Inventing Ireland (43 page)

Synge's art is a telling example of all this. It is based on the notion that it is possible only to one person in one place at one time; and yet somehow it is a result of a collaboration, because "no personality is enough to make a rich work unique".
⁴⁴
Such an individual expressed the entire generation in the act of expressing himself or herself. In Synge's world, there is no split between private and public, between urban and rural, between science and art. Instead, the dreamer Synge looks back from the zones of liberation on the reality of a nationalist phase, which he frames and critically evaluates. In
Deirdre of the Sorrows
this is done by exploring the relation between the heroic tales and the fallen Ireland in which they are still told: but between the heroic ideal and the reduced storyteller, Synge can open a space of freedom. This is the gesture rehearsed in his poem
"Queens", which lists the ancient, magnificent queens of legend, but concludes:

Yet these are rotten, I ask their pardon,
For we've the sun on rock and garden:
For these are gone and you're the queen
Of all are living, or have been.
⁴⁵

That same gesture is repeated in his farewell to Celticist trappings in "The Passing
of
the Shee":

Adieu, sweet Angus, Maeve and Fand,
Ye plumed yet skinny Shee,
That poets played with hand
in hand To learn their ecstasy.

We'll stretch in Red Dan Sally's ditch,
And drink in Tubber fair,
Or poach with Red Dan Philly's bitch
The badger and the hare.
⁴⁶

Deirdre of the Sorrows
is Synge's fullest exposure of the bankruptcy of the aristocratic code, which yearns for its own dissolution, but which hesitates to end. These telling moments indicate not just the hesitations of the colonizer before his final departure, but also the difficulty of extirpating the nationalism left in its stead. The play, however, enacts Synge's protest against those other, more nostalgic reinterpreters of the legend who recruit a past for the war against the future, rather than using it in that extirpation of the present which alone makes the future possible. For the nationalist, the sloughed-off is always at that moment constituted and frozen as a work of art to be admired, but, for the radical artist, form is the promise of an environment yet to be born.

Many of Synge's finest ideas – including the notion of the Hiberno-English dialect as "an art more beautiful than nature"
⁴⁷
– have their origin in
Wilde's dialectical aesthetics. The moral necessity of lying if something new is to be created; the failure of the mirror of realism; the desire for a form which is beautiful to the extent that it is unprecedented; the use of the iambic line to distinguish the poet-hero – all these derive from Wilde and are rooted in a single conviction: that the artist is one who proceeds not from feeling to form but from form to thought and passion, for "the mere form suggests what is to fill it and make it intellectually and emotionally complete".
⁴⁸
The loveliness which has long faded from the world held scant interest for such a mind, which is more exercised by a loveliness yet to be made. The new man and woman of the emerging world must be, in the literal sense, barbarians, who no sooner know the forms of the past than they rid
themselves of them. Beauty is, by definition, unprecedented; and to measure it by the past is to measure it by a standard on the rejection of which its real perfection depends. To realize the present, one must realize every century that preceded it and that went into its making. In the end, however, the dialectic must work through its human agents, in
art as in politics: for as Wilde said:

... the past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what ought not to have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.
⁴⁹

Yeats's notion that
style might
be an agent of redemption is canvassed in the opening two lyrics of his
Collected Poems.
Both the Happy and Sad Shepherd tell the same sad story: but the former's glad heart ensures that it is finally given a melodious inflection, while the latter's gloom distorts the material to "inarticulate moan".
Le style, c'est l'homme:
content is again proven secondary, illustrative, pliable. Real joy derives less from right thinking than from achieved self-expression. Yeats has little to say and much to express: and what he expresses is the unimportance of ideas or content:

Go gather by the humming sea
Some twisted, echo-harbouring shell,
And to its lips thy story tell,
And they thy comforters will be,
Recording in melodious guile
Thy fretful words a little while,
Till they shall singing fade in ruth
And die a pearly brotherhood;
For words alone are certain good:
Sing, then, for this is also sooth.
¹

Art may
soothe
the pain it describes so well:
to
express an emotion may also be to purge oneself of it. If singing can be truth, then style itself may be the subject. Insofar as man pursues themes, he does not choose them: rather, they choose him:

There was a man whom sorrow named his friend . . .
²

The danger of a world constructed on a foundation of pure style is self-enclosure, a point illustrated by the imperviousness of the dew-drops to the Sad Shepherds overture:

But naught they heard, for they are always listening,
The dewdrops, for the sound of their own dropping.

Self-delight has its narcissistic limits, and so the attempt to communicate with a shell proves circular. Again, in
"The Indian on God", creativity seems to betoken self-enclosure, each person seeing God as a version of himself. Humans insist on seeing God as human, but Yeats knows that the soul may exist in many other forms. The parrot in
"The Indian to His Love" rages at his own image in the enamelled sea, fearing such self-enclosure but seeking the antiself. In the end, there is but one consolation: if pain can be transmuted into art, and assuaged by it, then something has been achieved.

Many of Yeats's early lyrics are written to a "traditional air", as if the style preceded their content; or else they rework traditional themes and images as if redeemed by Yeatsian style. In this manoeuvre, Yeats seems to be hoping to add a little of his own art, just as folktale tellers do before relaunching the story back into the impersonality of tradition: once again, the implication is that he is a sort of "Homer", a name to which such texts may in time be appended. The poet, in seeking to dramatize himself, seems to become pure medium, the poetry evolving more at the instigation of words and rhythms than from the pressure of felt experience. The fear is that he may lose touch with the popular mood "and learn to chaunt a tongue men do not know".
³
Style is, none the less, prioritized, irresistible, a mode of action and power, as against the antithetical world of thought, contemplation, knowledge. Love is given to style, because all dreams yearn to take their appropriate form, whether a man seeking a woman's or a God coveting the earthly. However, the fusion with that form is ever imperfect and incomplete, for, if it were fully achieved, the passionate emotion would be expressed and thereby lost. Many of Yeats's single-sentence "breath-poems" deal, indeed, with expiration, the dying fall into the moment of death.

Some attempt to conceptualize this method is offered in
"The Moods": bodiless souls descend into forms, and these constitute the "moods" which impel actions in the world, but the style or mood determines the content of an action. This allows Yeats to respond to the puritan charge of the bad faith implicit in
mimesis
with the counterclaim that art creates, rather than describes, emotions and moods:

Literature differs from explanatory or scientific writing in being wrought about a mood... argument, theory, erudition, observation are merely what Blake calls "little devils who fight for themselves", illusions of our visible
passing life, who must be made to serve the moods, or we have no part in eternity.
⁴

A style, like a mood, goes fishing for a subject in the unconscious, but, once expressed in an embodied form, the subject – as in
"The Song of Wandering Aengus" – may elude human control. The poet's attempt to recapture what he had created – a girl, a nation – is enacted by revision, by the attempt to see again and control all that floated free: but this proves impossible. The elevation of style over subject is possible only in that liminal, twilit world of wavering rhythms and half-said things, wherein the critical faculties are dulled but not annihilated. In these moments, the all-too-present danger is sentimentality.

"The Cap and Bells" is the fullest exploration in the early books of the process. It tells the story of a young queen who will only accept the jester's love (content) after first receiving quite separately its instruments, the cap and bells (form): yet another case of expression becoming the very condition of conceptualization. The jester must lose his powers of creativity, his expressive instruments, before he can be sure of her love. The woman who enables art thus becomes also its enemy, and so the female who castrates
is
art.
He
wants the woman, but she wants the desire of the man, an irreconcilable conflict. Like all pornographers, she substitutes a part for the whole, his instruments for his soul: but, of course, he has already done the same to her, in fetishizing her foot and her hair. While in the pornographic mode, she holds his cap and bells in triumph, and sings while he is castrated. His prophecy is thereby fulfilled: "I will send them to her and die".
⁵
Self-castrated, he can experience ultimately in death. Only after this death can his soul blend with her body and, at that moment, she also dies, reuniting with her beloved in song. In the hereafter alone are form and content perfectly at one.

It would be possible to read the poem in many other ways – the male, as slave to an unacknowledged
anima,
being compelled to risk all for a full encounter; the Irish artist in England abandoning the court jester's self-castrating role for a more authentic national art; the high price paid by the licensed fool for his plain speaking. But these are already obvious interpretations. The deeper life of the poem bespeaks a poet's ambivalence about his an and his subservience to image and symbol. Again and again, in early love poems, the poet encounters an exacting woman, whose cruelty makes necessary the very art which she then proceeds to jeopardize. No wonder that he may wish the beloved dead in those moments when she is not killing him. A volume like
The
Wind Among the Reeds
is deliberately organized around styles and moods which later, taken in consort, yield up a meaning. For style is here a mode of arrangement.

"Never Give All the Heart" might equally be read as a recommendation to throw energy into form rather than content: in other words, never to say it all in one poem, for, if one does, then
all
is lost in the act of expression. "The painter's brush consumes his dreams" will be one way of putting this; "our love letters wear out our love" another. The half-said thing is dearest, to lovers as well as to poets, since it still leaves them their role; and a passionate lover would, anyway, never wish to suspect that most of the passion was on the other side. Moreover, if one could seem to say it all in one poem, that could only be a dishonest appearance: recall the actress, described in
Autobiographies,
who could best mimic a feeling only after it was all but gone.

This raises the inevitable question about art as bad faith, but perhaps the notion of a false imitation of a true thing is more applicable to performers than to artists. The paradox in "Never Give All the Heart" is bitter and that bitterness is rendered in the jagged syntax and awkward repetitions. On the one hand, there is the need to "act", but on the other there is the impossibility of acting out of deep feeling. The answer is the Mask, a necessary fakery, which, if consciously and confessedly manipulated, is not vulnerable to the charge of bad faith. The Yeatsian/Wildean theory is uncompromising on this point: it is possible to fake a nation into existence via a style, and what is thus created need be no pale imitation but a radical creation. The exemplar for the nation is not to be slavishly imitated, but one who awakens each man and woman to the hero in themselves, "because all life has the same root".
⁶

Hence the rigour brought to the discussion of style in
"Adam's Curse", the point being that what seems a nonchalant aristocratic mode is actually hard, middle-class work:

A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
⁷

The poem is itself an example of the method: a conversation-piece built out of the rhythms of an apparently effortless everyday speech. The styles of the outcast groups, of beggar and landless labourer, are recruited to redeem an altogether more sophisticated but threatened aristocratic wisdom, by a writer who wishes to think like a wise man
but express himself like the common people. And the reward for such successful articulation is to be thought an idle trifler by the workaday bourgeoisie:

Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
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.
⁸

Yet a shaped singing style is not just a basis for "self-conquest", but also an escape from the hot-faced bargainers and money-changers, indeed the only answer to the question which its own success raises. In the end, Yeats will conclude that only the styles of the outcast classes can redeem the language of the nation. So, in the poem, he attacks the middle class, bitterly describing poetry in their terms (of work, reward, trade). Even more, he attacks those (including himself) who succumbed to the bourgeois disease of seeking for precedents in books, of imitating approved models rather than looking inside themselves. Of course, it is a functional irony that "Adam's Curse" adds to that tradition of learned love, in which all books become an endless rehearsal for something which never happens, agents of that delayed gratification which is the essence of the Yeatsian life.

That irony underpins many of the poems in
In the Seven Woods,
which seem anxious to extirpate "literary" precedents from a tradition, but end by adding yet another. The rejection of literary models is based, in part, on the knowledge that sometimes even a style can go out of fashion "like an old song": the dire prophecy of the Sad Shepherd may be fulfilled. If "Adam's Curse" established the fundamental affinity between artist and women in their joint labour to be beautiful,
"The Mask" echoes the idea in its call for a deliberate regulation of self-giving spontaneity. Masks, like assumed styles, are essential but problematic: they offer not the truth, but a way towards it. The poem suggests that women are seen as images more than as persons, and yet they must with labour maintain both of those aspects. The pretence involved in wearing masks may betoken a courtesy which hinders love, or it may make available the only viable form of expression. The tension between mask and face intrigues the man: however,
the woman rightly refuses to remove the mask, for she senses that the truth lies at that unknown point where mask and face, antiself and self, are one.

Since style is the mask from which the whole person may be inferred, so the
forms of an art may in time provide the synecdoche for a nation. This Utopian idea explains Yeats's yearning for the success of the Dublin Municipal Gallery and for the return to it of the Lane Collection of paintings. If the arts lie dreaming of what is to come, then the renovated content of a free Ireland may emerge when least expected:

And maybe I will take a trout
If but I do not seem to care . . .
⁹

The terrifying difficulties attendant upon such a creation are traced in
"The Magi", whose lines reach forward only to fall back, and whose slow accretion of clauses conveys a rising sense of expectation, reinforced by the thrice-repeated "all", which is yet unfulfilled. Even the opening word "Now" is so qualified by the following phrase as to be annulled; and that technique of self-cancellation persists all through:

Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side
by side, And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.
¹⁰

"The Magi" is really an anticipatory style looking for an enabling content, a form without a finalizing substance; and this technique of anticlimax will be used with even greater subtlety in the elaborate stanzas of later poems like "In Memory of Robert Gregory" and "Among School Children".

An anticlimax is precisely what "The Magi" accuses Christianity of providing. The unsatisfactory incarnation of the divine in a fallen human body offers some hint of the sufferings implicit in submitting to a single form; and this comes the more appositely in a volume where Yeats deals, for the first time, with the chancy, sordid, reduced realities of an all-too-flawed Ireland. The assumption of form can be a severe
experience of humiliation: the self-conquest of the stylist is won only out of an initial degradation. However, the poet, if he were to wait for knowledge, might never begin his quest: and so he must start with the
search for a form. William Blake saw the body as satanic, but Christ took that form; likewise, the artist-martyr takes on the weaknesses of the flawed medium which he chooses, before casting it off again. "Incarnation and crucifixion are one",
¹¹
declared Yeats, by which he meant that style and form, pursued outside the self by a poet, are fully known as one only at the moment of death.