Essays by George Orwell by Eric Arthur Blair

Author:Eric Arthur Blair [Blair, Eric A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Collections
Publisher: http://c3jemx2ube5v5zpg.onion
Published: 2010-08-30T16:00:00+00:00

W. B. Yeats (1943)

One thing that Marxist criticism has not succeeded in doing is to trace the connection between “tendency” and literary style. The subject-matter and imagery of a book can be explained in sociological terms, but its texture seemingly cannot. Yet some such connection there must be. One knows, for instance, that a Socialist would not write like Chesterton or a Tory imperialist like Bernard Shaw, though HOW one knows it is not easy to say. In the case of Yeats, there must be some kind of connection between his wayward, even tortured style of writing and his rather sinister vision of life. Mr Menon is chiefly concerned with the esoteric philosophy underlying Yeats's work, but the quotations which are scattered all through his interesting book serve to remind one how artificial Yeats's manner of writing was. As a rule, this artificiality is accepted as Irishism, or Yeats is even credited with simplicity because he uses short words, but in fact one seldom comes on six consecutive lines of his verse in which there is not an archaism or an affected turn of speech. To take the nearest example:

Grant me an old man's Frenzy, My self must I remake Till I am Timon and Lear Or that William Blake Who beat upon the wall Till Truth obeyed his call.

The unnecessary “that” imports a feeling of affectation, and the same tendency is present in all but Yeats's best passages. One is seldom long away from a suspicion of “quaintness”, something that links up not only with the 'nineties, the Ivory Tower and the “calf covers of pissed-on green”, but also with Rackham's drawings, Liberty art-fabrics and the PETER PAN never-never land, of which, after all, “The Happy Townland” is merely a more appetising example. This does not matter, because, on the whole, Yeats gets away with it, and if his straining after effect is often irritating, it can also produce phrases (“the chill, footless years”, “the mackerel-crowded seas”) which suddenly overwhelm one like a girl's face seen across a room. He is an exception to the rule that poets do not use poetical language:

How many centuries spent The sedentary soul In toils of measurement Beyond eagle or mole, Beyond hearing or seeing, Or Archimedes' guess, To raise into being That loveliness?

Here he does not flinch from a squashy vulgar word like “loveliness” and after all it does not seriously spoil this wonderful passage. But the same tendencies, together with a sort of raggedness which is no doubt intentional, weaken his epigrams and polemical poems. For instance (I am quoting from memory) the epigram against the critics who damned THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD:

Once when midnight smote the air Eunuchs ran through Hell and met On every crowded street to stare Upon great Juan riding by; Even like these to rail and sweat, Staring upon his sinewy thigh.

The power which Yeats has within himself gives him the analogy ready made and produces the tremendous scorn of the last line, but even in this short poem there are six or seven unnecessary words.

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