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Yeats and the Symbolist AestheticAuthor(s): A. J. BateReviewed work(s):Source: MLN, Vol. 98, No. 5, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1983), pp. 1214-1233Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2906068 .

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Yeats and the Symbolist Aesthetic

A. J. Bate

"Of the French symbolists I have never had any detailed or accurate knowledge," wrote Yeats to Ernest Boyd in February 1915.1

Unperturbed, a Times Literary Supplement reviewer in 1922 spoke of "Mr Yeats, the only Symbolist poet seriously to be considered in English literature."2 Both statements are true: I shall try to show that Yeats was better acquainted with the Symbolist aesthetic than has hitherto been recognised and that, though often second-hand

(hence neither "detailed" nor "accurate"), the influence was crucial to his own poetic and intellectual development.

Considering his limited knowledge of French, it is unlikely that Yeats was making use of Mallarme's sonnet "M'introduire dans ton histoire" when the image of an "axle" appears in "He Hears the

Cry of the Sedge." It is to Eliot we must look for allusion (the opening of the second section of "Burnt Norton" consciously echoes Mallarme's celebrated "moyeux"); with Yeats, it is a case of

affinity. In one of the few valuable critical articles on Yeats and the French,3 Daphne Fullwood suggests that "influence" operates in the sense discerned by Shelley in his preface to The Revolt of Islam:

There must be a resemblance, which does not depend upon their own will, between all the writers of any particular age. They cannot escape from subjection to a common influence which arises out of an infinite combination of circumstances belonging to the times in which they live; though each is in a degree the author of the very influence by which his being is thus pervaded.

Yeats, then, was "influenced" by-though he may not have known-works which defined the late nineteenth century Sym-



M L N 1215

bolist aesthetic, such as Jean Moreas' Manifeste du Symbolisme (1886). Compare the claim "Ennemie de l'enseignement, la declamation, la fausse sensibilitY, la description objective .. ." and Yeats in "The Autumn of the Body" speaking of the struggle "against that pic- turesque and declamatory way of writing, against that 'externality' which a time of scientific and political thought has brought into literature."4 Moreas speaks of Symbolist poetry as a direct appre- hension of "l'idee": the word alerts us to the full eclectic range of

Symbolism, the way it draws on thinkers from Plato to Schopen- hauer.

Another set of influences is indicated by the sentence in Yeats's letter to Boyd immediately before the one I have already quoted, "My chief mystical authorities have been Boehme, Blake and Swed-

enborg." Cabbalist, mystic and Symbolist poet are of imagination all compact: they look beyond the physical to an absolute world of ideal essences.

The archetypal text was Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's Axel. Yeats

struggled with the play's high-flown French, but in the preface he contributed to H. P. R. Finberg's 1925 translation he said that its

symbols (castle, treasure, lamp) "became a part of me and for years to come dominated my imagination." I shall begin by showing how the work of Villiers and the other Symbolistes "became a part of" the early Yeats.

* * *

Arthur Symons is still an unjustly neglected figure. "Whatever I came to know of Continental literature I learned of him" wrote Yeats.5 "Whatever" should not be taken too literally, but the French influence on Yeats was strongest during the 'nineties, the decade that began with the formation of the Rhymers' Club and ended with the publication of Symons's seminal The Symbolist Movement in Literature. Yeats must have seen some close association between French Symbolism, the Decadence and the Rhymers, for he lumps Baudelaire, Beardsley and Dowson together in the thirteenth

phase of A Vision. We are faced with something of a chronological problem in the

matter of Yeats, Symons and the French. The friendship with Sy- mons was at its height in the middle of the decade, the period of The Savoy when the two poets shared rooms in Fountain Court; it was probably in 1895 that Symons read the passages from Verlaine and Mallarme which were, by his own admission, a great influence



1216 A. J. BATE

on Yeats's poetic practice. But Yeats admired Verlaine before this

(see the essay "Verlaine in 1894") and it is tempting to imagine that he knew the Fetes Galantes as early as 1891, well before Symons made his translations: the striking image "Unhook the stars out of the sky" in "Your Pathway," an unpublished poem of July 1891 to Maud Gonne, echoes "si/Je ne vous decroche une 6toile" in "Sur l'herbe." The conceit itself is commonplace ("Goe, and catch a

falling star") but "unhook" is not-yet it is a precise rendering of "decrocher."6

Nevertheless, the importance of Symons's versions of Mallarme and Verlaine is undeniable. Yeats called them "the most accom-

plished metrical translations of our time," and went on to say "those from Mallarme may have given elaborate form to my verses of those years, to the latter poems of The Wind among the Reeds, to The Shadowy Waters, while Villiers de 'Isle Adam had shaped whatever in my Rosa Alchemica Pater had not shaped."7

Among the poems Symons translated from Mallarme were "Brise Marine," "Soupir" and part of the "Herodiade." The first of these seems to me to have made a deep impression on Yeats's consciousness. He alludes casually to it when describing Lionel

Johnson ("like the poet in Mallarme, he had 'read all the books' "8), the images of the sea and the poet's lamp recur throughout his work, the poem's self-reflexive quality-its sense of the task of

poetic creation-is characteristic of the mature Yeats, and the lost

ship ("Perdus, sans mats, sans mats, ni fertiles ilots") is reminiscent of The Shadowy Waters. It was Rimbaud who first saw the poet as "bateau perdu,"9 but the image as it is used in The Shadowy Waters has a longer history, going back to Coleridge-one must never lose

sight of the fact that the Symbolist aesthetic had its roots firmly in the Romantic tradition. Through dream or image the poet per- ceives realities beyond mere reason,

For all that meets the bodily sense I deem Symbolical, one mighty alphabet For infant minds; and we in this low world Placed with our backs to bright Reality, That we may learn with young unwounded ken The substance from its shadow.

(Coleridge, "The Destiny of Nations: A Vision," 1.18)

"Influence" is operating in Shelley's sense when Yeats and Mal- larme are borne away by sea-birds, white breaking waves and intoxication. It is perhaps due to shared thought-processes rather



M L N 1217

than specific influence that there are close verbal parallels, such as the following (which has not, I think, been noticed before):

Fiddle, un blanc jet d'eau soupire vers l'Azur ("Soupir")

Like the pure jet, now lost amid blue sky ("The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid")

The true importance of "Soupir" to Yeats may, I suspect, be hinted at in his term "elaborate form." The autumnal atmosphere of the poem is close to that of many in Yeats's first three collections, but its strictly controlled form (accurately reproduced by Symons) sets an example of economy followed by Yeats in many of the

compact lyrics of The Wind among the Reeds, such as "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven," with its delicate and unobtrusive use of

repetition at the end of every other line. In "The Tragic Generation" (part of Autobiographies) Yeats ac-

tually quotes from another of Symons's translations, a section of the "Htrodiade." It begins with a very Yeatsian formulation, "The horror of my virginity / Delights me"-the violent juxtaposition of "horror" and "delight," then "night" and "white," "fire and ice," is similar to that used so powerfully in Yeats's middle period, "Sud-

denly I saw the cold and rook-delighting heaven / That seemed as

though ice burned and was but the more ice .. ."10 Having quoted Symons's version of Mallarme, Yeats compares his own art to "some Herodiade of our theatre, dancing seemingly alone in her narrow moving luminous circle." He uses the metaphor of the dancer for his sense of "something in myself compelling me to

attempt creation of an art separate from everything heterogeneous and casual, from all character and circumstance."11 Again and

again, one comes across remarks such as this which bear out Frank Kermode's argument in Romantic Image that the dancer is the ar-

chetypal Symbolist image of poetic creation. In A Vision Yeats writes "When I think of the moment before

revelation I think of Salome;" in a letter to Ren6 Francis, he says of Flaubert's exotic fiction (La Tentation de St Antoine, Salammbo, "Herodias") "How much of what is most typical in our generation, Wilde's Salome for instance and much elsewhere in his work, has come out of it."12 Nietzsche, who is central to so much Symbolist thought, has Zarathustra saying "I know how to speak the parable of the highest things only in the dance"; in eternity, "everything heavy shall become light, every body a dancer, all spirit a bird"13 (Yeats's Byzantine bird?).



1218 A. J. BATE

Salome is the perfect figure. Huysmans' des Esseintes in A Re- bours is obsessed by both the "Herodiade" and Gustave Moreau's

painting of her; Mallarme's poem of dance and decapitation seems to have influenced the later plays of Yeats, notably A Full Moon in March and The King of the Great Clock Tower. In being both human

figure and pure motion, the dancer attains the Decadent ideal, as defined by Symons, "to fix the last fine shade, the quintessence of

things; to fix it fleetingly; to be a disembodied voice, and yet the voice of a human soul."14 For Yeats, the dancer is both body and disembodiment: "O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, / How can we know the dancer from the dance?" (CP, p. 245). This

image is probably best understood in the context of the assertion

"my Christ... is that Unity of Being Dante compared to a perfectly proportioned human body" and Mallarme's essay "Ballets," where the dancer is seen as "incorporation visuelle de l'idee."15 There is an intimate connection between the notion of the elocutionary dis-

appearance of the poet, touched on in this essay, and Yeats's met-

aphor in the last line of "Among School Children." In "The World as Ballet," Symons not only suggests that the art

of dancing symbolises life in its very essence, but also describes it in terms that are familiar from Mallarme: "Nothing is stated, there is no intrusion of words for the irrelevant purpose of describing." This is precisely how Mallarme defines Symbolist poetry, "les mon- uments, la mer, la face humaine, dans leur plenitude, natifs, con- servants une vertu autrement attrayante que ne les voilera une

description, evocation dites, allusion je sais, suggestion."16 Some of Symons's best poems are about dancers-one thinks of

the mysteriousness of "Javanese Dancers," the magical intoxication of "To a Dancer" in London Nights (a volume dedicated, signifi- cantly enough, to Paul Verlaine) and the association between dance and eternity to "To a Gitana Dancing: Seville." Yeats thought that

Symons's "Decor de Theatre IV. La Melinite: Moulin Rouge" was one of the most perfect lyrics of the age. In this poem-Symons's most famous-Jane Avril "dances for her own delight," "enigmat- ically smiling" in anticipation of Yeats's many dancing girls, down to the "Sweet Dancer" of Last Poems.

Three further poems by Symons are close to Yeats in their treat- ment of the dance. "The Dance" in Amoris Victima (1897) has

For the immortal moment of a passionate dance, Surely our two souls rushed together and were one ... For an immortal moment we endured the whole Rapture of intolerable immortality.



M L N 1219

The idea of souls being united in the bodily activity of dancing reminds us of "The Phases of the Moon" ("All dreams of the soul / End in a beautiful man's or woman's body"); the phrase "intol-

erable immortality" and the yoking of "enduring" and "rapture" have the kind of energy and tension we associate with Yeats.

"The Dance of the Daughters of Herodias" refers to Salome as "a young tree / Swaying in the wind"-a tree is the image that

complements the swaying dancer in "Among School Children." In a slightly later poem, from The Fool of the World, Symons uses a number of techniques similar to those of the mature Yeats.

I dance, and as I dance Desires as fires burn white To fan the flame delight; What vague desires advance With covered countenance?

("The Armenian Dancer")

It is impossible to know to what extent Yeats's command of asso- nance owes its origins to such lines as the second and third of this stanza. Equally striking is the use of a question, which inevitably brings to mind "How can those terrified vague fingers push / The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?" ("Leda and the Swan"). The sixth stanza of Symons's poem makes effective use of a present participle, "dying into delight," in the manner of Yeats's

"Byzantium" with its "dying into a dance." Yeats lived with Symons during a period crucial to his poetic

development. There was an element of cross-fertilisation between them in poetic technique-for example, their shared sense of the

poem as a dramatised quarrel with oneself-as well as Symbolist theory. Critics have been right to emphasise the importance of The

Symbolist Movement in Literature which Symons dedicated to Yeats, "the chief representative of that movement in our country," but

relatively little attention has been given to Symons's poetry. "The Last Memory" (1897) demonstrates a two-way influence at work:

When I am old, and think of the old days ... I shall see, smiling out of the pale fire, One face, mysterious and exquisite

is derivative of Yeats's "When you are old" (or at least has a common source in Ronsard's "Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, a la chandelle"), but "was it Leonardo wrought / That stealthy ardency ... Was it Bronzino, those Borghese eyes?" is a question Yeats asks about woman's beauty some thirty years later, "Did



1220 A. J. BATE

Quattrocento finger fashion it?" ("Among School Children"). Any assessment of Symons should take into account the poet who could craft this image as well as the apologist who compared Yeats to Verlaine because in the work of both there was "union complete ou fusion de la substance et de la forme."17

Nevertheless, his greatest service was in introducing Yeats to the aesthetic of MallarmE and Wagner. Without Symons, Yeats would never have written "the symbolical movement, which has come to

perfection in Germany in Wagner, in England in the Pre-Raphael- ites, in France in Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, and Mallarme, and in

Belgium in Maeterlinck ... is certainly the only movement that is

saying new things."'8 Pre-Raphaelitism may seem a little out of

place in this company, but it testifies to what Yeats would have seen as the continuity between his very early work, which is steeped in Pre-Raphaelite language, and that of his "Symbolist" period.

Through Symons, Yeats received a simplified version of Mal- larme's aesthetic. The Poet is a magician: compare Mallarmt's "le

vers, trait incantatoire! et, on ne deniera au cercle que perpe- tuellement ferme, ouvre la rime une similitude avec les ronds,

parmi l'herbe, de la fee ou du magicien" with Yeats on the poet as enchanter.1' The idea is important because it partly explains the

Symbolists' interest in the arcane. In his essay on Villiers, Symons alludes to the Smaragdine Table of Hermes Trismegistus, "as things are below, so are they above;" Yeats quotes the same phrase in "The Symbolism of Painting," one of his most characteristic 'nineties essays. Both alchemist and poet seek correspondence between temporal and eternal, earthly and spiritual, experience and essence.

The Alchemists ... sought to fashion gold out of common metals merely as part of a universal transmutation of all things into some divine and imperishable substance; and this enabled me to make my little book a fanciful reverie over the transmutation of life into art, and a cry of measureless delight for a world made wholly of essences.

(Yeats, Rosa Alchemica20)

Essence is the key to Yeats's understanding of Mallarme, whose aim was to make poetry "pur," to strip it of all but the infinite sugges- tiveness of language itself.

Yeats said that he only followed Mallarme's path "for certain

furlongs."21 Mallarme had said "Mon art est une impasse," Yeats "The fascination of what's difficult / Has dried the sap out of my veins." In a crucial passage in The Cutting of an Agate, Mallarme's



M L N 1221

"delight in essences, in states of mind, in pure imagination" is contrasted with "the spoken word which knits us to normal man ... our delight in the whole man-blood, imagination, intellect

running together."22 There are two ways before literature: "up- ward into ever-growing subtlety, with Verhaeren, with Mallarm6, with Maeterlinck" or "downward ... until all is simplified and so- lidified again." At his best, Yeats dramatises this struggle as he searches for a voice and a relationship with the reader ("The Fish- erman" is just such an exploration). The poems that exclusively follow one of the two ways are, I think, weaker. Yeats's personal version of the movement "upwards" until "what seems literature becomes religion" is the system of A Vision, his own symbolical cosmography and history-the poems, such as "The Phases of the Moon," that rely too heavily on the system become not literature but the exposition of personal religion. Yeats said that in his church there was an altar but no pulpit: Robartes expounds the Phases with an inappropriately parsonical voice. The late poems that do the opposite and tend too much towards simple ballad forms and down to earth subjects (lust and rage) are often slight; great Yeats is the poet who embraces or holds together in tension both vision and reality.

He was aware that he made a number of poetic false starts. In "The Circus Animals' Desertion" he scrutinises his own career with

rigour yet with gentle ironic touches ("daily for six weeks or so") that preclude the possibility of self-indulgence. His conclusion, "I must lie down ... in the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart," is

closely involved with his rejection of the Symbolist aesthetic, as is shown by a letter written thirty years earlier which expresses a similar state of mind,

I once cared only for images about whose necks I could cast various 'chains of office' as it were. They were so many aldermen of the ideal, whom I wished to master the city of the soul. Now I do not want images at all, or chains of office, being contented with the unruly soul.23

Quite apart from its remarkable resemblance to "The Circus An- imals," this is a fine passage, couched in terms that are now familiar. The image, the ideal and the city of the soul are Mallar- mean, while being "contented with the unruly soul" epitomises the mature Yeats. The rejection of abstracts and mere essences is central to his development; only by experimenting with, then casting aside, the aesthetic of the 'nineties could he "awaken from the common dream." It is for this reason that an examination of his



1222 A. J. BATE

debt to the Symbolistes is of no small importance to our under-

standing of the whole body of his work.

J. B. Yeats saw that his son's development lay in the rejection of the Celtic Twilight and the abstracted mould of the 'nineties: "It is easier to write poetry that is away from life, but it is infinitely more exciting to write the poetry of life."24 One way of visualising the contrast is by comparing proper names in the early and later

poems: Moll Magee and King Fergus give way to real people, "that

enquiring man, John Synge" and "Augusta Gregory seated at her

great ormula table." There are affinities between Yeats and Mallarme in that they

both use Symbol to apprehend "the Translucence of the Eternal in and through the Temporal."25 There are certain similarities in their imagery: one reviewer of The Wind among the Reeds associated the volume with French decadence because there were twenty- three references to woman's hair in forty poems. The beloved's hair is undoubtedly a leading motif in Mallarm6, but it is also a

Pre-Raphaelite image-and, bearing in mind the mythological content of these poems, we should not forget that it frequently occurs in Old Irish verse.

Perhaps the most significant similarity between Yeats and Mal- larme is their shared belief that poetry must suggest rather than state (an assumption that accounts for much of their "difficulty"). When Yeats was asked to explain the symbols of The Shadowy Wa- ters, he said "the more one explains, the more one narrows the

symbols;" was he thinking of Mallarme's famous dictum "nommer un objet, c'est supprimer trois quarts de la jouissance du

poeme"?26 * * *

A more important stylistic influence was Verlaine. Yeats wrote at

length about him in Discoveries, attracted by his simplicity and ab-

sorption in the poetic moment. Symons spoke of Verlaine's lyrical form as "the passive, flawless medium for the deeper consciousness of things." Earlier in the same essay he had quoted the line "L'art, mes enfants, c'est d'etre absolument moi-meme." Yeats agreed: he attended Verlaine's lecture at Oxford and quoted with approval the remark "the poet should hide nothing of himself."27 Several times he uses the powerful-and typically fin de siecle-image of Verlaine oscillating between church and brothel.

In Verlaine, Yeats saw the ability to write with integrity about oneself. He aimed to write with "dignity," to give his verse "a lofty



M L N 1223

and severe quality" (Verlaine's terms28-yet they are precisely the

right words to apply to Yeats), but at the same time use lyrical form to perceive essences beyond the surface of the poetic texture. "Take rhetoric and wring its neck" (Verlaine, "Art Poetique") became a Yeatsian catch-phrase. On the other hand, rhetoric in a

very formal sense is persistently used by Yeats: much of the force of "Byzantium" derives from invocatio ("I hail the superhuman"), anaphora ("An agony of trance, / An agony of flame"), exclamatio ("The golden smithies of the Emperor!") and threefold amplificatio ("image, man or shade;" "Miracle, bird or golden handiwork;" "no

faggot feeds, nor steel has lit, / Nor storm disturbs"). The ambivalence of Yeats's attitude to Verlaine and all he stood

for is apparent as early as 1892, when he wrote an article in United Ireland that has frequently been overlooked,

The influence of France is every year pervading more completely En- glish literary life. The influence of that school which calls itself, in the words of its leader, Verlaine, a school of the sunset ... Decadants [sic] is now the dominating thing in many lives. Poetry is an end in itself; it has nothing to do with thought, nothing to do with philosophy, nothing to do with life, nothing to do with anything but the music of cadence, and beauty of phrase. This is the new doctrine of letters . . .29

He goes on to give an account of the "irritated silence that fell

upon a noted gathering of the younger English imaginative writers" (he must be alluding to the Rhymers' Club, who were

spellbound by Verlaine) when he tried to show the dependence "of all great art and literature upon conviction and upon heroic life." He ends with guarded approval of the Decadent ideal, "There is a good deal to be said in favour of all this." One is most struck, however, by the terms "conviction" and "heroic life," which seem to anticipate the voice of a very different Yeats, the poet who would reject Symbolism because it had "nothing to do with life," and would turn instead to the heroic life of Major Robert Gregory, to conviction about aristocratic values in "Meditations in Time of Civil War," and the undermining of those values in "The Second

Coming," The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction

(CP, p. 211).30

With "loftiness" and "dignity" comes a sense of the artist's superiority: he can say, with the aristocrat, "As for living, our servants



1224 A. J. BATE

will do that for us." The tension that is fundamental to Yeats's

creativity seems to me to lie in the antinomy between this belief and the desire to be deeply involved with political life and the needs of the people ("My countrymen Kiltartan's poor," CP, p. 152).

In 1897 Yeats used Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's famous line from Axel as the epigraph of The Secret Rose. After 1900, it was Nietzsche who formed many of his ideas of superiority (the marginal anno- tations to his copy of Thomas Common's Choice Selections show that he was particularly struck by such comments in Zarathustra as "The noble type of man regards himself as the determinant of worth"31), but in the 'nineties he aspired to the aristocratic ideals of Villiers and Axel, which he called his "Sacred Book."

Little attention has been given to Yeats's review of the play, "A

Symbolical Drama in Paris" (The Bookman, April 189432). The article begins with an attack on "the scientific movement," on Zola the Naturalist and the later plays of Ibsen (elsewhere Yeats ex-

presses admiration for Ibsen's early verse works, including them under the heading of Symbolism), contrasting them with Maeter- linck and above all "his master, Villiers." There follows a synopsis of the play. Sara is described as a "Medusa-like type," a reference that strengthens Mario Praz's argument in the opening chapter of The Romantic Agony that post-Romantics and Decadents were obsessed with this type of woman. Yeats quotes some of Sara's last lines, "Oh, to veil you with my hair, where you will breathe the

spirit of dead roses." This could be the source of the hair and roses that pervade The Wind among the Reeds, especially since Yeats con- tinued the review by saying that parts of Axel were near to his "perfect things," at the head of which he numbered "a certain night scene long ago, when I heard the wind blowing in a bed of reeds

by the border of a little lake"-a memory that combines the title of the volume and the content of one of its poems ("the border of the lake" is the setting of "He Hears the Cry of the Sedge"). There is an even closer correspondence between Yeats's response to Vil- liers' play and the end of his own The Shadowy Waters, where Dec- tora and Forgael resolve to die and "grow immortal": this is what he took to be the moral of Axel, "The infinite is alone worth at-

taining, and the infinite is the possession of the dead." A similar

thought occurs in "Blood and the Moon," written almost forty years after the review of Axel,

For wisdom is the property of the dead, A something incompatible with life (CP, p. 269).



M L N 1225

Cross-references of this sort reinforce one's sense of how deeply Yeats was affected by Symbolist thought.

Dectora's final lines testify to the close relationship between Axel and The Shadowy Waters; once again, there is an echo of Sara's "veil

you with my hair" (also familiar by now is "misty border of the wood"):

O morning star, Trembling in the blue heavens like a white fawn Upon the misty border of the wood, Bend lower, that I may cover you with my hair, For we will gaze upon this world no longer.

(CP, p. 500)

There are points of similarity between Axel and several of Yeats's

plays, for example The Countess Kathleen with its use of liturgical ceremony, but The Shadowy Waters is particularly important. Yeats

began it in the year he saw Axel and devoted more time to it than

any other play, working on it for eleven years and producing three versions (these were not merely successive drafts: he wanted them all to be included in the collected edition of 1907). It is the play he talks about most frequently in the letters, where he describes it as "magical and mystical beyond anything I have done," "the whole

story of the relation of man and woman in symbol" (the latter could also have been said of Axel). But when he revised it after 1900 he wrote, "The very temper of the thing is different. It is full of

homely phrases and of the idiom of daily speech. ... I believe more strongly every day that the element of strength in poetic language is common idiom." In 1926 he said of his overall devel-

opment, "My own verse has more and more adopted-seemingly without any will of mine-the syntax and vocabulary of common

personal speech"33-the re-writing of The Shadowy Waters is, then, a working example of this process.

Nevertheless, the final 1905 version is still close to Axel, with its hold full of treasure and the idea that vision is achieved only in death. The set, "the deck of an ancient ship" with a harp hanging on the mast, reminds us of Tristan and Iseult (Arthur Symons wrote his tragedy of this name in 1903); so perhaps we should not be too surprised to find Yeats telling Symons in September 1905 that his essay "The Ideas of Richard Wagner," published in the Quar- terly Review two months earlier, helped him in his final revisions of the play.

"The Wagnerian essay touches my own theories at several points, and enlarges them at one or two" he begins the letter. Yeats and



1226 A. J. BATE

Wagner are rarely mentioned in the same breath-perhaps because the poet was tone deaf and knew no German. Yet he refers to Wagner in The Celtic Element in Literature as the supreme master of Symbolism (Mallarme concurred, calling him "cette cime men- acante [a most perceptive adjective] de l'absolu") and described his music-dramas as tragedies which were "the most passionate influence in the arts of Europe. ... when I spoke of their influence I

thought ... of the best intellects of our day, of men like Count Villiers de l'Isle Adam, the principal founder of the Symbolist movement."34

The admiration of the French Symbolistes for Wagner was un- bounded, though A. G. Lehmann has suggested that it was often second-hand, filtered through the likes of Teodor de Wyzewa.35 The same is true of Yeats, Symons the filter. Wagner, as Yeats would have understood his theory through Symons's exposition, said that the ground of all human art is bodily motion (again, the dance) and that the poet should number among his tools both myth and "tone-speech," a raising of diction above the everyday. Yeats wrote his poems to be read aloud or-judging by his own delivery of them-intoned; he also recognised that as Wagner used his

gods, Mallarme the established legend of Herodias, so he should draw on Irish folklore. The later Yeats rejected the "embroidered coat" of "old mythologies" and chose instead to make a mythology out of his own life and beliefs (A Vision), his friends and the Ireland of his time. So it is that he can write on a far more human plane than the Wagner of, say, Rhinegold: the following lines from "The

Municipal Gallery Revisited" are paradoxically both rooted in hu-

manity and fully mythological in their overtones,

John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought All that we did, all that we said or sang Must come from contact with the soil, from that Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong.

(CP, p. 369)

A single allusion, the Antaeus simile, allows the poet and his friends to become symbols as well as human beings.

Yeats was also attracted by Wagner's active interest in the run-

ning of a theatre (though there was a slight difference in size between Bayreuth and the Abbey Theatre) and his desire to develop a distinctively nationalist brand of art. But ultimately one can say no more than that he was a part of-though possibly more than



M L N 1227

anyone else a progenitor of-the Symbolist movement, which Yeats came to know through Symons, scoured for ideas that comple- mented his own,36 and finally rejected as limited by its abstraction from the real world. "The Wagnerian essay touches my own theories at several points, and enlarges them at one or two": that is all.

The Symbolistes' first introduction to Wagner was Baudelaire's

essay "Richard Wagner et Tannhauser a Paris," which emphasises the composer's mystical flight towards the infinite, his letter to Berlioz on the inter-dependence of the arts (compare Yeats's combination of music, dance, mime and poetry in his plays) and the naturalness of such an artist also being a critic (as were Yeats, Mallarme and Baudelaire himself). Most important of all is the

part of the essay where he quotes his own poem "Correspond- ances" and makes the classic Symbolist formulation "les choses s'etant toujours exprimees par une analogie reciproque, depuis le

jour ou Dieu a profere le monde comme une complexe et indivi- sible totalite."37

"Correspondances" and synaesthesia are central to both French

Symbolisme and the broader history of Symbolism, with its roots in hermeticism. Yeats uses the term in his edition of Blake,

Whoever has understood the correspondence asserted by Blake between (say) sight, hearing, taste and smell, and certain mental qualities, feels at once that much in his own intellect is plainer to him. ... A 'correspondence', for the very reason that it is implicit rather than ex- plicit, says far more than a syllogism or a scientific observation.38

This passage is from a section of exposition of Blake's system sig- nificantly entitled "The Necessity of Symbolism." Blake's place in Yeats's Symbolist thought cannot be over-estimated: he is described as "the first writer of modern times to preach the indis- soluble marriage of all great art with symbol" ("modern" is inter-

esting-could Yeats have been thinking of Plotinus as the symbolist of ancient times?). In this context Yeats gives a typical definition of the Symbolist aesthetic, "A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a

spiritual flame"-note the self-reflexive quality by which a lamp, itself a recurring symbol (usually associated with the poet's light in the tower), is used to define the symbol. Blake is also a useful figure to keep in mind because of the similar problems posed by his and Yeats's respective "systems"; the following is true of them both,



1228 A. J. BATE

"mysticism was never the substance of his poetry, only its machinery.... The substance of his poetry is himself, revolting and desiring."39

Synaesthesia reaches an extreme with des Esseintes and his musical liqueurs. Huysmans' protagonist actually quotes Baudelaire when describing his passion for perfumes, an obsession shared by his slightly watered-down English counterpart, Wilde's Dorian

Gray (Symbolist or Decadent personae self-consciously feed off one another: des Esseintes' debauchery is a result of over-indulgence in the works of Baudelaire and Mallarme, Dorian's decline is

entirely due to reading A Rebours). It is probably from Wilde that Yeats derived the incense and

intoxicating dance of Rosa Alchemica. He deeply admired Wilde's

only volume of critical writings, Intentions (1891), with its sense of the music of verse, of dancing as union of body and soul, and its

exploration of masks (though poses might be a more apposite term). The business of poetry, proclaims Gilbert in The Critic as Artist, is "to create a mood"-this prefigures Yeats in an essay of 1895, "literature differs from explanatory and scientific writing in being wrought about a mood."40

Neither Wilde nor Pater can be separated from the Continental tradition. "All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music" is written with the same instinct as Verlaine's "De la mu-

sique encore et toujours"; another passage in Pater's essay on "The School of Giorgione" speaks in the Symbolist manner of art striving to become a matter of pure perception. And Pater suggests that Leonardo's women are like the daughters of Herodias.

Yeats's early prose has something of Pater's languor; he associated The Renaissance with the poetic of the 'nineties enough to print Pater's description of the Mona Lisa at the beginning of his Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935 despite the fact that it was written in prose in 1873. The analysis of dialectic method in Plato and Platonism may be used to illuminate Yeats's poems of self-com- munion and his dialogue-form: "continuous discourse with one's self... for those who prosecute it with thoroughness co-extensive with life itself." The ideal of Platonism provides another possible source for Yeats's notion of Unity of Being: "Organic unity with one's self, body or soul, in the well-being, the rightness, or right- eousness, orjustice of the individual, of the microcosm"41-though here Pater introduces distinctly un-Yeatsian moral overtones.

* * *



M L N 1229

Yeats's essay "The Symbolism of Poetry" refers to "sound, colour and form in a musical relation" in a paragraph that is virtually an

amalgam of Baudelairean "Correspondances" and Pateresque musicality. This essay, along with a number of others in Ideas of Good and Evil, constitutes Yeats's fullest contribution to "Symbolist" thought. It begins with a reference to Symons's Symbolist Movement in Literature, alludes to Wagner, and is indebted to Mallarme in such statements as "now writers have begun to dwell on the element of evocation, of suggestion, upon what we call the symbolism in great writers." It ends with a call for a return to imagination and the need for "wavering, meditative, organic rhythms"-"you cannot give a body to something that moves beyond the senses, unless your words are as subtle, as complex, as full of mysterious life, as the body of a flower or of a woman."42

Already, Yeats had progressed from his position in "The Au- tumn of the Body," an essay of two years earlier where the stylistic debt to Pater is most marked and the thought most radically di- vorced from everyday reality. "The arts are, I believe, about to take upon their shoulders the burdens that have fallen from the shoulders of priests, and to lead us back upon our journey by filling our thoughts with the essences of things, and not with things." Predictably, Yeats then uses the image of alchemy to describe the movement and its "ever more arduous search for an almost disembodied ecstasy." The full extent of Yeats's development becomes

apparent when we contrast this remark with the late poems, such as the "Crazy Jane" sequence, which are so concerned with the

body. In his thirties he wrote of eternity and disembodied ecstasy; in his sixties he said "only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mind-sex and the dead."43

In "The Symbolism of Poetry" he at least admits that what is

"beyond the senses" must be "given body." It is therefore not quite so open to criticism as "The Autumn of the Body," which Yeats attacked in an important letter of 1903 to AE,

I am no longer in much sympathy with an essay like The Autumn of the Body, not that I think that essay untrue. But I think I mistook for a permanent phase of the world what was only a preparation. The close of the last century was full of a strange desire to get out of form, to get to some kind of disembodied beauty, and now it seems to me the con- trary impulse has come. I feel about me and in me an impulse to create form, to carry the realization of beauty as far as possible. The Greeks



1230 A. J. BATE

said that the Dionysiac enthusiasm preceded the Apollonic and that the Dionysiac was sad and desirous, but that the Apollonic was joyful and self-sufficient. Long ago I used to define to myself these two influences as the Transfiguration on the Mountain and the Incarnation, only the Transfiguration comes before the Incarnation in the natural order.

(Letters, p. 402)

There is much to ponder here. Yeats is no longer in sympathy with the aesthetic of the 'nineties, but sees it as a necessary phase through which he has passed. The Apollonic-Dionysiac distinction reflects his reading of Nietzsche in 1902. The impulse to create

form hints at the greater technical conciseness and metrical control (often in innovatory forms-or new handlings of conventional ones, such as the sonnet in "Leda and the Swan") of the later

poems, as opposed to the imprecise "sad and desirous" wistfulness of his early pieces. Beauty is to be realized, embodied or made

tangible; his last letter, written six days before he died, bears out this conclusion, "When I try to put all into a phrase I say, 'Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.' . . . The abstract is not life and everywhere draws out his contradictions. You can refute

Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence." (Letters, p. 922). Symbolist Yeats draws on the abstract; the later poems tend to-

wards the Song of Sixpence (in the "folk" songs of Last Poems) and the Saint. Poet and Saint are associated in Per Amica Silentia Lunae (the little book which has as epilogue the "Letter to Maurice," Yeats's own account of French influences on his early work); the

sanctity of Byzantium is achieved through purifying fire; "Vacil- lation" is a bestowing of beatitude,

While on the shop and street I gazed My body of a sudden blazed; And twenty minutes more or less It seemed so great my happiness, That I was blessed and could bless.

(CP, p. 284)

(As in "The Circus Animals' Desertion," preciosity is avoided by means of a tiny and deliberately imprecise temporal detail).

Yeats's development can also be seen in terms of Transfiguration (compare Coleridge on Symbol and Translucence of the eternal

through the temporal) followed by Incarnation-the terrible

beauty that is born in the mature poems. The latter are Apollonic, "joyful and self-sufficient." "Self-sufficient" draws attention to



M L N 1231

their self-examinatory quality ("Of recent years instead of 'vision' ... I have tried for more self portraiture"44), "joyful" to the Nietz- schean concept of tragic joy that is at the heart of "Lapis Lazuli" and "The Gyres."

It is a development not unlike that of Paul Valery. Both poets came under the spell of Mallarme in the 'nineties, moved away from him in the course of a long, self-conscious and painful poetic development, and wrote their best verse late in life. As ways of

coming to terms with antitheses in the self, the personae Monsieur et Madame Teste may be compared to Owen Aherne and Michael Robartes, the theory of the Self to that of Masks. Both poets be- lieved that science and the preacher's voice would have to be cast out of poetry, and they both set store by the dancer as image of unified art (see Valery's dialogue-a favourite Yeatsian form- L'Ame et la Danse). For each of them, Symbolism was a circus animal, but in the end they had to face up to themselves: "L'oeuvre capitale d'une artiste, c'est l'artiste lui-meme."45

Yeats was always conscious of his own provinciality. In Dramatis Personae, he suggested that a young Irishman of talent would do well to spend the formative years between the ages of eighteen and

twenty-five outside Ireland (his own residence in London and visits to Paris came a little late by this account). In Samhain, 1901, he said that England would be too violent a contrast, France a healthier influence.

My principal aim in this essay has been to document the French influence on Yeats, both in Shelley's sense of a shared Zeitgeist and in the possible specific parallels I have discovered. In so doing I have tried to show that by setting him in a broad European context, we may gain a better understanding of Yeats than is possible if he is considered merely as part of the Irish Literary Renaissance. Nev- ertheless, it was to Ireland that he returned; having assimilated

Symbolist thought, rejected or adapted it to his own ends, he was able to create his own symbols and his own distinctive style. The Tower may be his version of Axel's castle, but it is rooted firmly in the soil of Ballylee.

Cambridge University

NOTES

1 Letters, ed. A. Wade (London, 1954), p. 592. 2 see W. B. Yeats: The Critical Heritage, ed. A. N. Jeffares (London, 1977), p. 252.



1232 A. J. BATE

3 "The Influence on W. B. Yeats of some French poets (Mallarme, Verlaine, Claudel)," Southern Review, N.S. 6 (1970), 356-79.

4 Manifeste du Symbolisme, quoted in H. Nicolas, Mallarmg et le Symbolisme (Paris, 1963), p. 69; Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London, 1961), p. 189. Hereafter

Essays. 5 Memoirs, ed. D. Donoghue (London, 1972), p. 36. 6 Symons translates "give"; there is no Dowson translation of this particular poem. 7 Autobiographies (London, 1955), p. 320. 8 Memoirs, p. 95. 9 "Le Bateau Ivre." Yeats barely knew Rimbaud's work, only referring to it three

times. Twice he speaks of "Les chercheuses de poux" which he may have known

only through a Sturge Moore imitation; there is also a comment in the "Letter to Maurice."

10 Collected Poems (London, 1961), p. 140. Hereafter CP. 11 Autobiographies, p. 321. 12 A Vision (London, 1937), p. 273; Letters, p. 562. 13 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, tr. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, 1961), p. 135,

247. 14 Symons, "The Decadent Movement in Literature," Harper's Magazine, Nov.

1893; quoted in Decadence and the 1890s, ed. Ian Fletcher, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 17 (London, 1979), p. 151.

15 Yeats, Essays, p. 518; Mallarme, Oeuvres Completes (Paris, 1961), p. 306. Hereafter Oeuvres.

16 Symons, Studies in Seven Arts (London, 1906), p. 391; Mallarme, Oeuvres, p. 645.

17 Symons, "Qu'est-ce que la poesie," Vers et Prose, 3 (Paris, Nov 1905). 18 Essays, p. 187. 19 "Magie," Oeuvres, p. 400; "Magic," Essays, 28-52, especially p. 43. Also compare

Valery in Poisie et Pens&e abstraite (Oxford, 1939), p. 20; "Je dis: merveilleux au sens que nous donnons a ce terme quand nous pensons aux prestiges et aux prodiges de l'antique magie. II ne faut pas oublier que la forme poetique a ete

pendant des siecles affectes au service des enchantements." 20 in Early Poems and Stories (London, 1925), p. 466. 21 Letters, p. 887 (on reading Roger Fry's translation of Mallarme). 22 Essays, p. 266f. 23 to Florence Farr, 1907, quoted in R. Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (2nd ed.,

London, 1964), p. 91. Not in Letters. 24 Letter from JBY to WBY, 30 June 1921, in The Critical Heritage, p. 245. 25 Coleridge, The Statesman's Manual, Collected Works, VI (London, 1972), p. 30. A

classic definition of the Symbol. 26 Oeuvres, p. 869. 27 Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London, 1899), p. 90; Yeats, Essays,

p. 270. 28 quoted by Yeats, ibid. 29 Uncollected Prose, ed. J. P. Frayne, I (London, 1970), p. 248. 30 "Ceremony" and "innocence" are rich Yeatsian values-in "A Prayer for my

Daughter" they are associated with "custom" and "beauty." 31 see the chapter on Yeats in P. Bridgwater, Nietzsche in Anglosaxony (Leicester,

1972).



M L N 1233

32 reprinted in Uncollected Prose I, 322-5. 33 Letters, p. 280; 324; 462; 710. 34 Letters, p. 459; the only critic to touch on Yeats and Wagner seems to be M. E.

Humble in an unpublished Cambridge University PhD thesis of 1969, German Contacts and Influences in the Lives and Works of W. B. Yeats and D. H. Lawrence; Mallarme, Oeuvres, p. 546; Yeats, Uncollected Prose II (London, 1975), p. 123.

35 see The Symbolist Aesthetic in France 1885-1895 (Oxford, 1950), 194-206. 36 "When Symons talked to me about the Symbolists, or read me passages from

his translations of Mallarme, I seized upon everything that at all resembled my own thought." Yeats, letter to C. M. Bowra, quoted in Bowra, Memories 1898- 1939 (London, 1966), p. 240. Not in Letters.

37 April 1861; reprinted in L'Art Romantique (Paris, 1925), p. 206. 38 The Works of William Blake Poetic, Symbolic and Critical, ed. E.J. Ellis & W. B.

Yeats (London, 1893), I, p. 238. 39 Essays, p. 116; Letter about Blake from JBY to WBY, Sept. 1915, quoted in

Ellmann, Identity, p. 204. 40 Essays, p. 195. 41 Pater, Plato and Platonism (London, 1893), p. 185, 268. 42 Essays, p. 155, 164. 43 Essays, p. 194: for the idea of art taking on the burden of the priests, consider

the sacramental imagery of Baudelaire and Huysmans; also see my comments below on artist and saint, and Lawrence's "One has to be so terribly religious to be an artist" (letter to Ernest Collings, 24 February 1913)-Wagner's influence on The Trespasser suggests that Lawrence is not unconnected with the tradition I am tracing. Letters, p. 730.

44 Letters, p. 583-compare the language of "A Prayer for my Daughter," "self-

delighting, / Self-appeasing, self-affrighting" (CP, p. 214). 45 Valery, Reponses, quoted in I. W. Alexander, "Valery and Yeats: the Rehabili-

tation of Time," Scottish Periodical, 1 (1947), 77-106.



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