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Richard Lines
William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet and visionary, died just sixty years ago, on 28 January 1939 at Roquebrune on the French Riviera. Lovers of the English language will be familiar with some of his beautiful lyric poems, such as 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree', 'When You Are Old' and 'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven', all of which appear in a recent popular anthology entitled 'The Nation's Favourite Poems'.
Yeats, born near Dublin in 1865 into an Anglo-Irish Protestant family, was brought up partly in England, at Bedford Park in Chiswick. But much of his childhood was spent in Sligo on the west coast of Ireland with his maternal grandparents, the Pollex-fens, and it was here that his love of his native Ireland, its hills and seashores, its old Celtic legends and fairy tales, was nurtured. After leaving school Yeats attended the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin (his father, John Butler Yeats, was a barrister turned painter in the Pre-Raphaelite style) and here he met his life-long friend George Russell ('AE'), a mystic, painter and poet whom he was later to describe as "the most spiritual and subtle poet of his generation, and a visionary who may find some room beside Swedenborg and Blake".
At
quite a young age Yeats immersed himself in the works of Darwin and
Huxley and his reading of evolutionary theory destroyed the Protestant
biblical fundamentalism in which he had been raised. Yet he was a man of
deep religious instincts and in a sense his whole life was to be a
search for a deeper meaning in life which he was unable to find in
conventional Christianity. Many years later Yeats was to write in his
'Autobiographies': "I am very religious, and deprived by Huxley and Tyndall, whom I detested, of that simple-minded religion of my child-hood, I had made a new religion, almost an infallible Church of poetic tradition, of a fardel of stories, and of personages, and of emotions, inseparable from their first expression, passed as from generation to generation by poets and painters with some help from philosophers and theologians."
His spiritual search led him to the Russian mystic Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, (whom he visited at her home in Upper Norwood, south London in 1887), and into the hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, of which he was an active member for many years. In later life he was attracted by spiritualism and attended séances. It was while he was still in his twenties that Yeats discovered the religious writings of that most rational of mystics, Emanuel Swedenborg. A friend of those days was the painter and poet Edwin Ellis, with whom he collaborated on a complete edition of the works of William Blake, a huge task which took the two men four years to complete, their book being published in 1893. Ellis had spoken to Yeats of the relations between Blake's works and those of Jacob Boehme, the German precursor of theosophy, and of Swedenborg. Of this time Yeats wrote that he "...had an unshakeable conviction, arising how or whence I cannot tell, that the invisible gates would open as they opened for Blake, as they opened for Swedenborg, as they opened for Boehme,...".
Twenty years later he returned to Swedenborg. In the essay on Swedenborg in his book 'If I were Four and Twenty" he wrote:
"One day I opened the 'Spiritual Diary' of Swedenborg which I had not taken down for twenty years, and found all there, even certain thoughts I had not set on paper because they seemed fantastic from the lack of some traditional foundation. It was strange I should have forgotten so completely a writer I had read with some care before the fascination of Blake and Boehme had led me away."
It may have been Blake's sarcastic dismissal of Swedenborg in 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell' a great work but one written as a satire on Swedenborg (possibly as a reaction to the dissensions within the early New Church whose first conference Blake and his wife had attended), that had led him away from his religious writings. In his later essay Yeats wrote:
"It was indeed Swedenborg who affirmed for the modern world, as against the abstract reasoning of the learned, and discovered a world of spirits where there was a scenery like that of earth, human forms, senses that knew pleasure and pain, marriage and war, all that could be painted on canvas...""All this," he writes, "happened to a man without egotism, without drama... who wrote a dry language lacking fire and emotion, and who, according to William Blake, seemed but an arranger and putter away of the old Church, an author not of a book but of an index."
Yet Swedenborg, Yeats writes, "...de-scribes what he has seen, and only partly explains it, for unlike science which is founded upon past experience, his work, by the very nature of his gift, looks for the clearing away of obscurities to unrecorded experience".
In a remarkable passage in his essay Yeats writes:
"In the west of Ireland, the country people say that after death every man grows upward or downward to the likeness of thirty years, perhaps because at that age Christ began his ministry, and stays always in that likeness; and these angels move always towards the springtime of their life, 'and grow more and more beautiful' the more thousand years they live; and women who have died infirm with age, and yet lived in faith and charity and true love towards husband or lover come 'after a succession of years' to an adolescence, 'for to grow old in heaven is to grow young'."
(Yeats's quotations are taken from Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell, No. 414).
From his mid-twenties Yeats divided his time between London and Ireland. In Lon-don he was very much part of the literary scene of the Nineties and the founder (with Ernest Rhys) of the Rhymers' Club which met at the 'Old Cheshire Cheese' pub off Fleet Street. Other members included Lion-el Johnson, Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons and the Catholic poet Francis Thompson. Oscar Wilde occasionally attended when the gatherings were held in private houses. He was also part of a small group (including Bernard Shaw and Kenneth Grahame) which met at William Morris's house in Hammersmith. He travelled to Paris where he met writers of the Symbolist school such as Mallarmé and Maeterlinck.
In about 1890 Yeats became converted to the cause of Irish Nationalism. These were the years following Gladstone's failure to bring in Home Rule and the divorce scandal which brought down Parnell. He met and fell in love with the beautiful Maud Gonne, a young Englishwoman who had taken up the Irish cause with passion. Maud inspired much of Yeats's poetry. They never became lovers, although he once travelled to Paris to ask her to marry him and give up her life of politics, but she refused him. Maud led a restless life at this time. She had a long affair with a French politician, Lucien Millevoye, by whom she had a daughter Iseult. She later married Major John Mac-Bride (who became something of an Irish hero because of his leadership of an Irish contingent on the Boer side in the Anglo-Boer War) by whom she had a son Sean, but he proved a brutal and drunken husband. John MacBride was one of those executed for his part in the Dublin Easter Rising of 1916. He is mentioned by name (along with Connolly and Pearse) in Yeats's famous poem about the Rising which contains the haunting line. 'A terrible beauty is born', Maud lived a long life and died in 1953 aged eighty-eight, Yeats told of his love for her in 'When You Are Old':
"How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face;"
What Yeats hated about England was not the 'green and pleasant land' of his hero Blake, but the over-bearing jingoistic Imperialism of the time and the materialism on the one hand and the squalor on the other of the great cities, the dark side of Victorian life. He sought something purer and more spiritual in a rural Ireland still untouched by the Industrial Revolution. Some of his greatest work was in helping to establish an Irish national theatre in which he was assisted by his friend Lady Gregory, at whose house, Coole Park in Galway, he spent many summers. Yeats wrote many poetic dramas, including 'The Land of Heart's Desire' whose concluding song includes the words:
"For they heard the wind laugh and murmer and sing Of a land where even the old are fair And even the wise are merry of tongue;"
Perhaps these lines contain an echo of Swedenborg whom he was reading 'with some care' at that time?
His most famous play (written with Lady Gregory) invoking the spirit of Ireland was 'Cathleen ni Houlihan' in which Maud once played the leading role. Yet ironically it was the wealth of an English friend, the tea heiress Annie Horniman, which enabled the famous Abbey Theatre in Dublin to open in 1904.
In his fifties Yeats was to find domestic happiness with a young Englishwoman, George Hyde-Lees, whom he married in 1917 and by whom he had a son and a daughter. George shared her husband's interest in the spiritual and the occult. She had a gift for automatic writing and this became the basis for his work 'A Vision', published in 1925.
When the Irish Free State was established he became a Senator and in 1923 he travelled to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Yeats was undoubtedly charmed by Swedenborg's native city. The medal he received showed a Muse with a lyre "like [one of] those Angels in Swedenborg's vision, [who] moves perpetually 'towards the day-spring of her youth'". After the Nobel Prize ceremony there was a banquet at which Yeats made a speech mentioning Swedenborg, Strindberg (the great Swedish dramatist who was enthralled by the eighteenth century seer) and Ibsen.
Yeats never became a 'Swedenborgian' in a dogmatic sense, but, like so many poets and other imaginative writers of the last two hundred years, he was deeply influenced by the teachings of this 'Samson shorn by the Churches' (as Blake called him). In his autobiography he writes movingly of his belief in a spiritual world where "when we are dead, we live our lives backward, growing young again till some attain an innocence that is no longer a mere accident of nature, but the human intellect's crowning achievement". When he gave his testament to the poets of the future in 1937, he implored them to conceive an amalgamation of natural and spiritual phenomena, and he pointed to Swedenborg as a model.
