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"I think that we will learn again how to describe at great length an old man wandering among enchanted islands, his return home at last, his slow gathering vengeance, a flitting shape of a goddess, and a flight of arrows..." --WB Yeats, November 1898"The kinematograph, the bicycle, electric tramcars... etc, are not susceptible of poetic treatment" --John Eglinton, also Nov 1898
This webpage is a synopsis of an 1898 debate in the pages of Dublin's Daily Express between John Eglinton, WB Yeats, George 'AE' Russell, and W. Larminie, published by Fisher Unwin in May 1899 as Literary Ideals in Ireland [Bibliofind], reprinted 1973 by Lemma ISBN 0-87696-043-3 [Amazon]. [passim cite] ditto
James Joyce was in his first year at the University, and the Quaker librarian TW Lyster might well have drawn his attention to their unusually high-level literary debate. Yeats cites Ibsen favorably, and the timing is right for this to have triggered Joyce's passionate advocacy of Ibsen, in full flower by March 1899.
And the themes being debated have many deep echoes with the debate in Ulysses chapter nine, Scylla and Charybdis, between Stephen Dedalus, John Eglinton, AE, and Richard Best.
In the 1880s, a new generation of Irish writers-- centered around WB Yeats-- began looking for a distinctly Irish literary style to replace the style of their English landlords. [timeline]
They wanted to replace the derogatory stereotypes of the Irish (violent or comic drunks, etc) with images they could be proud of, and they looked for guidance to the Gaelic folk literature, with its bards, heroes, and supernatural themes. (Think of Riverdance to realise how successful they were!)
(Think also of Joyce's first vignettes for Finnegans Wake, with themes of: Roderick O'Conor, Tristan and Iseult, saint Kevin, and saint Patrick. [etexts])
Yeats and Eglinton [bio] had been close friends since high school c1882, with Russell [bio] connecting in art school in 1884. They all three participated in the Dublin Hermetic Society and the Theosophical Society.
In July 1898 the Irish Literary Theatre [background] got its performing license after some legal difficulties [info], and WBY started cultivating the editor of the Express to get coverage for the formal announcement, scheduled for December (delayed I think until 9 Jan?).
Staging public controversies was a tactic Yeats had been developing, with Russell's approval:
AE to Lady Gregory, 12 Nov: "I am afraid I am the culprit with whom you must deal for the prolonged Yeats Eglington [sic] controversy. I thought and still think it a good thing to create public interest in such a discussion and I carefully fomented the dispute on both sides. I had a little private joy in this as I have long been battered by Yeats on one side and Eglinton on the other for just those things they accuse each other of..."
Larminie [Bibliofind]
The dates, except for the first and last [anj358], are reconstructions. According to the original Editor's Note all were in Saturday numbers, but Foster (erroneously, I'm guessing) dates the first as a Sunday. Possible Saturday dates: Sept 17-24, Oct 1-8-15-22-29, Nov 5-12-19-26, Dec 3-10 [cal]
17 Sept 1898 Eglinton
"Supposing a writer of dramatic genius were to appear in Ireland," Eglinton begins (no doubt getting Joyce's immediate full attention!) "where would he look for the subject of a national drama?"
Possibilities: legends, folklore, peasant life, Irish history, Irish patriotism
Denigrates current European styles in contrast to Wordsworth's "simplicity, hope, belief, and... absolute originality"
Rejects legends as being too distant from current consciousness "The proper mode of treating them is a secret lost with the subjects themselves."
Rejects Irish history as lacking inspiring events "Ireland must exchange the patriotism which looks back for the patriotism which looks forward."
"In short, we need to realise in Ireland that a national drama or literature must spring from a native interest in life and its problems and a strong capacity for life among the people.... In London and Paris they seem to believe in theories and 'movements'... In all ages poets and thinkers have owed far less to their countries than their countries have owed to them."
(cf this last with Stephen's "Ireland must be important because it belongs to me" [Eumeus])
24 Sept 1898 Yeats
Counterexamples of modern use of legends: Ibsen's Peer Gynt ("the chief glory of 'the national literature' of its country"-- Joyce notes name and title?) and Wagner's dramas.
Dante, Homer, Shakespeare "wrought their poetry out of the dreams that were dreamed before men ... grew limited and fragmentary" going back to the pre-literate era.
Literature has relied on legends of Greece, Rome, Wales, Brittany, and now Norway and Germany.
Irish legends "more numerous... and alone among great European legends have the beauty and wonder of altogether new things"
Irish legends associated with places: "every strange stone... has its legend" "It should make Ireland... a holy land to her own people" "the beauty of sun and moon burning over an island... that is a part of the scenery of our lives."
Oct 1898 Eglinton
WBY's own poems opened possibility of distinctive national drama
"a great poetic intelligence, supremely interested in life" can put "new spirit and import" into legends (eg Shakespeare's Prospero, Brutus, Cassius)
"Finn and Cuculain... must be expected to take up on their broad shoulders something of the weariness and fret of our age"
Wagner's art elitist not popular, dramatically weak; 'Peer Gynt' even less coherent than 'Faust' but Ibsen's (other) dramas are "the nearest thing to a distinctive drama reached in this century"
two schools of poetry:
1) Wordsworthian "confers on even common things the radiance of the imagination", "philosophical", poet as "seer and spiritual force", "man himself as the source of inspiration". May stint on artistic form (eg Whitman)
2) poet as "aristocratic craftsman" using "tradition...old faiths, myths, dreams", disconnected from "the source of all regeneration in art", art as escape, "cannot be representative or national" ("bias of belles lettres at present")
"The bias of the first is towards naked statement, hard fact, dogmatism {Scylla]; the bias of the second toward theory, diffuseness, insincerity. [Charybdis]"
Cites Shelley's "Cenci" favorably
Oct 1898 Yeats [ms cite]
Wagner's influence is wider than an elite, eg Villiers de L'Isle Adam and the other symbolists.
"the only permanent influence of any art... flows down gradually and imperceptibly, as if through orders and hierarchies"
"it is a misfortune that... Eglinton... should believe... in popular music, popular painting, and popular literature"
Hallam defended Tennyson's 'unpopular' poetry, inaccessible to 'duller temperaments', in contrast to Wordsworth's 'popular school' mixing anecdotes, opinons, and moral maxims (accessible to the dullards) with occasional finer sentiments, or imitations thereof
popular paintings offer "anecdotes or pretty faces of babies"
popular poetry not of 'seer' (seers are aristocratic) but of utilitarian, rhetorician, sentimentalist, journalist, preacher
"spiritual force is as immaterial... as the falling of dew or as the first greyness of dawn"
'expression of its age' and 'facts of life' are "the very phrases of the utilitarian criticism of the middle century"
real appearance of nature awakens "great passions that are not of nature" (citing Browning, Poe)
only transcendental beliefs make patient estheticism possible, liberating the arts "from 'their age' and from life... free to lose themselves in beauty, and... the accumulated beauty of the age"
poetry is not 'a criticism of life' but "a revelation of a hidden life"
Homer, Dante, Shakespeare used worldly knowledge to give form to exalted visions
a poem's legendary or non-legendary themes are less relevant than the "intensity of its passion for beauty, and... perfection of its workmanship"
Nov? 1898 Eglinton
Milton's "Samson" successfully transformed an old legend, unlike Samuel Ferguson's "Congal" or William Morris's "Sigurd"
"The kinematograph, the bicycle, electric tramcars... etc, are not susceptible of poetic treatment"
the "poetic and mythopoeic faculty" deserted the Greeks as the sense of meaning in life deserted the moderns, so both turned to theoretical speculation about poetry
honorable theory of poetry shared by Wordsworth, Carlyle, Ruskin, Emerson, Whitman
Wordsworth lacked artistry, but "simply because he was right, and by virtue of his simplicity and seriousness" was the best of the century [Nabokov notably scorned this 'simple and sincere' theory]
"poetry of thought": Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning
"poetry of art and artifice": Coleridge, Rossetti, Swinburne
the former has "higher seriousness and more universal appeal; because it is more concerned with the facts of life and is more inspired by faith and hope; because it expresses its age better and what is best in the age."
denigrates morbidity of Villiers and Verlaine
"Life is nothing but what we make it, and we do not alter its substance by twisting it into an abnormality."
WBY thinks Shakespeare was interested in life for the sake of art, but enduring art requires a more "broadly human and representative interest."
12 Nov 1898 AE [collected works cite]
"little real difference" between the positions of WBY and JE
JE came by way of Thoreau, Emerson, Arnold, and Whitman to the same ground as Yeats did by way of Shelley and Keats
"Beauty, heroism, and spirituality do not change like fashion"
Legends have been "purified" from the world of sense into the world of symbol
transcendental philosophy says the spirit is "not a product of nature, but antecedes nature, and is above it as sovereign"
"To regain that spiritual consciousness with its untramelled ecstacy, is the hope of every mystic."
"To liberate art from life is simply to absolve it from the duty laid upon it by academic critics of representing only what is seen... by man in his less exalted... moments" [AE painted landscapes that included visionary figures]
"in the moment he has attained to spiritual vision and ecstacy he has come to his true home, to his true self, to that which shall exist when the light of the sun shall be dark"
Nov 1898 Larminie
AE fails to confront WBY's inclinations to the French error
Shelley had explicit didactic aims in 'Cenci' which allowed the esthetic beauty to endure
Keats was more purely esthetic, but so was the early Shakespeare, so Keats might have evolved if he'd lived past 26 (cf Tennyson)
Swinburne, Rossetti, and Morris have switched to a less promising path, lacking "exuberant vitality" and the necessary ideas "which rouse the emotions into vigorous action" but trying to make a virtue of that lack
Arnold's idea of "'magic' in poetry" may have misled them into striving exclusively to suggest (rather than explicitly name) their meanings, but this feature of poetry is cloying when used alone, without ideas
Symons's recent translations of Mallarme are as thin as "homeopathic soup"
"The actions of men are the chief revelation to us of the nature of spirtual beings... learning of a higher kind is there for us in abundance. The great poets have all attained in it to higher mastery. Behind the facts of life they perceive the serious and solemn background, and exhibit to us their significance in that relation."
03Dec 1898 Yeats
my early writing tried to be as vividly descriptive as possible; then I lost interest in that and wanted only the "spiritual and unemphatic". I now see this as exemplifying a general cultural shift
Flaubert's Temptation of Saint Anthony was "the last great dramatic invention of the old romanticism" with "unforgettable descriptions of grotesque, bizarre, and beautiful scenes and persons"; Villiers's Axel is the "first great dramatic invention of the new" sweeping together "words, behind which glimmered a spiritual and passionate mood" and creating persons with no personal characteristic "except a thirst for that hour when all things shall pass away like a vapour, and a pride like that of the Magi following their star over many mountains; while Maeterlinck has plucked away even this thirst and this pride"
the same movement can be seen in recent English painting
decadence: "the arts lie dreaming of things to come... the autumn of the flesh"
"a crowning crisis of the world... man is about to ascend... the stairway he has been descending from the first days" Kalavala to Homer to Virgil to Dante to Shakespeare, each more influenced by "things and their accidental relations"
Goethe, Wordsworth and Browning have reversed the descent and become critics of life "Man has wooed and won the world, and has fallen weary... with a weariness that will not end until the last autumn... And now he must be philosophical about everything, even about the arts, for he can only return the way he came and so escape from weariness, by philosophy."
alchemy is replacing chemistry: "poetry henceforth will be a poetry of essences, separated one from another in little and intense poems"
quotes from Symons on Mallarme are reworked by WBY:
"I think that we will learn again how to describe at great length an old man wandering among enchanted islands, his return home at last, his slow gathering vengeance, a flitting shape of a goddess, and a flight of arrows, and yet to make all of these so different [that] things 'take light by mutual reflection, like an actual trail of fire over precious stones' and become 'an entire word,' the signature, or symbol of a mood of the divine imagination as imponderable as 'the horror of the forest or the silent thunder in the leaves.'"
10Dec 1898 AE
the decadents' art is exhausted and sad, hiding the "old wolfish lust". "it would put on the jewelled raiment of seraphim, retaining still a heart of clay smitten through and through with the unappeasable desire of the flesh" and "a crimson figure undergoing a dark crucifixion" at the hands of "the hosts of light"
"The psychic maladies which attack all races when their civilization grows old must needs be understood to be dealt with; and they cannot be understood without being revealed in literature or art. But in Ireland we are not yet sick with this sickness."
But this was really just a side issue in the real debate between nationality (WBY) and individualism (JE).
We must create a soul for our country, as Ancient Egypt did.
cf? Yeats in 1897's 'Tables of the Law': 'Jonathan Swift made a soul for the gentlemen of this city by hating his neighbour as himself.'
The cosmopolitan spirit is obliterating national distinctions, and the only remaining justification for nationalism is "the profound conviction that its peculiar ideal is nobler"
"Every Irishman forms some vague ideal of his country... but because it has never had any philosophical definition, or a supremely beautiful statement in literature which gathered all aspirations about it, it remains vague... To reveal Ireland in clear and beautiful light, to create the Ireland in the heart, is the province of a national literature."
"...as the ideal of Ireland grows from mind to mind it tends to assume the character of a sacred land."
Mangan: "And still the thoughts of Ireland brood/ Upon her holy quietude."
"This mystical view of nature, peculiar to but one English poet, Wordsworth, is a national characteristic"
"the bardic history of Ireland, wherein one would write of the battle fury of a hero, and another of a moment when his fire would turn to gentleness, and another of his love for some beauty of his time, and yet another tell how the rivalry of a spiritual beauty made him tire of love"
Whitman exploited himself as a 'stock personality' "to elevate and harmonise the incongruous human elements in the States."
We must not obliterate our Irishness like Dowden has, but take the other path, toward the mountaintop.
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