subject, much of this was due to wzy’s support and help. The process vividly
illustrates just how influential he had become. Richard Aldington and others
observed the efficiency of the Yeatsian publicity-machine working at full
stretch; the young American Robert Frost noted that Tagore was led to wBy
as the undisputed First Poet of the day. ‘How slowly but surely Yeats has eclipsed
Kipling.’” For the fifteen months of Tagore’s stay, wBy relentlessly pressed
his case in the circles where he wielded influence. The inevitable Florence
Farr was produced, to chant Tagore poems in Yeatsian fashion — much to
Tagore’s dismay.” By late November wy was pressing Gosse about elect-
ing Tagore to the Academic Committee (though Gosse succeeded in exclud-
ing him through ‘malice’, which wBy did not forget”!). With Pound enlisted,
and for the moment equally enthusiastic, six Tagore poems were placed in
the December issue of Poetry, with a commentary by Pound that compared
Tagore’s importance to the rediscovery of Greek literature by the Renaissance.
Richard Aldington saw the whole Tagore boom as an exercise in ‘snob appeal
... worked with consummate skill’.” Together, Sturge Moore and way
emphasized to Tagore the importance of carefully timing his publications,
in order to build a long-term reputation.”* But when Tagore won the Nobel
Prize in November 1913, it seemed the apotheosis of a lightning campaign in
which wey had been a decisive and Napoleonic general.
How much did the English version of Tagore’s poems owe to wBy’s
intervention? Along with Sturge Moore, he certainly adapted the poet’s own
translations, cutting out archaisms, inversions and Edwardian gentility.’“* When
Fox-Strangeways of the India Society had the temerity to make further
changes, wy blisteringly asserted to Rothenstein his proprietorial interest:

I have had an interminable letter from a man called Strangways suggesting altera-
tions in Tagores translation. He is the sort of man societies like the India Society
fatten. He is a manifest goose. I want [you] to get the society to understand that I
am to edit this book & that they are [to] send me proofs as any other publisher
would. I cannot argue with a man who thinks that ‘the ripples are rampant in the
river’ should be changed because ‘rampant’ suggests to his goose brains ‘opposition
to something’. I am very busy — I work like a clerk — and I cannot carry on a corre-
spondence with this man. I have replied politely saying I would go carefully through
the text in proof but do please see that he goes back to his pond.”

As this letter hints, wsy had from the beginning opposed Rothenstein’s
wish to see Tagore’s poems published by the India Society. He wanted a
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commercial publisher and a wide distribution. ‘Properly managed the book

might have a very large sale, as the Theosophical Society have educated a large
religious public into Indian interests.”° As so often, his business acumen
was proved right: the Society issued Gitanjali in 750 copies, at the high price
of 10s. 6d. each, in November 1912; wBy contributed an introduction and
Rothenstein a frontispiece. Sturge Moore grumbled at the ‘abominable price’,
second-rate poems, and the fact that wBy’s closing remark was an unacknow-
ledged quotation from Sturge Moore himself.” But when Macmillan took
it over the following March, they ran up twenty reprints over two years. Two
other volumes of poems shortly followed, The Gardener and The Crescent
Moon, and Cuala would publish the most successful of Tagore’s many plays,
The Post Office, which wsy privately and publicly hailed as a ‘masterpiece’.
The cult rapidly became a craze.
Tagore’s response to this powerful advocacy was understandably appreci-
ative, but increasingly ambivalent. He was at first overwhelmed with gratitude,
writing a breathless article on wsy for the Calcutta press: ‘a fountain shower-
ing gentle beneficence all around, every time I have met him in private I have
felt with increased intensity the potency of his physical, intellectual and ima-
ginative fullness’.” He went on to make some comments which suggest that,
if wBy had interpreted Tagore in the way that suited him, the process was
symbiotic: according to the Indian, the Irishman was engaged in a war against
‘modernism’ which was ‘not a new thing . . . [but] threadbare, played out’.
wey himself apprehended the world through his ‘soul’, not his intellect, ‘re-
cognising the perennial presence of a playful Providence’. Privately, Tagore
became unhappy and nervous about wsy’s slowness of pace and strange in-
accuracies when adapting his post-Gitanjali volumes.®*° For wBy, however,
the intricacies of literal translation (with Tagore as with Sophocles) must give
way to creative enthusiasm. And this could be shared with new initiates. At
Colleville in August, where he was working on the introduction to Gitanjah,
Iseult became enthused by Tagore’s poems, and wsy saw no reason why she
should not purchase a Bengali grammar and, thus armed, translate into
French the poems in The Crescent Moon. Though this project foundered, he
brought Iseult to meet Tagore in London the following summer.*!
Further, he determined that the message should be spread to Ireland. The
Post Office joined the Abbey’s repertoire, complete with Craig screens, and
on 23 March 1913 wey delivered a markedly autobiographical lecture on
Tagore in Dublin.” Though as aboy, he said, he had saturated himself in Indian
influences, he had ignored them since he was twenty;** but from the sum-
mer of 1912 he had been ‘intoxicated’ by Tagore, often too moved by his work
to read it in public. What appealed was the Indian’s spontaneity, his iden-
tification of poetry with sanctity, and the way his lyrics lent themselves to being

472
 GHOSTS I9II-1913
sung (Tagore’s low opinion ofFarr had evidently not reached him). Tagore’s
inspiration derived from his refusal to deal with politics, and to save himself
and his artistic soul for higher things: thus wy inferred from Tagore’s situ-
ation both a parallel for his own position and a vindication of it.
Like all feverish infatuations, the Tagore passion ran its course. Pound’s
enthusiasm had always been dependent on his master’s. ‘I’m fed up with
Tagore,’ he told Dorothy from Italy in May rg12. ‘I wish he’d get thru’ lec-
turing before I get back. I don’t want to be any more evangelized than I am
already —which is too dam’ much. AndI much prefer the eagle’s gods to any
oriental beetle with 46 arms.”** Quite soon, wBy himself began to worry about
the failure of communication with Tagore. A month after his Dublin speech
he confided to Rothenstein that the ‘organised intelligence’ and garden-city
culture of Europe, which men like themselves found second-rate and tedious,
was exactly what impressed Indian visitors — who accordingly undervalued
the dignity and solitude of their own tradition.* As for Tagore, by February
1914 he had become rather resentful of the way people assumed wy had more
or less written Gitanjalt. A year later he summed up their relations more fairly:
There are people who suspect that I owe ina large measure to [C. F.] Andrews’ help
for my literary success, which is so false that I can afford to laugh at it. But it is dif-
ferent about Yeats. I think Yeats was sparing in his suggestions — moreover I was with
him during the revisions. But one is apt to delude himself, and it is very easy for me
to gradually forget the share Yeats had in making my things passable. Though you
have the first draft of my translation with you I have allowed the revised typed pages
to get lost in which Yeats pencilled his corrections. Of course, at that time I could
never imagine that anything I could write would find its place in your literature. But
the situation is changed now. And if it be true that Yeats’ touches have made it pos-
sible for Gitanjali to occupy the place it does then that must be confessed.*°
For wsy’s part, he would come to see Tagore as a strayed artistic soul who,
like Hyde, was misled by ‘the folk mind’ into not knowing whether he was
writing sense or nonsense. Eventually wsy found Indian poetry unsatisfying
because of its lack of tragedy. But Sturge Moore had hit the essential
point long before when he remarked that wsy’s introduction to Gitanyali ‘treats
the book too much as if it represented a life’s work which it does not’.*” In
1912 Tagore still had a long artistic odyssey before him; and so had wsy.

wBy was not alone in his determination to make Tagore’s Western reputa-
tion during 1912 and 1913; an important lieutenant in the campaign was his
new American admirer Ezra Pound. From 1912 Pound became more and
more closely integrated into the emerging world of literary modernism in
473
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

London. In his early London days he had cultivated those of the last gen-
eration, who would bring him to wBy (Binyon, Plarr, Rhys, Elkin Mathews,
the Shakespears); when this had been achieved, his affinities shifted to
‘les jeunes’ who would become known as ‘Imagists’. This group eventually
extended to Richard Aldington, Ford Madox Ford, F. S. Flint, Pound’s
sometime fiancée Hilda Doolittle, T. E. Hulme, and some of the circle round
Harold Monro’s Poetry Review. Pound was their inventor and impresario,
defining them against what he denounced as the conventional fatuity of the
‘Georgian’ school. In 1912 he suddenly pinned the label ‘Imagist’ on the con-
temporaries he published in Poetry magazine, to their own surprise (‘a group
of ardent Hellenists who are pursuing interesting experiments in vers libre’).
Privately, he put it more sharply: ‘laconic speech . . . Objective — no slither;
direct — no excessive use of adjectives, no metaphors that won't permit
examination. It’s straight talk, straight as the Greek!’** This assertion was an
interim judgement, and he would keep trying out new definitions on the wing.
To many of Pound’s circle, wy seemed by contrast a voice defined by the past
(‘a gargoyle’, according to Ford®). But Pound’s homage to the Irish poet’s hier-
atic authority remained profound if not unquestioning. James Longenbach
has pointed out that his definitions of Imagism (however elastic) owed much
to wBy’s ideas published more than a decade before in “The Symbolism of
Poetry’, and the American’s early verses bore an embarrassing debt to The
Wind Among the Reeds. As ‘the Eagle’, wey hovers over Pound’s early corres-
pondence with Dorothy Shakespear: magnificent, unworldly, very slightly
ridiculous, but — as Pound would have put it— unquestionably the real thing.
WBY was, for the younger generation, a link to what was already the mytho-
logized world of the 1890s. His readings could summon up that aura, as in
one occasion at the Poetry Bookshop about this time:

The dark curtains were drawn across the windows and the room was in darkness except
for the golden light shed on the reader’s table from the two slender oak candlesticks.
From the workshop next door came the muffled beat of the gold-beaters’ mallets. A
ripple of expectation ran through the packed audience, then a deep expectant hush
as the poet stood silent for a moment framed in the candlelight against the dark cur-
tain, a tall dark romantic figure with a dreamy, inward look on his pale face. He began
softly, almost chanting, “The Hosting of the Sidhe’, his silvery voice gradually
swelling up to the final solemn finale.”

wey invoked magic; while for him, his reverent London disciples offered
an uncritical appreciation which was not available in Dublin. There were other
compensations too. By the summer of 1912 he — like several others of the
artistic avant-garde, notably Augustus John — had enjoyed a casual affair
with the beautiful but insipid Alick Schepeler, sending her letters of roguish
474
 GHOSTS IQII-I913
sexual innuendo from Coole.” He also met Pound’s friend the musician
Walter Rummel, and discussed collaboration on yet another version of The
Countess Kathleen. And Pound slipped more and more into the role of unofficial
secretary, reader, amanuensis. His manners remained deliberately farouche (he
unapologetically broke chairs, and at dinner with Eva Fowler chose to eat all
the table-decorations before the meal began”). His aggressive partisanship
had its disadvantages. A casual complaint from wey about the India Society’s
meanness with complimentary copies of Tagore’s book led to such a violent
assault by Pound on Rothenstein that wBy had to step in.
Tassumed that he had done it in the way that is customary among the faint energies
of our dying European civilisation... Heisa headlong ragged nature, is always hurt-
ing people’s feeling, but he has I think some genius and great good will . . . Hercules
cannot help seeming a little more than life size in our European Garden of the
Hesperides. His voice is too loud, his stride too resounding.

‘Hercules’ suggests a formidable dispatcher of tasks and assailant of monsters.

And while their relationship remained that of master to disciple, wey admired
Pound’s scholarship, patchy as it was, and his easy authority about medieval
Romance literature. Though this involved a fair amount of ‘high-hatting’ (in
Aldington’s phrase), it lent substance to his slangy, avant-garde literary man-
ners.” wBy himself knew something about high-hatting. And remarkably,
from 1912 he began to accept small emendations suggested by Pound to his
own work.
This was observed by others in the circle, such as George Hyde-Lees. Long
afterwards, an interviewer quoted her recollections. ‘“Well, Iwas young at
the time, but even I knew that certain words W. B. used no longer had the
same meaning. Ezra did this” — she wrote, as it were, across a manuscript. “He
went through the poems and W. B. accepted his suggestions.” It did not,
however, happen quite so smoothly as that. The first poems whose final
shape was influenced by Pound were five sent to Harriet Monroe for publica-
tion in her new Chicago magazine Poetry in December 1912: “The Realists’,
“The Mountain Tomb’, “To a Child Dancing in the Wind’, ‘A Memory of
Youth’ and ‘Fallen Majesty’ — a distinguished group, created in the onset of
lyrical energy after wBy’s summer of seances.”” wBy gave the poems to
Pound, self-appointed overseas editor of the magazine, who with astonish-
ing insouciance amended them. In ‘Fallen Majesty’ and “To a Child Dancing’
small but decisive changes were made — all the more sensitive since they
affected references to Gonne and Synge.”* wBy initially saw them as ‘mis-
prints’; when he realized what Pound had actually done, he threatened ‘in a
fury’ to withdraw the poems. But he forgave his disciple.” From this point,
November 1912, Pound exercised a variable degree of influence on the final
475
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

versions of WBY’s poems. wBy himself described the process to Gregory in

early January, after Pound had helped him remove “Miltonic generalisations’
from a draft of “The Two Kings’.
He is full of the middle ages and helps me get back to the definite and the concrete
away from modern abstractions. To talk over a poem with him is like getting you to
put a sentence into dialect. All becomes clear and natural. Yet in his own work he is
very uncertain, often very bad though very interesting sometimes. He spoils himself
by too many experiments and has more sound principles than taste.’

The results are probably to be found in his next contribution to Poetry, the
major poem “The Grey Rock’, which he was working on in the late autumn.”
Originally called ‘Aoife’s Love’, it ambitiously combined a reworking of
Celtic legend with a contrapuntal voice recalling his own poetic appren-
ticeship among the Rhymers twenty years before; their personal dissolute-
ness was praised as a concomitant of artistic integrity. It preached the same
moral lesson as his 1910 lecture ‘Friends of my Youth’. Not all the surviving
Rhymers appreciated being fixed into the heroic frieze of wBy’s life, and he
had to issue some hurried disclaimers. The deeply respectable Rhys was
mortified by the speed at which their history was being written, and wrote
pointing out that many of them were still alive and flourishing. ‘Neither you
nor Rolleston came into my head at the moment,’ wBy assured him. ‘One
begins to think of “the rhymers” as those who sang of wine & women — I no
more than you am typical.”
More importantly, new influences were making him review his own
poetic development. As far as wBy was concerned the commitment of
Pound and his friends to a ‘free’ rhythm, based on musical phrases, was sus-
pect. But Pound’s influence would encourage what became one of wBy’s
controversial hallmarks — the disquieting expression of earthy, crude images
in traditional and dignified verse forms. One of the key words whose sense
changed under Pound’s influence was ‘reality’: from this point wBy began to
use it to mean not only Platonic perfection but uncompromising actuality. At
the seance on 18 June 1912 ‘Leo’ had told wsy that in 1914 his work would
change, would ‘swim by itself”. By the end of 1912 the change was taking place.
Ina notebook given to him by Gonne that Christmas, wy inscribed an opening
statement which reflected his (and Pound’s) priorities:

First Principles

Not to find ones art by the analysis of language or amid the circumstances of dreams
but to live a passionate life, & to express the emotions that find one thus in simple
rhythmical language [deleted: which never shows the obviously studied vocabu-
lary]. The words should be the swift natural words that suggest the circumstances

476
 GHOSTS I91I-1913
out of which they rose [deleted: of real life]. One must be both dramatist and actor
& yet be in great earnest.!°
He was ending the year ina state of exhaustion and introspection. His dys-
peptic illness was not yet shaken off; his specialist Avery suspected appendix
trouble and ordered him to lose a stone, on a drastic diet which cut out salt,
sweets, milk, green vegetables, potatoes and spirits. But his intellectual enter-
prise persisted. His trafficking with Leo Africanus, his discovery of Tagore,
the admiration of the younger generation in London, all encouraged reassess-
ment: and at this point he began urging his father to write his autobiography,
revisiting the Dublin of his youth and defining the credo of his artistic genera-
tion. In late November wsy returned to Coole, feeling melancholic; Gregory
was preparing to depart once again with the players for America. Leaving, he
was filled with thoughts of death and age and — in one of his moments of
superb tactlessness — sent her this poem:
If you, that have grown old, are the first dead
Neither catalpa tree, nor scented lime
Should hear my living feet, nor would I tread
Where we wrought that shall break the teeth of time.
Let the new faces play what tricks they will —
Your ghost & mine for all they do or say
Shall walk the stairs and garden gravil still
The living seem more shadowy than they.’“

For Gregory, just sixty years old and about to rejoin her quondam lover John
Quinn in New York, this hardly struck a welcome note. She replied cautiously:
“The lines are very touching. I have often thought our ghosts will haunt that
path and our talk hang in the air — It is good to have a meeting place anyhow,
in this place where so many children of our minds were born — You won't pub-
lish it just now will you? I think not.” He took the hint and kept it private
until Seven Poems and a Fragment ten years later.‘ But for wBy in December
1912, it crystallized the self-image which summed up the year’s experiences:
a ghost haunting his own life.
In this mood, back in London, he was interviewed by the Dai/y News.”
He colluded with the journalist in presenting himself as a survivor of the 1890s,
standing out against the modern world (‘the whole of ancient life cultivated
man. It was an organised pageantry. How different it is today!’). Further, he
denounced poets who wrote about contemporary politics instead of the
essence of beauty; this meant playing to an audience, an ‘entirely destruct-
ive’ process. It is ironic, not to say contradictory, that a week later he would
publish his highly political — and highly contemporary — poem “The Gift’
(later “To a Wealthy Man who promised a Second Subscription to the Dublin

47/-
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

Municipal Gallery if it were proved the People wanted Pictures’) and thus
take his place in the violent public controversy over the question of a new
art gallery for Dublin.
This was a long-standing issue. Fifteen years before, when campaign-
ing for the first loan exhibition of modern French art in Dublin, Russell had
urged on wy the need to supplement their literary enterprise with ‘a new
art movement’, stimulated by ‘the force of good examples never seen here’;
he had, moreover, denounced ‘the apathetic wealthy classes who have not
the civic patriotism of second rate English towns where there are municipal
galleries’."°° wsy had responded with a public letter of support. Over the
intervening period Gregory’s nephew, the connoisseur and dealer Hugh
Lane, had carried on this torch, declaring his intention in 1903 and follow-
ing it through when he tried to raise money to buy the Staats-Forbes collec-
tion in 1904/5. Following a large number of private donations, the Dublin
Corporation had been committed from March 1905 to allotting £500 a year
to maintain ‘a Municipal Gallery of Modern Art . . . for the reception of the
valuable pictures which had been presented to the State’. That year, Lane began
his self-education in modern French painting, adding Manet and Renoir to
El Greco and Corot; but, though he quarrelled with the Royal Hibernian
Academy, he kept up his campaign for a permanent Dublin gallery. In June
1906 the Corporation agreed to maintain ‘temporary premises’, which from
late 1907 were fixed in Clonmell House, Harcourt Street. It turned out that
a special Act of Parliament had to be passed for the Corporation to exercise
the powers which they had assumed. This was done in 1911, and in the mean-
time Lane accepted financial responsibility.
In the subsequent years Lane was knighted, received the Freedom of
the City of Dublin, set up a showpiece home in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea,
turned huge profits by dealing for South African diamond millionaires, and
became even richer — none of which endeared him to Dublin opinion. But he
continued to lavish attention, and pictures, on the gallery-in-waiting. His
bargaining-point was the thirty-nine pictures he had provisionally given
to the gallery, on the condition of a permanent home; they ranged from
Courbets and Corots to works by Degas, Manet, Monet, Pissarro and
Renoir. After much lobbying, the Dublin Corporation had accepted the
principle of a Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, but for Lane, who had
begun already to canvass architects and designers, this was insufficient. In
November 1912 he threatened to withdraw the bulk of his bequest (now
worth £60,000) unless a proper building was raised. Following a Mansion
House meeting on 29 November 1912, a large public subscription was declared
to be necessary, and got under way, organized by a Citizens’ Provisional Com-
mittee. At this point opposition began to be voiced: and, since Gregory and

478
 GHOSTS IgII-1913
Lane were closely linked (his house in Cheyne Walk was now her base in
London), this affected the Abbey. The same people whose resources were cul-
tivated in their own fundraising drive of r910 were now approached once more,
not entirely to their pleasure. Notably, the Guinness magnate Lord Ardilaun
showed a distinct lack of enthusiasm, partly because one of the sites canvassed
for the gallery was St Stephen’s Green park, donated to Dublin by his fam-
ily, and incensed the Lane—Gregory camp by remarking that there was little
evidence ofa public demand for a modern art gallery. Tempers mounted, and
the issue was exacerbated by the insecurities and sensitivities arising over the
advent of Home Rule.
Probably during his stay at Coole in late November and early December,
wsy worked on a poem as a contribution to the campaign; back in London,
he spent some time in the British Museum checking references to Italian
history, since the poem was constructed round the idea of Renaissance cul-
ture to which the Gregorys had introduced him." The first version was
headed “To a friend who promises a bigger subscription than his first to the
Dublin Municipal Gallery if the amount collected proves that there is a con-
siderable “popular demand” for the pictures’. On 1 January, after an evening
with Pound going through it ‘line by line’, he sent it to Lane with an explanat-
ory note, suggesting publication in the Irish Times. Lane, who liked contro-
versy, was enthusiastic. A few days later wsy had dinner with the journalist
Joseph Hone, who promised an accompanying leading article. A Corporation
debate on the subject was imminent; on 20 January they would actually vote
an annual £2,000 grant for the gallery.'"’ With these auguries, wBy advised
Lane to bank on that support instead of throwing down the gauntlet to the
capitalist classes. “He replied that he hated Dublin,’ wrote wey ruefully to
Gregory. ‘I said so do we.” The die was cast, and on 11 January ‘The Gift’
was published, with Hone’s accompanying article. This was poetry as
political manifesto, and its echoes reached further than Dublin Corpora-
tion and the gallery question. The timing of its publication was aggressive,
and actually counter-productive; but the content of the poem was even
more offensive. A fantasy of Renaissance Italy and noble patronage was set
against Ardilaun’s frugality; the tone of aristocratic disdain was compounded
by the Olympian references to ‘Paudeen’ and ‘Biddy’ — symbolizing, through
diminutives of the patron saints Patrick and Bridget, the Irish ‘people’. The
poem’s moral might be taken as a counsel to the elite to ignore the popular
will, and as such, it was bound to arouse anger. Although wy made it clear
privately that the poem was written against the Ardilauns, the person most
outraged by it was William Martin Murphy — the millionaire newspaper
proprietor and transport magnate who had taken a leading part in the anti-
Parnellite movement and who had come to symbolize (not always fairly) the

479
 R
-DERz : ELEC:TION, Ge
ish ~ - ~ z aN perenne
ie pennant:
| (BY W. B. YEATS.)
COLONEL PAKENHAM'S {To » felend who promiaca a bigger aubserip-
WOMEN’S DEMONSTRATION
ADDRESS, tion than hia first to the Dublin Municipal IN DUBLIN.
4 Gallery if the amount collected proves that een emma
there is conpiderablo “popular demand”
LAND PURCHASE AND for the pictures.) ' ENTHUSIASTIC PROCERDINGS.
——o—
TARIFF REFORM, You gave, but will not give again
: Se Until enough of Paudeen’s pence SPEECHES BY LADY POWERSCOURT
By Biddy's half-pennies have lain Mr. J, B. POWELL, K.t.; MAJOB
To be ‘some sort of evidence,” O'CONNOR, J.P.; MRS. GRENVILLE
MR. HOGG’S POSITION, Before you'ys put your guinesa down, HON, MRS, ERNEST GUINNESS, MIS)
: —<+——— That things, iv wore a pride to give, MAGUIRE, AND MRS. J, CRAIC
Ave what the blind and ignorant town DAVIDSON,
| RETIREMENT RUMOURS. Imagines best to make it thrive, Under the auapices of the Women’s Centra
(ee YM OUR SPECIAL REPORTER.) What cared Duke Ercole, that bid Council of the City of Dublin Upionst As
LONDONDERRY, Faipay Niunt. His mummers to the market place, sociation, an +athusiastic meeting in opposi
What th’ onion sellers theught or did tion to Home Rule was held last evening i
The most important naws in connection with
So that bia Plutarch act the pace the Antieut Concert Rooms, Dublin. Thy
the peuding election in Londonderry is the
For the Italian comedies? fact that the large hall was crowded in ever
issue this afternoon of the address of Lieut.-
part was eloquvut teatimony to the strengtl
Colonel Pakenham, the Unionist candidate. And Guidobalde when he made
That grammar achool of courtesies of the oppositio: amongat Irish womei
With the publication of this document, the
Where wit and beauty learned their trade, to anf severance of the Union, There wa
issue is now knit betweea the vival candidates, vamplete unanimity in reiterating the declara
and there de a perceptible quicken of Upon Urbjno’s windy hil, tion uttered xo determinedly in Ulater--
eee ia party circles, the respective organ: tlud sent no runnere to and fro We will not have Home Hule.’ A rersl
isers peaking forward their preparations for ‘That he might learn the shepherd's will; bearing thix inscription was prominently dis
ithe fight. The city remains perfectly puace- Aud when they drove out Cosimo played on the platform, which was effechvel;
i tal, Almost everyone xeeuis to be fixed in tudifirrent how the rancour ran, draped with Union Jacks, ahile a profusion
of tlowera and evergreens made an artisty
‘hte determination tu vote for one or oS ilu sasc the lonrs they had sat free setting to the aceno. Avonvd the hall flog
candidate, and they calody await the call of / To Michelogzo’s latest plon were wlro hung, The proceedings were timec
duty. Bor the Sun Marco Library, to commenve at 815 o clock. but tong befor:
4 that hour every seat iu the hall was occupied
{ The followiry as the text of Colunel Paken Whee turbulent Ttaly should draw
The new Kingstown and District's Women’
lis address» Delrgit in Art whose end is peace,
Eiecions os Dray, 1 wee umanmiously | Tetloge He and jn watural few, Unionist Club was vopreaented by fifty mem
7 adopted as Unionist candidate fur the City of bers. While waiting for the meeting
Ty sie at the dugs of Greeve, begin, the audieave was entertained by th
Derry ata very large public meeting of ele: |
S tors of the cite, held on 22nd Mash, Mie. 3 rendering of juyal and patriotic airs by th
| wsoleit your vutes inmy tevour dam: Yuur epen hand bat shows our loss St. Stephen's Orchestra. As Lady Powers
pan Ulsterman, resident in tir neighboutias | Vor he kuew hetter how to live. court, Allied by the other speakers, tocl
) County uf Antrim, and can shim descent from Lease Paudeenys to their pitch and toss; their places on the platform there waa louc
: Hook up in the sun's eve, ani give eheerimg. Lady Powerseuurt, who presided
What the exultant heart calla goad, paid a touching tobute to the meinery
That some meow day may breed the hest the Dike of Abereoru, aud there was no om
im the hall who did not ce-eche the sentiment
Bouuise you gave. not what they would, When Mrs. Craty Davidse read niessazen 9
Rat the right twira for au cngle’s nest. suppart from Sir Rdward Caren, Mr. J, Hf
i cates ou treiont that tives tot alreais Wo BOYEATS. Campbell, Mr, Jares Chambers, Peofesse
CUO. She is now part of the greatest and | daunary 6th, 1915 Dowden. and the Ulster Weenen’s Uo.ons
ptichest comitiy ip the world. aud can conit Council, there was much enthusiasm Mr
dently exmet die sideration of her yeeds. Powell, Kat a trenchupt sp PD) prose
Df ehe hay do stand alone, Hie reverue he | MU ICIPAL ART GALLERY. a brief but expressive resolutions " We wal
Prould raise. withoat soranely handicapping by | wot have Home Rule.’ It was neconded in at
trades aid industres, would aot sili peanally effective address by Mrs. Grenville, o
ber erosony reauiements. Under the yoosent | FURTHER SUBSCRIPTIONS, Londons and haviies heen sappurted bx Majo
ota Mer expenditure is sa seriously restricted The Manwipal Art Gallery Buiiag Kona O'Connor and: Mise A, T. Maguire, Wes car
tht gov eutliy on the betterment of educa 'Comimithy sat at the Manswa house on} vied with acclimation: A vote of thanks 1
Yous, aralvace, or host vans a Dharstay, che Gh inst, resent ‘ Lady Povorscourt, which was carried on the
gemma U1 frolaund he moter of the Hon. Mis. Ernest tiuinness
1, Mahaliv © Vt) ax the \ svcenied hy Mrs Craig Davidsun. brought t
iS new mat Ge theasn bar Por Ur Soha ROO Con
rations, and a Parlhamedt in Das Pianias Markit. a@ close one tiue most remarkable und aue
stoad of yt nd brates WECS cessfnl nee ofits hind that have bee
ef Sweet my pd ree matponat ae: hell an Publ
finer wt Mise Por
for a long time,
aus anil YooR mere porechiahsm L:
seething these abiuty ta attend Amonyst those present on the plattors
appeal ta 3 de mal wish to see ther ; doo froin Mi Dermod U' Br ea,
WET =
cant ey ko pte poverty and The Me Lads nytt
Start TEN at tho pells.7
the Rake ia WO BS Hailes the Miss Acuett Kur be 8
= LL. J. Stathont. and Mn, Wl MP Carthy, Kt Sereas OB
Paent Ooxitoensuk, be suit tavir own oe ee Pci 2 Milos B
fous of Lowls, The neuttes having beet read and siued, elias ¥ pe 8K Bisa
3 sole ~ piedied he weivea ta du Witla bretarl doles vost AN oan
i the ydestich of sites wae alscussed. ik 13 Mis. Gand. Ue pe and SEs Wynne WD.
Une of the fast duties aa Cn t Gaver p hoped ttt an anmormcement may shaitiv be || Counce, KO. tem
trent xeuld |. ct thoroughly
reform that | Hades a.
3 Uh gee teh ee Wath
seund and deni. ) Mort
te the one sclerted. Meantime. tie | Maw thute.
“oof Minsing before the public the |
ts. eadeee ries ut sich re
Mee
1 atnet teed of xn Iplioms Was i
bortion. to | vdoax Chere iso bat three weeks i eae oe od
id ase effect to the prin j Wo WaMuck 1 No “Phomps :
site Xalae””
Whig fo collect the required amount. Culfes. Loftie bo Noeuin aink Mis, Nazi, Pte
ughout the { Te asits deeded ty ash the Lord Mayor to
it hin Sumi asproal mesting of the City Connell EADY POWERSCOURT,
foam agau Panes.
pt oaceeh a depatation representing the Com The dvesulert, wha was received with ap:
Fae but d vwoeld te ce fa fanch a care weiloatteml. and Jax before ot the! plause. sail she yas sare Chey all Celt very
falls corsidevol pad ano panna r atranygly ihat they hed met on a matter 0
eme tex pranose, aad rcpeetfially to ash
eid Tasarive as would beeeBe th: sverkers) obo
Pe coontry
foemel support of the Corporation fer it, the sreatest coiportince that of withstands
The present Oy venument, by their Act oat
tthe vollection of miadern pictures aud resistung to their atmest the, now, ever
Sa Hogh Lane may be preserved VE TeUSiDEly Gmemibent dager ef the passin.
1909, Nave dalton Jand rirchase in Treland, { eoaah Parhament of the Hone: Rule Bill

17. “The Gift’ (later “To a Wealthy Man who promised a Second Subscription to the Dublin
Municipal Gallery if it were proved the People wanted Pictures’) as first printed in the Irish
Times. Embedded amid news items reporting the gathering Home Rule crisis, unrest in the
Balkans, and the latest meeting of the Municipal Art Gallery Building Fund Committee, it
appears as a deliberate political intervention.

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 GHOSTS IgII-1913
essence of bourgeois Dublin philistinism. Murphy wrote to the press ‘from
Paudeen’s point of view’, asserting the right of ratepayers to say where their
money went and declaring he ‘would rather see in the City of Dublin one block
of sanitary houses at low rents replacing a reeking slum than all the pictures
Corot and Degas ever painted’. ‘I am told that various people answered
Murphy very effectively, wsy told Gregory on 24 January. ‘He merely showed
himself up by the ill-manners of his letters, as my sister says “They always
do”. Unfortunately he is not likely now to listen to any protest against the
tone of the criticism in the Independent. I’ve a couple more poems in my
head, to be written if the Gallery falls through.’ As the tone of this letter
indicates, the conflict had taken a very traditional configuration indeed,
highlighting wey’s developing affinities with Ascendancy values and Prot-
estant traditions. At this very moment, as has been seen, he decided to take
a public line on the dangers of anti-Protestant bigotry in a Home Rule
Ireland;** the campaign over Lane’s gallery, and the direction it took,
must be seen in conjunction with his simultaneous political statements of
December 1912 and January 1913, publicizing his feelings about Catholic
intolerance.
Although the fundraising issue continued to simmer, attention now
shifted to the positioning of the future gallery itself. Lane, whose taste ran to
the spectacular, had become committed to the idea of a dramatic new gallery
spanning the River Liffey, rather like an enclosed Venetian bridge; his friend
Lutyens was working ona design. Though other sites were canvassed (on the
Green, beside Dublin Castle, or on Earlsfort Terrace by the new National
University), a public meeting in February seemed to conclude that agreement
was reached ona Liffey site replacing the metal ‘Halfpenny’ footbridge (then
considered an eyesore, now a much loved landmark). Lane believed he had
the support of the Corporation, the Irish Times and the Freeman’s Journal: but
he needed £20,000, since building the bridge foundation alone would cost
£11,000." The Citizens’ Provisional Committee elected to raise the money,
but wBy quailed a little at Lane’s remorseless ambition, confiding to Gregory
his own preference for the Earlsfort Terrace site. A whispering campaign began
to denigrate Lane’s motives, and to attack Lutyens as un-Irish. Lane, the bit
between his teeth, now began to issue threats. He had been offered, he said,
‘a fine new London Gallery for French art & himself as curator if he would
give [his] pictures to London’. He had recently bought a Degas for a fab-
ulous £4,500; he would withhold it, and the rest, unless the bridge site, and
Lutyens’s plan, was accepted. But by the autumn of 1913, 45,000 was still
needed; and this too affected the Abbey, since Gregory and (less willingly)
wy had guaranteed a proportion of their American tour income for the gal-
lery fund.” Thus personal, political and professional reasons implicated wBy
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more and more closely in Lane’s cliff-hanging campaign to give the Dublin
public what he thought good for them.
It is clear that this was much in his mind through the spring of 1913, even
from chance remarks made in the course of interviews about the Gordon Craig
exhibition organized by the United Arts Club (‘the modern painter leaves
out what everyone can see, that he may emphasise the more what he alone
can see’!"*). On St Patrick’s Day wy sent a powerful letter to the Irish Times
advocating the bridge site, though he regretted not building a gallery adjacent
to the new university, where students could wander amid great art between
lectures (again, an echo of an idealized Italian city-state). A Corporation
debate on the issue was due on 19 March, and on the 18th he delivered a public
lecture, ‘The Theatre of Beauty’, to publicize the Craig exhibition. Here, and
in accompanying newspaper interviews, he made a deliberate connection
between Craig’s aesthetic, his celebrated Russian productions, and the need
to accept the new non-representational art (‘the only real art, judged by
better eyes; it selects the permanent, the important, and it touches the emo-
tions’). But this required a sophisticated understanding — as, paradoxically,
did the aesthetic of genuine folk art. Vulgarity was ‘modern in another sense;
a history of the concept would show that in ancient times only the educated
few understood how to guide the artistic productions which would elevate
the many. To achieve immediate popularity, modern art must necessarily
be insincere.
Many of these arguments had been advanced at least five years before,
in lectures such as “The Immoral Irish Bourgeoisie’."”” But now, though
supposedly referring to Craig's theatre, he was really reiterating the argu-
ment in his Irish Times poem about Lane’s gallery. Murphy may, indeed, have
been in wBy’s sights when he called for a study of the history and psycho-
logy of vulgarity. ‘He thought the psychology of it was the tendency all over
the world to educate men whether they liked it or not, and when they had
educated a man against his will he revenged himself by liking all the worst
things.” While much of the lecture specifically referred to avant-garde
theatrical production, his statements were obviously fashioned as weapons
in the simultaneous controversies which preoccupied him. Reporting on the
exhibition to Craig, he wrote:
In Ireland we have a most ignorant press & a priest created terror of culture. Lady
Gregory & I have lit our little lanthorn & kept the wick alight by solid determina-
tion. We would have found a better public elsewhere but we could not have found
in ourselves & others this determination which exists for the same reason that our
stupid public exists. Ireland is being made-& this gives the few who have clear sight
the determination to shape it.’7"

482
 GHOSTS I9II-1913
Less than a week after his Dublin lecture about the theatre came his
address (probably to many of the same people) on Tagore. And here too
he declared his stance against the debasement of modern politics, and the
lowering of artistic standards for a general audience. Praising Tagore for his
determination to adhere to higher things, wy added:
Do not think Iam condemning politics. They are necessary for Ireland, and I have
no doubt they are necessary for India; but my meaning is — different men for different
tasks. For those whose business it is to express the soul in art, religion or philosophy,
they must have no other preoccupation. I saw all this years ago, at the beginning of
this movement, and I wrote the ‘Countess Cathleen’ to express it. I saw people sell-
ing their souls that they might save the souls of others.12

The analogy was strained, to say the least, but he succeeded in reminding
his audience of his long and contentious engagement with Irish opinion over
questions of artistic freedom. Though the Countess had succeeded in what
she set out to do, he concluded, contemporary soul-sellers did not. Thus
Tagore’s poetry, Lane’s gallery, Craig’s screens were all drawn together in his
mind during March 1913, in aseries of public statements intended to dictate
priorities to an Ireland “being made’, and to declare independence from the
shibboleths of the Catholic bourgeoisie. He wrote to Gregory, in the course
of advising her how to deal with opposition on the current American tour:
I always feel in the end one gains from keeping ones attitude towards ones art & the
world so simple that one can use all ones thought & nota selection. It gives one more
enemies but it increases ones power in a greater proportion . . . [should not perhaps
be so anxious to free myself from all diplomacies if Ihad not suffered so much from
a series of false positions in the past. My last lecture here — that on Tagore — was to
some extent an attempt to free myself from the need of religious diplomacy.'”

In this at least, he succeeded; by now the Leader was attacking the Abbey for
its donation of £1,000 to Lane’s gallery fund, identified by Moran with the
avant-garde pretensions of a self-designated elite.

VI
Ironically, at this stage the question arose — for the last time — of a univer-
sity post for wBy in Dublin. In early April Dowden at last died. wzy sent a
graceful note to his daughter (whom he knew in another persona, as the
celebrated medium Hester Travers-Smith), recalling Dowden’s kindness
to him in his youth, but what preoccupied him was the immediate future.
Gregory counselled postponing his mooted American lecture-tour and

483
18. A Leader cartoon of 5 April 1913, responding to the offer of £1,000 from the Abbey to the
gallery fund. The editor, D. P. Moran, was a temperance advocate who hated the powerful
brewing interests (“Mr Bung’), and the profit-making Theatre is seen as a public house, as in
the opening scene of the Playboy. Gregory is Pegeen behind the bar, the lead Abbey actor Arthur
Sinclair represents her loy-carrying customer, while ‘Pensioner Yeats’ acts as floor-sweeper
and potboy.

awaiting overtures from the Fellows of Trinity: ‘you cd hardly refuse I think
at this Home Rule moment’.’” By early May he had conferred with Louis
Purser, who dangled the prospect of a Chair of Poetry specifically tailored
for WBY, involving seven or eight lectures and £120 a year. wBY wrote to Vice-
Provost Mahaffy on 14 May that he would gladly be considered a candidate
for such a post, but would be more cautious about a teaching chair in literature.
An attractive mirage emerged: Magee would be appointed ‘prof. of literature
with the examinations to do’, while wy gave lectures in poetry. But it was
dissipated by the candidature of Wilberforce Trench, whom wpy considered
a Protestant bigot with reactionary teaching ideas. In any case, he resented
the way that academic politicking interfered with his writing, especially as he
had just produced ‘one of the most passionate things I have ever done’, along
lyric and, he thought, potentially a great one. ‘I have been writing for six hours
without stopping & I wish Dowden had lived another year.’”°
He also resented returning to Dublin from London; as so often, he was
keeping a dual career in view. Already he had lent his name to a London-based
group called “The Society of the Theatre’, involving Augustus John, William
484
 GHOSTS IgII-1913
Poel, Pound, Stanislavski and others, committed to advancing Craig’s ideas
of ‘theatrical drama’.’” By the spring of 1913 he was cautiously in touch with
his old acquaintance Florence Darragh, who held out the promise of large-
scale financial backing for a London-based repertory theatre specializing in
Craig scenery and wsy’s plays: there were plans for an opening programme
of On Baile’ Strand, a Dunsany play and Craig’s old triumph, The Masque of
Love. ‘It would mean a mass of magnificent designs & the connection of my
work (whether it succeeded or failed in the ultimate London performance)
with the history of the stage,’ he wrote unguardedly to Gregory.!2” She must
have flinched, but he was by now canny enough to know that beginnings must
be cautious, and he warned Darragh that her grandiose plans might mean
truckling to debased public taste. (‘I am not talking merely out of my Dublin
experience now, but from my original theory founded on my whole experi-
ence of life.”**) They relied in any case for finance on Darragh’s influence
with ‘rich young Jews who spend £500 a year a peice at the hoziers’; and these
potential angels rapidly dematerialized. wBy kept the project at arm’s length,
offering literary advice only. But initially he had been enthused by the idea:
it seemed to offer not only a showcase for his plays, still underestimated in
Dublin, but a purchase on the world of English high culture where so much
of his reputation had been made.
Other forces drew him back to London in the spring of 1913; and one of
the most magnetic had to do with those memories of the 1890s which had
come to dominate his personal myth, and act as reminders of mortality. One
central figure in his life moved off-stage; in September 1912 Florence Farr,
after a brief period trying to make aliving in the casinos of the French Riviera,
set off to spend the rest of her life in Ceylon, where she improbably took
on the headship of a girls’ school. She would, as she jauntily put it, ‘end my
days in the “society of the wise” as the Vedanta books say one should’.”” The
end would come sooner than expected, since she developed cancer four years
later. And just before Christmas 1912, wBy had heard that one ofhis old acquaint-
ances from the 1890s, Mabel Beardsley, had been diagnosed with the same
disease.
As Aubrey’s sister, Mabel inherited a certain mystique: wBy remembered a
tongue-tied young musician, introduced to her at aWoburn Buildings Monday
evening, saying that it was ‘like meeting King Arthur’.’°° Others recalled her
as jolly, strapping and unshockable. ‘Being Aubrey’s sister little that is hid-
den to most young girls was unknown to Mabel,’ wrote Rothenstein rather
primly, ‘& there was nothing that cd not be discussed.”! wBy had more or
less lost touch with her, but wrote a sympathetic letter (‘I have never seen as
much of you as I would’). From January 1913 he began visiting her mother’s
Hampstead house on Sundays. At first he met other visitors there, as the old
485
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1890s circle regrouped by her bedside; stories and jokes were passed around,
along with memories of outrageous behaviour twenty years before. ‘How her
life, her speech would horrify the pious Dublin people & yet how base & dark
they seem in contrast,” wBy wrote to Gregory. Ricketts, another regular
visitor, made her a series of dolls (a fashionable aesthetic preoccupation of
the time’), fantastically dressed: wBy found her with their faces turned to
the wall when she had Mass said on 13 January. The esoteric and sophist-
icated Beardsley circle, discussing sexual inversion and the Russian ballet,
appealed to him as an escape from Dublin spite and intrigue (he was currently
weathering attacks in the press from Russell’s followers and was incensed by
meeting the co-operativist sage himself, ‘fat and confident’, at Asquith’s on
17 January’). As her strength slowly declined, Mabel kept Sunday afternoons
for wBy alone; the invalid’s ‘passion for reality’ and the gaiety with which she
approached death inspired him to a sequence of short poems, ‘On a Dying
Lady’. Seven were completed by early April. These poems, he told Farr,
were ‘among my best & very unlike anything I have written before’; combining
simplicity and exoticism, they struck echoes of the courtly-love tradition
which influenced Pound (wy told Beardsley jokingly that he disliked his
ridiculous Christian name and would like to have been called ‘Florimond’).
Pound's criticism helped refine the poems, whose original rhyming scheme
he found trite, despite wBy’s defence that it was Elizabethan. ‘Elizibeefan
... its just moulting eagle.’ But wy thought highly enough of the series
to consider holding up his next collection until they could be published.
Good taste apparently dictated suppressing them until Mabel had died,
though it did not prevent him sending drafts to the subject herself, who
indomitably lived on until 1916.1
Through the spring of 1913, while he observed and participated in Irish polit-
ical campaigns and kept a close eye on Abbey affairs, he maintained his very
different London existence: lunching at the Asquiths’, befriending Rupert
Brooke, manoeuvring on the Academic Committee for Tagore’s election,
arranging for the Royal Society of Literature to give the Edmond de Polignac
Prize to his protégé James Stephens.’ His health slowly returned to nor-
mal, though the various regimens had caused a severe weight loss; his cre-
ative energy continued, and by 5 March he had completed ‘The Three
Hermits’. As ever, he was restlessly rewriting early work and urging Bullen
(who now owed him £400 on sales) to incorporate changes into the Collected
Works: it must be ‘a collection precisely [of ]those things I wish to be my per-
manent self’.°’” He was conscious ofa distinct change, a new note, in his recent
poetry. But his public stayed a step behind. In 1913 his Poems, steadily reprint-
ing, were selling more than ever (over a thousand copies, and 880 the follow-
ing year), figures matched by the cheap editions of The Countess Cathleen and
486
 GHOSTS I9II-I913
The Land ofHeart's Desire.** But there was less demand for his recent work.
Anthologies proved that he was still best known for the poems written before
he was thirty.
And he was still searching for guidance. In early April he was seeking clair-
voyant advice and attending seances in Dublin, at the Cousins’ Sandymount
house, with a non-professional medium called Mrs Mitchell — requiring
information, among other things, about the prospects of the Darragh—Craig
theatrical venture.’ On 1 May he told Gregory that he had to be back in
London for seances with Mrs Wriedt on 12 and 13 May, ‘the only vacancies
I could get . . . Iwant to try a very important experiment.’’“° But far more
important to him was his exposure to the automatic-writing talents of a girl
called Elizabeth Radcliffe, to whom he had been introduced by the resource-
ful Eva Fowler.'*1
Bessie Radcliffe’s background was described by a family friend as ‘good,
solid stock, very English, intelligent but not imaginative, decidedly conven-
tional in all their ways’; she herself was ‘an attractive, well-educated creature,
of rather downright speech and with a few remnants of the schoolroom’s uncer-
tain manner’. Her upper-middle-class background, unusual for a medium,
meant that her disapproving family tried to discountenance all publicity.'?
At seventeen or eighteen she became known in the family circle for attract-
ing supernatural experiences, visits from the dead, and poltergeists; but,
like Stainton Moses, Kate Wingfield and other predecessors, her speciality
became automatic writing in foreign or ancient languages not formally
known to Radcliffe herself (though on at least one occasion they were quo-
tations from schoolbooks kept in her parents’ house"). By the middle of
May wey wrote excitedly to Gregory (from Lady Desborough’s house at
Taplow, where he was staying) describing Radcliffe at work. He was ready
to be convinced — especially when authorities at the British Museum (rather
guardedly) attested to the correctness of the various languages reproduced in
her script. Several encounters with Radcliffe followed, and along correspond-
ence in which wy desperately tried to divine messages from the material
poured out by her ‘controls’. A more sceptical observer described one of the
first encounters in Fowler’s London flat, with way looking ‘like a gross
exaggeration of the Idea of a Poet, as laid up in heaven’. The ‘control’ pro-
duced furious scribblings which were deciphered as violent abuse of Radcliffe
herself, with threats to harm her.

Yeats at once took charge. ‘Leave this spirit to me,’ he said; ‘I will exorcise him.’ He
then rose to his great height, and taking a stick — or was it the poker? — he drew a
complicated pattern on the carpet (‘Would you mind moving the tea-table a trifle?
Thank you’) while muttering incantations.

487
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

‘There,’ he said; ‘that will settle him. He cannot harm you now.’ [Radcliffe] took
up her pencil and wrote: ‘Ha! ha! if you think that folly can stop me, you will find
you are badly mistaken.’ The deflation of Yeats was complete. His long, angular
body subsided into an arm-chair. He had the beaten look of a defeated boxer in his
corner.‘
This particular ‘control’ was identified as the seventeenth-century classic-
ist Thomas Creech, easily traced in the Dictionary ofNational Biography,
and wBy remained uncertain of the extent to which unconscious memory
was supplying the information. Still, he persevered and by May 1913 had a
more specific claim on Radcliffe, for he was agonizedly anxious to solve a
sudden crisis in his private life. He had continued to see Mabel Dickinson,
in Dublin and London; they collaborated on spiritualist experiments at the end
of March. And in late May — now aged thirty-eight, and probably becom-
ing impatient — she wrote to him telling him she was pregnant.’*°
He was, as he privately recorded in a notebook, ‘horror struck; there
seemed no possibility of doubting it’. Yet something must have made him
feel he had cause to wonder. He told Gregory of the crisis, and she emphas-
ized that if Dickinson was pregnant he had to marry her.'“° But he looked for
occult guidance too. ‘In the first week of June’ he consulted Radcliffe’s con-
trols, and decided they gave him reason for delay. On 6 June he met Dickinson
in London; there was a violent quarrel, which suggests he expressed scepti-
cism, and then a truce. On 8 June he pressed Radcliffe to ‘interpret the Greek
which you sent me . . . itis very obscure. I doubt if the spirits got all their mes-
sage through . . . The matter Iasked about is of great importance.”*” Phrases
which translated as ‘cruel, cruel, cruel’ and ‘the torch of splendour’ were not
much help; in a series of letters wBy searched for alternative meanings (‘the
matter is of tragic importance’; ‘I am living under much strain & anxiety’).
Finally, as he recorded in his notebook, ‘they said I was deceived & that Ishould
not take the action I had all but decided on. “Deception, deception, deception,
you have said; you are right — Refrain, Refrain, Refrain” were their words.’
This suggests that he presented rather a leading question, though he recorded
that he kept the form of his written inquiry to the controls out of Radcliffe’s
sight, and had left out all names and facts — which might account for her
slowness in producing the answer he wanted. By the time of his unpublished
essay on Radcliffe, written in October, he was referring to these responses
as ‘the most precise and circumstantial answers’. He was at last convinced,
and he must have received a corroborating admission from Dickinson at the
end of June. She was apparently not pregnant at all, if she ever had been.!”
Though he continued to see Dickinson in July, at a session in Eva Fowler’s
cottage Radcliffe’s control obligingly gave ‘a warning (not produced by a
question) against seeing [Dickinson] which caused “strain and hesitating
488
 GHOSTS I9QII-1913
debate”. They spoke exactly as a wise friend would have spoken, but in the
first instance they knew what no friend could have known.’
His wise friend at Coole was more outspoken:
Thank God you are free! It has been a terrible time — I dont think you felt it more
than I did — perhaps not so much — An ugly undignified forced marriage instead
of a sacred & reverent sacrament — You have been saved ‘but so as by fire’ — I cant
sayIam surprised. I had such a strong conviction at times of the ‘deception, decep-
tion, deception’ — & more than that I had especially in waking up at night, a cer-
tainty the whole thing was a myth, but one mistrusts a judgement that goes with
one’s wishes. ‘*!
Later she wrote that ‘this unpleasant business . . . has troubled my thoughts
of you. From beginning to the present it has not been worthy of you.’ WBY
felt much the same, and was accordingly thankful for his deliverance. Dickinson
disappeared from his life, and went on to an English marriage anda respectable
old age.’** His faith in the investigations with Elizabeth Radcliffe had been,
in his eyes, vindicated, and the scepticism which he had tried to cultivate about
the materialization of Leo Africanus was dissipated. ‘Spirit identity’ had
been proved, and the existence of ghosts who could guide him. Later that sum-
mer he wrote in his notebook:
I have the sensation of beings of independent existence, & of much practical
wisdom who draw constantly on modern editions of the Classics (I hope yet to know
what editions) & on modern ideas & use them in the service of their own independ-
ent thought . . . I get the presence of living, independent minds gathering together
a language of thought & symbol out of the books and thoughts of those in associa-
tion with the medium & the medium herself, & drawing about them earth bound
spirits who follow certain obscure tracks of affinity.

They ‘plunge into our world like seabirds that plunge under water & fish’;
and ‘these great beings do not become secondary personalities or create such
in the mind of the medium but in the subconscious mind of an epoch, a fam-
ily, a phase of a race & express themselves through their general thought’.!
Their influence lay behind the known world, affecting it like unseen mag-
nets drawing iron filings into patterns on a sheet of paper.'** Later he would
develop some of these ideas into the system of influential archetypes which
lies behindA Vision. For the moment he was still speculating and - to his own
satisfaction — confirming the information relayed through mediums and
automatic-writing, as well as grappling with theories of telepathy. The mis-
heard, disjointed quality of mediumistic communication was, he believed,
due to long-dead spirits fastening on to the residual conciousness of more
recent ghosts. On 8 October he finished a long essay on Radcliffe’s script,
written for his own reference and updated and revised over the next years,!°°

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though he never published it, and progressively watered down its conclu-
sions. But at the time of writing it echoed the conviction of contemporary
commentaries like Theodor Flournoy’s Spiritism and Psychology and James
Hyslop’s Psychical Research and Survival, mediums like Radcliffe had actu-
ally proved that the spirit lived on.1*° By the time he lectured to the Dublin
Society for Psychical Research on 31 October, he was prepared publicly to
state his conviction: ‘he had the strongest reasons to believe that the soul
survived death, very little changed’. Speaking in detail about the state of the
soul after death, he likened it to the state of sleep, with ‘the dissolution of
personality and the moral sense’ that accompanied dreams.‘*’

He believed that everything done by the dead could be done by the living, if only the
living soul got detached from the body. The soul was suggestable to itself... when
the soul died it went over the most passionate moments of its life. When these
passions exhausted themselves it passed into a state of lucidity, which corresponded
to the state one entered at rare moments in dreams.

The reaction of the general Dublin public may be imagined. When he sent
a letter to the Irish Times protesting against a heavily ironic report (‘we feel
we must congratulate both him and his friends, the spirits, upon their lin-
guistic accomplishments’**), the editor riposted: ‘we agree with Mr Yeats
that life is too short for explanations of his psychical adventures’. Certainly
what is most striking is his need to believe, and his determination to pre-
sent leading questions and suggest likely interpretations, until a pattern or a
‘message’ shaped itself.
Equally impressive is the dividend paid in creative work. The seances of
1912 and 1913 not only lie behind the essay completed in 1914, ‘Swedenborg,
Mediums, and the Desolate Places’; they helped inspire his most sustained
burst of poetic activity for many years, and the collection of poems called
Responsibilities stands as their testament. Under the elliptical, pared-down,
colloquial style (encouraged but not, for all his claims, inspired by Pound)
ran a stream of obscure reference not only to wBy’s personal history but to
his supernatural investigations. The confluence was not always successful;
but at certain points the combination of personal testament and ideas such
as those put forward in his lecture ‘Ghosts and Dreams’ produced a sort of
controlled poetic explosion. There is no record of the exact date of com-
position of “The Cold Heaven’, first published in 1912, but it concentrates
the influences of these years. Staring at a winter sky, desperately looking
back at where his life had gone, the lacerating memory of his failure with Gonne
and his theories of death, ghosts and dreams come together in a passionate
fusion.
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 GHOSTS I9II-1913
SuddenlyIsaw the cold and rook-delighting Heaven
That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice,
And thereupon imagination and heart were driven
So wild, that every casual thought of that and this
Vanished, and left but memories, that should be out of season
With the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago;
And I took all the blame out of all sense and reason,
Until I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro,
Riddled with light. Ah! When the ghost begins to quicken,
Confusion of the death-bed over, is it sent
Out naked on the roads, as the books say, and stricken
By the injustice of the skies for punishment?"

491
Chapter 18: Memory HarsBour
1913-1914

We watch him in these controversial poems of his building up

a legend around himself; a stirring legend that will, I believe,
hit the fancy of the young men of Ireland as the Celtic Twilight
never did.

J. M. Hone’s review of Responsibilities,

New Statesman, 24 April 1915

I
‘IF one can judge by the influence in my youth of Duffy’s “Young Ireland”,
remarked wBy to Gregory in the autumn of 1913, ‘the power of our epoch on
Ireland in the next generation will greatly depend upon the way its person-
al history is written.’’ He made the same observation, using the same
analogy, to Tynan a month later; he felt part of a historic generation now,
like Tynan, publishing precocious autobiographies. A resentful admiration
for the way his old adversary Gavan Duffy had put his stamp on history con-
firmed his desire to create an autobiographical art which would assert the
place of his own tradition in Ireland, as the country moved towards appar-
ent independence. One campaign began with the carefully orchestrated
publication of ‘A Gift’ in January 1913 — a public poem about public opinion
— and climaxed in the October publication of his Poems Written in Discour-
agement, dealing with the struggles of the enlightened against Blind Men and
Fools. Another strategy was to present a personal, intimate history that made
its own claim on the national life. This is the background to the poems pub-
lished in Responsibilities in 1914, many written the previous year: and, still more,
to his own first volume of autobiography, completed at the end of 1914. That
disingenuous masterpiece called down the curtain on a phase in his own life:
it tells us as much about wey in 1914 as about the childhood of a poet in
Victorian Ireland.
It also reflects his renewed interest in his father’s ideas on style, person-
ality and art, which can be traced through their letters (both writing with a
future public in mind). This process was clarified by the publication of
Dowden’s correspondence, which showed the young jBy issuing the same
insouciant assertions that still flowed from his pen in the Petitpas boarding-
house halfa century later. The idea of jy writing his autobiography continued
to preoccupy his son, but — possibly remembering the endlessly unfinished
portraits, scraped down again at the moment of completion — by the summer

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of 1913 WBY was suggesting a book ‘of criticism & philosophy extracted
from your letters & lectures’: talk continued by other means. A sense of per-
sonal history had brought the realization of how much the conversation at
Bedford Park and the York Street studio had formed his own mind — if only
by reaction.
Thus the intersection between personal history and public life lies be-
hind many of wsy’s pronouncements in 1913 and 1914 — even on so anodyne an
occasion as the presentation of the Royal Society of Literature’s Edmond
de Polignac Prize (a hefty 4100) to James Stephens in November, for The
Crock of Gold. As the cynical Richard Aldington observed it, wBy ‘spoke in
his beautiful voice; he expressed Celtic lore with his more beautiful face:
he elevated and waved his yet more beautiful hands. He blessed us with his
presence. He spoke of spirits and phantasmagoria. He spoke of finding two
boots in the middle of a field and the owner of the boots listening for the
earth-spirits under a bush. He praised Mr Stevens’ [sic] Crock of Gold. He
read one of Mr Stevens’ poems, which was admirable as he read it. But
Aldington did not note wpy’s key remark, that Stephens’s book ‘had given
him more pleasure . . . than it could give to another man, wise and beautiful
though it was, because it was a proof that his own native city of Dublin
had vigour and lived with a deeper life’. The idea that Ireland, on the brink
of Home Rule, might at last produce an original and unpietistic creative
literature seemed to him the vindication of what his generation had tried to
do. Synge in his different mode had shown the way, and Joyce’s astonish-
ingly accomplished short stories (which wey was soon to read) would give
further evidence still.
And yet the old limitations persisted, and the old enemies — concentrated
by the summer of 1913 into the question of Lane and his art gallery. The Abbey
was now firmly identified by its directors with the campaign to raise funds;
its donation of money from the 1912/13 tour was described by the Mansion
House Committee as all that prevented the project’s collapse. At a special Abbey
performance in aid of the fund on 9 May, wey stressed that in the current
era they were playing to an enormous audience of the unborn: the future
denizens of a Home Rule Ireland, nurtured on a cultural nationality ‘more
lasting and penetrating than any that Young Ireland could give’. He described
the present moment as ‘the generation in which the Irish people became a
modern people’. By using ‘modern’ in an untypically positive sense, he was
identifying the gallery campaign with Ireland’s artistic and political matur-
ity. At the same meeting Lord Mayor Sherlock rashly declared that Lutyens’s
bridge site was as good as agreed upon.* However, over the next month a reac-
tion set in which — in wsy’s view at least — proved that Irish development
was arrested. The Lord Mayor, a supporter of the Lutyens plan, went to the

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United States for the summer, and in June the opponents of the bridge site
rallied. By 14 July the question was once again in doubt when only fourteen
members turned up to the vital meeting of the Dublin Corporation, less
than the quorum necessary to pass the plan.
wy took up the cudgels, speaking before a benefit performance of Blanco
Posnet at the Court Theatre in London, and thus confounding the theatre
movement, once again, with Lane’s enterprise. Outlining the history of the
projected gallery, he stressed that in order to secure pictures worth £70,000,
Ireland needed to raise a further £10,000 (of which 41,000 had been guar-
anteed by the theatre). But he moved on to wider issues, reminding the Irish
aristocracy that they had left the intellectuals and artists to struggle alone,
and reverting to his theme of independence in the making. But that inde-
pendence was now threatened.
There is a moment in the history of every nation when it is plastic, when it is like
wax, when it is ready to hold for generations the shape that is given to it. Ireland
is now plastic, and will be for a few years to come. The intellectual workers in Ire-
land see gathering against them all the bigotries — the bigotries of Dublin that have
succeeded in keeping ‘the Golden Treasury’ out of the schools, the bigotries of
Belfast that have turned Nietzsche out of the public libraries. If Hugh Lane is defeated,
hundreds of young men and women all over the country will be discouraged — will
choose a poorer idea of what might be . . . if the intellectual movement is defeated
Ireland will for many years become a little huckstering nation, groping for halfpence
in a greasy till. It is that, or the fulfilment of her better dreams. The choice is yours
and ours.*
He would repeat these phrases and images in his autobiography and poetry
for years: they show his belief that the old enemies still waited at the gate.
Though he tactfully omitted the phrase ‘by the light of a holy candle’ after
‘groping in a greasy till’ (reserving it for a private letter to Gregory), his target
was Catholic piety as much as commercial vulgarity. It cannot have helped
to defuse sensitivities in Dublin, but Lane in any case had the bit between
his teeth. After the abortive meeting Lane told the Lord Mayor, ‘I feel that
the Dublin Corporation has killed the goose that lays the golden egg with-
out yet securing the egg.’ He immediately ceded one (comparatively un-
important) painting to the Scottish National Gallery, and threatened to
dispose of the rest to other galleries ‘if the next meeting of the Corporation
is not satisfactory’. This ill-concealed dictation did not help matters, and
nor did his remark that the beauty of Lutyens’s bridge gallery ‘would set a
standard for Irish architects to look up to’. Gregory, always more judicious
than either her nephew or her fellow-director, felt he had gone too far: ‘the
ungraciousness of Hugh and the vulgarity of the opposition and the contempt
shown towards art makes one ashamed as one so often is of Dublin’. Still,

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she added, ‘I don’t see that he can withdraw [the pictures], and from his own
letters I think it was only the ones he has in London the Gallery would lose.’
But this was too sanguine. By mid-August she was ‘at my wit’s end’ about
the gallery. The Dublin Chamber of Commerce had now come out against
the bridge site, but Lane refused to consider any other. The Ardilauns would
not countenance building in the Green, but Merrion Square remained a
good compromise. Gregory felt Lane’s withdrawal of the pictures would
destroy his reputation, vitiate his original promise and ‘discredit all of us
workers’. Interestingly (in view of what was to happen), she was nearly as crit-
ical of Lane’s behaviour as Gonne was — though Gonne put it rather differ-
ently, telling wsy that Lane was a swindling social climber, ‘acting as after
all one expects a jew picture dealer to do — he has lived & made his money
in that world, so I suppose he has adopted their habits of mind & conduct’.
Gregory summed up to Quinn, revealing her own traditional antipathies and
exasperations:
As to the Gallery Idont know what willhappen. There is a sort of materialistic recrude-
scence in Dublin, ‘something useful’ wanted though no money or energy is to be spent
except on convents and churches. The Lord Mayor is being bullied by a vulgar man
called Murphy and Iam really afraid that after allwe may lose the pictures . . . [dont
mind Americans being materialistic because they work with a sort of fiery energy
for what they want. But these Dubliners dont work hard or get up early or take the
trouble even to keep themselves clean, and yet, cry out against any who look from
things visible to things in [vi] sible.’
And in the same letter she enclosed a poem wBy had ‘just written’ in response
to Murphy’s letters. Though he would eventually call it ‘September 1913’, he
had been meditating it since early July and it was drafted by 9 August, on
a visit to Somerset to investigate a medium. The title was probably chosen
to commemorate the date when the Corporation finally rejected the paint-
ings on 19 September.® By late August, however, he had heard reports that
the Corporation would throw out the gallery plan because the architect
was English. He pointed out to Gregory that this, though lamentable, was
a better ground (from their point of view) than Lane’s stubbornness over the
bridge site — since it put the blame clearly on local chauvinism. Here he
echoed a thought from ‘Synge and the Ireland of his Time’ (and anticipated
his poem ‘Easter 1916’): ‘Ireland like a hysterical woman is principle mad &
is ready to give up reality for a phantom like the dog in the fable.”
The poem he drafted in Somerset used the shopkeeping image from his
London speech. And he decided, as with “The Gift’, to place it as publicly
as possible. Once again he arranged publication in the Irish Times through
J.M. Hone, and there it appeared on 8 September, awkwardly titled ‘Romance
in Ireland (On reading much of the correspondence against the Art Gallery)’:

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What need you, being come to sense,

But fumble in a greasy till
And add the ha’pence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone,
For men were born to pray and save?
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone —
It’s with O'Leary in the grave.
Yet they were of a different kind,
The names that stilled your childish play;
They have gone about the world like wind.
But little time had they to pray
For whom the hangman’s rope was spun;
And what, God help us, could they save?
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone —
It’s with O'Leary in the grave.
Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide?
For this that all that blood was shed?
For this Edward Fitzgerald died?
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone —
It’s with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again,

And call those exiles as they were,
In all their loneliness and pain,
You'd cry — ‘Some womans yellow hair
Has maddened every mother’s son’ —
They weighed so lightly what they gave.
But let them be, they’re dead and gone:
They’re with O'Leary in the grave.

All wsy’s recent public pronouncements on Irish history and modern

personality find a voice in this major poem, published in Dublin’s Unionist
paper. O’Leary’s grave (which wBy had not attended for his funeral) now
seemed the repository of noble nationalism. The structure, rhythm and lan-
guage of the poem deliberately recalled — and even parodied — Thomas Davis’s
“The Green above the Red’."® This sharpened the point that for wBy the self-
less romance of nationality was represented not by any Young Irelanders, but
by three eighteenth-century Irish Protestants, whose sprezzatura recalled the
Italian noblemen of “The Gift’: a careless grandeur which would be dismissed

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by modern Paudeens as deluded sexual passion. Theme and subject enabled
him to combine lofty thought and bitter reality, in the manner Pound encour-
aged: flavoured, at least in his critics’ eyes, with the prejudices derived from
Gregory. A note made in wsy’s notebook about this time is relevant:
Great art, great political drama is the utmost of nobility and the utmost of reality
compatible with it. The persons of a drama fall into two groups commonly, the
group where nobility predominates and the group where reality predominates. If there
is too much of the first, all becomes sentimental, too much of the second, all becomes
sordid. Nobility struggles with reality, the eagle and the snake."

By striking this balance, and in its resonance, attack and clarity, ‘Septem-
ber 1913’ stands with the great polemics of literature. Stephen Gwynn was
not mistaken when he sensed ‘a touch of the middle-aged Milton’ about
it.” Perhaps more than any of his poems since ‘Innisfree’, it gave phrases to
the language (‘delirium of the brave’, ‘Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone’).
And it set the tone for Poems Written in Discouragement, which Cuala pub-
lished the following month in a limited-edition booklet. It also seemed to
place a seal on the Lane controversy, confirmed by the Corporation vote on
19 September. The arguments advanced in public debate accused Lane of log-
rolling, described the paintings as voguish humbug, and called for public
energies to be diverted elsewhere. Lane promptly removed his pictures from
the Harcourt Street premises, sending some to Belfast and some to London.
If matters stayed as they seemed, the situation was clear: through the Corpora-
tion’s pusillanimity, Murphy’s enmity and Lane’s arrogance, the pictures
were lost to Dublin.
But it was not quite as it seemed, and the situation continued to change
behind the scenes, setting the terms for endless future controversy. Gregory
and wBy were deeply involved in the débacle: not least because the money
raised for the aborted gallery would, technically, have to be returned to the
subscribers. This presented considerable trouble for the Abbey, where many
of the company had resented making over their profits in the first place. It
had been a bad year, with very low returns on their London season. In early
November some players began agitating to repossess the ‘Guarantee Fund’,
which contained American tour profits held in trust for the gallery appeal.
Rather than open this Pandora's box, wBy wanted to retain the money, pend-
ing the arts policy of an independent Irish parliament. Gregory felt even more
vehemently about not returning it; the Dublin rumour-mill thought she
had ‘a shady scheme . . . to snatch the money subscribed and take it for the
Abbey’, but she really wanted to keep it safe for the next phase of Lane’s
campaign.’* The players, led by Arthur Sinclair, actually reached the point
of threatening to sue her for return of the money, and she agreed to wBy’s

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proposal of legal arbitration (which had worked so well in the final Horniman
imbroglio). However, when the Irish Attorney-General J. F. Moriarty gave
a preliminary opinion favouring the players’ side, and wBy was prepared to
abide by it, she was furious."* Here as elsewhere, the Lane affair released feel-
ings of great bitterness.
But if there were any chance of a gallery being built, the directors wanted
to seize it. And in early November wy explained Lane’s strategy to Gregory:
as with so much else, it anticipated the Home Rule future. Lane wanted to
postpone things until he would be dealing with an Irish parliament rather
than city councillors, meanwhile founding a ‘really great’ international gallery
in London, built round his French pictures. Then, armed with unassailable
prestige as ‘a lever to work the Irish parliament with’, he would make Dublin
an offer it could not refuse on the basis of ‘a completely new collection . . .
he says he is tired of the old one, and knows much more now’. Finally, and —
as it would turn out — crucially, ‘He has remade his will. He has left every-
thing to the modern gallery, but has now left his money to the Irish national
gallery, and his pictures to England.’ (Belfast would get nothing; they had
objected to one of the paintings as it showed a mother with no apparent
wedding-ring.) Lane was a young man, and the world was not at war; the terms
of his will represented a strategic flourish, to be changed with different cir -
cumstances. But it stored up trouble in a way that nobody could anticipate
in the autumn of 1913.
That autumn was further shadowed by ominous developments in Irish
politics. In October the Home Rule bill was preparing for its third passage
through the Commons. The paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force had come
into existence, threatening armed resistance against its implementation, and
in September Edward Carson declared that such a measure would be met
by a provisional government in Ulster. In November a nationalist volunteer
organization was founded in Dublin, involving some political extremists
but rapidly taken under the wing of Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party.
Unsurprisingly, when wey tried to interest the Irish leader in the gallery ques-
tion, he had other things on his mind. But the local Irish crisis in the autumn
of 1913 was ignited by the politics of Labour, as Gwynn indicated to wBy when
telling him that Redmond felt it politically impossible to bring pressure to
bear on the Corporation.
... the important point from his view is that there is no use — in fact, it would be
lunacy at the present moment - to discuss in public the spending of money on a gallery
in Dublin, with the falling-down of tenement-houses and the general starvation. He
thinks that the public, however unreasonably, would be simply furious at the idea.
Unluckily, he does not know or care anything about paintings, and he has been
prejudiced by the line that Lane has taken . . . It is rather heart-breaking to think

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that we could have bought that space near the University and had the whole thing
launched long ago . . . [hope to God that Murphy and the Ardilauns may be damned
to an eternity of the Dublin Corporation."

For by September 1913 Murphy was locked into another kind of struggle
— with his workforce, whom he had forbidden to join James Larkin’s Irish
Transport & General Workers’ Union. The crisis was provoked not by the
original strike of the tram-workers but by the owners’ locking them out of
work — threatening to push large numbers of them over the edge of subsist-
ence as winter came on, in a city whose social conditions were belatedly being
recognized as worse than in any other European capital. This confronta-
tion, against the background of the decaying slum Dublin described to wBy
by Gwynn, mobilized many of wsy’s old friends and enemies. On one side
Gonne revived the unlikely socialist comradeships of her anti-Boer War
days, and Shaw provided support from the stage of the Albert Hall; on the
other, Murphy, the Dublin establishment and the Catholic episcopacy refused
arbitration and closed ranks. The political beliefs of those who supported the
workers were not wBy’s; perhaps their most prominent champions among
Dublin's intelligentsia were Constance Markievicz and Russell, from whom
he was by now estranged. Russell’s great letter “To the Masters of Dublin’
appeared in the Irish Times on 7 October and was reprinted as a broadsheet:
it accused ‘an oligarchy of four hundred masters [of ]deciding openly upon
starving one hundred thousand people’. wBy would not have approved of
Russell’s analogy between an arrogant bourgeoisie and the Irish landed aris-
tocracy, ‘already becoming a memory’, but the manifesto made the connec-
tion between the Corporation’s lack of cultivation and the capitalists’ oppression
(and Larkin had spoken out in favour of Lane’s gallery). Slum Dublin was
unknown to wBy, except perhaps through his protégé James Stephens’s
luminous little novel The Charwoman’s Daughter. But though his poem
against Murphy was written weeks before the lock-out, it was published just
after the employers’ decision, and exploded as a salvo in that battle too. At
any rate, the enemy was the same, and as early as 18 September, lying awake
at night, wBy had ‘got the idea for the letter called “Challenge to William
Murphy”’.’”? What finally provoked his anger into a public statement was,
predictably, clerical interference.
As the locked-out workers’ living-standards declined drastically, British
sympathizers organized by the Daily Herald and led by the left-wing phil-
anthropist Dora Montefiore offered temporary refuge to their children.
Catholic organizations such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians were
mobilized to prevent them leaving, leading to confrontations at the boat-
train on 22 and 23 October. It was claimed that socialist agitators were
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abducting children to godless England; Protestant proselytism was also

alleged, and priests were well to the fore, raiding the public baths where the
children were being prepared for the journey, and interrogating parents at rail-
way stations. They were aided by Catholic notables like Countess Plunkett
and Maud Gonne, who supported the strikers but opposed the removal of
children, declaring her fears of the white slave trade.’* At a peace meeting
on 27 October, wy appeared alongside the Protestant Archbishop, the
Warden of Trinity Hall and other prominent Dubliners. While he spoke pow-
erfully about the conditions of the city’s working classes, he avoided endors-
ing Larkin’s case; impartiality was needed, and the intricacy of the situation
must be recognized. The real target of his speech was an attack on the press
— easily identified as Murphy. However, the Lord Mayor (chairing the meet-
ing) adroitly cut him short, telling him he would find opportunity elsewhere
to ‘express contempt for anyone he liked’.'? The notes wBy made for his
speech survive:

I do not wish to complain of Dublin’s capacity for fanaticism, you cannot have
sincere religious feeling in a not very well educated community without that capa-
city. It is the shadow of enthusiasm everywhere. I do not even complain of the poor
devil of a Hibernian who goes to a railway station to prevent a father from buying a
ticket for his own child . . . 1do not even complain of the priest who shepherds him,
being very certain that the general run of the clergy of all denominations are just
as intolerant as their congregations permit. When I think, however, of the press
of Dublin which is owned by one of the parties to this dispute, and remember how
the nationalist press has printed open incitements, publishing the names of work-
ing men and their wives for purposes of intimidation, and that the Unionist Press
~with the exception of one article in the Irish Times — has been disgracefully silent,
I find no words to express my contempt. The press of Dublin with the plain con-
nivance of the Castle and the Castle police, has deliberately incited, with the object
of breaking up the organisation of the working-class, an attack on the elementary
rights of the citizen, whose like has not been seen in any city of Western Europe
during living memory.”°

Prevented from delivering this thunderbolt from the platform in the Mansion
House, he turned it into a letter to a surprising recipient: the Irish Worker,
organ of Larkin’s Transport & General Workers’ Union. Published on
1 November, wsy’s unexpected manifesto indicted the Catholic Church
and Murphy’s control of the press, and drew a warm response from Russell:
‘I have differed from you in many things but I felt all my old friendship
and affection surging up as I read what you said. It falls on us to make a fight
for social and intellectual freedom.”! Their rapprochement did not mean
complete sympathy; wBy remarked to Gregory a week later that Russell was
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a bad controversialist, since he was ‘only strong in a frenzy’, while their own
‘spirits rise for battles we have not chosen’.” Still, he was on the side where
he belonged and his speech and letter were not isolated gestures: he pressed
for the Abbey to put on a polemical play about drunken policemen, ‘while
the strike is on’. The old enemy had shown himself once more, hoof and horns:
he told Gregory, with ill-concealed relish, ‘sooner or later we'll have to face
the Catholics on the question of sex’.
His mind, as so often, was going back to Synge and the Playboy; and when
wy sat down that autumn to write an explanatory comment for his Poems
Written in Discouragement, he traced, in his systematic way, a pattern which
linked together three great public upheavals in Irish life, and mapped his own
intellectual development against them.” The draft, written with many ex-
cisions, reflects a thought in the process of crystallization:

During the <twenty or> thirty years I have been reading Irish newspapers there have
been three <events which stirred my imagination profoundly> public controversies
which <have> stirred my imagination <profoundly>. One was the fall of Parnell. There
were sound reasons upon one side or the other to justify a man in joining either party,
but there were none to justify lying accusation forgetful of past service, in frenzy of
detraction. And another was the dispute over the Play Boy <& there again there were
sound reasons for one or other side>. There were <natural reasons> sound reasons
for opposing, or for supporting, that violent laughing thing but none for the lies, the
unscrupulous rhetoric spread against it in Ireland & from Ireland to America. The
third was the Corporation's refusal of the <great> building for Sir Hugh Lane’s
famous collection of pictures. One could respect the argument that Dublin with its
poverty &its slums could not offord the twenty thousand pounds the building would
have cost the city <but here again the ignoble thing was not the argument> but not
the minds that made use of it. <One saw the public mind in decomposition &
wondered if it would ever again be a living thing. >

The conclusion of this commentary, constantly rewritten, indicted ‘religious

Ireland’ for keeping ‘devine things’ as ‘a round of duties seperate from life’: a
crossed-out passage asserted, ‘It may well be that Ireland will have to become
irreligious or unpolitical even, before she can change her habits.’ The only
bulwark against middle-class vulgarity was reared up by ‘a few educated men
& the remnants of an old traditional culture among the poor’: he first wrote,
and then excised, ‘we who are trying to educate Ireland’. But he left in the
scathing conclusion, that the Parnellite split first revealed publicly ‘how base
at moments of excitement are minds without culture’. This was retained in
all the editions of his poems about Lane’s gallery. It stands as the record of
his disillusionment with Irish public attitudes, and his readiness — by 1913 —
to confront them from the vantage of unashamed elitism.
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II
That view, moreover, was reflected in his artistic and esoteric life as well. In
July 1913 he had decided to reorganize his English winters: to leave London
and find a base in the country, where he could work uninterruptedly, helped
by Ezra Pound as his secretary.” The plan was inspired by weekends spent
with the Tuckers and Eva Fowler; his original idea was to borrow her Kent
cottage, Daisy Meadow. Here he spent much ofJuly, pursuing supernatural
investigations with Elizabeth Radcliffe. Dedicated to her voices since the
Dickinson imbroglio, he was determined to prove their authenticity. The key
proof could be a message from someone so obscure as to leave no record that
could have been absorbed by the medium through everyday channels. wBy
was excited to receive details of one John Mirehouse, whose motto, family
mansion and wife’s maiden name could be checked independently; further
‘proof’ was provided by the ghost of a nun from Gort who had been in the
Crimea with Florence Nightingale. But the nun’s life turned out to be fully
covered in a book published in 1897, and the Mirehouse details were trace-
able in directories. Only Thomas Emerson, a policeman who committed sui-
cide in 1850, seemed a genuine discovery. wBy ruthlessly used his contacts in
the Asquithean social world (Edith Lyttelton, Eddie Marsh, the Reginald
McKennas) to extract information from Scotland Yard records, and spent much
of July and August making pilgrimages to follow up clues. Long letters to
Gonne, his father and Gregory triumphantly asserted the genuineness of this
phantom, and much of September and October at Coole was spent writing
his long essay on Radcliffe.”
He remained preoccupied by her for years: wearying his friends with her
feats, sending her anxious notes requiring guidance, defending her to a scep-
tical investigator,”” summoning her to Daisy Meadow or Eva Fowler’s London
flat. Radcliffe, like many mediums, would give up her powers when she mar-
ried; unlike Mrs Wriedt or Mrs Piper, she was not in it for financial reasons,
and was determined to avoid publicity. wsy had to write a contrite letter when
he mentioned her gifts, though not her name, in a Dublin speech that
November. Since she had provided ‘the most important evidence I know on
the most important problem in the world . . . I felt that Iwanted to explain
to that gathering of people some of whom I have known all my life that there
was a reason for an added fervour in my manner of speech.’”*
Radcliffe was not alone in being embarrassed by that ‘added fervour’.
After prolonged exposure to wBy’s addiction, Pound complained that when
‘some question of ghosts or occultism comes up, then he is subject to a curi-
ous excitement, twists everything to his theory, usual quality of mind goes’,
and George Yeats recalled in later years that his single-mindedness on the
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issue became a worrying obsession.”’ It may have contributed to a slight
estrangement from Gregory at this time. In March, staying with Quinn in
New York, she had poured out accumulated resentments about wBy — his
cowardice about the Gosse affair, his ‘disgraceful subservience’ to Horniman,
his use of her own work. After the Lane débicle, they disagreed about how
to handle the actors’ claim on the guarantee fund. She reminded him, to his
discomfiture, that he by now owed her £500. Worst of all, a certain constraint
developed over his visits to Coole.
Robert Gregory was technically master of the estate and house since his
majority in 1902; his father’s will was clear on the point, and his mother
often represented herself as managing it until he came of age. But the will
guaranteed her residence for life, and she still held the reins. This suited her
son and his wife, who liked to spend a good deal of time abroad; and the
house had now become an inextricable part of his mother’s life as a summer
salonnieére, an identity which she was understandably reluctant to jeopardize.
Nor had Robert shown any marked taste for estate management. But the fact
that she continued to throw Coole open to wByY for months on end raised
problems. The younger Gregorys had not wanted him there during the latter
stages of Margaret’s pregnancies; and before his visit in the autumn of 1913
Gregory had to ask him, rather awkwardly, if he would mind providing his
own wine, ‘& perhaps a special decanter’.*° Resentment from Robert and his
wife had long been building up, and Margaret Gregory had given her side of
things to a surprised Lady Dunsany three years before:
Apparently Coole was left to Mr Robert Gregory but Lady Gregory continued to
live there and run it and Mrs G accepted the position when she married and now I
think regrets it but is too fond of Lady G. to protest. But Lady G. did say when she
married that Yeats would cease to live there most of the year and he has not ceased
and until now has even had the Master of the House’s room. That at last she has struck
at, but of course their living a good deal in Paris to paint at first must have made it
impossible for her now to alter the position. I know there is no reason why a great
mind should mean a great soul but she related one or two petty meannesses of his
which I should have thought beneath him . . . Mrs G. says that he does not mind
what Lady G’s opinion of him is as he knows she will forgive him anything in the
end, and that he knows the young Gregorys, the real owners, hate his presence and
has no shame about staying on.**
It is unlikely that relations were improved by his attempt to press Gregory
to seances with a Mrs Charlotte Herbine, whose card he kept, appropriately,
in his copy of Ennemoser’s History ofMagic. By contrast, the Shakespear—
Tucker—Fowler circle were deeply sympathetic to these investigations, and it
was while staying with Nelly Tucker at a rented weekend house called “The
Prelude’, Coleman’s Hatch, in Sussex, that wBy found a vacant cottage near

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by. He took Olivia Shakespear to vet it, which must have reminded them both
of choosing a bed for their trysting-place twenty years before. (A year later,
a local expedition together to see a Burne-Jones window at Rottingdean
reduced her to tears: ‘it has carried me back twenty years’, she told him, to
the year they met.*”) At Stone Cottage, he could work up his lectures for
the forthcoming American tour. Woburn Buildings could be redecorated (its
staircase painted dramatically in red and black), though Coleman’s Hatch
was near enough London for him to keep up his Monday evenings. With his
pension, he could afford it; and in any case during 1913 and 1914 his writing
income averaged an exceptional £400.** Pound as amanuensis would save
his eyes, which were giving chronic trouble: one was so inflamed as to be use-
less. And he could, implicitly, declare a certain independence from Coole.
Gregory saw this at once, writing regretfully that he and his companion could
have come to Coole to work. By then it was too late: he had been annexed
by Pound.
Ina celebrated letter Pound loftily told his mother the arrangement would
‘not be in the least profitable . . . Yeats will amuse me part of the time and
bore me to death with psychical lectures the rest. I regard the visit as a duty
to posterity." But he had achieved the dream which brought him to England.
Though still uneasy about Pound’s ‘desire personally to insult the world’, the
Eagle had been domesticated into Uncle William, later one-half of ‘Billyum
& Ez’. Their close connection was solemnized by the £40 prize which Poetry
awarded wy for “The Grey Rock’ in early November 1913, and which he grace-
fully returned (except for £10 to order abook-plate), suggesting that it be given
toa struggling younger poet, and nominating Pound. The three winters they
spent in Stone Cottage, and indeed Pound’s whole London sojourn, would
haunt and sustain the American through the nightmare of his later life. In
the Cantos, written after his incarceration for Fascist collaboration thirty
years later, a radiant flash of memory amid the psychotic shadows preserves
Stone Cottage for ever by conjuring up wBy’s incantatory voice:
so thatIrecalled the noise in the chimney
as it were the wind in the chimney
but was in reality Uncle William
downstairs composing.
that had made a great Peeeeacock
in the proide ov his oiye
had made a great peeeeeeecock in the...
made a great peacock
in the proide of his oyyee
proide ov his oy-ee
as indeed he had, and perdurable

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 MEMORY HARBOUR 1913-1914
They moved in during the second week of November. Pound read to wBy,
helped with correspondence (and posting), took dictation; wBy’s letters sent
from Stone Cottage acquired something of the disciple’s didactic staccato.
They went for walks, and in the evenings Pound even tried to teach the older
man how to fence (‘I encourage myself with the belief that I am growing thin,’
wey told Mabel Beardsley). It was nota total retreat from the world. Woburn
Buildings still celebrated its Mondays, and Radcliffe was firmly told that her
spirits wanted them to meet once a week ‘& ifwe cannot get writing to med-
itate together’.> And the old preoccupations possessed him. Still working
on the essays and notes to accompany Gregory’s survey of Irish supernatural
beliefs, wBy reread Ennemoser’s History ofMagic and Cornelius Agrippa’s
Occult Philosophy, the latter especially provided much about Neo-Platonic
correspondences with the celestial world, solar and lunar spheres of influ-
ence, and divination, as well as the occult power of poetry, the enchantment
of harmonies and the potency of incantation.** Pound introduced him to De
Daemonialitate (supposedly by the seventeenth-century Franciscan ‘Lodovico
Maria Sinistrari’, but really yet another invented text), which supplied potent
imagery of incubi and succubi. They also read together a seventeenth-
century French Rosicrucian romance by the Abbé de Montfaucon de Villars,
The Comte de Gabalis, subsequently translated by Shakespear. From this first
winter, as James Longenbach has shown, the two poets followed a ‘curriculum’.
The winter months resembled a prolonged reading-party: later they would
proceed to Landor, Rennaissance Neo-Platonists, Homer. And from Pound’s
side, wBy’s occult explorations and Gregory’s folktales coincided with his
own interest in Japanese literature, particularly ghost stories and plays, which
in turn cross-fertilized wBy’s search for a new sort of theatre, discovered in the
disciplines of Noh drama. For all his beliefin the sharp shocks of reality, Pound
was also a devotee of wByY’s Ideas ofGood and Evil, and echoed the call for an
esoteric symbolism that addressed an initiated elite, trained to understand.
In November and December 1913 they worked their way through a super-
natural syllabus, whose results would be codified next year in wByY’s essay
‘Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places’.
But worldly matters could not be left outside the door of the lonely cot-
tage ‘by the waste moor (or whatever)’.*” Eternal Abbey problems resurfaced.
Lennox Robinson wanted to give up most of his production and manage-
ment duties, with wBy’s blessing and to Gregory’s relief — but not before
he was responsible for disastrous losses of at least £300 on the winter tour of
1913/14.°° Sara Allgood was as usual threatening to leave for a better salary,
while Frank Fay was once more trying to negotiate a return. There were even
renewed rows about disturbances over the Playboy in Liverpool at the end of
November: to wBy’s fury, Andrew Wilson, currently Stage-Manager at the
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Abbey, colluded in withdrawing the play (‘he should have remembered that
we faught the Castle in Dublin’).*? And way continued to read and criticize
work submitted to the theatre as decisively as ever. The directors had been
expecting great things of the new play from the Ulster ‘realist’ StJohn Ervine,
but wBy dismissed it in a masterly letter accusing Ervine of seduction by Shaw.
Shaw has a very unique mind a mind that is part of a logical process going on all over
Europe but which has found in him alone its efficient expression in English. He has
no vision of life. He is a figure of international argument. There is an old saying, ‘No
angel can carry two messages.’ You have the greater gift of seeing life itself.
Ervine (while privately thinking it odd that wBy could communicate with
ghosts, but not with GBS) valued the advice more than the abandoned play
— especially since wBy came up from Stone Cottage to discuss it.” This was
wy at his most percipient. His help was at this time extended once more to
a much greater writer: at his prompting, Pound approached James Joyce,
who had become immersed in publication difficulties, first with Dud/iners,
thenAPortrait ofthe Artist as a Young Man. Pound now had patronage to bestow,
through the Egoist magazine as well as Poetry, and he also possessed an almost
unerring eye for genius. The Portrait began serial publication in the Egoist
in February, and wey was not alone in recognizing a masterpiece.
After the Irish disillusionments of the summer and autumn, the retreat to
the New Forest restored his confidence. This was infectious: at a seance on
11 December with Charlotte Herbine a spirit told him ‘that I should marry,
that I was better than when he saw me last’. wBy confessed his nervousness
about the impending astrological conjunction but the spirit told him briskly
that his horoscope was incomplete. ‘He said nothing would harm me for the
next seven or ten years when my life would be at its height, or some such phrase.
Thad only begun to find myself in 1910 I had not yet done my best work, in
plays or any thing. He besought me to get rid of “mystery” and symbolism,
all was quite simple.”*!
It could have been Pound speaking, and perhaps, in a sense, it was. Life
in Stone Cottage had provided all wBy needed - or nearly all. Ina fragment
dated 28 December, he wrote
I'd have enough if Heaven would send
Peace in my body and my own thought
And one intimate friend
For the rest is naught.
Since Dickinson no intimate friend had emerged; his chief consolation
was probably the continuing closeness to Olivia Shakespear. But by the time
he left for America in January he could sum up the last months as ‘the best
winter I have had in years — the only winter in which my evenings have not
506
 MEMORY HARBOUR IQI3-I9I4
been a problem & the only winter in which my creative power has been a
conscious pleasure’.
However, the exit from Paradise had been marred by a serpent, in the
predictable form of George Moore. The January and February 1914 issues of
the English Review carried extracts from Vale, the final volume of Hai/ and
Farewell. They were ominously titled ‘Yeats, Lady Gregory and Synge’, and
dealt with those figures as they appeared to Moore’s elaborately astonished
eye ten years before. He repeated private conversations, retailed gossip, and
was apparently determined to out-do his own impressive record of offensive-
ness. The first extract, with tremendous panache, plunged straight into wBy’s
materialization at Lane’s fundraising meeting in 1904, fresh from America,
endowed with ‘a paunch and a huge stride’ and upholstered in a fur coat. Most
wounding of all was Moore’s innocent amazement at wBY’s contempt for ‘the
middle classes’, considering his bourgeois origins.** This came at a sensit-
ive time, when wBy was in the process of rediscovering his family traditions.
And there was more: a picture of wBy reclining at Coole, fed strawberries
by adoring ladies, while reciting ‘Adam’s Curse’ about the back-breaking
work of poetry. There was an unforgiveable report of a railway-journey con-
versation where Moore asked wy if he had ever consummated his love for
the unnamed but unmistakable Maud Gonne (‘the golden-haired Isolde
whom, perhaps, the poet missed or found in Brittany or Passy’). wBy was
recorded as saying, ‘I was very young at the time and was satisfied with . . .’
— but Moore, ina touch of genius, affected to forget exactly what had satisfied
him. Finally, a backbiting evening of Dublin conversation was recalled,
devoted to the subject of ‘why Yeats had ceased to write poetry’. Moore cre-
ated the portrait of an exhausted talent, who had redirected his brilliance into
becoming the impresario of others: forcing Synge to ruin his health by return-
ing to rural Ireland, and masterminding Gregory’s unlikely début.
Breathtaking as Moore’s tastelessness was, WBY saw it would be folly for
him to engage in a public duel; he contented himself by allowing Pound to
write a pseudonymous piece in the Egozs¢, which repeated the points made
by wy in private letters. But Gregory’s position was different. She had felt
a certain fondness for the earlier volume, which described her solicitude for
the young wBy; but Moore had only been sharpening his claws. In the extract
from Vale he managed to infer not only a murky side to her marriage, but a
bigoted girlhood spent trying to convert Catholics.
Augusta abandoned missionary work when she married, and we like to think of Sir
William saying to his bride, as he brought her home in the carriage to Coole, ‘Augusta,
if you have made no converts, you have at least shaken the faith of thousands. The
ground at Roxborough has been cleared for the sowing, but Kiltartan can wait.’ And
the bride may have agreed to accept her husband’s authority for had she not promised

5°7
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

to love, honour and obey? However this may be, the Gospels were not read by Lady
Gregory round Kiltartan. I should like to fill in a page or two about her married life,
but though we know our neighbours very well in one direction, in another there is
nothing we know less than our neighbours, and Lady Gregory has never been for
me a very real person.

This unreality was extended to her writing, subtly deprecated as a patchwork

plagiarism from scholars like Kuno Meyer, masterminded by wey. But the
real danger lay in the charge of proselytizing. Gregory’s mother had indeed
been a violent Protestant, who had attempted to wean local Catholics from
their faith. Though her daughter’s diary makes her own abhorrence of this
quite clear,* Moore’s allegations gave potent ammunition to those Dublin
circles where the Abbey was already an object of suspicion. Heer initial reac-
tion was that ‘there is no answering such things, they must be endured’.* But
wBy sharply disagreed, realizing the danger to the theatre’s reputation if
Gregory were to be identified as an evangelizing Protestant —a charge already
circulating privately in Dublin, as he reminded her. Quinn also cabled advice
to act aggressively. However, Gregory's first remonstration with the publisher
was both timid and naive, admitting that her mother and sister ardently
spread the Protestant word, but that she ‘shrank from any effort to shake
or change the faith of others’. Moore smoothly claimed that he meant no
harm by his ‘banter’. ‘Of course, proselytising is to me a virtue. I am a fervid
proselytiser, as you will see in Vale, if you'read the book.’ Further:
I cannot allow it to be thought that Ilook upon the preaching of the Gospel as a shame-
ful act . . . Ionly said that you had done what Christ enjoins us to do. In your letter
to Heinemann you say that though your mother and sisters read the Bible in cot-
tages, you confined yourself to practical help. This would be interpreted by Moran
and his like ‘that while your mother & sisters read the Bible you distributed tea and
sugar’. The least said on this matter the better.

However, pressed by wsy (who suggested finding a top-class lawyer through

his well-connected friend Clara Huth Jackson*’), Gregory got the offend-
ing passage withdrawn from the published book after threats of legal action.
Lane, portrayed as an eccentric and affected transvestite, similarly forced with-
drawal of statements about his picture-dealing. Moore never forgave either
of them.* Seeking bigger game, he departed grandly to Palestine to research
a scandalous novel about the life of Christ. wBy meditated ‘a serious attack’,
but held it over.” Instead, like his adversary, he took to creative memoir, writ-
ing the poem which would appear as a dedicatory epistle to Responsibilities.
Addressed to his ancestors, it invoked past Yeatses and Pollexfens, relying (not
always accurately) on Lily’s records, and finally apologizing for not carrying
on their line:
508
 MEMORY HARBOUR 1913-1914
Pardon that for a barren passion’s sake,
Although I have come close on forty-nine,
I have no child, I have nothing but a book,
Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine.

In less dignified mode, he added another poem to close this new collection,
which indicted Moore as a ‘passing dog’ relieving himself on ‘all my priceless
things’.*° But ‘Pardon, Old Fathers’, as he told Mabel Beardsley and Gregory,
provided immediate therapy, and concentrated his mind on matters which
Moore could not defile: wBy’s family gods, and the incorruptible world of
memory, mother of the muses.
Long in the future, taking his own refuge in memory, Pound would apo-
strophize his companion as “William who dreamed of nobility’. That dream
of an artistic aristocracy, derived from Ferrara and Coole, was central to both
the poets at Stone Cottage, and Moore’s attack coincided with a deliberately
symbolic demonstration of homage to the ideal, which provided another
kind of therapy. In late November Pound had suggested giving a dinner for
the ageing Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who represented poetic aristocracy incar-
nate. It was originally to be in London, but ‘escaping the usual air of Hampstead
& of literary men’s wives’;*' eventually it was fixed as Sunday lunch in Blunt’s
own country house, Newbuildings Place, on 18 January 1914 in celebration
of his seventy-fourth birthday. Thus it provided another forum for wBy
to affirm commitment to an artistic freemasonry; and those who travelled to
pay homage to Blunt, in a motor-car hired for £5, comprised a delegation of
former Rhymers and aesthetes (wBy, Plarr, Sturge Moore) and young Imag-
ists (Pound, Frederic Manning, F. S. Flint, Richard Aldington). There were,
evidently by intention, no Georgians.
It was a freezing day, but a certain state was maintained. The meal in-
cluded a roast peacock, allegedly at wBy’s request.*” Pound’s address prais-
ing Blunt’s espousal of radical causes mixed up Mazzini and Arabi, and the
container for their poems of homage, a stone casket carved with a recumbent
figure by Gaudier-Brzeska, looked rather odd; Plarr, the ex-Rhymer who
had made an unfortunate marriage, rapidly became de trop and was sent to
Coventry by the others on the way home for his pushy behaviour.*’ But it was
considered a success, worth advertising, and an account was planted out in
The Times some months later.”* Blunt, who drily recalled difficulties with the
Abbey over his play Fand a decade before, responded to his lionization with
aslightly crusty amusement. He claimed he had never really been a poet, had
only written verse ‘when I was rather down on my luck and made mistakes
either in love or politics or some branch of active life’, and preferred to be cel-
ebrated as a horse-breeder. He appreciated their verses of homage, ‘if they
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 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

were verses .. . |waited for a rhyme that did not seem to come’. After some
barbed remarks about wBy’s addiction to blank-verse plays, he toasted the
company — ‘Mr Yeats especially, as I have said the most disagreeable things
to him.’ In reply, wBy spent little time on rebutting Blunt’s charges (though
he instanced his own use of rhyme in The Green Helmet). Principally, he took
the opportunity to identify himself with Pound and the younger generation
(‘we represent, I should say a school, he at one end of the stocking and I at
the other, a very remote antithesis’) and to praise Blunt for declaring in his
early work a poetry of personal utterance, against the prevalent abstraction,
‘the result of the unreal culture of Victorian romance’. As with so many other
statements of wBy’s at this time, this evolved into autobiography:
If] take up today some of the things that interested me in the past, I find that I can
no longer use them. They bore me. Every year some part of my poetical machinery
suddenly becomes of no use. As the tide of romance recedes I am driven back sim-
ply on myself and my thoughts in actual life, and my work becomes more and more
like your earlier work, which seems fascinating and wonderful to me.

Thus wsy and Pound had made their point. It was this ritual homage which
Pound would seize upon in his later poetry of expiation: the moment when
he ‘gathered from the air a live tradition’ remained as a positive act of art-
istic integrity.*° For wBy it meant even more. The visit was a demonstration
of his own place in a‘live tradition’ — back to the Rhymers, and forward to the
new generation, both paying homage to a radical aristocrat from the Gregory
world. It was a bonus to be told by Mrs Fowler that a Foreign Office friend
had said he would ‘never speak to any of those poets again’ for honouring the
old anti-imperialist;”” but the intended audience was the literary world of
‘A. C. Bensonism’, the malicious Moore, and the philistines of Dublin (where
Moore’s attack had been joyfully taken up and widely reprinted). Fortified
by all this, wy set offacross the Irish Sea. The last week of January was spent
dealing decisively with the revolt among the players about the money they
had raised for Lane’s defunct gallery, led by Arthur Sinclair. For all Gregory’s
protests, a compromise was arrived at, and peace restored on the basis of the
Solicitor-General’s opinion, which backed the players.* On 31 January wBY
sailed for the United States.

II]
This venture had been planned long before: arrangements had been completed
with James Pond’s Lyceum agency in early August 1912. Unlike the last tour,
it was not intended to coincide with the Abbey season in America; though
the players were there at the same time, wBy had come to make money on
510
 MEMORY HARBOUR 1913-1914
his own account. Pond had quoted $200 per three-day engagement, and wBy
originally hoped to make £1,000,” later, more realistically, whittled down to
clearing £500. There was a specific reason for this. He was painfully
conscious of Gregory’s revelation that the money she had discreetly lent him
over the years now added up to that sum, and — connected as this was with
their recent coolness — he felt it incumbent upon him to pay her back.
WBY spent an intensive two months lecturing in the East and Mid-West.*
Still estranged from Quinn, he gloomily anticipated a cheap New York hotel
(though he longed to return to the Plaza after his tour ‘if Pond lets me’). He
found ysy cheerful but needy as ever: the old man owed $537 to the Petitpas
boarding-house, where wy ‘spent three evenings & was taught dancing by
several ladies’. The Petitpas debt at once swallowed up $200 of his son’s
profits (followed by £50 the next year).® His repertoire of speeches derived
from those he had given in 1910 to raise money for the Abbey, but were extens-
ively reworked: they were given under the titles John M. Synge and the Ireland
of his Time’, ‘Contemporary Lyric Poets’ and ‘The Theatre of Beauty’. To
his surprise, the last (rewritten at Stone Cottage in November and practised
on two occasions in London) proved most in demand, though he remained
dissatisfied with it, and apparently varied its content from place to place.
As wey told his father, many of JBy’s ideas came into it — notably on the way
personal content defined great poetry. But its chief object was to categorize
the two main types of drama, poetic and realistic, and to relate the technical
innovations of Craig and Reinhardt to the return of the poetic play. This was
fairly standard, but the influence of recent events (and the company of Pound)
may be traced in his comment that while ‘realism was readily grasped by the
uncultured mind’ of democracy, ‘the reaction against democracy was creat-
ing an aristocracy of good taste’. Maeterlinck and D’Annunzio were cited
as playwrights who would dramatize ‘the inner being’; the expression of
beauty was related to a dialectical struggle, quoting Ibsen’s dictum that ‘all

* He arrived on 6 Feb. and stayed at the National Arts Club until 1 Feb., speaking at the University
Club of Brooklyn on the gth, the Poetry Society on the roth, the League for Political Education on the
uth. On 12 Feb. he lectured in Montreal, moving on to Toronto for a Gaelic League occasion. On 15 Feb.
he was in St Catherine’s, Ontario, on 16 Feb. he spoke at Buffalo, on the 17th at Wells College; on the
18th he attended a seance at Mr and Mrs Roland Crangle’s, and on 19 Feb. he spoke at Detroit. On 20
Feb. he was at Cleveland, on 21 Feb. at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio; he was in Chicago from 23 Feb.
to 2 Mar. Here his engagements were: 23 Feb., Twentieth Century Club; 24 Feb., University Lecture
Association (with an address to a small group of Irish Americans in the afternoon or evening); 26 Feb.,
Fortnightly Club and Book and Play Club; 28 Feb., Teachers’ Association and Northwestern University.
The Poetry Banquet was on 1 Mar. On 3 Mar. he was in Memphis, 5 Mar., Cincinnati (the Women’s Club,
and a Drama League dinner for 200), 6-7 Mar., at Pittsburgh, 9 Mar., Washington DC, 10 Mar., New
York, 12 Mar., Washington, Conn., 13-16 Mar., Amherst, 17 Mar., Yale, 18 Mar., Stamford, Conn., 19 Mar.,
Amherst again, 20 Mar., Montclair, 21 Mar., Orange, NJ 22 Mar.—2 Apr., New York. He spoke on 23 Mar.
to the Drama League, 24 Mar. at Philadelphia, 25 Mar. at Brockley, 26 Mar. at the University of
Pennsylvania. He spent the last few days at his own devices, sailing on 2 Apr.

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art is a battle with the phantoms of the mind’. Thus Mrs Campbell, ‘in ordin-
ary life . . . like a pirate in a cave, always enforcing her authority’, excelled in
playing selfless parts; Gregory, who lived her own life ‘in heroic obedience
to a self-created iron law’, wrote of even wicked characters ‘with infinite
indulgence’; Synge ‘tasted all the bitterness of dying that he could reach out
and find new beauty’. ‘Great art comes not from thought, but from ecstasy.
And ecstasy always co-exists with pain.’ The artist must confront reality, avoid-
ing sentimentality and emotionalism. This could be done by a great realist
like Flaubert, but not by a Galsworthy; and his audiences were left in little
doubt that the ‘poetical’ dramatist came nearer the essence of things than either.
On previous tours wByY’s lectures had been promotional, explaining the func-
tion and history of the Irish literary movement. In 1914 he provided some of
this material, fighting the Playboy war over again and describing the Irish play-
wrights’ discovery of traditional speech. But he was chiefly concerned with
presenting a personal testament. It was part autobiography — the friends of
his youth, yet again. ‘If poetry is to be a personal utterance, there must be per-
sonality, and personality needs a disturbed life for its development, for, as
Goethe says, “by action, not by thought, we know ourselves”.’ The Rhymers
found ‘action in dissolute lives; he ‘attributed his own salvation to the excite-
ment of Irish politics’. Nor did ‘personality’ stop there:
If I need the most complete external exposition of any man’s life I cannot give him
a greater memory than isin that life . . . But if] give an exposition of my own mind,
I am the spectator of the ages. The Tale of Troy is quite near to me, probably much
nearer than anything I read in this morning's paper . . . [Poetic language expresses]
a vast symbolism, a phantasmagoria going back to the beginning of the world, and
always the Tale of Troy, of Judea, will be nearer to me than my own garden, because
I am not limited by time. I am as old as mankind. Out of all that rises the inner art
of poetry, the language of music and the arts, which is not the natural language.”

This recalled Wilde’s Decay ofLying, and his celebrated comment that one
of the greatest tragedies of his life was the death of a character in Balzac; it
struck an echo back to the lessons of the nineties. This was not an altogether
welcome resonance in the America of 1914. Unsurprisingly, some audiences
were reported as finding him difficult to understand. The private reaction of
an undergraduate at Amherst may have been broadly representative:
One side of me was embarrassed, made uncomfortable, perhaps even offended by
the stance, the pose, the theatrical quality — us Anglo-Saxons weren't supposed to
do things that way —and another, I hope more sensitive side, was mightily impressed,
awed, fascinated by the intonations of the music, the risings and fallings, pauses
and resumptions beyond anything we could be told by spelling and punctuation
marks.

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 MEMORY HARBOUR 1913-1914
Though wey was treated with great respect and gravitas, press coverage was
much scantier than in 1903/4, or rg11. But he was expressing ideas which would
dominate in his work over the next decade.
He was also responding to current events. Before leaving, he had defined
his objective as reaching ‘my own countrymen in the United States, imply-
ing that he would carry the controversies of recent months into Irish American
terrain. As it happened his lectures avoided these issues, and his audiences
were in the main university students and literary societies, not emigrant asso-
ciations — even though Pond’s brochure was printed in green and bedecked
with harps and shamrocks. The question of censorship arose both in his lec-
tures and in interviews (Maeterlinck had just been placed on the Index); in
a New York interview he praised the ancient Greek attitude to sex (‘the most
healthy of all peoples’) and remarked ‘the man who is sex-mad is hateful to
me, but he was created by the moralists’. And in Detroit on 19 February he
gave an interview on the Irish political situation, guardedly optimistic. ‘It will
be fortunate for Ireland if a compromise can be arranged by which Ulster will
remain, under home rule; for this Ireland will have two parties, of fairly equal
strength, in its political affairs, and a much better administration can be
expected under that condition.’ He later remarked that the Unionist leader
Carson (as MP for Trinity College) had no right to advocate Ulster’s cause
at Westminster, and in the event of Home Rule would be in the position of
a traitor; he must even now be looking for a convenient exit from an ‘excess-
ively awkward position’. The expectation of Home Rule had changed the nature
of nationalism.

There was a time when every young man in Ireland asked himself if he were not
willing to die for his country. Ireland was his sweetheart, his mistress, the love of
his life, for whom he faced death triumphantly. That is the theme of my ‘Kathleen
ni Houlihan’. And it is not over-drawn, as those who know Ireland may attest. But
Ireland has changed. The patriotism of the Irish is the same, but the expression
of it is different. The boy who used to want to die for Ireland now goes into a rage
because the dispensary doctor in County Clare has been elected by a fraud. Ireland
is no longer a sweetheart but a house to be set in order.

Just before he left he told a New York reporter that the Ulster crisis would
actually be conducive to a settlement, ‘because the reaction from the display
of militarism would advance the common sympathies of English and Irish
democracy’. Democracy could not afford to be halted by military force, he
declared, and would vindicate its supremacy over armies and aristocracy.
(It should be noted that, though he had earlier condemned ‘democracy’ in
artistic terms, as encouraging shoddiness and sentimentality, he clearly saw
it as a political good.) But he favoured the recent proposal to allow Ulster to

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vote herself out of a Home Rule parliament after ten years, because he
thought that by then the province would be reconciled. ‘He favoured Home
Rule as a step, although he said he was a Nationalist.’**
His opinions were also solicited on current trends in poetry, and he took
the opportunity, without naming names, to deliver a pronouncement on
Pound and his circle:
My contemporaries lived wild lives with the manner of bishops. Nowadays I see
about me young men of twenty-four or twenty-five who live lives of comparative pro-
priety in the manner of bandits. On[e] friend wears the cloak of an Italian student,
Two have given up wearing hats because they say they have never found headgear
to suit them. Poetry is once more full of passion and audacity. Yet these young men
have not yet classified themselves. It will be a full ten years before we shall be able
to measure them.®

Later, referring specifically to Pound, he remarked ‘the very keenness of his

intellect will make his apprenticeship along one’ —a quintessentially Yeatsian
compliment. He also revealed an admiration for Conrad (‘a great novelist’)
and, less expectedly, for Arnold Bennett’s O/d Wives’ Tale (‘a masterpiece in
a perfectly different art’). But he was dismissive about American drama, and
the transatlantic literary scene in general. ‘I would say that in America you
have no self-conscious literary class whose members write for the appreci-
ation of one another, such as existed once in New England. Such a class
tends to produce excellence in literature, but I do not find it here.’ More than
once he told them they suffered through being distant from Paris, the origin
of ‘nearly all great influences in art and literature’.
This tactlessness hints at a certain dissatisfaction, and he was often tired,
bored and lonely. The Moore controversy followed him; though his replies
to reporters were dignified (‘he hinted that jealousy was the motive of the attack
but did not attempt an answer’), he spoke bitterly about it to William Phelps
at Yale, and fell out with his father over the latter’s indulgent attitude on the
subject.*” As the exhausting tour wore on, several observers noticed his with-
drawal into abstraction, shaking himself out of a trance in order to perform.
(At Amherst, probably bored beyond endurance, he told his hosts that he was
accompanied by a spirit being in the form of an invisible ‘little green elephant’.®)
There were few refuges, though a particularly successful seance in Buffalo pro-
vided much needed respite. He was happiest in Chicago, staying for a week
with Harriet Monroe and enjoying a great success. Hundreds came to hear
him speak at Northwestern University (and hundreds were turned away).
He gave six lectures around the city, attended an Abbey performance of The
King’s Threshold, and was generally lionized; here alone there was widespread
newspaper coverage, and he had to evade a posse of reporters when he went
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to visit a medium in Edgewater. He lectured on ‘magic and mysticism’ and
declared his commitment to ‘Christian mysticism’. He also spoke to a
small group of a dozen influential Irish Americans, explaining the import-
ance of not boycotting the Playboy. Finally, on 1 March, Poetry gave a banquet
for more than a hundred people in his honour, including some visiting
Abbey people like Lennox Robinson and young American poets such as
Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay, whom wy singled out for praise in his
speech. Lindsay treasured this as ‘the literary transformation scene of my
life’.”” wBy also spoke of Pound, once again forecasting a long apprentice-
ship but citing “The Return’ as the most beautiful poem written in free verse.
His speech hinted that Pound’s values had joined those of Synge in his own
aesthetic message:

If your American poetry is ever to be great it must be humble and simple. Your poets
must use the fervour of their lives in the work, must breathe into their verses. The
poet must give his nature as it is— the evil with the good. Try to get rid of poetic dic-
tion and all that is artificial. Let the readers encourage their poets to be simple and
not to try to preach and deal in the abstract.”

None the less the intelligence and energy of the Chicago literary world
pleased him, and only there did he seem to rediscover his pleasure in America.
Moving on to Memphis, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh was a disappointment
and Ernest Boyd, meeting him at a Washington reception, noted yet again
his abstraction. “He had taken flight from his ignominy ina species of trance,
leaving the shell of himself to pay the penalty of greatness.’
‘Greatness’, by now, clearly hung about him. His Montreal audience in-
cluded an old Bedford Park neighbour, Georgina Sime, who had known him
as a vague and (she thought) somewhat pathetic youth a quarter-century before.
When he took the platform, she was astonished. ‘It was not Willie Yeats but
William Butler Yeats who confronted me . . . aman in middle life, a man calm,
self-possessed, with an ample dignity of his own, whose tailor was clearly
of the highest rank in his profession.’ She was struck by how little attempt
he made to impress his audience, standing apart and expecting adulation,
which he received in full measure.” Francis Hackett, sharing a railway journey
to Philadelphia with him, equally remarked his self-presentation even in
private: hieratically pronouncing opinions, moving his hands, staring raptly
ahead. ‘When I talked he suspended his animation, like a singer waiting for
the accompanist to run down.’”* (He did, however, express great interest
when Hackett told him about Jung’s theory of England’s national superi-
ority complex.) Hackett was mesmerized by wBy’s monologue; he talked
brilliantly of John Mitchel, approving his denial of the dubious Victorian
god of ‘progress’, and believing (incorrectly) that this anticipated Carlyle.
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Yet his nationalism seemed moderate and constitutionalist: he liked Asquith,

and thought Home Rule inevitable, with the aid of British public opinion.
As for the United States, his prejudice came through again: in America, cul-
ture was seen as a possession of the prosperous. But his interest was caught
by everything, down to the lack of billboards at the Pennsylvania Station, and
his aphorisms ranged from the insistence of Chicago plutocrats on tangible
art to the kind of women who marry artists. Hackett emerged from the rail-
way carriage dazzled, but feeling he had never quite connected. “The Yeats
I met did not meet me.’
His friends saw a different side, and one of them now re-entered his circle.
When he returned to New York on 10 March, a letter was waiting from John
Quinn: at the urging of Dorothy Coates (currently ill with tuberculosis), he
wanted to make up their quarrel. ‘I have always felt that apart from intellect
you were always generous in your sympathies and full of humanity and that
your heart was in the right place.’ wBy answered at once. Though he was about
to leave yet again for Amherst and Yale, on his return to Manhattan they were
reunited and wBy moved into the familiar apartment (now hung with aston-
ishing Post-Impressionist paintings) for the last ten days of his stay. He and
Quinn were more or less inseparable for this time, ‘like brothers together’,
JBY reported to Lily. For Quinn’s part, he found wy “as boyish and as good
a companion as ever’: ‘that droop of the head and apparent abstraction’ were
simply a defence against boring strangers. And Quinn exerted himself to make
wBy’s last week entertaining dinners, enjoyably louche company at Petitpas,
a luncheon given by the Bourke Cockrans at the St Regis, and finally a great
dinner thrown by Quinn at Delmonico’s. The thirty-eight guests included
yByY, the Bourke Cockrans, the Theodore Roosevelts, James Huneker, Judge
Cohalan, Charles Dana Gibson, the expatriate Rhymer Richard Le Gallienne,
and wsy'’s old school friends Johnston and Gregg. Guests received a pri-
vately printed pamphlet of nine wBy poems, with a studio portrait by Arnold
Genthe. Here, wy gave his last speech (scandalizing Judge Keogh: ‘why John,
he must be a regular pagan!”).” The next day he boarded the Adriatic for home.
yBy saw him off; at the last moment, ‘with five minutes to spare’, his son sud-
denly begged him to return too, ‘he paying all the expenses. When I resisted
he suddenly said “I wish you would write me a series of letters out of which
I could make a book.” ’”° wBy had been pressing the idea on him for months,
but the sudden appeal on the dockside was what stuck in the old man’s mind.
As wy left America, he was preoccupied with how to sustain his eternally
improvident father. And he and Quinn began to work out the principle of
an arrangement which would last until jBy’s death: way would send the
great collector a steady stream of manuscripts, for which Quinn would pay
money into a trust fund, and out of that fund subsidize By — whose money
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problems loomed over wsy’s departure from New York, just as they had
dominated his arrival.””
There was another financial arrangement to be made, but a more gratify-
ing one; after his return he was able to repay Gregory her £500. She replied
in one of her best letters, at once graceful and magnificent, in the manner of
a Henry James heroine. But as in James, there was a subtle aftertaste of moral
blackmail:

As to that money, I am rather sad — I was much happier in giving it than I shall be
in getting it back - Remember no-one knows one word about [it] — & never wd
have known ~ so you are giving it of your own free will, & I am all the more touched
by this because you have worked so hard for it & for me —I dont pretend that it is
not of importance to me, it will straighten out some difficulties — & more than this,
it was money | should have in all likelihood have invested, & have for my children,
had I not thought it a better investment to help you to health & leisure, both as a
service to Ireland & to creative literature —.’8

Once again she subtly indicated that, for her, supporting his work was like
rearing a family. The old bond was reaffirmed between them, after the
constraint of 1913 and 1914, and this made all the miseries of his Amer-
ican tour worth while. But he was completely exhausted, and felt he could
never face another lecture: a mood which, at the same time, he ruefully knew
would pass.”

IV
Back in London wsy picked up the threads of his life, returning to the
Shakespear circle, where Pound’s long-awaited but perilous marriage to
Olivia's daughter at last took place on 20 April. The hunger for mediums
was unappeased; while in Canada he had managed to attend seances, notably
with Mrs Wriedt on 14 February. (She provided good value, bringing in
Synge with messages for Gregory; a sceptic might note that wBy had just
lectured on the Irish Theatre, and that Gregory’s memoir Our Irish Theatre
was currently in the bookshops.) In London Eva Fowler introduced him to
a priest with access to a ghost immune to threats of exorcism, relics of the true
cross, and (Samuel Butler-style) a revolver.* In less ironic mood, his friend
R. W. Felkin identified one of Radcliffe’s voices for him as Anna Luise
Karsch, who — he was told — initiated Goethe into Rosicrucianism: George
Hyde-Lees was set to looking up details about her, and Radcliffe promptly
asked for a reading-list on Rosicrucianism, which wBy ingenuously helped
to provide. Anda month after his return, on 8 May 1914, he went to Paris with
Everard Feilding of the Society for Psychical Research.
They attended seances with the famous Mme Juliette Bisson, who specialized
Sey
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

in theatrical effects (cabinets, ectoplasm, spirit photographs, nude mater-

ializations), but whose collaborations with a shady colleague (‘Eva C’) had
recently been exposed as fakes.*! Unsurprisingly, wBy and Feilding found their
experiences with her ‘entire failures’. They were, however, merely awaiting
Gonne’s return from Colleville in order to travel on 11 May to the village of
Mirebeau, near Poitiers, where Feilding had been authorized by the Vatican
to investigate a supposed miracle. Religious pictures in the sacristy of the
local church had been producing drops of liquid blood, the roof of the church
dripped with gore at the elevation of the Host, and miracles had taken place
at a Calvary which the Abbé was building on a neighbouring hill.* The cir-
cumstances were classic: an introverted rural community, a priest at odds with
his bishop, a cult of the Sacred Heart, scenes of mass excitement, and a
supernatural call to build ‘a great church’ — a basilica of thirty-three domes,
one for each year of Christ’s life. And the blood, when later analysed, was not
human; even at the time of the investigation, wBy was considering ways in
which the Abbé Vachére could have faked the manifestation, or deceived him-
self, though he thought ‘a sceptical explanation difficult’,
But the importance he placed on the adventure is shown by a long report
which he dictated when they returned to Paris. Undertaking a spiritual quest
in Gonne’s company was a matter of great personal significance to him,
underlined by a gnomic message from the priest: as they left Father Vachére
told him urgently to ‘learn some French and come again, for I am too old to
learn English and I wish to talk to you’. The whole episode was reminiscent
of the atmosphere presciently evoked in The Speckled Bird. Father Vachére
informed Gonne that he had been told by a miraculous voice that she would
come and live by his church in Mirebeau some day; as for wBy, he reported
to Gregory, ‘I am it seems intended for a mystic apostolate the voice used this
strange sentence “if he does not give his intelligence to me, I will take his
intelligence away & leave him at the mercy of his heart”.’** (Gregory sharply
replied, “That sentence is the long cry of the church’s — give us your intellect,
to save your soul.’**) As Gonne recorded it, the Abbé (who had been told his
visitor was a great Irish writer) ‘said, pointing to Mr Yeats, “Tell him our Lord
says he must write for Him. He must become an Apostle of the Sacred Heart.
He will have special help for doing this”’—a message repeated in various ways.
‘Then pointing to me, he said, “elle a le coeur”, and to Mr Yeats, “il a l’intel-
ligence”.”*° This echoed their mystic marriage of long before. For wzy, the
images of sanctity and the messages from God reminded him that ‘a few
days before [I] had schemed out a poem, praying that somewhere upon some
seashore or upon some mountain I should meet face to face with the divine
image of myself. I tried to understand what it would be if the heart of that
image lived completely within my heart, and the poetry full of instinct full
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 MEMORY HARBOUR 1913-1914
of tenderness for all life it would enable me to write.’ Back in Paris, the
‘scheme’ was entered into his occult notebook:

Subject of poem. Now Iknow what it is I have sought in the dark lanes of the wood,
always thinking to find it at every new corner: what I have sought on the smooth sand
of little bays of the sea, places delightful under the feet; what I have sought behind
every new hillock as I climbed the shoulder of the mountain I have sought that only
Ican see the being that bears my likeness but is without weariness or trivial desires
that looks upon far off things, bearing its burden in peace

It would become the conclusion of Ego Dominus Tuus’, a philosophical dia-

logue about art and personality not finished until December IgI5.
I call to the mysterious one who yet
Shall walk the wet sands by the edge of the stream
And look most like me, being indeed my double,
And prove of all imaginable things
The most unlike, being my anti-self,
And standing by these characters disclose
All that I seek; and whisper it as though
He were afraid the birds, who cry aloud
Their momentary cries before it is dawn,
Would carry it away to blasphemous men.*
Thus the messages from Mirebeau were related to guidance from Leo
Africanus, now worked closely into his continuing argument with himself
(in America he had told Hackett his lectures would not be turned into essays
but dialogues, ‘of a man wandering through the antique city of Fez’®”). His
link with Gonne had been strengthened too; staying with her in Paris after
the Mirebeau adventure, he was impressed by Iseult’s literary gift, and offered
to edit a book of her prose poems. As often before, sexual and supernatural
excitements coincided, maintained by no less than six seances with Juliette
Bisson, which produced ‘extraordinary’ effects: ectoplasm materialized in great
quantities, with agonized convulsions on the medium’s part, and spirit pho-
tographs were taken. He returned to London at the end of May, with much
to think about — particularly in view of his essay ‘Swedenborg, Mediums, and
the Desolate Places’, to which he would devote the summer. On 6 June he
was once again trying to find guidance from Leo Africanus via Mrs Wriedt
at Cambridge House.
There was also a London production of The King’s Threshold to oversee,
with marvellous costumes by Ricketts: visiting the painter just after his return
from Paris, wBy impressed him by the lucidity with which he discussed
British public morality, the hypocrisy of the mob over Parnell and Wilde, the
hypnotic effect ofa popular catch-cry (complicated in the Wilde case by ‘the

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Britisher’s jealousy of art and artist, which is generally dormant but called into
activity when the artist has got outside his field into publicity of an undesir-
able kind’*). This probably reflected his reading of Mrs O’Shea’s recent book
about her life with Parnell, but it also refined the ideas in his notes to his new
collection of poems, Responsibilities. Cuala produced this in May r1914;”°
Macmillan would eventually publish a fuller version incorporating The Green
Helmet poems and the rewritten Hour-G/ass in 1916.
The volume was carefully constructed. Its title was derived from the first,
anonymous epigraph: ‘In dreams begins responsibility.’ Allegedly from an
‘Old Play’, it echoes the assertion in his 1912 lecture ‘Apparitions’: ‘Dreams
are irresponsible things and the medium is, therefore, an irresponsible per-
son.”' The second epigraph, from Confucius via Pound, also referred to the
reality of a dream-world. But the contents of the book were relentlessly per-
sonal, and even formally autobiographical. Right up to proof-stage in April
wey had been altering the order of poems and reframing the whole collec-
tion between his dedicatory poem to his ancestors, and the envoz against
Moore. Nor was the collection dedicated only to Yeatses and Pollexfens:
the first poem, “The Grey Rock’, was both an attack on ‘the loud host’ of the
Griffithites in Ireland and a memorial to the Rhymers (or to what wBy had
decided they represented).”” Here too he was casting himself as the survivor
of a tradition. His adaptation of different poetic modes was seen in sev-
eral poems (like “The Two Kings’, “The Three Beggars’, “The Hour before
Dawn’) combining a narrative form reminiscent of Ferguson with a pared-
down modern language suggesting Pound’s editorial pencil. Although Pound
himself, infuriatingly, chose to dismiss “The Two Kings’ as uselessly Tenny-
sonian when reviewing the volume, it was carefully balanced in apposition
to “The Grey Rock’. Obscure as the result sometimes was, a powerful per-
sonal voice expressed itself through laceratingly direct imagery. There was
also a group of poems for and about Gonne — and, strikingly, Iseult (“To a
Child Dancing in the Wind’, ‘A Memory of Youth’, ‘Fallen Majesty’, Friends’),
while supernatural visions were indicated in “The Mountain Tomb’ and
“The Magi’.
But the collection centred on the public poems provoked by the gallery dis-
pute. For way, Lane carried on the essential tradition of nobility in patronage,
as Parnell represented nobility in politics; and the two were directly connected
in “Toa Shade’, again deliberately located in September 1913. And the formal
repudiation of mean lives and bourgeois values was echoed in the images of
beggars, wildness, sexual freedom. ‘Running to Paradise’ (also written in the
miraculous month of September 1913) expressed this with a rhythm and dic-
tion reminiscent of much simpler poems in his first collections, and ‘The Witch’
delivered the same message with radical compression:
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 MEMORY HARBOUR 1913-1914
Toil and grow rich,
What’s that but to lie
With a foul witch
And after, drained dry,
To be brought
To the chamber where
Lies one long sought
With despair.

Revising it for republication by Macmillan in 1916, wBy substituted ‘some

stale bitch’ for ‘a foul witch’; this was objected to by an editor, and to Pound’s
annoyance wBy agreed (‘much as Idesire to see the vocabulary of the seven-
teenth century restored I prefer to leave martyrdom to the young who desire
it’).”* But the impulse proves his determination to rid himself of the late-
Victorian ‘embroidery’, now debased by imitators. ‘A Coat’, intended to end
the collection before he added the closing lines about Moore, declared his
intention as clearly as possible:
Song, let them take it
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.

Responsibilities, especially taken with the Green Helmet poems, is a strik-

ingly autobiographical collection, full of addresses, recollections, manifestos.
It is also extraordinarily rich and dense in texture: if less coherent than The
Wind Among the Reeds, it announced a savage energy as well as phenomenal
recent creativity. Moore’s allegation that wBy’s poetic days were over could
have received no more ringing contradiction. But it inevitably divided the
critics. Clement Shorter in the Sphere saw it as ‘a painful example of W. B.
Yeats's decay as a poet’. Ford Madox Hueffer grudgingly admired the harsh-
ness and modernity of this new voice.”° Pound, of course, hailed it (with some
lofty reservations) in Poetry. Robert Lynd in the Manchester Guardian under-
stood it as a new departure, verse laboured ‘with a deliberateness like that of
Flaubert in writing prose’; like several other reviewers, he noted the impor-
tance of family influences and Jpy’s ideas. But the most perceptive com-
mentary came from Joseph Hone, who had helped arrange the original
publication of “The Gift’ and ‘September 1913’ and was himself working on
a book about wBy’s poetic development. Hone asserted that the Collected Works
of 1908 had ended a chapter; the importance of that publication was not that
wey had said all he had to say, but that what he said would now be said dif-
ferently. This had been hinted in The Green Helmet and ‘Synge and the Ireland
of his Time’; it was proved by Responsibilities. wBy’s search for a public had
produced not only a new political viewpoint but an ‘individual protesting voice’.
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It may be that Synge saved Mr Yeats for Ireland when he suggested that poets should
use the whole of their personal life for material if again they would be read by strong
men and thieves and deacons, and not by little cliques only. Mr Yeats may not have
found an Irish audience; but he is more than ever preoccupied with the thought of
one, or he would not be writing these typical poems in which all his personal experi-
ence is bound up with Irish events.”°
“The whole of his personal life’ is indeed there: Gonne, Gregory, Lane, pol-
itics, the occult, and the struggle to achieve artistic clarity out of it all through
a new language. That autumn, as he completed his essay on Swedenborg and
mediums, he told Farr it was the last project which would require research:
‘henceforth I shall make all out of myself’.”” Towards the end of his life, in
a famous late poem, he would declare the need to search back into his own
experience and emotions, ‘where all the ladders start’: but the process had
taken shape a quarter-century before, in this landmark collection of 1914.
As reviewers puzzled over it in the summer, he was preparing for
Coole, but Ireland was not apeaceful refuge. With Home Rule on the statute
book, events proceeded to crisis: gun-running for paramilitaries in North
and South climaxed in the terrible events of 26 July, when a company of the
King’s Own Scottish Borderers fired on a crowd of demonstrators, leaving
three dead and dozens wounded. This was a Rubicon: its tragic effect is pre-
served in Jack Yeats’s powerfully elegiac painting Bachelor's Walk, In Memory.
Nationalist feeling in Ireland ran dangerously high. But as a last-ditch con-
ference met in London to arrive at a compromise over Ulster’s intransigence,
Europe descended into international war. The day after its declaration, on 5
August, wBy wrote to Robinson, ‘I wonder how the war will effect the minds
of what audience it leaves to us. Neitsze was fond of foretelling wars for the
possession of the earth that were to restore the tragic mind, & banish the mass
mind which he hated . . . In Ireland we want both war & peace, a war to unite
us all.”* The idea of war uniting all the Irish was Redmond’s strategy too: he
declared the whole-hearted commitment of nationalist Ireland to the war effort,
hoping to defuse Ulster’s hostility to Home Rule and to profit by any post-
war settlement. For the moment, the legislation was postponed and the
deadlock remained.
WBY’s own reactions were personal. He worried at once about Gonne,
thankful to hear she was safe in the Pyrenees, and then apprehensive once
more when she returned to northern France to nurse the wounded. He also
feared the results for the Abbey, with English tours stopped and audiences
diminished; in a letter to the Irish Times he appealed for support from local
patrons. He retired, as intended, to Coole in late August, where he walked in
the woods and counted the swans on the lake, but further travel plans (Austria
and even India) had to be cancelled. A journalist, engaging him on the subject
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of war in October, found him vague — but not too vague to refuse to sign a
protest to Germany from ‘men of letters’ (probably the Royal Society of Literat-
ure).”” This detached approach persisted. He avoided invitations to subscribe
to war-effort publications, and when the Abbey was asked to put on charity
performances ‘for the Belgians’ he drew up a careful policy of requiring the
usual fee and then making a ‘voluntary’ donation from the company itself. As
to the larger issues, he saw the conflict as a battle between the ideas of the New
and Old Testament (Germany representing the latter) and, more concretely,
was struck early on by the incompetence and ‘useless heroism’ of British
officers. ‘England is paying the price for having despized intellect, he
told the no doubt sympathetic yay. “The war will end I suppose in a draw
& everybody too poor to fight for another hundred years though not too
poor to spend what is left of their substance preparing for it.” But so far it
affected him only slightly. Back in London, he happened to be in the Bank
of Ireland during the first Zeppelin raids, and was invited to take refuge with
the directors, but his chief reaction was to note the modesty of their lunch.
He also approved of the appearance of the blacked-out streets: ‘not one light-
ed advertisement of Bovril’.’°' But he was surprised by the preoccupation with
the war in every conversation — unlike the talk in the Stephen’s Green Club
in Dublin, where it seemed extremely far away. He himself sustained this
approach in Woburn Buildings and Stone Cottage (where he and Pound
planned their second winter). In late 1914 the war still seemed to hima strange
interlude where people endlessly told each other untrue stories.
But this would change, as the carnage lasted longer than anyone ex-
pected, and attitudes altered with it — especially in Ireland. The Volunteer
movement soon split over Redmond’s endorsement of the war, with the
minority Irish Volunteers taking an advanced IRB line. An early warning
of polarized feelings came in November. wsy had come back to Ireland to
speak at the Thomas Davis centenary meeting of the Trinity College Gaelic
Society on 17 November. One of the other speakers was to be Patrick Pearse.
Pearse’s revolutionary opinions had moved from culture and education to
politics: he was now in IRB councils, and known for emotional Fenian
speeches — and for his opposition to the war effort. Mahaffy had just been
elected Provost and, at his most offensively reactionary, forbade the students
to have ‘a man called Pearse’ at their meeting on the grounds that he was ‘a
declared supporter of the anti-recruiting agitation, as it appeared in the “Irish
Volunteer” ’.'°* The Society stuck firm, refusing to alter their platform, and
regretting that ‘the teaching of Thomas Davis, which at least represented the
gospel of free speech and liberty of conscience, should have borne no fruit in
Trinity College’.’”
The whole matter put wey in a difficult position. He realized the sensitivity
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of the situation; after a long history of attacking Trinity and its ethos he
had very recently mended his fences with the Fellows, including Mahafty
himself. He wired the students that if they insisted on Pearse, he should be
chaired by Canon Hannay (the novelist ‘George A. Birmingham’, who was
both a Gaelic enthusiast and a playful sceptic about advanced nationalism).
This would ‘keep them out of further trouble with the college’.* But it was
not enough. The event was forced to move outside the walls to the Antient
Concert Rooms, and wBy had to fulfil his commitment, delivering a “Tribute
to Thomas Davis’ and by his presence implicitly endorsing Pearse.'°’ However,
he took great care to steer this support away from politics. He praised Pearse
for ‘doing much for Irish literature’, and emphasized Mahaffy’s contribu-
tion too; but the Provost had forgotten a vital principle, by ‘refusing to listen
to a scholar on his own subject, even though they greatly objected to his pol-
itics’. Pearse’s alleged anti-English and anti-recruiting views were men-
tioned; if true, ‘he was as vehemently opposed to the Unionism of Dr Mahafty
as he was to the politics of Mr Pearse, but he would like to hear Mr Pearse
on Davis’.’°° wBy went on, rather surprisingly, to attack the ‘evil influence’
of O’Connell, but also to condemn Mitchel for preaching hate of England
instead of love of Ireland. ‘Hatred of England soon became hatred of their
own countrymen as when they learned to hate one man, perhaps for a good
reason, they hated probably twenty men for bad reasons.’ Replying, Pearse
reversed this message: Mitchel’s Jai/Journal, he said, was ‘one of the holy books
of Ireland: the last gospel of the New Testament of Irish nationality, as Wolfe
Tone’s Autobiography is the first’. This was prophetic, as was the rough recep-
tion awarded Tom Kettle, who had joined the British army to fight in France.
Holloway noted wsy’s unconcealed boredom during Pearse’s ‘deadly
monotonous’ speech. As his own words proved, his views of advanced nation-
alists had hardened; he saw Griffith as ‘a mischievous personality, better
out of the country’,’”’ and his dislike of Pearse was probably exacerbated by
Gonne’s admiration for him. But he disapproved of censorship and did not
identify with the war effort. According to Lily, ‘He could not get out of it.
He says he hates Pearse’s politics. The government he says want the Military
authorities to put down certain papers. The Military want the government
to do it."°° wBy’s own account to Gregory shows how determined he was to
hold the ring for ‘respectable’ opinion, as well as his scepticism (at this point
shared by many) about Pearse’s politics.
All went well and was quite unimportant. Russell wrote a long eloquent letter which
the chairman (Gwynn’s son [Denis] ) refused to read as the Society he is president
of consists of students of the National University and he did not think it right to
critise T.C.D. I made him get Kettle as Kettle is now in the army and you may have
seen in the Irish Times the noisy reception he got. I have been very anxious as I have

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to think of our Abbey stalls. I got in a great many home truths not in the final draft
of my speech and amused myself by making them cheer for Nietsche [sic]. They
applauded wildly when the chairman said (he was thinking of Pearse) a lot of Irishmen
seemed to be possessed with the idea of dying for their country (he meant it was an
hysterical emotion). I got him to ask all those who wanted to die for their country
to hold their hands up. One man did amidst laughter, Pearse made a long mono-
tonous speech about Emmet and Wolfe Tone. I hear that he once said to his school
‘I dreamed last night that I saw one of my boys going to be hanged. He looked
very happy.”
This brush with Dublin politics hinted at antipathies and confrontations
which were hardening beneath the surface, but wBY was as yet unconscious
of them. He returned to England with relief. There was more decoration to
be done to Woburn Buildings, and he spent several days at Brighton with the
Tuckers before removing himself to Stone Cottage, with both the Pounds.
His supernatural investigations since 1909 had brought him back into Golden
Dawn circles, probably through Felkin, who now presided over the Stella
Matutina division." In mid-October wey studied new rituals to advance
to a higher degree; and he had been joined in this involvement by George
Hyde-Lees, whose induction into the Order that year (as ‘Nemo’) began under
his sponsorship.
Also in October, at Coole, he had finally finished his long essay ‘Swedenborg,
Mediums, and the Desolate Places’, though it would not be published until
Gregory’s Visions and Beliefs in the West ofIreland was ready in 1920. It stands
as a record of his preoccupations in these years, and his reading in modern
spiritualists (Hyslop, Myers, Lodge, Flournoy) as well as ancient occultists.
Above all, he was determined to present folk-stories as ‘an ancient system of
belief’, echoing the implications of anthropologists like E. B. Tylor and
Frazer as well as devotees like Evans Wentz, and echoing a controversy
between Edward Clodd and Andrew Lang twenty years before.'" Like Lang,
wey argued that psychical researchers and anthropologists were confronting
the same reality. And he felt it equally important to assert the seriousness of
spiritualist inquiry; for all the seedy deceptions practised in Holloway and
Soho, there remained ~as in folktales — the ‘gravity and simplicity’ of the idea
that the dead are all around us, and that there are spirits who can guide us.
Thus he made connections back to his earliest passions: Blake, ‘who grows
always more exciting with every year of life’, Boehme, the Neo-Platonists,
Paracelsus, and finally Swedenborg, who was, in his turn, related to the
American medium, Andrew Jackson Davis. There are echoes too of the
Stone Cottage curriculum (‘a Japanese poet’ is invoked, along with Pound’s
translations) and of Freudian speculations on dreams and the unconscious,
absorbed through the Journal ofthe Society for Psychical Research. Swedenborg,

525
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

WBY points out, defined the unconscious mind, ‘a discovery we had thought
peculiar to the last generation’. The core of the essay, however, relates Irish
fairy belief to the themes and theories of spiritualist investigation — not very
satisfactorily. Manifestations at seances, like the stories of second-sighted coun-
trymen, were relayed with a deliberate lack of analysis and scepticism; the tone
was very different from his contemporary unpublished essays on Elizabeth
Radcliffe and the Mirebeau ‘miracle’, which employed the pseudo-scientific
sobriety of the SPR style. None the less, the essay is an impressive personal
synthesis, not least for the beauty of its language and the powerful evocation
of a dimension in which ‘we are all in a sense mediums’ and may appeal to
guiding spirits. And his own life is firmly placed in the frame, from the open-
ing sentence. ‘Some fifteen years ago I was in bad health and could not work,
and Lady Gregory brought me from cottage to cottage while she began to
collect stories . . .. Unlike the accompanying essay, “Witches and Wizards
and Irish Folk-lore’, a rather scrappy compilation offaits divers from occult
reading, the Swedenborg essay is a defiant instalment of autobiography.
Accordingly, it not only echoes Responsibilities, published at this time; it also
complements the work which had obsessed him since the summer, and which
he moved to Stone Cottage to complete. This was an account of his child-
hood and youth.

Vv

When wey sat down in London during the tense summer of 1914 and
began to write about his childhood he was completing a long process of self-
examination, concentrated since 1912 but going back at least to the aftermath
of Synge’s death. This helps explain the limpid flow of the prose, and the sharp
edges of the framework. But it was also stimulated by the fact that Tynan and
Gregory had recently published memoirs, the recent savaging from Moore,
his long interrogations and analysis of ghosts and dreams, his disillusionment
with modern Ireland, and his readings in Stone Cottage, including Joyce’s
Portrait, whose influence may be traced in the child’s-eye impressionism of
his opening passages.'” From the beginning he was determined to write ‘not
autobiography in the ordinary sense, but reveries about the past’.!"* Above all,
the book begun as ‘Memory Harbour’ is a meditation both on personal history
and Irish history, as well as on the making of a mind: written at a time when
he was firmly convinced that he and his friends ‘would live as a generation’.
As he reached the end, he wrote ruefully to zy about modern artists ‘who
have overthrown my world by substituting sensation for sentiment. The gen-
eration of the mangel-worzel has followed that of the green carnation, &
I am growing old.’
526
 MEMORY HARBOUR 1913-1914
Once he began writing, the book possessed him. A letter to Beardsley repeats
what he wrote to many confidantes at this time:
I have been writing my ‘Memories’ — they will stop at my twentieth year for after
that I could not write freely—I should have to be unkind or indiscreet. I have never
written anything so exciting, for it runs in my head all day. It brings before [me]
many little strange events from earliest childhood that have shown what Ican only
call supernatural interference.!"°

By 9 July he had written twenty-four pages, expecting to produce an essay

about twice that length in all. But ten days later he had written fifty pages,
‘vivid and strange’, and was completely gripped by it. ‘I have never written
anything so exciting, for it is the history of my mind.” Even an attack of
neuralgia would not stop him; by the end of the month he thought the first
draft all but finished. At Coole he turned aside from it to finish his Swedenborg
essay, but he returned to it in mid-October, and continued to add to the text
until the end of the year, when he dictated it to Pound at Stone Cottage.”
In writing it he was transported back to Sligo. From the first he was deter-
mined to call it ‘Memory Harbour’, and to illustrate it with Jack’s painting
of the same name ~a central image of their Sligo childhood, painted just after
their mother’s death in 1900. “That picture is my frontispeise & in a sense my
text’.""* ‘It was the Rosses Point as Jack saw it as a child,’ Lily remarked:
the sun shining, the thatch like gold, a ship coming to anchor, the pilot boat going
out, the sea captain in his shore going clothes off to town on a car, the Island, the
light-house, everything visible and everything happening at the same time and all
at its best. The Rosses Point to us as children was paradise, & I think to us all when
we look back is as Jack painted it.”

Unfortunately, the title had already been used, by Filson Young; though wBy
tried to keep it, and Cuala initially announced it under that name, it was
changed to ‘A Revery on Childhood and Youth’, and finally Reveries.?° The
book became a family enterprise, with illustrations by Jack and yBy (produced
by Cuala in a separate folder), printed by Lolly, and reliant on anonymous
contributions from Lily. wsy pursued his cousin Lucy Middleton for recol-
lections of supernatural experiences in Sligo, but he was above all dependent
on Lily for family lore as well as memories. ‘He picked my brains,’ she told
Ruth Pollexfen. ‘Most of the early part is my memory, not his, and I am very
glad to have helped, and don’t tell.” He also relied on her judgement, and
wanted her to see the finished draft. More reluctantly, he felt it should be
read by Jack, but he was determined to keep its contents from Lolly until the
typed copy arrived at her printing-press. As it was, changes were made even
at proof-stage. He realized the delicacies involved, and did not want to offend

527
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

their Sligo relations unnecessarily: Lily made him remove a description of

their aunt Agnes Gorman’s terrible visit to Bedford Park in a state of manic
delusion, and wBy’s guilt at informing her ‘keeper’ (‘she had put her trust in
us and we were going to betray her’).’”” But he was determined to stand by
what was ‘essential to my picture” — the artist’s child to the end.
His own reaction to Tynan’s autobiography a year before had alerted
him to his contemporaries’ reactions. While finding it ‘careless & sometimes
stupid’, he had been moved by the portrait of himselfin youth; in the letters
she quoted he ‘recognised the thought, but the personality seems to me some-
one else’.’** His own account would chart the creation of that youthful per-
sonality, from the standpoint of the man he had become. At the same time
he was very conscious of the readership he wished to reach. (When he began
the next instalment he first thought publication would have to wait for his
death, ‘but found after writing some hundreds of pages that one does not write
so well for so remote an audience’.'”) He had no doubts about the impor-
tance of his autobiography: he had made his feelings clear in his lecture of
1910, when he announced that a poet's ‘life is an experiment in living and those
that come after have a right to know it’. In Reveries this echoes back to his
early youth: ‘I often said to myself how terrible it would be to go away and
die where nobody would know my story.’ This was no longer a danger.
He had already been written into history by Tynan, Gregory and Moore,
while books devoted to his work had appeared or were being written by
Hone, Forrest Reid and the ‘absurd’ Horatio Krans.!2° And he had realized
— and repeated over and over again — that his generation would stand out
in history, as the Young Irelanders did, and not be ‘detached figures’. As he
completed Reveries, he confided to Gregory his determination to help fix this
immortalization. ‘I think it is partly with that motive I am trying for instance
to improve my sister’s embroidery and publish my father’s letters. Your biog-
raphy when it comes will complete the picture.””” The day after finishing his
memoir, spending Christmas at Coole, he wrote to BY:

I have brought them down to our return to London in 1886 or 1887. After that
there would be too many living people to consider, & they would besides have to be
written in a different way. While I was immature I was a different person & I can
stand apart & judge. Later on I should always, I feel, write of other people. I dare
sayIshall return to the subject but only in fragments. Someone to whom I read the
book said to me the other day ‘if Gosse had not taken the title you could call it
“Father & Son”’.. . You need not fear that I am not aimable.'28

A long campaign lies behind the lovely little book which Cuala produced
in 1915,'”” but it is artfully concealed. In Paterian fashion, the style competes
for attention with the subject matter: it is tentative, almost languorous.
528
 MEMORY HARBOUR 1913-1914
Impressions float into the child’s mind: a noise, a colour, an outburst of tears.
The effect of ‘reverie’ was carefully constructed by checking letters, interrog-
ating Lily, and looking up genealogies; but in this, as so much else, wsy’s artistic
ambition was to apprehend ‘reality’ by going beyond the limits of ‘reasoning’
and achieving a passionate insight through lived experience. This is the
rationale of his autobiography: since 1912 he had written over and over again
that the history of the past era would be shaped by personal memoirs.
So even inthe child’s-eye view of Merville, expanding out to Rosses Point
and the Sligo countryside, there is a sense of impending threat, explosions off-
stage, dislocation to come. In the background the Pollexfen clan loom against
the landscape, defining the world; at their centre is the old seafaring grand-
father, preparing — like Pope Julius — his tomb. The mundane reality of
Middleton & Pollexfen as property developers, town councillors and urban
Protestant bourgeoisie is irrelevant. Though no false claims of aristocracy
are made, they emerge as figures of archaic distinction and overwhelming
personality. The Yeatses are also evoked impressionistically — old pieces of
silver, clerical traditions, a family tree which someone used as a spill to light
his pipe. In New York, still smarting at Moore’s aspersions, he had persuaded
his father to talk about family traditions, and to itemize the family treasures
which disappeared when Sandymount Castle was broken up. ‘Once he used
the phrase “we had great family influence”.”"*° The characterization (notably
of George Pollexfen) is sharper than anything in his early fiction, proving that
he had read Balzac to advantage. And his father strides negligently through
it all, the tension between him and his wife’s family openly admitted, along
with his improvidence. His attitude to wsy, in whom he inspired ‘admira-
tion and alarm’, was delineated in terms which would hurt spy when the book
was published. He ‘terrified’ his son ‘by descriptions of my moral degrada-
tion and humiliated me by my likeness to disagreeable people’. The book begins
with unhappiness and sustains the theme throughout: a misery ‘not made by
others, but a part of my own mind’. Hamlet is cited, not accidentally. And
themes are traced which forecast the pattern of his later life, notably the
presence of the supernatural: those voices heard from the air in his early
childhood.
If one concern is to create personal identity through family background,
another is to establish family identity by relation to Irishness. Here too the
Kulturkampf developing in Irish life over the previous decade influenced
wBy’s intention. Working from Lily’s annotations made on the back of
family prints and engravings, he sketched the Yeats background of Marl-
borough generals, captains of yeomanry, hard-riding country clergy: all quint-
essential emblems of Protestant Ascendancy, even if Robert Emmet had been
a family friend. ‘I am delighted with all that joins my life to those who had

529
 THE APPRENTICE MAGE

power in Ireland.’ As well as evoking a Victorian boyhoood, Reveries celeb-

rates Ireland before Home Rule.
A knowledge of the status he had attained by 1914 is subtly assumed, and
indicated (he now dines with the kind of people in whose parks and woods
he used to trespass as a suburban naturalist). But no grand claims are made,
which might substantiate Moore’s caricature. Though the relationship
with the declining Thomastown estate is slightly idealized, the poverty of
the Hammersmith period is directly confronted. A year before, it had been
brought vividly back by a profoundly depressing visit to his Blakean collab-
orator Edwin Ellis, who had suffered a severe stroke."*! The awakening of
sex is dealt with metaphorically (‘the bursting of a shell’); observations of
homosexuality in a pederast teacher, and two Sligo boys, are given in an off-
hand, man-of-the-world way. But overall, the story is of the growth of a poet’s
mind. He is throughout taught to view the world as an artist’s son. In that
sense at least, he is born into the elect. His reading is related to his own early
work; Scott gives way to Sligo county histories. Susan Yeats and Mary Battle
stand behind the stories in The Celtic Twilight. The passionate confusion of
his early education is relived: again, his father devastates received ideas with
his iconoclasm but puts nothing in their place. Their recent rapprochement,
and the ideas broadcast in By’s letters from New York, helped inspire a long
passage about his father’s attitude to personality, generalization and abstrac-
tion; while Dowden, though his early support and encouragement are grace-
fully acknowledged, is finally drawn as a portrait of artistic limitation and
bourgeois respectability.
‘Towards the end of the book, the public persona of the youthful poet has
emerged. wBy took the opportunity to present his own version of the figure
painted more superficially by Tynan: cadaverous, affected, unhappy. The
light-heartedness and enthusiasm which Tynan wistfully recalled (and which
she implied had subsequently been hidden under layers of Gregory-induced
grandeur) are not evident, though they can be verified from his youthful
letters. But his objective in Reveries is to re-create the early slights, the obses-
sions, the religious sense, the effort to discover self-possession, which lay behind
his early work; to explain the emergence of his genius, and with it his unpop-
ularity; and to give due weight to his search for supernatural guidance. At a
very late stage, with the rest of the book in galley-proof, he introduced a descrip-
tion of the traumatic Dublin seance in 1888.1* Part of the reason was to refute
‘Tynan’s cheery and deflationary account, but he was also inspired by going
to a medium who produced George Pollexfen’s spirit, with the message that
their psychic work together had been of great importance to him.'*? Thus,
Reveries is about wBy in 1914, not between the ages of one and twenty.
With equal deliberation, and equally with an eye to contemporary politics,

530
 MEMORY HARBOUR I9I3-I914
Reveries leads up to the young wsy’s meeting with O’Leary and his ex-
posure to the ideas of Young Ireland: ‘the poet in the presence of his theme’.
J. F. Taylor, probably far more important in recollection than at the time,
stands for all Dublin enmities. And as the country waits, in that favourite
image culled from O'Grady, like ‘soft wax’ for shaping, the two monoliths of
Catholic Ireland and Protestant Ireland still stand opposed. The youthful wBy’s
innocence about the innate strength of conservatism and piety is ruefully
evoked: but (again reflecting rg14) it is the conservatism and piety of Catholic,
not Protestant, ascendancy. Though the memoir ends in the 1880s, Synge is
a haunting presence just off-stage.
When a commitment to personal utterance emerges towards the end,
it reflects, like so much else, discoveries made much more recently than his
twenties. But he knew he was making history, and that his own experience
was essential for understanding that. More questionably, he thought his-
tory was firmly shaped in 1914; the creation of a Home Rule Ireland had
been paralleled by the construction of the poet's self. In that new age, his
generation would be identified as avatars. He was already determined to
continue writing his autobiography. As with the Collected Works of six years
before, the process seemed to reflect the close of an era. And as he ended the
book at Coole that Christmas, he wrote as if most of his life had gone by, and
there was little to anticipate. The ironyisenormous. For, rich as his achieve-
ment had been, what lay ahead was more astonishing yet: perhaps his greatest
poetry, political revolution, war, new loves, marriage, fatherhood, still more
radical changes of creative direction, spectacular supernatural revelations,
public controversy and acclaim beyond anything he had yet experienced. He
knew nothing of this when he closed the book in diminuendo mood with ‘the
old thought’ he had first hit upon in his 1909 diary (and would rediscover
in his notes for a famous poem seven years later): a classically Yeatsian aph-
orism on the very idea of anticipation.
For some months nowI have lived with my own-youth and childhood, not always
writing indeed but thinking of it almost every day, and I am sorrowful and disturbed.
It is not that I have accomplished too few of my plans, for Iam not ambitious; but
when I think of all the books I have read, and of the wise words I have heard spoken,
and of the anxietyIhave given to parents and grandparents, and of the hopes that I
have had, all life weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me a preparation for
something that never happens.'4

532
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cy
 APPENDIX
‘The Poet Yeats Talks Drama with Ashton Stevens’
San Francisco Examiner, 30 January 1904*

For two hours he had been talking to a thousand and more people from the stage of
the Alhambra Theater on the subject of the Celtic Revival. In these circumstances,
an ordinary man dealing with an ordinary subject would have been tired — not to men-
tion the condition of his auditors. But Yeats, leader in her poetry, patriotism and drama,
is essentially of Ireland — extraordinary and tireless. During the afternoon he had
addressed the students of the University of California, in a rather ‘measured’ way,
he feared; but the last two hours in San Francisco had warmed him up. He was now
ready to talk a little.
We sat at a table in one of the Alhambra offices, the nearest available place.
He lighted a friendly cigarette and buttoned along chinchilla overcoat over his con-
ventional evening clothes, for the night was cutting and the room without any
warmth of its own. Even with the chinchilla there were many angles discernible in
his lean lengths; and his face, as plastic to mood or emotion as an actor’s, was angu-
lar too, and magnetism of a delicate nervous sort was in his face as well as in his words
and the swift angular gestures that went with them. But he had none of the actor’s
self-consciousness. Always the subject was the thing, even when I ventured to say
that the Celtic spirit, in the opinion of some, was important largely for the person-
alities of its re-creators.
He had spoken of Lady Wilde, and I had deplored the dearth of English drama
from the time of the Irish Sheridan to the time of her Irish son.
‘There, in Sheridan and Oscar Wilde, you have personalities,’ he said, ‘the per-
sonalities that made drama. After Sheridan and until Wilde, the English drama
had machinery, good machinery, but no personality. I think a disturbed life, such as
an Irishman’s, makes for drama.’
‘No conflict, no drama,’ I quoted.
‘Precisely,’ said he. ‘Conflict develops character in men as well as in plays; it
develops personality, without which there is nothing strong nor lasting. ‘The mod-
ern Englishman is not individually strong; he is strong only in the mass. He is skill-
ful in the mechanism of the drama, but that is all; his drama is a machine, for it lacks
personality. Turn from it to the drama of Wilde or Bernard Shaw and you will find
not so much machine but real personality. These men have something to express; it
is more than a manner anda form. Their dramatic construction is intuitive, instinct-
ive, you may say; it expresses personality. Wilde’s contempt for the modern British
drama of Britons has been equalled only by Shaw’s. Why, when Wilde was asked
why he went to a London theatre where one of his plays was being acted, he said: “I
go to see if the audience succeeds.”

* See above, p. 311, and Chapter 12, n. 51, p. 590.

533
 APPENDIX

“The English stage is quite despicable,’ added Yeats, in a tone of sorrow rather than
of anger.
‘Now, there’s Pinero,’ I offered, by way of specification.
‘A fine technician, a master of stagecraft, I'll grant you that — but no personality,’
he returned with vim. ‘Pinero has not what Arnold calls the literary conscience.’
“You've seen many of his plays?’
‘Some comedies, and I read, or rather Ishould sayI failed to read his “Second Mrs
Tanqueray.” I had to give it up.’
So much for Pinero. I told Yeats that he should have seen Mrs Patrick Campbell
play Paula Tanqueray, and he regarded me kindly through his gold-framed glasses,
as much as to say, ‘Drama, my dear boy, should be bigger than its mimes.’ Then he
did say this:
“You go to one of the first performances of a popular play, and possibly enjoy it.
You go again, a few years later, when that play is revived, and you say, “It’s so old-
fashioned!” because the popular mode of construction has changed, and the play is
not strong enough to survive the change.’
He looked to see if I followed, and when I nodded affirmatively, he clinched his
argument with an epigram: ‘Stage-craft is always changing; drama is eternal.’
‘Up to Sheridan’s time,’ he went on, ‘the audience sat on the stage. That was
changed in Sheridan’s time, and realism became possible, and- English drama died.
It was the beginning of the age of scenery. Huge canvasses were spread and many
lights introduced, and managers and audiences became accustomed to accepting in
place of drama an inferior kind of excitement, which has found perhaps its lowest
expression in the musical comedies and the popular-novel-like dramas of to-day.’
He paused for a new cigarette, and to myself I wondered how William Butler Yeats
would like my job or that of any other paid play-taster, whose life, with the excep-
tion of rare intervals, is one long musical comedy or popular-novel-like drama. I put
the question, but not in exactly those words. I asked him what he would do if he
had not written dramas of his own, and should find himself a dramatic critic on an
American newspaper. And in answer he compromised by telling me not what he would
do, but rather what I myself might do in that distressful position.
“You might do like Mr Walkley, the London “Times” critic. Walkley has adopted
a fair compromise by saying of certain typical productions, “If people like this sort
of thing they will like this specimen of it.” Your mission — at least your duty — is to
tell the public whether the play will please the public, and why, or why not; and to
tell so far as possible what you like or dislike, and why or why not. That is about all
an honest critic can do. But I imagine American newspapers are not so unlike the
English in that “sporting” and “dramatic” go hand in hand, or column by column.’
He smiled grimly. “The Track and the Stage!’ he said with irony; ‘I believe that is the
proper combination.’
‘But you may depart from it,’ I suggested.
‘And then one may get the sack,’ he suggested back.
‘Not invariably,’ said I. ‘My editor, for instance, puts a premium on independent
opinions expressed in signed reviews. While he may not personally share in my

534
 APPENDIX

opinion that Ibsen’s “Ghosts” is a great drama, he in no way interferes with the
publication of that opinion. He is even sufficiently liberal-minded to permit me to
scalp an occasional musical comedy,’
‘In that case,’ said the poet, cheerfully, ‘you are fortunate — for you have a mission.
By pegging away you can do some good, perhaps. Where you find intellect in a play
you can prize it; for intellect is good, and illuminative of the conscience. The ima-
ginative intellect is especially good. And you can expose for their full unworth the
apparently “virtuous” plays that corrupt — plays that are written not with conviction
but merely to profit big theatrical syndicates whose sole object is the making of
money out of a corrupted public taste. Many aplay with a so-called good ending is
a despicable piece of rot.’
‘For example, Mr Yeats?’ said I; and he chose a play at random, from the recent
London successes, not knowing, and I forgetting at the time, its authorship, for which
our own American Madeline Lucette Ryley is responsible. However, the selection
of an American play brought the moral that much nearer home. He said:
‘Forbes Robertson — pretending to despise it — and Gertrude Elliott produced
“Mice and Men” in London. It ran for five hundred performances. Its story will
serve to illustrate what I have in mind. The hero is a brainless scapegrace — you will
observe he is a character by whose presence the masculine portion of the audience
is not made uncomfortable. The heroine is a hoyden; you know the type — none of
the women are made uncomfortable by her presence. Well, the brainless hero is in
love with another man’s wife; and he goes away; and he returns in two years quite
cured, and falls in love with the hoyden; and everybody is delighted, because they
are about to marry. Then the brainless hero receives a letter from the other man’s
wife, and in virtuous scorn tosses it into a waste basket, where it is found by her
husband.’
For an instant Yeats stopped and with an ironic gesture pictured the situation.
‘For the sake of a virtuous pose, a gesture on the part of the actor, the author per-
mits his hero to throw the married woman’s note into a waste basket where it may
be found by her husband. For such conduct a man of the world would be expelled
from his clubs. But the curtain falls to the tune of joyous wedding bells. The author’s
eye is so firmly fixed on the moral law that he doesn’t know that he has made his hero
a cad. And the audience — well, the commercial stage is so consistently unreal that
the audience doesn’t know the difference.’
He struck a match, and while it flamed I asked Yeats how he would write such
a play.
‘T wouldnt,’ said he.
‘But supposing, said I.
“Well, then, suppose a great writer should be forced to undertake the dramatic treat-
ment of such a subject — say by order of a king, anything you like. He would, natur-
ally, make us feel that the married woman had been wronged. And then—we should
feel that we had been trapped into sympathizing with an immoral person, and oblo-
quy would be heaped on the dramatist’s head.’ Yeats’ tone was bitter.
‘““Ghosts,”’ he said, harking back to Ibsen with a gesture of detachment, ‘has its

535
 APPENDIX

place among the necessary plays. The dramatist should cast the light of his con-
science into obscure corners.’
‘And must he not, if he would make his message plain, have the architectural
quality?’
‘Yes, architecture is vital; you cannot have great drama without construction, “the
art of preparation,” as the French say.’
‘And that means action?”
‘Yes, always action — in this age. But a modern public will tolerate the stopping of
the action for, say, wit. Wilde taught them that toleration. The public may be stopped
for wit —’
‘Or for poetry?’
Yeats laughed aloud at that query. “This age will stop nothing for poetry, he said.
“The play may pause for persiflage — for the modern audience has a feeling for wit,
you must grant it that — but not for poetry.’ And the poet said it with an Irishman’s
smile in his eyes.
It is on account of their esoteric and mistily poetical qualities that Yeats’ dramas
have by many English and American critics been deemed too fragile for ‘the fire of
the footlights.’ It isJames Huneker, music critic for many years before he was called
to the dramatic desk of the New York ‘Sun’ to further the illusion that that news-
paper is being published in the twentieth century, who says: ‘I find Mr Yeats’ plays
full of the impalpable charm — he almost makes the invisible visible! — we catch in
Chopin, Chopin in one of his evanescent secret moods. But place these shapes of
beauty out from the dusk of dreams, place them before “the fire of the footlights,”
and they waver and evaporate.’
Not unmixed praise! but the same writer takes up the cudgel for Yeats — whose
own, by the way, is as swift and stout a weapon as I want to know - when “The Lit-
erary Digest’ reprints several newspaper reviews of the solemn elderly school under
the general heading of ‘Is Mr Yeats a Decadent?’ Why not ‘Is Mr Yeats a Democrat?”
— why not?
We talked of these things over our cigarettes, and I said, ‘I suppose you are used
to being called a decadent?’
‘No, he protested good-humoredly, ‘and I don’t want to be. The truth is, Iam rather
at a loss to know just what is meant by the common application of “decadence.” Is
it the absence of “action”? May not the man in a cell dream of his paradise? One can-
not make the bearing of thought on action the question of decadency, else surely all
the monks and most of the saints are decadents.’
‘One of your critics ascribes your decadence to your insistence on the hair in
describing women — “dim heavy hair” and such phrases.’
‘I think I know the one you mean,’ Yeats smiled. ‘And he did describe a mood
in my work that is passed, whether for good or evil — I sometimes think for evil; for
I can no longer produce in myself that mood of pure contemplation of beauty;
since I began writing for my little theatre in Dublin my work has been in the line of
action, and even in what lyrics I have written lately there has been much of this activ-
ity and life. But the critic you mention was good enough to contrast my later work

536
 APPENDIX

with what he believed to be my earlier, as proof positive of the decay that had set
in. He selected a poem of mine as showing no symptoms of decadence, saying that
it had the spirit of the primitive Irish epic — and this poem, which he thought was
one of my earliest, was one of my very last. Then he said that I had been influenced
by the French, and unwittingly flattered again, for I’m a very poor French scholar.
I think it all came about because I am a friend of Arthur Symons.’
Symons, I believe, does not mind being labeled ‘decadent.’ Neither should I if
I could rewrite D’Annunzio in Symons’ English. The mention of Arthur Symons
ran us unerringly into D’Annunzio, about whose plays Yeats confessed himself
puzzled.
‘I can’t make out “The Dead City,”’ said he. ‘It is supposed to be “real,” and if
“real” why should the characters talk in that unreal way. His “Francesca da Rimini”
I can follow easily enough, for that is a flight of fancy, But as drama — Well, in the
first act there is an admirable scene with the jester — which has nothing to do with
the play. And later there are an astrologer and a peddler—and, as 1 remember, noth-
ing to do with the play. But at present’ — and he took off his glasses and wiped them
and smiled a humorous judicial smile — ‘I do not like to say that I do not like
D’Annunzio’s plays. Sometimes it takes a long time to understand an artist. I do see
most lovely passages in his work, but it will take me perhaps a long time to under-
stand him as an artist that has influenced the whole of Europe.’
‘Give me the final test for the plays I see,’ said I, still pursuing the light.
Your theatre will not be doing good modern work,’ he answered, ‘till you can write
after a performance, “It is as great as Tolstoy, it is as great as Balzac!” — not till then.’
And not till then did we remember that Yeats’ friends were without waiting to take
him to the feast, and the janitor waiting to lock up.
‘If they weren't waiting I'd be good for a couple of hours more,’ said Yeats, and I
believed him with all my heart and wished he had them to spare.

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 ABBREVIATIONS

THE following abbreviations have been adopted for frequently recurring names of pub-
lications, places and people. Otherwise, for printed sources the usual convention has been
adopted of a full citation in the first instance, followed by a recognizable shortened form.
Manuscripts are cited by location, and in the case of the NL] a call-number is given.

ABY Collection of Anne Yeats

AG Augusta, Lady Gregory
Au W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London, 1955)
Berg The HenryW. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library
Berkeley Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley
Bodleian Bodleian Library, Oxford, MSS Eng. lett. c. 194-5, e. 87-8 [JBY—Rosa
Butt letters]
Buffalo Lockwood Memorial Library, State University of New York at Buffalo
Cave Richard Cave (ed.), George Moore, Hail and Farewell: Ave, Salve, Vale
(1933 edition, reprinted and annotated, Gerrards Cross, 1976)
CH A. Norman Jeffares (ed.), W. B. Yeats: The Critical Heritage (London,
1977)
Chi John Kelly and Eric Domville (eds.), The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats.
Volume 1: 1865-1895 (Oxford, 1986)
CL, ii Warwick Gould, John Kelly and Deirdre Toomey (eds.), The Collected
Letters of W. B. Yeats. Volume 2: 1896-1900 (Oxford, 1996)
CL, iii John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard, The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats.
Volume 3: 1901-1904 (Oxford, 1994)
CLJMS, i and ii Ann Saddlemyer (ed.), The Collected Letters ofJohn Millington Synge
(2 vols., Oxford, 1983-4)
CT W. B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight (London, 1893)
CUA Archives, Catholic University of America, Washington DC
Cw W. B. Yeats, Collected Works (8 vols., Stratford-upon-Avon, 1908)
E&I W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London, 1961)
ECY Elizabeth Corbet (‘Lolly’) Yeats
Ellmann, JY Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (2nd edition, London, 1964)
Ellmann, M&M Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (and edition, Harmonds-
worth, 1979)
Emory Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia
Ex W. B. Yeats, Explorations (London, 1962)
FFTIP W. B. Yeats (ed.), Fairy and Folk Tales ofthe Irish Peasantry (London,
1888)
A Freeman's Journal
FS William M. Murphy, Family Secrets: William Butler Yeats and His
Relatives (Dublin, 1995)
G-Y L Anna MacBride White and A. Norman Jeffares (eds.), The Gonne—Yeats
Letters 1893-1938: Always Your Friend (London, 1992)
Harvard Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Hone Joseph Hone, W. B. Yeats 1865-1939 (London, 1942)
HRHRC Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at
Austin

539
 ABBREVIATIONS

Huntington Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California

T&R, iand ui E. H. Mikhail (ed.), WB. Yeats, Interviews and Recollections (2 vols.,
London, 1977)
IGE W. B. Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil (London, 1903)
Illinois University Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
ies Irish Literary Society (London)
JMS John Millington Synge
Kansas Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas Libraries,
Lawrence, Kansas
Katharine Tynan (later Hinkson)
Allan Wade (ed.), The Letters of W. B. Yeats (London, 1954)
Brotherton Library, University of Leeds
W. B. Yeats, Letters to the New Island, first edited by Horace Reynolds
in 1934; the edition used here is by George Bornstein and Hugh
Witemayer for the Collected Edition (London, 1989)
LTWBY, i and ii Richard R. Finneran, George Mills Harper and William M. Murphy
(eds.), Letters to W. B. Yeats (2 vols., London, 1977)
MBY Collection of Michael Yeats (all family correspondence not otherwise
attributed in the notes was in this location at the time of writing)
Mem Denis Donoghue (ed. and transcriber), W. B. Yeats, Memoirs. Autobio-
graphy — First Draft, Journal (London, 1972)
MG Maud Gonne MacBride
NLI National Library of Ireland, Dublin
NLS National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh
Northwestern McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University,
Chicago
NYPL New York Public Library
Pethica James Pethica (ed.), Lady Gregory's Diaries 1892-1902 (Gerrards Cross,
1996)
PF William M. Murphy, Prodigal Father: The Life ofJohn Butler Yeats
1839-1922 (London, 1978)
KL-P Ruth [Pollexfen] Lane-Poole
Reading University of Reading Library
SIUC Morris Library, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
SB W. B. Yeats, The Speckled Bird, with variant versions, annotated and
edited by William H. O’Donnell (Toronto, 1976)
SMY Susan Mary (‘Lily’) Yeats
SQ Maud Gonne MacBride, Servant ofthe Queen (London, 1938)
TB Ann Saddlemyer (ed.), Theatre Business: The Correspondence ofthe First
Abbey Theatre Directors: William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory and]. M. Synge
(Gerrards Cross, 1982)
TCD Trinity College, Dublin
Tulsa Archives, Tulsa University, Oklahoma
UP, i and ii John P. Frayne (ed.), Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats. Volume r(London,
1970) and John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson (eds.), Uncollected Prose
by W.B. Yeats. Volume2(London, 1975)
W. B. Yeats’s ‘Visions Notebook’, begun 11 July 1898, in a private
‘VN’

collection
VP Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (eds.), The Variorum Edition of the Poems
of W. B. Yeats (and edition, New York, 1966)

540
 ABBREVIATIONS

VPI Russell K. Alspach, assisted by Catherine C. Alspach (eds.), The

Variorum Edition ofthe Plays of W. B. Yeats (London, 1966)
VSR Warwick Gould, Phillip L. Marcus and MichaelJ.Sidnell (eds.), The
Secret Rose. Stories by W. B. Yeats:A Variorum Edition (London, 1992)
Wade, Bibliography Allan Wade, A Bibliography ofthe Writings of W. B. Yeats (3rd edition,
London, 1968)
WO W. B. Yeats, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (London, 1889)
WTIN W. B. Yeats, Where There is Nothing, first published 1903; the version
used here is that edited by Katharine Worth, together with The Unicorn
from the Stars (Gerrards Cross, 1987). It is also in VP/ (1966).
Yeats Annual (London, 1982-), followed by number and date. (Nos. 1
and 2 edited by Richard Finneran; from no. 3 (1985), edited by Warwick
Gould
Yeats: An Annual ofCritical and Textual Studies (1983, various publish-
ers), cited by number and date
Yale Beinecke Rare Book and MS Library, Yale University
George Mills Harper (ed.), Yeats and the Occult (London, 1976)
Robert O’Driscoll and Lorna Reynolds (eds.), Yeats and the Theatre
(London, 1975)

541
 NOTES

INTRODUCTION

Russell to George Moore, quoted in John Eglinton (W. K. Magee), 4 Memoir of AE

(London, 1937), 110-12. Cf. his review of Reveries in New Ireland, 16 Dec. 1916, 88—9, where
he inveighs against WBY for denying his own past in the form of his early poetry.
To Ernest Boyd, 17 Aug. 1914, Healy Collection, Stanford.
Literature, Science, Philosophy, edited by Josue V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore,
1982), 106: a reference I owe to Denis Donoghue.
Is the Order ofR. R. etA.C. to remain a Magical Order? (1901), 26-7.
James Longenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism (Oxford, 1988), 184-5.
‘J. M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time’, E & TJ, 314.
Th
Ge
RS To Gordon Craig [28 May 1913], Arsenal, Paris.

Prologue: YEATSES AND POLLEXFENS

Epigraph: MBY.
pie Proudly repeated by WBY in Au, 23. Also see JBY, ‘Memoirs’, unpublished (p.rorof TS
transcript, courtesy of W. M. Murphy, to which later page references refer): ‘One day
while still a school boy he showed us some verses that delighted because of a wild and
strange music. I remembered his mother’s family and their puritan grimness and, turn-
ing to a friend, said “if the sea-cliffs had a tongue what a wild babbling there would be!
I have given a tongue to the sea-cliffs.”’ F'S, 397-8, locates the earliest use of this image
in a letter to Edward Dowden of 8 Jan. 1884.
See T. V. Sadleir, Registrar, Office of Arms, to WBY, 30 May 1925.
The elder Benjamin, who died in 1750, was the son of Jervis Yeats, a merchant of New
Row. Jervis was enrolled freeman of the City of Dublin in 1700; his will is dated 1712. He
had three sons, John, Benjamin and Samuel. Benjamin’s son, the Benjamin who mar-
ried Mary Butler, died on 17 Dec. 1795, according to Wilson's Dublin Directory.
See SMY to WBY, 31 Aug. 1933. The first Irish Voisin was Abraham, born 29 Oct. 1637
in Orleans, naturalized in England in 1657, and married to Anne Heaton in Dublin
on 29 Dec. 1668. His daughter Mary married Edmond Butler (probably son of Edmond
Butler of Monkstown, d. 1705) in 1696 or 1697, and died in 1745 (?), being buried, by request,
near Archbishop King, at St Mary’s, Donnybrook. Their grandson, John, born in 1725,
married Margaret Goddard on 27 May 1750. His daughter Mary Butler was born on 25
Feb. 1751 and married Benjamin Yeats (the younger) on 22 Aug. 1773; she died in 1834.
This and much other information comes from SMY’s records: her ‘Odds and Ends’
scrapbook (MBY) and notes she copied (6 Mar. 1906) from a record in an old prayer-
book dated 1750, the property of Miss Jane Yeats of Bray. SMY also wrote a long letter
to her father on 17 May 1909, giving details of Yeats wills she had looked up in the
Custom House, which add some information.
William also had a large house at Dundrum: SMY to R L-P 23 Mar. 1937.
cae Daughter of William Corbet and Grace Armstrong of Hackwood, County Cavan, who
had been married on 31 Mar. 1791. Jane, their youngest child, was born on 4 Oct. 1811.
William Corbet was solicitor in Chancery and King’s Exigenter in the King’s Bench
Exchequer; he died on 25 Apr. 1824, aged sixty-seven; his family came originally from
Shropshire. (Information taken by SMY from the family Bible of the Corbets in 1913,

542
 NOTES TO PAGES 27-3

then owned by her uncle Isaac Yeats of 52 Morehampton Road). Grace Armstrong
Corbet lived to be ninety-three, dying at Sandymount Castle in 1861.
He was an uncle by marriage of Jane (Corbet) Yeats, having married an Armstrong: SMY’s
notes at HRHRC.
. Anearlyletter to him from his brother (11 July 1845) commiserates about sickness; he was
absent from the laying of the foundation stone for the new church at Tullylish in Mar.
1861, due to ‘ill health’ (Belfast Newsletter, 18 Mar. 1861). Also see E. A. Myles, ‘Notes for
a History of Tullylish, Diocese of Dromore’ (1923), Representative Church Body Library,
Dublin.
According to SMY, this was because they never spoke of the dead, but there may have
been more to it. See PF, 550, n. 62, for some cautious speculation.
Io. According to Lennox Robinson, the turrets were added to Sandymount Castle in a
hurry by an early nineteenth-century owner who had unwisely invited an Italian acquaint-
ance to stay in Ars castle, and had to make the boast good. TS notes for a biography, Lennox
Robinson Papers, Emory. The Reverend Yeats’s addresses (after Tullylish) were Madeley
Terrace, Sandymount (1855-7) and The Cottage, Sandymount Green (1858-62). For
WBY’s return to Sandymount Castle in a later incarnation, see Chapter 9, p. 246, below.
II. Other children of the marriage were Mary Letitia (1841-95), who married Robert Blakely
Wise; Ellen, who died unmarried in 1869; Robert Corbet, who died aged fifteen; Grace
Jane (1846 to 8 Feb. 1935); Jane Grace (‘Jenny’) (1847 to 25 Sept. 1938); William Butler, who
went to Brazil and died in 1899; Isaac (1847-1930); and Fanny, who married a Dr Gordon
and lived at 26 Morehampton Road, dying on 6 Sept. 1944. Her birth date is not record-
ed, but she must have lived well into her eighties. Grace and Jenny, who lived to be over
ninety, and Isaac, who died at eighty-three, lived at 52 Morehampton Road, Dublin.
12. JBY to Joseph Hone, 29 Dec. 1915, Kansas. This letter also records the Huguenot fant-
asy. Among my ancestors was a man called Voisin — must have been a French Huguenot.
That’s the man I'd like to have met. He dyed the whole family ina sort of well-mannered
evangelicalism. At least I cannot otherwise account for it among a family so intelligent
as were my father’s family. Its being well mannered points to a French source.’ Huguenots
or not, a reference of SMY’s to ‘old cousin Ellie Yeats, the narrow pious Plym’ is inter-
Jan. 1932); the strict faith of the Plymouth Brethren appealed
esting (letter to WBY, 19
to many mid-nineteenth-century Irish Protestant families, including that of Charles
Stewart Parnell.
1s “Things were so terrible that they never sat down to their very plain meals without draw-
ing down the blinds as at any moment some starving person might press their face to the
window.’ (SMY to Joseph Hone, 7 May 1939, HRHRC).
JBY to WBY, Hone, 11.
. JBY, Memoirs’, 50.
See JBY, ‘Memoirs’, 5-6.
JBY to Rosa Butt, 16 Jan. 1908, Bodleian [for location, see Abbreviations list].
SMY to R L-P, c. Dec. 1913.
SMY to RL-P, 9 Oct. 1939.
SMY to R L-P, 3 May 1921. However, Grace Corbet was not one of the King’s County
Armstrongs, but from the less elevated Cavan branch.
21. According to SMY’s notes in HRHRC, there had been Pollexfens in seventeenth-
century Galway. A Pollexfen will of 1637 showed that John Pollexfen (husband of Susan,
father of James) held land and tenements in Ireland as well as England (SMY to JBY,
17 May 1909). A more immediate Irish connection was WBY’s great-grandmother Mary
Stephens, from Wexford, the wife of Anthony Pollexfen (according to SMY’s scrapbook;
elsewhere she is called ‘Anne’, which may be a confusion). Another family tradition
involved the Pollexfens’ descent from Francis Drake, whose third wife was Elizabeth

543
 NOTES TO PAGES 37-7

Pollexfen of
Woodbury; SMY wrote to WBY on 19 July 1938 that Drake’s ‘daughter’ Ann
Pollexfen married General Elliott, defender of Gibraltar. The Drake family tree shows
at least three Pollexfen—Drake marriages in the seventeenth century, but all involve
descendants of the Admiral’s brother Thomas. The Anne Pollexfen Drake who mar-
ried Elliott was a great-great-great-granddaughter of Thomas Drake. Gifford Lewis has
pointed out that the status of the family in the eighteenth century was armigerous, and
produces interesting Chancery Court material in “The Pollexfen Ancestry of William
Butler Yeats’, unpublished TS (Sept. 1994). Jack Yeats visited the tomb of Anthony and
Mary Pollexfen, his and WBY’s great-grandparents, in Brixham.
22. For family background, see W. M. Murphy, The Yeats Family and the Pollexfens ofSligo
(Dublin, 1971), extended in Chapter 1of FS.
Pee See Gifford Lewis, The Yeats Sisters and the Cuala (Dublin, 1994) for a useful corrective
view of the Pollexfen background.
24. Elizabeth Pollexfen Middleton, cousin and eventually mother-in-law of the enterpris-
ing William Pollexfen, died in 1853. The firm was called Middleton & Pollexfen until
1882, when on Middleton’s death it became Messrs W. & G. T. Pollexfen & Co.
25. The girls were Susan (1841-1900), who married JBY in 1863; Elizabeth (1843-1933), who
married Reverend A. B. Orr in 1878; Isabella (1849-1938), who married John Varley, the
painter, in 1878; Alice (1857-1932), who married Arthur Jackson, the eventual inheritor
of the family firm; and Agnes (1855-1926), who married Robert Gorman. The boys were
Charles William (1838-1923), of Liverpool; George Thomas (1839-1910); William
(1844-1846); John Anthony (1845-1900), a sea-captain in Liverpool; William Middleton
(1847-1913), an engineer who went insane; Frederick Henry (1852-1929), the black sheep;
and Alfred Edward (1854-1916).
26. JBY to Rosa Butt, ‘Aug. 07’, Bodleian.
27. JBY to Rosa Butt, n.d., Bodleian.
28. The remark occurs in ibid., but also inJBY to SMY, 27 Jan. 1914.
29. See pp. 6-7, below.
30. ‘No sleep and unceasing talking’: a description quoted in PF, 183.
3G See interview with Thomas McGreevy, I & R, ii, 409.
Boe SMY to Joseph Hone, 9 May 1939, HRHRC. William Pollexfen’s mother is elsewhere
‘Mary’.
33- See my essay ‘Protestant Magic: W. B. Yeats and the Spell of Irish History’, Paddy and
Mr Punch (London, 1993).

Chaptert: THE ARTIST’s CHILDREN

SLIGO 1865-1881
Epigraph: SB, 127.
I. ‘Memoirs’, 38.
ibid., 7,
. JBY to Rosa Butt, 31 Oct. 1910, Bodleian.
. Same to same, n.d.
. ‘Memoirs’, 114.
bd
PW
Nn. Though he never mentions Henry Thomas Buckle, many of his opinions seem to stem
from that source too.
7: JBY to Rosa Butt, 18 Nov. 1910, Bodleian. He had just found out that
George had left
him nothing in his will; see p. 432, below.
8. Same to same, 18 Mar. 1921, Bodleian.

544
 NOTES TO PAGES 77II

. Sligo Independent, 12 Sept. 1963.

. SMY to RL-P, 22 Oct. 1928.
. JBY to Rosa Butt, 3 Oct. 1918, Bodleian.
. Same to same, 20 May 1915; also 20 Oct. rg10.
. 17 Apr. 1863, from South Hampton Terrace, NLI MS 31, 106. My thanks to Linda
Satchwell for her transcription and drawing this letter to my attention.
14. JBY to Rosa Butt, 23 Nov. 1908, Bodleian.
. Will registered 2 June 1863, Principal Probate Registry, Dublin. The date of death (24
Nov.) is according to CanonJ.R. Leslie, ‘Biographical Index of the Clergy of the Church
of Ireland’ (4 vols., unpublished, Representative Church Body Library, Dublin), and the
Letters of Administration attached to the will.
16. e.g. Registry of Deeds 1854.9.209, whereby Reverend Yeats got £500 through charging
his personal and ecclesiastical estate to Corbet’s company, for half-yearly payments on
the security. In 1861, £500 was raised on the lands for}BY (1861.4.13.2); at the same time
the entail was broken by deed, so JBY could dispose of it as he pleased.
17. Registry of Deeds 1861.13.51, for the unpaid debt; 1862.2.86, 1866.1.202, 1868.12.37, 1873.7.95,
1875.37.148, for mortgages. The last deed details the charges on the land: jointure of £100
to JBY’s mother, and four mortgages totalling £3,550 at interest rates varying from 4.5 to
6 per cent.
18. A deed of release of 18 Apr. 1752 shows William Humphrey of Holborn (Mary Butler’s
uncle) deeding Thomastown farm, thirty acres of bog at Ballyna, and aparcel of ground
east of Dorset Street, Dublin, to John Butler. (The lands were to go to Mary Butler’s
brothers, but they died without issue, so the property passed to her son.) This deed was
sent to WBY by T. V. Sadleir after a search at the Registry of Deeds, on 25 Aug. 1925.
The lands were eventually sold in 1888 under the provisions of the Ashbourne Act.
19. As SMY pointed out, on the evidence of Trollope’s clergymen: letter to R L-P, 25
Oct. 1937.
20. PF, 38-9.
21. His will was proved 23 Nov. 1870, with effects under £12,000; JBY’s mother, Jane Grace
Yeats, was the sole executrix (National Archives copy, grant of probate T5807). He had
left Sandymount Castle two years before and was living at 17 Upper Mount Street. His
partnership (with Armstrong) had been dissolved in the mid-1860s; but he was not,
despite family lore, formally bankrupt at the time of his death. However, lengthy claims
against his estate survive in MBY. Twenty-five creditors were allowed sums ranging from
£911 to ros. Jane Grace Yeats got £233. 145. od.; JBY, £68. 75. 4d.
. SMY to RL-P, 25 Oct. 1937.
. JBY to Rosa Butt, 18 Mar. 1921, Bodleian.
. See for instance Sligo Independent, 21 Jan. 1860, and editorials in ibid., 11 Feb. 1860, 9May
1863 and 25 July 1863. Middleton & Pollexfen possessed the only steam-tug in the port,
a profitable monopoly which would be threatened by pilots’ reforms. In the many sal-
vage claims reported by the local press, Middleton & Pollexfen are invariably prominent.
PALO:
. Editorial, 25 July 1863.
. Sligo Independent, 10 May 1879.
. Sligo Champion, 9 Sept. 1871, Sligo Independent, 26 May 1877.
. Editorial in Siigo Independent, 22 July 1876.
. ibid., 2t Nov. 1868, reporting Middleton’s speech on the borough election.
. Black-bound family album, MBY.
5 ESI, 8.
JBY to Rosa Butt, 21 July 1917, Bodleian.

545
 NOTES TO PAGES II-16

. SMY to RL-P, 17 Feb. 1935.

. Interview with Mrs Henry Franklin of Sligo, 1 July 1946, Ellmann interview book, Tulsa.
. JBY to Isaac Yeats, 10 July 1911, ABY.
. Describing his difficult daughter ECY, he wrote: ‘As a Pollexfen she has a tendency to
be gloomy and pessimistic, with a desire to wound her best friends, to positively stab them
to the heart, though only as words go. This ast characteristic she inherits directly from her
mother. The desire to be cruel only comes on her when she [is] tired or out of spirits. When
the fit has passed, she does not remember having said anything that could hurt anyone’s
feelings. This also was a trait of her mother’s.’ (JBY to Rosa Butt, 9 July 1911, Bodleian).
38. Same to same, 3 Mar. 1903, Bodleian.
39- See same to same, 29 Nov. 1915, 20 Oct. rg10, Bodleian. “There was another woman, but
ofher you must never ask me. It was many years ago and happened when I was very young.’
Elsewhere he refers to it as ‘nearly 40 years ago’.
40. Letters of 10 Nov. 1872, 6 Feb. 1873, NLI MS 2064 (copies by SMY).
4l. 20 Feb. 1873, loc. cit.
42. See PF, 57ff.
43. JBY to WBY, 25 Apr. 1915; see Murphy, The Yeats Family and the Pollexfens ofSligo, 16.
44. JBY to WBY, 10 May 1914, quoted ibid., 87.
45. Six were born of the marriage but Robert Corbet Yeats, born 27 Mar. 1870, died on 3
Mar. 1873 of croup at Merville, and Jane Grace, born 29 Aug. 1875, died less than a year
later of bronchial pneumonia.
46. n.d., but postmarked 3 Mar. 1903, Bodleian.
47- Au, 29. ‘Sang jaune’ was the view of the Comte de Basterot (an enthusiastic racial theor-
ist) in 1896: my thanks to Deirdre Toomey for this reference.
48. SMY scrapbook, 33.
49. SMY to George Yeats, 28 Apr. 1939.
50. JBY to RL-P [1902].
SI. JBY to WBY [1904]; WBY to Dorothy Wellesley, 7 Dec. 1937, Meisei University (Japan).
G28 See for instance P. Colum, ‘My Memory of John Butler Yeats’, Dud/in Magazine, 32, 4
(Oct.—Dec. 1957); also in ‘Memoirs’. Sometimes ‘looking’ appears as ‘spitting’.
53: SMY scrapbook, 16.
54- SMY to RL-P, 8 Dec. 1930.
55: SMY to R L-P, 3 Jan. 1938.
56. SMY, ‘Odds and Ends’, 28. ECY’s diary records a visit from Martha Jowitt in 1888,
having left ‘seven years ago’.
57- SMY, ‘Odds and Ends’, 28.
58. SMY to RL-P, 5 May 1937.
59: To R. L-P, 23 Aug. 1938.
60. Fragment, MBY.
61. See A. N. Jeffares, ‘Yeats’s Birthplace’, YA 3 (1985), 175-8.
62. SMY, ‘Odds and Ends’.
63. JBY to WBY, 1 Mar. 1919, courtesy ofW.M. Murphy.
64. ‘Memoirs’, 78.
65. Interview with George Yeats, 8 Oct. 1947, Ellmann interview book, Tulsa. The doctor
was W. E. Carnegie Dickson. See also Agnes Gorman to WBY, n.d., in response to inquir-
ies about childish illnesses he may have had: “The Misses Davys, who lived next door in
Union Place, said you got a bad fall from a nursegirl’s arms, when a baby, and you were
never the same after it. Another friend remembers a very serious illness you had when
about 4 or 5 years old from which it was at one time thought you would never recover.’
In blue paperback notebook, with horoscope notes, MBY.

546
 NOTES TO PAGES 16-20
66 . JBY to Susan Mitchell, 6 Sept. 1913. Also JBY, ‘Memoirs’, 102: ‘I think what charac-
terizes genius is an infinite seriousness. My son as an infant was more serious than other
infants. That was why his aunts said — “He was such a nice baby.”’
. JBY to Susan Yeats, 1 Nov. 1872, NLI MS 2064 (copy by SMY).
. See for instance 75ff., 79ff., goff.
. ‘Memoirs’, 100.
. ‘Magna est veritas et prevalebit’ was one example: see Marguerite Wilkinson, ‘A Talk
with John Butler Yeats about His Son’, Touchstone (New York), vi, 1 (Oct. 1919), 16-17.
; oe Edwards, TS draft of unfinished biography of WBY (hereafter ‘Oliver Edwards
525
. See SMY to JBY, 26 May 1917, NLI MS 31,112 where she recalls the Branscombe
summer: JBY reading them David Copperfield, Potter walking the girls into the village
to their lodgings, teaching them chess moves in the dust of the road; the children beg-
ging for black paint, disapproved of byJBY on artistic grounds. Once acquired, Jack paint-
ed horses. They also made big stones into dolls, with faces painted by Jack. ‘Willy and
the Ford boys had a smugglers’ cave.’
73° Anne Yeats, ‘Memories of My Father and My Uncle’, a paper read to the Irish Literary
Society in London, 26 Nov. 1991; KT, interview with WBY, Sketch, 29 Nov. 1893.
74- See SMY’s annotations to Reveries, ABY.
75: WBY to Louis Purser, 20 Mar. 1911, private collection. Other references from SMY to
RL-P, 22 Mar. 1931, and interview with Mrs Henry Franklin of Sligo, rJuly 1946, Ellmann
interview book, Tulsa.
76. SMY to RL-P, 5 July 1927. Ellie Connolly’s lessons are mentioned inJBY to Susan Yeats,
18 Dec. 1872, NLI MS 2064 (copy by SMY).
die J. B. Yeats, Ah Well: ARomance tn Perpetutty (1942; repr. London, 1974), 12-13.
78. SMY, ‘Odds and Ends’, 15 [9 May 1941].
79- JBY to John Todhunter, 24 Apr. 1870, Reading.
80. SMY to Joseph Hone, 21 June 1942, HRHRC. Elsewhere she calculated that WBY
‘lived entirely in Sligo from his fourth to his tenth year’ (SMY to R L-P, 21 May 1939).
In fact, he was continuously there from the age of seven years and one month to nine
years and five months (PF, 59).
81. Often on board the Svigo, for which Middleton & Pollexfen were the agents; they advert-
ised it as ‘quite new, very fast, and has proved an excellent Sea Boat for conveyance of
Passengers, Livestock and Merchandise’ to Liverpool. (S/igo Champion, 28 Jan. 1860).
82. SMY to Joseph Hone, 19 May 1939, HRHRC. WBY adds memories ofcabinets with
relics of distant journeys.
83. SMY, scrapbook, 6 (under heading ‘Elizabeth Pollexfen’).
84. Au, 52.
85. For Elizabeth Pollexfen’s education, see SMY’s scrapbook. Mrs Middleton and Mrs
Pollexfen are recorded as supporting the Parish Clothing Funds for regular Sunday
School attendance (Sligo Independent, 21 Jan. 1863) and William Middleton and William
Pollexfen subscribed to the Coal Fund and the Infant School (ibid., 7Mar. 1863).
86. Sligo Independent, 13 and 27 Aug. 1864. The issue concerned invitations to the annual
RAS ball, and once again the committee was dominated by Wynnes, Tottenhams and
Gore-Booths.
87. JBY to Rosa Butt, 31 Oct. 1910, Bodleian.
88. See advertisements in Sligo Independent, 22 and 30 Nov. 1867, Lower Rosses, Upper
Rosses and Creggy Connell. ‘There are magnificent sites for Villa residences and Bathing
Lodges on this estate. It is situated within 3'/, miles of the town of Sligo. There is a valu-
able oyster bed connected with Lower Rosses . . . The purchaser can have immediate pos-
session. Each townland has a right to Sea Manure, and all are well watered, and opened

547
 NOTES TO PAGES 207-27

up by roads maintained at the expense of the barony.’ Middleton bought Lower Rosses
in two lots: one for £6,250 (492 statute acres, with a net yearly profit rent of £261. 1s. 1d.);
and one for £2,700 (275 statute acres, rented at £167. 75. 7d.).
89. Shgo Independent, 21 June 1879.
go. Mem., 77, 102.
gl. Diary/sketchbook for 1888. On a rare occasion when the Wynne children visited Uncle
Matthew Yeats at Fort Louis, the Yeats children violently attacked them with pails of
water: SMY’s scrapbook, 4-6.
92. Au, 14.
93- SMY, scrapbook, 4.
94. ibid., 13.
95. Au, 12-13, 15ff., 76ff.
96. SMY to R L-P, 23 Feb. 1926; see also 11 Oct. 1937. ‘The present moment was so irritat-
ing he never spoke of the past or future.’
o7- SMY to Joseph Hone, 21 June 1942, HRHRC.
98. SMY to RL-P, 2 Dec. 1935.
99: Same to same, 4 Apr. 1937. Their acquired Sligo accent was of particular interest to the
scholar of phonetics Alexander Ellis when they lived in Bedford Park.
100. Au, 14-15.
IOI. SMY to RL-P, 4 Oct. 1937.
102. Shgo Independent, 4 Apr. 1868.
103. Soa local bank manager remembered being told, when he tried to get out of church-going
on account of bad weather. Note by SMY in family album.
104. Mem, 153-4; Au, 31; LNI, 72.
105. UPS tero:
106. SMY to RL-P, 23 June 1936. However R. M. Smylie, recalling his own Sligo background
in 1941, remarked that though Jack Yeats was a familiar figure in the town around 1900,
he never saw WBY there; and “The poet disappointed me greatly in later years when I
discovered that he knew far less about Sligo than I expected him to know.’ (Siigo Champion
Sesquicentenary 1836-1986 [a special commemorative album of the paper], 39).
107. Au, 27.
108. (Clie nt.
109. School reports and timetables are preserved in MBY; also a letter from B. G. Tours to
Joseph Hone, 133 Oct. 1943 (Tours was Chairman of the Old Boys’ Association and pro-
vided some information from school records). Also see Au, 35, 49.
110. SMY to RL-P, 27 Oct. 1931.
III. Wilkinson, ‘A Talk with John Butler Yeats about His Son’.
112s JBY to WBY, 22 Feb. 1881 (from 90 Lower Gardiner Street, Dublin).
ay. Cancelled passage in NLI MS 30,790, ‘How IBegan to Write’, 1 July 1938.
II4. Interview with Richard Ellmann, 7 July 1947, Ellmann interview book, Tulsa.
II5. Au, 35.
116. SMY to R L-P, 28 June 1937.
Ts SMY, notes at HRHRC.
118. The certificate is in MBY.
II9. Au, 30.
120. Or possibly after the spring term. B. G. Tours to Joseph Hone, 15 Oct. 1943 (MBY), affirms
that he was definitely there that term.
121.lol This is stated in SMY’s recollection in HRHRC, and it is the address given when she
registered at the Art School in May 1882. The unflattering description is in her annota-
tion of Reveries, ABY.

548
 NOTES TO PAGES 27-31

122. SMY to Joseph Hone, 25 Feb. 1842, HRHRC. For these parties, see my essay ‘To the
Northern Counties Station: Lord Randolph Churchill and the Orange Card’, Paddy and
Mr Punch, 241.
123. SMY’s notes in HRHRC.
124. Au, 11. JBY was particularly pained by allegations of bad temper and violence. ‘None of
my children have ever been slapped except once when I gave a single slap to Jack’s bare
arm.’ (JBY to Rosa Butt, 20 Mar. 1920, Bodleian).
125. ‘Memoirs’, 85.
126. Interview with WBY by Horace Reynolds, 9 Dec. 1932, Harvard.
Of. JBY to Rosa Butt, 6 Mar. 1908, Bodleian. Gregg eventually became editor of the New
York Evening Sun; for a biography see CL, i,7. Also see TS by Willard Conneely, ‘A Talk
with W. B. Yeats’, HRHRC, which quotes WBY as saying that he began writing ‘about
15. SMY’s memory is in her notes at HRHRC. See also Wilkinson, ‘A Talk with John
Butler Yeats about His Son’.
128. Wilkinson, ‘A Talk with John Butler Yeats about His Son’.

Chapter 2: EXPLORATIONS
DvuBLIN 1881-1887
Epigraph: TCD MS 3986 D.
I. Au, 64-6.
2. mee PE. 13h
a ‘Memoirs’, 27.
4. Au, 61; also UP, i, 170, which describes Howth as a literally fairy-haunted place. “Village
Ghosts’ was published in the Scots Observer, 11 May 1889, and reprinted in CT.
. See below. Gerard Manley Hopkins thought Ferguson ‘pushed’ WBY’s Is/and ofStatues
(letter referred to below, n. 55), but there is no direct evidence of this.
. See WBY to Mrs Travers Smith (Dowden’s daughter), 27 Apr. [1913], Harvard, after her
father’s death, saying,
how deep a loss I feel your father’s death to have been, and how much he once was to me.
I have a very vivid and charming memory of certain Sunday mornings when my father brought
me to see him &I think his encouragement was the firstIhad from a man of letters. One morning
he read out some chapters of his then unpublished life of Shelley & those chapters & all they con-
tained are clear in my memory today. When I was 17 or 18 J read his poetry a great deal too & how
gracious he always was, a noble figure which seemed to represent the tradition of culture where it is
one with courtesy.

WBY was at this time, after many vicissitudes, hoping to succeed to Dowden’s Chair;
see p. 483, below. se
. SMY, ‘Odds and Ends’, as quoted in PF, 133.
. In Apr. and May SMY and LCY were still entered as living at Island View, Howth, in
ow
the General Register of the Metropolitan School of Art. The first Thoms Directory entry
for JBY at Ashfield Terrace is 1885, but this probably represents a time-lag.
. 1 Mar. 1922, quoted in CL, i, 9. Also see Au, 83.
PE 36-7.
. ‘Yeats in the Making’, Poet's Lore, Philadelphia, 17, 2 (Summer 1906), 102-12 J & R, i,
6-12).
. SMY, ‘Odds and Ends’, 1-2.
er?
. SMY, ‘Odds and Ends’, 13.

549
 NOTES TO PAGES 32—37

. Magee repeatedly consigned his schoolday memories of WBY to paper: see the Erasmian,
June 1939, the Dial, 72, 3 (Mar. 1922), Dublin Magazine, 28, 3 (July-Sept. 1953), 25.
. Dublin Magazine, 35.
. ‘W.B. Yeats at School’, 7'P’s Weekly, 7 June 1912 (J & R, i, 1-3).
. Reverend F. R. Montgomery Hitchcock, quoted in Oliver Edwards TS, 25.
. Johnston, ‘Yeats in the Making’.
. Letter from M. A. Christie to TLS, 20 May 1969, relaying the written reminiscences of
his uncle, McNeill.
. Oliver Edwards TS, 25.
3 GFE SU,
. JBY to WBY, 12 Sept. 1917, courtesy of W. M. Murphy.
. Her father was Serjeant Richard Armstrong, a Dublin barrister who had lost his wits.
She married first Henry Morgan Byrne, a solicitor, and later — allegedly — ‘a Welsh
gardener’, who fled from her eccentricities (PF, 560).
. George Yeats to Allan Wade, 24 Aug. 1953.
5 (GLK iB.
. To Olivia Shakespear, 26 May 1924, L, 705.
. WBY to Mary Cronin, CL, i, 6-7.
. See JBY, ‘Memoirs’, 93, 98, and many references in SMY’s letters.
. ‘Memoirs’, and Wilkinson, ‘A Talk with John Butler Yeats about His Son’, 12.
. ‘Memoirs’, 82.
. ‘Memoirs’, 8.
. Interview with George Yeats, 1 Mar. 1946, Ellmann interview book, Tulsa; also 4u,
79-80.
. ‘Memoirs’, 28-9. ‘I find the Trinity College intellect noisy and monotonous, without ideas
or any curiosity about ideas, and without any sense of mystery, everything sacrificed to
mental efficiency. Trinity College is intellectually a sort of little Prussia.’
. John Bennett to Joseph Hone, 2 June 1939, NLI MS so19. See also General Register of
the Metropolitan School of Art. Additions to the fee of £1. 1s. 6d. brought it up to a
few pounds at most.
. SMY to RL-P, 28 Aug. 1936.
. Au, 81.
. Lecture on ‘My Own Poetry’ reprinted in the Irish Times, 26 Jan. 1924.
. ‘The Tragic Theatre’, UP, ii, 387.
. Orso Ellmann thought, M & M, 32. On 30 May 1897 WBY wrote to Robert Farquharson
Sharp: ‘I think, 1886, must be correct for my giving up art. I have no way of finding out
with certainty 8cit is made the more difficult by there being the usual period of drifting.’
(CL, ii, 107).
Al. Report of the Committee of Enquiry into the Work Carried Out by the Royal Hibernian
Academy and the Metropolitan School of Art (HMSO, Dublin, 1906), 60-61.
42. Interview with KT, the Sketch, 29 Nov. 1892. Shelley’s Prince Athanase supplies a leit-
motif for WBY’s youthful self-image:

His soul had wedded wisdom, and her dower

Is love and justice, clothed in which he sate
Apart from men, as in a lonely tower,
Pitying the tumult of their dark estate.

43. NLI MS 30,060. The most detailed treatment of this prentice work is in George Bornstein
(ed.), The Early Poetry. Volume 1: ‘Mosada’ and ‘The Island of Statues, Manuscript Materials

pe)
 NOTES TO PAGES 37-45
by W.B. Yeats (Ithaca and London, 1987) and Volume 2: ‘The Wanderin 25 ofOisin’ and Other
Early Poems to 1895 (Ithaca and London, 1994).
. See “The Magpie’, reprinted by Bornstein in Early Poetry. Volume 2, 403.
. On this early work, see George Bornstein, ‘The Making of Yeats’s Spenser’, YAACTS 2
(1984), 21-9.
. Acancelled passage in NLI MS 30,790 — though he admitted that he had formed an inter-
est in such people ‘before I had been much humiliated’.
. Anotebook marked ‘to Ashfield Terrace’ includes ‘The Blindness’, which frequently men-
tions ‘a crater of wild olives’. Russell’s contemporary reference to “The Equator of Olives’
may represent a mishearing: see A. Denson, Letters from_AE (London, 1961), 3. In ‘How
I Began to Write’, NLI MS 30,790, WBY recalls one play being ‘an imitation of Shelley,
its scene a crater of the moon’.
: ECD.
5 IDET ER
. 4 Apr. 1885, Reading.
. Au, 92.
. To Mary Cronin, as above.
. 8 Jan. 1884, PF, 134. The Island was also sent to Dr William Frazer, a Dublin dermato-
logist with literary leanings; see CL, i, 75. Todhunter thought it ‘not on the highest level’
but liked it; to Dowden, 28 May 1885, TCD.
. 23 July 1885 and 26 Aug. 1886, TCD.
. To Coventry Patmore, 7 Nov. 1886, C. C. Abbott (ed.), Further Letters of Gerard Manley
Hopkins Including His Correspondence with Coventry Patmore (Oxford 1971), 373-4. On
24 Dec. 1913 WBY correctly described it to Carlo Linati as ‘a feeble early work, only
valuable to collectors’.
. NLI MS 30,790.
. ‘Memoirs’, 30-31.
. Dominic Daly, The Youn gg Douglas Hyde: The Dawn ofthe Irish Revolution and Renaissance
1874-1893 (Dublin, 1974), 87.
. ‘Memoirs’, 57.
. Ay, 93.
. Oldham to Sarah Purser, n.d., NLI MS 10,201.
. H. W. Nevinson, quoted in Harry Nichols, “The Contemporary Club’, Irish Times,
20-21 Dec. 1961.
. Mem, 52.
. Daly, Young Douglas Hyde, 72.
. Leon O Broin, Revolutionary Underground: The Story ofthe Irish Republican Brotherhood
1858-1924 (Dublin, 1976), 88.
. 10 Jan. 1888, NLI MS sq2s.
. C. H. Oldham, R. I. Lipmann, F. I. Gregg, John R. Eyre, W. Stockley, J. Stockley
(Daly, Young Douglas Hyde, 202, n. ii). See FJ, 13 and 20 Feb. 1886, for a lively meeting
where McCarthy Teeling was censured and expelled — attended by WBY.
. See
I & R, i, 11.
. For a detailed consideration of WBY’s work for the Gael, see John Kelly, ‘Aesthete
among the Athletes’, YAACTS 2 (1984), 75-143.
. PF, 144.
. To Frederick Langbridge, 12 Oct. [1893], CL, i, 366-7.
. Henry Summerfield, That Myriad-minded Man:A Biography of G. W. Russell A. E.’
1867-1935 (Gerrards Cross, 1975), 16, says WBY’s interest in Sinnett was ‘Easter 1885’.
Johnston recalled reading him at that time: see Johnston to Ernest Boyd, 12 July 1915, Healy

551
 NOTES TO PAGES 45-49
Collection, Stanford, adding that he interviewed Sinnett and Mohini Chatterjee (not
Blavatsky) in Notting Hill. Magee definitely situates the ‘craze’ as beginning when
Johnston was in his final year at the High School. The article stimulated by his London
visit appeared in the DUR, July 1885, 66. In Aug. the DUR announced the possibility of
a visit from Mohini Chatterjee ‘towards the end of the year’; as it happened, he came in
1886 (see below, nn. 79, 81).
13: Magee, ‘Portrait of Yeats’, Irish Literary Portraits (London, 1935) (repr. J & R, i, 56).
74: CIE IS99:
75- ‘HowI Began to Write’, NLI MS 30,790.
76. Baron von Reichenbach (Physico-physiological Researches on the Dynamides or imponder-
ables... ., London, 1850) believed that the force of ‘Od’ resided in magnets, crystals and
human hands or fingers; he related this to mesmerism and faith-healing.
i ‘The Poetry of AE’, Daily Express, Dublin, 3 Sept. 1898 (UP, ii, 121-4).
78. Though the significance of the word ‘Hermetic indicated a resolution to study more than
Theosophy: see Peter Kuch, Yeats and AE: The Antagonism that Unites Dear Friends
(Gerrards Cross, 1986), 14. By Apr. 1886, however, the Society became the Dublin
Theosophical Society, which WBY declined to join.
79: His article on Althea Gyles is also relevant: the Dome, Dec. 1898 (UP, i, 133). Johnston
told Ernest Boyd there was a preliminary meeting in Apr. or May at Oldham’s rooms (12
July 1915, as above).
80. This was encouraged by the work of Max Muller (notably his editions of The Sacred Books
of the East, 1879-1910) and English versions of The Buddhist Sutras (1881), The Bhagavada-
Gita (1882) and The Upanishads (1884). But it had been anticipated by Goethe, and Indian
philosophy also influenced Emerson, Whitman and other writers devoured by WBY at
this time. Andrew Lang’s Myth, Ritual and Religion (2 vols., 1887) was the inescapable
vade-mecum.
81. Purser MSS, NLI 10,201: an undated postcard, but postmarked Apr. 1886. The Charter
members of the Society were L. A. M. Johnston, WBY, F. T. Gregg, H. M. Magee
(‘Eglinton’s’ elder brother), E. A. Seale, W. F. Smeeth, R. A. Potterton and Charles
Johnston. The Irish Theosophist
was started by D. N. Dunlop, a Scot resident in Dublin.
82. Peter Washington, Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: Theosophy and the E mergence ofthe
Western
Guru (London, 1993), 88-9.
83. See Russell to AG, postmarked g May 1900, Berg. For Chatterjee, see P. S. Sri, ‘Yeats
and Mohini Chatterjee’, Y4 11 (1994), N. Guha, WB. Yeats:AnIndian Approach (Calcutta,
1968) and H. R. Bachchan, W. B. Yeats and Occultism (London, 1976), Chapter 2, espe-
cially 18ff. for biographical details. He translated Sankaracharya’s Viveka-Chudamani in
the Theosophist, vi-viii, and The Bhagavad-Gita in 1887.
84. Following WBY, it is generally thought that Chatterjee visited Dublin in 1885, but see
n. 79 above; the fact that an article by him appeared in the DUR in May 1886 also augurs
for the Apr. 1886 date. WBY’s poetry from this point shows Chatterjee’s influence. See
the first version of “The Indian upon God’: From the Book of Kauri the Indian — Section
V. On the Nature of God’, DUR, Oct. 1886. This may be a fragment of a projected
series. Also see P. S. Sri, ‘Yeats and Mohini Chatterjee’, Y4 11 (1994).
85. See the original version, ‘The Way of Wisdom’, the Speaker, 14 Apr. 1900: reprinted with
a useful commentary by Vinod Sena in Quest, 69, 62 (July-Sept. 1969). It carried a
favourite quotation from Axéi: ‘As for living, our servants will do that for us.’ By the time
he reprinted it as “The Pathway’ in CW, however, he would add, ‘How many years it has
taken me to awake out of that dream.’
86. Russell to Sean O’Faolain, wrongly annotated 23 Apr. 1939 (recte 1930?): transcript in
Ellmann MSS, Tulsa. cf. Russell, Song and Its Fountains (London, 1932), 9-11.
87. The Candle of Vision (London, 1918), 5-6.

552
 NOTES TO PAGES 49-55
88. A recollection of Russell’s recorded by Denson and quoted in Kuch, Yeats and AE, 27
he said these were the happiest days of his life.
89. Kuch, Yeats and AE, 52.
go. Deirdre Toomey points out that ‘mentally vibrate’ isa Golden Dawn phrase, which hints
that this is post-1890.
gl. LTWBY, ii, 573-4.
92. This is clarified in NLI MS 30,115, ‘My Friend’s Book’, a TS of WBY’s review of Song
and Its Fountains, with much autobiographical reminiscence.
93- To Ernest Boyd, 12 Oct. 914, Healy Collection, Stanford.
94. Kuch, Yeats and AE, 8, interestingly discusses WBY’s conflicting later accounts of his reac-
tion to Russell’s visions. In 4u he recorded that he came to believe in their supernatural
origin when Russell’s predictions were vindicated; but in his earlier review of Song and
Its Fountains he claimed that he became convinced through verifying Russell’s visionary
representations by ‘the obscure symbolism of alchemy’. Such knowledge was hardly
available to him in 1884.
95- Lévi was translated into English in 1886. Cornelius Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia
[1531] had been available in English since the seventeenth century, but Henry Morley
published his Life in 1871 and A. Prost’s long commentary appeared in French in
1881-2.
96. Though Madame Blavatsky claimed to have been granted her insight and considerable
spiritual power by an ancient Tibetan brotherhood of Masters; the description of their
existence given in Sinnett’s The Occult World is adapted in early WBY poems like
‘Anashuya and Vijaya’.
97- See James Olney, ‘W. B. Yeats’s Daimonic Memory’, Sewanee Review, 85 (1977), 587-603.
98. See KT, The Middle Years (London, 1916), 27-30, and Twenty-five Years (London, 1913),
208-9. These occasions may have taken place on WBY’s visit from London to Dublin,
Nov. 1887 to Jan. 1888; see Chapter 3, below.
99- Au, 103-5.
100. Denson, Letters from AE, 6-9, quoted by Kuch, Yeats and AE, 55, with commentary.
IOI. Russell to Carrie Rea, 1886, quoted by Kuch, Yeats and AE, 14.
102. Reprinted in UP, i, 88ff.
103. See UP, i, 84.
104. See his remarks quoted at the Ferguson centenaryin Trinity. ‘On one occasion, when he
was dining with him, Ferguson expressed his desire to see Dublin a literary city. This was
one of the great hopes of his life, and to some extent that hope was coming about.’ (Daily
Express, Dublin, 16 Mar. 1910).
105. CL, i, 8. In a notebook, probably from 1884, there are random jottings attacking Eliot
for ‘shouting the moral law’.
106. UP, i, 104.
107. Twenty-five Years, 141, for the Oldham connection. WBY thought they had been intro-
duced by O’Leary and his sister, but KT records that she met O’Leary through the Yeats
family when JBY was painting her portrait in the summer of 1886; also see the Sketch, 29
Nov. 1893.
108. To Mrs James Pritchard; Geoffrey Barrow, ‘Katharine Tynan, Letters 1884-1885’, Apex
One, t (1973).
109. 7 Nov. 1886, 27 Jan. 1887, Abbott, Further Letters ofGerard Manley Hopkins, 273, 151.
IIO. See Chapter 3, p. 72, below.
III. The major effort was for the Gae/, 28 May 1887; see Kelly, ‘Aesthete among the Athletes’.
Notes followed in Irish Fireside, 9 July 1887, and Truth, 4 Aug. 1887. See Carolyn
Holdsworth, ‘ “Shelley Plain”: Yeats and Katharine Tynan’, Y4 2 (1983), 59-92.

553
 NOTES TO PAGES 55-61
i lanl2 . See especially an influential review of WO in the Irish Times and the Magazine ofPoetry
(Oct. 1889), as well as the interview quoted above.
113. 28 Aug. 1906, Harvard.
II4. Daily Express, Dublin, 27 Aug. 1898 (UP, ii, 116-17).
IIS. ‘The Younger Poets of Today’, unattributed cutting in Ellmann MSS, possibly from
Magazine ofPoetry (Oct. 1889), 454.
116. Pamela Hinkson, “The Friendship of Yeats and Katharine Tynan’, Fortnightly Review,
Oct. 1953, 174 (July—Dec.), 254. The phrase ‘clearing away the rubbish’ was strangely enough
repeated by Ezra Pound in 1914: Omar Pound and A. Walton Litz (eds.), Ezra Pound
and Dorothy Shakespear: Their Letters 1909-1914 (New York, 1984), 325.
117. Published 6 Aug. 1887. See also p. 70, below.
118. See Kelly, ‘Aesthete among the Athletes’ for a discussion.
119. Russell to O’Faolain, as above.
120. 27 June 1947, Ellmann interview book, Tulsa; also SQ. She had met O’Leary and JBY the
day before at the Contemporary Club. Also see MG to Joseph Hone, 20 Mar. 1939, NLI
MS 5914: “We met for the first time at John O’Leary’s tea party.’ This is not altogether
to be trusted, as she was liable to false-memory syndrome; but the repeated circumstan-
tial detail is telling.
I21. She was, for instance, born neither in Kerry nor in Dublin, as she sometimes claimed,
but in Tongham, Surrey, on 2 Dec. 1866. See Conrad Balliett, ‘The Lives — and Lies — of
Maud Gonne’, Eire-Ireland, 144, 3 (Fall 1979), 17-44.
1228 Au, 83.
123. Mem, 52.
124. izle Ge
125. Daly, Young Douglas Hyde, 90.
126. NLI MS 3726A.

Chapter3: Two YEARS: BEDFORD Park

1887-1889
Epigraph: Reading.
I . JBY to O'Leary, 23 May 1887, NLI MS 5925.

Zz . Same to same, 16 Jan. 1888.

ge (ML, iene,
4 . Ian Fletcher, ‘Some Aspects of Aestheticism’, WB. Yeats and His Contemporaries (Brighton,
1967), 20, quoting The Queen, 1880-81.
. The word ‘suburban’ was used by James to mock aestheticism in The Tragic Muse (1889).
Nn . Itis Saffron Parkin The Man Who Was Thursday, and is also described in his Autobiography.
7. Geoffrey Paget to Josephine Johnson, 15 Jan. 1975; my thanks to Professor Johnson for
this reference.
. GBS shared the generally low opinion of Sparling, exacerbated by his own interest in May
Morris. ‘A tall slim immature man with a long thin neck on champagne bottle shoulders,
and not athletic. He was brave, sincere and intellectual in his tastes and interests. Having
apparently complete confidence in himself, he had a quite unconscious pretentiousness
which led his audiences and new acquaintances to expect more from him than he was able
to give them.’ (Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw. Volume r, 1856-1898: The Search for Love,
London, 1988, 225). GBS’s affair with May provided the inspiration for Candida.
. CL, 1, 56. It was the same as the Terenure house in Dublin.
TOF For descriptions of the house, see ECY to William
Rothenstein, 19 Oct. 1939, Harvard;

554
 NOTES TO PAGES 61~71
Ernest Rhys, ‘W. B. Yeats: Early Recollections’, Fortnightly Review, NS, 138 (July 1935),
52-7 (I & R, i, 35-6) KT, Sketch, 29 Nov. 1893.
Il. 17 Sept. 1888.

I2. 13 June 1940, Ellmann interview book, Tulsa.

13. Legge was a civil servant and literary critic, Crook a Sligo man who taught school in
Clapham and lectured on Irish affairs; CL, i, 14, 26.
14. CL, i, 64.
16s Interview with George Yeats, 1 July 1946, Ellmann interview book, Tulsa.
16. As he himself recorded: CL, i, 92.
2G). CL, 1, 97-
18. GE; i, Tor.
19. John Kelly deduces that this was probably his payment from Scott for FFTIP.
20. Citas:
2 Nevinson, Masefield, Symons, Horton and Sturge Moore all fit this mould.
2D Rhys, “W. B. Yeats: Early Recollections’.
225 CL, i, 50. The meeting was at the Radfords’, and GBS recorded in his Pitman pocket
diary, ‘An Irishman called Yeats talked about socialism a great deal.’
24. Au, 148-9.
25. Since Ye Pleiades of Feb. 1888 had a piece by ECY entitled ‘Love Me Love My Dog’, she
cannot have been entirely ignorant on the subject.
26. To KT, c. 15 June 1888, CL, i, 71.
27. See below, p. 74.
28. GIy x, 50:
29. It seems loosely based on a tale in the Book ofthe Dun Cow, Leabhar na hUidhri, about
the bewitching of King Eochaid by Edain; WBY used it again, in “The Two Kings’.
O’Curry had published it in his Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish in 1873, and Lady
Wilde in her Ancient Legends in 1887; but WBY does not seem to have used these repos-
itories for material until after 1887, and the story also appears in O’Grady’s canonical (to
him) History ofIreland (1878). See Phillip Marcus, ‘A Source for Dhoya’, Notes & Queries,
216 (Oct. 1967), 383-4.
30. CIE, AOA
ait See below, pp. 110-11.
32. CLI e cs
33: To Elizabeth White, 30 Jan. 1889, CZ, i, 131.
34- cf. “The Coolun’ in Lays ofthe Western Gael (1888): “With the dew of the meadow shin-
ing/On her milk-white twinkling feet.’
35- CL SARS
36. CL, 1, 98.
37- See below, pp. 296, 361-3. And Griffith would, accordingly, republish ‘Ferencz Renyi’ in
his newspaper the United Irishman on 24 Dec. 1904.
38. 27 Apr. 1887, CL, i, 11.
39: u July 1887, CL, i, 26.
40. 12 Feb. 1888, CL, i, 48.
Al. 6 Sept. 1888, CL, 1, 93-4.
42. Mem, 32. His father is identified by a version of the story told by Russell to Monk
Gibbon, The Masterpiece and the Man: Yeats as IKnew Him (London, 1959), 31-
43. GIL shine,
44. 2 Nov. 1889, Hyde MSS, TCD.
45. (GIES sie

555
 NOTES TO PAGES 71-77
46. CL, i, 41.
47. T. O’Rorke, History, Antiquities and Present State ofthe Parishes ofBallysodare and Kilvarnet
in the County of Sligo, with Notice of the O'Haras, the Coopers, the Percevals and Other
Local Families (Dublin, n.d.); W. G. Wood-Martin, History ofSligo, County and Town.
[Volume 1] From the Earliest Ages to the Close ofthe Reign ofQueen Elizabeth (Dublin, 1882);
[Volume 2] From the Accession ofJames I to the Revolution of1688 (Dublin, 1889).
» (GIL aos
CE. 4,38:
. Daly, Young Douglas Hyde, 87.
. Nora O’Mahony to Austin Clarke, ¢.'1930, Huntingdon. For speculation about the pro-
posal see Carolyn Holdsworth, Y4 2 (1983), and James McFadden, YAACTS 8 (1990).
. Mem, 32.
. See McFadden for a countering speculation.
. Denson, Letters from AE, 6.
. Possibly at the Sigerson house in Clare Street. See above, p- 51; Kuch, Yeats and AE, 54;
KT, Twenty-five Years, 208-9; Au, 102-3.
. Kuch, Yeats and AE, 28-9, Gibbon, The Masterpiece and the Man, 55. See Summerfield,
Myriad-minded Man, for a full account.
CLA TOS:
. Au, 128.
. ECY’s diary, 18 Jan. 1889.
. He finally admitted to AG on 7 Feb. 1913: ‘I shall never speak it.’ Berg.
5 (CIE Oey.
. Pethica, 151.
. CL, i, 62 (‘Tcould only speak with considerable difficulty at first.’)
. ‘The Strife of Love in a Dream’, an Elizabethan version of the first book of Francesco
Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili for Lang’s new edition in Aug. 1889. This introduced
him to a Renaissance decadent masterpiece which helped inspire ‘Leda and the Swan’
nearly forty years later, according to Giorgio Melchiori, The Whole Mystery ofArt: Pattern
into Poetry in the Work of W. B. Yeats (London, 1960).
. See correspondence between Winifred T. Davis and Horace Reynolds, Harvard, for
attempts to trace these in 1935. UP, i, 28, estimates the quantity of traceable work.
- CL, 1; 91.
Ba OF BRRbs
. See JBY to O'Leary, 23 May 1887, NLI MS 592s, and WBY to KT, 25 June 1887, CL, i, 24.
. To Hyde, 23 Aug. 1889, CL, i, 183.
. Graphic, 9 June 1888.
5 (GIL OO) SD,
DOL iG,
. See CL, i, 58-9; UP, i, 198-202, 159, 185. There is a dubious report by Edward Garnett in
Berg.
- Verso of O’Leary autograph sent by WBY to Constance Gore-Booth, late 1890s,
Harvard.
. 12 Feb. 1888, CL, i, 48.
5 OIL, toy
- Oct. 1901, in AG’s copy. Berg. Au, 149; Mem, 32. The figure varies between ‘some twelve
pounds’ and ‘£14’, but twelve guineas seems right.
. ECY’s diary.
. An important article in Leisure Hour, Oct. 1890 (UP, i, 175-82), may have been written
in 1887.

556
 NOTES TO PAGES 77-88
80. CE, 1580.
8. CL, i, 194.
82. UP, i, 189.
83. UP, i, 410.
84. 27 Sept. 1888.
85. It was published at the end of the month.
86. CL, i, 93.
87. CL, 1, 118.
88. CL, i, 119; also see 97-8.
89. SMY to R L-P, 17 June 1930.
go. On 20 July 1901 he wrote to Robert Bridges (CL, iii, 90) that he had grown ‘not a little
jealous of the “Lake Isle” which has put the noses of all my other children out of joint’.
Hugh Kingsmill saw him in Switzerland in 1924, ‘reciting “Innisfree” with an air of sup-
pressed loathing’, while his female audience ‘beamed ardently at him, as though ready
at a word to fall in behind him and surge towards the bee-loud glade’ (I & R, ii, 295-6).
On another occasion it was sung in the open air by 2,000 boy-scouts (I & R, i,152). WBY
wrote to Edith Lister at Bullen’s: ‘Imagine “Innisfree” as a marching song — poor island.’
(28 July? [from Coole], Harvard).
gl. Gh, 128.
92. UP, 1, 130-37.
93- CL, i, 24.
94. So he claimed in Au, though some doubt is cast by his assertion that WO was already
published — and it did not appear until the end of 1889. However, the detail that Wilde
was working on the proofs of The Decay ofLying is strong circumstantial evidence for
1888; WBY may have confused two visits. On 25 July 1888 he first visited Lady Wilde;
SMY records another visit on 16 Nov. 1889 (SMY to KT, Illinois).
95- Au, 134-5.
96. A reflection possibly prompted by WBY’s later knowledge of Moore. See Conneely, ‘A
Talk with W. B. Yeats’; also Ralph Shirley to Arland Usher, 21 June 1939, HRHRC.
97: W. R. Rodgers, transcript of “W. B. Yeats: A Dublin Portrait’, HRHRC.
98. NUI MS 5925.
99. Hyde to Ellen O'Leary, 2 Feb. 1888.
Ioo. See especially George Bornstein, ‘Remaking Himself: Yeats’s Revisions of His Early Canon,
D. C. Creetham and W. Speed Hill (eds.), Text: Transactions of the Society for Textual
Scholarship (1991).
IOI. cf. ‘All Things can Tempt me’ and ‘Adam’s Curse’.
102. CL, 1, 54.
103. CTs, 122)
104. 4 Feb. 1889, TCD.
105. See NLI MS 31,087, a collection of cuttings.
106. Reviews quoted in the text are as follows: 9 Mar. 1889; Boston Pilot, 4 May 1889; 5 June
1888, TCD; Academy, 30 Mar. 1889; 12 July 1889; 1 Feb. 1889; 16 Feb. 1889; 4 Mar. 1889; 25
May 1889; Providence Sunday Journal, 12 May 1889.
107. Mem, 21.
108. Mem, 40.
109. SMY notebook, ECY diary; see CL, i, 134, n. 3.
110. CIETRO:
III. Au, 123.
112. In a notebook entry of 13 July 1899, at Coole, he recorded his use of apple-blossom as
an occult invocation, adding ‘the apple blossoms are symbols of dawn and of the air and

Spy
 NOTES TO PAGES 88-95

of the earth and of resurrection in my system and in the poem [Shadowy Waters]’. See
below, p. 219.
113. ‘The Tragic Theatre’ from The Cutting of an Agate (E &9 I, 243-4).

Chapter 4: SECRET SOCIETIES

1889-1891
Epigraph: Healy Collection, Stanford.
I. Ellmann, M & M, 73.
a, CL, i, 256, for a round-up.
reels 4r 4D. A7i=2.
“GL A240ens 3.
| WIP So Sa).
fk
Nn. In ‘An Extraordinary Adventure in the Shades’, Mangan wrote of ‘Mannerism’ and
WwW

genius. ‘You shall tramp the earth in vain for a more pitiable object than a man of genius
with nothing else to backitup . . . Transfuse into this man a due portion of mannerisms
~ the metamorphosis is marvellous . . Mannerism! destitute of which we are, so to speak,
walking humbugs; destitute of which the long odds are, that the very best individual among
us, after a life spent in the treadmill system, dies dismallyina sack.’ See David Lloyd,
Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish
Cultural Nationalism (London, 1987), 197, and for further reflections on the ‘mask’, 206-7,
212-13.
. Though WBY recurred more often to Mangan’s chilling ode ‘Siberia’ than to the well-
worn ‘Dark Rosaleen’, he characteristically interpreted it as referring to the inner land-
scape of alienation — not as a metaphor for the famine conditions under which it was written.
. To KT, 9 Mar. 1889, CL, i, 153.
. Au, 155-6.
mC te23t
. My thanks to Deirdre Toomey for this reference.
. Orso WBY alleged.
- G-YL, 19, implies she attended her sister Kathleen’s wedding when she was herself eight
months pregnant, which shows a distinct lack of conventionality. The belief in cursed
marriages is recorded in SQ, 333.
14. Margaret Wilson’s subsequent life is described by Tania Alexander, 4 Little ofAll of
These:AnEstonian Childhood (London, 1987), Chapter 3. The half-sister, Eileen Wilson,
lived with MG in Paris.
eC lita28-
. Mem, 63.
- CL, 1, 154-5.
. 23 Oct. 1889, CL, i, 192.
. See UP, i, 213-15; LNJ; and WBY’s handwritten paragraph of hyperbole about MG
destined for an unnamed newspaper, at Harvard.
. CL, i, 167-8.
. See below, p. 112.
. To KT, 10 Oct. 1889, CL, i, 190.
5 JA ne.
. CL,1, 158, 223-4.
sn GLyay 1455 166-7:
» (GIL okyoy

558
 NOTES TO PAGES 95-103
A (OG SiGe
. See UP, i, 146-62, though ‘Irish Fairies’ dates from later — cf. CL, i, 175-82.
. e.g. the fact that Sir Charles Gavan Duffy was working on ‘the last few chapters’ of his
life of Thomas Davis ‘in a house near Park Lane’ (LNJ, 15).
. A favourite phrase about the grass blade that carries the universe upon its point crops up
regularly (e.g. LNI, 78).
. Gamely reviewed by WBY on 7 Oct. 1893 but left unsigned.
5 Gb eatsoy
. CL, i, 195. SMY wrote to KT that their maid Rose ‘liked it so much that she said “I
wish Miss Tynan would just walk into the kitchen so as I could tell her.”’ (17 Nov. 1889,
Illinois).
. LNI, 88-9.
. SMY to KT, 17 Nov. 1889, Illinois.
5 (GIL ey.
5 (GL rit
oy CL 1535105.
. See below, Chapter 8. Spelt ‘Kathleen in its early incarnation, WBY eventually settled
for ‘Cathleen’.
. 14 Oct. 1889, UP, i, 142-6.
ae CLE UTA
. 23 Aug. 1889, CL, i, 183.
. I Sept. 1889, CL, 1, 186.
a GIioIg9:
5 (GL ye ioe xe
. CL, 1, 194, 170-71, 184.
5 (GIL i akose
. See Jan Fletcher, “The Ellis—Yeats—Blake Manuscript Cluster’, Book Collector, 21 (Spring
1972), 72-94.
», (GUase nie
5 (WS oie.
. See review of Housman’s Blake, UP, i, 280.
. Material at Reading records WBY’s thoughts on the survival and dispersal of Blake
MSS (for instance MS gg1, an account in WBY’s handwriting of Mrs Blake’s dealings
with her husband’s literary estate, and also WBY to Geoffrey Keynes, 13 and 27 Feb. 1913,
apologizing that he cannot remember or find out how he and Ellis discovered the ‘Book
of Ahaniz)).
Gia 226,10. A.
Cie DATs
5S Giaigey a,
. 5 Oct. 1890, Kansas.
. NLI MSS 13,569, 13,570, 13,574. See M. C. Flannery, Yeats and Magic: The Earlier Works
(Gerrards Cross, 1977).
. 13Jan. and 3 Feb. at least, from the evidence of ECY’s diary.
5 UIP Alsop Mis, isioR (CIE, hath im, 2,
. Au, 173-5, 179. cf. Voltaire’s dying words: asked to renounce the devil, he refused on the
grounds that in the circumstances he needed all the allies he could find.
. Occult notes and diary.
5 (CNL ik evs.
Ong 28

559
 NOTES TO PAGES 103-109

64. On its formation, see R. A. Gilbert, The Golden Dawn and the Esoteric Section (London,
Theosophical History Centre, 1987).
65. See R. A. Gilbert, ‘Provenance Unknown: A Tentative Solution to the Riddle of the Cipher
Manuscript of the Golden Dawn’ in Albrecht Gotz von Olenhausen (ed.) with the
assistance of Nicholas Barker, Herbert Franke and Helmut Moller, Wege und Abwege:
Beitrage zur Europdischen Geistesgeschichte der Neuzeit: Festschrift fir Ellic Howe zum 20
September 1990 (Freiburg, 1990), 79-89.
66. Mathers used a Swedenborgian masonic ritual document as his model. Despite its use
of masonic structures, the Golden Dawn was Christian Cabbalist in its Outer Order, and
Rosicrucian in its Inner Order. My thanks to Deirdre Toomey for guidance on this
point.
67. See Ellic Howe, The Magicians ofthe Golden Dawn: ADocumentary History of a Magical
Order 1887-1923 (London, 1972), 41-2, for other descriptions of Mathers in his British
Museum days.
68. See Howe, 38, for conflicting claims regarding the Golden Dawn's foundation; for its organ-
ization, R. A. Gilbert, The Golden Dawn Companion:AGuide to the Hi:istory, Structureand
Workings ofthe Hermetic Order ofthe Golden Dawn (Wellingborough, 1986).
69. Howe, The Magicians ofthe Golden Dawn, 63.
70. Israel Regardie, My Rosicrucian Adventure (Chicago, 1936), 14.
748 Gerald Yorke’s foreword in Howe, The Magicians ofthe Golden Dawn, ix-xix.
G23 George Cecil Jones to John Symons, quoted in Howe, The Magicians of theGolden Dawn,
61.
73- Howe, The Magicians ofthe Golden Dawn, 50; see Pethica, 151, for WBY’s account to AG.
The Comtesse used to provide coffee for him at her flat near the British Museum.
74. 18 Nov. 1890, NLI MS 592s.
75: Dorothea Hunter told Ellmann, ‘the Order was my university. In it were collected, clas-
sified and edited the great traditions of occultism and mysticism — from which we could
deduce that of which we were capable.’ See Warwick Gould’s brief biography of her in
YA 9 (1992) [Yeats and Women, ed. Deirdre Toomey], 142.
76. Howe, The Magicians ofthe Golden Dawn, 58.
77: UP wivacgs
78. SB, 221.
79. See below, pp. 120-21.
80. See below, Chapter 7.
81. Rhys, “W. B. Yeats: Early Recollections’, dates it as the winter of 1889/90.
82. Karl Beckson, Arthur Symons:ALife (Oxford, 1987), 6r.
83. To William Symington McCormick [November 1891], John Sloan (ed.), Selected Poems
and Prose ofJohn Davidson (Oxford, 1995), 175-6. George Arthur Greene was one of the
organizers.
84. See especially his rg10 lecture ‘Friends of my Youth’, NLI MS 30,088; also his 1936 BBC
broadcast ‘Art and Ideas’; and The Trembling ofthe Veil.
85. See Dowson to Symons, 5 July 1896, in Desmond Flower and Henry Maas (eds.), The
Letters ofErnest Dowson (London, 1967), 371-2 — a letter asking Symons to tone down a
biographical article, assuring him that he has become ‘the most pastoral of men’.
86. See Jerusha Hall McCormack, John Gray: Poet, Dandy and Priest (Brandeis, 1991), 21ff.
87. Ernest Boyd, Ireland's Literary Renaissance (Dublin, 1916), 139-44, 172-5, 184-9. On WBY’s
use of mysticism and symbolism, see also M. Bowra, Memories (London, 1966), 240-41.
88. UP, ii, 261.
89. Johnson's Poems (1895) are full of yearning towards men friends (including the
‘beauti-
ful sybilline lips’ of Manmohan Ghose); many are addressed to people, including a poem
to Lord Alfred Douglas about choirboys. (See also below, Chapter 6, n. 87, for his poem

560
 NOTES TO PAGES 109-116
to Davray.) Three poems printed posthumously in a 1928 pamphlet edited by
Vincent
Starett included a poem in Latin to Wilde thanking him for writing Dorian Gray: ‘Hic
sunt poma sodomarum/Hic sunt corda vitiorum/Et peccata dulcia.’ There is a copy in
WBY’ library.
go. GIF oko
gl. Beckson, Arthur Symons, 81. See also Dowson to G. A. Greene, 27 Nov. 1893 in
Flower
and Maas, The Letters ofErnest Dowson.
92. 23 Apr. (LNI, 5—7ff.).
93. CL 1,257, 0.7.
94. Interview with George Yeats, 1 June 1946, Ellmann interview book, Tulsa.
95- UP, ii, 257; also introduction to Oxford Book ofModern Verse; and see George Bornstein,
‘Last Romantic or Last Victorian’, YA 1 (1982), 117ff.
96. CL, i, 245.
97- CL, 1, 246.
98. Now in Emory Special Collection.
99- 9 Nov. 1891, NLI MS 5925.
100. CL, 1, 274-5:
IOI, The Pseudonym Library, founded in 1890, would be Fisher Unwin’s greatest success. It
was a popular imprint ‘specifically suited by their brightness and originality’ for holiday
reading. Pocket-sized and cheap, they were sold on railway bookstalls and usually achieved
several editions. See Warwick Gould, ‘Journey without Maps’, YA 11 (1995), 229-31.
102. To O'Leary, 1 Dec. 1891, NLI MS 5925.
103. See UP, i, 245-50 for United Ireland article, 15 Oct. 1892.

Chapter 5: THE BATTLE OF THE Books

1891-1893
Epigraph: L, 405.
T. MG to Hone, 23 Mar. 1939, NLI MS so19.
2. In conversation with Patrick McCartan in 1937: see ‘William Butler Yeats — the Fenian’,
Ireland-American Review (Nov. 1940), 45, and Yeats and Patrick McCartan: A Fenian
Friendship. Letters with a Commentary by John Unterecker and an Address on Yeats the
Fenian by Patrick McCartan (Dolmen Press Yeats Centenary Papers, No. x, Dublin, 1965).
There is, however, an intriguing transcription in WBY’s handwriting in Huntingdon
of a newspaper article from the mid-1860s, attacking ‘pro-British’ Irish bishops from a
distinctly Fenian viewpoint. It may have been done for O'Leary, who used this material
in his Recollections, ii, 31.
See O Broin, Revolutionary Underground, Chapter 4.
GL 4, 277:
Cin 242:
8 July 1891, NLI MS 10,201.
Cl in2Opies
See James White, ‘AE’s Merrion Square Murals and Other Paintings’, Arts in Ireland,
I, 3 (1973), 4-10.
MG to Ethel Mannin, 29 Oct. 1946, NLI MS 17,875.
. Mem, so.
Date according to CL, i, 269, n. 3. See UP, i, 206-8.
Mem, 47-8.
See WBY to AG, Aug. 1922, SIUC, for his horror at seeing it printed on a banner at an
Irish American gathering; he first supposed it was a biblical quotation.

561
 NOTES TO PAGES I16-124

15. It is dated ‘Dublin, October 1891’ and written into the notebook called “The Flame of
the Spirit’; this is the version quoted here, reproduced in Bornstein, Early Poetry: Volume
2, 487. The slightly different version pulled from the proofs of The Countess Kathleen and
Various Legends and Lyrics is in ibid., 488.
CI 272
YA 7 (1989), 190.
George Mills Harper (ed.), Yeats’s Vision’ Papers. Volume 2: The Automatic Script25June
1918-29 March 1920, Steve L. Adams, BarbaraJ.Frieling and Sandra L. Sprayberry (eds.)
(London, 1992), 229.
See Bornstein, Early Poetry: Volume2,484. The ‘Rosy Cross’ notebook is NLI 30, 318; “The
Flame of the Spirit’ was auctioned to an unknown buyer by Sotheby’s on 23 July 1987.
t Nov. 1891, CL, 1, 266.
CL, 1, 277.
CL, 1, 295.
United Ireland, 2 Apr. 1892. See Donald Pearce, ‘Dublin’s National Literary Society,
1892’, Notes &% Queries, 19, 6 (12 May 1951).
. Au, 229: a significant anticipation of later priorities. The quotations come from a letter
to Rolleston on 10 May, apologizing for not being able to attend an ILS meeting.
CL, 1, 297.
. Atameeting in the Wicklow Hotel on 24 May a Provisional Committee was appointed;
on 31 Maya public meeting was arranged for the Rotunda on g June, where WBY moved
the foundation of the NLS, particularly stressing the Library project. See CL, i, 300.
3 June 1892. “There are Nationalists whose friendship no man need disdain but there are
others with whom it would be difficult to cultivate even a distant acquaintance.’
18 June 1892.
CL, 1, 301.
Clii.303'
CL, i, 305, for WBY’s doleful report to O'Leary. He put a brave face on it elsewhere by
claiming that he had always intended the London ILS to be ‘federated with a central body
in Ireland’, but this concealed the fact that the ‘central body’ was to have been the Young
Ireland League, not the newly created and respectable National Literary Society.
B23 Au, 224-5. See Daly, Young Douglas Hyde, 153, for Hyde’s favourable reaction to Gavan
Duffy and an ILS meeting on 30 July; Gavan Duffy impressed them by his practicality
and business acumen in publishing matters. WBY is not listed as attending.
33- CLEj1,31-
34: CE e313
35. In a version very different from later revisions; see M. J. Sidnell, “Yeats’s First Work for
the Stage: The Earliest Versions of The Countess Cathleen’ in D. E. S. Maxwell and S. B.
Bushrui (eds.), W. B. Yeats 1865-1965: Centenary Essays on the Art of W. B. Yeats (Ibadan,
1965).
36. LTWBY, i, 6.
3/- 8 Nov. 1892.
38. CL, 1, 3334.
39: 12 Nov. 1892: ‘You have no authority to make proposition to him as you have done.’
40. CL, 1,350, n. 5.
Al. 18 Nov. 1892, LTWBY, i, 6-8.
42. This meeting in the early 1900s, where Sara Allgood’s recitation of ‘Moll Magee’ was
ill-received, is recorded in an unattributed cutting in Henderson’s cuttings book, Kansas.
For WBY’s reprimand, see Au, 229-30. The motion recording that ‘Count Plunkett be
required to convey to the Library subcommittee the dissatisfaction of the Society regard-
ing the manner in which the meetings of the subcommittee have been conducted, the

562
 NOTES TO PAGES I24—I31

apparent absence of minute book or report of its proceedings’ was put by Messrs McCaul
and Curtis at a meeting of 29 June: NLS minute book, NLI MS 1465-6. The offending
report, a very scrappy production, is in NLI MS 5018, reprinted in CL,
i,358.
See ‘Yeats’s First Draft’, 134. 29, notes in Ellmann MSS, Tulsa.
CH, 78-82.
. To AG, 25 May 1930; quoted in CL, ii, 127, n. 3.
See VSR, 185ff. for this original version.
A recollection of SMY: PF, 174.
. To John Quinn, 19 Feb. 1915, NYPL.
CL, i, 304, n. 7.
. Mem, 60.
CL, i,245, quoting a long letter from Rolleston to Hyde. This correspondence varies between
suspicion of WBY, uncertainty as to how far he actually represented the Dublin Society,
and belief that he was being ‘sensible and disinterested’ (23 Jan.). Rolleston’s letters also
make clear that he was being ground between WBY’s and Gavan Duffy’s implacable con-
tempt for each other. Both London and Dublin subcommittees were to draw up lists of
books, but power remained with Gavan Duffyas editor-in-chief and Rolleston and Hyde
as subeditors.
CiET 352.
53- Daly, Young Douglas Hyde, 154-5.
54: Howe, The Magicians ofthe Golden Dawn, 97, who claims he completed the 5=6 initia-
tion the following day. cf. below, p. 129.
CL, i, 341, n. 4. WBY and Hyde themselves went to Cork on 23 Jan., where the meet-
ing was chaired by the ex-Young Irelander Denny Lane, and the condescension of the
Dubliners was not universally welcomed. See Daly, Young Douglas Hyde, 160, for arather
ingenuous report.
United Ireland, 11 Mar. 1893.
United Ireland for 22 Apr. and 6 May reports speeches at Loughrea, New Ross and
Dublin. By 27 May she was once more speaking to ‘L'Union de la Jeunesse Republicaine’
in Paris. On 4 Apr., in Sligo, WBY completed the mournful nationalist ‘Ballad of Earl
Paul’, not subsequently collected. WBY attended a GD Council of Adepts at Clipstone
Street on 30 May, and was active in London literary circles in early June.
. Astrological notes for 1893, MBY, probably compiled 1914-15: referring to Apr. 1893. ‘It
was a year of great trouble. A great breach with MG .. . Later on 1 went to Paris & saw
her again. A real breach for reasons I knew nothing of had however taken place.’
Mem, 68. The poem here is as it appeared in National Observer, 29 July 1893.
. See their exchanges in Dec. 1898: below, Chapter 8.
. JBY to SMY, ro June 1892 [1893?], courtesy of W. M. Murphy.
CTE 318:
Contract dated 25 May 1892, NLI 30, 654.
Howe, The Magicians of the Golden Dawn, 107.
CT. See also UP, i, 283-8, ‘Causerie’.
. MG to Hone, 23 Mar. 1939, NLI MS sor9.
UP 1187-85377.
. Mary Helen Thuente, W B. Yeats and Irish Folklore (Dublin, 1981), 104, puts this case
convincingly.
United Ireland, 2 Dec. 1893. In Dublin on 31 Oct. he gave a more defiantly anti-rational
and literal account of fairy life (United Ireland, 4 Nov. 1893), but he still described these
beliefs as the expression of emotional and psychological needs.
70. UP, i, 266-75.

563
 NOTES TO PAGES 131-139
7h, Astrological notes probably compiled 1914-15. See also n. 53, above.
72. He had anticipated this in his letter on Tennyson’s death to the Bookman, Dec. 1892 (UP,
i, 251).
73: See his piece on Allingham in United Ireland, 12 Dec. 1891 (UP, i, 212).
74. Until Poetry, Jan., 1980, 223-6, with an interesting commentary by Christina Hunt
Mahony and Edward O’Shea. The poem stresses vigilance, and keeping the faith with
past generations who had fought for ‘Eri, our old/And long-weeping mother’.
75: LNI, 12, 30, etc. He continued, however, to attack ‘Anglo-Irishness’ much as the ‘Celt in
London’ had done; the ‘braggadocio and swagger’ of debased eighteenth-century types
was compared to the ‘serious, reserved and suspicious’ Irish peasant, as the true race type.
76. See his notebook signed ‘D.E.D.I., 28 June 1893’, YO, 3. He had been admitted to the
Portal grade on 20 Jan. (Howe, The Magicians ofthe Golden Dawn, 97).
77- CL, i, 366-7. For Quinn, see Sally Warwick-Haller, Wiliam O’Brien and the Irish Land
War (Dublin, 1990), 57-8.
78. ‘Interview with Mr W. B. Yeats’, Irish Theosophist, ii, 2 (15 Nov. 1893), 147-9 (UP, i,
298-302; and J & R, i, 19-23).
79: CL, 1, 369-74.
80. CL, i, 371.
81. My italics.
82. JBY to SMY, Dec. 1893, courtesy of W. M. Murphy.
83. LNI, 4.
84. ibid., xviii.

Chapter 6: LANDs OF HEART’S DESIRE

1894-1896
Epigraph: n.d., NLI MS 30,285.
CL, i, 395.
CL, i, 368-9.
CL, i, 401, 437.
CEN 377.
It had begun, according to WBY, as a version of a Reynard tale, and on its first outing
was cast in a heavy-handed ‘Oirish’ dialect; see above, p. 125.
CL, i, 385.
Bookman, Feb. 1894 (UP, i,317).
19 Aug. 1893 (UP, i, 283ff.).
Bookman, Oct. 1893 (UP, i, 295).
UP, i, 274; even, in this case, an anonymous five-act play about Anne Boleyn written by
a Catholic zealot.
Beckson, Arthur Symons, 98; CL, ii, 281, n. 1, quoting Clodd’s diary.
Its first appearance was in Harper's New Monthly Magazine.
Draft preface, NLI MS 30,285.
CL, 1, 379.
Dated 10 Mar. 1894; printed by Bornstein, with variants, in Early Poetry: Volume 2, 493.
This version follows pencilled revisions; an alternative has ‘retake’ in the first line, with
line 3 reading ‘Before a slanderers breath could break’,
York Powell had arranged Mallarmé’s English tour: Roger Pearson, ‘A Change of Heir:
Mallarmé at Oxford and Cambridge in 1894’, Oxford Magazine, 103 (Fourth Week,
Hilary term, 1994).

564
 NOTES TO PAGES 139-145
17s Au, 341-2.
18. Savoy, April 1896 (UP, i,399).
19. OP, 4, 323-4.
20. UP, i, 324. For his recurrent image of ‘the wind among the reeds’, see below, p- 146.
2% Richard Cave (ed.), Hail and Farewell: Ave, Salve, Vale (1933 ed., repr. and annotated,
Gerrards Cross, 1976), 78-9. Max Beerbohm also recorded his appearance: ‘a white
streak of shirt-front and above that a white streak of face; and I was aware that what I
had thought to be insubstantial murk was a dress-suit with the Author in it. And the streak
of the Author's face was partly bisected bya lesser black streak, which was a lock of Author’s
raven hair . . . It was allvery eerie and memorable.’ (I & R, i, 28).
22. Au, 282-7. He was also consoled by Wilde turning up at the theatre and praising WBY’s
short story “The Crucifixion of the Outcast’ — further encouraging his inclination to side
with ‘decadence’ rather than Shavianism.
23. Josephine Johnson, Florence Farr: George Bernard Shaw's New Woman (Gerrards Cross,
1973).
24. CL, 1, 384.
AS CL, i,386.
26. Johnson, Florence Farr, 63.
27. Bookman, Aug. 1894 (UP, i,375-7).
28. 18 Sept. [1894], Reading.
29. See e.g. letter to Fisher Unwin, CL, i, 429.
30. CL, 1, 407.
3I. ‘Shemeber’ (Pamela Carden Bullock) to George Pollexfen, 3 Jan. 1895, LTWBY, i, 11-12
(where it is wrongly addressed to WBY).
a2 UP, ui, 272; Genevieve Brennan, ‘Yeats, Clodd, Scatological Rites, and the Clonmel Witch
Burning’, YA 4 (1986), 207-15; Hubert Butler, ‘The Eggman and the Fairies’, Escape from
the Anthill (Mullingar, 1985), 63-74.
33. CL, 1, 424-5.
34- PF, 176.
35- On 19 Aug. 1911 Lucy Middleton wrote to WBY in answer to a request for recollections
of psychic phenomena explored by them both in Sligo; he was beginning to write his remin-
iscences. Her account (MBY) may refer to this time:
That time at ‘Avena’ Ballisodare [the Middleton house by the mills], there was a very old mirror in
the drawing-room. I sat ona sofa. The mirror was on the wall behind my head. You sat also on the
sofa. SuddenlyIheard knocking on the mirror. Then you asked if there was aspirit there and the
answer was yes. Then you asked other questions. I do not remember what they were, but you got
answers which rather upset you. Then suddenlyI saw a most beautiful white light, over the lawn
in front of the house, and I thought that was good. Then upstairs there were knocks everywhere.
Henry also heard them there. (I think, as a very small child I saw beautiful lights & heard strange
sounds in that house, but they all seemed to me so natural I never minded them much, not know-
ing anything about such things then.)

36. CL, 1, 418.

37: Clin As se
38. Mem, 78-9.
39- 26 Dec. [1898], CL, ii, 331.
40. CL, i, 463.
41. CL, 1, 447.
42. 23 Sept. [1894], CL, i,399.
43. CL, 1, 430-31; UP, i,347¢f. and also above, pp. 52-3.
44. Daily Express, Dublin, 29 Jan. 1895; CL, i, 435, for WBY’s reply.

565
 NOTES TO PAGES 145-156
CL, i, 438.
18 Aug. 1894, Illinois.
See above, p. 140, for another reference to this image in his review of Axé/; it also recurs
in LHD: ‘The reeds are dancing by Coolaney Lake’, etc.
UP, 1,360ff.
CL, i, 472.
. Also see his Bookman review of Todhunter’s Life ofPatrick Sarsfield (UP, i, 388-9) for
reflections on the decadence of historical writing; he attacked ‘conventional patriotism’
for overthrowing ‘honest research’ and creating ‘a mystery play of devils and angels’.
Thus to attack ‘conventional patriotism’ he was prepared to shift his entire philosophi-
cal ground regarding the achievement of historical insights.
Good Reading about Many Books, Mostly by Their Authors, published by Fisher Unwin (1894),
197.
See John Kelly, ‘Yeats’s Relations with His Early Publishers’, A. N. Jeffares (ed.) Yeats,
Sligo and Ireland (Gerrards Cross, 1980), 11.
CL, 1, 402.
CL, 1, 434.
. My thanks to Warwick Gould for this insight.
. 7 Apr. 1895, CL, i, 457-8.
Amadan means ‘fool’ (Hyde's diary, as translated by Dominic Daly, private collection).
Interestingly, on this visit WBY did manage to meet the influential newspaper editor
Jasper Tully.
UP, i,358-9. It was, significantly, a volume in the New Irish Library series, so considered
by WBY as fair game.
PP, 182.
. Since the current numbers of the Irish Theosophist were heavily freighted with endless
serials about Cuchulain, Fand, Lugh Lamfada, the birds of Aengus and so on by ‘AE and
Aetan’, WBY probably felt it was time to move on.
See Bornstein, The Early Poetry: Volume 2, 16-17.
See John Harwood’s Olivia Shakespear and W. B. Yeats: After Long Silence (London, 1989),
37, a book which casts invaluable light on this important relationship and on Shakespear's
own life.
YA 4 (1986), 70.
Pound and Litz, Pound and Shakespear Letters, 211.
See especially Mendelssohn's photograph, frontispiece, Y4 4 (1986), which appeared
with a profile in the Literary Yearbook for 1897.
CL, i,396.
CL, i, 415.
CL, 1, 459.
CL, i, 464.
See Harwood, Shakespear and Yeats, 46, n. 23 and 198-9; he dates this as 15 July 1895.
Beckson, Arthur Symons, 114.
UP, i,373-5.
Denson, Letters from AE, 16.
. PF, 182-3. See below, p. 528, for WBY’s memory of this incident in ro14.
See Symons to Rhys, 7 Feb. 1891, Princeton, which establishes that he moved in on 5 Feb.
Beckson, Arthur Symons, 264.
. Ihnois.
SMY to John Quinn, 1 Apr. 1921, NYPL, quoted in W. M. Murphy, ‘Home Life among
the Yeatses’, A. N. Jeffares, Yeats, Sligo and Ireland, 180-8r.

566
 NOTES TO PAGES 156-163
79: PF, 195.
80. SMY diary, 11 Aug. 1895.
81. G-YL, 1, 52-3.
82. In Au, WBY put this incident at the end rather than the beginning oftheir affair;
but
he situates it in the Temple, which means that it was at this stage of events.
Harwood
suggests very late 1895 or January 1896.
83. Harwood’s treatment (63ff.) is necessarily speculative but highly perceptive.
84. Warwick Gould in YA 4 (1986), 276.
85. I& R,i, 28-9.
86. Such as ‘Herne’ or ‘Hearn’, and ‘Bruin’.
87. Symons had told Davray as early as 1892 that WBY was ‘much the best of our younger
poets’; Beckson, Arthur Symons, 82. Lionel Johnson dedicated a poem, “To Passions’,
to Davray in 1894, dealing characteristically with self-hatred, haunting thoughts, and
struggles with temptation. ‘I know thee, O mine own desire!/ I know not mine own self
so well.’
88. UP, i, 405.
89. CL, i, 454, 461.
go. 19 Mar. 1896, CL, ii, 14. cf.a throwaway remark ina review of
June 1896 (UP, i,405). {Ireland]
is so busy with opinions that she cannot understand that imaginative literature wholly,
and all literature in some degree, exists to reveal a more powerful and passionate, a more
divine world than ours; and not to make our ploughing and sowing, our spinning and
weaving, more easy or more pleasant, or even to give us a good opinion of ourselves, by
glorifying our past or our future.’
gI. Symons to WBY, “Tuesday’ [26 Sept. 1895], MBY. See YA 5 (1987), 59, and CL, ii, appendix.
92. Pethica, 160.
93: “Yeats ofBloomsbury’, Life and Letters ofToday, 21, 20 (Apr. 1939), 60-66. See also John
Masefield, Some Memories of W.B. Yeats (Dublin, 1940).
94. CL, ii, 8.
95. YA 4 (1986), 57.

Chapt
7: WAITING
er FOR THE MILLENNIUM
1896-1898

Epigraph: TCD.
1. Captain John Aherne was a French-educated United Irishman revolutionary in 1798. The
names Herne, Hearne or Ahearne recur in WBY’s fiction from 1894; ‘Michael Hearne’
first turns up in an uncollected story of Oct. 1896, ‘The Cradles of Gold’. Heron sym-
bolism runs through WBY’s dramatic work, culminating in The Herne’s Egg. ‘Hearne’
was the name of a ‘witch doctor’ on the borders of Clare and Galway (‘The Fool of
Faery’, Kensington, 1, 4, June rgor). From 1901 WBY knew the work of Lafcadio Hearn,
the Greek-Irish interpreter of Japan, who also wrote ghost-stories; see my introduction
to Paul Murray, 4 Fantastic Journey: The Life and Literature ofLafcadio Hearn (London,
1993). On the treatment of the name and its images, see Warwick Gould’s essay in YO,
especially 272-9.
2. Or so WBY told Russell: Kuch, Yeats and AE, 113.
B See “The Flame of the Spirit’ notebook, described above, p. 117.
4. Ex, 333.
5 Kuch, Yeats and AE, 108-9.
6 LAW Beth akeAy

567
 NOTES TO PAGES 163-170
. Who was led astray by ‘some memory of something I had told him about a certain
Austrian count’ (20 July 1896, CL, ii, 41-2). This indicates that Pollexfen’s horoscopes
relied upon more than astrological input.
. To AG, 10 Dec. 1897, CL, ii, 155-6.
. See Warwick Gould’s reconstruction to this relationship in YA 9 (1992), 134-88.
. Where on 22 June 1896 he entertained Havelock Ellis and Arthur Symons; on 3 Jan. 1898,
Osman Edwards, Sarojini Chattopadhyay, Florence Farr, Arthur Symons and Dorothea
Hunter.
. See letter to Clement Shorter, 24 Mar. 1896, CL, ii, 16-17, and his refusal two years later
to do a study of Tennyson for William Blackwood — who was told severely that it should
be done ‘by someone who has grown up among English people & English scenery’, not
among ‘the lean kine of aCeltic country’. (11 Mar. 1898, CL, ii, 197).
12. 26 May 1896, CL, ii, 31.
Tey And a 20 per cent royalty after 2,500 copies. See ‘Agreement’ in MBY dated 23 Dec. 1896;
but negotiations had begun some time before. Gould and Toomey believe the contract
postdates some or all of the payments in advance. The novel was being discussed by the
Yeats family at least as early as Apr. 1896. These terms were inaccurately recapitulated
by WBY ina letter to Fisher Unwin, 20 Dec. 1900, HRHRC. IGE eventually replaced
the unfinished novel, to earn the outstanding £50.
14. Draft of Dramatis Personae, Harvard.
ii, nee CL, i, 46—75
16. n.d., but probably 1896, Yale.
17s Symons MSS, Princeton.
18. Gifford Lewis, The Selected Letters ofSomerville and Ross (London, 1989), 240.
19. 23 Aug. 1907, Alan Himber (ed.), with the assistance of George Mills Harper, The Letters
ofJohn Quinn to William Butler Yeats (Ann Arbor, 1983), 84.
20. Lewis, Letters ofSomerville and Ross, 240.
21. To Horace Reynolds, 15 June 1936, Harvard.
22. See a letter of c. 1906, Berg. ‘Edward is a joy—and will give you new notes for your diary.
These Papists haven't the courage of a mouse, and then wonder how it is we go ahead.’
The ‘diary’ was probably a draft of Discoveries. See below, p. 346.
2B Joseph Hone, ‘I Remember Lady Gregory’, RTE radio talk, broadcast 14 Mar. 1956, Kansas.
The authority was a niece of Aubrey de Vere, probably Annie Cole (for whom see Pethica
26, n. 9).
24. 2 December 1881, in Cairo. ‘Lunched with the FitzGeralds, Mr & Lady Anne Blunt, Mrs
McCarthy, Dean Butcher.’ Typical of local rumours that attach themselves to the occu-
pants of local Big Houses, it was also suggested that Sir William at sixty-four was too
old to father a child!
DS. 17 Mar. 1892, Gregory family MSS, Emory.
26. To WBY [Nov. 1898], from Venice, and fragment [Christmas 1900], Berg.
a7 Arnold Harvey to Bishop Wyse Jackson, 15 Jan. 1964, recalling his life at Coole as Robert
Gregory’s tutor, Berg.
28. Pethica, 118. ‘E. Martyn had also poets with him, Symonds [sic] and Yeats — the latter
full of charm & interest & the Celtic revival — I have been collecting fairy lore since his
visit — Their first meeting is recorded in her diary, 14 Apr. 1894, Berg. ‘At the Morrises
I met Yates [sic] looking every inch a poet, though I think his prose “The Celtic Twilight”
is the best thing he has done.’
29. See the poems in Images of Good and Evil (1899), written in Ireland. Symons also pro-
duced at Rosses Point the ‘Preface’ to the second edition of London Nights, which declares,
‘I contend on behalf of the liberty of art, and I deny that morals have any right of juris-
diction over it.’
30. See Thuente, Yeats and Irish Folklore, 235ff. WBY’sarticles appeared in New Review, Nov.

568
 NOTES TO PAGES 170-178
1897; Nineteenth Century, Jan. 1898; Fortnightly Review, Sept. 1900 and Apr. 1902. Visions
and Beltefs would include his ‘Witches and Wizards and Irish Folklore’ and ‘Swedenborg,
Mediums, and the Desolate Places’, written in 1914. He was still referring to the project
as ‘a big book of folk lore’ in a letter of 22 Dec. to AG.
aie YA 9 (1992), 70-71.
32. See UP, ii, 299, 327-8.
33° Au, 400.
34- cf. Russell’s interesting letter to AG when Visions and Beliefs was finally published. ‘. . .
not all dreams are explicable by material causes or are even traceable to suppressed desires
as the psychologists would have them . . . I think it a great pity we have no sympathetic
psychologist questioning these people. Wentz was not subtle enough, and W. B. Yeats
who is subtle has not I think your way of being intimate with the folk you allure to con-
fidence.’ (9 Sept. 1920., Berg). See UP, ii, 221-2, for a good circumstantial account of how
AG and WBY collected folklore, in ‘Irish Witch Doctors’, Fortnightly Review, Sept. 1900.
35: Elizabeth Coxhead, Lady Gregory.ALiterary Portrait (rev. ed., London, 1966), 41.
36. TB, 14.
37: In George Mills Harper and W. K. Hood, A Critical Edition of Yeats’s A Vision’ (1925)
(London, 1978) she appears anonymously in Phase 24 as ‘a certain friend’ and is profiled
quite recognizably (103-4). In the 1937 version, published after her death, she is named.
Also see his ‘Modern Ireland: An Address to American Audiences 1932-3’, edited by Curtis
Bradford, in Robin Shelton and David R. Clark (eds.), Irish Renaissance (a special num-
ber of the Massachusetts Review, Dublin, 1965), 16, for a direct assertion that AG had ‘no
philosophical interests’.
38. Nov. 1897, Pethica, r51.
39- ‘Statement by LG to JQ’, Quinn papers, NYPL, recording a conversation in 1913. Also
see YA 9 (1992), 71. In fact WBY went to Belfast in Sept. 1899 with money from the North
American Review.
40. Pethica, 197.
4l. See D.J.O’Donoghue, Irish Independent, 26 Mar. 1909.
Lal

42. To Sharp, 4 July [1898], CL, ii, 250. In.4u, WBY puts this instruction in 1899, three years
after their meeting. For a full consideration and further references, see my ‘Good
Behaviour: Yeats, Synge and Anglo-Irish Etiquette’, Paddy and Mr Punch.
43. To Fiona Macleod, [?12] Jan. 1897, CL, ii, 75. For Ubu Roi see Beckson, Arthur Symons,
159.
44. Mem, 89. See Harwood, Shakespear and Yeats, for a close deconstruction of this memory.
45. ‘VN’: my thanks to Warwick Gould and Deirdre Toomey for their transcription.
46. Au, 376-7.
47: The phrase comes from an important letter to Richard Ashe King, 5 Aug. 1897, CL, ii, 130.
This beliefis constantly expressed by him in different ways, even when at his most ‘polit-
ical’ (see his letter about Ashe King’s speech to the National Literary Society, United Ireland,
30 Dec. 1893, CL, i, 371-4).
48. See Symons’s ‘In Sligo’, Savoy, 7 (Nov. 1896), for an account ofa Rosses Point pilot called
Redmond Bruen. Jack Yeats remembered ‘all the Bruens’, Y4 11 (1994), 99.
49. SB, 20.
50. SB, 127.
SI. 1925 Introduction; draft (in the form of a letter to Ashe King) is in NLI MS 30,372. ‘Rosa
Alchemica’ was started in Fountain Court and completed in Woburn Buildings, which
fixes it as late 1895 or early 1896.
52. 19 Mar. 1896, CL, ii, 15.
53: Au, 376. See also Marjorie Reeves and Warwick Gould, Joachim ofFiore and the Myth of
the Eternal Evangel tn the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1987), 236.
54. See Thuente, Yeats and Irish Folklore, 22-3, for an associated point.

569
 NOTES TO PAGES 178-183
. UP, ii, 52; see also Reeves and Gould, Joachim ofFiore, 222-3.
. Thuente, Yeats and Irish Folklore, 219-20.
. The life of Saint-Martin (1743-1803) was written by A. E. Waite; the Martinist leader
in the 1890s was Gerard Encausse, known as ‘Papus’.
. ‘Mescal: A New Artificial Paradise’, Contemporary Review, June 1898. Symons, who
took a more spectacular trip, was another guinea-pig.
. See WBY’s letter to the Speaker, 18 May 1897.
. 30 May 1897, CL, ii, 104.
. The first instance was 14 Feb. 1897, Pethica, 125.
. Pethica, 136. Plunkett’s diary for 21 Mar. 1897 (Plunkett Foundation, Oxford) recorded
that he ‘met Yates [sic] the new Irish poet and Barry O’Brien & had a most interesting
symposium on Ireland. My fellow guests told me they and many others like them had
agreed thatIwas the only possible Irish leader.’
63. 16 Mar. 1897, CL, ii, 82.
64. See report of meeting of ’98 Centenary Committee in London, United Ireland, 10 Apr.
1897. F. H. O’Donnell excoriated the unrepresentative (i.e. non-Fenian) committee in
Dublin, and the London delegates (WBY, Ryan, O’Donnell) ‘refused to surrender the
right and authority of their central body to organise England, Scotland and France’.
O’Donnell was simultaneously involved in a row over his review of O’Leary’s Recollections
in the Athenaeum, which may have begun WBY’s estrangement from his old mentor.
65. Such as “The Desire of Man and Woman’ in the Dome, June 1897 (later ‘He mourns for
the change that has come upon him and his Beloved, and longs for the End of the World’);
he was working on a proof in Sligo.
. Pethica, 156. His letter to Sharp himself, 20 Nov. 1897, was masterly, asking him to give
way to Martyn: ‘Little things, like taking the Chair & so on, which mean nothing to you
& me mean something to a man like him, a man who is not very young & not at all suc-
cessful.’ (CZ, ii, 149).
. To Robert Bridges, 6 June 1897, CL, ii, 110.
. 25 May 1897, CL, ii, 101-2.
. See Irish Times, 21-2 June 1897, which plays down the violence; but ensuing correspon-
dence makes clear it was considerable.
. From Tillyra, 30 June [1897], CL, ii, 117. See also Pethica, 148; meeting AG
just afterwards,
WBY said that “by main force & lock & key’ he kept MG inside. ‘“— he himself disap-
proved of it — not because of disrespect for the Queen for he thinks it was right to make
some protest against the unhappy misgovernment & misfortunes of Ireland during her
reign — but that he thinks the impulse shd come from the <mob> people themselves, &
not be thrust on them from above —’
GL a3:
. Margaret Ward, Maud Gonne: Ireland’ Joan ofArc (London, 1990), 47.
. Mem, 101. This conflates these impressions with his 1896 Tillyra visit, but certainly refers
to 1897.
. John Masefield, Some Memories of W. B. Yeats (New York, 1940), 21.
. According to a letter from Russell to AG, 16 July 1898, Berg.
. Mem, 102.
- 16 July 1898, Berg. Also see a letter of5July 1901: ‘Lock him up. Treat him as the
[Balearics?] did their children. No work no breakfast.’
. See below, pp. 282-3.
. Mem, 72, 125.
. Pethica, 149-50.
. Mem, 117. Pethica, 152-3, recalls taking WBY into the estate office at Duras ‘& there we
had tea & talked, & the idea came to us that if “Maeve” could be acted in Dublin, instead

57?
 NOTES TO PAGES 183-190
of Londonas E. M. thought of— & with Yeats “Countess Kathleen” it
would be a develop-
ment of the literary movement &help to restore dignity to Ireland.’
82. This last clause was probably added by AG when
filing the draft for her archives. It is
now in Berg and must precede the version AG remembered typing out
from dictation.
The typed copy has additional signatories — Standish O’Grady, Edward Martyn,
George
Moore and Fiona Macleod. This is significant; in Jan. he had sounded
out Macleod and
cia about Celtic plays for the Young Ireland Societies and shared the idea
with AG
in Feb.
83. 28 Apr. 1899, Berg.
84. See WBY to AG, 24 Oct. 1898, CL, ii, 277. WBY later realized that the concept
of
‘Celticism’ was bogus through reading an article by Andrew Lang.
85. I& R, i, 15-19, quoting Cornelius Weygandt.
86. WBY to AG, 17 Nov. 1897, CL, ii, 144-5.
87. 22 Jan. 1898, CL, ii, 175.
88. 17 Nov. 1897, CL, ii, 144-5.
89. See his letters to AG, 13-14 June 1898, CL, ii, 236-8.
go. Mem, 131. ‘VN’ makes clear that this refers to an episode ofJuly 1900.
gi. See Warwick Gould’s article on Dorothea Hunter, YA 9 (1992), 132-88.
92. ‘The Gifts of Aodh and Una’ in Ballads in Prose, singled out by WBY in the
Bookman,
Aug. 1895, and Daily Express, Dublin, 24 Sept. 1898 (UP, i,366; UP, ii, 126-7).
93- UP, it, 707-71;
94. Letter accompanying ‘Black Pig’ sketch, n.d. [29 Nov. 1987], Emory, quoted by R.
Schuchard in YA3(1985), 155; see below, p- 192.
95- United Ireland, 11 Dec. 1897: possibly by F. H. O’Donnell.
96. Letter of Dec. 1897, Berg.
97 AG to Lord Gough, 3 May 1898, Gregory family MSS, Emory. She was also the presid-
ing genius behind a show of Jack’s in May 1898.
98. WBY recollected that Jack gave it to him; buta letter dated ‘Sat. sth’ from AG to WBY,
Berg, remarks: ‘I wrote to Hugh Lane about Memory Harbour & he went to Guildhall
& asked it to be sent to Woburn Buildings.’ The painting is reproduced on the front
endpaper of this book.
99- 10 Dec. 1897, CL, ii, 155.
100. See ‘A Poet at Home: A Pen Portrait of Mr Yeats’, the Gael, 20, 1 (Jan. 1901), and Reginald
Hine, ‘Memories of W. B. Yeats’, TS, HRHRC. The leather chair features in the draft
poem to MG, below, pp. 238-9. Also see John Masefield, Some Memories of W. B. Yeats,
and Richardson, as above, p. 161 — though she thought the art-serge curtains were dark
green and the candles white.
IOI. 10 Apr. 1900, CL, ii, 511.
102. 11 Aug. 1898, CL, ii, 260.
102% See Russell to AG, 31 May 1902, Berg. York Powell had written worriedly to Russell.
104. Pethica, 217.
105. ‘Thursday’, probably 1898, Berg.
106. UP, ii, 219, for an account.
107. ‘Monday’, possibly 1901, Berg.
108. 25 Mar. 1898, CL, ii, 204.
109. 29 May 1898.
IIO. 3 Oct. 1897, CL, ii, 135.
III. NLI MS 30,502, quoted in CL, ii, appendix.
Tl. See letter to FY, 5Mar. 1897.
113. See e.g. United Ireland, 13 Mar. 1897.

578
 NOTES TO PAGES I9I—197

II4. NLI MS 30,502.

IIS. To Russell, 10 Dec. 1897, CL, ii, 153. The quarrels concerned the rivalries between the Cen-
tenary Committees; arguments over Sharp’s chairing an ILS meeting; and a wrangle with
Elkin Mathews over the American rights to The Wind Among the Reeds.
116. Pethica, 161.
117. O Broin, Revolutionary Underground, 91. The PRO records claim that Mark Ryan had
got $10,000 (£2,000) from the INA in America in Jan. 1898 — probably an exaggeration
of MG's collection.
118. To Russell, 22 Jan. 1898, CL, ii, 176.
119. To AG, 23 Jan. 1898, CL, ii, 178.
120. 7 Feb. 1898, Berg.
121. Of which Mark Ryan was Treasurer and G. Lavelle Secretary: United Ireland, 5Jan. 1898.
122. Pethica, 177.
123. Mark Ryan, Fenian Memories, edited with an introduction by T. F. O’Sullivan (2nd ed.,
Dublin, 1946), 185-6. He incorrectly dates it as 20 Mar., but see FJ, 14 Mar. 1898, for a
report.
124. ‘98 Centennial Association of Great Britain and France: Report ofSpeeches Delivered at the
Inaugural Banquet Held at the Holborn Restaurant, London, on Wednesday, 15 April 1898
(Dublin, 1898).
125. Pethica, 167.
126. To AG, 18 May 1898, CL, ii, 228. See also obsessive letters from the Matherses (28 Mar.
1898, 6 Apr. 1898, 31 Oct. 1898).
127. 8 June 1898, CL, ii, 234.
128. To AG, 8 July 1898, Berg.
129. To JMS, 21 June 1898, CLJMS, i, 26-7.
130. To SMY, 11 July 1898, CL, ii, 251-3. Pethica, 187.
131. To AG, 11-12 Aug. 1898, CL, ii, 259. This was the Reverend H. M. Kennedy, Vicar of
Plumpton: see Ryan, Fenian Memories, 186-7, who locates this occasion at the Frascati
Restaurant, Oxford Street, on 9 Aug. It is reported in FJ, 10 Aug. There were delegates
from South Africa, France, America and Australia; the toast ‘Ireland a Nation’ was pro-
posed by Lionel Johnson, “The Men of 98’ by J. F. Taylor. WBY chaired a meeting
addressed by MG in St Martin’s Hall the next day, assembling many of the same
people. There were further demonstrations in Dublin on 13 and 15 Aug. AG had herself
spoken at the celebration of 12 Mar. (see Tuam Herald, 12 Mar. 1898), recommending tree-
planting as a safe form of commemorating revolutionary heroes.
132. WBY stressed the warmth of her reception to Sharp, 22 Aug. [1898], CL, ii, 264. Fora
report of his speech, see FJ, 16 Aug. 1898. England could not ‘settle the Irish question
with a handful of alms . . . this movement sprung [sic] from the hearth of the people like
smoke from the inextinguishable fire of patriotism which burned within their hearts for
ever.’ For a full account, CL, ii, 261, n. 3.
133. O Broin, Revolutionary Underground, 94-5.
134. To Russell, 27 Mar. 1898, CL, ii, 205.
135. Berg.
136. See Sketch, 28 Apr. 1897, and ‘Le Mouvement Celtique: Fiona Macleod’, Irlande Libre,
1 Apr. 1898 (UP, ii, 108-10).
137. e.g. postmarked. 13 Jul. r900, 8 Aug. 1900, Berg.
138. To AG, 5 Aug. 1900, Berg. By 1901 they were at each other’s throats in the A// Ireland
Review.
139. 5 May 1898, Yale.
140, To WBY from Venice, n.d., but probably Dec. 1898, Berg.

By
 NOTES TO PAGES 197-206
I4I. See letter to AG, 1June 1898, CL, ii, 23039)
142. See Rolleston to WBY, 1 July 1898, Kansas, and letters in Berg, June—Aug
. 1899.
143. See also a letter to Sharp, 1 Nov. 1898, CL, ii, 284-5, relating this ‘controver
sy’ to the pre-
paration of public opinion for the theatre.
144. Russell to WBY, n.d., but 1896.
145. Berg. She reported this letter to WBY. Also see CL, ii, 289-90, 294-303.
146. n.d., Berg.
147. 13 Oct. 1898, misquoted in LTWBY, i,41. Another contact was Edmund Gosse; they dined
at his house on g Jan. 1898.
148. Letters of 28 Oct. 1898, 24 Nov. 1898. For the description of ‘Ulick’s’ rooms,
see Evelyn
Innes (1898 version, pub. by Fisher Unwin), 300-303.
149. Both quotations from JBY to AG, 29 July 1898, W. M. Murphy (ed.), Letters from
Bedford
Park:A Selection from the Correspondence (1890-1901) ofJohn Butler Yeats (Dublin, 1972),
41-2.
150. 24 Nov. 1898, LTWBY, i, 4s.
151.To AG, 5 June 1900, CL, ii, 537. Actually it was Mirabeau.
152. Beltaine, 1899: a message also preached in his letter to Ashe King, 5 Aug. 1897, CL, ii, 129-30.

Chapter 8: SHaDowy WATERS

1898-1900
Epigraph: Winged Destiny (London, 1910), 329.
Lie 6 Dec. 1898, CL, ii, 312-13.

8 Dec. 1898, CL, ii, 314.

See ‘VN’, 1.30 a.m., 7 Dec.
See Mary K. Greer, Women ofthe Golden Dawn (Rochester, 1995), 215.
15 Dec. 1898, CL, ii, 320.
YA 9 (1992), 120-22.
eS
oS Ryan,
SENS Fenian Memories, 192. MG later addressed it as an occasional lecturer, but in 1899
neither she nor WBY took any part.
See occult notebook, MBY. Druids, mountains, the cauldron, wands, the stone of the
Dagda, Elathan, Lugh all feature.
Postmarked 16 Dec., CL, ii, 319-20.
She wrote to Enid Layard: ‘Iam afraid she is only playing with him, from selfishness and
vanity . . . [don't wish her any harm, but God is unjust if she dies a quiet death.’ (Mary-
Lou Kohfeldt, Lady Gregory: The Woman behind the Irish Renaissance, London, 1985, 130).
Reflected in The Tower as well as in the material for AV.
G-YL, 99-100.
26 Dec. 1898, CL, ii, 330.
CLE 320 sia 5:
Berg.
Postmarked ro Jan. 1899, Berg. For ‘Elathan’ see also G-Y L, 102.
See below, pp. 206-8.
La Croix, 17 Apr. 1897.
9 Feb. 1899.
24 Feb. 1899, MBY, quoted in LTWBY, i, 46-7.
See Daily Express, Dublin, ro Jan. 1899, reporting the ILS ‘At Home’ on 9 Jan.
. WBY particularly wooed Lecky, hoping that he would agree to read Lionel Johnson's
prologue to The Countess Cathleen.

573
 NOTES TO PAGES 206-212

225 On Gill, see Russell to AG, 10 Jan. 1899, Berg.

24. ut Mar. (UP, ii, 148-52).
25. United Irishman, 11 Mar. 1899.
26. JBY to AG, 11 Apr. 1899, Berg.
27. YA7 (1990), 91.
28. For a full contemporary account, see Pethica, 219-20.
29. Russell to AG, 7 Apr. 1899, Berg.
30. Irish Literary Society Gazette, i, 4 (June 1899); also UP, ii, 153-8.
Bie For the earlier attacks, see “The Future of the Irish Nation’, New Ireland Review, Feb.
1899. ‘A certain number of Irish literary men have “made a market” — just as stock-
jobbers do in another commodity— in a certain vague thing, which is indistinctly known
as “the Celtic note” in English literature, and they earn their fame and livelihood by
supplying the demand which they have honourably and with much advertising created.’
This is an attack on WBY’s ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’.
B23 Given to the National Literary Society on 6 May and published on that date in Literature
(UP, ii, 162-4), but also reported in FJ on 8 May.
33: Recollections ofDublin Castle and Dublin Society, by a Native (London, 1902), 3-4. It later
became the Academy Cinema.
34- The changes are preserved in WBY’s 1899 copy in the Huntingdon. Also see Colin
Smythe, “The Countess Cathleen: A Note’, Y4 3 (1985), 193-7, and details of revisions in
CL, ii, 669-80.
35: He had seen a draft of Moore’s ‘Edward Martyn and his Soul’, NLI MS 30,502.
36. United Irishman, 15 Apr. 1899.
37- A Pseudo Celtic Drama in Dublin: a copy is preserved in Henderson's cuttings book,
NLI MS 1729. This and Souls for Gold appeared as separate letters in the FJ and were
amalgamated as a pamphlet printed by the Nassau Press in London. Souls for Gold is
conveniently reproduced as Appendix VIII in AG’s Our Irish Theatre: AChapter ofAuto-
biography (Gerrards Cross, 1972 ed.), 261-70, and fully discussed in CL, ii, 669-80.
38. t May 1899, Berg.
39- Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Irish Literary Theatre 1899-1901 (Dublin, 1975), 39.
40. CL, ii, 395.
41. In 1911 there were plans to turn it into an opera by means of a Franco Leoni score, designs
by Gordon Craig, and the contralto of Clara Butt: see below, p. 440.
42. c. 1 May 1899, CL, ii, 406.
43. Recently produced work included Wolfe Tone, The Irishman, and much Boucicault.
44. Apart from some sour English critics: The Times thought ‘it says a great deal for the
acting that The Heather Field is endurable on the stage at all’ (Hogan and Kilroy, Irish
Literary Theatre, 48).
45. Berg.
46. Daily Express, Dublin, 15 May 1899.
47- Cave, Hail and Farewell, 128.
48. United Irishman, 20 May 1899; cf. James Joyce’s later disapproval.
49. ‘A Literary Dinner’, by ‘Cugaun’ [Griffith], United Irishman, 20 May 1899.
50. 10 May 1899.
SI. Hogan and Kilroy, Irish Literary Theatre, 39. For the student point of view, see C. P. Curran,
Under the Receding Wave (Dublin, 1967), Chapter 6. James Joyce was, famously, a non-
signatory.
52. See 1 Apr. 1899. For Ryan's critique of Griffith’s anti-Semitism, see 26 Aug. 1899. The
paper also nurtured an early cult of Wolfe Tone (1July 1899, 5 July 1899, 12 Aug. 1899, 26
Aug. 1899) and advocated the cause of old Fenians in search of Corporation sinecures,

574
 NOTES TO PAGES 212-221

like Tom Clarke (who failed, despite the United Irishman’s vehement endorsement, to
be elected Clerk of the Rathdrum Union (30 Sept. 1899) or Supervisor of the Abbatoir
(16 Oct. 1900).
. ‘EA.C.’ to United Irishman, 19 Aug. 1899.
13 May 1899.
Sketch for continuation of Au, NLI MS 30,502.
Possibly imbibed through John Gray as well as Havelock Ellis: see McCormack, John
Gray: Poet, Dandy and Priest. But the major source was Ellis: see Reeves and Gould, Joachim
ofFiore, 238-9.
22 May 1899, CL, ii, 416.
20 July 1898, Berg. He had mentioned the title in an 1893 interview; see also above,
Chapter 6, n. 47. Also see Symons, ‘In Sligo’, Savoy, 7 (Nov. 1896): ‘There is always a sigh-
ing of wind in the reeds, as of a very gentle and melancholy peace.’
. Manywere written ina bound MS book dated 29 Aug. 1893, discussed in detail by Curtis
Bradford in Yeats at Work (Carbondale, 196s). A note of the title was recorded opposite
a draft of “The Host of the Air’, now available in an edition by Carolyn Holdsworth, ‘The
Wind Among the Reeds: Manuscript Materials (Ithaca and London, 1993).
. Postmarked 22 Apr. 1899, Berg.
CH, 108.
. ToAG, 24 Apr. 1899, CL, ii, 400. Actually the comparison was to the less celebrated Egil
Skalla-Grimson, a medieval Icelandic poet whom WBY himself had mentioned in CT:
6 May 1899, CH, 109-13.
Preface to Poems (and ed.), dated 24 Feb. 1899.
Correspondence with Symons in MBY shows he accepted payments of£2and these prices
were not outstanding: John Davidson got £25 for a poem in 1896.
. June [1899], CL, ii, 422. Also see United Irishman, 17 Feb. 1900, and review on 10 July
1900.
12 July 1899, CL, ii, 433.
Russell’s letters to AG (Emory) contain many references to this.
. 27 Aug. 1899, CL, ii, 443.
‘VN’, as transcribed by Gould and Toomey.
. To William D. Fitts, 19 Aug. 1899, CL, ii, 439.
. To AG, 12 Oct. 1899, Berg.
a1 June 1899, Berg.
ToJBY, 1m Aug. [1899]. Dunleavy and Dunleavy insist that Lucy Hyde’s first visit to Coole
came later, but WBY to Clodd, 27 July [1899], confirms Hyde’s 1899 visit, and they were
at a Gort meeting on the same date (reported Daily Express, Dublin, 31 July 1899).
Daily Express, Dublin, 31 July 1899, reporting a meeting of 27 July; also An Claidheamh
Soluis, 29 July 1899. The Kiltartan Gaelic League was founded on 16 July.
Hyde later begged MacNeill not to let An Claidheamh attack the Irish Literary Theatre:
“They are not enemies to us. They are a half-way house.’ (Janet Egelson Dunleavy and
Gareth W. Dunleavy, Douglas Hyde: AMaker ofModern Ireland, Oxford, 1991, 207).
. 3June 1899.
See especially issues of 10 June 1899, and nearly every week thereafter. The leaders on 1
and 8 July were particularly violent attacks on Anglo-Ireland.
c. 30 Sept. 1899, CL, ii, 454.
See Moore to AG, 7 Nov. 1899, Berg.
Cave, Hail and Farewell, 212-13. See also Moore to AG, ‘Monday night’ [7 Nov. 1899],
from the Shelbourne Hotel (Berg), for an indication of WBY’s involvement: ‘I beg you
to save me from further emendations from our friend. I am sure that they will be excel-
lent but my sanity must be considered. TodayI sent him the fifth act and the first scene

575
 NOTES TO PAGES 221-227

of the second — this scene is intended to balance the first scene of the fifth act. I was a
little disappointed that he did not like the fourth letter. It was impossible for me to write
a new situation but I trust that by a judicious turn I kept what situation there was. The
play no longer ends in the fourth act and the structure of the act is I think good. . . I
hope that you will get him to write about the fifth act but no emendatering [sic]. I
want him to write The Shadowy Waters. If he could only finish it. It would be finished
by now if it had not been for Martyn’s play.’
82. To AG, 28 Nov. 1899, CL, ii, 474.
83. To AG, 21-2 Dec. 1899, CL, ii, 480.
84. 2 June 1900, CL, ii, 534-5.
85. W. R. Rodgers, ‘Notes for the Radio’, MS notebook in HRHRC.
86. GAIL, Tek
87. FJ, 18 Dec. 1899. The meeting was precipitated by Trinity’s award of an honorary degree
to Joseph Chamberlain. It took place on 17 Dec. and was boycotted by nationalist MPs;
there was a large police presence, defied by Connolly, who commandeered the demon-
strators’ vehicle and suggested storming Dublin Castle to MG (she uncharacteristical-
ly demurred).
88. United Irishman, 23 Dec. 1898.
89. See Donal McCracken, The Irish Pro-Boers 1877-1902 (Johannesburg, 1989), 77, for reports
to Leyds, probably from O’Donnell; these events climaxed in Mar. 1900.
go. See PF, 215-17, and Deirdre Toomey, ‘Away’, YA 10 (1993), 3-32: an exceptionally illu-
minating essay.
gl. 20 May 1900, CL, ii, 530.
92. To AG, 4 Jan. 1900, CL, ii, 485-6.
93- JBY to Rosa Butt, postmarked 3 Feb. 1900, Bodleian: “Yesterday I was much bothered
over a speech I wanted to make last night. Two days before I had gone to see Willie and
read him some notes of what I had meant to say, and he had rather treated me de haut
en bas, irritating me muchly, so I was very anxious to make a good speech. And I did. No
mistake about it. I said to myself: “I am a Papa struggling to maintain my position’, so
I threw away all false modesty and spoke out with all my might, saying what I thought.’

Chapter 9: OccuLT PotitTics

19OO-I9OI
Epigraph: CL, ii1, 40
i AG to WBY, [?25] Nov. 1899, Berg. He left Moore the rights to both plays in his will.
. Pethica, 231.
. ‘Wednesday’, n.d., HRHRC. For possible models in the play, see Pethica, 244.
. WBY to AG, 31Jan. 1900, CL, ii, 492-3.
. Ajourney described in Cave, Hail and Farewell, 234-5, and Pethica, 240-41.
. Cancelled phrase in WBY to AG, 30 Sept. 1899, Berg; see CL, ii, 455.
. 18 Feb. 1900, Berg.
. 24 Feb. 1900, written by Griffith, not Fay.
Oo
DAN
WV
fw
ON . Pethica, 236.
. Daily Express, Dublin, 23 Feb. 1900.
. An agreement outlined in Martyn to WBY, 31 Mar. 1899, NLI MS 13,068.
. Pethica, 246-7.
. See G-YL, 116, for the 1899 incident.
om
oe
eM
HtS)
4163
GO . Leyds Archives, quoted in McCracken, Irish Pro-Boers, 77; the correspondent may be
O’Donnell, playing a deep game. The original, in French, reads:

576
 NOTES TO PAGES 227-234

La ‘Demoiselle 4 Millevoye’ est venue chez notre directeur, toute furieuese de n’avoir pas regu ce
quelle demandait. Elle était accompagnée d’un nommé Yeats, qu’on dit d’étre le dernier successeur
de Millevoye, et devant ce jeune homme, elle a dit tout ce quelle avait entendu chez vous, et encore. . .
Elle déclarait que vous aviez dit d’étre en communication avec des révolutionnaires irlandais ‘par
lentremise d’une personne qui n’appartenait a leur organisation’!!! Sans doute, avant 24 heures le
Tout Dublin saura qu'elle n’a eu pas de succés parceque, et parceque, et parceque, etc. etc.
Si elle nest pas espionne, elle l’est presque, et sa vantardise est plus dangereuse que la trahison
méme.
Excepté parmi le petit peuple, elle a la réputation la plus detestable. On met en circulation des
histoires de ‘trois enfants en nourrice a Paris’, mais elle se montre partout dans nos Meetings, et nous
sommes obligés de la souffrir. Mais on ne peut pas étre trop prudent quand elle est prés.

. United Irishman, 9 Dec. 1899.

. See above, pp. 179, 194.
. United Irishman, 24 Mar. 1900: F. H. O’Donnell again. See also ibid., 3 Mar. 1900. The
paper printed frequent interviews with MacBride as well as hand-outs of his portrait.
. Pethica, 258.
. 10 Apr. 1900. cf. article in Sambain, quoted below.
. 5June 1900, CL, ii, 537.
. United Irishman, 15 July 1899, 23 Sept. 1899, 17 Feb. 1900; Leader, 23 Dec. 1899.
. ToT. P Gill, CZ, it, 574.
. 27May1900, CL, ii,526-7. For the dealings with Boer agents and confusions about money,
see above.
. To AG, 28 June 1900, CL, ii, 549-50.
. See United Irishman, 7 July 1900, ‘What We Owe to the Children’ by MG, and accom-
panying reports. MG's figure of 30,000 children attending her anti-loyalist picnic is
generally accepted; but it was a mechanical calculation made by the faithful United
Irishman. 35,000 children were attending school in Dublin; 5,000 were at institutions
like the Masonic Schools, which supported the rival Queen’s Breakfast; therefore 30,000
were supposed to attend the Patriotic Treat, which was reported accordingly.
26. G-YL, 129-30. He was at Coole by 2 July.
27. See VPI, 81ff.; it begins Scene III.
28. He did, however, believe in the authenticity of the inspirational cipher MS, which had
actually been drafted by Kenneth Mackenzie using a sixteenth-century cipher code, and
subsequently appropriated by Westcott. See R. A. Gilbert in Y4 13 (forthcoming); and
‘Provenance Unknown: A Tentative Solution to the Riddle of the Cipher Manuscript
of the Golden Dawn in Albrecht Gotz von Olenhausen (ed.) with the assistance of Nicholas
Barker, Herbert Francke and Helmut Moller, Wege und Abwege: Beitrage zur Européischen
Geistesgeschichte der Neuzeit: Festschrift fiir Ellic Howe zum 20 September 1990 (Freiburg,
1990).
29. 2 May 1900, CL, ii, 524.
30. CL, iii, 26-7.
Ble To AG, 9 Dec. 1900, CL, ii, 597.
2B), As John Dunn. See SB, 192ff., especially 195.
33- SB, 200.
34. See Warwick Gould, ‘Playing at Treason with Miss Maud Gonne’, Modernist Writers
and the Marketplace (London, 1996).
35: To W. J. Stanton Pyper, 22 Dec. 1900, CL, ii, 617; also see WBY to Fisher Unwin, 18
Nov. 1900, CL, ii, 591, demanding an increase in royalties and a fixed-term contract for
three or four years at most.
36. WBY to Fisher Unwin, 20 Dec. 1900, CL, ii, 612-13, details the books which Bullen might
part with — SR, CT, The Tables of the Law, and advance rights on SB. There were, he

a/7,
 NOTES TO PAGES 234-241
admitted, many unsold copies of SR and possibly CT. On 7 May 1gor he told Gregory,
‘T have arranged with Watt that henceforth he will take full responsibility as to who I pub-
lish with. I am to say “I have handed over all my affairs to him” & so escape the difficulty
of [sic] caused by ones personal relations with publishers.’ (CL, iii, 67).
37: To AG, 9 Dec. 1900, CL, ii, 597-8.
38. A worry originating a year before: see WBY to Rolleston, 6 Aug. 1899, CL, ii, 436.
39- By Moran. See 19 June 1900. The ostensible target was the ILS.
40. Report in An Claidheamh Soluts, 27 Oct. 1900.
4l. To AG, 6June 1900, CL, ii, 539. ‘Echtge of Streams’ was offered to John Lane on 13 Aug.;
it used some of the images from the unpublished ‘Cycles Ago’: see above, p. 116.
42. 2 May 1900, CL, ii, 522.
43. Independent, 31 Aug. 1900. This was a pet cause of AG’s: see her article in An Claidheamh
Soluts, 14 Oct. 1899.
44. The letter to the Leader mentioned above (written 26 Aug., printed 1 Sept.) called for
‘an intellectual and historical nationalism like that of Norway, with the language ques-
tion as its lever’, rather than ‘purely political nationalism’ — the straight Hyde line. Yet,
as usual, WBY also argued for the validity of Irish national expression through the
English language.
45. To SMY, 1 Nov. 1899, CL, ii, 461. See also Moore’s letters to WBY in MBY.
46. The following quotations are taken from undated Moore letters in the Berg.
47- 13 Oct. 1900. In Aug. Moore had thought of taking WBY off to Moore Hall to finish
it: Moore to AG, 11 Aug. 1900, Berg.
48. WBY to AG, 25 Dec. 1900, CL, ii, 619.
49. To Symons, 17 Nov. 1900, CL, ii, 588-9.
50. To AG, 2 and 25 Dec. 1900, CL, ii, 594-5, 618-21.
ii To AG, 25 Dec. 1900, CL, ii, 619.
52. WBY to John Masefield, 6 Dec. 1900, CL, ii, 596. Masefield first went to Woburn
Buildings on 5 Nov., according to Some Memories of W. B. Yeats, 10. However, the unti-
tled TS draft in HRHRC has 11 Nov., and Pethica, 287, fixed it as the r2th.
53: WBY to AG, 12 and 20 Dec. 1900, CL, ii, 603-4, 609-10; also typed copy ofletter to
Law, 16 Mar. t901, MBY, which argues for the principle of tolerance and offers WBY’s
own resignation from the committee. In this letter he attacked the Society’s patronage
of Edward Carson and F. H. O'Donnell. It is an important statement.
ca See CL, ii, 457, n. 1, 552, n. 1.
. Angle brackets indicate deletions. The original is in WBY’s 1893 notebook of poems,
129-32, undated. I have followed Carolyn Holdsworth’s transcription in ‘The Wind
Among the Reeds’: Manuscript Materials, except for the penultimate line, where I read ‘wood’
instead of ‘crowd’, as does Richard Ellmann, whose transcription of the original is in
Tulsa.
. To W.S. Pyper, 22 Dec. 1900, CL, ii, 617-18.
. ‘A Prophecy’, 11 Nov, 1899; she later imported some of this material into The Unicorn from
the Stars.
. Though WBY believed some Fenians voted for him; see an interesting letter to AG, 13
Oct. 1900, CL, ii, 575-7.
. All Ireland Review, 1 Dec. 1900 (UP, ii, 244).
. Russell to AG, postmarked 27 Dec. 1900, Berg. The latest offence was a review of the
Treasury ofIrish Poetry, 30 Dec. 1900; protests followed on 5 and 12 Jan. rgor. Also see
Leader, 3 Nov. 1900, for ‘Mr Yeats’s Jug’, a caustic commentary on recent interviews
with the poet in English papers (UP, ii, 243-4); and for WBY’s analysis, a letter to AG,
8 Jan. 1901, CL, iii, 10-11.

578
 NOTES TO PAGES 241-246
61. Berg (incomplete). This could date from the 1899 Countess Cathleen controversy, but
James
Pethica convincingly attributes it to 24 May 1901.
62. peAG, 23 Jan. 1901, discussing the controversy over the Brooke—Ro
lleston anthology,
L, iii, 19.
63. 29 Jan. 1901. See also T. S. Moore to R. C. Trevelyan, n.d., but 1901, University
of Lon-
don, suggesting a visit to WBY to discuss a production of The Shadowy Waters. I hope
my theatre is actually going to be, or at least to try to be. But please keep this fact a pro-
found secret.’
64. For a close analysis, see George Mills Harper, Yeats’s Golden Dawn (London,
1974),
Chapter 6.
65. Quoted ibid., 43.
66. CL, iti, 30.
67. Harper, Yeats’s Golden Dawn, 54. Harper guesses that WBY may have drafted them, but
the style is uncharacteristic.
68. CL, iti, 40.
69. CL, iii, 44.
70. Harper, Yeats’s Golden Dawn, 63-4. The last comment is bitchy: WBY did not proceed
to a further degree until much later.
71. He might also have been the driving force behind a pamphlet by
Brodie-Innes suggest-
ing a new constitution: see ibid., go—91.
Te They still had several preoccupations in common. WBY’s library contains Volume VIII
of Collecteana Hermetica, edited by William Wynn Westcott E.gyptian Magicby 8.S.D.D.
(i.e. Farr), published in London by the Theosophical Publishing Society in 1896. Some
of its contents are suggestive, such as the explanation of the hawk with a human head as
representing the Ka [Ego] ofa King or Queen; while the emphasis on symbolism, chains
of creation and reincarnation echo many of WBY’s occult preoccupations. The chapter
on Gnostic magic deals with initiation, disciplines, formulae, cycles of ascent and Neo-
Platonic wisdom.
73: Or so Harper thinks: Yeats’s Golden Dawn, 94-5.
74: There were two of these at the very height of the controversy, on 16 Feb. and 23 Mar.
75° See CL, iii, 14.
76. The opposing organization, from 1903, was Waite’s ‘Independent and Rectified Rite’.
By 1914 WBY had become more active in the SM, probably becoming Imperator and
instructor in ‘ancient traditions’.
ils See WBY to AG, 13 Oct. 1900, CL, ii, 575. It was published in the Monthly Review, Sept.
1901, and reprinted in IGE.
78. YA7 (1990), 98.
79 1: Ordering sources of Celtic knowledge. 2: Symbolism and astrology. 3: Methods of
divination, talismans, etc. 4: Mystical philosophy. 5; Clairvoyance. 6: Thaumaturgy.
7: White magic. On 4 Aug. he defined the initiation procedure, revolving round ob-
ligations symbolized by the cauldron, stone, sword and spear.
80. [?26] May 1901, forthcoming CL, iv, appendix.
8I. UP y11,347, 253-4.
82. 25 May 1901, CL, iii, 74.
83. Notebook, MBY: ‘Visions of old Irish mythologies, begun Dec. 13 1898. Less my own
visions than the visions of others & of myself with others. My own are in diary.’ This
vision, the first in a series with ‘F.L.’ (George Pollexfen), was induced by incense and dated
17 July rgor.
84. See below, pp. 254-5.
85. 28 June rgo1, CL, iti, 84. SMY replied on 1 July.
86. To AG, 22 Dec. 1901, CL, iii, 139.

5/9
 NOTES TO PAGES 247-253
. Lewis, Selected Letters ofSomerville and Ross, 252.
. Fora full report, see Ce/tia, Dublin, Sept. 1901, i/5, 145-6.
. AG to WBY, n.d., but Aug. 1901, Berg.
. Celtia, 1/5, 141.
. Hyde warned WBY about this in a letter from Enniscrone, July 1901, MBY, and in
another on 1 Aug. 1901, LTWBY, i, 88-9.
. To Sharp, 4 Aug. 1901 (private collection).
. See an important letter of ‘Friday’, Berg.
. See WBY to AG, 18 May 1901, CL, iii, 69-70.
. See James Pethica, ‘“Our Kathleen”: Yeats’s Collaboration with Lady Gregory in the
Writing of Kathleen ni Houlihan’, YA 6 (1988), 3-31; also D. J. Murphy (ed.),
Lady Gregory’s Journals, ii (Gerrard’s Cross, 1987), 28, 18 July 1925 (‘Rather hard on
me, not giving my name with Kathleen [sic] ni Houlihan that I wrote all but all
of’). Also See Constant Huntingdon to Margaret Gough, 6 Dec. 1944, Gregory MSS,
Emory, which mentions the ‘bombshell’ about Cathleen ni Houlihan; and John
Campbell, “The Rise of the Drama in Ireland’, New Liberal Review, Apr. 1904.
Fragments in the Berg collection refer to ‘our Kathleen’ and show that she changed
the proofs for Bullen, to restore the ending ‘as it is acted’ — a significant intervention.
The Berg MS is all in her hand — a first draft in notebooks and additional sheets.
alone.’ This is corroborated by W. Boyle to Holloway, 20 Feb. 1908: ‘The odd thing is
that Fay told me Lady Gregory wrote the whole of it except the part of “Kathleen”.’ (Private
collection: my thanks to Dr Nicholas Boyle for this and other references).
96. ‘Friday’ [late 1901], Berg.
Die See below, pp. 261-2.
98. Statement during the Irish National Theatre’s patent inquiry, 1904; Ellmann transcript,
Tulsa.
99. 20 July rg01, CL, iii, 91.
100. 20 July rgo1, CL, iii, 92.
101. 11 Aug. 1901, CL, iii, 105.
102. WBY to ECY, 25 July 1901, CL, iii, 94.
103. WBY toJBY, 12 July 1901, CZ, iii, 87.
104. Text printed in Dublin Magazine, 26, 2 (Apr.—June 1951).
105. See WBY to AG, 3 Apr. 1901, CL, iti, 54—s. ‘It was the only good sceneryI have ever
seen, a perfect fulfillment of the ideal I have always had. He got wonderful effects by pur-
ple robed figures against a purple back cloth.’ The performance was on 26 Mar.
106. See the Speaker, 11 May 1901.
107. 19 Oct. 1go1.
108. 24 Nov. 1gor.
109. See WBY to FJ. Fay, 1 Aug. rgo1, CL, iii, 97-8.
IIO. 28 Oct. 1901, Lewis, Selected Letters ofSomerville and Ross, 254.
III. 14 Mar. 1901. He suggested that before putting on the play they should ‘find some nat-
ural occasion for drawing a distinction between your political faith as nationalists & Home
Rulers on the one hand, & your view of the Queen’s visit on the other’,
112. To AG, 3 Mar. rgo1.
113. 10 Apr. 1901, quoted in Hogan and Kilroy, Irish Literary Theatre, 90.
II4. ‘Griffith is I think strong on this point & influences the others’: WBY to Russell, c. 9
Aug. 1901, CL, iii, 103.
II5. Hogan and Kilroy, Irish Literary Theatre, 71. Actually in the end Benson simply carried
a fleece; the kid had disgraced itself in rehearsals by ‘eating the property ivy’ (Mem, 123).
116. F. R. Benson, My Memories (London, 1930), 11.

580
 NOTES TO PAGES 253-260
ity: The late Sir Frederick Ashton in conversation with RFF.
118. FY, 13 Nov. 1901.
119. 19 Nov. 1901, CL, iii, 120.
120. AG had written to him about this decision in the spring (from Coole, ‘Friday’, Berg),
and Moore’s letters in the summer had also taken this decision as read.
I2I. Hogan and Kilroy, Irish Literary Theatre, 74-5. The idea of a Corporation subsidy had
been suggested to WBY by Moore, 27 July rgor, Berg.
122. Samhain, t, 6.
1233 ibid., 9. He was thinking of Rolleston, whom he had told in Feb. 1900 to ‘do something
that will violently annoy the upper class to redeem his character’ (Pethica, 241).
124. United Irishman, 31 Aug. 1901.
125. Practically written by June 1901 (WBY to AG, 6 June rg01, CL, iii, 79) and destined for
the Speaker; eventually printed in the Cornhill, Mar. 1902. Both reprinted in IGE. See
above, p. 246.
126. See Daily Express, Dublin, 5 Aug. 1901.
127. See especially “What is “Popular Poetry””’, E & J, 3-4.
128. “What is “Popular Poetry”?’, E & I, 10-11.
129. WBY to Hugh Law (Assistant Secretary of the ILS), 16 Mar. rgo1, CL, iii, 50—sr.
130. All Ireland Review, 1 Dec. 1900. Also see Samhain, 1, above.
131. 2 Nov. 1901, Berg: after listening to WBY lecturing at a Merrion Row meeting to pub-
licize the ILT.

Chapter to: NATIONAL DRAMAS

I9OI-1902
mG alerAGe
lanl

. See R. Schuchard, “W. B. Yeats and the London Theatre Societies rg01-1904’, Rev.
Eng. Stud, xxix, 116 (1978).
. Holroyd, Shaw, i, 208.
. WBY to Henry Newbolt, 5 Apr. 1902, CL, iii, 169. He had first met Newbolt at Robert
Bridges’ in Mar. 1897.
. 20 Jan. 1902, CL, iti, 149.
6. From 1903; it published WBY’s ‘Dream of the World’s End’ (in no. 2), Russell’s draw-
ings and Deirdre (no. 7), and also embodied a strong Japanese theme, with several poems
by Yone Noguchi in nos. 1-12.
5byl sig
.26 Nov. 1901, CL, iii, 126.
.22 Mar. 1902, CL, iti, 161.
.UP, ii, 265-7; for the earlier reaction, CL, iii, 121.
.R. Schuchard, ““An Attendant Lord”: H. W. Nevinson’s Friendship with W. B. Yeats’,
YA 7 (1990), 105.
CL ei 155,
. Ella Young, Flowering Dusk (New York, 1945), 72-4.
. This argument is advanced in Sean McCann, The Story of the Abbey Theatre (London,
1967), The Splendid Years: Recollections ofMatre nic Shiubhlaigh as told to Edward Kenny
(Dublin, 1955), Dawson Byrne, The Story ofIreland's National Theatre: The Abbey Theatre,
Dublin (Dublin, 1929), as well as in Gerard Fay, The Abbey Theatre: Cradle of Genius
(London, 1958), W. G. Fay and Catherine Carswell, The Fays of the Abbey Theatre
(London, 1935) and T. G. K[eohler] in Dublin Magazine, 10, 4 (Oct.—Dec. 1935).

581
 NOTES TO PAGES 260-265
Denson, Letters from AE, 96-7. Also see Russell to Ernest Boyd, 14 Mar. 1914, Healy
Collection, Stanford.
. Also see P. Colum, ‘Early Days of the Irish Theatre’, Dublin Magazine, 24, 4 (Oct.—Dec.
1949) and 2s, 1 (Jan.—Mar. 1950).
. To Ernest Boyd, Healy Collection, Stanford.
. See WBY to AG, 20 Jan. 1902, CL, iii, 149.
. CL, iii, 305. Naturally, this does not appear in his recollections of 1935 (Fay and Carswell,
Fays ofthe Abbey Theatre, 119).
. G-YL, 150. For full production details, see Antony Coleman, ‘A Calendar for the
Production and Reception of Cathleen ni Houlihan, Modern Drama, June 1977.
. Lewis, Selected Letters ofSomerville and Ross, 256.
. Irish Literature and Drama, 158; also see PF, 245, for other reactions.
. ‘The Acting in St Teresa’s Hall’, United Irishman, 12 Apr. 1902 (UP, ii, 284-6).
. CL, iti, 176, 173.
. cf. McCann, Story of the Abbey Theatre, tor: “The Irish Literary Theatre had given place
to a company of Irish actors. Its committee saw them take up the work all the more
gladly because it had not formed them or influenced them.’
. 21 Sept. 1906, NLI MS 1804, 425-6.
. See United Irishman, 18 May 1901.
. 5 and 29 May 1902, 10 June 1902.
. See Katharine Worth, The Irish Drama ofEurope from Yeats to Beckett (London, 1978),
32. Formalism and chanting had distinguished French experimental theatre in the 1890s;
Wagner and current ideas about ancient Greece fitted in too.
. 2,000 words in an hour and ten minutes on 17 Apr.; see letter to AG, 18 Apr. 1902, CL,
ill, 175.
. WBY to AG, 23 May 1902, CL, iii, 184.
. SeeWBY to AG, 23 May 1902, CL, iii, 185. Also Robert Gregory to AG in Gregory fam-
ily papers, Emory. An Irish Club started by Samuel (later Dermott) Trench at Balliol
tried to organize a dinner for WBY the following Mar. but could not get enough men:
see Robert Gregory to AG 17 Nov. 1902, 14 Mar. 1903. WBY stayed with Eric Maclagan.
Trench would become ‘Haines’ in Ulysses, though he was not English.
333 See Fiona Macleod in Fortnightly Review, Feb. 1903; Leader, 5 Mar. 1904, pointing out
AG's reliance on Eleanor Hull; and Athenaeum, 26 Mar. 1904, on the debt to Standish
Hayes O’Grady. For AG’s careful preparation of reviews, see her letter to WBY, ‘Saturday’,
probably 14 Mar. 1903, Berg, arranging a TLS discussion of Poets and Dreamers (‘Symons
inspired by you wd be best’).
34. For its genesis, see fragment in Berg. WBY had already suggested a magazine article,
but AG offered to pay him as much money for a preface putting the stories in context.
35: By W. P. Ryan, writing from a purist Irish-Ireland vantage on 5 July. He thought AG’s
work provided a temporary use but in twenty years would be of historical interest only
as a specimen of the sort of artificial construction needed to revive Irish culture. Her style
was ‘a melancholy absurdity’ and her project essentially a bastardizing one, working
(albeit unintentionally) in English interests. WBY’s claims for the book were resound-
ingly dismissed. It did, however, become a repository for Irish-Irelander lecturers short
of a theme, especially those who could not read Irish: see MG’s paper ‘Emer’ read to
Inghinidhe, reprinted in United Irishman, 1 Nov. 1902, and self-confessedly lifted in
entirety from Cuchulain.
36. Draft in Berg, dated 23 May 1902; also CL, iii, 187-9.
37° AG to WBY, 25 May 1902, CL, iii, 167, n. 1.
38. To AG, 16 June 1902, CL, iii, 203.
39- CL, iti, 417.

582
 NOTES TO PAGES 265-268
40. The draft in the Berg is more equivocal still.
4l. Schuchard, ‘“Attendant Lord”’, Y4 7 (1989), 107.
42. 6 May 1903, CL, iii, 358-9. Sir Henry Lawrence (of Lucknow) was his host; Lady
Lawrence, a sister of Mrs Coffey, had been brought up in Ireland.
43. 1 June 1902, Berg.
44. 16 June 1902, Berg.
45. 18 June 1902, CL, iii, 204.
46. CL, 111, 202.
47. See letter to The Times, 24 June 1902; and Hubert Butler, ‘The British Israelites at Tara’
in R. F. Foster (ed.), The Sub-Prefect Should Have Held His Tongue (London, 1990). MG
brought in d’Arbois de Jubainville, the Duke of Tetuan, and many other ‘names’; Hyde,
Griffith, Moore and WBY visited the site to remonstrate with the owner, an occasion
described in Griffith, ‘Mr Rolleston, His Friend, and Tara’, United Irishman, 15 Nov. 1902.
48. The Hour-Glass and The Pot ofBroth.
49. The journalist William Bulfin recorded this occasion. He found WBY’s manner
nervous, uneasy, pins-and-needles — [it] made you anxious about him in spite of yourself. . . He is
unsettled in his ways. He had just heard some singing which appeared new to him, and he wanted
explanations about it from Dr Hyde. And he was particularly anxious that Dr Hyde should look it
up and remember about it and take a note of it; and on no account to forget it, and occupy himself
with it, and generally speaking to get it, whatever in the world it was, upon his nerves and mind,
just as it had planted itself on the nerves and mind of Mr Yeats himself. It is a serious thing to bea
poet like Mr Yeats, who dreams dreams and gets things on his nerves . . . (repr. from the Southern
Cross in the Gael, Dec. 1902).
Moore described the singer (Cave, Hail and Farewell, 330-31): ‘a vague drift of sound,
rising and falling, unmeasured as the wind soughing among the trees, or the lament of
the waves on the shore, something that might go on all day long’.
50. CL, iii, 120, 128. Ricketts and Shannon, who saw it on 20 Nov. 1901, were equally struck,
noting Campbell’s ‘magnetic force and emotional depth’: Charles Ricketts, Self-Portrait,
Taken from the Letters and Journals ofCharles Ricketts, Collected and Compiled by T. Sturge
Moore and Edited by C. 8. Lewis (London, 1939), 70-71.
SI. W. K. Magee, Memoir ofAE, 107; Kuch, Yeats and AE, 204ff.
Dy. NLI MS 8777; see CL, iii, 228, n. 2.
53: See DanielJ.Murphy, ‘Lady Gregory, Co-author and Sometimes Author of the Plays
of W. B. Yeats’, in R. J. Porter and J. D. Brody (eds.), Modern Irish Literature: Essays in
honour of William York Tindall (New Rochelle, 1972), 43-52. AG probably provided
touches of verisimilitude: ‘Ward’, for instance, is a generic traveller name in Ireland.
54. Sept.—Oct. 1902, Berg.
55. The version Quinn retailed to John Lane on 24 Oct. 1902 (letter book, no. 1, NYPL) is
worth recording.
In the Spring Mr Yeats and George Moore together with Mr George Russell (‘A.E.’) were discussing
new plays and Russell told Yeats and Moore a story about a member of a well-connected family who
had joined the tinkers in Ireland, and had related various of his experiences. Yeats remarked that
the story as told to Moore and himself by Russell would make a good play, and thereupon Moore
and Yeats began to sketch up the scenario. Subsequently Moore and Yeats had one or two talks about
how the acts should run but no actual writing was ever done. Later Moore got tired of the matter
and said that he did not care to go on with the play then and told Yeats that he might write the play
if he cared to, Moore remarking that he might use the idea some time for a story.
According to Quinn, WBY then went to the west; when Moore, visiting Martyn, heard
that WBY was working on the play at Coole he threatened an injunction, claiming
that they had begun a collaboration and WBY had treacherously gone on alone. ‘Yeats
asserts that there is not an idea or a scene of Moore in the play as written by him. Russell

583
 NOTES TO PAGES 268-274
corroborates Yeats and is willing to testify as to the origins of the story.’ AG similarly
convinced Quinn that Moore had no case. “Yeats has great confidence in the play and
feels it is one of the best things he has ever done.’ Hyde and AG agreed, according to
Quinn; their own part in its inception was not mentioned by him to Lane. Quinn’s own
enthusiasm was real; on 1 Nov. 1902 he told AG that he hoped Lane would publish it and
distribute it widely in the USA, which would make WBY’s reputation there. Publishers
did not agree, however, and he ended by paying Knickerbocker $72.09 for a copyright
edition (letter of : Apr. 1903).
56. UP, iii, 298.
57: cf. ‘General Introduction to my Work’, in which he would write that as an Irishman sat-
urated in English culture, ‘My hatred tortures me with love, my love with hate.’ (Edward
Callan, ed., Yeats on Yeats: The Last Introductions and the Dublin Edition, Dublin, 1981,
63).
. Berg, and see Reeves and Gould, Joachim ofFiore, 250-52.
. TLS, 26 June 1903.
. To AG, 25 Nov. 1902, Berg.
. Schuchard, ‘“Attendant Lord”’, 102.
. For changes, see Katharine Worth’s introduction to the Irish Dramatic Texts edition pub-
lished by CUA and Colin Smythe (1987).
. WBY to Bullen, 12 Feb. 1908, Kansas (also L, 503). There was a diverting controversy
over a real-life tinker who claimed the play libelled him and was enterprisingly interviewed
by the United Irishman: described by WBY in a fragment, NLI 30,343. Also see James
Woods, The Annals of Westmeath (Dublin, 1907), 182-3.
. WTIN, 1987 edition, 94: a Blake reference, also used in JGE.
. Fifteen copyright copies only, at the Knickerbocker Press, with some changes, plus
thirty of a large paper edition: see Wade, Bibliography, 60-61 (items 42-3). Also see Quinn
to S. J. Richardson, 22 Oct. 1902, and to Harold Paget, 24 Oct. 1902, NYPL, for terms.
. See especially a long letter to AG, 4 Dec. 1902, CL, iii, 266-9.
. n.d., Emory.
. CL, iii, 238. On 27 May 1902 Quinn ordered Zarathustra from a book dealer (letter book,
no. 1, NYPL); on 15 Nov. 1902 he sent on The Case of Wagner, Genealogy ofMorals, and
poems; a letter of 3 Feb. 1903 shows him asking Elkin Mathews to send WBY Volume
8 of Wagner's prose works, translated by Ellis, and also Nietzsche’s The Crown ofBay.
69. See above, Chapter 6, p. 159. WBY wrote to AG on 26 Dec. 1902 about his immersion
in Nietzsche, who ‘completes Blake & has the same roots — I have not read anything
with so much excitement since I got to love Morris’s stories which have the same curi-
ous astringent joy.’ (CL, iii, 284). Also see WBY to Quinn, 6 Feb. 1903, CL, iii, HOA.
70. An essay reprinted in Plays, Acting and Music (1903).
71. To Horace Reynolds, 19 Aug. 1941, Harvard.
72: Russell to AG, postmarked 30 Mar. 1903, Berg.
(3 Quinn to AG, 15 May 1903, Berg.
74: CNA LS
75: PRY o3T—9,
76. ibid., 238.
TT: Postmarked 10 June 1902, Berg.
78. 16 June 1902, Berg. Russell had already offended both WBY and AG by his moralizing
letters about his friend’s slow rate of work; see above, p. 182.
79: PF, 241.
80. CL, iti, 192.

584
 NOTES TO PAGES 274-281
81. On 4 Oct., in a state of drunken dissolution. WBY did not react very noticeably, apart
from telling York Powell he might write in memory of him; they had become distanced
from each other, and Johnson was only later incorporated into his personal myth.
82. CL, iii, 254-5.
83. 7 Nov. 1902: my thanks to W. M. Murphy.
84. To RL-P, 18 Apr. 1943. This is one of the very few references to MG in the vast corpus
of Yeats family correspondence.
85. See above, p. 149.
86. CL, iii, 243.
87. 17 May 1906, HRHRC.
88. Preserved, like everything else, in a Ulysses reference: J. J. O’Molloy to Stephen, p. 140
of NY 1961 edition.
89. See A. Walton Litz, ‘“Love’s Bitter Mystery”: Joyce and Yeats’, Y47 (1990), 81-9.
go. This comes from the later version as in Ellmann, IY, 86-8; the earlier quotation from WBY’s
TS ‘The Younger Generation’. For Joyce’s envoi, see W. R. Rodgers, ‘Notes for the
Radio’. ‘John McCormick once repeated the story to Dulanty, the Irish ambassador in
London, and Dulanty asked if it were true. Joyce was very cross about it, cross with Gogarty.
“Why,” said Joyce to Dulanty, “even if I'd thought it Iwouldn't have said it to Yeats. It
would have been unmannerly.’
gl. Ellmann, IY, 86-91. He also remarked to an American interviewer a year later, ‘It is use-
less to discuss philosophy with a man more than 27’— another echo of Joyce (New York
Morning Sun, 15 Nov. 1903).
92. CL, 111, 249-50.
93- Others included Thomas MacDonagh and Henry G. O’Brien: see CL, iii, 246-7, 251.
94. On the strength of this one meeting Symons became an ardent admirer, and wrote to
Elkin Mathews powerfully pressing the claims of Joyce’s poems on 9 Oct. 1906. ‘He is
not in the Celtic movement; and though Yeats admires his ability he is rather against him
because Joyce has attacked the movement.’ (Symons papers, Princeton). This became
Chamber Music, Symons kept up the pressure, reviewing the volume the following May.
95: Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (2nd ed., Oxford, 1982), 660-61, fn.
96. CL, iui, 456. It is also significant that WBY took to advocating the plays of Sudermann
for the Irish theatre — advice first tendered by Joyce in ‘The Day of the Rabblement’.
97- W. O’Brien and D. Ryan (eds.), Devoy’s Post Bag 1871-1928 (Dublin, 1953), ii, 347-8.
98. See below, p. 288.
99. CVI.
I0O. United Irishman, 8 Nov. 1902.
IOI. Writing as ‘Che Buono’ in the Southern Cross, Argentine, 16 Jan. 1903.
102. We Two Together (Madras, 1950), 76. :
103. See United Irishman, 8 and 15 Nov. 1902. “To anyone who had not come within the glam-
our of Mr Yeat’s personality, both speech and song bordered perilously on the ludicrous.’
104. ibid. (a cutting is in Gregory’s scrapbook, no. 2, Emory).
105. Thomas McGreevy in I & R, ii, 410.
106. 26 Dec. 1902, CL, iii, 285.
107. ‘Mr Yeats and the Freedom of the Theatre’, United Irishman, 15 Nov. 1902; M. C. Joy wrote
defending WBY on 29 Nov.
108. To an extent that eventually embarrassed WBY; see Adrian Frazier, Behind the Scenes:
Yeats, Horniman and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre (London, 1990), 59-60, for sub-
sequent changes.
109. It was finished by the summer; see a letter of 13 June 1902, CL, iii, 201.
IIo. 26 Dec. 1902, CL, iii, 285. See also n. 96 above.

585
 NOTES TO PAGES 282-289

Chapter 11: THE TASTE OF SALT

1902-1903

Epigraph: Arsenal, Paris.

I. His own articles about the war in the FJ, 1906-7, provoked many complaints and
contradictions.
Balliett, “The Lives — and Lies — of Maud Gonne’, 31.
G-YL, 154.
e.g., ibid., 156.
See UP, ii, 265, 269, and many other places.
G-YE. 162,
To WBY, 9 Feb. 1903, Reading.
SOS To ‘Na Geadna Fiadhaine’ (“The Wild Geese’) at the Bijou Theatre, Bedford Street; AG
BS
ee
eh
ENR
was present. Farr told Nevinson that MG ‘had not even told him about the engagement
until the day before it became public’ (Schuchard, ‘“Attendant Lord”’, 104), which fits
the dates: it was first published in Ireland in the FJ on 9 Feb.
J. G. P. Delaney, ‘“Heirs of the Great Generation”: Yeats’s Friendship with Charles
Ricketts and Charles Shannon’, Y4 4 (1986), 58 (letter to the Fields).
G-YL, 164-6; CL, iii, 315-17.
18 Dec. 1902, CL, iii, 281.
G-YL, 166.
Schuchard, ‘“Attendant Lord”’, 104.
See report in United Irishman, 28 Feb. 1903.
G-YL, 167.
ibid., 108. See WBY to AG, 13 Oct. 1908, Berg. MG ‘says that but for a letter of yours,
or a message from you, I forget which, her husband would have been able to take half
her fortune. It was owing to you that she got married according to English laws.’
t Mar. 1903, Tulsa; NLI MS 18,312.
Interview with MG, 27 June 1947, Ellmann interview book, Tulsa. See also below, p. 592,
n. 16.
CL, iti, 303.
AG told M. Bourgeois (30 July 1913, Healy Collection, Stanford), giving circumstantial
detail, that she read it out loud.
16 Dec. 1902, CL, iii, 279.
. To Quinn, 4 June 1909, Diakoff Collection, NYPL; my thanks to W. M. Murphy for
this reference.
Some of their reports are preserved in the George Roberts Collection, NLI MS 5651.
20 Nov. 1902, CL, iii, 258.
Made politically acceptable by reducing the amount earned in America by the emigrant
hero. For the Nassau, see SQ, 332; alsoJ.H. Pollock, William Butler Yeats (London, 1935),
33-4. When it closed in 1912, WBY recalled ‘I have had so many meetings there with
O'Leary, Taylor and the like.’ (To AG, 3 Nov. 1912, Berg).
26. See Catherine Phillips (ed.), “The Hour-Glass’: Manuscript Materials (Ithaca and London,
1994).
by Russell to AG, 24 Mar. 1903, Berg. The idea may have owed something to Jack’s penchant
for working models: see JBY to Rosa Butt, Nov. 1900, Bodleian. ‘Jack at work either on
picture or a great undertaking which occupies all his evenings, a circus, with puppets of
horses and men, a most laughable thing. Jack explains, a country circus tries to imitate
life ancient or modern. He imitates the circus.’
20 Mar. 1903, CL, iii, 333.

586
 NOTES TO PAGES 289-295
29. NLI MS 7267.
30. See Greensheaf, 2 (1903), 6-7, and above, p. 219.
216 CL, 111, 351.
32: Copy in Reading.
33:Daily News, 16 May 1903. Chesterton must have relished the conceit; he knew them both
from Bedford Park days. My thanks to Owen Dudley Edwards for this reference.
34. Schuchard, ‘ “Attendant Lord” ’,104.
35: Interviews with George Yeats, 17 June 1946 and 8 Dec. 1947, Ellmann interview book, Tulsa.
36. Originally this was expected to be £600; it was derived from the earnings of the Vale Press
Faustus.
37: CL, iti, 402.
38. WBY’s feelings may be intuited by a fragment from AG to him (Berg), written while
he was in the USA: ‘I looked in at Mrs Emery’s “Dancers” as I wanted to see her about
music for Shadowy Waters. She had a good many people, and if she keeps them togeth-
er it may be quite a useful society. Walter Crane dancing the Sarabande was afine sight,
his face wooden all the time. He is rather disgusted at the collapse of the Masquers. Mr
Elliott who I met at the Sesame was sorry for your sake, you would be so disappointed!
but I told him you would not take it to heart.’
39. 16 Mar. 1903.
40. See latter to United Irishman, 1 Aug. 1903, and a debate on 24 Oct. with Father Maloney
at the London Irish Literary Society, where some priests walked out.
4I. 14 July 1903, CL, iii, 398-9.
42. To AG, 8 May 1903, CL, iii, 363.
43. WBY told AG of this in a letter of 4 May. The company’s subsequent visit in Mar.
1904 was probably in order to be vetted by the Exhibition Committee, who were to pay
expenses. In the event, the company did not go, but several ex-members did, causing much
annoyance and confusion when they described themselves as “The Irish National Theatre
Society’; see below, Chapter 12, p. 319.
44. Academy, 16 May 1903.
45- CL, iii, 400.
46. Athenaeum, 27 June 1903 (CH, 137).
47- CL, 111, 342.
48. See Leader, 26 Sept., 10 and 17 Oct. 1903. ‘Imaal’ was
J.J. O”’
Toole. However, in New Ire-
land on 10 Oct. a piece was carried arguing that the Irish failed to appreciate WBY.
49. To Quinn, 15 May 1903, CL, iii, 372.
50. SMY to Quinn, 22 Sept. 1903, NYPL. ‘When Willy appeared Papa drew his attention
to the beautiful pink colour of the little bits of fish remaining . . .’
si. G-YL, 174.
Ge For his reiterated condemnation in June 1903, see CL, iti, 385—7.
53: ESOL itp.
54. Gabriel Fallon in J & R, i, 180-81.
55: Berg. Also see TS at Harvard, with prologue and additions. At Coole in late Aug. JBY
was struck by how much work WBY and AG did ‘jointly’ (to Rosa Butt, 1 Sept. 1903,
Bodleian).
56. 31 Aug. 1903. The prologue, though published in the United Irishman, was wisely never
performed.
57: 17 Oct. 1903, an uncompromising piece by ‘Chanel’ [Arthur Clery]. “This abnegation
Mr Yeats preaches is the virtue which makes men martyrs and apostles, but which, if indis-
criminately inculcated in the case of ordinary men, may easily be carried too far.’ Chanel
also thought The Shadow of the Glen ‘one of the nastiest little plays I have ever seen’.
For Beerbohm on The King’s Threshold, see CH, 144-5.

587
 NOTES TO PAGES 296-304
. Principally Maire Quinn and Dudley Digges, later followed by P. J. Kelly. MG’s decision
was made final in late Sept., according to a letter to Roberts.
The same message was preached in an important open letter to the United Irishman,
10 Oct. 1903, CL, iii, 439-41.
. 13 July 1903 and 1 Aug. 1903; a TS of the first is in AG’s papers, with corrections by her
(Berg).
GaYLag 25874, 177,079:
. PF, 258. See also a peremptory letter of hers to W. G. Fay, 21 Aug. 1903, Harvard.
Robert Hogan and MichaelJ.O’Neill, Joseph Holloway’ Abbey Theatre:A Selection from
Fits Unpublished Journal Impressions of a Dublin Playgoer (London, 1967), 27.
Frazier, Behind the Scenes, 75-9.
. McCann, The Story of the Abbey Theatre, 131.
. On31 Oct. and 2-3 Nov. the Cumann na nGaedheal Theatre Company presented Cathleen
nt Houlihan and Connell’s Emmet, as well as plays by Hyde, Cousins and Ryan. Patriotic
dramas were turned out for the United Irishman week after week: see Frazier.
Memo, ‘Reasons for and against the Establishment of the Gaelic Company’, Berg.
. New Ireland, 17 Oct. 1903.
United Irishman, 24 Oct. 1903.
See Tom Kettle, ‘Mr Yeats and the Freedom of the Theatre’, United Irishman, 15 Nov.
1902.
. 18 Apr. 1903.
CE, iit,.477-8.
Page proofs and prelims of In the Seven Woods, with annotations, Harvard.
. To Shelby, 11 Aug. 1903, Kansas.
See Cuala Archives, TCD; also ECY to Quinn, 7 Oct. 1903, HRHRC.
See Quinn to AG, 24 Mar. 1903, Berg.
To ECY, 25 July 1901, CL, iii, 94.
So Maurice Joy reported to Nevinson: Schuchard, ‘“Attendant Lord”’, rro-11.
. Apr. 1904, CL, iii, 577.
. See Quinn to AG, 24 Mar. 1903, Berg.
Later, WBY remembered Quinn as having suggested the tour the day after they met at
the Galway feis, 1 Sept. 1902 (CL, iii, 140); and see Quinn to AG, 15 May 1903 (Berg):
‘one of the aims thatIhave for the [Irish Literary] Society is to have Yeats over here some
time next year and also Hyde. I will have it arranged that Yeats will lecture at Harvard
and Columbia Universities and before other Irish Societies and the same way with Hyde.
You will remember that I mentioned this when I was at Coole.’
82. 28 June 1903, CL, iii, 389. The high-souled tone of the letter may owe something to its
having been dictated to AG.

Chapter 12: FROM AMERICA TO ABBEY STREET

1903-1904

Epigraph: Self-Portrait, Taken from the Letters and Journals of Charles Ricketts, Collected and
Compiled by T: Sturge Moore and Edited by C. $. Lewis (London, 1939), 106.
I. George Brett to Quinn, NYPL.
2. To Russell, 3 July 1903, and to Horatio S. Krans, 20 Nov. 1903, rudely (but unsuccess-
fully) discouraging the latter from writing a book about WBY, Quinn letter book,
no. 1, NYPL (the source of all subsequent Quinn letters unless otherwise stated).

588
 NOTES TO PAGES 304-312
Se See letter to Krans, above; to WBY; to George J. Bryan, 21 Nov. 1903.
Quinn to AG, Berg.
Si Quinn told a Californian correspondent that Colonel Higginson would be introducing
Ca
WBY at Harvard, and then wrote to Higginson to tell him about the lecture and invite
him to do so.
Quinn to James Phelan, 22 Oct. 1902, letter book, no. 1, NYPL.
See Richard Londraville’s reconstruction of the texts of three of these in Y48 (1991), 78-122,
CL, iti, 511.
GS
BOSQuinn to AG, 15 May 1903, Berg.
Io. 22 Nov. 1903.
II. Paul Elmore Moore in the New York Independent and the Evening Post accused WBY
of morbidity, sensuality and sickliness, instancing as proof the number of references to
hair in The Wind Among the Reeds; with unconscious irony he contrasted WBY with the
‘wholesome’ Lionel Johnson. Huneker loyally pointed out that WBY’s recent work was
all against this tendency. See pp. 536-7, below.
CL, iii, 473.
ibid., 467.
See Karin Strand, ‘W. B. Yeats’s American Lecture Tours’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis
(Northwestern University, 1978), 15-17, for details of interviews.
New York Morning Sun, 15 Nov. 1903. A recurrent theme in his letters was the attractiveness
of educated American women compared to argumentative English bluestockings.
See CL, iti, 490.
Such as Brisbane of the New York Evening Journal, see also his letter to Daniel Coholan,
16 Dec. 1903.
Quinn to Dr T. J. Shahan, 1o Feb. 1904, CUA Archives; also ‘M’ (probably M. F. Egan)
to same, 28 Dec. 1903.
19. He used the organ-stop metaphor at a Co-operative Conference seven years before
(Irish Homestead, 6 Nov. 1897) and two years later in a speech at Trinity (Daily Express,
Dublin, 1 June 1899).
20. YA 8 (1991), 91.
21. Quoted in Strand, ‘American Lecture Tours’, 77.
22. ibid., 22.
Dg 19 Dec. 1903.
24. CL, iti, 500.
25 7 Jan. 1904, NLI MS 18,566.
26. Quinn to Mrs Byrne, 1 Feb. 1904.
2s Letters to James Byrne and Patrick Ford, 7 Jan. 1904.
28. CL, iii, 497. :
29. Massachusetts Review, 5, 2. He was referring to a piece in the Standard, 5 Jan. 1904, about
WBY’s allegedly congenital blemish of ‘self-consciousness’.
30. CL, iti, 538.
3I. To AG, n.d., but after seeing Tobin in Paris, possibly r910—11, Berg.
B25 Strand, ‘American Lecture Tours’, 38.
33- Though Russell himself had turned against Finlay: see his letter to Quinn, Jan. 1904
(Denson TS), where he attributed Finlay’s dislike of WBY to a fear that mysticism
would destroy Jesuit education. My thanks to Warwick Gould for this reference.
34- Strand, ‘American Lecture Tours’, 344.
35: ‘Renaissance of Irish Literature’, a full report in Mai/ and Empire, Toronto, 15 Feb. 1904.
36. See Robert Mahony, “Yeats and the Irish Language Revival: An Unpublished Lecture’,
Trish University Review, 19, 2 (Autumn 1989), 220-26.

589
 NOTES TO PAGES 312-319
By Harry Connell, on 31 Oct. 1903. Dudley Digges played Emmet, and Maire Quinn,
Sarah Curran.
CL, iit, 537-8.
CLG Gio.
. Notinversion of speech printed in UP, ii, 310-27. See Berg TS, where WBY calls it “The
Song of Hatred’, but it must be “The Curse of the Boers on England’, subsequently pub-
lished by AG in Poets and Dreamers.
Gaelic American, 4 Feb. 1939.
See John Masefield to Jack Yeats, 27 Mar. 1904, Harvard.
Hackett’s description is in a TS preserved at Yale.
CL, iui, 494-5.
See Sheridan to Patrick Ford, quoted by Quinn to WBY, 7 Jan. 1904, NLI MS 18,566.
. According to George Yeats, in 1964.
See NLI 30,654. CT and IGE had earned £97. 2s. 7d. since publication, against advances
of £109. 1s. 9d., while the plays had earned only £21. 185. 11d. against their advance of
431. 10s. (increased to £34. 4s. 2d. 1/2 by copies which WBY had taken in lieu). A multi-
ple of fifty would give something like the 1997 equivalent.
CL, iti, 593-4.
CL, iii, 482.
Tuesdays at Ten (Philadelphia, 1928), 147.
. One newspaper interview in particular, with Ashton Stevens in the San Francisco Exam-
iner, 30 Jan. 1904, gives a very vivid impression, and is an antidote to George Moore’s
famous description in Vale. It shows WBY at his liveliest and least pretentious, as well
as revealing the considerable extent of his theatrical knowledge. See Appendix.
. Jan. 1904, Berg.
See San Francisco Chronicle, 30 Jan. 1904; and below, p. 327.
CL, iii, 527.
CL, iii, 504-s.
. Holloway diary, NLI MS 1802, 169.
‘Cottie’ Yeats to Elkin Mathews, 16 Dec. 1903, HRHRC.
CL, iii, 548.
. New York Daily Tribune, 15 Nov. 1903. cf. Inter-Ocean, Chicago, 17 Jan. 1904: ‘We have a
national theater, of which I am the head, which is making actors, and good ones too, of
young Irish working people.’
. CL, iti, 496.
See CL, iii, 462, and Volume 4 of AG’s Collected Plays (Coole ed., Gerrards Cross). On
a surviving TS AG wrote ‘chiefly WBY’s’; it does neither of them much credit.
Hogan and O’Neill, Holloway’s Abbey Theatre, 33, and LTWBY, i, 122.
CLJMS, i, 76.
See Stephen Gwynn to W. G. Fay, 13 Dec. 1903, Harvard. Rather nervously, Gwynn sug-
gested a cut of at least 20 per cent to the players, rather than a straight partnership.
See letters to George Roberts, Mar. 1904, in Harvard.
. 27 Mar. 1904, Harvard.
CH, 44.
CL, iii, 563.
. Cutting in Henderson scrapbook, Kansas, 43.
. This correspondence is in the Theatre Collection, Harvard.
u1 June 1904, Harvard.
. AG ‘deplored’ Kelly’s expulsion; see an undated letter to WBY, Berg. In the same letter

5990
 NOTES TO PAGES 319-328
she remarked that Russell ‘must have an uneasy conscience to be so out of temper’ and
offered some gentle suggestions about improving The King’s Threshold.
73: Hogan and O'Neill, Holloway’ Abbey Theatre, 38.
74: ibid., 39.
75: n.d., but April rg04, Berg.
76. CL, iu1, 615. Sturge Moore agreed, writing to R. C. Trevelyan (late June 1904, Univer-
sity of London): ‘it was miserably acted there are lots of good things in it and first rate
situations but there is no unity of impression or culmination of interest or focus of sym-
pathy, and it is very long here and there boring one altogether’.
77: Delaney, ‘“Heirs of the Great Generation”’, YA 4 (1986), 57.
78. Rolleston’s poem had been published by Gill in Dublin in 1897, printed by Patrick
Geddes at Edinburgh and illustrated by Althea Gyles.
79: SMY to JBY, 27 July 1904, from Frankfort, NLI MS 31,112. As this book goes to press,
Jack Yeats’s 1929 painting Farewell to Mayo has just been auctioned for £804,000.
80. CL, iii, 642ff. WBY made it clear that he expected Fay to reproduce sections of this very
carefully constructed letter (which is really an article by other means) in any written riposte
he made to Moore.
8. CL, iii, 658.
82. TB, 188.
83. On all this, see CL, iti, 654-5.
84. To Maire Garvey, 1 Sept. 1904, NLI MS 8320.
8s. cf. Moran’s own dislike of Cathleen ni Houlihan when he saw it in 190s. ‘The “poor old
woman’ has gained admittance to the scented drawing-room where they take alittle green
sentimentality with their coffee and gossip. “Kathleen ni Houlihanism” makes Irish patri-
otism quite harmless.’
86. CL, iti, 660-63.
87. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw. Volume 2, 1898-1918: The Pursuit ofPower (London, 1989),
83.
88. He refused to provide a quote about GBS in Mar. 1915 ‘unless at considerable length, &
after weighing my words; he is a very brilliant man & my friend’ (UNC, Chapel Hill).
Henderson’s cuttings book, NLI MS 1730, 254, contains an unattributed interview with
WBY, explaining that the play cannot be put on because of its length and casting difficult-
ies, not because of the content: ‘the story is badly told, but the situations are an astonish-
ment, and the characters the life of the situations’.
89. WBY to Shaw, postmarked 1 May 1905, HRHRC. ‘Green elephant’ has a particular res-
onance: WBY was well known for having seen a vision of a green elephant following a
man in Piccadilly, and Shaw used the phrase to denote the affectation he disliked in WBY
(‘he saw no green elephants at Coole’, Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw. Volume iB
1918-1950: The Lure ofFantasy (London, 1991), 195).
go. There was a difficulty about the price, but the idea came off four years later and the
picture now hangs in the Houghton Library at Harvard.
gl. To Frank Fay, CL, iii, 668.
92. CL, iii, 678.
93: At the Royal Hibernian Academy: see Hogan and O'Neill, Holloway’ Abbey Theatre, 47-
8; the date was 8 Dec. 1904. This was probably the incident described by Moore in Vale
(see below).
94. CL, iii, 685.
95. For the sake of vividness, this is quoted not from the 1933 revised edition used by Cave,
but from the original 1914 edition of Vale (164-7). See below, Chapter 18, n. 43, for WBY’s
belief that Moore was conflating two occasions.

591
 NOTES TO PAGES 825435

96. James W. Flannery, W. B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre: The Early Abbey Theatre in
Theory and Practice (London, 1976), 253.
97: Hogan and O’Neill, Holloway’ Abbey Theatre, 49.
98. Frazier, Behind the Scenes, 112.
99. S.O.’Sullivan, The Rose and the Bottle (1946); Fay and Carswell, The Fays of the Abbey Theatre,
nic Shiubhlaigh, The Splendid Years.

Chapter 13: DELIGHTING IN ENEMIES

1905-1906
Epigraph: 5 Feb. 1906, Henderson scrapbook on National Literary Society, Kansas.
I. Jeb pure
2 Interview with Niall Montgomery, Ellmann interview book, Tulsa.
. Subsequently married off to MacBride’s brother Joseph, summoned from Westport for
the purpose.
. An Irishwoman wrote complaining that MG’s separation contradicted advice she had
previously given; MG replied that a woman with no income had to stay with the bread-
winner, whereas she had ‘the power of turning the drunkard out’.
5G-YI5 208.
. Feb. 1905, NLI MS 18,702 (copy).
. WBY to AG, postmarked 12 Jan. 1905, Berg.
. Feb. 1905, Berg.
. 11 Mar. 1905, NYPL.
. To Rosa Butt, 19 May 1905, Bodleian.
. 29 June 1905, NYPL.
. ‘Sunday’, n.d., but probably 14 May 1905, Berg.
. This strikingly anticipates the theme of Purgatory more than thirty years later.
. G-YL, 206.
. Postmarked 11 Mar. 1905, NYPL.
. MG thought the Evening Mai/ account was ‘fairly just’ (30 Sept. 1905); the Independent,
though according to her pro-MacBride, was sued by him for libel after reporting some
of the speech by MG's counsel. MacBride’s version is preserved in a testimonial he wrote
for Fred Allan (NLI MS 29,818). He stressed MG’s‘impure life’, her ‘indelicacy’, and her
‘trying to force her ex-lovers on me’. A particular grievance originated in her contact with
WBY immediately after their honeymoon. See above, p. 286.
iW Nov.—Dec. 1905, G—-YL, 221.
18. This anticipates the later account in Ireland after Parnell of the country being ‘like soft
wax for years to come’ (a phrase first encountered in Standish O’Grady’s Story ofIreland);
much as the MacDonnell article predicts the analysis of political energy being diverted
into culture after 1891.
19. Cave, Hail and Farewell, 550; see also Hogan and O'Neill, Holloway’s Abbey Theatre, 53-4.
20. To Quinn, 15 Feb. 1905, L, 446.
ai. The lecture to the Catholic College was delivered in mid-Apr.; see An Claidheamh Soluis,
22 Apr. 1905, for a leader. Also FJ, 2 Feb. 1905, for a meeting at the ‘Calarosa Club’
attended by AG and WBY, who stoutly defended their choice of plays.
22. 18 Feb. 1905, Illinois.
23. Kohfeldt, Lady Gregory, 177.
24. To Gerard Fay, ‘May 1952’, NLI MS 10,954.
25. This view of WBY’s interference is borne out by Holloway’s Abbey Theatre, 45, and is

592
 NOTES TO PAGES 335-341
preserved in the tone of a letter from WBY to Roberts, 24 Oct. 1905, dropping him as
Concobar for the English tour of On Baile’ Strand. Please come round tomorow (Tuesday)
about one. I have something important to say —I may as well tell you the truth — I don’t
like your Concobar & I must make a change. I think Ishould tell you that both the Fays
are against my taking you out of the part but I am afraid it must be done.’ (Harvard).
Holloway thought this was why Roberts left the company the following Jan. (Holloway’s
Abbey Theatre, 67).
26. To Bullen, 15 May 1905, Kansas.
a Cancelled passage in letter to AG, Berg.
28. His condescension towards Boyle is indicated in Holloway’ Abbey Theatre, 59.
He told
him to keep to the Building Fund style, ‘“for”, added Yeats, “it is scarcely likely that one
could be supreme in more than one thing.” Yeats nearly had a fit when Boyle told him
he wrote poetry, but recovered somewhat when Boyle said it was only comic poetry.’
29. WBY to Farr, 11 June 1905, HRHRC.
30. Perhaps reflecting the connection he now made between the characters of Cuchulain and
Parnell: Hogan and O’Neill, Holloway’ Abbey Theatre, 58.
3I. Cave, Hail and Farewell, 541-3, Hogan and O’Neill, Holloway’s Abbey Theatre, 61.
32: [29] May 1905, NYPL.
33: See Johnson, Florence Farr, 117-18, and Inis Fail, Aug. 1905.
34. BOT.
35: 3 Aug. 1905, L, 458-9.
36. ibid.
37: See AG to Maire Garvey, 28 Oct. 1905, Harvard.
38. 7 May 1905, HRHRC.
39- A letter from Portman Square, in Harvard.
Dear Mr Yeats, It is a matter which gratifies me intensely, that the Society should be now able to
free certain of its members so that their whole strength and energy should be given to the Theatre
&its needs, practical as well as artistic. We must all have alittle patience with the public and in time
the Theatre will become part of the natural life of the community. Ifa time of difficulty should arise
and there should be anxiety as to continuing these payments, I will now try to minimise this anxi-
ety by offering myself as security. I will undertake to make up the salaries to the sums agreed on,
when any deficiency occurs; but when more people are freed I must be informed first so as to know
the extent of the liability.
For another concocted letter, and general speculation about WBY’s strategy, see Frazier,
Behind the Scenes, 119-20.
40. See a series of undated letters in Berg.
4l. An interesting letter from Russell to Quinn, 4 June 1909, NYPL, repeated this analysis,
discussing at length the enmities WBY had created in Dublin and stressing the difficulty
Russell had in persuading the original National Theatre Society to elect WBY as
President, he himself having refused. I owe this reference to W. M. Murphy.
42. To JMS, TB, 74.
43. n.d., probably Sept. 1905, Berg. See also Russell to WBY, Denson, Letters from AE, 52-4,
which is 13 Sept. 1905 (not Apr. 1904, as printed).
44. n.d., Berg, but WBY’s answer is 19 Sept. Also see LTWBY, i, 151-5; Kuch, Yeats and AE,
224-5; and the letter to Quinn mentioned in n. 41, above.
45. TS in Berg.
46. WBY to AG, c. 21 Sept. 1905, Berg.
47- n.d., but late Sept., and 6 Nov. 1905, Berg.
48. n.d., but probably Nov. 1907, Berg.
49. n.d., Berg.
50. n.d., but ¢. 15 Jan. 1906, Berg. He added an important postscript:

593
 NOTES TO PAGES 341-346
Even if Lady Gregory & myself leave old Society your friends will not be near a working majority.
The Fays, Wright & Miss Allgood are alone enough to stop that. Furthermore there is in the long
run no worthwhile way to be popular except good plays. At the same time I am ready to consider
anything you suggest provided it does not weaken discipline or delay the work in any way. Remember
it is we who are in the strong position. We are quite ready for any reasonable concessions but can-
not concede anything that will make the work commoner or the discipline weak. My dear Colum
in the long run popular support is not got by concession to it but by strength in the quiet doing of
our work. Of demagogues Ireland has enough. By the by I never advocated a ‘free gallery’ & the
popular theatre I want must be one for all classes — peer & peasant if that is possible but certainly
not one class, like the theatre of the National Players.

Gite Masefield to Jack Yeats, n.d., Harvard.

Se SMY to Quinn, 25 Dec. 1905, NYPL.
53: See WBY to AG, 11 Nov. 1905, Berg.
54: Berg.
55: To AG, late Dec., Berg.
56. 8 Jan. 1906, Berg.
bys 2 Jan. 1906, TB, 88. See also ibid., 89—go.
58. 5 Jan. 1906, Berg. While in Scotland in mid-Jan., he discovered the weakness of his legal
position.
59- TB, 94. Also see PF, 306-7, for further letters about this imbroglio.
60. Draft from AG to JBY, Berg; also see AG to Colum, 9 Jan. [1906], Synge MSS, TCD.
61. Fragment in Berg, misdated 5 Jan. 1905.
62. 6 Jan. 1906, original in Kansas.
63. LTWBY, i, 160.
64. 16 Jan. 1906, Kohfeldt, Lady Gregory, 181.
65. 18 Feb. 1906, Berg. His actual resignation letter was dated 24 Apr. 1906, ibid. Also see
Berg for AG’s rebuttal of Colum’s accusation that they were ‘becoming less and less a the-
atre of the people’; she instanced their accessible plays and her own commitment to a six-
penny pit, and stoutly defended Willie Fay. WBY wrote savagely about Colum to Quinn
on 4 Apr. 1906 (NYPL): “He has the horoscope of the kind of pretty woman who never
grows up. I know an old lady of title, who at an immense age keeps all the little mincing
ways of what has been charming, and in her case, slightly scandalous five and twenty. I
am sure that the stars had in all things except the scandal a like record at her birth as at
Colum’. I have had wonderful letters from him, and so has Lady Gregory. He is turning
in every direction, always trying to butter somebody’s parsnips anew, and will not have a
friend left in about six months.’ Thus early, he was grouping unlikely people by horoscope-
type, as he would do in 4 Vision twenty years later.
66. 10 Mar. 1906.
67. TL fragment, Berg. A later reference to WBY gleaning ‘notes for his diary’ suggests it
belongs to this period, when WBY was drafting Discoveries.
68. AG to WBY, Berg.
69. 6 Jan. 1906, HRHRC, quoted in Kuch, Yeats and AE, oof.
70. G_Vulio mas
ilsTo Quinn, 5 Dec. 1905, NYPL.
72. 6 Jan. 1906, Berg.
13° 6 Jan. 1906, private collection.
74- 20 July 1909, private collection.
75° See an important letter to Bullen, 21 Sept. 1906, Kansas.
76. NLI MS 30,313.
77: WBY to AG, 27 Mar. 1906, Berg; he had only43 left in his bank account.
78. Mathews would agree only to The Wind Among the Reeds being reprinted in a book

594
 NOTES TO PAGES 346-350
costing at least 8s. 6d. Eventually
WBY had to leave it out of the first edition of Oct. 1906,
though it was included in the revised edition from Apr. 1907.
79: To AG, 20 Dec. 1906, Berg. He hoped for a new edition at Easter 1907 when Mathews’s
rights over The Wind Among the Reeds and Fisher Unwin’s over Poems would expire;
but
sales slowed, the book was not reprinted, and CW gained priority over it.
80. Berg, misdated rgos.
81. 30 May 1906, Berg.
82. To Holbrook Jackson, 19 Apr. 1906, Colgate University Library (Hamilton
, NY).
83. See Tom Steele, Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club (Aldershot, 1990),
128-32.
84. 17 Apr. [no year], Berg. ‘If you don’t [go] you must send it back — &
you mustn't cash it
till you are actually going to take your ticket — itwill just get you there & back & give you
aweek or so— & if you stay longer, you can’t be spending more than at Woburn Buildings
or the Nassau.’
85. Arthur Sinclair, as recorded by Gabriel Fallon in IER, i,176; also see Hogan and
O’Neill,
Holloway’ Abbey Theatre, 160. Sinclair, who joined the company in 1904, played Fergus
in Deirdre (1906) and Thomas Hearn in The Unicorn from the Stars (1907).
86. Brigit O’Dempsey to Gerard Fay, as above.
87. 1 May 1906, NYPL.
88. SMY to Marie Freudenthal, 7 Mar. 1906, private collection.
89. WBY to Quinn, 1 May 1906, NYPL.
go. 7 May 1906, HRHRC.
gI. TB, 124.
g2. See reviews in Henderson's cuttings book, NLI MS 1730.
93- Frazier, Behind the Scenes, 176-7.
94- 19 June 1906, NLI MS 33,068.
95: 3 July 1906, Berg: an important letter, written from London after a weekend at Mells.
Miss Horniman seems to me very reasonable — she is in good health and quite unlike her old self
but she has made up her mind not to go in any business relation with Fay. At the same time she had
made it perfectly plain that she looked upon the English work of this theatre as supplying her with
what she called a career. I never had this in so many words but have always suspected that the find-
ing of work for her was a condition of wholehearted support. She is prepared to treat us very gen-
erously under any circumstances but if we cannot restore her relation to some part of the work
however circumscribed we will probably find either that she may break with us altogether on some
unforeseen issue or that all her means may be taken up with some other project just at the moment
when our theatre is in want of fresh capital.

96. To AG, 25 June 1906, Berg.

97: TB, 134.
98. ibid., 146-8; WBY to Nugent Monck, 10 Sept. 1911, private collection.
99. 30 Aug. 1906, NLI MS 13,068. She believed that Moore’s article ‘Stage Management in
the Irish National Theatre’, written as ‘Paul Ruttledge’ in Dana (Sept. 1904), hinted that
she handed over the theatre for sexual rather than artistic reasons.
I0oo. PF, 304
Iol. 28 Aug. 1906. Part of this letter is in MBY, and part in Harvard.
102 4 Oct. 1906, Kansas. The letter she mentions is a TS copy from WBY at Coole, dated 1
Oct. 1906, demanding a legal agreement to make him sole editor, paid aretainer through
Watt, which he would pay back to her ‘so long as the agreement holds good’. The orginal
is in the Yeats collection at Bucknell, sent on by ECY to Emery Walker with a frantic
plea for advice. WBY’s letter is not a friendly document.
103. 12 Oct. [1906], NYPL.
104. See ECY to Emery Walker, 3 Oct. 1906, Bucknell: a letter specifically blaming the

595
 NOTES TO PAGES 350-356
influence of Coole, and revealing that Jack had advised them to try and dispense with
WBY altogether.
105. ECY to Quinn, 29 Oct. 1906, 25 Nov. 1906, NYPL. Quinn's suggestions, dated 16 Nov.
1906, closely resembled Russell’s terms, according to ECY.
106. She told Bullen that he demanded 20 per cent for In the Seven Woods and the same for
Hanrahan, which she had not paid yet since the book had not sold well.
107. See WBY to KT, 28 Aug. 1906, Harvard. A long and grateful letter to her on 1 Sept.
(Harvard) became a sustained critique of Russell’s indiscriminate enthusiasm and reliance
on ‘inspirationism’. WBY specifically connected Russell, Starkie and nic Shiubhlaigh with
the Dun Emer struggle: ‘it is all one dispute’.
108. 13 Aug. 1906, TB, 139.
109. WBY to AG, 19 Jan. 1907, Berg.
IIO. To AG, 25 June 1906, Berg. In an interesting letter toJBY from Coole, 21 July 1906 (L,
474-6), WBY compared Darragh to Mrs Campbell as Deirdre, finding that Darragh came
much nearer to the ‘distinguished, solitary, proud’ style of the new acting school, where-
as Mrs Pat was ‘trained in plays like Mrs Tanquery, where everything is done by a kind
of magnificent hysteria (one understands that when one hears her hunting her monkey
and her servant with an impartial fury about the house) . . . the problem with me just
now is whether, as I am rather inclined to, to leap at the advertisement of a performance
by Mrs Pat or to keep to my own people and my own generation till they have brought
their art to perfection.’ The idea of ‘something to perfection brought’ would stay with
him. (In fact, when Mrs Campbell did play Deirdre, Dublin wits referred to it as ‘The
Second Mrs Concobar’.)
III. See e.g. a letter of 22 Sept. 1906, NLI MS 10,952.
112. It appeared on 20 Oct. and 24 Nov. 1906.
113. Daily Express, Dublin, 15 Oct. 1906.
IT4. Aug. 1906, NLI MS 13,068.
IIS. Hogan and O’Neill, Holloway’ Abbey Theatre, 74-6.
116. A copy is in the Synge papers, TCD.
117. Curiously, on 10 Dec. at the National Literary Society, he stoutly defended the policy of
limiting their programme to Irish plays: see Hogan and O’Neill, Holloway’s Abbey Theatre,
78-9.
118. ‘Friday’, n.d., Berg.
119. NLI MS 18,680, where it is misfiled under 1923; not in TB.
120. See a detached note in her hand, in NLI MS 13,068.
I have come to the conclusion that the only way to preserve the authors’ time so that they may do
their own work is to engage a highly paid Managing Director who would be capable of stage man-
agement & general direction. The authors, when desirous to do so, to produce their own works.
Other works (except peasant plays, which may be left to Fay) to be produced either by artists, dir-
ectors, or the Managing Director. This new man to be responsible for them being kept up to the
level of their production. If the other Directors agree &a suitable man can be found, Mr Yeats will
accept my offer.
See also a letter of 16 July 1906: “The careful arrangements you may make in December
will not be carried out in January.’
I2I. TB, 186. Interestingly, Brigit O’Dempsey claimed that W. G. Fay respected
Horniman
and ‘was always indignant at WB’s and that old Trout’s attitude to her’: to Gerard Fay,
24 Nov. 1907, NLI MS 10,954.
122. WBY to AG, 27 Dec. 1906, Berg, and to JMS, 28 Dec. 1906, TB, 187-8.
123. WBY to AG, 3 Jan. 1907, Berg.
124. ibid.
125. 28 Dec. 1906, TB, 188.

596
 NOTES TO PAGES 356-361
126. 5 Jan. 1907, TB, 197.
127. 11 Jan. 1907, Berg.
128. Apparently in a long letter from WBY, 8 Jan. 1907.
129. Probably 10 Jan. 1907, TB, 202. Original in Berg.
130. TB, 203-4. They could withdraw their plays after six months if they
wished, and Fay was
to be guaranteed control of ‘dialect work’.
131. ‘She probably talked in the reckless sort of way the majority of us talk among
our equals
and forgot that it was quite a different thing to talk that way before people like Mac and
the Allgoods, who have, more or less, to look up to us if w are to keep any kind of discip-
line.’ (to AG, 17 Jan. 1907, Berg).
132. TB, 160.
133. Printed circular of 1906, signed ‘WBY’.
134. 5 Feb. 1906, Henderson scrapbook on National Literary Society, Kansas. Kettle had founded
the Nationistin late 1905 — and (so WBY told Quinn, 6 Dec. 1905, NYPL) had been expelled
from it for ‘some purely historical articles on liberal Catholicism in France and a mild
article asking for lay control of the University College, Stephens Green’. WBY blamed
Father Finlay (an enemy since their conflicting American tours of 1903/4); he added that
Kenny had been similarly driven from the Irish Peasant
by ‘the umbrella of a parish priest’.
135. To Quinn, 16 Sept. 1905, NYPL.

Chapter 14: SYNGE AND THE IRELAND OF His TIME

1907-1909
Epigraph: Arrow, i, 3, 23 Feb. 1907.
z WBY to AG, 14 Jan. 1907, Berg. Horniman guaranteed his salary ina letter of 17 Dec. 1906.
. Fragment, n.d., Berg.
. An impression he gained from JMS to WBY, 9 Jan. 1907: TB, 201.
- 16 Jan. 1907, Margaret McKim Maloney Collection, NYPL. Payne confirmed this in his
Wn

letter of resignation, 27 June 1907, Berg.

. See Horniman to AG, 26 Dec. 1906, NLI 5380, and to WBY, 31 Dec. 1906, NLI MS 13,068.
. 12Jan. 1907, TB, 205, n. 1.
. See Fay and Carswell, The Fays of the Abbey Theatre, 212.
. 26 Jan. 1907, NLI MS 180s, 63.
© . Berg.
DN
ON
Io. It is also significant that he had left her his address, evidently half expecting trouble.
See Grierson’s TS memorandum in NLS. The Aberdeen lecture was given gratis, while
for an Edinburgh engagement he received ‘£5 with difficulty’ (AG to Hyde, n.d., Hyde
MSS, TCD). WBY blamed his financial crisis on ECY’s refusal to pay him a proper
royalty.
II.Evening Telegraph, 29 Jan. 1907.
12. 30 Jan. 1907, Henderson scrapbook, NLI 1730, 94-5.

13. 30 Jan. 1907. For the calling in of the police on Monday night by Willie Fay, see Evening
Telegraph, 29 Jan.; it is doubtful if WBY could have returned in time to arrange it. Also
see AG to WBY, n.d., Berg, referring to a hostile Weekly Freeman article: ‘He does not
mention that it was Henderson who worked him [JMS] up that night, & Molly also, so
that I found Synge intimidated & had to give my own orders to the police. I wish I had
dismissed him there & then.’
14. See Arrow, i, 3, 23 Feb. 1907, and Henderson scrapbook, NLI MS 1730, 96-7.
15. Irish Times, 29 Jan. 1907; Evening Mail, 28 Jan. 1907.
16. Irish Times, 31 Feb. 1907.

597
 NOTES TO PAGES 363-367
17. See an incensed letter to WBY, 23 Aug. 1907, Himber, Letters ofQuinn to Yeats, 83-90.
18. To Hugh Viscount Gough, 3 Feb. 1907, Berg.
19. Béaslai and Colum, arrested on 29 Jan., were both fined forty shillings after detention
and prosecution. ‘I cannot believe that Mr Yeats imagined my father could be a mem-
ber of an organisation,’ the younger Colum complained to Robert Gregory. ‘Of course
he is not.’ (1 Feb. 1907, Gregory MSS, Emory). WBY gave evidence in court that Béaslai
““had addressed some words to me in Irish.” “Were they complimentary or the reverse?”
“I am sorry to say, I understand no Irish.”’ (Evening Telegraph, 30 Jan. 1907). ‘What an
instance of National topsey-turveydom in the picture of this Irish dramatist, this author-
ity on the ways and speech of the Western peasant, standing sick, silent and ashamed
when addressed in Irish,’ remarked a contributor to the paper.
20. Pian,
21. Sinn Féin, 2 Feb. 1907.
22. Richard M. Kain, “The Playboy Riots’ in S. B. Bushrui (ed.), Sunshine and the Moon's Delight:
A Centenary Tribute to John Millington Synge (Gerrards Cross, 1972), 181.
23. FY, 2 Feb. 1907. For Milligan, see Evening Telegraph, 4 Feb. 1907; for Sigerson, National
Literary Society address reported on 25 Feb. 1907.
24. In a letter to Robert, duplicated to JMS, now at Emory: see TB, 210-14.
25. FY, 5 Feb. 1907. For Joyce’s interest see Richard Ellmann (ed.), The Letters ofJames Joyce.
Volume2 (London, 1966), 211.
26. PF, 316.
aT. See Leader, 9 Feb. 1907, and for the general theatrical scene, Seamus de Burca, The
Queen’ Theatre Dublin 1829-1969 (Dublin, 1983).
28. Ex, 226-8, and FY, Irish Times, 5 Feb. 1907.
29. Sinn Féin, 9 Feb. 1907, followed up the story and triumphantly established that the Aran
parricide had killed his father by accident and ‘the people did not glorify him for being
the cause of his father’s death, but pitied him in his sorrow’. The man’s name was O’Malley.
WBY had heard that storyinAran in 1896 (see above). But when JMS was there in 1808,
all the nationalist papers reported a grisly murder of a father by his son — with a spade
(FY, 23 June 1898). JMS conflated both incidents.
. As he wrote to Rosamund Langbridge (early Feb. 1907, private collection), and also
Grierson (11 Feb. 1907, NLS).
. 18 Feb. 1907, PF, 317-18.
. n.d., from Florence, Foster-Murphy Collection, NYPL.
7 PB err etc,
. To Grierson, 11 Feb. 1907, NLS. Boyle admitted in a letter to D. J.O'Donoghue (13 Feb.
1907) that he had merely used the issue to withdraw: ‘I have been boiling for some time.’
(private collection).
. To AG, 6 Mar. 1907, Berg. See below, pp. 388-9.
. To same, 9 Mar. 1907.
. TB, 222ff.
. D. H. Greene and E. M. Stephens,J.M. Synge, 1871-1909 (London, 1959), 269.
. As in his speech to the British Association (UP, ii, 366-70).
. See aletter from Stephen Gwynn, 23 Aug. 1907, Berg.
. To Quinn, 18 Feb. 1907, NYPL.
. ‘The Immoral Irish Bourgeoisie’, Irish Times, 11 Feb. 1908; interview with Robert Lynd,
Daily News, 6 June 1910 (also I & R, i, 64-8); Odserver, 19 June 1910. Also see lecture to
Gaelic League, ‘The Theatre and Ireland’, Evening Telegraph, 4 Mar. 1910, and lecture
‘The Living Voice’, RDS, 13 Feb. 1907, Evening Telegraph, 14 Feb. 1907.
43. To Quinn, Apr. 1907, NYPL.
44. 28 June 1907, NLS. The book in question was Edmund Garratt Gardner’s Dukes and Poets

598
 NOTES TO PAGES 367-372
in Ferrara (1904). WBY may also have been influenced by
his study of Ariosto, The King
of Court Poets (1906).
. Horace Reynolds diary, Harvard, recording a letter of 6 July
1927.
- Pethica, 315.
. NYPL. He claimed that one shop had ordered 200 sets which seems
unlikely, given the
early stage of proceedings. Bullen may have been spinning him an
encouraging line.
3. To Joseph Hone, 4 May 1907, HRHRC.
. See R. Schuchard, ‘Yeats, Titian and the New French Painting
’ in A. N. Jeffares (ed.),
Yeats the European (Gerrards Cross, 1984), 142-59.
. VSR, 152. This passage then goes on to describe Aherne’s shifting his allegianc
e to mod-
érn Symbolist painters, to the narrator's resentment. My thanks to Warwick
Gould for
suggesting this point.
: nid., but c. 1909, Berg.
- 27 June 1907, Berg. They had reached London on 26 May.
. See letter in NLI MS 13,068, wrongly attributed to July 1906 (recte 1907).
. 18June 1907, misdated in L, 500-sor. TB, 223—6, gives the backgrou
nd, and AG to JMS,
20 June 1907, shows that she was involved at every stage. Horniman’s response
is in NLI
MS 30,596: ‘But what are my arguments against the wooing of the vampire
Kathleen ni
Houlihan . . . I will not waste my time on a lost cause. This should be a
great relief to
your mind, to know that you need never fear any more interference from me.’
. €.g. letter of 21 June 1907, NLI.
. 27 Feb. 1908, Berg.
. Letters of 25 June and 15 Aug. 1907, TB, 227-8, 236.
. WBY to AG, 22 June 1907.
. To Quinn, 7 Jan. 1908, NYPL.
. As did AG’s The Canavans, written while she was reading drafts of the Playboy:
my
thanks to Ben Levitas for this suggestion.
. Masefield saw him at Binyon’s A/zi/ain London on 3 Sept., where he met Farr (Masefield
to Jack Yeats, 4 Sept. 1907, Harvard); and Philip Moeller met him in the
train at Athenry
on 7 Sept., returning to Coole.
. To Quinn, 4 Oct. 1907, L, 496.
» Michael Holroyd, Augustus John: ABiography (rev. ed., Harmondsworth, 1976),
311.
. See Ellmann MSS at Tulsa, which include a transcript of Horniman to Bullen,
3 July
1907; Horniman to Bullen, 11 Mar. 1907, MBY, shows that Bullen asked for £1,500
surety, claiming he would sell 750 copies at a subscribed price of four guineas; even with
a cheaper Irish price and free review copies, she would recoup her money. She would
then receive one third of the profits, and Bullen two thirds, after a ‘reasonable royalty’
for WBY. Also see WBY to Edith Lister a year later (‘Sunday’, 19 Apr. 1908, Kansas):
‘I do not want to get his business with her & my business with her mixed up together.’
. Mathews retained it, and brought out another printing in 1907; but it was eventually
included in CW.
. MBY A27 records a loan of £70 in 1908, and a letter in NLI MS 13,068 of 26 Mar. 1908
shows WBY repaying that amount to Horniman.
. 8July 1907, Harvard.
- See Horniman to WBY, 7July 1907, NLI 13,068. ‘I hope that you are going to make it quite
clear in the library edition that Lady Gregory has given you certain help in the peasant
dialogue. I felt it only fair to tell Bullen what you told me some time ago, that she con-
siders that she has a certain claim on your disposal of your work, because of the help she
has given you.’ Thus she took her revenge for his refusal to move his plays to Manchester.
69. n.d., but 1907, Harvard.
70. To Bullen, 30 Sept. 1907, Kansas.

599
 NOTES TO PAGES 372-377

. To Lister, 14 Sept. 1907, Kansas.

. To Bullen, early Mar. 1908, Kansas.
. 27 Mar. 1908, 8 May 1908, Harvard.
. Marginal note on proof of Spenser essay, c. May 1908, Kansas.
. WBY to AG, 18 Dec. 1907, Berg. For reactions, see William H. O'Donnell, ‘Portraits
of W. B. Yeats: This Picture in the Mind’s Eye’, YA 3 (1985), 90-93.
. WBY to Lister, Harvard, and to Farr, “Tuesday’, n.d., HRHRC.
. See Sargent to AG, 17 May 1908, Emory, and AG to Quinn, 28 Mar. 1908, Berg.
. 17Jan. 1908, NYPL (Z, 502).
. 4 Oct. 1907, NYPL.
. HRHRC.
. Fay repeated this in letters of 26 and 29 Apr. 1908 to Patrick Hoey and Niall Montgomery,
Huntingdon.
. 3 Nov. 1907, NLI MS 30,586.
. WBY allegedly referred to them as ‘thieves and blackmailers’ who ‘stole £50 of my own
and Lady Gregory’s money’, according to Casimir Markievicz. See TS copy of WBY
to T. G. Keohler, 18 Nov. 1907, Berg, and JBY to Rosa Butt, postmarked 25 Oct. 1907,
Bodleian.
. 22 Nov. 1907, by ‘F.M.A.’.
. 29 Oct. 1907, HRHRC.
. To Rosa Butt, postmarked 4 Dec. 1907, Bodleian. cf. same to same, 3 Jan. 1908: “The ser-
iousness of America at once delights me and puzzles me and alarms me. I find Jack was
a great success with them. I believe that is because Jack was brought up by his grand-
parents, who had this kind of seriousness, not having lived in what calls itself grand soci-
ety and so not being practised in persiflage and levity. Jack’s jokes are always serious.’
. n.d., but Dec. 1907, Berg.
. See SMY to JBY, 6 Sept. 1908, courtesy ofW.M. Murphy: ‘So he and Madame now
pooh-pooh the Castle and are all for Sinn Fein Theatre of Ireland ete.’
. 21 [recte 23] Nov. 1907, UP, ii, 356.
. 10 Dec. 1907, Morris Library, SIUC.
. 3Jan. 1908, Berg. Galway was currently riven by agrarian unrest, and she wanted to attract
‘the classes’ to this local performance in early Jan. 1908: see correspondence in Berg, espe-
cially a letter postmarked 26 Dec. 1907. Worries about ‘no getting over class distinctions
in the way of friendship’ may be found in AG, n.d., but early Mar. 1908, Berg, and on
Sat., 21 Mar., she wrote, “They are all very much to blame, but not so much as Ireland &
Romanism &
the general feeling in the country that nothing means anything.’ (Berg).
92. He blamed Fay’s ‘whole flawed generation’ for the breakdown.
93. See especially 30 Dec. 1907, TB, 264-7.
94. 12 Jan. 1908, TB, 271.
95: Frank's discontent was partly due to his hopeless love for Maire Garvey, who eventu-
ally married Roberts; when he died in 1931 SMY described him to R L-P as ‘one of those
people who got on with no-one, nursed grievances, and had a struggle to live’. But
W. G. Fay’s version of the break is significant.
From the first Frank and I had seen in the National Theatre movement the possibility of a real art
theatre, and we had been led to believe that the Abbey Directors shared our enthusiasm . . .
Unfortunately the lavish encomiums of the English press had been too heady for our friends Yeats,
Synge and Lady Gregory. They imagined we had arrived, when we had no more than started. We
had a company that could do peasant plays with an accomplishment and a finish that had never been
rivalled, much less excelled. But we should have to show much more than that before we could claim
to be a real art theatre. (quoted in McCann, Story of the Abbey Theatre, 134).

600
 NOTES TO PAGES 377-380
96. 24 Dec. 1906, TB, 186.
97- Letter from Camberwell, early 1908, Berg.
98. Boyle to Holloway, 5 Feb. 1908, private collection.
99. ne na to Quinn, 3 Mar. 1908, NYPL, and to AG, 7 Mar. 1908, NLI MS 18,708
copy).
I0o. To Patrick Hoey, postmarked 3 Mar. 1908, Huntingdon.
IOI. ‘But as I helped put him in the saddle, I'd better say no more.’ To Maire Garvey, 26
Apr. 1909, NLI MS 8320. He also attacked the way AG’s plays were ‘praised & praised
with insincerity, by people who have their own fish to fry’ (6 Mar. 1909, ibid.). Fay’s cor-
respondence in the Huntingdon repeats these views ad infinitum.
102. To Patrick Hoey, 24 Mar. 1909, Huntingdon. JMS’s ‘alien creed . . . prevented him from
understanding those brought up in another creed .. . The pessimism that clings like a
mist around Riders to the Sea is foreign to the Catholic nature.’
103. See W. G. Fay’s letter book, NLI MS 2652, letters of 23 Dec. 1923 and 13 Mar. 1933.
104. WBY to AG, 9 Feb. 1908, NLI MS 18,708 (copy).
105. Later withdrawn when Guinan tried to take it up.
106. To Quinn, 3 Mar. 1908, NYPL.
107. Daily Express, Dublin, 17 Feb. 1908, has a full report. Norreys Connell faintly disputed
this reading in his memoirs. WBY tried out his ideas on Holloway the day before, but
Holloway still saw the play as an anti-Irish caricature. For The Piper, see Richard F. Peterson
and Gary Phillips, ‘W. B. Yeats and Norreys Connell’, Y4 2 (1983); also McCann, Story
of the Abbey Theatre, 140-41.
108. TB 272=9.
109. To AG, 11 Jan. 1908, Berg.
110. To Rosa Butt, postmarked 4 Dec. 1907, Bodleian. Drafts of WBY’s letters to Horniman
in the Berg show him threatening resignation from the Theatre. He was in London on
5 Dec. and Masefield spotted him there on the 19th, as he wrote to Jack (Harvard).
iil. See WBY to Bullen, 12 Feb. 1908, Kansas: ‘She has written . . . a most violent letter on
the supposition that it is quite a different body and has excused herself by saying she
couldn't possibly know what society it was as it gave its name in Irish. . . They, poor
people, had simply written to hire the Theatre . . . I don’t know what their intentions
were but our Secretary who is a law student took a very serious view of the situation.
She is always doing this sort of thing.’
II2. To Lister, 18 Mar. 1908, Harvard (also see L, 505-6). On 21 May he wrote to the Evening
Mail, giving the reasons for Fay’s departure and denying that the Abbey discouraged the
work of young writers, strategically citing as their one rejection a scandalous piece about
an immoral priest.
113. WBY toL. A. G. Strong, 1920-22, I €&R, i, 152.
II4. 26 Feb. 1908, Berg. cf. her remark to WBY, 19 Apr. 1908: ‘We must keep on our digni-
ty, & not be spiteful. I thought Synge spiteful, & concluded it is because he is timid &
had never, as you & I did, spoken up to the Fays face to face.’
115. WBY to Quinn, 3 Mar. 1908, NYPL.
116. To Quinn, 28 Mar. 1908, Berg.
117. Telegraph, New York, 9 Nov. 1907.
118. To Quinn, 29 Oct. 1907, Foster-Murphy Collection, NYPL.
119. See WBY to AG, 21 Jan. 1907, Berg, for a long-running row with ECY about the sums
she paid her writers. Also see financial statement, Cuala Archive, Box 1, no. 34, state-
ment 1906-10, 'CD. Purchases and royalties built up nearly threefold over the period,
while salaries and other expenses stayed low; but incomes from shows and exhibitions
fluctuated wildly. The income from printing and embroidery increased, but they still
traded at a loss and at the end of the first five years barely broke even.

601
 NOTES TO PAGES 381-389
120. A review in the Bookman, Feb. 1908, noted that WBY was ‘coming out of the land of
dreams into the intensity of personal life’—a phrase also used by the Manchester Guardian,
20 Jan. 1908.
12%. 4 Mar. 1908, Conal O’Riordan (Norreys Connell) correspondence, SIUC.
122) JBY to Rosa Butt, postmarked 14 Sept. 1907, Bodleian.
123. FS, 350-51; and JBY to Ruth Hart, 21 Nov. 1913, TCD.
124. Examples would be Thomas MacDonagh and P. S. O’Hegarty.
125. As described in “The Return of the Stars’, NLI MS 30,535.
126. To AG [9 Mar. 1908], NLI MS 18,708 (copy).
127. See Patricia Boylan, ‘Mrs Duncan’s Vocation’, Irish Arts Review, 12 (1996), and Al/
Cultivated People:AHistory ofthe United Arts Club, Dublin (Gerrards Cross, 1988).
128. In Sept. 1907: ECY to Quinn, 22 Sept. 1907, NYPL.
129. Foster-Murphy Collection, NYPL. He had also continued to be jealous of the actor Robert
Farquharson, as a ‘young admirer’ of Farr’s: see Horniman to WBY, 27 Sept. 1907, NLI
MS 13,068.
130. 8 Dec. 1907, Himber, Letters of Quinn to Yeats, 95.
131. Died 17 May 1905; son of a Bishop of Meath; Vicar of St Ann’s and Precentor of St Patrick’s,
1855-1902; Dean of Chapel Royal, 1869-1902; Professor of Pastoral Theology at TCD,
1894-1902; a supporter of temperance and the higher education of women.
132. ‘Sunday’ [April 1908], Berkeley.
133. So George Yeats told Ellmann: 17 June 1946, interview book, Tulsa.
134. 4 Oct. 1907, NYPL.
135. 11 May 1908, Berkeley.
136. Probably written from Paris in June; Yale.
137. To Dickinson, 30 Aug. 1908, Berkeley.
138. G=Y J 247.
139. n.d., but probably Sept.—Oct. 1907, Library of Congress.
140. Dr Ely Starr, for an unnamed subject born 21 Dec. 1866. WBY used this prediction when
surveying the astrological history of their relationship, particularly their separation in 1893
and the spiritual marriage of 1895.
I4I. See Chapter 13, n. 84, for her offer the previous year.
142. Particularly Manet and Renoir, to judge by comments in his notebook: NLI MS 30,535.
143. The letter, evidently to MG, survives in MBY: obviously sent to WBY to gauge his
reaction.
144. WBY to JBY, 17 July 1908, Boston, from Burren, partly quoted by Wade and misdated
to 1909 in L, 532-3.
145. ‘PLLA.L. diary’, 1909, MBY. MG’s house is described in Young, Flowering Dusk, 101. For
Iseult’s votive offerings, see WBY to AG, n.d. [28 June 1908], NLI MS 18, 709 (copy).
146. The ‘P.LA.L. diary’ records that their rapprochement began then. Curtis Bradford wrote
in Ellmann’s copy of “Yeats and Maud Gonne’ (University of Texas Studies in Literature
and Language, iii, 4, Winter 1962): ‘Not the full story, but as much of it as GY will let me
tell.’
147. G=ViE 250:
148. G=Y L267.
149. To Quinn, 13 Aug. 1908, NYPL.
150. Mem, 172-4. The poem was written down in Feb. 1909 but composed ‘about six months
ago’.
I5I. n.d. [11 June 1908], n.d. [20 June 1908], Berkeley.
152. SMY to Quinn, 5 July 1908, NYPL.

602
 NOTES TO PAGES 389-397
1$3. NLI MS 30,535 consists of notes made on 12 July, expecting some kind of resolution
on
the 14th; in fact, he received a letter on the 1th.
154. Originally presented as a doctorate at Rennes and published by Oxford in rg11.
The ded-
ication also extends to Russell, in even more flowery terms. One of Wentz’s interviewee
s,
Owen Conway of Rosses Point, ‘said that Mr W. B. Yeats and other men famous in Irish
literature had visited him to hear about the fairies, and though he knew very little about
the fairies he nevertheless always liked to talk to them.’ Fairy Faith contains much about
Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, Neo-Platonism, and specifically instances Freud’s inter-
pretation of dreams; regeneration among the aged is also a preoccupation. (See
464,
467-8, 511.) WBY’s influence is writ large throughout.
155. 26 July [1908], Berkeley.
156. 4 Sept. 1908, UP, ii, 367.
157. 6 Sept. 1908.
158. VSR, 158.
159. See NLI MS 30,535, a notebook ofshort essays begun 24 May 1908.
160. Arsenal, Paris. Both poems were printed in the English Review in late Sept.
161. To AG, 13 Oct. 1908, NLI MS 18,709 (copy).
162. ibid.
163. PRO, CO 904/r0: my thanks to Warwick Gould and Deirdre Toomey.
164. Hyde called for the Author at the end, but only — he explained — ‘to see what he looked
like’: WBY to AG, 17 Oct. 1908, NLI MS 18,709 (copy).
165. Roberts to Garvey, 17 Oct. 1908, NLI MS 8320. The police report recorded that on this
date ‘she left by express boat from North Wall for Holyhead’.
166. Recounted to JBY, 30 Oct. 1908, Boston. The Liverpool visit was 19—21 October.
167. To RL-P, 6 Sept. 1909.
168. 15 Nov. 1908, L, 512.
169. Reginald Hine, ‘Memories of W. B. Yeats’, TS in HRHRC. Masefield adds Memory
Harbour, some Blake engravings and prints, a portrait of WBY by JBY, a Cecil French
drawing of a woman with a rose between her lips. One of the Beardsleys was the famous
poster from Farr’s production of The Land ofHeart's Desire.
170. Hine says Cathleen ni Houlihan, but it must have been The Countess Cathleen.
I7I. To AG [27 Dec. 1908], Berg: he finally terrified her into silence. Young’s version is in
Flowering Dusk, to1-2.
172. As Ellmann was told both by Edith Shackleton Heald and George Yeats: 8 Dec. 1947,
interview book, Tulsa. George Yeats was sworn to secrecy by her husband. I am grate-
ful to Elizabeth Heine, whose forthcoming work on WBY and astrology confirms Dec.
1908 as the date they became lovers.
173. G-YL, 258-9.
174. 29 Dec. 1908, Kansas.
175. NLI MS 30,654.
176. ‘Tuesday’, n.d., HRHRC.
177. CH, 164.
178. See Warwick Gould, Journey without Maps’, Y4 11 (1994), 239.
179. To Quinn, 27 Apr. 1908, NYPL.
180. Writing to Henry Meade Bland in response to an essay by the latter, he remarked: ‘I don’t
think Imeant anything so definite as old age by “the star hung low in the rim of the sky”
but I wrote that long ago & know nothing of it but what the verses tell me or anybody.
I have forgotten the mood I wrote it in.’ (2 May 1908, Mills College Library, Oakland,
Calif.).
181. See a letter to SMY, ‘Sunday’, n.d., MBY: he had been investigating the family arms, as

603
 NOTES TO PAGES 397-403
AG wanted to give him a bookplate incorporating it. (In fact, this eventually awaited his
prize for “The Grey Rock’ in 1913.) However, a crest for Mary Yeates of Lifford had been
found, with a goat’s head and gates which recurred in family emblems. ‘He [James
Duncan] says the coronet means that at some time our ancestors held their land not direct
from the King but from some great lord. It is a very old coat of arms so we need not fear
to light upon an ancestor who paid honest money for it.’ He was also excited by the prospect
of quartering the Butler arms — as their ancestress was an heiress it was a ‘heraldic neces-
sity’. See Mem, 196, for a journal entry.
182. See WBY to AG, 20 Mar. 1908, Berg.
183. Ina letter of 6 Feb. 1909, telling her he wrote it on 3 Feb., Berg.
184. n.d., Berg.
185. Thirty or forty volumes by then, he thought. See also Warwick Gould, ‘A Crowded Theatre:
Yeats and Balzac’ in Jeffares, Yeats the European.
186. WBY to AG, 7 Mar. 1909; he dined with Dickinson on g Mar.
187. L, 525; Mem, 176, 244.
188. WBY to OHegarty, 23 Dec. 1908, Kansas.
189. ‘He would create a taste for reading & for reading the best literature & that is the one
thing that matters.’ (26 Jan. 1909, HRHRC).
190. To AG, 22 Mar. 1909, Berg.
I9I. AG to Quinn, 28 Mar. 1908, Berg.
192. See TS memo about his will in Gregory papers, Berg.
193. JMS himself emphasized WBY’s input in a letter to ECY, 24 Nov. 1908, Berg.
194. “Wednesday’, 24 Mar. 1909, Berg, and TB, 298.
195. Also used by Lionel Johnson in the conclusion to ‘The Dark Angel’. WBY would re-
employ it for the epigraph to JMS’s Poems and Translations. The original source is
Enneads, V1, 9, 11. In Taylor’s translation, “This, therefore, is the life of the Gods, and of
divine and happy men, a liberation from all terrene concerns, alife unaccompanied with
human pleasures, and a flight of the alone to the Alone.’
196. MS notes by SMY, HRHRC.
197. WBY to Farr, 25 Apr. 1909, HRHRC.
198. See below, Chapter 15, pp. 417-21. For the literary testament, see TS memo in Berg.
According to WBY to Joseph Hone, 3 Oct. 1910 (copy, HRHRC), Roberts tricked
Edward Stephens into agreeing to publish the Manchester Guardian articles.
199. Fragment, n.d., Berg.
200. Au, 520.

Chapter 15 : SEVERANCES
1909-I9I0
. PF, 345, 348.
- SMY to Quinn, 9 May1909, NYPL: ‘Aunt Augusta’ had rubbed them up the wrong way,
‘& Willy sees eye to eye with her when he is actually with her’.
. [28] Apr. 1909, Conal O’Riordan (Norreys Connell) correspondence, SIUC.
. 17 May 1905, Berg.
. To Quinn, 12 Mar. 1909, NYPL.
. ToJBY, 29 Apr. 1909, L, 528-9; to AG, late Aug. rgr1, Berg.
. WBY to Dunsany, 19 Sept. 1911, Berg.
. Mem, 210.
ON 8 May 1911, Arsenal, Paris.
.
HAN
©
FW

604
 NOTES TO PAGES 403-410
. New York Evening Sun, 2 Apr. 1909.
. See WBY to AG, reporting ECY, 1 June 1909, Berg.
. WBY to Felkin, 11 June 1909, and solicitors’ letters in Berg. This failed; Crowley pub-
lished the rituals in Equinox, and won in an appeal against an injunction launched by
MacGregor Mathers.
. Sinn Féin, 8 May 1909.
. ibid., 20 Feb. 1909.
. 4June 1909, NYPL.
. See WBY’s TS ‘Why the Abbey Theatre Remained Open’, 3 Feb. 1911, Berg.
. See letters of 19 and 20 June 1910, NLI MS 30,596. The plan was that she return the
subsidy and the cost of running the theatre, takinga ‘nominal sum’ for the buildings
and contents: ‘I want to treat them well and also to
avoid any misconception.’ (to ‘Mr
Whelan’, 19 June 1909, copied to WBY, 20 June 1909). Shaw was involved as a broker,
suggesting a new limited company.
. This correspondence is in Berg.
. Connell was already wearied by the unprofessional behaviour of the actors: see R. F. Peterson
and Gary Phillips, ‘W. B. Yeats and Norreys Connell’, Y4 2 (1983), 46ff. He advised WBY
to bring back the Fays.
. Berg.
. 8July 1909, Berg.
. Draft copy NLI MS 13,068.
aids NYPL:
. 21June 1909, ‘P.I.A.L. diary’, MBY. Through a misreading (and its placing in the MS)
this has often been attributed to the beginning of the year, but it is certainly dated June.
. To Rosa Butt, 16 Aug. 1908, Bodleian.
. To Rosa Butt, 24 July rg18, Bodleian.
. SMY toJBY, 26 May 1909, gives some of the background and mentions that Meyer sup-
ported WBY’s appointment.
. 5 May 1909, NLI MS 18,474.
. To Quinn, 5 May 1909, NYPL.
. To AG, 1 June 1909, Berg; to Grierson, 12 Oct. 1909, NLS; to Quinn, 5 May 1909,
INIVEIe
. The best account is Lucy McDiarmid, ‘Augusta Gregory, Bernard Shaw and the Shewing-
Up of Dublin Castle’, PMLA, 109, 1 (Jan. 1994).
. An important letter.
Will you tell Yeats ifhe is at Coole thatIgot at Griffiths [sic] over the Blanco Posnett [sic] perform-
ance. He did what was required this week but another correspondent had sent in an article with a
different point of view and Griffith’s comment is a blend of my advice & the other correspondent.
Anyhow he sets his face against any row in the theatre & that is what Yeats told me he wanted. I
could not get at Ryan of the Nation but anyhow I don’t think he has much influence in these mat-
ters &¢Sinn Feinn [sic] will do what is necessary. (postmarked 19 Aug. 1909, Berg).
33: Sinn Féin, 21 Aug. 1909.
34. Samhain, 1904.
35- 28 Aug. 1909.
36. ToJBY, 21 Aug. 1909, NLI MS 31,112.
37: Lady Dunsany’s diary, 20 Oct. 1910 (private collection) records Margaret Gregory’s view.
‘Lady G. stage managed Blanco Posnet entirely last year and made it the success it was.
Y. never saw it acted until the last dress rehearsal. Then, realising that all the English
and foreign critics had collected and that there was a stir, he asked her to let him take the
rehearsal, saying he wished the reporters to think he had stage managed it, and she is so
used to giving way to him that she agreed.’

605
 NOTES TO PAGES 410-418

. DanH. Laurence (ed.), Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters 1898-1910 (London, 1972), 860-61.
. The Times, 25 Aug. 1909.
. ToJBY, 21 (reporting dress rehearsal) and 26 Aug. 1909, NLI MS 31, 122.
. Farr to Quinn, n.d., NYPL.
. A guinea a performance for one-act plays; on three-act plays, 5 per cent of takings up to
£50, 7.5 per cent up to £100, 10 per cent thereafter.
. Irish Times, 23 Nov. 1910.
. Mem, 225-6.
. To AG, 7 Oct. 1909, Berg.
. To AG, 10 Oct. 1909, Berg. She collaborated on the new version, as a letter of 28 Nov.
1909 shows.
. Fairfield’, Botanic Road, near Dr Delany’s ‘Delville’, where Swift had been a frequent
visitor. Thom’ Directory describes it as ‘vacant’ in 1909, but the Gogarty family owned it
and let out rooms in it. SMY described it to JBY, 19 Oct. 1909, NLI MS 31,112: ‘There
is writing of his [Swift’s] on a pane of glass. Lady Gregory suggested to the landlady that
she would add to the value of the house if she got Willy to write on another pane. “I will’,
said Willy, “if she provides the diamond.”’
. SMY to JBY, 2 Nov. 1909, NLI MS 31,112. On the following Sunday they were at
Russell’s, where he and George Moore were ‘very friendly together’.
. ToJBY, 29 Nov. 1909, L, 540.
. 25 Oct. 1909, University of Delaware. (On 6 Mar. 1900 he went to Benson’s uncut Hamlet
with AG, perhaps the beginning of this obsession.)
. To JBY, 18 and 29 Jan. 1910, NLI MS 31,112.
. To Dickinson, 16 Jan. 1910, Berkeley.
. 17 Dec. 1909, Berg. WBY had canvassed the idea of an appeal two days before.
. See WBY to Horniman, 22 Jan. 1910, NLI MS 33,068.
. 18 Jan. 1910, 13 May 1910, NLI MS 31,112.
. TL copy fragment, AG to WBY [Jan. 1910], Berg.
. ‘Statement by L. G. toJ. Q.’, NYPL.
. ‘Friday’ [Feb.—Mar. rg10], NLI.
. 25 Nov. 1910, NYPL.
. To AG, 3 Sept. 1911, Berg: not an interpretation shared by many others. AG’s feelings
are shown by an undated letter from this period (Berg), where she stated that despite the
good audiences they were producing ‘too much Boyle & Co. I shall think every week lost
till we get on some verse . . . I think we shall have to pray for a slump to show that we
have kept to our ideas.’
. Enclosed with letter of 11 Feb. 1910, Berg.
- Who told Quinn he only saw WBY about once every six months, and then by chance:
21 Aug. 1910, NYPL.
. See Robert O’Driscoll, ‘Yeats on Personality: Three Unpublished Lectures’, YT, 4-59.
. ToJBY, 18 Jan. 1910, NLI MS 31,112. Pound lectured at the Polytechnic in Regent Street
on “The Spirit of Romance’ in 1909, and published a book of that title in IgIo.
. 23 Feb. 1910, L, 548-9.
. The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York, 1948), 115-16.
. O'Driscoll, “Yeats on Personality’, 58.
. Irish Nation, 12 Mar. 1910.
. Leader of5Mar. 1910.
. The gushing Masefield told him that JMS ‘thought of him almost as God’ (WBY to AG,
26 Apr. 1910, Berg). WBY was sceptical.

606
 NOTES TO PAGES 418-424
. To AG, 20 Mar. 1910: see Mem, 242-3, for drafts, and 229 for the original inspiration in
Sept. 1909.
. 1Apr. 1910, NLI MS 10,854.
. To Cornelius Weygandt, 25 Apr. 1910, A. Weygandt Collection; to AG, 22 Mar., 1 and
4 May 1910, Berg.
. Nowin Berg.
. See above, pp. 299-300.
. Mem, 154-5, 211.
. 5 May 1910, Berg.
. Mem, 178.
. See also Mem, 191-2, where he refers to women giving themselves to an opinion as to a
‘terrible stone doll’.
. To AG, 22 and 25 Sept. rgr0.
. WBY to Masefield, 12 July 1910, University of Vermont.
. Seeascorching letter from Maire Garvey, 15 Oct. 1910, NLIMS 8320, to ‘A cailin na rine’.
I suppose you heard of all this pother about Yeats’ Introduction — he has treated Roberts in what Ican
only call a scandalous manner. I don’t mind anything a man would do in fighting with another so
long as he confines himselftothe rules of the game — but to run round behind backs & do all he could
to injure the other man by trying to prejudice other people against him is nothing but meanness —
of course the outside people being mostly sensible merely laughed. Yeats can go round the world
& enjoy himself without troubling to do the work wh. he now says was his to do & when he has put
other people to expense by his carelessness he can try to get out of it by bluff & impertinence. I know
one thing that if Roberts depended on him or anyone under his influence for help in his work he’d
be in a bad way — However Yeats’s spite may embitter some of his own drink one of these days &
then we'll hear a grumble.

83. Academy, Dec. 1910.

84. 25 Apr. 1910, Berg.
85. Later the scene of D-Day landings, and renamed Omaha Beach.
86. 6 Jun. 1910, Berg. Also an important letter of 22 May 1910, giving AG’s version: ‘I have
never treated her as an equal without regretting it.’
87. The Times, 14 June 1910. WBY made this point in his TS ‘Why the Abbey Theatre
Remained Open’, dated 3 Feb. 1911, Berg. Also see drafts of 1909 Samhain in Berg.
88. It turned out he objected to Blanco, not the Playboy. AG’s solicitor, David Moore, finally
took over the lease.
89. To AG, 21 Sept. 1910, Berg.
go. See WBY to Moore, draft, 27 Sept. 1910, with AG’s MS additions, dated 2 Oct. 1910, Berg.
gl. As reported in the Irish Times, 22 Nov. 1910.
92. To AG, 16 Feb. 1911. The final arbitration, dated 29 Apr. 1911, is in Berg; the decision was
that Horniman was clearly not justified in witholding the subsidy.
93- ‘Thursday’, n.d., draft in NLI MS 30,908. AG, still furious at Horniman’s accusations
of fraudulence, opposed the idea of arbitration (to WBY, 7 Jan. 1911, Berg).
94. Diary, 1 Dec. 1910.
95- 30 Oct. 1910, NLI MS 31,112. Sara Allgood was a chief offender, deeply jealous of her sis-
ter and constantly threatening to leave. Since she was a key actress for the Playboy, this
endangered the Company’s most precious possession.
96. For annual income (£185. 3s. 9d. and £181. 15s. 4d.) see MBY A27; for royalties NLI 30,654.
97- 4 Feb. 1910.
98. For James, Bennett, Wells, see Letters: The Journal ofthe Royal Society ofLiterature, 6 (Sum-
mer 1995); for the younger generation, Dorothy Shakespear to Ezra Pound, 29 Nov. 1913,
in Pound and Litz, Pound and Shakespear Letters, 280.

607
 NOTES TO PAGES 425-431
99. ‘Tuesday’, Berg.
100. See WBY to AG, 18 Apr. 1910.
IOI. He had already met Lady Ottoline Morrell on 9 May 1909 at a London tea-party with
AG: see her diary, Berg.
102. To AG, 17 Dec. 1905. He was using, ironically, the metaphor Horniman employed to express
her apolitical stance six years before: ‘If the French were to land at the west of Ireland it
would make no difference to me except that I would buy two evening papers instead of
one.’ It went back to a joke made by Gill in Nov. 1898, retailed in Aw, 421.
103. Fragment [from Coole], Berg.
104. Draft, 29 July 1910, Berg.
105. 22 July 1910, Berg.
106. Original in Berg; also see Mem, 289-90.
107. WBY first attended an ‘At Home’ of Gosse’s on 8 Dec. 1895; Gosse recorded eighteen
subsequent visits to receptions, lunches and dinners. Book of Gosse, Cambridge University
Library: my thanks to Adrian Frazier. There may well have been more. The loan is
recorded in WBY’s 1899 diary.
108. 13 Aug. 1910, Berg.
109. Letters in Berg. A (third) draft of the petition indicates how carefully AG was treading:
We wish to draw the attention of HM’s Government to the claims of Mr W. B. Yeats to a pension
from the Civil List.
Mr Yeats is everywhere acknowledged as being in the first rank of living poets. His prose writ-
ings, both critical and imaginative, are also in the first rank, as is his dramatic work, in verse & prose.
He was chosen as one of the original members of the Academy Committee.
He was the founder and is the managing director of the National Theatre Society of Ireland
which is perhaps the most intellectual and vigorous of the repertory theatres of the British Isles,
and which has been publicly recognised by the Chief Commissioner of Education in Ireland as a
most valuable educational influence.
Mr Yeats has for many years given lectures on literature in young men’s societies in Ireland
without any payment, nor has he taken payment for his plays performed by the Abbey Theatre
Company, or for his constant and personal work there, which has taken up a great deal of the time
and energy he might otherwise have put into his creative and more financially profitable work.

IIo. Mem, 252.

III. ibid., 256-8.
II2. MBY. WBY to Birrell, 9 Aug. [1910], and Gosse to WBY, 27
July, are in the University
Library, Liverpool.
113. [P24] Aug. 1910 and [?end of Dec.] 1909, Berg.
II4. Quinn to Russell, 5 Mar. rg11, 2 June 1911, and Russell to Quinn, 20 Mar. 1911, NYPL.
115.Leader, 25 Nov. 1911: one of many such comments.
116, PF, 378. The Fellows opposed were the famously conservative Thomas Thompson Gray
and the equally ferocious George Lambert Cathcart, both devoted to resisting change
in any manifestation.
117. 7 Sept. 1910, Berg.
118. AG to WBY, ‘Tuesday’, n.d., Berg.
11g. To JBY, 5 Dec. 1910, NLI MS 31,112. On 6 Mar. 1911 WBY retailed this conversation to
Cockerell; it obviously went the rounds.
120. Allen Upward, Some Personalities (London, 1921), 26, records Pound’s remark.
121. Letters of 2 and 1 Oct. rgit.
122. To Sydney Cockerell, 6 Mar. 1911, 22 Sept. 1910, L, 556, 550—St.
123. To AG, 11 Nov., 16 and 19 Dec. 1910, Berg.
124. SMY’s notes for Joseph Hone, HRHRC.

608
 NOTES TO PAGES 432-436
125. Jack’s judgement and, in the end, unfair: WBY
to AG, 28 Oct. 1910. For another view
ofJackson, see FS, 397; n. 70. However, from this time
the Leader attacked the firm for
not employing Catholics, using this as a stick to beat WBY.
See a sketch of 9 Dec. 1911,
where WBY speaks of the Abbey in the guise (inevit
ably) of a policeman. ‘Now the
Pollexfens of Sligo showed a woeful want of Art in exclud
ing Popery from their official
cast, and by doing so gave the whole show away. I did
the thing differently, and that is
where the divine afflatus comes in. Pollexfen adopted
the crude and clumsy principle of
no Papists need apply, but in my establishment it was—
none but Papists need apply, espe-
cially Papists of very bad characters. Now, of course,
we are both found out; but, oh, what
a differe
nce was in the Art.’
126. To AG, Jan. rorz, Berg.
127. To SMY, from Coole, n.d., Boston College.
128, To AG, 28 Jan. ro11, Berg.
129. See PF, 379; Ellmann, M & M, 210-11.
130. 15 Sept. rgr1.

Chapter 16 : TRUE AND Fatse IRELANDS

IQIO~I9I1
Epigraph: Inter-Ocean, 2 Mar. IQI4.
I. ‘But then, WBY added, ‘Mrs Emery
is not of a domestic temperament.’ To AG, Oct.
1910, Berg.
WBY to AG, 21 Jan. 1911, Berg, and to Dickinson, 28 Jan. 1911,
Berkeley.
WBY to AG, 14 Nov. 1910, Berg.
Astrological notebook, MBY.
Go To Charles Rowley, 14 Jan. rg11, SIUC. It is a vision of death
wise aboard a theatrical ship,
hailed by a crowd on the shore, and may owe something to a dream of
SMY’s the night
_ JMS died: see Mem, 200.
Sphere, 14 Jan. 1911; Daily News, 23 Jan. IQII.
Drafted in May 1910; see Mem, 246. Originally ‘Raymond Lully and his
wife Pernella’,
2D
‘A Drinking Song’ is a free translation of Goldoni’s ‘Vive Bacco, e Vive Amore’
from La
Locandiera, for AG’s adaptation Mirandolina. ‘The Mask’ was in The Player
Queen. See
Mem, 258, 260.
20 Mar. 1911, NYPL.
Io. See Lady Dunsany’s diary, 27 Jan. 1911, private collection. “He read it to
her a year ago
and she loved it and wrote to me some days later mentioning that “the play
of slaves and
kings is much in my mind”, It was, for, leaving her harmless, character
istic and some-
times really funny Irish comedies, she suddenly wrote The Deliverer with
an Oriental
background, slaves, an overseer and even ending in the last act with a remark
about “the
King’s cats” — Eddie’s ending with “the King’s dog”.’ She believed that AG and
WBY
tried to short-circuit the London production of Argimenes in June.
II. WBY to AG [late Jan. 1911], postscript, Berg.
ph 28 Jan., 27 Feb. 1911, Berg.
ey: Lady Dunsany’s diary, 15 June 1910, private collection.
14. For these reflections, see letters to AG, 6, 25 and 13 Mar. 1911, Berg.
15. To Lister, 23 Mar. 1911, Kansas.
16. 19 Mar. 1911, Harvard.
op 1 Jan. 1911; see Harwood, Shakespear and Yeats, 136, for a reading which
connects this
stanza to Shakespear. It is true that the MS draft shows him cancelling lines which

609
 NOTES TO PAGES 436-443
would identify the first ‘friend’ as Shakespear (‘<Though we would part in tears> <It
parted us in>’ and the second friend as AG (‘<taught> <shown> me how to live’); he may
have wanted to introduce some ambivalence. But I think the order of women in the poem
is Shakespear, AG, MG: the reference to ‘fifteen years’ (written at the end of 1910) and
‘heart and delighted heart’ seems clearly to invoke Shakespear (their love-affair began
in 1895), and the change of ‘youth’s bitter burden’ to ‘youth’s dreamy load’ may still refer
to the way AG’s influence concentrated his mind and helped him release his frustrations
in work. Also see Deirdre Toomey in YA 6 (1988), 224-5.
18.To AG, 22Jan. 1911, Berg.
19. George Yeats thought there had been a second affair, but dated it as 1903, which is
unlikely; Hone also thought so. The queries in the automatic script preserved after
WBY’s marriage in 1917, and the casting of horoscopes, suggest that he and Shakespear
were close in 1910, which would relate interestingly to the recent resolution of his rela-
tionship with MG. But all this must remain speculative.
20. The Lees, according to Nelly, were county gentry who ‘followed strange gods’ in reli-
gious matters and had a tendency to be spendthrift, but every now and then ‘saved the
ship’ by throwing up a commercial genius; George’s great-uncle Harold made money on
early railways, for instance. On the Woodmass side, Nelly’s grandfather married the eighth
daughter of the second Baron Erskine (of the 1806 re-creation) who was descended from
the Earls of Buchan. See her letter to WBY, 29 Oct., n.y., MBY.
21. In Nov. rg11, staying with the Tuckers at Margate, WBY wrote to AG: ‘She was a Mrs
Hyde-Lees whom I have known vaguely for years.’ (Berg).
22. Harold was born on 24 Nov. 1890 at Brighton. According to George’s birth certificate,
she was born on 17 Oct. 1892 at Fleet, Hants, but her horoscope book (in MBY) records
her birth date as 8.25 a.m. on 16 Oct.
23. To Pound, 14 Sept. 1911, Pound and Litz, Pound and Shakespear Letters, 58.
24. These qualities are well caught in Curtis Bradford, ‘George Yeats: Poet’s Wife’, Sewanee
Review, 77, 3 (July—Sept. 1969), 385-404. Also see Grace Jaffé, YA 5 (1987), 139-53; Anne
Saddlemyer, ‘Georgie Yeats: More than a Poet’s Wife’, Jeffares, Yeats the European,
191-200.
25. Bergson’s Presidential Address for 1g11 is copied out on the versos of her brother’s French
vocabulary book, MBY.
26. To Gordon Bottomley, 8 Jan. rgro.
27. Richard Ellmann, Eminent Domain: Yeats among Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot and Auden
(Oxford, 1967), 66-7.
28. Quoted in Harwood, Shakespear and Yeats, 142, 147.
29. To JBY, 9 May 1911, Boston.
30. To Lister, 15 Aug. 1911, Buffalo; it was printed as an appendix.
31. Postmarked 30 May 1911, Berg. See VP/, 57-9. Sturge Moore said that ‘the unique
cadence of this lyric so perfectly sustains the meaning of these forty-five words, which
convey so central an epitome of life in such a novel perspective, that even today [late
19208—early 1930s] tears of admiration moisten my eyes as I read’ (‘Do We or Do We Not
Know It?’, YA 4, 1986, 147).
Bz. Interestingly, Eva Fowler knew Leoni, and WBY worked on The Countess Cathleen at Daisy
Meadow inJune. Leoni was also recommended by WBY’s musical typist, Miss Anderson.
33. Pall Mall Gazette, 9 June 1911.
34. ‘and I have been full of pride ever since’: to Agnes Tobin, 30 July 1911, private collection.
35: To AG, 26 Aug. 1911, Berg.
36. 17 July 1911, Boston.
37- HeAG, 5 Sept. 1911, Berg; Redmond himself was bringing pressure to bear on them through
ailey.

610
 NOTES TO PAGES 443-450
38.To AG, 28 May ro11.
39-To WBY, 7 Sept. [1911], Berg. Worried that WBY wanted to widen their range to
Elizabethan work, she reminded him that they were not trying to out-do Tree in
Shakespearean drama. ‘I thought we had decided, or you had consented, that your verse
plays should be our object outside folk drama.’
40. To AG, 28 Apr. 1911, Berg. The idea had long been mooted; see AG to WBY, ‘Sunday
22’, probably Dec. 1907, Berg. This shows Lieber was already under consideration; later
she decided such a venture would be impossible without the Fays.
4l. Cathleen Nesbitt, 4 Little Love and Good Company (London, 1975), 52, 56.
42. Irish Times, 9 Sept. 1911.
43. To Lister, 28 July 1911, Harvard.
44. Montrose J. Moses in J & R, i, 126.
45. See Jessie D. Rittenhouse [Secretary of the Poetry Society], My House ofLife: An
Autobiography (Boston and New York, 1934), 231-2.
46. Strand, ‘American Lecture Tours’, 91.
47- ibid., 93.
48. Quoted in Strand, ‘American Lecture Tours’, ror. See also the Boston Sunday Post inter-
view, I & R, i, 73-5.
49. See Harper's Weekly, 11 Nov. 1911, and UP, ii, 397-401. Strand quotes the Boston Evening
Transcript and the Harvard Crimson.
50. Otherwise Mrs Minnie Meserve Sproule; not Mrs Crandon, as asserted by Hone. See
Strand, ‘American Lecture Tours’, 104.
it. Quoted in Strand, ‘American Lecture Tours’, 107.
52. Quoted in ibid., 109.
53: Quoted in ibid., 115. However, in a later New York interview he criticized Goldsmith for
emigrating and writing for an English market.
54- Quoted in ibid., 120.
55: Quoted in ibid., 125.
56. WBY was at a reception in Roxbury on the 15th. The play had in fact been presented
once already in the USA, at Chicago the previous May; see Himber, Letters of Quinn to
Yeats, 135.
57: 12 Nov. 1911, Berg.
58. 27 Nov. 1911.
59: Friday 13th [?Dec., 1912], Berg: she was writing Our Irish Theatre at the time.
60. She wrote to WBY on Christmas Day from the Algonquin Hotel:

One or two evenings ago J said to Quinn “Will you ever be quite friends with Yeats again?’ He said
‘I don't know, I don’t think about it, I feel no bitterness towards him.’ I said ‘I know you cannot or
you cd not write so nicely of him as you do. It is not a thing I want to talk about, but Yeats said the
other day “It is a strange thing that Quinn who knows me so well and I have lived with so much
should think me capable of what he does.” He said ‘When women get mixed up with things there
are always quarrels’ and changed the topic. I feel sure it is all right and that when you meet him again
you can just talk as if nothing had happened. (Berg).
61. “Tuesday 17’ [Dec. 1911], Berg.
62. To WBY, n.d., Berg.
63. To WBY, ‘Saturday’, n.d., Berg.
64. Quoted in Strand, ‘American Lecture Tours’, 127.
65. To AG, 12 Nov. 1911. Shaw also encouraged this line: see Dan H. Laurence and Nicholas
Grene, Shaw, Lady Gregory and the Abbey: A Correspondence and a Record (Gerrards Cross,
1993), 67-8.
66. 26 May 1911, Berg.

611
 NOTES TO PAGES 451-456
To WBY, n.d., Berg.
. To Quinn, 7 Dec. 1911, NYPL.
. ToAG, 18 Nov. 1911, Berg.
12 Nov. 1911, Berg.
. 12Nov. 1911, NLI MS 31,112. ‘Uncle Pat’ was great-uncle Patrick Corbet, son of William
Corbet and Grace Armstrong; born in 1793, he served in the Burmese war, led a siege at
Rangoon, became Governor of Penang, and died in 1840. “The general’ was John
Armstrong (FRS 1723), son of Robert Armstrong and Lydia Harward, born in 1674,
ADC to Marlborough at Malplaquet and Oudenarde, made Chief Engineer in 1714. He
died in 1742, and was buried within the churchyard of the Tower of London.

Chaptert7 : GHOSTS
IQII-1913
Epigraph: Reading.
I. For a list of AG’s plays, see WBY to AG, 1 Jan. 1912, Berg. The ‘second company’ was
paid, according to WBY, out of a special fund given to himselfand AG ‘to use as we please
for the furtherance of the dramatic movement in Ireland’ (to A. D. Wilson, 29 Apr. 1914,
Berg); he does not say where this originated. For Monck in America, and his mental in-
stability, see AG to WBY [Feb. 1913], Berg.
. To AG, 2 Jan. 1912, Berg.
. Same to same, 11 Feb. 1912, Berg.
. 14 Apr. 1912, private collection; probably The White Cockade and the revised Hour-Glass.
. a1Jan. 1912, Berg.
. See Irish Times, 20 Jan. 1912.
wv
fw
Dn
N - McCartan was an IRB member who would become much involved with revolutionary
politics in the USA from 1917, and later still would organize a Testimonial Committee
for WBY: see Yeats and Patrick McCartan:AFenian Friendship. Letters with a Commentary
byJohn Unterecker and an Address on Yeats the Fenian by Patrick McCartan (Dolmen Press
Yeats Centenary Papers, No. X, Dublin, 1965).
. WBY to AG, 11 Jan. 1912, Berg.
. DrTom Steele suggests that this attack may have come from Pound, but believes the author
is more likely Beatrice Hastings (letter to RFF, 2 Oct. 1995).
. To AG, 9 Apr. 1912, Berg. His remark to Stephens is in a letter of 19 May; his defence of
WBY was in the New Age on 9 May, following the attack on 2 May. A further attack
appeared on 16 May.
II See AG to Hyde, 7 Dec. 1911: ‘Oh Craoibhin what are these wounds, with which we are
wounded in the house of our friends? . . . We are fighting your battle ifyou did but know
it, and the battle of all who want to live and breathe.’ Hyde cravenly blamed the pres-
sure put on him by Gaelic League fundraisers in the USA. See G. W. Dunleavy, ‘The
Pattern of Three Threads: The Hyde-Gregory Friendship’ in Ann Saddlemyer and
Colin Smythe (eds.), Lady Gregory Fifty Years After (Gerrards Cross, 1987), 140-1.
Oy. Irish Review, Dec. 1912 and Jan. 1913; for Boyd’s subsequent attack, see ibid., Feb. 1913.
13. He did receive some help from Dr Rynd of the Norwich Cathedral Chapter: for this and
other comments, see WBY to AG, 7 Jan. 1912, Berg. For a critique, see Bernard M. W.
Knox (trans.), Oedipus the King (New York, 1959), vii.
Yeats, for reasons he did not see fit to explain, cut the play in the same highhanded way he edited
Wilde's Ballad ofReading Gaol (“My work gave me that privilege’); what the result is in the case of
Wilde I leave others to judge, but in the case of Sophocles it is close to disastrous. In the last scene
of the play, for example, he has omitted ninety of the 226 lines Sophocles wrote, and he has moved

612
 NOTES TO PAGES 456-462
part of speeches as much as a hundred lines away from their true position, not to mention the fact
that at one point he has taken two lines from Oedipus, given them to the chorus, and slapped them
into the middle of one of Oedipus’s long speeches at a point where an interruption destroys the power
of the speech. As if this were not enough, he has, in an earlier scene, omitted Jocasta’s famous lines
on chance, without which the play loses a great deal of its meaning.
David R. Clark and James B. McGuire agree that WBY sacrifices much irony and sub-
tlety: see The Writingof‘Sophocles’ King Oedipus’: Manuscripts of W. B. Yeats, transcribed,
edited and witha commentary by David R. Clark and James B. McGuire (Philadelphia,
the American Philosophical Society, 1989).
14. To AG [18 Jan. 1912], L, 565.
15. To Stephens, 19 May 1912, private collection.
16. See Karen Dorn, ‘Dialogue into Movement: W. B. Yeats’s Theatre Collaboration with
Gordon Craig’, YT, 109-36.
17s 23 May 1912, Arsenal, Paris.
18. See James Flannery, ‘W. B. Yeats, Gordon Craig and the Visual Arts of the Theatre’,
YT, 103-4, for its initial performance.
19. Ellmann, Letters ofJames Joyce. Volume 2, 298. Davray was simultaneously vetting French
translations for him.
20. 12 July 1912, University of Vermont.

21. The royalty figure (£36. 4s. 9d.) probably included something from profits on antholo-
gies, etc.; for detailed accounts from Fisher Unwin, see NLI MS 30,564. Plays brought
in very little: LHD, £4. tos. 7d. in 1912-13, CC, £4. 75. 2d. In 1912 Poems made £64. 2s. od.
For redecoration, see WBY to AG, 7 Apr. 1912, Berg: ‘my rooms look very nice with their
new green carpet & the blue green corduroy curtains. Mrs Old says “I wish her ladyship
could see it.”’
By. 6 Oct. 1911.
23. He heard this from Mair of the Manchester Guardian, Molly Allgood’s husband, in May
1912. Other candidates included Dunraven, Lord Dudley, Horace Plunkett and ‘Lord
O'Donnell’ (recte MacDonnell). This is an interestingly early anticipation of the Free State
Senate established in 1922.
24. Mar. ro11.
25. 2 Jan. 1912, Berg. On 6 Jan. he commended Stephen Gwynn for condemning the new
papal decree.
26. Irish Times, 11 Apr. 1912. ‘It seems to us absurd to suppose that a difference in religious
belief involves conflicting interests between ourselves and our fellow-countrymen.
Should, however, any such conflicting interest develop, we are confident in our ability
to give due prominence and effect to our views under an Irish parliament. Having enjoyed
in a predominantly Catholic community the fullest tolerance and friendly relationship
with the majority of our countrymen, we feel bound in honour in the present crisis to
assert our confidence in the continuance and future development of such relationships.’
Dye To Gosse, 25 Feb. 1912, Leeds.
28. 30 Nov. 1912, HRHRC. ‘Chapel doors in America’ refers to an American Jesuit, Father
Kenny, who had led attacks on the Irish players in 1911; the Leader relayed his onslaughts
for an Irish readership. WBY replied to him in FY, 21 Nov. rgtt.
29. 24 Jan. 1913, TS of speech, NLI 30,095.
30. 24 Jan. 1913, Northwestern.
3I. See her interview in New York, 3 Dec. rg11. ‘When did the new Irish literary movement
begin? The moment Parnell died. That moment, according to Lady Gregory, was the
sharply defined begining ofa new era for Ireland. Usually it is rather hard to tell the exact
moment when a movement in art or politics had its origin, but this is an exception.’
E. H. Mikhail, Lady Gregory: Interviews and Recollections (London, 1977), 54.

613
 NOTES TO PAGES 462-465

g2e Draft, NLI 30,272.

33: An envelope in MBY records seances with Mrs Feilding, 3 May 1909, Mrs Mitchell,
17 and 24 May 1909 (at the Cousins’ house in Sandymount). A record of a seance dated
14 Aug. 1900 in MBY details an historically verifiable materialization (Joseph Damer,
a Cromwellian diplomat); but it is unclear if WBY attended (he was based in Coole at
this time). The circumstantial details are checked in a long TS dated Sept. 1900.
34. Quoted in Ruth Brandon, The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth
and Twentieth Centuries (London, 1983), 91. cf. William Volckman, who grabbed ‘Katie
King’, a spirit produced by Florence Cook, as she danced around the room in veils,
shouting, ‘I feel stays.’
35: Andrew Lang had argued for psychic folklore in the 1890s; he and Edward Clodd debated
the matter in the Folk Lore Society and its journal (March—Sept. 1895). Warwick Gould
points out that Lang’s edition of Robert Kirk’s The Secret Commonwealth ofElves, Fauns
and Fairies (London, 1893) anticipates the methods of ‘Swedenborg, Mediums, and the
Desolate Places’. WBY knew both Lang and Clodd.
36. cf. James Olney, The Rhizome and the Flower (Berkeley, 1980). See H. W. Nevinson, Last
Changes, Last Chances (London, 1928), recording a conversation with WBY on 30 Oct.
1916. ‘He talked of Freud and Jung and the subconscious self, applying the doctrine to
art. He said the great thing is to reduce the conscious self to humility, as by the imita-
tion of some ancient master, so leaving the Unconscious Self free to work.’ There is a note
of Freud’s and Jung’s works with titles in German and the name of M. D. Eder, their future
translator, in WBY’s 1913 notebook, but in another hand. See Chapter 17, n. 157, below.
37- See Journal ofthe Society for Psychical Research, xiv (July 1910), for along account of Ernest
Jones’s pioneering essay on Freud, and xxv (Nov. 1912), for Freud’s own ‘Note on the
Unconscious in Psychoanalysis’. For long-standing theories of the unconscious, see
Erich von Hartmann, Philosophy ofthe Unconscious (1868), a bestseller of its day, trans-
lated into English in 1884; and L. L. Whyte, The Unconscious before Freud (London, 1978).
38. See below, pp. 525-6. Theodor Flournoy, whom WBY read, discussed Freud’s theory of
dreams as disguised realizations of suppressed wishes, citing Die Traumdeutung (1900): see
Hereward Carrington (trans.), Spiritism and Psychology (1911), 86. Myers, in Human Per-
sonality and Its Survival ofBodily Death (1903), redefined the subconscious as the ‘sub-
liminal’, and devoted much discussion to personality and the self. The work of Hyslop closest to
WBY’s interests was Psychical Research and Survival (London, 1913): see especially 39 and 45.
. There is an odd prediction here of ‘In dreams begins responsibility’. See Irish Times,
13 Jan. 1912.
. 26 Jan. 1912, Berg.
. 31 Jan. 1912, Berg. The reference here is to the Cambridge Platonist Henry More, but
the image comes originally from the 5th-6th C. ap Alexandrine John Philoponus’ De
Aeternitate Mundi: see Peter Kuch, ‘“Laying the Ghosts”: W. B. Yeats’s Lecture on
Ghosts and Dreams’, YA 5 (1987), 119, 135.
42. This was Wriedt’s second visit. In 1911 she had been invited by ‘Julia’s Bureau’, then in
its final phase, but still providing detailed procedures for opening up communications
with the dead; forms, records and stenographers were laid on. Mrs Wriedt charged a dol-
lar per person and specialized in luminous forms, voices from a trumpet and ‘apported’
flowers, magically conveyed to the hands of the participants. See N. Fodor, Encyclopaedia
ofPsychic Science (London, 1933) for a long entry.
43. Harper’s and WBY’s accounts were preserved in an occult notebook, MBY, and in
Curtis Bradford’s transcription, NLI 30,499; WBY’s subsequent long essay, and the
antecedent communications, are discussed in Steve L. Adams and George Mills Harper
(eds.), “The Manuscript of Leo Africanus’, YA r (1982), 3-47. There is an entry on Leo
in the contemporary edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (xxiv, 453) as well as Chambers’s
Biographical Dictionary.

614
 NOTES TO PAGES 465-470
44. A French edition of Leo’s Description de l'Afrique was published from 1894 to 1896. The
English translation by John Pory, ‘A Geographical Historie of Africa’ (1600), was edited
by Robert Brown and E. Denison Ross for the Hakluyt Societyin1896 and subsequently
found by WBY (who, however, preferred to refer to the 1600 version). Accounts like Leo's
lie behind surveys such as Andrew Lang’s Myth, Ritual and Religion and E. B. Tylor’s
Primitive Culture, not to mention R. W. Felkin’s article on Africa in Proc. Royal Soc. of
Edinburgh, xiii, and his Uganda and the Egyptian Sudan (1882). Pory was widely cir-
culated; Leo also turns up in the introduction to Ben Jonson's Masque ofBlackness (1605),
which WBY may well have read, and he was much used by Olfert Dapper for his
Description de l'Afrique (Amsterdam, 1686), a major source for the final version of Frazer’s
Golden Bough (1911-15).
45. See above, p. 114. There is also an echo of the translation of Verhaeren’s ‘Les Moines’,
which WBY would have read in the Irish Review of May 1912. The ‘moine epique’ close-
ly resembles WBY’s version of Leo: he comes out of the desert, familiar with lions, into
the Roman world. ‘One has seen him walk along by the sounding deep .. .’
- Ellen Anker asked him some simple questions in Italian, which for WBY seemed proof
positive (notebook, MBY).
- Williams, who lived near Woburn Buildings, had been exposed as a cheat in 1878: he reg-
ularly conjured up John King the Pirate, but a search revealed the piratical beard in his
pocket.
. cf. the references to ‘shrieking’ during love-making in ‘A Man Young and Old’.
. MBY. Harwood discusses this record in Shakespear and Yeats, 137-8, but without relat-
ing the violets to their origin at the Leo seance.
. It was also probably influenced by W. S. Landor’s Imaginary Conversations, a fashion-
able book at this time.
. MBY; see Adams and Harper, ‘The Manuscript of Leo Africanus’.
. When told by ‘Leo’ to sit up straight in his chair, for instance, he believed that this could
not be an observation of Mrs Wriedt’s own, since the lights were turned out. On a sum-
mer evening at 6.30 p.m., this is hardly convincing — except for someone as myopic as
WBY.
. To Edwin Ellis, n.d., but probably 2 Aug. 1912, Reading.
. To AG, 8 Aug. 1912, Major Gregory Collection. The poem was eventually published in
the Quest, a spiritualist magazine.
. I assume that this is the lyric of twenty-one lines mentioned in a letter of 13 Aug. to
AG, Berg: and the poem which Cousins heard him intoning on 15 Aug., when he told
MG be had finished it. The visit is described in J. H. and M. Cousins, We Two Together
(Madras, 1950), 158-62.
. 8 Sept. 1912, Reading.
. To AG, 16 Oct. 1912, Berg: this was Elizabeth Radcliffe. See below, pp. 487-8.
. MBY. There was a great deal more about Parnell, with the usual description of his ‘burn-
ing eyes’ and circumstantial details about Pigott. Peters had evidently read Barry O’Brien.
. cf. ‘Parnell’s Funeral’: ‘Their school a crowd, his master solitude’.
. To Ford Madox Ford, 14 Nov. 1912, Berg: it could have been “The Two Kings’. Neither
is ‘120 lines’ but this was presumably a first draft.
. 14 Nov. 1912, Bodleian.
. See All the Year Round, 5 Apr. 1842, 80; he died in 1846.
. North American Review, cxcvii (1913); Fortnightly, xciii (1913).
. See The Times, 13 July 1912.
. n.d., but July 1912, Sturge Moore MSS, University of London.
. ibid.
. Tagore to WBY, 13 May 1913, HRHRC.

615
 NOTES TO PAGES 471-473
68. n.d., Harvard.
69. To Sidney Cox, 2 May 1913; L. Thomson (ed.), Selected Letters ofRobert Frost (New York,
1964), 72. Later Frost would decide that WBY missed greatness through affectation. WBY
himself had seen Swinburne, not Kipling, as the monarch to dethrone; on 12 Apr. 1909,
the day after Swinburne’s death, he said to SMY, ‘Now I am king of the cats.’ This is
a reference to an Irish folktale where an old couple talk before their fire of the death of
a famous cat and his burial — whereat their own cat leaps up, shouts, ‘I’m king of the
cats now, and vanishes up the chimney. It is, therefore, a more ironic remark than it may
seem.
70. Sturge Moore to his wife, 14 Oct. 1912, University of London: ‘in the matter of recita-
tion etc. we seem to agree perfectly. He doesn’t like Miss Farr at all, & can’t understand
Yeats recommending her.’
7h See same to same, loc. cit., and WBY to AG, 14 Nov. 1913, Berg: ‘I am delighted at Tagore
getting the Nobel Prize. It is a blow at Gosse, which amuses me.’
72. Quoted in Longenbach, Stone Cottage, 25.
73: WBY to Macmillan & Co., 19 Apr. 1914, British Library. But Tagore did not listen. ‘When
Mr Tagore was in England both I & Sturge Moore urged upon him a considerable lapse
of time between the publication of his books here as we thought that many books soon
after each other (though it would mean a larger temporary sale) would cause a reaction
and be bad for his reputation in the end. It has been this understanding which has made
me hold back the new volume of which I have the MSS.’
. See the amended volume of The Crescent Moon in Rothenstein MSS, Harvard.
. 7 Sept. [1912], but probably 17 Sept., Harvard.
. To Rothenstein, ro Aug. 1912, Harvard.
. To his wife, 24-5 Nov. 1912, University of London. For all his grumbling he designed the
cover of The Crescent Moon and accepted its dedication to himself.
. Ina speech in Dublin, 23 Mar. 1913 (see below, p. 483) and in a letter to Rothenstein, 1
Dec. 1912, Harvard.
. The article appeared in Prakashi, and was translated in the American Review ofReviews,
49 (Jan.—June 1914).
. See Sturge Moore to wife, 28 July 1913, late July 1913, University of London. Also 1 Aug.
1913: ‘He is rather frightened about Yeats & my corrections. They are going over them
together now. I shall be very curious to know how Tagore manages. It will require great
tact. It really is not at all my fault if Yeats is vexed because I never even suggested doing
anything till I was asked, but I may get into hot water with Yeats all the same if Tagore
is a little cowardly.’ Also see M. M. Lago (ed.), Imperfect Encounter: Letters of William
Rothenstein and Rabindranath Tagore 1911-1941 (Cambridge, Mass., 1972).
81. See WBY to Rothenstein, 19 Aug. 1912, Harvard. In 1933 Sturge Moore described
meet-
ing Iseult at WBY’s, ‘very lovely to look at and quite nice’, though her real relationship
to MG was not to be mentioned. Pound was there too. By Sept. 1914 Iseult had indeed
collaborated with Tagore’s nephew Devabrata Mukherjee in translating The Gardener into
French, and WBY wrote to Tagore on 12 Sept. 1914, suggesting delicately that they be
given publication rights; however, the collaboration foundered when Mukherjee fell in
love with Iseult (G—-Y L, 339-50).
82. Reported in Irish Times and FJ, 24 Mar. 1913; see below, p- 483.
83. This was to ignore the important essay ‘The Way of Wisdom (later ‘The Pathway’), writ-
ten in 1900; see above, p. 552, n. 85.
84. Quoted in Longenbach, Stone Cottage, 26.
85. 23 Apr. [1913], Harvard.
86. Tagore to Rothenstein, 4 Sept. 1915, Harvard; Lago, Imperfect Encounter, 195.
87. To his wife, 25 Nov. 1912, University of London.

616
 NOTES TO PAGES 474-481
88. ee Carpenter,A Serious Character: The Life ofEzra Pound (London, 1988), 186-7,
196ff.
89. Ellmann, Eminent Domain, 62.
go. Longenbach, Stone Cottage, 81.
gl. Joy Grant, Harold Monro and the Poetry Bookshop (London, 1962), quoting a 1959
broad-
cast by Arundel del Re.
92. ‘Last night I dreamed that I was paying devoted but anxious & rather distant attention
to an entire stranger — my dread being that she might be on the edge of that infirmity
which we spoke of & my fear, which you attributed to the vanity of man. Then just as I
discovered that she was not at all liable to it I awoke, and to my irreperable loss.” ( [Sept.
1912], Huntingdon).
93- WBY to AG, 21 April [1914], Berg.
94. 14 Nov. 1912, Harvard.
95: For ‘high-hatting’, and Pound’s scholarship, see Carpenter,ASerious Character, AO.
gl.
96. Patricia Hutchins, ‘Yeats and Pound in England’, Texas Quarterly, 4, 3 (Autumn 1961),
214.
97- On 15 Aug. Monroe had written to WBY reminding him they had met in Chicago and
asking for poems.
98. For details see Ellmann, Eminent Domain, 64-5. The TS of the poems at Chicago
University preserves Pound’s emendations.
99. The imbroglio is outlined in the letter to Rothenstein quoted above — as an explanation
why Pound was being so zealous in the Tagore affair.
Ioo. 3 Jan. 1913, Ellmann, Eminent Domain, 66.
IOI, A Berg holograph is dated 21 Oct. 1912, but it was not published until the following Apr.
102. 17 Nov. [?], from Coole, according to Rhys, Letters from Limbo (London, 1936), 158-9;
actually 13 Nov. 1912, British Library. It apparently refers to a letter WBY sent to G. A.
Greene, which was passed on to Rhys.
103. Notebook, MBY.
104. [7 Dec. 1912], Berg. An alternative ending was provided, which is closer to CP:

Let the new faces play what tricks they will

In the old rooms ~ for all they do or say
Our shades will walk the gravel still
The living seem more shadowy than they

105. Quoted by Wayne Chapman, Y4 6 (1988).

106. Though he considered it for the reprint of Responsibilities in 1917, going so far as to write
it in on a proof.
107. 3 Jan. 1913.
108. Postmarked 10 Sept. 1898, Berg.
109. See Thomas Bodkin, Hugh Lane and His Pictures (2nd ed., Dublin, 1934), BOs)
II0. See WBY to AG, 13 Dec. 1912, Berg. Two MSS drafts of the whole poem exist, dated
24 and 25 Dec. 1912.
III. 20 Jan. 1913. £22,000, dependent upon the Committee presenting a site, plus £3,000.
1123 8 Jan. 1913, Berg.
113. Irish Independent, 17 Jan. 1913. For WBY’s target, see his letter to Lane, 1 Jan. 1913: ‘I
have tried to meet the argument of Lady Ardilaun’s letter to somebody, her objection to
giving because of Home Rule & Lloyd George, & still more to meet the general argu-
ment of people like Ardilaun that they should not give unless there is a public demand.’
(L, 573-)

617
 NOTES TO PAGES 481-487
II4. 24 Jan. 1913, Northwestern.
IIS. See above, pp. 459-61.
116. Lane to WBY [Feb. 1913], Berg.
117. See AG to WBY, n.d., Berg, and 8 Nov. 1913, Berg.
118. Irish Times, 8 Mar. 1913.
11g. Trish Times, 11 Feb. 1908.
120. Trish Times, 19 Mar. 1913.
121. [28 May 1913], Arsenal, Paris.
122. Irish Times, 24 Mar. 1913; there is a fuller report in FJ, same day.
123. 12 Apr. 1913, Northwestern.
124. 15 Apr. 1913, Berg.
125. To AG, 7 May 1913. The poem may have been ‘Running to Paradise’.
126. Possibly by establishing a School for the Art of the Theatre: see Dorn in YT, 135-6. Other
founding members were John Martin Harvey, Tomasso Salvini, Cecil Sharp and Craig
himself, who probably wrote the prospectus.
127. 8 Mar. 1913, Berg.
128. 28 Mar. 1913.
129. To Quinn, 18 June 1912, NYPL.
130. WBY to Mabel Beardsley, 23 Dec. [1912], HRHRC.
131. To Joseph Hone, 22 Nov. 1939.
132. 14 Jan. 1913, Northwestern.
133- He may have been influenced by Lotte Pritzel’s doll-sculptures — figures of wire and wax
in decadent dance postures, reminding many of Aubrey Beardsley’s work. There was a
celebrated exhibition in Munich in 1913, inspiring a famous essay by Rainer Maria Rilke.
134. To AG, 18 Jan. 1913, Northwestern. ‘He is probably the only person we know who has
never doubted himself or judged himself, which is I dare say the same thing.’
135. See WBY to Farr, 18 Feb. 1913, private collection; to Mabel Beardsley, 24 Nov. 1913, HRHRC
(‘Florimond’ was the Comte de Basterot’s name. WBY cancelled ‘Michael’ before it —
the name he gave the hero of SB, and his own son); Pound as quoted in Longenbach,
Stone Cottage, 158; WBY to Bullen, 22 Feb. 1913, Buffalo. Beardsley eventually sent, or left,
her own copies of the poems to Andre Raffalovich: see TS at Reading. For a commen-
tary see Elizabeth Ingli James, “The University of Reading Collection’, YA 3 (1985), 170.
136. See WBY to ‘Mr Ames’, 3 Apr. 1913, RSL Archives: which contradicts Longenbach’s
assumption (Stone Cottage, 62) that WBY disapproved of the choice.
137. 22 Feb. 1913, Buffalo. Chapman & Hall were remaindering 125 copies; there were 500 left,
most of them unbound.
138. See NLI MS 30,654. In 1913 and 1914 CC and LHD were down from 1,009 and 1,035 to
595 and 590 respectively, though Poems only dropped from 1,047 to 880.
139. See notebooks, MBY. He saw Brailey on 4 Apr. and Mrs Mitchell on 8 Apr. (he had pre-
viously visited her on 17 and 24 May 1909).
140. In the event, he saw a Mrs Webster instead, on 12 and 13 May: see WBY to AG, ro May
1913, Northwestern.
I4I. In the spring of 1912, according to George Mills Harper and John Kelly, ‘Preliminary
Examination of the Script of E [lizabeth] R [adcliffe]’, YO, 145. He certainly was meet-
ing her at Daisy Meadow by Oct. 1912. Her parents lived in Kensington Square, near Mrs
Fowler.
142. See L. E. Jones, I Forgot to Tell You (London, 1959), 37; StJohn Ervine, Some Impressions
ofMy Elders (London, 1928), 252. Ervine recounts an incident similar to one in Jones's
book, ofa small object miraculously materializing in Radcliffe’s clenched fist.
143 . Jones, I Forgot to Tell You, 41-2. For other automatic writers, see A. Gauld, The Founders
618
 NOTES TO PAGES 487-490
ofPsychical Research (London, 1968). Moses similarly convinced Myers by writing mes-
sages from people who could not be traced in biographical dictionaries, even though
he
reproduced mistakes that appeared in their newspaper obituaries.
144. Jones, I Forgot to Tell You, 44.
145. WBY recorded this in a small leather-bound notebook, with ‘from Maud
Gonne Xmas
1912’ written in front, MBY. For the spiritualist experiments see ‘Notes on Two Clairvoyant
Descriptions by Brailey’ made on 3 Apr. 1913, describing an experiment ‘last week’.
146. So George Yeats told Ellmann in an interview of 17 June 1940, interview book,
Tulsa.
147. 8 June 1913, private collection.
148. 11 and 17 June 1913, private collection.
149. See date of AG’s letter to him, below. On 3 July (Berg) he wrote to her ‘the releif
of that
other matter being over is immense’.
150. Notebook, MBY.
ISI. n.d., but probably 2 July 1913, Berg.
152. AG to WBY, ‘Tuesday’, Berg. Dickinson married Arthur Beresford Lane (1864-1939),
a barrister resident in London, as his second wife in 1927. He was himself Irish, and his
first wife had been a granddaughter of the Young Irelander William Smith O’Brien.
Educated at Charterhouse and Trinity College, Cambridge, Lane was Secretary of the
Railway Companies Association, and also involved in the Control Board (Liquor Traffic).
Mabel subsequently retired to Devon and died in 1962, aged 87.
153. Small leather-bound notebook, with ‘from Maud Gonne Xmas 1912’ written in front,
recording ‘evidence’ of seances, MBY.
154. An image he would use more than once, and which Pound borrowed both for his 1915
essay Affirmations II: Vorticism’ and to epitomize his own workin the Pisan Cantos (74/449).
155. See YO, 7, 130-71. Some of his conclusions use very special pleading; for instance, the fact
that mediums very often reproduced quotations from Greek and Latin grammars is put
down to the spirit minds going back to their schooldays. And Radcliffe’s sketches of blobs
and lines were very readily seen as occult symbols of scarab and bullrush.
156. In Hereward Carrington’s rgrr translation of Flournoy there is much that is echoed by
WBY about ‘usurpation’ ‘deceiving spirits’ and automatic-writing. The tone is marked-
ly similar, showing an ostensibly scientific desire for empirical proof (or disproof), but
an extraordinary readiness to believe. His account of Mrs Piper’s absorption of the
incomplete memories of the dead (235) with a composite memory is very Yeatsian. James
T. Hyslop’s Psychical Research and Survival (London, 1913, in Mead’s Quest series) is also
echoed in the Radcliffe essay. Interestingly, Hyslop remarks ‘daydreams and poetry in our
normal lives are the best analogies’ of the spirit state. WBY was also influenced by Rama
Prasad’s Nature’ Finer Forces (1890), which postulates that evil or destructive acts done
in one lifetime are enacted in reverse in the next. cf. also William James's suggestion, quot-
edin Wentz, Fairy Faith, 479: if ‘there were in the universe a lot of diffuse soul-stuff, unable
of itself to get into consistent personal form, or to take permanent possession of an
organism, yet always craving to do so, it might get its head into the air, parasitically, so
to speak, by profiting by weak spots in the armour of human minds, and slipping in and
stirring up there the sleeping tendencies to personate’.
157. See Irish Times, 1 Nov. 1913. cf. William James, above. In WBY’s 1913 notebook a pen-
cilled note in another hand gives references to ‘Dr Sigmund Freud, University of Vienna
~ “Traumdeutung”, Dr Carl G. Jung, Univ. of Zurich, - Wandlungen und Symbol der
Libido to be translated by Dr Eder (London, 2 Charlotte Street) Jahrbuch fiir psycho-
analysischen und psychopathische Forschungen (Franzpanische Vienna).’ M. D. Eder’s
translation of Freud’s On Dreams was published in London in 1914 (A. A. Brill’s trans-
lation of The Interpretation ofDreams appeared in 1913).
158. Trish Times, 3 Nov. 1913.

619
 NOTES TO PAGES 491-498
159. cf. Visions and Beliefs, 350. ‘Did Cornelius Agrippa identify soul with memory when, after
quoting Ovid to prove that the flesh cleaves to earth, the ghost hovers over the grave,
the soul sinks to Oxos, and the spirit rises to the stars, he explains that if the soul has done
well it rejoices with the almost faultless spirit, but if it has done ill, the spirit judges it
and leaves it for the devil’s prey and “the sad soul wanders about hell without a spirit and
like an image”?’ There are also cross-references to Rama Prasad’s ideas about punishment
in further existences (see above, n. 155). WBY’s letter to Clodd, 6 Nov. 1898, about ghosts
and revisiting, is also relevant (CL, ii, 290-93).

Chapter 18: Memory HARBOUR

IQI3-I1914
1. 14 Nov. 1913.
. Quoted in Pound and Litz, Pound and Shakespear Letters, 282. On 18 Oct. 1913 WBY loy-
ally told Stephens, “The Academic Committee is the English substitute for the French
Academy, and contains almost every English man of letters of eminence, so the prize is
a real distinction.’ (private collection).
. Irish Times, 10 May 1913.
. Manchester Guardian, 15 July 1913. Ireland as wax waiting for an impress is an image from
Standish O’Grady’s Story ofIreland. The shopkeeping image, which would be recycled
in ‘September 1913’, may have been suggested by a poem of Thomas MacDonagh’s in the
Trish Review of June 1911: a vision of an Irish village where the people were bent double,
hoarding ‘pence in a till in their little shops’.
. To WBY, 23 July 1913, Berg. She also worried about the vagueness of the bridge esti-
mate. For Lane’s comment about Irish architects, see Irish Times, 19 July 1913.
. See AG to WBY, 16 Aug. [1913], Berg; MG to WBY, 5 Sept. 1913, G-YL, 324.
. 12 Aug. [1913], Berg.
cow . See WBY to AG, 9 Aug. 1913, Berg. On 1 July he asked her to send an Irish Times with
an account of the Corporation debates: ‘it may move me to another poem’.
. To AG, c. 26 Aug. 1913 (from “The Prelude’, though on Woburn Buildings paper),
Northwestern. Aesop 118 (S. Handford, trans., Fables ofAesop, Harmondsworth, 1954,
122) tells of a dog crossing a river with a bone in her mouth, who loses it in the river when
she snatches at the shadow bone mirrored in her reflection.
Io. Sure ’twas for this Lord Edward died, and Wolf [sic] Tone sunk serene —
Because they could not bear to leave the Red above the Green;
And ’twas for this that Owen fought, and Sarsfield nobly bled -
Because their eyes were hot to see the Green above the Red.
The full poem is in T[homas] W[allis] (ed.), National and Historical Ballads, Songs and
Poems by Thomas Davis, MRIA (Dublin, 1876), t90—-91. See Colin Meir, The Ballads and
Songs of W. B. Yeats: The Anglo-Irish Heritage in Substance and Style (London, 1974), 92-3.
There is a TS draft of ‘September 1913’ in NLI MS 21,873 with emendations in what looks
like Pound’s hand. This includes the variation: ‘For this that Bond and Emmett [sic] died’.
Oliver Bond was a 1798 United Irishman, evidently rejected as too obscure.
II. Brown leather notebook, MBY.
12. To WBY, 8 Oct. 1913, Berg.
13. See Lady Dunsany’s diary (quoting Gogarty), 18 Jan. 1914, private collection.
14. For background, see letters from AG to WBY (8 Nov. 1913, Berg), and his reply (14 Nov.
1913): also copies of documents in Quinn collection, NYPL. The situation peaked in Jan.
1914: see below. “They are children, very good when they are good children,’ WBY told
her. ‘I do not think we should judge them as we would judge people accustomed to

620
 NOTES TO PAGES 498-507
money. They are all a first generation people just getting above a very precarious life. Money
appears to them as afirst necessity, it means a different social world & greater refinement.’
See also AG to Quinn, 2 Feb. 1914, NYPL. Jonathan Pim, the Solicitor-General, concurred
with Moriarty’s opinion on 31 Jan.: the money should be returned to the players, less $200
and costs.
15. WBY to AG, 5 Nov. 1913, Berg.
16. 8 Oct. 1913, Berg.
17. Brown leather notebook, MBY.
18. Trish Times, 23 and 24 Oct. 1913. There is a letter from MG in the 23 Oct. issue, and an
account by Montefiore of an interview with MG on 28 Oct.
19. Irish Times, 28 Oct. 1913.
20. NLI MS 30,615: cf. letter to Irish Worker as in UP, ii, 406-7.
2I. 5 Nov. 1913, Denson, Letters from AE, 91.
apy 14 Nov. 1913, Berg.
2B WBY to AG, 10 Nov. 1913, Berg; the previous quotations come from letters of 15 and 5
Nov., NYPL.
24. Full MS in NLI MS 30,314; published version in the Cuala edition of Responsibilities,
and a portion retained in CP. See VP, 818-20, for all the versions.
Pe The plan was outlined to AG in a letter of 7July 1913.
26. For the Radcliffe material, see Harper’s and Kelly’s discussion in YO, 131-71.
27. Professor Harold Hartley of Oxford.
28. 26 Nov. 1913, private collection.
29. See Longenbach, Stone Cottage, 249, and Ellmann interview book, Tulsa.
30. ‘Sunday’, summer 1913, Berg; two or three dozen bottles of sherry were suggested.
Catherine Gregory was born on 21 Aug., after a difficult pregnancy.
31. Lady Dunsany’s diary, 20 Oct. 1910, private collection, quoted (with some differences)
in Mark Amory, Lord Dunsany:ABiography (London, 1972), 73-4. She added: ‘Even allow-
ing for much bias on her part there is a sordidness and pettiness shown by him which
surprises one — and I must say that I had never detected anything of the kind — I never
thought he had the straightforward simplicity and generous appreciation of other
writers that A. E. shows, but I never thought him mean.’
Bz, Virginia Moore, The Unicorn: William Butler Yeats’s Search for Reality (London, 1952),
253)
ae £382 and £413. 1s. 2d., MBY A27.
34. Carpenter,A Sertous Character, 220.
35. 2 Dec. 1913, private collection; as with MG, he wanted to induce simultaneous medita-
tion over the same symbol.
36. See 1897 edition. Agrippa was a supposed Rosicrucian,; Henry Morley’s commentary iden-
tifies him as a Platonic revivalist.
37: Canto 83.
38. See AG to WBY, 15 May [1914], Berg, for an account of his shortcomings.
39. To AG, 3 Dec. 1913. Also see WBY’s letter to The Times, 4 Dec. 1913.
40. Dec. 1913. Incident and letter are given in Ervine’s Some Impressions of My Elders (London,
1923), 251.
4l. The astrological conjunction was Sun progressed in conjunction with natal Mars. See
brown leather notebook, MBY.
42. To AG, ‘Friday’, early 1914, Berg.
43. See above, pp. 327-8. Mem, 269-70, records WBY’s belief that Moore was confusing his
speech after the RHA lecture with an address to the National Literary Society about the
same time. At the former, he had called on the aristocracy to support Lane’s gallery; at
the latter, he had attacked the Irish bourgeoisie.

621
 NOTES TO PAGES 508-512
me bethicastii=12s
. To Quinn, 1 Jan 1914, Berg.
. 9Jan. 1914, Berg. AG’s modest disclaimer is ina letter to S. Pawlins of Heinemann, 5 Jan.
1914, Berg.
. Wife of a banking magnate and daughter of Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff,
she was an old friend of AG’s: see Pethica 70, n. 24.
. On 27 May 1920 AG was innocent enough to ask Moore for a contribution to a memoir
of Lane. After remarking that he was ‘an extraordinarily clever picture dealer, apt at buy-
ing and equally apt at selling, works of art’, Moore said that ‘there is really nothing more
to say, except perhaps that if he had lived he would have died a millionaire’. He then
reminded AG that both Lane and she had put pressure on Heinemann ‘to withdraw or
mutilate’ passages in Hail and Farewell, as a final stroke he offered to let her reprint his
original passage about Lane for the memoir (Berg). It was brutal, but she should not have
expected otherwise.
. So AG told her sister, 15 Mar. 1914, Berg.
. AG to Quinn, 20
Jan. 1914, NYPL, makes clear that by then WBY had written both poems:
she quotes the last lines of the closing poem.
. WBY to AG, 24 Nov. 1913, Berg.
. See V. Meynell (ed.), Friends ofa Lifetime: Letters to Sydney Carlyle Cockerell (London,
1940), 185-6; his wife later claimed it came as a surprise to him.
. WBY to AG, 31 Jan. 1914, Berg, furnishes a description.
. UP, ii, 410ff.: included there because Hone thought WBY wrote it, but it has more recent-
ly been assumed that Aldington was the author. This seems more likely on stylistic and
other grounds. Also see The Egoist, I, i.
. See account in HRHRC (Flint, F. S., Misc.).
. See Canto 81.
. To AG, 31 Jan. 1914, Berg. This letter shows he joined the boat at Liverpool, coming by
train from Euston.
. See AG to WBY, 22 Jan. 1914, Berg, for a letter dissenting from his advice to accept
Moriarty’s opinion. She would have supported full legal arbitration, but by short-circuiting
it ‘you propose for the sake of putting them [the players] in good humour to accept a deci-
sion which will leave us open to the charge of illegally paying the company money that
doesn't belong to us’. Rather than accept such a ‘shady proceeding’, she wanted to take
Quinn's opinion. On 28
Jan. she triumphantly wrote again, having found aletter of WBY’s
which had originally made the same point (Berg); but he was determined that the
Company should depart to America in good humour. On 2 Feb. she was still complain-
ing to Quinn about the Solicitor-General’s opinion: see Quinn collection, NYPL, box
15, folder 3, which also has copies of the relevant documents.
59- To AG, 3 Aug. 1912, Berg.
60. ‘Thad not asked for it or even hinted it, JBY told Rosa Butt. ‘It was a pleasant surprise,
and money can't be abundant with him, but he lives always in the most thrifty way, never
wanting to spend money on himself, in that like his mother.’ (5 Nov. 1915, Bodleian). A
gloomier version of finances is given in SMY to Quinn, 5 Apr. 1915, NYPL, emphasiz-
ing their own poverty (and dependence on a pound a month from Jack). Quinn had sug-
gested JBY returning to Dundrum, bringing them a guaranteed £70 p.a. from WBY:
SMY approved, but feared the old man would swiftly demand a studio in town. The earl-
ier donation is recorded in JBY to Rosa Butt, 21 Feb. 1914, and the dancing evening in
WBY to AG, 13 Jan. 1914, Berg.
61. The identification of Campbell and AG is my own, but seems unmistakable.
62. Quoted by Strand, ‘American Lecture Tours’, 159, 166.
63. A letter quoted in TS of Professor Humphries’s address ‘Yeats at Amherst, 1914 [14 June
1964], Amherst College Archives.

622
 NOTES TO PAGES 514-520

64. These quotations are given by Strand, 135, 137, 140, 149.
65. ibid., 123.
66. ibid., 138.
67. ibid., 140, 144, 147. Phelps wrote that WBY ‘expressed hatred of George Moore, and said
a great many “events” that Moore described in his book, conversations with Yeats, etc.,
never happened’.
68. Humphries’s address, as above. In WBY’s cuttings file in NLI there is a scrap of May
1900 (attribution illegible) which recounts: ‘one is never safe in Mr Yeats’s company. It
is on record that he once talked to a noted theosophist with the appalling result that when
the man got up he was followed over the carpet by a “little green elephant”.
69. Marie Chambers, ‘Personal Glimpses: William Butler Yeats’, HRHRC. This is consis-
tent with his reading of Joachim, Swedenborg and Boehme.
70. See E. Ruggles, The West-Going Heart:ALife of Vachel Lindsay (New York, 1969); and,
for the banquet, Poetry magazine MSS 1912-1976, Chicago University.
ape Inter-Ocean, 2 Mar. 1914.
vp Quoted in Strand, ‘American Lecture Tours’, 146.
73. G. Sime and F. Nicholson, Brave Spirits (London, n.d.).
74. F. Hackett, The Invisible Censor (New York, 1918), 114-18; a version was also published
in the New Republic.
75: B. L. Reid, The Man from New York: John Quinn and His Friends (New York, 1968),
WigsOe
76. JBY to Mrs Buss, 1 June 1917, HRHRC.
Gi Quinn first suggested an annual retainer (28 Apr. 914, Himber, Letters ofQuinn to Yeats,
141); but by July the arrangement was made of payment per item.
78. ‘Wednesday 8th’ [?April] 1914, Berg; YA 9 (1988), 82-3.
79: To RL-P, 5 Apr. 1914 (written on board ship).
80. To AG, 1 May 1914, Berg.
81. See Brandon, The Spiritualists, 150-57; in Jan. her spirit photographs were shown to be
based on pictures in Le Miroir.
82. See George Mills Harper, ‘“A Subject of Investigation”: Miracle at Mirebeau’, YO, i72=
89. Feilding later wrote a long report published in T. Bestermann (ed.), Transactions of
the Fourth International Congress for Psychical Research (London, 1930).
83. 13 May 1914, Berg.
84. 15 May [1914], Berg.
85. Brown leather notebook, MBY.
86. A holograph in the Berg collection is thus dated. It also oddly echoes the translation of
Verhaeren’s ‘Les Moines’ printed in the Irish Review, see above, p. 615, n. 45.
87. Strand, ‘American Lecture Tours’, 149. This eventually became “The Poet and the Actress’,
first reprinted in YA 8 (1991), with a commentary by David R. Clark.
88. See WBY to Radcliffe, 21 May 1914, private collection.
89. Self-Portrait, entry for 29 May 1914.
go. SMY to Quinn, 13 May 1914, NYPL, says ‘our new book of his new poems will be out
tomorrow’. Wade’s Bibliography gives 25 May, but subscribers’ copies would have been
released before publication day.
gI. See above, pp. 463-4. As WBY would have known, Walter Scott used ‘Old Play’ to sig-
nify that an epigraph was invented.
92. See Mem, 241, for its original inspiration.
93: See LTWBY, i, 289-90, for JBY’s reaction. The grouping of the poems is considered in
Warwick Gould, ‘An Empty Theatre? Yeats as Minstrel in Responsibilities, J. Genet, Studies
in W.B. Yeats (Caen, 1989).

623
 NOTES TO PAGES 521-528
94. [July 1916], BL. Pound annotated his copy ‘emended by WBY to “some stale bitch” &
then castrated by the greasy Macmillan’. George Yeats noted in her copy of CP that “The
Witch’ was written to Olivia Shakespear.
95- Outlook, June 1914.
96. New Statesman, 24 Apr. 1915.
97. Oct. 1914, private collection.
98. Aug. 1914, private collection.
99- Barrett H. Clark, ‘In London with William Butler Yeats’, New York Morning Sun, 25 Aug.
1918.
Ioo. 12 Sept. 1915, Boston. The theory about the Old and New Testament values is in Clark,
as in n. 87, above. This letter is misdated in Wade, 588; see Curtis Bladford, W. B. Yeats:
The Writing of ‘The Player Queen’ (DeKalb, Ill., 1997), 467.
ror. SMY to R L-P, 18 Mar. 1939; WBY to AG, 8 Oct. 1914, Berg.
102. 10 Nov. 1914, TCD.
103. Charles Power to Mahaffy, 12 Nov. 1914, TCD.
104. WBY to AG, 17 Nov. 1914, Berg.
105. TS dated 20 Nov. 1914 in Ellmann MSS, Tulsa.
106. Irish Times, 21 Nov. 1914. Holloway reported it as ‘pro-Germanism of Mr Pearse’; see Ruth
Dudley Edwards, Patrick Pearse: The Triumph ofFailure (London, 1977), 226.
107. To AG, 2 May 1911, Berg.
108. To R L-P, 20 Nov. 1914.
109. TS copy of WBY to AG, 21 Nov. 1914, Berg.
IIO. Gilbert, Golden Dawn Companion, 167-9, clarifies that WBY was ‘active’ at least after
1910, and Imperator and instructor in ‘ancient traditions’ in 1914.
III. See p. 614, n. 35, above.
II2. Warwick Gould points out another possible influence in the fragment of autobiography
published with William Allingham’s Diaries.
113. To SMY,28 July 1914, Boston.
II4. 31 Oct. 1914, NYPL.
IIS. ‘Wednesday’, n.d., from Royal Societies Club, HRHRC.
116. See letters to Quinn, 9 July 1914, NYPL, and to AG, 14 July 1914, Berg.
117. See TS at NLI and Harvard. The MS is at Colby College.
118. To G. B. Thring, 16 Oct. 1914, quoted in Warwick Gould, ‘Singular Pluralities: Titles
of Yeats’s Autobiographies’, YA 11 (1994), 208.
119. To Quinn, 30 July 1914, NYPL.
120. ECY to Grant Richards, 9 Nov. 1914, HRHRC. The Quinn TS at Harvard is ‘A Revery’.
See also Gould, ‘Singular Pluralities’.
121. To RL-P, 26 Sept. 1923. SMY later annotated her copy in great detail, identifying the
anonymous (ABY).
122. See above, p. 155, for this incident. My thanks to Linda Satchwell, who has generously
shared with me her analysis of the MS and its changes.
123 To SMY, 11 Nov. 1914.
124. To AG, 1 Nov. 1913, Berg.
125. Inscription in AG’s copy of The Trembling ofthe Veil, Emory Special Collections.
126. WBY to Carlo Linati, 24 Dec. 1913, Pierpont Morgan Library. One might add critical
commentaries by Weygandt and Gwynn, and Maurice Bourgeois’ Synge.
127. 25 Nov. 1914; see Rev. Eng. Lit., iv, 3 (July 1962). As to the embroidery, he wrote a remark-
ably long and careful letter to R L-P on 2 Sept. 1914 (MBY) about a plan to get Henry
Lamb to design patterns for SMY to work, thus launching her into esoteric and fash-

624
 NOTES TO PAGES 528-531
ionable artistic circles; he would pay for the experiment. He wished her to create art: ‘I
want to make an attempt to lift their work into a world where people pay great prices
and where workers aim at making their work the best of its kind in the world,’
E580:
. It was supposed to be issued at Christmas rors, but was held up by an American copy-
right difficulty; it went on sale on 29 Mar. 1916. It was revised when reissued with The
Trembling ofthe Veil as Autobiographies in 1926.
. To AG, 4 Mar. 1913, Berg.
. His ancient enemy Mrs Ellis filled him with tales of the decline and decrepitude of his
childhood friends and mentors. Ina letter of 17 July 1911 toJBY (Boston) WBY describes
the end of their friendship: ‘Some twelve years ago I went to see him in Paris and realised
with a shock how intolerable his wife was. Sometimes when one has not seen a person
for years one goes back to them and realises that there is some burden there which one
can never take up again though it did not seem too heavy once. I think he felt my hostil-
ity to her.’
132. See above, p. 51.
133. My thanks to Linda Satchwell for pointing this out. He was also much involved in veri-
fying a vision of SMY’s during the summer he wrote Reveries: see FS, 381-3.
134. The last word of the MS was ‘comes’, changed in the TS to ‘happens’; otherwise, this
concluding section was written as directly and fluently as nearly all the rest.

625
 INDEX

THe abbreviations used are as in the notes. Writings by WBY (including Samhain and Arrow,
which were largely his own work) are gathered in his composite entry. The journals and news-
papers listed are those which recur in the text, or which were particularly important to WBY.
The notes are also indexed when they contain substantial additional information rather than
a short or passing reference. Pseudonyms are indexed, but not fictional personages (such as
Michael Hearn or Michael Robartes) — with the exception of ‘Fiona Macleod’, who falls
somewhere in between.

Abbey Theatre: finances, 225, 237, 258, 291, 296, 320, Bagwell, Richard, 145
337-99 344s 349; 352s 389-90; 397; 406, 413-14, Bailey, William Frederick, 334
421-4, 505, 605 (n. 17); premises, 320, 323; patent Balfour, Arthur James, 425, 436
for, 322-3, 328-9; opening, 328-9; early seasons, Balfour, Lady Betty, 204, 206
334-44, 373-4, 381-2; professionalization of the Balzac, Honoré de, xxvii, 17, 108, 158, 172, 250, 336,
company, 337-43; tours in Britain, 341, 347-9, 3693 393» 398, 411, 512, 537
change in direction (late 1906), 352-8, 596 (n. 120); anim, Charles, 98
reorganization into limited company (1910), Banim, John, 98
422-3; in USA, 443-50, 453-4, 460, 510, 514, 611 Barlow, Shaun, 289
(n. 40); acting school, 453-4; and the Lane gallery Barrie,J.M., 292, 422
appeal, 481, 483, 493, 497-8, 510, 620-21 (n. 14), Basterot, Comte Florimond de, 167, 169, 177, 183,
622 (n. 58) 546 (n. 47)
see also Horniman, Annie; Irish National Battle, Mary, 130, 143, 204-5, 530
Theatre Society; Yeats, William Butler Beardsley, Aubrey, 138, 142, 155, 158-9, 187
Aberdeen, Ishbel Maria Gordon, Countess of, 292 Beardsley, Mabel, 403, 485-6, 505, 509, 527, 618 (n. 135)
Aberdeen, John Campbell Gordon, seventh Earl of, Béaslai, Piaras, 363, 365
409, 411 Beatty, Dr Thomas, 15
Achurch, Janet, 141 Beatty, Reverend Dr, 2
Acosta, Helen, 79 Bedford Park, 26, 59-61, 65, 74-5, 80, 103, 107, 137,
‘AP’, see Russell, George William 140, 155—6, 158-9, 164, 257, 274
Aeschylus, 99 Beerbohm, Max, 211-12, 292, 295; cartoon of WBY
Agrippa, Cornelius, 50, 505 and Moore, 77; records Savoy dinner, 158-9; on
Aldington, Richard, 471, 474-5, 493, 509, 622 (n. 54) the Abbey players as exotics, 318-19
Alexandra, Queen, 321 Bennett, Arnold, 424, 514
Ali, Mir Alaud, 47 Benson, A. C., 424, 510
Allgood, Molly (‘Maire O’Neill’), 328, 348, 376, 384, Benson, Constance, 253
399-400, 413, 423, 433, 441, 444, 454 Benson, Francis Robert, 253
Allgood, Sara, 328, 342, 353; 360, 378, 380, 384-5, 393, Benson Company, 237, 251-3
397 399. 405-6, 413, 423, 429, 441, 454, 505, 607 Berkeley, George, 48, 146
(n. 95) Bernard, Dr John Henry, 212
Allingham, William, 24, 75, 131, 146-7, 274, 624 Besant, Annie, 102
(n. 112) Best, Richard, 223
All Ireland Review, 235-6, 251, 256, 262 Binyon, Laurence, 257-8, 425, 474
Andrews, C. F., 473 ‘Birmingham, George’, see Hannay, Canon James
Antoine, André, 142, 199, 323 Owen
Arabi, Colonel Ahmed, 168, 509 Birrell, Augustine, 411, 422, 425-6, 428
Archer, William, 263, 266, 292, 318 Bisson, Juliette, 517-19
Ardilaun, Arthur Edward Guinness, first Baron, Blake, William, 48, 95, 98-101, 102, 104, 109, 113,
206, 479, 495, 499, 617 (n. 113) 129-30, 133, 148, 157, 159, 163-4, 177-8, 187, 213, 245,
Ardilaun, Olivia Charlotte Guinness, Baroness, 423, 269, 272, 466, 468, 525, 559 (n. 52)
495, 499, 617 (n. 113) Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna, 46-7, 50, 52, 62-3, 78,
Armstrong, Eliza, 17 81, 102-4, 133, 162
Armstrong, General John, 612 (n. 71) Bloggs, Frances, 60
Armstrong, Laura, 34, 68, 93, 550 (n. 24) Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen, 169, 266, 292, 336-7, 366,
Arnold, Matthew, 32, 53, 131, 198, 534 422, 509-10
Ashton, Sir Frederick, 253 Boehme, Jacob, 99, 101, 109, 163, 463, 525
Asquith, Herbert Henry, 412, 425-6, 428, 436, 441-2, Boer War, xxviii, 221-3, 235, 239-40, 283-4, 313, 350,
458, 486, 516 447
Asquith, Margot, 436, 441 Bookman, 96, 108, 129, 133, 139, 146-7, 180, 196-7,
Association Irlandaise, see Young Ireland Societies 334) 372
Atkinson, Robert, 206 Boston Pilot, 44, 56, 70, 93-5, 107, 110, 119, 150, 160,
Ayton, Reverend William Alexander, 104 447-8

626
 INDEX

Bowen, Elizabeth, 50 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 86, 293, 360

Boyd, Ernest, 89, 455, 515 Colles, Ramsay, 229
Boyle, William, 336, 343-4, 348, 352, 354, 366, 377, Collins, Mabel, ro2
413, 593 (n. 28), 598 (n. 34), 606 (n. 60) Collins, Richard Henn, 237
Bradley, Katherine Harris, 63 Colum, Padraic, 278, 281, 284, 288-9, 306, 317, 336,
Brémont, ‘Comtesse’ Anna de, 105 338, 340-41, 343, 347, 358, 363, 401, 404, 417, 455,
Bridges, Robert, 179, 250 459, 594 (n. 65)
Brodie-Innes,J.W., 243 Comte, Auguste, 7
Brooke, Rupert, 486 Comyn, Michael, 82, 86
Brown, Robert, 466 Connell, Norreys (Conal O’Riordan), 208, 366, 375,
Browning, Robert, 56, 88, 108, 199 378, 380, 382, 402, 404, 405, 415, 601 (n. 107)
Bruce, Kathleen, 385 Connolly, Ellie, 17, 21
Bulfin, William, 279-80 Connolly, James, 180-81, 194, 223
Bullen, Arthur Henry, 176, 234, 246, 258, 336, 346, Conrad, Joseph, 425, 514
350; 379-73, 385 396, 440, 457, 486 Contemporary Club, 39-45, 53, 64, 132-3, 289
Bullock, Percy, 103 Coole Park, see WBY; AG
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 104 Cooper, Edith, 63
Burke, Edmund, 193 Corbet, Patrick, 612 (n. 71)
Butcher, S. H., 425 Corbet, Robert, 2, 9, 62, 545 (n. 21)
Butler, Mary, 2, 542 (n. 3), 545 (n. 18) Corbet, William, 542 (n. 6)
Butler, Samuel, 463 Cornwallis-West, George, 374
Butler family, 1, 435 Cousins, James, 212, 260, 262, 279, 281, 289, 294, 296,
Butt, Clara, 440 317, 467-8, 487
Butt, Isaac, xxviii, 2-3, 28, 30-31, 39, 41 Craig, Edith, 257, 280, 285, 290
Butt, Rosa, 3, 8, 11, 13, 342 Craig, Edward Gordon, 257-8, 280, 282, 287-8, 291,
Byrne, Raven, 456 378; 390, 403, 416, 424, 440, 447, 468, 485, 487, 511;
produces Dido and Aeneas, 251, WBY wants to
Callanan, Jeremiah, 15, 147 bring him to Ireland, 263; invites WBY tojoin his
Calvert, Louis, 326 bohemians in Florence, 408; his screens, 413, 456,
Campbell, Beatrice Stella (Mrs Patrick), 267, 352, 472; and The Hour-Glass, 422, 433; exhibition in
382, 389, 392-3, 402, 407, 412, 534, 583 (n. 50), 596 Dublin (1913), 482-3
(n. 10); likes Diarmuid
and Grania, 236-7; Crane, Walter, 290
interested in Deirdre, 370, 374, and plays it, 392; Crewe, Robert Offley Ashburton Crewe-Milnes,
WBY sees her as a volcano cooking eggs, 380, and first Marquess of, 425
a pirate in a cave, 512; she sees him as more Croker, Thomas Crofton, 63, 76
cultured than Shaw, 380; wants to give him wine Cromartie, Sibell Lilian Blunt-Mackenzie,
to write on, 385-6; assailed by Horniman, 405 Countess of, 321, 337, 343, 348, 385
Carleton, William, 76, 97-8, 121, 145, 147 Cromer, Evelyn Baring, first Earl, 412-13, 425
Carroll, William, 305 Crook, W. M.., 62, 93, 555 (n. 13)
Carson, Edward, 498, 513 Crowley, Aleister, 104, 110, 231-3, 404, 605 (n. 12)
Casey, W. F,, 413 Cruise O’Brien, Francis, 364
Castletown, Bernard Edward Fitz-Patrick, second Cuala industries, 274, 380, 399, 403, 421, 445, 462,
Baron, 189, 200, 206, 225 472, 497, 520, 527, 601 (n. 119)
Cathcart, George Lambert, 608 (n. 116) see also Yeats, Elizabeth Corbet; Yeats, Susan
Catholic University of America, 305 (n.), 306, 309, Mary
312 Cumann na nGaedheal, 240, 278-9, 281, 294, 296,
Chateaubriand, Frangois Auguste René de, 96, 186, 298, 361
201 Cunard, Maud Alice, Lady, 346
Chatterjee, Mohini, xxx, 47-8, 85, 102, 469-70, 551-2 Curtin, Jeremiah, 176
(n. 72)
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 336, 431 Daily Express (Dublin), 120, 145, 169, 197-8, 206, 211,
Chernoweth, Mrs (medium), 447, 463 225-6, 458
Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, 60, 287, 290 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 368, 511, 537
Christian, Clara, 451 Dante Alighieri, 96, 99, 199
Churchill, Lord Randolph, 27 Darragh, Florence Laetitia (Dallas), 352-5, 357, 374)
Churchill, Winston, 436 485, 487
Cipriani, Amilcare, 354 Davidson, John, 107-8, 428, 577 (n. 65)
Claidheamh Soluts, An, 220-21, 235, 410 Davis, Andrew Jackson, 525
Clan na Gael, 179, 191, 306, 309, 313-14, 332, 365, 445, Davis, Thomas, 44, 53, 56, 98, 121-2, 124, 147, 193,
450 220, 418-19, 462, 496, 523-4
Clarke, Dr Adam, 106-7 Davitt, Michael, 41-2, 169, 190, 223, 229
Clodd, Edward, 525, 614 (n. 35) Davray, Henry, 159-60, 176, 178, 205, 214, 469, 567
Coates, Dorothy, 407-8, 516 (n. 87)
Cockerell, Sydney, 266, 430 Dee, John, 104
Cockran, William Bourke, 305, 516 Dérouléde, Paul, 205
Coffey, George, 97, 202, 261 Desborough, Ethel (Etty) Grenfell, Baroness, 436,
Cohalan, Daniel, 312-13, 516 487

627
 INDEX

de Valera, Eamon, 5 Emery, Edward, 137

de Vere, Aubrey, 86, 146-7 Emery, Florence Farr, see Farr, Florence
Devoy, John, 305, 309, 312-13, 365, 445, 449 Emmet, Robert, 120, 127, 193, 220, 312, 378, 428, 496,
Dick, F. J., 114 525, 529; WBY’s speech on (1904), 312-14
Dickinson, Mabel, 388-90, 396, 398-9, 429, 431, 502, Ervine, St John Greer, 433, 446, 506
506; background, 383-4, 602 (n. 131); begins affair ‘Esmond, Alice’, see Ryan, Margaret Mary
with WBY, 383-5; coaches Molly Allgood, 413; Esson, Louis, 319
pregnancy scare, 488—9; subsequent life, 618
(n. 152) Fagan, Charles, 53
Dickinson, Page, 384 Farley, Archbishop John Murphy, 302
Digges, Dudley, 261, 319, 328, 344, 378 Farquharson, Robert, 337
Dillon, John, 113, 187-8, 206, 229 Farr, Florence, 144, 152, 154, 159, 183, 205, 269, 286-7,
Dixon, Henry, 332 324) 345, 395; 374-5, 392 396-7, 407, 429, 431, 522;
Dobson, Austin, 425 hears Countess Cathleen, 97, and Golden Dawn,
Dolmetsch, Arnold, 250, 257-8, 263 104-5, 137, 231-2, 241-5, 355-6; acts in A Sicilian
Donne, John, 468 Idyll, 107; character, 137; collaborates with WBY
Doolittle, Hilda (H. D.), 474 in 1894, 137-8; and the Irish theatre movement,
Doran, John, 18 207-8; and chanting, 250, 257-8, 263, 279, 287,
Dougherty, James, 409-11, 442 290, 308, 471; writes plays with Olivia Shakespear,
Douglas, Lord Alfred, 266 259; love-affair with WBY, 290-91, 337, 367-8;
Dowden, Edward, 18, 26, 49, 57, 75, 86, 126, 146-8, acts in The Shadowy Waters, 336-7; in Deirdre, 433;
161, 549 (n. 6); Yeats family’s view of, 29-30, 573 protects the psaltery from railway porters, 433;
interest in the young WBY, 37-9, 44-5; WBY’s advice on marriage, 433; dismays Tagore, 471;
attacks on, 52, 145; refuses to support Wilde, 154; moves to Ceylon, 485; on Egyptian magic, 579
advocates cosmopolitanism rather than (n. 72)
nationalism in literature, 335—6; obstructs WBY’s Fay, Frank, 292, 315, 318, 348, 355, 401, 423, 600
succession to his chair, 429-31; death, and WBY’s (n. 95), 601 (nn. ror, 102); as theatre critic for
second attempt, 483-4; in Revertes, 530 United Irishman, 212; challenges WBY to write a
Dowden, John, 18 rousing nationalist play, 248-9; attacks Diarmuid
Dowson, Ernest, 107-8, 110, 157, 199, 385, 392, 416-17 and Grania, 252-3; theatrical work before INTS,
Dublin Castle, 112, 190, 318, 409-11, 426, 442, 500 259—61; collaboration with WBY, 262-3, 278-81,
Dublin Hermetic Society, 46-7 as Seanchan, 295; abandons Griffithism, 296,
Dublin University Magazine, 28, 39, 53 77 324-5, 343; advised by WBY how to reply to
Dublin University Review, 37, 39, 41, 52 Moore, 323; opposes Darragh, 352-3; falls asleep
Dufferin, Frederick Temple Hamilton-Temple- during Unicorn, 374; split with Abbey, 377-80;
Blackwood, first Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, tries to return, 413, 505
206 Fay, William, 284, 289, 308, 328, 342-3, 358-9, 379,
Duffy, Charles Gavan, 118-24, 126-7, 131, 142-3, 375, 401, 423; theatrical background, 252-4, 259;
145—6, 197, 233, 274, 492 collaboration with WBY, 260-63, 278-81; success
Dumas, Charles, 434 on English tour, 292; WBY ignores his
Duncan, Ellen, 383, 468 contribution to training actors, 317; tells WBY
Dun Emer industries, 274-5, 287, 300-301, 316-17, about working-class Dublin, 333; criticized as
336, 380 stage-manager, 338, 375-6; and Brigit
‘Dungannon Clubs’, 195, 341, 405, 458 O’Dempsey, 348; Horniman’s enmity to him,
Dunlop, D.N., 133 348-9, and his respect for her, 600 (n. 95);
Dunraven, Windham Thomas Wyndham-Quin, opposes Darragh, 352; Horniman’s campaign
fourth Earl of, 383, 426, 442 against him, 354—7; split from Abbey, 376-80
Dunsany, Beatrice, Baroness, 435-6, 503, 621 (n. 31) Feilding, Everard, 462, 517-18
Dunsany, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Felkin, Robert W., 465, 517, 525
eighteenth Baron, 411, 417, 430, 467, 485; befriends Fell, H. C., 150-51
WBY, 383; needs ‘fifty pounds a year and a Fellowship of the Three Kings, 222, 245, 257
drunken mistress’, 403-4; subscribes to Abbey, Fenianism, xxviii, 21, 31, 41-4, 53> 84, 93, 106, 112-15,
422; thinks AG plagiarizes him, 435-6; Craig 119—20, 124, 132, 179-80, 189, 193, 220, 262, 285,
mistakes him for stage-carpenter, 440; published 300, 322, 341, 405
by Cuala, 462 Ferguson, Sir Samuel, 28-9, 41, 44, 52, 56, 69, 85, 122,
145, 147, 160, 220, 520, 549 (n. 5)
Edward VII, King, 265, 292, 300, 318, 409—10, 421-2 Fianna na hEireann, 405
‘Eglinton, John’, see Magee, W. K ‘Field, Michael’, 108, 292
Elgar, Edward, 251 see also Bradley, Katherine Harris; Cooper,
Eliot, George, 53, 553 (n. 105) Edith
Elliott, Gertrude, 535 Field, William, 193, 226-9
Ellmann, Richard, xxvi-xxwvii, 89, 276 Figaro, Dublin, 120, 128, 229
Ellis, Edwin, 12, 75, 98-102, 107, 127, 136, 453, 468, Findlater, Adam, 193
530, 625 (n. 131) Fingall, Elizabeth (Daisy) Plunkett, Countess of,
Ellis, Henry Havelock, 156-7, 159, 177-8, 272 200, 204
Ellis, Phillipa (Mrs Edwin Ellis), 100, 625 (n. 131) Finlay, Father Tom, 311
Emerson, Thomas, 502 First World War, xxix, 522-3

628
 INDEX

Fitzgerald, Charles, 305 518-19; death of son Georges, 115-16; conception

Fitzgerald, David, 1430 of Iseult, 117, 127; estrangement from WBY in
Fitzgerald, Lord Edward, 194, 496 1893, 127-8, and reconciliation, 157; their political
Fitzgerald, John Francis, Mayor of Boston, 449 disagreements, 133-4, 194; and AG, 172, 179; anti-
FitzGibbon, Gerald, Lord Justice, 27 Jubilee demonstration (1897), 180-81, 227, 395;
Fitzmaurice, George, 373, 382, 440 reveals her secret life to WBY, 201-5; and the
Flint, F. S., 474, 509 theatre movement, 206, 278-81, 287-90, 295-300,
Flournoy, Theodor, 463, 490, 525 323-4; campaign against Boer War, 222-3, 326-30,
Forbes-Robertson, Johnston, 535 576-7 (n. 14); performance as Cathleen ni
Ford, Ford Madox (Hueffer), 474, 521 Houlihan, 260-62, 279, 306, 320, 328; marriage to
Fortuny, Mario, 447 and separation from MacBride, 282-7, 290, 293,
Fowler, Eva, 437-8, 463-4, 468, 475, 487-8, 502, 510, 330-34, 347, 363, 445, 592 (nn. 4, 16); hissed at
S17 bbey, 353-4; consummation of affair with WBY
Fox, Valentine, 154 (1908-9), 386-9, 391-6, 407, 434-5, 465, 602
Fox-Strangeways, H. H., 469, 471 (n. 146), 603 (n. 172); entertains him at Colleville,
Frazer, James, 170, 213, 525 421, 461-2, 467-8; threatened with blackballing at
Freeman's Journal, 86, 90, 209, 212, 227, 264, 265, 296, the Arts Club, 436; and Lane gallery campaign,
327; 397 495; and Dublin lock-out, 499-500; investigates
Freemasonry, 104, 198, 205, 431 ‘miracle’ at Mirebeau, 518-19; and First World
Freud, Sigmund, 463, 525, 614 (nn. 36, 37), 619 War, 522
(n. 157) Gonne, May (later Bertie-Clay), 91, 117, 330-32, 407
Frohman, Charles, 377 Gore-Booth, Constance, see Markievicz, Constance
Frost, Robert, 471 Gore-Booth, Eva, 129, 144, 152-3
Fuller, Loie, 109 Gore-Booth, Joanna, 144
Gore-Booth, Sir Robert, 23
Gael, 44, 53, 56, 71, 218 Gorman, Agnes Pollexfen, 4, 16, 21, 24, 155, 528
Gaelic Athletic Association, 44, 71 Gorman, Elma, 4
Gaelic League, 126, 165, 169, 184, 220, 235, 252, 290, Gosse, Edmund, 199, 208, 417, 438, 456, 528, 608
307, 312; 325, 341, 365, 417, 455 (n. 107); admires Wind Among the Reeds, 217;
Gallagher, T. J., 447 introduces WBY to Asquith, 412; and Academic
Galsworthy, John, 171, 446, 512 Committee, 424-5; and Civil List pension, 425-8;
Garnett, Edward, 107, 110, 123-5, 129, 135, 149 excludes Tagore, 471
Garvey, Maire, 324, 342, 344, 607 (n. 82) Gourmont, Rémy de, 138
Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, 509 Granville-Barker, Harley, 326, 415
Genthe, Arnold, 516 Graves, Alfred Percival, 82, 207, 229
Gibson, Charles Dana, 516 Gray, John, 108, 157, 575 (n. 56)
Giles, William, 59 Gray, Thomas Thompson, 608 (n. 116)
Gill, Thomas Patrick, 95, 162, 188, 197, 203-4, 206, Greene, George, 107-8
210-12, 225-6, 241, 246, 319, 451 Gregg, Frederick, 27, 33, 35, 37s 48, 53, 305) 516
Gillmor, Alexander, 10 Gregory, Augusta, Lady, 30, 76, 100, 111, 175, 181, 185,
Gladstone, W. E., xxviii, 30, 113 198-9, 217, 300, 301, 308, 345, 375, 384, 5125
Gleeson, Evelyn, 274-5, 380 personality, 169-70; her politics, 169, 196, 227-8,
Godwin, Ernest, 60-61 441; meets WBY, 169-70, 568 (n. 28); their
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 99, 276, 346, 512 relationship, xxix, 169-72, 357; collaboration on
Gogarty, Oliver St John, 168, 272, 301, 330, 430, folklore, 170-71, 183, 204, 505, 569 (n. 34); and
441 MG, 172, 179, 194, 201-5, 227, 232, 286, 333, 391, 573
Golden Dawn, Hermetic Order of, 1o1, 103-7, 110, (n. 10), 586 (n. 16); collaboration on theatre plans,
129, 132, 137, 143, 148, 163, 165, 222, 230-34, 241-5, 179, 183, 188-9; entertains him at Coole, 181-3,
269, 347, 376, 380, 560 (nn. 66, 75), 577 (n. 26) 189, 195, 218-19, 246-9, 288, 321-2, 503-4; and in
Goldsmith, Oliver, 146, 448 London, 187, 191, 477; solicitousness, 187-8,
Gonne, Iseult, 127, 157, 286-7, 331, 334, 387, 421, 467, 219-21, 309-10, 346, 380, 389, 503, 511, 595 (n. 84);
472, 519, 616 (n. 81) and Irish Literary Theatre, 225-6, 237, 570 (n. 81);
Gonne, Kathleen (later Pilcher), 91, 282, 284 defends WBY against ‘the priests’, 240-41;
Gonne, Maud, 5, 44, 122, 144, 163, 175, 212, 252, 257, collaboration on play-writing, 248-50, 268—7o,
277; 385, 412, 429, 461, 468, 475-6, 499; birth and 295, 356~7, 372, 580 (n. 95), 599 (n. 68); WBY
background, 57, 91-2, 118-19, 554 (n. 121); meets supports her work, 250, 258, 264-5, 293, 308, 469,
WBY, xx, 57, 87-8, 554 (n. 120); character, 91; 507, 582 (nn. 33, 34, 35); her interest in Joyce,
politics, 91-2, 114, 179-81, 189-95, 205, 213, 221, 276-7; and Irish National Theatre Society/Abbey
313, 321, 333, 354, 386, 411, 420, 570 (n. 70), 576 Theatre, 287-9, 294-6, 317, 325—6, 328, 335,
(n. 87), 577 (n. 25); and Millevoye, 92-3; inspires 339-44, 352-8, 376, 402, 405—6, 413-16, 421-3, 444,
WBY’s work, 97, 203, 219, 230-31, 238-9, 284, 449-50, 453, 455, 606 (n. 60), 611 (n. 39);
301-2, 388, 391, 393-6, 420, 434-6, 456-7, 467-8, influences WBY’s views, 324, 344, 346, 369,
520, 522; political influence on him, 98, 114~15, 411-12; and Lane, 326-7, 478-83, 494-8; antipathy
193-4, 196, 313, 399, 420; occult researches with to Annie Horniman, 337, 339-40, 405-6, 414,
him, ror, 106, 518-19; and the Golden Dawn, 421-2, 503, 596 (n. 121), 607 (n. 86); and Playboy,
104-6, 117; spiritual association with WBY, 114, 360-65, 449-50; brings WBY to Italy, 367-69;
157, 195-6, 201-3, 285, 386-8, 391, 394-5, 465-6, and Catholicism, 376, 507-8, 518, 568 (n. 22), 600

629
 INDEX

Gregory, Augusta, Lady (cont.): Healy, Timothy Michael, 54, 61, 113, 184-5, 187, 188,
(n. 91); illness (1907), 398; relationship with 206, 211, 423
Synge, 399-401, 449; and Blanco Posnet, 409-11, Heaney, Seamus, xxviii
605 (n. 37); coolnesses between her and WBY, Heine, Heinrich, 276
414, 426-9, 503-4, 511; and Civil List pension, Heinemann, William, 154, 508
425-9, 503, 608 (n. 109); WBY’s tributes to her, Henderson, W. A., 349, 360, 370, 397
436; tours with Abbey in USA (z911-12), 449—-50, Henley, William Ernest, 75, 80, 81, 86, 143
4534; love-affair with John Quinn, 449-50; Henry, Augustine, 274-5
satirized by George Moore in Hail and Farewell, Herbine, Charlotte, 503, 506
451, 507-9, 622 (n. 48); advises about Mabel Hillier, Arthur, 19
Dickinson, 488-9; WBY repays her money, 517 Hinkson, Henry, 72, 114, 148
WORKS Hitchcock, F. R. Montgomery, 32-3
The Canavans, 599 (n. 60); Cuchulain ofMuir- Hodder & Stoughton, 234
themne, 248, 258, 264-5, 412, 469, 582 (nn. 33, 34, Hodgkin, Rose, 48
35); The Deliverer, 435, 609 (n. 10); Full Moon, 435; Holloway, Joseph, 252, 262, 297, 320, 360, 423, 524
The Gaol Gate, 376, Hyacinth Halvey, 348; Kincora, Homer, 99, 133, 302-3, 505
328, 335-6, 404; Mirandolina, 415; Moliére Home Rule, 29~30, 41, 44, 62, 91, 93, 113, 119, 169,
translations, 328, 347; Our Irish Theatre, 450, 517, 179, 190, 228, 405, 442-3, 445, 448-9, 452, 457-61,
526, 528; The Rising ofthe Moon, 377; Spreading the 479, 481, 493, 498, 513-14, 516, 522, 530-31; Ulster’s
News, 328, 348; Twenty-five, 278, 289; Visions and resistance to, 442, 457-61, 513-14, 522
Beliefs in the West ofIreland, 170, 439-40, 464, 5253 Hone, Joseph, xxvi, 112, 335, 479, 492, 495, 521-2, 528
(with WBY), Cathleen ni Houlihan, 248-9, 580 Hood, Tom, rr
(n. 95); The Pot ofBroth, 249, 279, 348, 359, 372s Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 39, 54
377 Hopper, Nora, 145, 186, 198
Gregory, Margaret (formerly Parry), 370-71, 398, Horniman, Annie Elizabeth Frederika: supports
412, 468, 503 Mathers, 104-5; sponsors Farr’s Avenue Theatre
Gregory, Richard, 421 season, 137, 140; fascinated by WBY, 171, 286, 291,
Gregory, Robert, 169, 363, 367, 412, 415, 468, 568 330, 348-9, 355; 3745 389, 397, 405-6; in Golden
(n. 24); on WBY at Oxford, 264; set-designs, 289, awn, 222, 231-3, 241-7; provides financial
326, 379; WBY presses him on Dun Emer, 350-51; backing for theatre movement, 225, 237, 258,
anti-Sinn Féin, 363; marriage, 370~71, 398; soured 291, 296, 320, 337-9, 344, 349, 352, 389-90,
relations with WBY, 398, 503; and AG’s quarrel 405-6, 413-14, 593 (n. 39), 595 (n. 95); WBY’s
with Gosse, 426-8 amanuensis, 264, 286, 291; her own theatrical
Gregory, Sir William, 168, 248, 412, 507-8 interests and ambitions, 281, 318, 328, 339-41, 347,
Grein, J. T., 142, 199 368-9, 379; and AG, 323, 339-40; troubled
Grierson, Herbert, 360, 367, 468 relations with Abbey, 326, 328, 347-9, 354-9,
Griffin, Gerald, 98 369-70, 376-7, 400, 405-6, 420-23, 433, 453, 599
Griffith, Arthur, 195, 220, 266, 272, 281, 284, 288, (n. 54), 601 (n. 111), 605 (n. 17); guarantees WBY’s
297 -8, 315, 378, 418, 442-3, 524, 574-5 (n. 52); CW, 371, 373, 599 (n. 64)
founds Sinn Féin, 70, 286, 296; criticizes Irish Horton, W. T., 163, 171, 235, 250
Literary Theatre, 206, 211-13; campaigns against Howard, B. Douglas, 96
Boer War, 223, 229, 240; and MacBride marriage, Howard de Walden, Thomas Evelyn Ellis, eighth
286; ‘first serious quarrel’ with WBY, 327; and Baron, 346, 436
Playboy, 360, 363, 365, 3993 growing enmity to Hughes, Herbert, 341
Y, 405, 457-8 Hughes, John, 254-5
Guiney, Louise Imogen, 90, 94 Hulme, Thomas Ernest, 474
Gwynn, Denis, 524 Huneker, James Gibbon, 306, 516, 536
Gwynn, Stephen, 44, 81, 262, 292, 294, 318-19, 336, Hunt, Leigh, tog
339; 355, 363, 448, 459-60, 497-9 Hunter, Dorothea, 164, 186, 243
Gyles, Althea, 152, 176, 214, 221-2 Hunter, Edmund, 186, 231-2
Hutcheson-Poé, Colonel William, 422, 442
Hackett, Francis, 314, 515—16, 519 Huysmans, Joris Karl, 138, 176-8, 323
Haldane, John Scott, 425, 442 Huxley, Thomas, 25, 35
Hallam, Arthur, 99 Hyde, Annette, 150
Hamilton, General Sir Ian, 389, 425-6 Hyde, Douglas, 42-3, 45, 71-2, 76, 77, 82, 95, 131,
Hannay, Canon James Owen (‘George 142-3, 145, 148, 165, 176, 187, 195, 198, 211-12, 226,
Birmingham), 524
240, 247, 250, 263, 264-5, 294, 392, 408, 451, 459}
Hardy, Thomas, 425-6 political opinions, 43, 341, 461; relations with
Harper, Edith, 464 WBY, 57, 71, 455; WBY reviews Love Songs of
Harper, George Mills, 243 Connacht, 133, 136-7; delivers ‘Necessity for De-
Harrington, Timothy, 188, 193, 228 Anglicizing Ireland’, 125-6; WBY criticizes other
Harris, Thomas Lake, 163 works by Hyde, 146, 150; WBY stays at Ratra, 150,
Harris, W. G., 25 186; Hyde’s marriage, 220; at Coole, 220, 271-3}
Harvey, John Martin, 413 Hyde helps with Where There is Nothing, 270;
Hastings, Beatrice, 612 (n. 9) leaves INTS, 295-6; replies to WBY’s ‘At the
Healy, Father James, 27 Abbey Theatre’, 455; reproached by AG for
Healy, Johnny, 21 attacks on Abbey, 612 (n. 11)

630
 INDEX

Hyde, Lucy, 220 memorializes him after death, 416-17; poem to

Hyde-Lees, Edith Ellen, see Tucker, Edith Ellen Davray, 567 (n. 87)
(‘Nelly’) Johnson, Samuel, 428
Hyde-Lees, George (later Yeats), 437-8, 468, 475, Johnston, Charles, 30, 32, 35, 44-8, 53, 62-3, 113, 163,
517) 525 302, 305, 516
Hyde-Lees, Gilbert, 437 Johnston, William (‘of Ballykilbeg’), 46
Hyde-Lees, Harold, 437 Jonson, Ben, 336, 345
Hyslop, James, 463, 490, 525, 614 (n. 38), 619 (n. 156) Jowitt, Martha, 14
Joyce, James, 29, 175-6, 270, 288, 303, 330, 364, 585
Ibsen, Henrik, 96, 140, 142, 206, 208, 269, 294, 297, (nn. 91, 94); critique of Irish Literary Theatre,
335» 415, 447, SII—12, 535 253; meets WBY and is helped by him, 275-8, 585
Inghinidhe na hEireann, 240, 252, 259—61, 278-9, (n. 90); fails to visit MG, 277; admires WBY’s
294, 317, 328, 379 imagination, 277; reviews Blanco Posnet, 411;
Irish Agricultural Organization Society (IAOS), entertained in Woburn Buildings with his son,
185-6, 191, 311 457; and Dubliners, 493; helped by Pound, 506;
Irish Daily Independent, 332, 361, 481 possible influence on style of Revertes, 526
Trish Fireside, 52, 56 Joyce, Patrick Weston, 82, 130, 148
Trish Home Reading Magazine, 127, 135 Jubainville, Henri d’Arbois de, 130, 146
Trish Homestead, 186, 210, 280-81 Jung, Carl Gustav, 463, 515, 614 (nn. 36, 37), 619
Irish Literary Society (London), 90, 18-19, 124, (n. 157)
126-7, 135, 180, 187, 207—8, 229, 233, 237, 241, 243,
255, 292, 319, 578 (n. 53) Karsch, Anna Luise, 517
see also National Literary Society (Dublin) Kavanagh, Rose, 113
Irish Literary Society (New York), 302, 304, 306 Keats, John, 86, 99, 302-3, 470
Irish Literary Theatre, 162, 183-5, 197, 203-14, Keegan, John, 118
217-18, 220, 223, 225-6, 229, 235, 250-54, 260, Kegan Paul, see Paul, Charles Kegan
262, 268, 276, 278, 317, 570 (n. 81), 571 (n. 82), Kelly, John T., 118, 120
575 (n. 76) Kelly, P.J., 261, 319
Irish Monthly, 56, 86, 98 Kensington, 234
Trish National Alliance, 112, 189-90, 195, 227, 283 Keogh, Judge Martin Jerome, 516
see also Fenianism Keohler, Thomas Goodwin (later Keller), 339, 404
Irish National Dramatic Society (and Company), Kermendy, Lazlo, 447
261, 267, 273, 278-81, 287-8, 339 Kerrigan,J.M., 376, 378, 444
Irish National Theatre Society (INTS), 278, Kettle, Thomas, 280-81, 298-9, 330, 358, 524, 597
287-300, 317-21, 323-6, 334-44, 354-8, 377-8, 405, (n. 134)
423, 587 (n. 43), 590 (n. 64), 593-4 (nn. 50, 65) Killanin, Michael Morris, first Baron, 167, 169
Irish Parliamentary Party, xxviii, 113, 180, 188-90, King, Richard Ashe, 133, 184
225-8, 265, 405, 442, 498, 523 Kipling, Rudyard, 304, 306, 425, 471
Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), 112-13, Krans, Horatio, 528
189-90, 195, 223, 278, 283, 341, 405, 523 Kropotkin, Prince Pyotr, 268
see also Fenianism Kuch, Peter, 49
Irish Socialist Republican Party, 180-81
Trish Times, 86, 298, 327, 336, 402, 417, 442, 450, 454, Labouchére, Henry, 54
463-4, 482, 490, 495, 499, 500, 522 Laird, Helen, 342, 379
Trlande Libre, 173, 180, 196 Lamennais, Félicité Robert de, 186
Iveagh, Edward Cecil Guinness, first Viscount, 422, Landor, Walter Savage, 505
430 Land War (1879-82), xxviii, 24, 30-31, 132
Lane, Arthur Beresford, 619 (n. 152)
Jackson, Alice Pollexfen, 9, 31 Lane, Sir Hugh, 326-8, 338, 360-62, 383, 386, 442,
Jackson, Arthur, 9, 31, 125, 432, 609 (n. 125) 461, 478-83, 493-8, 501, 507-8, 520, 622 (n. 48)
Jackson, Clara Huth, 508 Lane, John, 100, 109, 154, 275
Jackson, Frank and Edith (“Mr and Madame Lane-Poole, Ruth (formerly Pollexfen), 441
Horos’), 244-5 Lang, Andrew, 199, 525, 614 (n. 35)
James, Henry, 292, 424 Langbridge, Frederick, 132, 135
James, William, 272, 308, 389, 619 (n. 156) Larkin, James, 499-501
Jameson family, 27, 382 Larminie, William, 176
Jarry, Alfred, 173 Lawrence, Emily, Lady, 265, 384, 583 (n. 42)
Jepson, Edgar, 107 Lawrence, Sir Henry, 265, 384, 583 (n. 42)
Joachim of Fiore, 177 Lawrence & Bullen, 129, 164, 234
John, Augustus, 371, 373, 392, 397) 474, 484 Layard, Enid, Lady, 169, 368
Johnson, Lionel, 109, 119, 124-5, 129, 131, 135, 146, Leader, 207, 235-6, 240-41, 247, 251, 264, 280, 293-5,
152-5, 162, 198, 367, 385, 391-2, 397, 400, 560 323-4, 344, 364, 375s 37, 406, 428, 454-5, 483
(n. 89), 585 (n. 81), 589 (n. 11); discovers his Leamy, Edmund, 119
Irishness, 107; hosts a Rhymers meeting, 107-8; in Lecky, William Edward Hartpole, 145, 148, 188, 206,
Dublin with WBY, 132; influence behind Secret 228
Rose, 177-8; drinks ‘in his own rooms’, 188, death, Lee, Vernon, 109
274; WBY selects his poems for Dun Emer, 322; Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, 50, 178

631
 INDEX

Le Gallienne, Richard, 107, 125, 129, 516 Mangan, James Clarence, 79, 90, 98, 118, 122, 131, 146,
Legge,J.G., 62, 555 (n. 13) 558 (n. 6)
Leinster, Maurice FitzGerald, sixth Duke of, 422 Manning, Frederic, 509
Leisure Hour, 130 Markievicz, Casimir, Count, 152, 326, 374-5, 383,
Leo Africanus, 427, 464-6, 476, 477, 489, 519, 614-15 400, 404, 456
(nn. 43, 44, 45) Markievicz, Constance, Countess, 5, 91, 456;
Leoni, Franco, 424, 440 friendship with WBY, 129, 14.4; marriage, 152;
Lever, Charles, 98, 145 theatricai involvements, 326, 404; at the Arts
Lévi, Eliphas, 50 Club, 383, 436, WBY considers her a ‘steam
Library of Ireland (later ‘New Irish Library’), 18-21, whistle’, 384; founds Fianna na hEireann, 40s,
124, 233, 274 453; supports workers in 1913 lock-out, 499
Lindsay, Vachel, 515 Marsh, Edward Howard (‘Eddie’), 502
Linnell family, 100 Martin, Violet (‘Martin Ross’), 89, 167, 246-7, 251-2,
Lissadell, 20, 23, 129, 144 261, 335
Lister, Edith, 396 Martyn, Edward, 13, 157, 211, 220, 317, 328;
Little, Philip Francis, 267, 270 background and personality, 165; entertains WBY
Lloyd George, David, 412, 442, 458 (1896), 165-7; WBY’s attitude towards him, 168;
Lodge, Sir Oliver, 525 and Irish Literary Theatre, 183—4, 188, 207, 252-3;
Logue, Cardinal Michael, 363, 459-60 scruples about Countess Cathleen, 207; The Heather
Longenbach, James, 474, 505 Field, 208, 210, The Bending ofthe Bough, 221,
Lover, Samuel, 98 225-6; AG’s view of him, 241, 344; Maeve, 248;
Lucifer, 51, 80, 102, 103 alienated from WBY, 278, 334, 422; later
Lugné-Poé, Aurélien-Francois, 264 theatrical involvements, 294-5; in Hail and
Lutyens, Edwin, 481-2, 493-4 Farewell, 451
Lyell, Charles, 425 Marx, Karl, xxvii
Lynch, Arthur, 128, 135, 222-3 Masefield, Constance (Mrs John Masefield), 428,
Lynch, Hannah, 73 436
Lynd, Robert, 434, 52r Masefield, John, 187, 287, 318, 341, 385, 416, 418, 428,
Lyster, Thomas W., 38, 75 436, 457
Lyttelton, Edith, 405-6, 502 Masquers, the (formerly “Theatre of Beauty’), 257-8,
Lyttelton, Katharine, Lady, 399 290-91, 587 (n. 38)
Lytton, Victor Alexander George Robert Lytton, Mathers, MacGregor (formerly Samuel Liddell
second Earl of, 426 Mathers), background in occult organizations,
103-4; meets WBY, 104; influence in Golden
McAnally, David Rice, 77, 96 Dawn, 104-6; involvements in Paris, 120, 157;
Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 17 entertains WBY there (1894) 138, (1898) 194,
MacBride, John, 227-8, 240, 278, 283-7, 290, 305, (1899) 205; in WBY’s fiction, 162, 233-4; and
31I-12, 319, 330-34, 338, 367, 386, 391, 458, 592 Celtic millennialism, 172-3, 186, 194; quarrels with
MacBride, Maud Gonne, see Gonne, Maud WBY and Golden Dawn, 222-3, 231-2, 242-4,
MacBride, Sean (Seaghan), 286, 330, 387, 467 380; abortive moves towards reconciliation, 386
McCartan, Patrick, 454, 612 (n. 7) Mathers, Moina (formerly Mina Bergson), 104, 117,
McCarthy, Justin, 54, 425 152, 162
McCarthy, Justin Huntly, 41 Mathews, Charles Elkin, 59, 61, 95, 142, 148, 214, 234,
MacDonagh, Thomas, 383, 392, 399, 408, 415-18, 459 266, 275, 346, 371; 438, 474
Macdonnell, Annie, 334 Maturin, Charles, 50, 56, 178
MacDonnell, Sir Antony, 320, 442 Maunsel & Co., 335-6, 338, 400, 402, 414, 420
McGarrity, Joseph, 445, 450 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 509
MacGinley, P. T., 279 Mead, G. R. S., 102
McGrath, John, 160 Meredith, George, 74, 108, 152, 158, 321
McKenna, Reginald, 502 Merrick, Esther, 17
MacKenna, Stephen, 218, 244, 463 Meyer, Kuno, 408, 508
Mackenzie, Kenneth, 104 Meynell, Alice, 469
Maclagan, Eric, 322 Meynell, Wilfrid, 54
“Macleod, Fiona’, see Sharp, William Middleton, Alexander, 62
Macmillan (publishers), 234, 272, 301-2, 304, 316, Middleton, Elizabeth, 4
396, 472, 520 Middleton, Henry, 20, 68, 71
McNeill, John, 32-3 Middleton, Lucy, 21, 125, 144
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 139, 149, 216, 219, 236, 263-4, Middleton, Mary, 20
305, 335) 511, 513 Middleton, William, 7, 9-10, 20, 23, 31, 547-8 (n. 88)
Magee, W. K. (‘John Eglinton’), 31-2, 47-8, 81, 89, Middleton & Pollexfen, 4, 9-10, 19-20, 23, 31, 431-2,
197200, 211, 293, 334, 404, 458-9, 484 529, 545 (n. 24), 547 (n. 81), 609 (n. 125)
Mahaffy, John Pentland, 126, 206, 429-30, 435, 484, ill, J.195.72
523-4 Millevoye, Lucien, 92-3, 117, 127, 157, 202, 205, 227,
Mair, G. H., 433
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 109, 138-9, 161, 176-7, 215
284, 293, 331
Milligan, Alice, 133-4, 144-5, 180, 184, 207, 225, 147,
Mancini, Antonio, 373
259, 363
Manet, Edouard, 36, 429, 478 Mirehouse, John, 502

632
 INDEX

Mitchel, John, 44, 120, 124, 145, 147, 148, 193, 209, Newbolt, Sir Henry John, 257
419, 515, 524 New Irish Library, see Library of Ireland
Mitchell, Mrs (medium), 487 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 159, 177, 213, 269, 272, 287, 294,
Mitchell, Susan, 404, 423 3245 331, 336; 345, 406, 463, 470, 494, 522, 525, 584
Molony, Helena, 379 (nn. 68, 69)
Monck, Nugent, 436, 444, 453, 456, 475 Nineteenth Century, 169-70, 172
Monro, Harold, 474 Nordau, Max, 155
Monroe, Harriet, xxvii, 514 North, Violet, see Russell, Violet
Monteagle, Thomas Spring Rice, second Baron, 292 Nutt, Alfred, 65, 74, 77, 96, 130
Montefiore, Dora, 499
Montfaucon de Villars, Abbé de, 505 Oakley, Harold, 248
Moore, George, 36, 77, 141, 156-7, 190, 205, 217, 222, O’Brien, Dermod, 383, 459
239, 273, 403, 438, 461, 510; relationship with O’Brien, Kate, 21
Edward Martyn, 165; relationship with WBY, OBrien, R. Barry, 81, 96, 135, 149, 237, 331
XXV—XXVI, 171, 507-9; and the Irish Literary O’Brien, William, 113, 169, 225
Theatre, 184, 211, 225-6; growth of friendship, O Conghaile, Seamus, 382
199-200, 228-9; advises WBY on his work, 219; O’Connell, Daniel, 313, 446, 524
collaboration on Diarmuid and Grania, 221, 236-7, O'Connor, T. P., 193
250-53, 575-6 (n. 81); on Where There isNothing, O’Curry, Eugene, 196
250, 267-70, 278, 583-4 (n. 55); and the Irish O’Dempsey, Brigit, 335, 348, 377
National Theatre Society, 261, 323, 334; quarrel O'Donnell, Frank Hugh, 189-91, 195, 209-10, 212-13,
with WBY, 270; satirizes WBY in Hail and 223, 227, 229, 235, 363, 570 (n. 64), 576-7 (n. 14),
Farewell, 315, 327-8, 450-52, 453, 507-9, 514, 526, 578 (n. 53)
528, 530, 621 (n. 43); WBY’s ripostes, 508-9, O'Donoghue, D. J., 118
520-21; hated by Annie Horniman, 349, 595 (n. O'Donovan, Father Jeremiah, 289, 301, 380
99); suggests corporation subsidy, 581 (n. 121); O'Grady, Standish James, 41, 68, 124, 133, 142, 145-8,
suggested obituary for Hugh Lane, 622 (n. 48) 156, 179, 180, 184, 191, 198, 207, 211-12, 235-6, 240,
WORKS 251, 279) 399» 425y 531
Diarmuid and Grania (with WBY), 250-53; O’Hegarty, P. S., 399
Evelyn Innes, 194, 199, 257; Hail and Farewell, 211, O'Kelly, Seamus, 404, 454, 456
236, 397) 507-9 Old, Sarah Martha, 160, 187
see also Gregory, Augusta, Lady Oldham, Charles Hubert, 39, 41, 45, 47, 53, 91, 113,
Moore, Thomas (‘Tom), 146-7, 235, 319 118, 132-3
Moore, Thomas Sturge, 140, 241, 250, 257, 266, 287, O'Leary, Ellen, 44, 71-2, 75, 79, 90, 93) 95» 113
290, 348, 374, 416, 469-73, 509 O'Leary, John, 46, 57, 59, 71-2, 90, 95, 103, 118, 174,
Moran, David Patrick, 207, 229, 235-6, 240-41, 247, 176, 178, 211, 221, 223, 228, 305, 307; as prototype of
256, 263, 280, 325, 344, 364, 443, 458, 508 old republican hero, 42, 84; influence on the
Moriarty, J. F., 498 young WBY, 42-4, 53, 57, 112-13, 418; judgement
Morris, May, 65, 93, 137 on WBY’s work, 44, 69, 75-6, 156; lends him
Morris, William, 59-60, 63-5, 76-7, 81, 85, 87, 139, money, 65, 113, 135-6, 164; helps WO, 81, 95; low
201, 254, 274, 307, 309; 336 opinion of WBY’s magical researches, 102, 106,
Morris family (Killanin), 167, 169 120-21; supports Parnell, 113; and NLS campaign,
Moses, Stainton, 487, 618-19 (n. 143) 114, 119-24, 127; and 1798 Centennial Committee,
Mukherjee, Devabrata, 616 (n. 81) 190, 195; supports MacBride against MG, 333, 367;
Muller, Max, 170 death, 367, 385, 397, 400, 496; as portrayed in
Murphy, William Martin, 375, 423, 479-83, 495, 497; Reveries, 531
499-501 O’Looney, Bryan, 82, 86
Murphy, William Michael, xxv O'Mahony, Nora, 72
Murray, Gilbert, 290-91, 334 Orage, Alfred, 347
Murray, T. C., 440, 446 O'Reilly, John Boyle, 447-8
Myers, Frederic, 463, 525, 614 (n. 38) Orr, Elizabeth (formerly Pollexfen), 4, 16, 61
Orr, Geraldine, 21
Nation, 87, 93, 98 O'Shea, Katharine, 113, 520
National Library of Ireland, 29, 45, 89, 134, 200-201 O Suilleabhain, Eoghan Rua, 162, 178
National Literary Society (Dublin), xxx, 120-27, O'Sullivan, Seamus, 404
131-2, 205~6, 235, 358
National Observer (formerly Scots Observer), 75, 80, Paget, Dorothy, 137, 210
86, 94-5, 97, III, 113, 125, 129, 130, 176 Paget, Henrietta, 137, 142
National Publishing Company, 121-3 Paget, Henry, 66
National University of Ireland, see University Pall Mall Gazette, 61, 64, 86, 108
College Pan-Celtic Society and League, 71, 121, 197, 200,
Nesbitt, Cathleen, 444 204, 212, 247, 259
Nettleship, John Trivett, 12 Paracelsus, 525
Nevill, Lady Dorothy, 188 Parnell, Charles Stewart, xxviii, 2, 5, 30, 31, 41, 44, 55,
Nevinson, Henry Wood4d, 207, 245, 259, 269, 286, 59, 86, 113, 115-16, 126, 133, 150, 180, 190, 307,
290, 292-3, 469 313-14, 334) 375, 448, 459, 462, 468, 501, 519-20, 543
New Age, 347 (n. 12), 613 (n. 31)

633
 INDEX

Pater, Walter, 48, 108-9, 132, 155, 177, 346 Quaritch, Bernard, 100-101, 129
Paul, Charles Kegan, 82, 95 Quinn, John, 167, 292, 294, 319, 321, 324, 383-4, 407,
Payne, Ben Iden, 359, 366, 369, 412 426, 495, 508; collects WBY’s MSS, 40, 516-17, 623
Pearse, Patrick, 5, 220-21, 399, 410, 417, 523-5 (n. 77); and Where There is Nothing, 268-9;
Peters, Alfred Vont, 468 befriends WBY, 270-73; at Coole, 271-2, 326;
Phelan, James, 311 sends him Nietzsche, 272; as art-collector, 272,
Phelps, William, 514 450; patron ofJBY, 272-3, 302, 382-3, 516-17;
Pinero, Arthur, 534 intercedes with American publishers, 301-2;
Pirrie, William James Pirrie, first Baron, 422 organizes WBY’s USA tour (1903-4), 302-6,
Plarr, Victor, 107, 119, 474, 509 308-15; and MacBride separation, 331-2; helps
Plotinus, 50, 244, 400, 463 Abbey in USA, 377, 445, 458; quarrels with WBY,
Plunkett, Grace, 166 407-8, 428, 449-50, 511, 611 (n. 60); AG complains
Plunkett, Horace, 179, 185, 188, 189, 191, 197, 206, of WBY to him, 426, 503; affair with AG, 449-50,
2II-I2, 240, 311, 322, 383, 451, 570 (n. 62) 477; reconciliation with WBY, 516-17
Plunkett, Josephine, Countess, 500 Quinn, Joseph, 132, 154, 160
Poel, William, 385, 389, 484-5
Poetry magazine (Chicago), 433, 471, 474-5, 504, 506, Radcliffe, Elizabeth (‘Bessie’), 487-90, 502, 505, 517,
511 (n.), 515, 521 526, 618 (nn. 141, 142)
Pollexfen, Alfred, 9 Radford, Ernest, 107-8, 142
Pollexfen, Alice, see Jackson, Alice Pollexfen Raftery, Anthony, 236, 271
Pollexfen, Anthony, 3 Redmond, Joanna, 443
Pollexfen, Elizabeth, see Orr, Elizabeth, Redmond, John, 188, 206, 442-3, 448, 498, 522-3
Pollexfen, Elizabeth Middleton (grandmother of Redmond, William, 223
WBY), 4, 19, 125 Reid, Forrest, 528
Pollexfen, Frederick, 441 Reinhardt, Max, 447, 456, 511
Pollexfen, George, 4, 5-9, 19, 23, 71, 111, 130, 142, Renan, Ernest, 177, 186-7
143, 171, 180, 186, 193, 198, 294, 300, 452, 466; Rhymers Club, 107-11, 130-31, 142, 154, 416-17, 476,
character, 6—7, 246, 401; relations with WBY, 71, 509-10, 512, 520
431-2, 530; and Golden Dawn, ro4, 143, 170, 232, Rhys, Ernest, 63, 74, 76, 79-80, 95, 97, 107, 109, 118,
432; investigates fairy lore, 125, 246; casts 161, 167, 205, 469, 474, 476
horoscopes, 163, 170, 568 (n. 7); WBY confides Richardson, Dorothy, 161
in about MG, 200, 204-5; angry at WBY’s attack Ricketts, Charles, 108, 161, 257, 285, 291, 304, 321, 324,
on Queen, 228, 246; death, 431-2; portrayed in 352; 379, 385, 397) 399, 402-3, 416, 486, 519-20
Reveries, §29 Rising of 1798, 44; Centennial Association (1898),
Pollexfen, John, 155 179-81, 185, 189-95, 202, 209, 248, 570 (n. 64),
Pollexfen, Ruth, see Lane-Poole, Ruth 572 (nn. 115, 131)
Pollexfen, William (grandfather of WBY),3-4, Ritchie, Anne Thackeray, 292
9-10, 19, 21, 125, 529, 548 (n. 96) Roberts, George, 320, 335, 342, 392, 400, 420, 607
Pollexfen, William Middleton, 5 (n. 82)
Pond, James, 510-11, 513 Robinson, Lennox, 415, 422, 440, 445-6, 505, 515, 522
Pound, Dorothy, see Shakespear, Dorothy Roche, James, 444
Pound, Ezra, 305 (n.), 430, 485, 497, 520, 525; Rolleston, Thomas William, 39, 42-3, 86, 107-8, 113,
relationship with Olivia Shakespear, 153, 438-9; 118-19, 121-4, 127, 128, 131-2, 142, 146, 155, 197, 203,
WBY’s view of his work, 288, 514-15; influence on 233, 321, 383, 469, 476, 581 (n. 123)
WBY’s work, 434, 439, 475-6, 486, 490, 511, 520, Rooney, William, 223
525; arrival and career in London, 438, 473-4; view Roosevelt, Theodore, 305 (n.), 308-9, 314, 516
of WBY, xxvii, 438; and Dorothy Shakespear, Roper, Esther, 152
438-9, 517; possibly attacks WBY’s plays in New Rosicrucianism, 103-4, 106, 129, 139, 178, 244, 517
Age, 455, 612 (n. 9); and Tagore, 469, 471, 473; and Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 86, 187
Imagism, 474; with WBY at Stone Cottage, Rothenstein, William, 304, 469-72, 475, 485
502-7, 523, 525-7; publishes Joyce, 506; defends Rummel, Walter, 475
Y against Moore, 507; honours Blunt, 509-10 Russell, Edmund, 62, 86
Powell, Frederick York, 60, 65, 74-5, 139, 156, 217-18, Russell, Father Matthew, 82, 98
301, 564 (n. 16) Russell, George William (‘AE’), xxvii, xxx, 47, 53, 56,
Power, John, 93 114, 116, 118, 138, 162, 194, 219, 227, 232, 235, 308,
Prasad, Rama, 619 (n. 156) 322-4, 383, 458-9; early friendship, 42, 48-52, 72;
Pre-Raphaelitism, 26, 70, 80, 85, 157 disagreements over spiritual quest, 49, 51-2, 101;
Pritzel, Lotte, 618 (n. 133) relationship with WBY, xw, 73y 155, 178, 222, 336,
Probyn, May, 79 344-5, 542 (n. 1); WBY praises his work, 142, 148,
Proust, Marcel, 175-6 and condemns it, 350-1, 381, 596 (n. 107);
Providence Sunday Journal, 44, 95, 107 Russell’s millennial beliefs, 162-4, 185-6, 191-2;
Psychical Research, Society for, 103, 438, 462-4, 466, WBY dedicates The Secret Rose to, 176; work-
517; 526 patterns, 182; at Coole, 183, 196, 246, 248; and Irish
Purser, Louis, 91, 484 Literary Theatre, 185, 207, 210, 225-6; and IAOS,
Purser, Sarah, 35, 41, 47, 113, 205, 260, 2745 323) 334, 185-6, 191; marriage, 186; wants to whack Fiona
340, 382, 387 Macleod, 197, 237; and Literary Ideals in Ireland
Pyne, Evelyn, 79 controversy, 198-9; discusses WBY with AG, 204;

634
 INDEX

annoyed at Leader’s attacks on WBY, 240; Shaw, Dr George Ferdinand, 212

complains about him, 256, 266, 273-4, 340; Shaw, Norman, 60-61
conflicts over INTS, 260, 278g, 288, 295-6, 298, Shawe-Taylor, John, 279, 442
319-20, 328, 338-41; his Deirdre, 261, 320-22; and Sheehan, Daniel T., 364
Where There is Nothing, 267-70; and Joyce, 275-6; Sheehy-Skeffington, Francis, 364
disagrees with WBY about publishing, 336, 338; Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 29, 37; 49, 57, 85, 88, 132, 200,
opposes Playboy, 363-4; estrangement from 371, 550 (n. 42)
WBY, 404-5, 415, 428, 435, 486; intercedes with Sheppard, Oliver, 36
Griffith over Blanco Posnet, 410, 605 (n. 32); in Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 533-4
Hail and Farewell, 451, and modern art in Dublin, Sherlock, Thomas (Lord Mayor of Dublin), 493-4
478; and 1913 lock-out, 499-50; reconciliation Shiubhlaigh, Maire nic (“Maire Walker’), 324, 328,
with WBY, soo-so1 341-2, 344, 404, 423, 444-5
Russell, Violet, 186, 286 Shorter, Clement, 218, 327, 521
Ryley, Madeline Lucette, 535 Shorter, Dora Sigerson, 36, 207
Ryan, Fred, 211, 260, 279, 288, 340 Sickert, Walter, xxv
Ryan, Margaret Mary, 96 Sigerson, Dora, see Shorter, Dora Sigerson
Ryan, Mark, 112, 195, 202, 227, 229 Sigerson, George, 42, 122, 126-7, 202, 212, 363
Ryan, William Patrick, 150—s1, 160, 240, 360 Sigerson, Hester, 44, 202
Sime, Georgina, 515
Sackville, Lady Margaret, 259, 337 Sinclair, Arthur, 454, 497, 510
St Albans, Grace, Duchess of, 206 Sinclair, May, 469
Saint-Martin, Louis Claude de, 178 Sinnett, A. P., 45, 47, 551 (n. 72)
Sandburg, Carl, 516 Sinn Féin (movement), 70, 240, 275, 296-7, 328,
Sargent, John Singer, 373 360-65, 376, 383, 399, 408-10, 422, 428, 442, 458
Sarsfield, Patrick, 220 Sinn Féin (journal), 363-4, 404-6
Savage-Armstrong, George Francis, 126, 197 Sligo (town and county), 9-10, 14, 18-21, 23, 69-71,
Savoy, 136, 139, 153, 155, 157-9, 160, 164, 167, 177-8, 179 79, 90, IOI, 110, 125, 129-30, 143-4, 170, 182, 223
Schepeler, Alick, 474-5 Sligo Independent, 10, 77, 86
Scott, Charles Prestwich, 423 Smith, Pamela Colman (‘Pixie’), 257-8, 326
Scott, Sir Walter, 17, 530 Smithers, Leonard, 154, 158-9, 221-2
Scott, Walter (publisher), 63, 66, 97 Solomon, Simeon, 107
Serres, Michel, xxvi Somerset, Lady Katharine, 425, 435-6
Shahan, T. J., 306 Somerville, Edith Gnone, 89, 167, 251
Shakespear, Dorothy (later Pound), 153, 438-9, Sophocles, 99, 42
47345 525 Southwark Irish Literary Club, 63, 79, 118, 120,
Shakespear, Henry Hope, 152-4, 437 160
Shakespear, Olivia, 144, 155, 164, 175, 203, 223, 386, Sparling, Henry Halliday, 61, 74-5, 95, 554 (n. 8)
474, 506, 517, 609-10 (n. 17); background and Speaker, 136, 157, 277
personality, 152-3, 437; writings, 152-3, 259; starts Spencer, Herbert, 32
affair with WBY, 153-4; occult interests, 153, 463, Spenser, Edmund, 38, 269, 345, 373-4
466; WBY’s poems to, 157-8, 215-16, 436, 624 Stanislavski, Konstantin, 485
(n. 94); consummates affair with WBY, 158; Stannard, Henrietta, see ‘Winter, John Strange’
slackens off, 172-4, 175, 179, 182; revival of Starkey, James, 335, 339, 342
relationship (1900), 234; introduces WBY to Stead, W. T., 464
Pound, and to Hyde-Lees family, 437; possible Stephens, Edward, 604 (n. 198)
second affair (1910), 437-8, 610 (n. 19); and Stone Stephens, James (Fenian), 195
Cottage, 503-4 Stephens, James (writer), 404, 455, 486, 493, 499
Shakespeare, William, 99, 148, 199, 258, 413, 416 Stephens, Mary, 3, 5 (as ‘Ann’), 543 (n. 21)
Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, 424 Stepniak, Sergius, 60, 140, 268
Shannon, Charles, 108, 149-50, 161, 321, 326, 373, 385, Stevens, William, 76
397) 402-3 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 74, 135
Sharp, Elizabeth, 345 Stoker, Bram, 50
Sharp, William (‘Fiona Macleod’), 80, 81, 181, 193, Strachey, Lytton, 396
255; meets WBY, 80; communicates through Strang, William, 54, 314
Fiona Macleod, 165-6, 180; dramatic ambitions, Stuart, Thomas, 128
173, 179, 184, 207, 237-8; plagiarizes WBY’s work, Sudermann, Hermann, 281, 378, 382
178; and Celtic Order, 180, 186, 194, 196-7, 245; Sullivan, Margaret (Mrs Alexander), 54, 93-4
WBY’s attitude to Fiona Macleod, 196-7; falls Sutherland, Millicent, Duchess of, 314, 422, 441
out with Russell, AG and WBY, 197, 237-8; Swedenborg, Emanuel, 49-50, 96, 99, 101, 109,
WBY’s reaction to his death, 345 129-30, 222, 433, 463, 466, 522, 525-6
Shaw, George Bernard, 107, 157, 250, 319-20, 3595 Swift, Jonathan, 146, 412, 448, 606 (n. 47)
383, 414-15, 429, 506, 533, 591 (n. 89); meets WBY Swinburne, Algernon, 86, 88, 129, 616 (n. 69)
at Morris’s, 64; rivals for Florence Farr, 137; Arms Symons, Arthur, 138-9, 153-4, 177-8, 199, 216, 218,
and the Man, 139-42; hatred for the psaltery, 257, 222, 237, 270, 277, 287, 290, 337; 397; 400, 4975
263; John Bull’s Other Island, 325-6; Mrs Campbell 427-8, 567 (n. 87), 570 (n. 58), 585 (n. 94);
finds him less cultured than WBY, 380; Blanco influence on WBY, 99, 109, 263, 272 (regarding
Posnet, 409-11; chairs WBY’s Adelphi lecture, Nietzsche), 537; early friendship, 107-10; and
417; WBY’s judgement ofhim, 506, 591 (n. 88) French literature, 138—9, 173; as ‘decadent’, 154-6,

635
 INDEX

Symons, Arthur (cont.): Tynan, Katharine, 43, 39, 51, 53-6, 59, 63, 65, 68-70,
568 (n. 29); they share rooms, 155-7; and the 75-6, 87, 90, 92, 95-6, 99, 142, 146, 156, 160, 199,
Savoy, 156-8; in Ireland, 164-8, 365; not liked by 301, 335, 492; log-rolls for WBY, 39, 54-5, 73, 79;
Violet Martin, 167; breakdown, 391-2; takes 87, 96, 109, 111; meets WBY, 53, 553 (n. 107);
drugs, 570 (n. 58); helps Joyce, 585 (n. 94) literary works, 53-4, 70, 72, 75, 82, 86, 135;
Symons, Rhoda, 392 : relationship with WBY, 54-5, 68, 70-71, 78;
Synge, Edward, 420 possible proposal, 55, 72-3; her marriage, 72;
Synge, John Millington, 205, 260, 268, 303, 466, 468, irritated by WBY, 114; loses touch, 119, 136, 148;
470, 493, 507, 512; meets WBY, 172-3; mutual interview for Sketch, 132; enlisted by WBY in row
suspicion, 172, 356, 359, 383, 400-401; visits Aran, with Dun Emer, 350; her memoirs, 492, 526, 528,
173-4; visits Coole, 183, 246, 323; and Irish public 530
opinion, 270, 296-300; and INTS, 287-8, Tyrell, Dr Robert, 212, 430
294-300, 324, 338-43, 348, 352-8; relationship with
AG, xxix, 288; opinion of WBY’s plays, 318, 366, Ulster Literary Theatre, 320
374; love-affair with Molly Allgood, 348; tensions United Arts Club, 378-9, 383-4, 400, 416, 435-6,
with other Abbey directors, 366, 374, 380; illness 442, 463-4, 468, 482
and death, 385, 398, 399-401; literary estate, United Ireland, 69, 93, 113, 115, 116, 119, 120, 125, 126,
399-400, 402, 420-21, 604 (n. 198), 607 (n. 82); 133, 145, 160, 187
admiration for WBY’s work in general, 418 United Irish League, 227, 281, 332, 334
WORKS United Irishman, 195, 206, 211-13, 217, 220-21, 223,
Deirdre, 400, 403, 4133 Playboy ofthe Western 226-7, 240, 248-9, 252-5, 260-65, 268, 278-9, 293,
World, 357-67, 376, 399, 403, 408, 411, 418-20, 296-300, 318, 327, 332, 341, 3445 574-5 (n. 52)
44350, 454, 501, 505-6, 512, 515, 597 (n. 13), 598 University College, Dublin (of the National
(n. 29); Riders to the Sea, 287, 296, 312, 348, 446; University; previously the Catholic College), 334,
In the Shadow ofthe Glen, 287-8, 294-300, 348, 399, 408, 443, 481-2
363-4, 446; Well ofthe Saints, 320-21, 334-5, 378-9, Unwin, Thomas Fisher, 76, 95, 98, 110-11, 118, Looe
403 129, 130, 142, 148-9, 160, 214, 218, 234, 371, 396, 412,
457, 561 (n. 101)
Tagore, Rabindranath, 467, 469-73, 477, 483,
616 (nn. 73, 80, 81) Vachére, Abbé, 518
Taylor, Jane, 2 Varley, Isabella (formerly Pollexfen), 45, 301
Taylor, J. F., 42-4, 90, 121-2, 127, 146, 211, 367, 418, Vaughan, Ernest, 376
531 Veasey, Charles Cyril, 26
Taylor, John, 2 Vedrenne,J.E., 325-6, 359
Taylor, Thomas, 50 Vegetarian, 65-7
Teeling, Charles MacCarthy, 190 Verlaine, Paul, 109, 138-9, 381
Tennyson, Alfred, 82, 86, 88, 99, 129, 139, 199 Victoria, Queen, 168, 171, 227-8, 252, 469
Theatre of Ireland, 344, 363, 374, 383, 399, 404-, 408, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Philippe-Auguste, 135,
600 (n. 83) 138-40, 176, 186, 219; Axé/, 139-41, 175, 372
Theosophy (and Theosophical Society), 45-8, 50, Voisin, Abraham, 542 (n. 4), 543 (n. 12)
78, 85, 90, 99, 101-3, 133, 164, 306-7, 347, 470 Voisin, Mary, 542 (n. 4)
see also Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna
Thomas, Robert Palmer, 243 Wade, Allan, 397
Thomastown, estate at, 2, 9, 18, 24, 30, 57, 63, 382, 530 Wagner, Richard, 199-200, 212, 233, 251, 263, 269, 392
Thompson, Francis, 217 Waite, A. E., 176
Tobin, Agnes, 311, 392, 397; 497, 425, 438 Walker, Frank, 342
Todhunter, John, 12, 18, 37, 60, 69, 74-5; 77, 79, 82, “Walker, Maire’, see Shiubhlaigh, Maire nic
86, 99, 104, 107, 109-10, 118-19, 140-42, 205, 208 Walkley, A. B., 269, 292, 318, 534
Tolstoy, Leo Nikolayevich, 74, 269, 537 Walsh, Archbishop William, 169
Tone, Theobald Wolfe, 121, 145, 148, 179, 193, 496, Ward, Mrs Humphry, 424
524-5; Wolfe Tone Memorial Committee (1898), Watkins, John, 103
179, 189, 191, 195, 202, 226, 364, 572 (nn. 117, 132) Watson, William, 125, 295
Toomey, Deirdre, 202 Watt, A. P., 234, 258, 372, 396
Traquair, Phoebe Anna, 322, 348 Webb, Alfred, 42
Travers-Smith, Hester, 483 Weekes, Charles, 47, 146, 163
Tree, Herbert Beerbohm, 183, 326 Wells, H. G., 424
Trench, Wilberforce, 484 Wentz, William Evans, 389, 525, 603 (n. 154)
Trevelyan, Charles, 469 Westcott, William Wynn, 103-s, 165, 231, 431
Trevelyan, R. C., 470 Weygandt, Cornelius, 308, 315
Trinity College, Dublin, 6, 7, 28-9, 33, 35, 39-40, 43) Whitman, Walt, 42
120, 145-6, 148, 206, 220, 316, 360, 429-31, 443, 461, Whitty, May, 210
483-4, 523-5, 608 (n. 116) Wilde, Constance, 80, 104
Tucker, Edith Ellen (‘Nelly’; formerly Hyde-Lees), Wilde, Jane Francesca, Lady, 76, 90, 93, 95, 121, 155,
437-8, 463, 468, 502-3, 525 176, 295, 533, 557 (n. 94)
Tucker, Harry, 437, 468, 502, 525 e, Oscar, 132, 352, 385, 533; lectures in Dublin,
Tully, Jasper, 566 (n. 57) 35; WBY visits at Christmas (1888), 80-81, 557
Tylor, E. B., 525 (n. 94); reviews WO, 86; at Rhymers, 108-9;

636
 INDEX

scandal, 154-5, 519-20; WBY echoes ‘Decay of Cathleen, 210-11, on Wind Among the Reeds, 217;
Lying’ (1914), 512; Wilde praises ‘Crucifixion of and his wife’s death, 223—4; relationship with John
the Outcast’, 565 (n. 22) Quinn, 272-3, 382-3, 407-8, 515-17; return to
Wilde, Sir William, 130 Dublin (1902), 273-4; correspondence with
Wilde, Willie, 301 WBY, 351-2; at Playboy debate, 364; reports on
Wilkins, George, 35 WBY and AG at Morehampton Road, 375; moves
Wilkins, William, 32-3, 45 to New York, 382-3; WBY wants him to write his
Williams, Charles, 465 autobiography, 477, 492-3, 516; his life in New
Williams, William Carlos, 417 York, 511, 622 (n. 60)
Wilson, Eileen, 92, 331, 558 (n. 14), 592 (n. 3) Yeats, Mary (‘Mickey’), 23
Wilson, Margaret, 558 (n. 14) Yeats, Mary Cottenham (‘Cottie’; Mrs Jack Yeats),
Wingfield, Kate, 487 155, 315-16, 322, 411
‘Winter, John Strange’ (Henrietta Stannard), 90 Yeats, Matthew, 30-31, 35, 57
Woodford, A. F. A., 103 Yeats, Robert Corbet, 13, 16, 21-2
Woodman, W. R., 103 Yeats, Susan (formerly Pollexfen), 4, 20-22, 27-8,
Wood-Martin, W. G., 69, 71 94, 125, 155, 432, 530; marriage, 1, 6-8, 11; character,
Wriedt, Etta, 464-6, 487, 502, 517, 519, 614 (n. 42) 11, 546 (n. 37); depression, 21, 30-31; in Dublin
Wright, Claude Falls, 47 (1880s), 30-31; strokes and ill-health, 61-2, 155;
Wyndham, George, 252, 298, 425 death, 223-4
Wynne, Frances, 110 Yeats, Susan Mary (‘Lily’), 3, 5, 10, 13-14, 18, 22, 28,
31, 34, 36, 59, 61, 76, 91, 96, 125, 129, 150, 155, 223,
Yeats, Benjamin, 1, 542 (n. 3) 246, 341, 392, 413, 524; relationship with WBY, 13,
Yeats, Benjamin William, 1, 542 (n. 3) 156; interest in ghosts, 50; embroidery-work, 65,
Yeats, Elizabeth Corbet (‘Lolly’), 13-14, 31, 36, 59, 155, 322, 468, 528, 6or (n. 119), 624 (n. 127); hears
61, 91, 94, 274-5, 300, 341-2, 350-51; character, 14, ‘Innisfree’, 79; happy at Blenheim Road, 156;
546 (n. 37); relationship with WBY, 14; records returns to Dublin, 274-5; and Dun Emer, 274-5,
life in Bedford Park, 61-3, 78; printing and 316-17, 332; defends Jack’s work to JBY, 322; and
artwork, 65, 134, 155, 274, 317, 350; sets up Dun Cuala, 380; visits New York, 382; and George
Emer, 274-5; prints In the Seven Woods, 300-301; Pollexfen’s death, 431-2; on Blanco Posnet, 410-11;
disagreements with WBY, 341-2, 350-51, 595-6 on the fortunes of the Abbey, 414, 423-4; and
(nn. 102, 104); sets up Cuala, 380, 601 (n. 119); Ruth Pollexfen (Lane-Poole), 441; helps WBY
prints Reveries, 527 with his autobiography, 451-2, 508-9, 527-9; as
Yeats, George, see Hyde-Lees, George family historian, 542 (n. 4)
Yeats, Isaac, 375 Yeats, Thomas, 7
Yeats, Jack, 12-14, 18, 20, 91, 134, 318, 431-2; Yeats, William Butler, Reverend, 2, 9, 23, 28, 168, 411,
character, 14, 322, 600 (n. 86); and Sligo, 14, 18; 543 (n. 8), 545 (n. 16)
cheers up Blenheim Road, 14, 61, 94; early
YEATS, WILLIAM BUTLER
commercial work, 65-7, 98; relationship with
JBY, 94, 322, 375, 432; with WBY, 96, 322, 350-52; BACKGROUND: birth, 13, 15; childhood, 13-17, 24-5,
AG tries to patronize him, 187, 195, 250; at Coole, 27, 527-31, 546 (n. 65), 547 (nn. 66, 72, 80);
271-3; drawings, 271, 310, 351; SMY’s faith in him, education (London) 16-17, 24-7 (Dublin) 31-3
322; and the Abbey, 326, 468; and visions, 389; and (art school) 36, 254, 530; reading and spelling
circuses, 586 (n. 27) difficulties, 17; attempts to learn French, 74, 139,
PAINTINGS 143, 393} self-education, 89-90
Bachelor’s Walk, In Memory, 522; Farewell to Mayo, CHARACTER: vagueness, 16, 55~6, 60, 3795 liking for
591 (n. 79); Memory Harbour, 19, 87, 527 gossip, xxvii, 32, 171; sense of humour, 32, 171, 183,
Yeats, Jane Grace (formerly Corbet; WBY’s 451; intellectual name-dropping, 32; dominating
grandmother), 2, 13, 17 personality, 49, 376; combativeness, 55, 135, 341-2,
Yeats, Jane Grace (short--lived sister of WBY), 13 344-6; diligence, 58, 89-90; resilience, 148, 150,
Yeats, Jervis, 542 (n. 3) 243-4; shyness, 285, 437-8, 451; self-doubt, 426-8
Yeats, John, Reverend, 2,7 FAMILY: relationship with sisters, 13-14, 156, 350-52;
Yeats, John Butler, xxv, 1-2, 14, 25, 35, 37) 45, 70, 81, with JBY, 15-16, 27, 28, 58, 94, 156, 351-2, 432,
96, 105, 126-7, 199, 207, 214, 330, 332, 379, 414, 5265 528—9; interest in family background, 375, 397,
attitude to England and Englishness, 3, 39-40; to 507-9, 526-31, 603-4 (n. 181); autobiographical
America, 3, 382-3; and Pollexfens, 4, 8-9, 12-13; explorations, 416, 418-21, 432, 451-2, 477, 492-3,
character, 6, 529; sociability, 6, 8, 11-12, 27, 60-61, 510, 512, 521-2, 526-31
383; early career, 6, 10-12; marriage, 6-8; and HEALTH: possible infantile tuberculosis, 16, 546
money, 7, 9, 18, 26, 57, 61, 65-6, 273, 317, 4325 511, (n. 65); influenza, 96, 264; depression, 96, 118;
622 (n. 60); to Trinity College, 7, 295 35, 316, 430, teeth, 125; smoking, 133, 398; eyesight, 136, 188,
550 (n. 34); portrait-painting, 12, 26-7, 40, 42, 45, 258, 264, 321; sick headaches, stress, exhaustion,
54, 57, 64, 94, 132, 187, 195, 273, 328; relationship 219-20, 403; digestive illness and rheumatism,
with WBY, 15-17, 27-8, 58, 94, 383,432, 528-9, 576 464, 468, 477, 486
(n. 93); influence on WBY’s views, 28, 58, 68, 75, LITERARY INVOLVEMENTS: early literary interests
416, 448, 454, 492-3, 51, 521, 530; Dublin life in and writings, 27, 29, 37-8, 55, 542 (n. 1), 551 (n. 47);
1880s, 28-31, 43; and Irish politics, xxx, 31; move first publications and journalism, 37, 44, 59-60,
back to London (1886), 57; and his children, 94, 63-8, 74-7, 89-90, 94-6, 254; work-processes, 52,
134, 156, 375, 549 (n. 124); views on Countess 182, 219, 371, 390, 421, 430-31, 468, 475-6, 526-31;

637
 INDEX

Yeats, WILLIAM BuTLeR (conz.): lecture, 1903), 312-13 (Emmet speech, 1904), 315,
LITERARY INVOLVEMENTS (cont): 460-61 (on Home Rule) 494 (Lane’s gallery), 500
earnings, 63, 94-5, III, 164, 234, 266, 309, 312, (1913 lock-out), 511-12; and Hugh Lane’s
314-15, 371, 396, 412, 424, 433-4, 457, 486-7, 504, campaign, 327-8, 477-83, 493-8, 501
511, 568 (n. 13), 575 (n. 65), 577 (n. 35); 590 (n. 47), THOUGHT AND INFLUENCES: views on painting,
597 (n. 10), 607 (n. 96), 613 (n. 21); and publishers, 36, 482; Indian philosophic interests, 47-8, 244,
76, 81-2, 95, 111, 148-50, 275, 300, 316, 335-6, 346, 470, 472-3, 552 (nn. 80, 84); and Neo-Platonism,
371, 577-8 (n. 36), 594-5 (nn. 78, 79); revisions, 82, 50, 244, 463, 505, 525-6; adoption of‘mask’, 58, 90;
182, 397, 456-7, 486; interest in chanting, 257-8, and ‘Celticism’, 63, 71, 73, 77, 86, 107, 110, 131-2,
263, 266-7; and James Joyce, 275-8, 585 (nn. go, 177-8, 183-5, 196-7, 246-7, 566 (n. 60); and
91, 96); change in style c. 1902, 302; and university Symbolism, 109, 139, 474; theory of ‘Moods’, 147,
jobs, 408, 429-31, 441, 483-4; and Academic 159; use of a/ter egos in his work, 162, 427, 465-7;
Committee of English Letters, 424-6, 439, and ‘popularity’, 255—6, 282, 285-6; and
456, 471, 486, 620 (n. 2); and Civil List pension, philistinism, 256, 327-8, 400, 479-83; and elitism,
425-9, 4303 at Stone Cottage with Pound, 324, 333, 369, 385, 411-12, 434-5, 441-3, 450, 452,
502-7 461-2, 479-83, 501, 529-30; importance of Synge’s
LOVE-LIFE: attractiveness to women, 34, 54-5, 171, work to him, 358-67, 381, 400-401, 416—21, 432,
218, 308, 316; sexual tensions, 33-4, 72, 89, 158, 493, 501, 515, 522, 526, 531; effect ofItalian art and
173-4, 182-3; love-affair with Laura Armstrong, culture on, 367-9; and French art, 388-9; Japanese
34, 68; Olivia Shakespear, 70, 152-4, 164, 173-6, influences, 390, 505, 525; visits Mont-Saint-
437) 567 (n. 82); Florence Farr, 137, 290-91, 368, Michel, 421
383; and MG, 87-8, 92-3, 113-14, 127-8, 138-9, see also Johnson, Lionel; Symons, Arthur
153, 157, 175-6, 179, 201-5, 230-31, 333, 386-9, SOCIAL LIFE AND MOVEMENTS: in London, xxvii,
391-6, 407; reaction to her marriage and XXX, 63, 80-81, 90, 94, 161, 237; drug-taking, 109,
separation, 284-7, 330-34, 586 (n. 8); and Mabel 178, 182-3, 196, 204; visits to Paris, 138-40, 172-3,
Dickinson, 383-5, 488-9 194, 205, 207, 384, 386-9, 393-4, 439-40, 517-19
see also individual entries (see also Gonne, Maud); and Woburn Buildings,
OCCULT AND SPIRITUAL INTERESTS: and fairy 154, 158, 160-61, 187, 221-2, 393, 433, 613 (n. 21); life
lore, 21, 77-8, 130-33, 389, 439-40, 526, 563 (n. 69); in Temple, 155-7; to Aran, 166-7; at Coole, 181-3,
Theosophy, 46-8, 101-4 (see a/so separate entry); 189, 195, 218-19, 235-6, 246-9, 266-70, 288, 294,
magical studies, xxv, 48-52, 505, 515, 553 (n. 94); 319, 321-2, 324, 337, 346, 370-71, 389-91, 408, 468,
seances and spiritualist investigations, 51, 73, 202, 507; to Italy, 367-9, 381
447, 462-9, 487-91, 502-3, 514, 517-19, 525-6, 530, see also Gregory, Augusta, Lady
614 (nn. 33, 34, 35) (see also Leo Africanus); and THEATRE: XXix, 137, 139-42, 179, 183-5, 188-9, 197,
religion in general, 64, 84-5, 169, 268-9, 501; and 200, 205-14, 221, 225-6, 235, 250-54, Chapter ro
folklore, 74, 76, 79-80, 129-30, 136-7, 170-71, 456,
463-4, 526; and Golden Dawn, 101, 103-7, 129,
passim, 317-29, 334-44, 346-9, 352-8, 369-70,
373-82, 402-6, 413-17, 421-4, 429, 439-40, 446—7,
132, 231-4, 241-5, 355-6, $25, 579 (nn. 67, 70, 76); 4537, 484-5, 505-6, $1112, 533-7, 592-3 (nn. 25,
millennial expectations, 162-6; Celtic Rituals and 39); ‘Theatre of Beauty’, 257-8; ‘Society of the
Order, 164, 180, 186-7, 191, 196-7, 203, 213, 233-4, Theatre’, 484-5
237-8, 243-5, 247, 287, 579 (n. 79); and astrology, see also Abbey; Craig, Gordon; Masquers
XXX, 10, 20I, 237, 251, 320, 331, 357 383, 386, 389,
393» 434, 437, 506, 602(n.140) WORKS
POLITICS AND NATIONALISM: XXVviil—xxix, 43-4, POETRY COLLECTIONS (in order of publication):
55, 62, 106-7, 113-15, 126-7, 131-2, 179-81, 189-95, Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland (ed.), 75, 85, 95;
212-13, 226-30, 265, 300, 362-7, 375, 399, 405, 412, A Book ofIrish Verse (ed.), 143, 145-8, 197, 218; WO,
418-21, 441-3, 447-9, 457-62, 470-71, 523-5, 565 78, 81-7, 90, 95, 100, III, 129, 149, 250, 397; The
(n. 3); and Catholicism, 35, 98, 168, 176-8, 209-10, Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics,
240-41, 280-81, 286-7, 298-300 (visit to Notre 122; Poems (1895), 148-52, 160, 208, 214, 218, 234,
Dame seminary, 311, 444, 461), 338, 443, 448, 314, 396, 486; The Wind Among the Reeds, 130, 492,
458-62, 481-2, 494, 500-501, 531, 566 (n. 50), 597 508-9, 520-22, 526; In the Seven Woods, 275, 287,
(n. 134) 300-302; Poems 1899-1905, 336, 346, 358, 371, 412,
PUBLIC LIFE: relationship with Irish opinion, 38,
424, 457; Collected Works in Verse and Prose, 217,
4475, 734, 119-24, 143, 264-5, 280-81, 291-2, 269, 370 ~73, 396-7, 400, 457, 486, 521, 531, 599
299-300, 326, 435, 441, 479-83, 507, 574 (n. 31); (n. 47); Poems: Second Series, 424; The Green
reputation, xxv, 58, 109-10, 128-9, 135-6, 142, 160, Helmet and Other Poems, 388, 424, 434-5, 520-21;
218, 371, 396-7, 454-5, 474, 485, 512-13, 515, 589 Poems Written in Discouragement, 492, 497, 501;
(n. 11); and NLS (Dublin), xxx, 114-15, 117-25, Responsibilities, 490, 492, 508-9, 520-22, 526;
562-3 (nn. 26, 31, 42, 51); and ‘Best Irish Books’ Seven Poems anda Fragment, 477; Collected Poems,
controversy, 145-8; and the Irish language, 220, 82
235-6, 255) 263, 298, 304, 312, 363, 417, 458-9, 578 unpublished: ‘The Flame of the Spirit’, 117;
(n. 44), 598 (n. 19); and Dun Emer/Cuala, 275, ‘The Rosy Cross Lyrics’, 117
300-301, 316-17, 322, 350-52, 595-6 (nn. 102, 104), INDIVIDUAL POEMS (by V’Ptitle; ifnot in VP, by
624-5 (n. 127); American tours, (1903-4) 302-17, the title under which they appear in the text):
345, 5337, 588 (n. 81), (1911) 444-50, (1913) 510-17; Adam’s Curse, xxx, 182, 282-3, 302, 507; Against
as a public speaker, 305, 307, 309 (Carnegie Hall Unworthy Praise, 434-5; All Things can Tempt

638
 INDEX

me, 390; The Arrow, 301, At Galway Races, 390, When You are Old, 117, 119; When You are Sad,
435; At the Abbey Theatre, 455; Baile and Aillinn, 119; The White Birds, 114; The Witch, 520-21;
250, 301; The Ballad of Father O’Hart, 76; The The Withering of the Boughs, 235, 301; Words,
Ballad of Moll Magee, 69; The Cap and Bells,
215; A Coat, 520; The Cold Heaven, xxx, 490-91; unpublished: T will not in grey hours revoke’,
Cycles Ago, 116-17; A Dawn-Song, 56; Down by 138-9; ‘Subject for Lyric’, 238-9
the Salley Gardens, 69; A Drinking Song, 435, PLAYS AND DRAMATIC POETRY: Cathleen ni
609 (n. 8); Easter 1916, 495; Ego Dominus Tuus, Houlhan, 248-9, 258, 260-62, 279, 287, 302, 312,
518-19; A Faery Song, 114; Fallen Majesty, 475, 318-19, 320, 322, 324, 328, 348, 364-5, 393, 411, 428,
520; The Fascination of What’s Difficult, 418; 440, 513, 580 (n. 95), 591 (n. 85); The Countess
The Fiddler of Dooney, 216-17; The Folly of Kathleen, 97, 110-0, 121, 125, 129, 149-51, 203-4,
Being Comforted, 301; A Friend’s Illness, 398; 207-14, 230-31, 248, 251, 252-3, 260-61, 276, 287,
Friends, 436, 520, 609-10 (n. 17); The Grey Rock, 290, 302, 316, 349, 363, 393-4, 424, 436, 449,
468, 476, 504, 520; He bids his Beloved be at 456-7, 468, 475, 483, 486; Deirdre, 321, 328, 352-3,
Peace, 157; He gives his Beloved certain Rhymes, 37» 372» 374» 392-3, 403, 440, 444; Diarmuid and
157; He hears the Cry of the Sedge, 215; He Granta, 221, 236-7, 250-53, 319, 451, 575-6 (n. 81);
remembers Forgotten Beauty, 215; He thinks of The Golden Helmet, 382; The Green Helmet, 425,
his Past Greatness when a Part of the 433-4, 440, 510; The Hour-Glass, 278, 281, 289, 292,
Constellations of Heaven, 215; He thinks of those 318, 370, 390, 422, 433, 435, 440, 456, 463, 520; The
who have Spoken Evil of his Beloved, 196; He Island ofStatues, 34, 37-8, 81, 87; The King’s
wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, 216; He wishes Threshold, 291, 295-300, 304, 316, 318, 321, 334, 372
his Beloved were Dead, 215; His Dream, 434, 609 398, 440, 514, 519; The Land ofHeart's Desire,
(n. 5); The Hosting of the Sidhe, 474; The Hour 137-8, 140-42, 145, 152, 226, 248, 250, 252, 302, 310,
before Dawn, 520; How Ferencz Renyi Kept 319, 456, 487; Mosada, 37-40, 52, 55, 85, 246, 551
Silent, 56, 70; In Church, 96; In the Seven (n. 55); (adaptation of )Oedipus Rex, 334, 410, 413,
Woods, 301; Into the Twilight, 128; Kanva on 455-6, 612-13 (n. 13); On Baile’s Strand, 275, 300,
Himself, 85; King and No King, 395-6; King 302, 312, 315-16, 321, 326, 328, 336, 346, 352, 366,
Goll, 85; The Lake Isle of Innisfree, 72, 78-9, 109, 440, 485, The Player Queen, 380, 385, 389, 393, 398;
135, 233, 311, 497, 557 (n. 90); Leda and the Swan, 402, 411-12, 429, 440; Plays for an Irish Theatre,
556 (n. 64); A Legend, 66-7; Lift the White 440; The Pot ofBroth, 250, 279, 302, 318, 348, 359,
Knee, 610 (n. 31); Love and Death, 37; The Lover 372; 377; The Shadowy Waters, 56-7, 137-8, 140, 143,
mourns for the Loss of Love, 173-4, 215; The 149, 172, 174, 183, 186, 218-19, 226, 234, 238, 251, 289,
Lover pleads with his Friend for Old Friends, 196; 318, 336-7, 352-3, 372, 380, 424, 440, 591 (n. 76);
The Lover tells of the Rose in his Heart, 215; A Time and the Witch Vivien, 37, 85; The Unicorn
Lovers’ Quarrel among the Fairies, 85; Lug na from the Stars, 269-70, 370, 374; Where There ts
Gall, 69; The Magi, 520; The Man who Dreamed Nothing, 244, 250, 267-70, 274-5, 279, 321, 372, 451,
of Faeryland, 109; A Man Young and Old, 393-4; 583-4 (n. 55), 584 (n. 63)
The Mask, 429, 435; A Memory ofYouth, 467-8, CRITICAL AND POLEMICAL ARTICLES, ESSAYS
475, 520; Miserrimus, 149; The Mountain Tomb, AND JOURNALISM: ‘The Academic Class and
467, 475, 520; Mourn — and Then Onward}, 116; the Agrarian Revolution’, 206; ‘America and the
Never Give all the Heart, 316; The New Faces, Arts’, 316; the Arrow, 353, 365, 368; ‘The Celtic
477, 617 (n. 104); No Second Troy, 395, 435; The Element in Literature’, 187, 293; “The Freedom of
Old Age of Queen Maeve, 301; Old Memory, 316; the Theatre’, 268-9; ‘Ireland and the Arts’, 246,
On those that hated “The Playboy of the Western 254; An Irish National Theatre’, 298; “The
World’, 1907, 399; Pardon, old Fathers, 508-9; National Theatre and Three Sorts of Ignorance’,
Parnell’s Funeral, 468; The Poet pleads with the 299-300, 418; ‘Nationality and Literature’, 131-2;
Elemental Powers, 216; The Priest and the Fairy, ‘The Reform of the Theatre’, 296; Samhain,
35; Reconciliation, 388; The Realists, 475; Red 253-4, 257, 262, 279, 298, 353, 365-6, 372, 3925
Hanrahan’s Song about Ireland, 301; Running to ‘Speaking to the Psaltery’, 257; “The Tragic
Paradise, 520; The Seeker, 85; September 1913, Theatre’, 429; ‘Symbolism in Painting’, 293;
XXX, 494-7, 521, 620 (n. 10); Song of the Faeries, ‘What is “Popular Poetry”?’, 246, 254, 293
37; The Song of Wandering Aengus, 182, 216; The EDITED AND CRITICAL COLLECTIONS: The
Sorrow of Love, 117, 149; The Stolen Child, 56, Cutting ofan Agate, 421, 445, Fairy and Folk Tales
75-6; A Summer Evening, 96; The Three ofthe Irish Peasantry, 64-5, 74, 76-8, 97; Literary
Beggars, 520; The Three Hermits, 486; To a Ideals in Ireland, 241; Representative Irish Tales, 98;
Child Dancing in the Wind, 467, 475, 520; To a The Works of William Blake, 98-101, 110, 127, 129
Shade, 520; To a Wealthy Man who promised a FICTION: “The Adoration of the Magi’, 176-7, 176;
Second Subscription to the Dublin Municipal ‘The Binding of the Hair’, 157; ‘The Book of the
Gallery if it were proved the People wanted Great Dhoul and Hanrahan the Red’, 125, 128;
Pictures, 477-81, 492, 496, 521, 620 (n. 4); To ‘The Crucifixion of the Outcast’, 565 (n. 22); “The
Ireland in the Coming Times, xxx, 122-3; The Curse of the Fires and Shadows’, 129; Dhoya, 55,
Travail of Passion, 159; The Two Kings, 476, 520, 68—71, 111, 118, 555 (n. 29); ‘The Heart ofthe
615 (n. 60); The Two Titans, 39; Upon a Dying Spring’, 129; ‘Out of the Rose’, 129; John Sherman,
Lady, 486; Upona House Shaken by the Land 34, 68-71, 78-9, 110-11, 118, 143, 175, 201, 396-7;
Agitation, 411-12, 435; Voices, 37; The ‘Michael Clancy, the Great Dhoul, and Death’,
‘Wanderings of Oisin, 56, 71-2, 78, 81-5, 372; 132, 136, 564 (n. 5); ‘Rosa Alchemica’, 159, 176-7,

639
 INDEX

Yeats, WILLIAM BuTLer (coné.): his Time’, 365-6, 417-21, 442, 445, 495; Memoirs,
FICTION (cont.): 79, 153-4, 158, 173, 182, 226-7; Reveries over
569 (n. 51); The Secret Rose, 111, 132, 159, 176-8, 180, Childhood and Youth, xxv—xxwi, 492, 526-31; ‘The
242, 258, 267-8, 466; The Speckled Bird, 6, 106, 143, Tragic Generation’, 138
164, 174-6, 203, 231, 233-4, 236, 245, 269, 346, 370, PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTIONS: Discoveries, 346,
421, 466, 548, 568 (n. 13); Stories ofRed Hanrahan,
336; ‘The Tables of the Law’, 176-7, 278, 368, 390 365, 368, 380-82, 389, 398, 445, 594 (n. 67); Ideas of
Good and Evil, 132, 134, 258, 277, 291, 293-4, 314,
FOLKLORE AND THE OCCULT: The Celtic Twilight, 372, 505; The Moods’, 293
129-31, 132, 163, 214, 267, 291, 314, 389, 530; Is the
Order ofR.R. et A.C. to remain a Magical Order?, Yorke, Father Peter, 305, 311
243-4; ‘Magic’, 245, 263, 293; ‘Swedenborg, Young, Ella, 286, 301, 338, 386, 393
Mediums, and the Desolate Places’, 464, 468, 490, Young Ireland (1830s—1840s), 44, 90, 120—21, 146,
595, 519, 522, 525-7; ‘The Tribes of Danu’, 170;
A Vision, 489, 594 (n. 65); ‘Witches and Wizards
402, 417-19, 442, 445, 452, 462, 493, 496, 528
Young Ireland League, 115, 118-19, 121
and Irish Folklore’, 526 Young Ireland Societies (in Dublin, founded 1885),
MEMOIRS: Autobiographies, xxvii, xxix, 10, 24, 32, 59,
39) 41, 43, 45, 53, 64, 79, 112, 115, 184, 189, 551 (n. 67);
62, 74, 79, 106, 108, 109, 112, 114-15; Dramatis (in Paris, founded 1896 as ‘L’Association
Personae, 167-8; ‘J. M. Synge and the Ireland of Irlandaise’), 172-3

640
 RARY
SAN DIEGO PUBLIC LIB
 R. F. POSTER |
W.B.YEATS: A LIFE
I. THE APPRENTICE MAGE

WINNER OF THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE 1997

In the first authorized biography of W. B. Yeats for over fifty years, Roy Foster brings
new light to Yeats’s bohemian early life of uncertain finances, love-affairs, avant-garde
friends, and experiments with drugs and occultism, to illuminate one of the most .
complex and fascinating lives of modern times. Dramatically altering traditional
perceptions of the poets life and art, The Apprentice Mage charts the growth of an artist’s
mind and of an astonishing personality, both of which were instrumental in the
formation of anew and radicalized nationalist identity.

‘One of the books of the decade... a labour of love that is never remotely laborious,
an improbably page-turning account of the growth ofa poet’s soul rendered with
the literary equivalent of acombination of spy-in-the-sky and microscopic time-
lapse photography’ — PAUL MULDOON, Times Literary Supplement

‘This is an amazing work of scholarship, vitalised by the affinities between Foster and
WBY, fastidiously controlled, wonderfully illuminating’ skAmMUS DEANE, Guardian

‘a marvellous combination of deep research, wide thinking and subtle balance—an

achievement worthy of its subject’. ANDREW MOTION, Independent on Sunday

‘A master work. Roy Foster is a first-class scholar, who is thoroughly at ease with his
subject, and writes beautifully about it. He has a deep respect for the poet without
feeling any need to be reverential’ CONOR CRUISE O'BRIEN, Sunday Telegraph
| . : P i 3 . 5
Foster’s skill and unforced pertinacity are beyond praise ... Itis not easy to see how
this book could have been improved, or how lovers of Yeats’s poetry ... could have
been better served’ PRANK KERMODE, London Review of Books

‘In his portrait of this singular, emblematic man, he has created a narrative of the
making not only ofa poet, but ofaliterature and nation’
JOHN BANVILLE, The New Republic

[This] luminous and heroic study is the first to do full justice—in its detail but also
in its balancing of those elements—to the versatility of avery great man. The sheer
amount of work (reading, research, and thought) which underlies each paragraph is
awesome: and the biographer, for all his rigour, has been not just merciful but kind,
offeri INQ aw armly human por trait’ DECLAN KIBERD, Tribune We

————
1907 (Tate Galley: London); detail from abinding design by
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0-19-288085-3
Althea Gylesfor The Wind Among the Reeds (British Museum).

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