CEUD BLIAN o shoin do rugadh William Butler Yeats. ‘Ach da nesclaiti an doras anois,’ dubhairt Richard Best liom la amhain, ‘is da dtagadh Oscar Wilde no John Synge isteach, ta fhios agam nach naithneochfainn iad mar bheidis nios sine is nios laige na mar ataim-se fein anois. Ach ni mar sin a chim iad.’ Thuigeas cionnas mar a chonnaic se iad:
I see them walking in an air of glory
Whose light doth trample on my days …
Is mar sin a chim Yeats. Is beodha anois e na le linn a bheatha fein, agus nil le deunamh agam ach an rud is doigh liom ba mhaith leis adearfainn do radh. Ba mhaith leis go labrochfainn an Ghaoluinn, mar biodh nach raibh aon teanga aige fein ach an Beurla (agus gur chuireas i niul do oiche amhain nach ro-mhaith a mheasas a bhi an Beurla fein aige) ba mhian leis nach bhfoghlui-meochfadh a mhac ach an Ghreigis agus an Ghaoluinn – niorbh fiu puinn leis an Laidin mar, dar leis, nar scriobhadh aon rud foghanta riamh innti – ach ba theanga na sibhialtachta an Chreigis, agus bhi gach aon rud eile le foghluim as an nGaoluinn. Nilim deimhnitheach go raibh iomlan an chirt aige.
This is the hundredth birthday of William Butler Yeats. His personality and work have never seemed more alive than they do now, which makes this a day of rejoicing rather than of regret. My own task is an easy one because I have merely to say a few of the things I think he would have wished me to say. I know he would have wished me to speak Irish, because though he was no linguist he was fascinated by the Irish language and literature. One night he told me that all he wished his son to learn at school was Greek and Irish. Latin, according to him, had never produced a real writer, but Greek was the language of civilization, and everything else a man needed to know could be learned from Irish.
Another thing he would have wished me to do – and which I must do since none of the eminent people who have written of him in his centenary year has done so – is to say how much he owed to the young Englishwoman he married, and who made possible the enormous development of his genius from 1916 onward. This should be said by someone who was closer to them both than I was, but it was obvious even to a casual acquaintance. It is not too much to say that if Yeats had not married, or indeed, if he had married someone else, that the story of his later work would probably have been very different. In many ways he was a most fortunate man; fortunate in his parentage, because it is not every poet who has a genius for a father, and most fortunate in his marriage.
He would have wished me too to commemorate along with him his great friends and collaborators, Lady Gregory and John Synge. He was a man with a genius for friendship; with a great memory for small kindnesses done him and a great generosity in forgetting injuries. No one without that sweetness of character could have detached Lady Gregory from her career as a London literary hostess and left her collecting folk stories in Gort, or John Synge from his Paris attic to live a lonely life on Aran. No one without it could have been so cruelly hurt at the bitterness shown to Synge in his last years. For a long time before Yeats’ marriage he withdrew gradually from Ireland and the Irish theatre to their great loss, but even that hurt he learned to ignore if not to forget. In this again, I think, we in Ireland may owe a debt to Mrs Yeats.
I have introduced the issues of love and friendship deliberately because in the summing-up of any man’s achievement there are always two things to be taken into account – the man’s character and the character of the circumstances he had to deal with.
The character of the circumstances is admirably expressed in his choice of a burial place, which my friends in Radio Eireann describe as ‘a quiet churchyard’. To the eye of the amateur historian like myself Drumcliffe is no Stoke Poges, but an important Columban monastery whose history reaches back to the sixth or seventh century. Indeed, Colam Cille may well have stood where we are standing now. If ever we in Ireland were to become conscious of our heritage, we should probably find at the other side of the road from the round tower the foundations of a beautiful twelfth-century church, and under the road itself, where trucks and cars pass by, we should find paved roadways, high crosses and numerous tombstones of abbots and kings. Yeats was not the first great man to be buried here; but this is the sort of Ireland he inherited, and that we still inherit – a ruined, fragmented country, divorced from its past. His father before him had inherited it, and on it he blamed what he thought were our faults as a people. ‘The faults of the Irishman,’ he wrote, ‘his foolish swagger and wild exaggeration of himself and everything, is because, notwithstanding his love for his native land, he is not allowed to have pride in it. The individual personality is enormously strengthened by the national personality – the Frenchman is more himself because of Paris.’
In Yeats’ youth he had been divorced from the religion of his ancestors by his father’s good-natured atheism, qualified by palmistry; and from the time he was a boy he set out to fashion a religion for himself from fragments of Greek and Indian mythology and the poetry of Shelley and Blake. In the same way by a system of education that is still with us he had been divorced from his country’s past, though its monuments were all about him, on Knocknarea, in Carrowmore, in Sligo and Dromahair; and in the same patient, stubborn way he set himself to re-create an Early Ireland of his own from a handful of translations of old sagas and poems. Even when he was an old man, you could still make him happy with some fragment of Irish literature he did not know, and this was not easy because he knew almost everything that had been written by an Irishman.
This is where the character of the man and the character of the circumstances met, for a fragmented country offers little to a young writer with a vigorous mind. If Paris strengthens the Frenchman’s character, Dublin enfeebles the Irishman’s. We must, I think, be the only civilized country whose universities have no chair of the national literature. Ireland would have killed Joyce if he had not left it; he felt sure it had killed Yeats, and told him so, a little too soon perhaps.
But in fact the same background that would have killed Joyce gave Yeats his opportunity. He had the sort of eclectic, synthetic mind that can always discover ‘the right twigs for an eagle’s nest’; the sort of mind that can build happily among ruins. He compared himself with the bee – ‘O honey bees, come build in the empty house of the stare.’ It needed a mind like his, strong, but full of sweetness to build in this empty house of ours, and to see beyond the quarrelling sects and factions an older Ireland where men could still afford to be brave and generous and gay.
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.
That is the real voice of Yeats; faithful to his own party, but never embittered, never unjust. Once, during his supposed Fascist period a certain famous Englishman approached him at a party in London and said, ‘Of course, you support Mr Cosgrave’s party, Yeats,’ and Yeats replied, ‘Oh, I support the gunmen – on both sides!’ (‘And the damn fool turned his back on me,’ he added when he told me the story.) Even his worst enemy he would remember for some kind or chivalrous gesture. Once when a journalist who had attacked himself and Maud Gonne died he said to me, ‘And yet all the time, that man knew one secret about Maud Gonne that could have destroyed her influence forever. I went to see him in his office and said, “You must never say that!” and he went on attacking us as bitterly as ever, but he never said it.’
He dreamed of an Ireland where people would disagree without recrimination and excommunication. When he opposed the Divorce Bill in the Senate it was because it made a further cleavage between Catholic and Protestant, and his speech begins in a characteristic way, ‘It is perhaps the deepest political passion with this nation that North and South should be united.’ One night he said to me, ‘You may live to see what I shall never see – the day when Irishmen can disagree without each demanding that the other shall worship at his own narrow conventicle.’ He was criticizing the greatest single weakness in our people, our tendency to turn everything we love from our language to our religion into a test of orthodoxy.
It is part of the fragmentation of our national life, and the part that is most injurious to our culture, for culture is an interpenetration and mingling of all the creative forces within a country. Because we leave our literary history to be written by Americans and Englishmen, we fail to see how in Yeats’ prime the language movement and the literary movement fed one another, and were themselves fed by other creative activities like co-operative creameries and the beautiful stained glass of Loughrea Cathedral and Cong parish church.
A poet’s work endures, but if it has been fruitful, it changes its meaning from generation to generation. This is Yeats’ hundredth birthday, and his first birthday into immortality. Today we establish a tradition, and I can only hope it will be a worthy one. I should like to think that as a hundredth birthday present we might do something that would ensure that no young Irishman would ever again grow up so ignorant of his own past; that we might establish a chair of Irish literature in one of our universities, or restore Sligo Abbey, which is as beautiful as any Oxford college, as a repository of the great collection of Yeats relics that Miss Niland has already acquired.
Through centuries after this, if our civilization lasts, others will speak where I am speaking now and other audiences will listen. I hope that what they will praise in Yeats will not be the things that we praise, for that would merely mean that we had left our work undone, and that the tradition we establish today may be the basis of another different Ireland:
That we in coming days may be
Still the indomitable Irishry.
Drumcliffe, June 13th, 1965.