Authors: Declan Kiberd
Another emblem there! That stormy white
But seems a concentration of the sky;
And, like the soul, it sails into the night
And in the morning's gone, no man knows why;
And it is so lovely that it sets to right
What knowledge or its lack had set awry,
So arrogantly pure, a child might think
It can be murdered by a spot of ink.
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Here the suggestion is of a superb animal destroyed by a stroke of a pen, a pen wielded by that very poet who earlier felt threatened with madness by the selfsame image. This is not just a wonderful example of Yeats as deconstructor, but a characteristic warning, repeated through many works, of the corrupting effects of the written word. The "spot of ink" spells the death of "life" and its replacement by "a logical process". This recurring debate between
faith and good works had been initiated decades earlier by Wilde, who said that he had put his genius into his life and only his talent into his work. Because
he
opted for art, Yeats cannot help looking over his shoulder at the road not taken and wondering whether it might not have been better to throw "poor words" away and start "to live". Hence, his view of art as something he might yet escape from. The argument between faith and good works comes to a head in the short poem called
"The Choice":
The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story's finished, what's the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity, an empty purse,
Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse.
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Because art is unthinkable in heaven, where all perfectly-attuned beings are (we may assume) silent, the poet must risk damnation and repudiate the heavenly mansion. Only in suffering here on earth are images endowed with the redemptive strangeness of art: "Only an aching heart / Conceives a changeless work of art".
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Such an art may soothe the pain it describes so well, but it changes or improves nothing: "what's the news?" All that can be said with certainty is that, like the Dancer in "Among School Children" who bruised body to pleasure soul, like the woman of "Adam's Curse" who laboured to be beautiful, like the poet who found fascination in what's difficult, so here, whether
he had chosen life or art, the speaker would anyway have found himself choosing pain, difficulty, sweat: "In luck or out the toil has left its mark". If mis option for self-improvement sounds like hard work and Samuel Beckett, then so it should: though both writers enjoy their cavalier moments of nonchalance and unalloyed ease, each is also humiliated by the curse of that rather Protestant Adam who learned that we pay for our pleasures.
This element in
Yeats's thought had never been wholly dormant. The opening passage of
Autobiographies
describes how the young boy in Sligo had heard an inner voice of accusation at a remarkably early age:
One day someone spoke to me of the voice of conscience, and as I brooded over the phrase, I came to think that my soul, because I did not hear an articulate voice, was lost. I had some wretched days until, being alone with one of my aunts, I heard a whisper in my ear, "What a tease you are". At first I thought my aunt must have spoken, but when I found she had not, I concluded it was the voice of my conscience and was happy again. From that day the voice has come to me at moments of crisis, but now it is a voice in my head that is sudden and startling. It does not tell me what to do, but often reproves me.
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From such beginnings, it is hardly surprising that Yeats should have come to define poetry as coming from the quarrel with oneself, a sort of secular application of the notion of "every man his own priest". He found that certain movements of the Protestant spirit might actually be conducive to, rather than inimical to, the creation of art: for, as he often observed, a mind cannot create until it is split in two. The puritan campaign against theatricality was, in fact, a self-defeating enterprise, since its call to introspection actually encouraged a man to play before himself, to stand back from himself and to try to imagine how the varied aspects of his own personality might appear to others.
Yeats's criticism of the provincial was that he lacked this spiritual discipline and so had no sense of his own presence, being doomed to define himself in terms set by a distant metropolis. Dowden was his tell-tale specimen: having failed to trust his own nature,
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he wrote as would any Englishman of Shakespeare and of Shelley. This was, at root, a refusal of self-election by a provincial mind, which is contrasted, at the end of
Autobiographies,
with Synge's sturdily independent sensibility, that of an authentic national artist, who is depicted as reading only the classics and never bothering with newspapers or with the views of his inferiors.
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So, by somewhat devious routes, Yeats came to endorse
Shaw's thesis of a connection between
Protestantism and nationalism. His instancing of Dowden as a provincial was not only a way of hinting at what an alternative metropolitan selfhood might be, but also an exposure of one who was deficient in me true puritan techniques of self-scrutiny. A failure of the religious imagination militates against the creation of an autonomous national identity, which in turn accounts for an apostasy in the zones of art. If there is no nationality without literature, mere is no great literature without nationality.
Many poems of Yeats achieve their electric power from the tension in them between two rival voices. Often, the overt structure of entire poems is based on such a debate, between He and She, or Hic and Ille (or, as
Ezra Pound mocked, Hic and Willie). This was a characteristic strategy of the post-Protestant imagination at the end of the nineteenth century: in
The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford,
for example,
William Hale White introduced "characters whose function is to speak for another side of his own mind and test ironically the strength of his developing convictions".
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Another of White's tactics – to set his mature ideas alongside those of his troubled, younger self – will be equally familiar to readers of Yeats. But it is in
The Winding Stair
collection that these elements of split and secularized Protestantism, implicit in earlier work, are brought to the surface in a deliberate and explicit fashion, and this most clearly in "A Dialogue of Self and Soul".
In seeking literary sources for the poem, it is usual to mention Andrew Marvell's "Dialogue Between Soul and Body", but an equally valid source might well be
Samuel Ferguson's prose work,
A Dialogue Between the Head and Heart of an
Irish Protestant.
On the surface, the poet appears to choose Self, rebirth and the impure satisfactions of image-making over Soul, heaven and that stonelike silence which seems to pervade it. A closer reading reveals a Beckettian encounter, not a dialogue at all so much as a set of non-intersecting monologues, contributed by two speakers who can bear any ignominy, stress or toil, except that of listening to one another.
Soul summons Self to climb the stair to the top and thence to heaven, where all thought is concluded; he proposes escape from the "crime" of birth (another Beckettian twist); and he offers forgiveness on condition that art is abandoned ("man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind") and silence supervenes ("when I think of that my tongue's a stone"). Self cannot accept. The sword in his hand, though a consecrated holy object with its place in sacred ritual, is also a work of art and of war. The entire second half of the poem is Self's attempt not just to embrace the world of pain, toil and image-making, but in doing so
to appropriate most of the vocabulary and insights of the now-silent Soul. Soul had asserted that "only the dead can be forgiven", but Self manages to sacralize art and, after confessing in classic Protestant fashion to himself, he is ready to "forgive myself the lot". Consequently, in the final lines, he is not just artistically creative, laughing and singing, not just "blessed", but also – like Coleridge's Mariner – redeemed by being once again able
to bless:
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.
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The appropriation of Soul's terms and gestures may legitimize that closing use of the plural "we". Soul, though the initial summons to the stair was intransitive, did once refer to the emblem discussed by Self; it was Self who remained absolutely averse to interaction, lest he lose in heaven his capacity for an. A living man, though blind and drunk, can make images (however repetitive his diction) out of human suffering; a soul in pure darkness of ancestral night would find the tongue a stone. As if to bear this out, there is something strangely moribund about the smooth surfaces of Soul's diction. Self is not just a more moving poet, but his lines have a deliberate awkwardness and cultivated jaggedness which anticipate Beckett's own use of repetition and his own cultivation of linguistic clumsiness:
. . . The mirror of malicious eyes
Casts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape.
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All those repetitions of "man", "faces", "What matter?", "I am content" are hardly suggestive of a careless cavalier ease. The final resolution, though real enough, has an element of strain and forcing about it – "I am content... I am content" – as if the anxious, conscience-stricken poet were not really certain that his sins were shriven at all. "We
must
laugh" precedes "We are blest".
In his magisterial book
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
Max Weber addresses this very point: the awful uncertainty and loneliness of a religion which, having done away with person-to-person confession, found it had also abolished "the means to a periodical discharge of the emotional sense of sin".
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The hardest person of all to forgive turns out to be oneself; and so the sinner is doomed to seemingly endless repetitions of the same narrative in hope of some
eventual expiation. Hence, Beckettian monologue and Yeatsian autobiography. Hence, also, the obsession with the word "remorse" throughout
The Winding Stair,
whether the "nights remorse" of "The Choice", the "cast out" remorse of "A Dialogue of Self and Soul", or the plainly confessed
"Remorse for Intemperate Speech".
The Self which forgives at the close of "A Dialogue of Self and Soul" is, by definition, a deeper, more comprehensive self than the past person who committed the crime and is now forgiven. Yeats's poetry places itself within the tradition of a "search for evidences", which encouraged a self-absorbed spirituality always keen to deduce symbolic meanings for the self from any minor mutation of weather or landscape. The old puritan demand for "justification" is now applied to nature, which is asked to provide a measure of the continuity and the distance between past and present selves. The idealized landscapes of childhood may evoke in Yeats a strong sense of national feeling (akin, perhaps, to that felt by a soldier dying for his country on foreign battlefields), but they are also the locales which evoke memories of unconfessed, hard-to-admit guilts, as in "Vacillation":
Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.
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In that poem, Soul canvasses the claims of an artless heaven; the Heart worries about its lack of philosophic theme, but decides that the fallen world of Homer, its images constantly awaiting transformation, is sufficient. However, the tide makes it abundantly clear that this conclusion is reached only with much vacillation.
The remorseful failure to obey the Protestant ethic of getting gold is brought about in "Vacillation" by the poet's submission to a deeper puritan imperative – his need to unlock, study and know his inner self. Like the subject of Beckett's 1938 novel
Murphy,
Yeats is caught between the desire for workaday success ("perfection of the life") and
self-interrogation ("perfection of the work"). Reflecting this, there is a tension throughout
The Winding Stair
between the attempted
sprezza-tura
of "what matter?" and the ignominy and pain known in the process of making a self. One part of Yeats, the idle, reckless, would-be-aristocrat, does indeed say "what matter?"; but another aspect, his
middle-class and rather puritanical conscience, stands "appalled".
That conflict, common to more than
Yeats and Beckett among modern Irish writers, had its roots in eighteenth-century Ireland, where a severe restriction of Catholic opportunity and a high degree of social mobility in the Church of Ireland community made for careers open to Protestant talents. The result was what the historian
J. C. Beckett has called "a kind of aristocratic egalitarianism – since it was generally safe to assume that an Irish gentleman was a Protestant, there was a temptation to reverse the order and to assume that an Irish Protestant was a gentleman".
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Even in that witty formulation, however, may be noted a fatal discrepancy which troubled John Butler Yeats between hard work and gentlemanly leisure: he complained that most
Protestants could not really be gentlemen, because a gentleman by very definition was not preoccupied with getting on in the world and yet Protestant Ireland seemed to think of little else.
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The theoretical self-image of the Anglo-Irish was aristocratic and gentlemanly, but in practice, as Edmund Burke sarcastically noted, they were a middle class masquerading as an aristocracy. Though Gold-smith, Swift, Sheridan and Berkeley were all recruited by Yeats in
The Winding Stair (or
his pantheon of ascendancy intellects, they were each of them impeccable representatives of the Irish Protestant middle class: hard-working men who lived by the pen and who felt, if anything, a very unYeatsian contempt for the idleness and mendacity of the rural ascendancy. Two centuries after Goldsmith's strictures, one of them,
Louis MacNeice, remarked that (with the exception of Lady Gregory's and one or two others) the
Big Houses contained no culture worth speaking of, "nothing but an obsolete bravado, an insidious bonhomie and a way with horses".
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They were brought down less by IRA firebombs than by a combination of fast women and slow horses – in other words, by a decay that came mainly from within. This was recognized by Synge when he wrote that they were neither much pitied nor much deserving of pity.
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