At first, it is only Lucy Middleton who is seeing something strange, but soon the two men also witness the appearance of a “small bright light on the horizon, as it seemed, mounting up slowly towards the sky”. A dance of strange lights follows, and Yeats then allows himself some apparently candid reflections on the experience:
We saw it all in such a dream, and it seems all so unreal, that I have never written of it until now, and hardly ever spoken of it, and even when thinking, because of some unreasonable impulse, I have avoided giving it weight in the argument. Perhaps I have felt that my recollections of things seen when the sense of reality was weakened must be untrustworthy.
Characteristically, Yeats qualifies his scruples with a supplementary anecdote of the inexplicable and the uncanny (where a mirror emits tapping sounds as if struck by “a shower of peas”). The rationalizing voice of controlled recollection, as often in The Celtic Twilight, finds itself unable to keep up with the pace and sheer oddity of its material, and the narrative presence of Yeats is constantly being surprised by what lies outside its power to explain.
For the young Yeats (as for his older self, in a different way), experience was a story, to which all manner of other stories – from myth, history, religion and folklore – were subservient, and for which they were readily serviceable. Keen to convey a sense of his own visionary capacities, Yeats’s need to emphasize his rational (and literary) abilities meant that other, more self-abandoned, visionary figures had to be created to fill out the Irish autobiographical fiction that was being created. Country people of all kinds were dragooned to this purpose (notably Mary Battell, housekeeper to Yeats’s uncle), but so was the poet’s friend and contemporary, George Russell, who in his youth was given to taking long walks in the Dublin hills, “talking to half-mad and visionary peasants”, as Yeats puts it in The Celtic Twilight. In a chapter which he entitles simply “A Visionary” (and where Russell is “X”), Yeats puts some distance between himself and his companion in the matter of supernatural apprehension:
“Is it the influence of some living person who thinks of us, and whose thoughts appear to us in that symbolic form?” I said; for I am well instructed in the ways of the visionaries and in the fashion of their speech. “No,” he replied; for if it were the thoughts of a person who is alive I should feel the living influence in my living body, and my heart would beat and my breath would fail. It is a spirit. It is someone who is dead or who has never lived.”
The George Russell who had lived (and was indeed still living) to be a contemporary of Yeats in the 1920s found himself recollected in The Trembling of the Veil (1922) as someone who “saw visions continually, perhaps more continually than any modern man since Swedenborg”. This older Yeats insisted that “I wanted him to examine and question his visions . . . . I thought symbolic what he thought real”, and reached the conclusion that “The wholeness of the supernatural world can only express itself in personal form, because it has no epitome but man”. If there was no such confidence in “A Visionary”, haunted as the piece is by the possibility of meeting as “a spirit” “someone who is dead or has never lived”, there is an altogether more literary emphasis both on Russell’s having given up the career of a poet, and (implicitly, at least) the narrator’s own poetic achievements. “X” meets on his walks “an old peasant who, dumb to most men, poured out his cares for him”, these cares culminating in the lament “The fret [Irish for doom] is over me”. The refrain was taken up in Yeats’s poem “The Old Pensioner”, a slight two-stanza affair of 1890: “And therefore do I wander on / And the fret is on me . . . . The well-known faces are all gone, / And the fret is on me”. In its earliest printings, “A Visionary” both quoted Russell’s own poetry at length, with faint emanations of praise, and gave broad hints at the superior Yeatsian handling of the material to be found in The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics, published the year before The Celtic Twilight.
But Russell was not quite “X” in reality, and was himself perfectly capable of criticizing his old friend’s poems. It was a recurring irritation to Yeats that Russell persisted in remembering (and quoting) the earlier versions of these poems, giving to them a protracted, ghostly existence. So, when Yeats came to absorb The Celtic Twilight within Early Poems and Stories, “The Old Pensioner” was treated (pointedly) to a supercharged rewrite, becoming “The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner” and losing its original, Russell-supplied refrain; now, the wandering old man would announce that “I spit into the face of Time / That has transfigured me.” To all intents and purposes, the new version is a 1920s Yeats poem, its rhetoric and certainty obliterating the spirit of its nineteenth-century source. Nevertheless, the bothersome figure of “X”, like someone dead or perhaps never (quite) alive, lingered in the print of the 1925 collection.
Yeats’s gift for fiction was profitable enough to be developed by the poet in the course of the 1890s, and the stories which were to form The Secret Rose show a more ambitious artist at work, shaping folkloric materials into very carefully crafted form. It was this writing which Yeats was later to see as blighted stylistically by Pater; but the judgement is in some ways an unfair one, since the prose style puts on display a promisingly developed sense for both the elaborate and the incantatory which, in its way, seldom rings false: the prose is worked, and visibly worked up at times, but it very seldom feels (in the negative sense) artificial: it is undoubtedly true to something at least in Yeats at the time. As originally published, the collection of stories carries a dedication to Russell (now with his pen name “Æ”), and the confession that Yeats believes poetry can only be made “by looking into that little, infinite, faltering, eternal flame that one calls one’s self”. It is by the weak light of this flame that Yeats recommends an approach to the supernatural. In a concluding flourish, Russell is reminded that in Ireland “no shining candelabra have prevented us from looking into the darkness, and when one looks into the darkness there is always something there”. The dedication, in its turn, was dropped, and fell into the darkness of Yeats’s publishing history.
The “something there” in the darkness, through all Yeats’s revisions and reimaginings of supernatural material, was to remain indefinite. In the fiction, however, “something” can find itself made solid as someone; and here, Yeats created figures that mediated between the mortal world and the world beyond, possessing the comparative solidity of fictional characters. They tended to possess, also, George Russell’s red hair. First among these is the poet Red Hanrahan, who appeared in a story of 1892 (as O’Sullivan the Red), and went on to occupy a suite of six stories in The Secret Rose. Yeats’s historical model here was a Munster poet of the eighteenth century, Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin, but the figure who emerges in the stories is a peasant alter ego for Yeats himself: tormented by supernatural revelation and unrequited love, the object of popular acclaim at the same time as regular persecution, Hanrahan is a poet doomed by his resistance to “the call of the daughters of the Sidhe” who “will find no comfort in the love of the women of the earth to the end of life and time”, since “the cold of the grave is in his heart for ever”. The stories follow Hanrahan through both natural and supernatural disappointments to his inevitable death, but Yeats was not by any means finished with the arc of experience thus described. When the poet’s next red-headed man, Michael Robartes, appears in the final (heavily and self-consciously fin de siècle) stories of The Secret Rose, it is as Hanrahan’s occult successor. Robartes is a magician rather than a folk poet; but he possesses all the elemental abandon of his predecessor, and goes on (at least in The Secret Rose) to share his fate. Yeats gives Hanrahan a mystical-religious straight man, Owen Aherne, who begins “Rosa Alchemica” by talking about Robartes’s “tragic end”, which took place “more than ten years” ago; and recounts an alarming visit from the magician, heralded by “a loud knocking at the door”. “I shuddered”, Aherne remembers, “as I drew the bolt”: “I found before me Michael Robartes, whom I had not seen for years, and whose wild red hair, fierce eyes, sensitive, tremulous lips and rough clothes, made him look now, just as they used to fifteen years before, something between a debauchee, a saint, and a peasant”.
As he and Aherne would do much later, when they come out of the dark and the past to visit Yeats himself, Robartes appears as a not entirely welcome surprise, sending the present back into memories of “years before”. In “Rosa Alchemica”, Aherne gives his version of a kind of magical orgy hosted by Robartes in the West of Ireland, one which ends in violent revenge taken by the pious (and affronted) locals. This is a very important piece of writing for Yeats, a parable of the necessary end of his own Symbolist poetry, which Robartes’s magic partly represents. But any relief at Robartes’s presumed end was premature, whether for Yeats (in some moods) or for his readers. Robert Bridges wrote to the poet in 1897, with proper medical regard, that “I hope that you will take care of your body”, adding the wish “that the saints or goddesses will preserve you from too much of the Rosa Alchemica”; he let Yeats know, too, that he was “glad that Michael Robartes is dead”.
By the 1920s, in the throes of another period of intellectual and stylistic upheaval, Yeats brought Robartes back from the dead by means of the fiction of having the character seek him out, to tantalize him once more with the puzzles and half-cracked codes of occult knowledge. In preparing (yet again) his fictional prose for a new edition, Yeats encountered the vivid ghosts of unfinished business – literary, autobiographical and philosophical – which was coming to seem unfinishable.
At some point, the momentum of Yeats’s creativity overwhelmed his ambitions to settle on fixed and final forms of thought. The poetry of The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair (1933) is ruthlessly committed to pressing everything from the past into service: Yeats’s youth and middle age, as much as history and legend, are primarily grist to the poet’s artistic mill. In such an unsparing environment, Yeats’s past work was just as ripe for plunder as other aspects of his life and thought; and the long-ingrained habits of revision came to be parts of the dynamic process of self-imagining on which all of the poet’s later work is founded. But ghosts have a way of upsetting such priorities, since they come back from a past which they – unlike the haunted person – have never outgrown, disowned, or forgotten.
The book called Mythologies was published in 1959, twenty years after Yeats’s death, but elements of its arrangement had been settled by the poet in the 1930s, when he was working with Macmillan towards a so-called edition de luxe of his works. Naturally, further changes were made to the arrangement of the early prose in Early Poems and Stories; textual decisions were taken with the impulsiveness of creativity, and the newly imagined edition was no closer than its predecessors to the exact styles and procedures of books like The Celtic Twilight or The Secret Rose. Warwick Gould and Deirdre Toomey have now edited Mythologies in accord with Yeats’s latest thoughts. By removing the meditation Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917), which was never at home in the book of 1959, and which Yeats never intended to appear in that context, Gould and Toomey give us the short prose fiction which the poet wished to preserve, in the form and order that seemed to him acceptable late in life. How far short of the whole story this is may be gauged from the seventy pages of appendices which are necessary to record Yeats’s textual changes, and the more than 200 pages devoted to explanatory and textual notes. The critical and textual work here is as impressive as it is copious, and the editors have performed a scholarly service for Yeats far in excess of anything of which he would himself have been capable. There can be no doubt that this edition sheds an extraordinary light on an aspect of Yeats’s writing which has generally been left in semi-darkness, and which it is important for critics of the poet to understand. The editorial achievement here is enormous, and it will last.
But now that the textual ghosts of Mythologies are in broad daylight, so to speak, it is also obvious that Yeats was not so much haunted by his past as the haunter of it, subjecting his writings, like his life, to repeated questionings and changes of emphasis. Often, damage is done in the process: there is repeated stylistic damage, for example, in the ways Yeats tended to revise his prose, and wholesale vandalism at times (as in the Lady Gregory-inspired “improvements” to the dialogue of the Red Hanrahan stories, first perpetrated in 1905, and dutifully retained thereafter). The Yeats who published The Secret Rose knew more about the craft of fiction than the old man (and great poet) of the 1930s. To have Mythologies, then, even in an immaculately edited form, is not a substitute for the earlier versions of the material it contains. We can understand that Yeats was unable to leave the dead alone; what is more challenging to appreciate is the fact that Yeats’s dead were often never alive, “fictitious characters” who “live through events that were a travesty of real events”, as Owen Aherne puts it in A Vision. Was the writer W. B. Yeats one such? As Yeats puts the matter in the first-person voice of “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” (1939), he was always engaged in inventing “character isolated by a deed / To engross the present”, and it was in fiction, as much as with the dead, that he found the place “where all the ladders start / In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart”.
