2—
Freedom and Individuality:
The Politics of Yeats's Theatre, 1900–1903

Nearly a year after the first production of The Countess Cathleen , W. B. Yeats wrote a letter to Lady Gregory in which he explained the aims of his recent political moves and made a forecast for the theatrical movement.^[1] A startling epigram from this letter of 10 April 1900—"One must accept the baptism of the gutter"—is sometimes cited by literary historians to show that Yeats had attitudes native to his class toward those who were poor and lived in cities; such people called up in him associations with dirt, ditchwater, and the sweepings of the street. He had, according to G. J. Watson, "an almost eastern sense of caste pollution," and Conor Cruise O'Brien, on the basis of this letter, speculates that Yeats was relieved when he found himself free to fight the Catholic "mob" rather than to work within it.^[2] However, this important letter shows more than the way in which Yeats re-

[1] Wade, 338–39.

[2] Watson, Irish Identity and the Literary Revival (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1979), 38; Conor Cruise O'Brien, "Passion and Cunning: An Essay on the Politics of W. B. Yeats," in In Excited Reverie , ed. A. Norman Jeffares and K. G. W. Cross (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965), esp. 225–26. Watson elaborates O'Brien's argument that class conflict was a crucial element in the life and work of Yeats, and he extends the argument to Synge, whose work, he says, shows a "residue of quasi-aristocratic contempt for the 'natives' he was never able to expunge totally" (Watson, 38). For two of the many critics attacking O'Brien's article, see Patrick Cosgrave, "Yeats, Fascism, and Conor O'Brien," London Magazine , July 1971, and esp. Elizabeth Cullingford, Yeats, Ireland and Fascism (New York: New York University Press, 1981), discussed at length below.

sponded to the force of class feeling; other passages enable one also to measure the forces of politics and patronage as they determine the shape taken by Yeats's intellectual ambitions. An inquiry into this particular letter sets the stage for an analysis of the political identity of the poet in the years between the beginning of the Irish Literary Theatre (1899) and the establishment of the Irish National Theatre Society in the Abbey (1904).

The entire paragraph moves through a chain of subjects—theatre, money, politics, and popularity—to the final remark on "the baptism of the gutter":

I don't think we need be anxious about next year's theatre. Moore talks confidently of finding the money, and I feel sure that our present politics will have done more good than harm. Clever Unionists will take us on our merits and the rest would never like us at any time. I have found a greatly increased friendliness on the part of some of the young men here. In a battle, like Ireland's, which is one of poverty against wealth, one must prove one's sincerity, by making oneself unpopular to wealth. One must accept the baptism of the gutter. Have not all teachers done the like?^[3]

The "present politics" that Yeats expected would do him and his theatre "more good than harm" were the extreme anti-British politics into which he had thrown himself in the previous months. In the columns of the Freeman's Journal (20 March 1900) and the Daily Express (3 April 1900),^[4] WBY had called Queen Victoria's April tour of Ireland a junket to recruit soldiers for the suppression of liberty in South Africa in the Boer War. Anyone who stood by the road and cheered the queen, he said, dishonored Ireland and condoned a crime. Furthermore, he set forth a plan for a committee to organize protest so that public demonstrations of national spirit did not lead to riot. There is a piquant mix of the provocateur and the politician here, the old O'Connell monster-meeting style, the Parnell Land League style, of appearing to hold back the blood-

[3] Wade, 338–39.

[4] Frayne and Johnson, 2:207–8.

thirsty masses that one has first roused to high passion. Yeats's "present politics," in short, were disloyal, provocative, and spectacularly nationalistic.

"Present politics," however, suggest that there are "future politics" and "past politics"; that the tactics of the moment shift about in the play of the battles, perhaps in light of long-term strategy. The past politics were those of a more gentlemanly, "cultural" nationalism that aimed to set forth Irish scenes and Irish characters in a fashion that was artistic, "outside the questions that divide" Irishmen,^[5] and did not necessarily involve disloyalty to England. With those politics, Yeats and Lady Gregory had managed to assemble a list of notable Irishmen as guarantors of the Irish Literary Theatre, many of them Protestants, and some Unionists, such as Horace Plunkett, a Unionist leader of rural cooperatives, and the Trinity College historian W. H. Lecky.

The theatre ultimately did not have to call upon its patrons for the full cost of production, because Edward Martyn had agreed to pay for the first and then the second season of performances, each of which featured his work along with plays by Yeats or Moore. But after Martyn's third play, A Tale of a Town , was rejected, and then reconstructed by Yeats and Moore as The Bending of the Bough , Martyn began to let it be known that he was not going to pay for other men's work.^[6]

[5] "Prospectus," Irish Literary Theatre, January 1899, rpt. in Lady Gregory, Our Irish Theatre (1913; rpt. New York: Capricorn Books, 1965), 9.

[6] Martyn's commitment to a joint theatre project with Yeats wavered from the beginning with the clerical opposition to The Countess Cathleen in April 1899, but it did not entirely fail for several years. On 31 January 1900, WBY wrote to Lady Gregory that "Moore promises to raise a certain amount of money if Martyn goes out . . . but at any rate I shall do all I can to keep Martyn, but make plain that what is indispensable is the good work we may yet do and not the money which another may give as well as he" (Wade, 334). Martyn ultimately paid for the third season of the Irish Literary Theatre, and did not completely lose interest in working with Yeats and funding his theatre until the time of his gift of £50,000 to the Pro-Cathedral for founding a Palestrina choir, in the late spring of 1902, after the first performance of the Irish National Dramatic Society in April, by which time it was clear to Martyn that Yeats had no room in his plans for Martyn's work or his type of realistic drama about middle-class Irishmen. As late as 25 July 1902, Frank Fay held out hope that Martyn would lend the Irish National Dramatic Society "sufficient money to build a hall" (Finneran, Harper, and Murphy, 2:101).

Moore subsequently looked elsewhere for funding, and by the time WBY wrote to Lady Gregory on 10 April 1900, Moore "talk[ed] confidently of finding" it. But even as early as 31 January 1900, Yeats had thought he could pick up additional money from a source of his own, a "Miss—."^[7] "One must of course not mention her name in the matter," he quickly added in this letter, and Lady Gregory obediently blotted it on the page, but one would be very surprised if the unmarried woman in question were not the English spinster Annie Horniman. She had not wished it to be known that she had financed the production of Yeats's first play, The Land of Heart's Desire , at the Avenue Theatre in 1894; and in 1900 Yeats would not have liked it to be known that an Englishwoman might become a financial backer of what he wished to be seen as a more directly nationalist theatre. The new possibilities of patronage from Moore's friend and Yeats's passionate lover of art, it appears, allowed the directors of the Literary Theatre some freedom of movement in the local political scene.

When Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Martyn first began discussions of an Irish Literary Theatre, they sought guarantors for the sake of publicity, capital, and even legitimacy; indeed, one of them, Lecky, an Irish M.P., had a government regulation amended to permit nonprofit performances of plays by literary societies. The sponsorship of the class Yeats called "the class of wealth" when he disapproved of them, and "the educated class" when he approved had, then, been important at the start, but it had soon turned into a liability. During the arguments over The Countess Cathleen , Yeats had reason to worry that his work would be received with suspicion as long as it was put before the world by Unionist sponsors.

Even before the May 1899 performance of The Countess Cathleen , Yeats published an essay in the Daily Nation that distinguished his own social and political position from that of many other educated Protestants.^[8] This defends Irish folklore against the Trinity don Robert Atkinson's charge that it was

[7] Wade, 334.

[8] WBY, "The Academic Class and the Agrarian Revolution," Daily Nation , 11 March 1899, in Frayne and Johnson, 2:148–52.

all "silly or indecent."^[9] Clearly, WBY could not take the charge that folklore was "at bottom, abominable" lying down. He had based much of his work on the premise that folklore was the source of universal wisdom and a treasury of racial dignity. Yeats, however, does more in this essay than defend folklore: he offers an explanation of the character of Protestant intellectuals as an effect of the land wars, during which the Protestants, if they did not lose their Ascendancy, lost the basis of it in property. "The true explanation" of Atkinson's fury over Gaelic classes, he says, is that he "like most people on both sides in politics of the last generation which had to endure the bitterness of the agrarian revolution, is still in a fume of political excitement, and cannot consider any Irish matter without this excitement."^[10] In Yeats's view at this time, neither the Anglo-Irish establishment nor the revolutionary Catholic masses were capable of leading the nation. Once, he says, Thomas Davis and the Young Ireland movement of the 1840s had released a pure stream of ideal nationality, but the "inevitably imperfect ideals" of the revolutionary masses had muddied the stream, and the Ascendancy class had dried it up altogether. Who was to lead the nation and again open clear streams of national life?

During this period, 1899–1901, WBY sometimes imagined himself as a kind of Moses, one who could strike water from the rock, threaten an empire, bring ideal laws from the mountaintop, and lead the people to a promised land. The ascendancy class, he ominously says, would "wander forty years in the wilderness that all who have sinned a particular sin might die there." But the leadership of the tribe would then pass into the hands of a few men "who are seeking to create a criticism of life which will weigh all Irish interests, and bind the rich and the poor in one brotherhood."^[11] The chief ambition of the poet during this period was to found and lead that small band of Levites. It is worth remembering that Moses

[9] Daily Express , 23 February 1899; Frayne and Johnson, 2:148.

[10] Frayne and Johnson, 2:150.

[11] Ibid., 151.

originally lived among the Egyptians. Yeats surely believed that the leadership of the Irish should come from disaffiliated Protestants like Davis, Parnell, and himself. As Yeats remarked in the 1901 Samhain , "Moses was little good to his people until he had killed an Egyptian."^[12]

Thus the present politics. And they had an effect that, if not intended, was still welcomed: the "Egyptian" Lecky publicly resigned from the board of the Irish Literary Theatre because of Yeats's disloyal and rabble-rousing letters to the press. Early in that letter of 10 April 1900, WBY says he may write again to the press to needle Lecky a little more by saying he could not resign; he had already been dropped from membership for not paying dues. This charge, Yeats hoped, would so annoy Lecky that it would spread into a long public controversy concerning the queen, which "would make Moore and myself quite happy."^[13] Surely everyone would then see that there were not only Unionist Protestants but nationalist ones too, and Yeats could look to "greatly increased friendliness" from the young Catholic nationalists, many of whom had fought him on The Countess Cathleen ,^[14]

I am not saying that in making a public attack on the queen's Irish tour, Yeats was not a nationalist, that he felt neither sympathy for Irish recruits, nor solidarity with the Boers, nor indignation against Irishmen loyal to the British Empire. But why did he make these sentiments public in language that could cause a break with men who had before been his friends?^[15] In the letter before us, it is quite clear that after his

[12] WBY, Explorations (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 83.

[13] Wade, 338.

[14] As early as 18 February 1900, Yeats had planned this strategy, for on that day Lady Gregory recorded a conversation between Yeats and T. W. Rolleston at an art exhibit in which WBY said "he must do something to violently annoy the upper classes to redeem his character" (Seventy Years: Being the Autobiography of Lady Gregory , ed. Colin Smythe [Gerrards Cross, Bucks.: Colin Smythe, 1973], 358).

[15] To be precise, Lecky was more the friend of Lady Gregory than of Yeats. To Lecky, Yeats was just one of "those Celtic people," as expressed in a dinner-table conversation entered into Lady Gregory's diary: "Dined Lecky's; he rather cross. Took me down to dinner and said first thing, 'What sillyspeeches your Celtic people have been making!' 'Moore?' I said, 'Yes, and Yeats, oh very silly'" (1 March [1900]; Seventy Years , 362). As a consequence, it was Lady Gregory and not Yeats who suffered the personal loss when Lecky resigned, even though WBY explained to her that it would help the theatre: "4 April 1900: I looked at The Times and saw Mr. Lecky has withdrawn his support from the Irish Literary Theatre in consequence of 'the discreditable conduct of Mr. W. B. Yeats, Mr. George Moore and other prominent supporters of the movement.' It will do the theatre no harm, rather good I think . . . but that little want of courtesy in his decision being sent to the papers with no private notice to me hurts me" (Seventy Years , 368).

first "Queen letters," he continued the controversy because these "present politics" would do the theatre "more good than harm." Had they done more harm than good, it seems probable that Yeats would have expressed his sense of the political situation differently, perhaps privately among friends, not in the pages of Dublin daily papers. When the Irish Literary Theatre needed to raise money and gain legitimacy, Lecky was welcome. Now what it most needed (at least if Moore and Yeats were right in their hopes of money) was political credibility with the nationalist audience, and for that the class among which Lecky lived and from which he took his values had to be made at least temporarily unwelcome.

This letter tells us a number of things about the role of Yeats in the politics of theatre and in the theatre of politics. First, he was never unmindful of the way in which his role in the practical politics of events like the Jubilee Riots (1897), the Wolfe Tone Commemoration (1898), the queen's visit to Dublin during the Boer War (1900), or Edward VII's call on his Western colony (1903) affected his popularity with nationalists, Catholic and Protestant, and with Unionists, giving him more or less freedom of maneuver as a maker of plays and popular opinion in Ireland. Second, the welcome given his theatrical initiatives dictated to some extent the particular costume he assumed in his political roles. For example, in 1899, when he seeks a broad coalition to back the Irish Literary Theatre, he is a gentleman asking the support of other gentlemen; when that theatre is under way, he is a member of "the aristocracy of art,"^[16] claiming to stand above all parties and to

[16] Frayne and Johnson, 2:324.

weigh the opposed interests of rich and poor; finally, in 1900, after the uproar among Catholic nationalists over The Countess Cathleen , he is a rebel trying to embarrass an old queen. Amid these past and present politics, the real question is, What is the ultimate future political aim, the vision of the strategist behind the tactical masks?

2

Elizabeth Cullingford sees only one Yeats, who means what he says, and is just as he appears to be.^[17] Yeats, in her opinion, always stuck to the same principles, those of the school of John O'Leary: a belief in Irish nationality and a belief in the liberty of the individual. When forced to choose between independence for all or liberty for one, he would choose liberty.^[18] "There are things a man must not do to save a nation," O'Leary said and Yeats forever repeated. Asked for an example, O'Leary offered, "Cry in public."^[19] It is not hard to figure out, although Cullingford does not press the point, that the list of things that one should not do even to save a nation is long. Indeed, from other things O'Leary said or Yeats did, one can add that a good nationalist does not insult a lady, kill a civilian, participate in an election, or bend to the will of the majority. "Yeats's overriding passion," Cullingford rightly says, "Is the passion for liberty," his own liberty in particular. The freedom of the Irish nation as a whole could wait a long time, even forever, if its attainment required the sacrifice of

[17] Cullingford, Yeats, Ireland and Fascism (New York: New York University Press, 1981); on the first page of her book, for example, she takes Yeats's aphorism "Our intellects at twenty contain all the truths we shall ever find" as her text.

[18] Ibid., 13.

[19] The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats (1938; rpt., New York: Collier, 1965), 64, 143. From WBY's account of O'Leary's character and thought, it is clear that O'Leary "hated democracy" (141), thought "No gentleman can be a socialist" (141), did "not approve of bombs" (67), and "derided . . . sentimentality," "philanthropy," and "humanitarianism" (141). Yeats thinks O'Leary if pressed "would have added [to the list of those things a man must not do even to save a nation] . . . 'To write oratorical or insincere verse'" (143).

the individual freedoms enjoyed by Yeats and granted him by a colony of the English empire.

Cullingford's book aims to change the picture Conor Cruise O'Brien drew of Yeats in his essay "Passion and Cunning"—a complex portrait of the poet as calculating, snobbish, authoritarian, patriarchal, and sometimes delighting in violence—very nearly the type of the authoritarian personality that emerged in right-wing movements of the 1930s. O'Brien's Yeats looks for the main chance to impose his will; Cullingford's Yeats sees a distant vision of a free Ireland, but keeps an eye out to stay clear of any group that would impose upon his privileges. While these formulations can be reconciled—one emphasizing Yeats's power over others, and the other his insistence that none should have power over him—the general characterizations of the poet by the two critics are absolutely contradictory: O'Brien depicts Yeats as an aristocratic colonist and possible fascist; Cullingford rehabilitates Yeats as a liberal nationalist.

While Cullingford's book, written under the guidance of Richard Ellmann, is well documented and scrupulously dated, her conviction that Yeats is morally and politically consistent causes her to overlook the importance of occasion to the content of Yeats's remarks. For example, much of her evidence that Yeats was a liberal thoroughly in sympathy with the mass movement toward nationality, even after Maud Gonne's marriage in February 1903 and Horniman's offer of a theatre in October 1903, comes from a speech Yeats made to the Clan na Gael in New York in January 1904. It is possible that Yeats gave the Irish-Americans what they wanted: an individualist, democratic, and heatedly nationalist Ireland, not unlike America. After his return to Ireland, Arthur Griffith brought up Yeats's remark to a New York reporter that the Irish dramatists "now study what the people want, and they give it to them in such form that thirty or forty police must often be stationed inside the theatre to prevent riots."^[20] Of course, whatever public demonstrations there had been—protests over

[20] United Irishman , 11 February 1905, from the New York Daily News ; rpt. in Hogan and Kilroy, 3:3.

The Countess Cathleen —were directed against the Irish Literary Theatre, not the government, and the police were called in to protect Yeats's theatre against its audience. Yeats answered Griffith by saying he had never said such things, or even mentioned "politics of any kind" while in America. One must be cautious in dealing with a writer who sometimes turns out not to say what he said and often to have meant something different from what he intended to be understood.

Even if Yeats can be found to have cast into noble language certain thoughts about freedom and the individual, he was certainly not a liberal, and not simply because he might better be conceived as a conservative. It is not clear that individuality can be stated in terms of principle, or that the social and historical conditions were present in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland for persons to achieve individuality, if individuality is understood in Mill's sense as the full and free expression of the unique powers of a person. If such conditions were not in place, one could not choose between a morally repugnant, opportunist Yeats and a morally attractive, principled Yeats;^[21] all men of the time would have been faced with diminished opportunities for self-expression in keeping with a constant principle. Before we can summarize Yeats's political identity, we must examine individuality and freedom in light of their historical rise and decline.

3

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, leaders of the school of Critical Theory, argue in their genealogy of the authoritarian personality that the economic basis of individuality disintegrated from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, leav-

[21] In "Passion and Cunning," O'Brien offers a political description of Yeats, not a moral judgment of him, though his account is laced with irony. It is clear that O'Brien admires Yeats's political skills—his dexterity, patience, timing, and organizational power—although he has no sympathy with Yeats's more right-wing views. Neither Yeats's political skills nor his views diminish O'Brien's sense of the great value of his poetry. In Yeats, Ireland and Fascism , Cullingford, however, is representative of many Yeats critics in taking O'Brien's essay as character assassination, and responding with testimonials to the poet's moral acceptability.

ing individualist values as a superstructure without a real social basis.^[22] Individuality, they explain, is not the birthright of all persons; it depends on a variety of social conditions—gender, education, property, religious beliefs, and so on. The first qualifying condition of individuality is a degree of separation from society: one is an individual because one is not a part of a group, so only in cultures in which there is a realm of experience that is not communal can there be individuality. A second condition is that the life of the individual must be distinguished from the existence of the species and other life-forms, so that only in cultures in which the fact of individual death has taken on absolute importance can there be individuality.^[23] These are elementary requirements, and certain parts of the populations of all Western cultures since the Middle Ages have met them. But there are further conditions for individuality necessary before the phenomenon can become a widespread social value. To be an individual in the full sense of the term, one needs to be a man of property. Only a man who has to his name a home, a wife, children, a retinue of servants, and a large balance at the bank, preferably in gold, possesses the power to plan his life, the leisure to manifest private interests in hobbies or forms of art, and the authority to give shape to his own little society.^[24] Within his

[22] See especially Max Horkheimer, "The Rise and Decline of the Individual," in The Eclipse of Reason (New York: Continuum, 1974), 129–57. I have also drawn upon Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment , trans. John Cumming (1944; rpt., New York: Herder & Herder, 1972), and Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972). The Critical Theorists are pertinent because they concentrated their work upon the connection between bourgeois individualism and the authoritarian personality that emerged in fascism; they are reliable to the extent that they succeed in maintaining a critical distance from both Marxist and liberal ideologies, while making arguments whose rigor and scope—including psychology, economics, sociology, and history—appeal to reason.

[23] Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason , 137.

[24] Ibid., 140–57; esp. 140–41. Nietzsche argues in a similar way in The Genealogy of Morals , ii, where he defines the autonomous individual as one with "an independent long-range will, which dares to make promises"; this raises him above the mass of people "who are unable to stand security for themselves."

house the man of property can arrange the education of his young, medical care for sick dependents, provision for parents in their old age, and labor relations with servants; he can see to it, in short, that by the authority of his will, his life is stamped on the world in his own time and, through his children, for generations to come. It is apparent that in its origins, individuality is inseparable from aristocratic features democratized among the middle classes during the great movement of nineteenth-century British capitalism: private property, privilege, male dominance, and authoritarianism.

This definition will seem too narrow and historically specific to some, who would like to think that anyone, rich or poor, can be an individual, indeed, that nothing can eradicate the unique qualities of each person. Horkheimer and Adorno are arguing that his completely open definition of individuality obscures the way in which individuality is dependent on society and prevents us from seeing that the realization of an enduring and integrated self is the end of a long and deliberate labor for emancipation from animal desires, material needs, and social compulsion. A person who must agree to take a factory job in order to eat may achieve little expression through his work; and if he must work all the time when he is not asleep or exhausted, he may find little expression outside his work. If he cannot afford a home and moves from shelter to shelter, he may acquire none of the symbols of identity. If he never acquires the capital to educate his children or leave them a family estate, he may find no self-expression through procreation. If his access to thought is limited to the productions of a mass-culture entertainment industry, even his mental life may become subject to supervision.^[25]

How many are there in this class of people whose chances for individuality are so severely limited? Certainly, one must be able to speak of degrees of individuality, and neither Horkheimer nor Adorno is perfectly clear about what degree

[25] See Horkheimer, "Art and Mass Culture," in Critical Theory , 277–88; and Horkheimer and Adorno, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception," in Dialectic of Enlightenment , 121–67; esp. 144.

counts for full individuality in the nineteenth-century British sense of the ideal that they outline. What about independent artisans with their own implements of labor and their own style of manufacture, but very little fixed property? Or—more to the point—artists not completely deterred by their straitened circumstances?^[26] Horkheimer and Adorno do not take up such cases; they offer a theoretical model, not an adequate social history. In this model, those who miss the chance for full bourgeois individuality include most of those, to begin with, who are not adult males, and of the males, many whose work gives them no more than a subsistence. Individuality, then, widely existed only among the bourgeoisie, and by the end of the nineteenth century, Horkheimer argues, the growth of capitalism into a world market, ruled by laws of supply and demand, international conflicts, natural disasters, and the collision of vast industrial interests, severely limited the freedom and economic security of most private entrepreneurs. Many people were left in the end with just that degree of individuality with which they were born: a biological difference, specially determined by the psychology of the nuclear family and then forcibly adapted to the social forms of a new economic order. In these circumstances, to continue to speak without qualification of "freedom" and "individuality" is to indulge in ideology.^[27]

4

A generation earlier, Yeats's family had consisted of merchants and rectors, owners of a small country estate, and members of a privileged class in a colonial society. But the poet's father,

[26] I am grateful to my colleague Felmon Davis for alerting me to several questions about the Critical Theorists' account of individuality.

[27] Ideology is here used pejoratively to refer to the class character of the ideas, in the sense developed by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1972)—"the illusion of a class about itself" that represents the interests of a group as the interest of mankind. For a discussion of the meanings of "ideology," see Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 126–30.

J. B. Yeats, had sold the country estate at Thomastown,^[28] dropped his study of law, and sought to make a life for himself as a portrait painter, moving from residence to residence in Dublin and London, always in and out of debt. In his early years, then, WBY experienced the dissolution of the economic basis of his membership in an elite. But this did not occur simply through the prodigality of his father. The 1848 Encumbered Estates Act and the 1885 Ashbourne Act under which his father's estate was sold brought about a massive redistribution of property in Ireland—what WBY called "the Agrarian Revolution"—the encumbered estates of Protestants passing into the hands of their former Catholic renters, now peasant proprietors and future tradespeople. The whole solid structure of Irish feudalism began to melt into the air. To a vast new class of private farmers were added a mass of industrial workers, mainly in Belfast and the Lagan Valley; a middle class of men engaged in trade in Dublin and provincial towns; and a new intellectual class, many of them artisans, clerks, and journalists, demanding political expression for these new elements in Irish society.^[29] In a few generations, Ireland changed from a society in which a small, basically Protestant, class possessed the means to attain individuality, while a huge inarticulate Catholic peasantry did not, to one in

[28] The Yeats estate was 560 English or American acres, with seventeen farm tenancies, mostly engaged in the dairy business. However, it was so heavily mortgaged that income from rents did not suffice to support WBY's grandfather's family, much less his father's. It was sold in 1889 for £7,032, all but £1,004 of which went to pay off loans against the property, the remainder being used immediately to meet other debts. Even had the estate been kept in the family, and passed entirely to WBY, the eldest son, it would not have freed him from work. For the details, see William M. Murphy, Prodigal Father: The Life of John Butler Yeats (1839–1922) (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978), 151, 574.

[29] W. J. McCormack argues along similar lines that "Too much has been made of [Ireland's] 'generally remarked upon lack of a capitalist bourgeoisie,'" and notes the importance of the industrial sector around Belfast, the commercial districts in Dublin, and the "petit bourgeois" character of the Land League—all ignored, even repressed, in the writings of Yeats, Synge, and Lady Gregory. See Ascendancy and Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 249–51.

which the economic basis of the Protestant identity was shattered and new classes of farmers, tradesmen, and artisans vociferously sought some sort of collective identity as citizens of a de-Anglicized republic. For them the goal was not to refine the isolated individual, but to realize the national being as a whole, with its own language, manners, dress, industry, and government.

In the early summer, Yeats would return from his London residence to a grandfather's or uncle's home in Sligo, and after 1896 to Lady Gregory's estate at Coole, where he could enjoy the leisure of a gentleman, fly-fishing for trout, writing poems, or conducting spiritual investigations, but come autumn he went back to London to write what he could sell, a review for five pounds, an edition of folk stories for ten guineas.^[30] To a remarkable degree, Yeats did the work he wanted to do rather than simply what he was told to do, or what readers would in the greatest number buy, but if he had been born forty years earlier, he could imagine, he might have written entirely at his leisure.^[31] It is no surprise, therefore, to hear the poet sing of his dream of the noble and the beggarman, to hear him lament the destruction of a great house and wonder whether it was worth it to make many small houses a little stronger, or, finally, to hear him trumpet the absolute necessity of individuality and freedom. As Kenneth Burke suggests, when we analyze the element of comfort in beauty, in order to be dia-

[30] An impression of Yeats's money difficulties can be gained from the eloquent index of John Kelly and Eric Domville's edition of The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats , vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 546: "FINANCES: 95, 'cleared out,' 102, 103, 148, 158; 'low these times,' 159, 160, 183, 218; 'a trifle short,' 220; 'a financial crisis,' 223, 224, 228, 233, 260; 'in a fix for a pound,' 261, 262, 272," etc.

[31] Born forty years earlier, Yeats would have reached maturity during the Famine years, when peasants paid few rents, if any. For three generations, the family property was insufficient to provide a complete living to the Yeatses. These facts, however, do not prevent WBY from looking back to better days. W. J. McCormack has a stimulating discussion of the perpetual "backdating" of the good life that is characteristic of Ascendancy thinking (and not unknown to other classes in other lands!) (Ascendancy and Tradition , 308–9, and passim).

lectical, we should include "the element of discomfort (actual or threatened) for which poetry is the medicine."^[32] By this dialectical reasoning, Yeats's assertions of individual freedoms are an elegy for what was lost: the feudal privileges of a great man in a big house.

In his prose notes to "Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation" (1910), Yeats himself describes the deeply felt difference between the struggle for identity under the old regime and in the new Ireland. He wrote this poem, he says, when he heard that the courts had reduced the rents allowed to landlords, a structural change in Irish society that he thought had large costs: "I am always feeling a lack of life's own values behind my thought—work had to create its own values. Here [in Lady Gregory's house] there has been no compelled labor, no poverty-thwarted impulse. One feels that when all must make their living, they will not live for life's sake but the work's and be poorer."^[33] This is Yeats's hard task: to make real in literature certain values of his class—personal power, energy, precision, family memories, and the eccentric cultivation of intellect—that have been cut loose from their social setting. They must be created by writing; they exist only in that writing.

How, then, can we define the political identity of Yeats? First, that identity cannot simply be reduced to its private property: there is little equivalence between Yeats in 1900 and his rented room at 18 Woburn Place, London, with its books, pictures, and the services of a cleaning woman named Mrs. Olds. Second, Yeats cannot be accurately accounted for by reflection upon receipts for work done or money borrowed—so much for commissions, so much for royalties, unpaid loans

[32] Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (3d ed.; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), 61. I am indebted to Frank Lentricchia's Criticism and Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) for calling attention to this passage, and in general for his spirited rereading of Burke.

[33] WBY, Memoirs: Autobiography—First Draft, Journal , transcribed and edited by Denis Donoghue (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 226.

from Lady Gregory. Third, he cannot be completely understood by being reinstated in the class of educated Protestant Irishmen from whom he took some of his values. Yeats is a petit bourgeois Irish Protestant of large ambition and little property; but, of course, not every petit bourgeois Irish Protestant of similar ambition is a Yeats.^[34] His individuality, of course, is his writing. But the first, second, and third factors (property, labor, and class) all determine to some extent the form of that individuality, in the Burkean light of prescribing specific medicines for those otherwise untreatable discomforts. In each case, Yeats turns a material deprivation into an aesthetic ideal and a world imprisoned in the past into a free utopia of poetry.^[35] The London flat is the scene in which a poetry is made laying claim to all the islands, mountains, and streams of Sligo. The real material impoverishment of his early years becomes a literature that is a monument to the victory of the soul. And, finally, a broken Ascendancy—"the

[34] This adapts Sartre's mot: "Valéry was a petit-bourgeois intellectual. Of that there is no doubt. But not every petit-bourgeois intellectual is Valéry" (quoted in the Times Literary Supplement , 11 July 1986, 753).

[35] In The Space Between: Literature and Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), Jay Cantor shows the relevance of another Critical Theorist's thought—that of Herbert Marcuse—to this effort in Yeats's poetry to recapture a lost world. Marcuse sees the main function of art as being to conceive a world other than the one we live in, and to embody utopia, not reality. But Cantor argues that "Yeats's technique for recapturing the lost world insures that the past remains lost" because the life of the self for Yeats is dependent on the absence of reality (Cantor, 42). For Cantor, this constitutes a defect in Yeats's art, because a symbolic world that was, is, and will always be absent "cannot nourish" (Cantor, 43). If Yeats's combination of elegy and utopia is a defect at all, however, it is one only in terms of Cantor's political morality, not in terms of aesthetics, even, I think, Marcuse's aesthetics. Cantor would have Yeats submit his self to the transformations of a revolutionary moment; it is enough for Marcuse that the artist transform the world through the aesthetic illusion, giving "the things of the world a new meaning and function" (Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt , 81; quoted in Cantor, 127). So majestic are Yeats's transformations of the world that the escape from fact is at one with the triumph over fact. The bad conscience that haunts his poetry is that its world is one in which only some may fulfill their wishes. Made through the dominion of self, it would require for its realization continuing domination. The appeal of that world to us is also a criticism of the structure of our wishes.

dying mind of a dying class," he called it—is transfigured into an "aristocracy of art."^[36] But the material deprivation upon which the utopia is raised limits the reality, the possibility of actual achievement, of the values expressed. The freedom found in his poetry is that of a world of everything that is not the case.^[37]

5

In moving from belles lettres into the theatre as a field of individual expression, Yeats encountered, of course, greater obstacles to the transformation of facts to wishes, a world into a self. For the poet individuality may be in part conditioned by the external factors of property, labor, and class. These simply define his status; they do not deny him the chance to write in rebellion against that status, and make a world in the world's despite, as Yeats does in his poetry. For the man of the theatre, however, individuality depends on still further conditions, because theatre is a large cooperative enterprise. It takes not just an author but also a company of actors, set and costume designers, a business manager, an auditorium, patrons, and, of course, a paying audience. Each of these elements of the society may look upon the theatre as its field of self-expression, the scene in which its own social wishes can be represented as fulfilled.

When a part of the audience of The Countess Cathleen repudiated the play as a picture of Ireland, Yeats was left with the defense that his play was art, and like all works of art represented one man's vision of spiritual truths, not a conten-

[36] WBY, letter to the All Ireland Review , 22 September, 1900, rpt. in Frayne and Johnson, 242–43. A characteristic passage on the "aristocracy of artists, the only aristocracy which has never oppressed the people," occurs in WBY's New York address to the Clan na Gael on "Emmet the Apostle of Irish Liberty," 28 February 1904, rpt. in Frayne and Johnson, 324.

[37] I lately discovered that this sentence must have been a recollection of Frank Tuohy's dry remark "Yeats's world, it might be said, comprised everything that is not the case" in his biography, Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 60.

tious account of the social history of its audience. It is clear that in the aftermath of the performance, Yeats was troubled. He was taken off guard by being attacked in Ireland by nationalists; he had thought of himself with good reason as having acted as a nationalist politician himself during, for instance, the recent Wolfe Tone Commemoration (1898). Furthermore, his defense of art did not enable him to make a claim upon the attention of the broad public essential to a theatre. Why should citizens pay to see a play made up out of heterodox spiritual beliefs, showing little sympathy to their national ideals, written by a poet who lived in London? If he wanted to be a playwright in Ireland, he had to repair the damage to his public stature done by The Countess Cathleen .

Between the letter of 10 April 1900, in which he expressed confidence about the future of the theatre and laid out plans to rehabilitate his nationalist standing by an attack on the queen, and October 1901, Yeats certainly lost hope in the Irish Literary Theatre as a vehicle for the expression of his individuality. The amazing system invented for the composition of Diarmuid and Grania (scheduled for the third season), with George Moore on one end of the production line, Yeats on the other, and a pack of translators in between to move the text between French, English, Gaelic, and Kiltartan dialect, could have been patented as a technique for the elimination of personality from literature. It ended in a predictable quarrel over just whose property the play was, and who could make the final judgments on its form.^[38] By this stage, Yeats had sacrificed many personal preferences to the idol of theatrical success: he relinquished for a time his right to do verse drama, to choose whatever subject he liked, to supply no propaganda, to make his friends among educated Protestant Unionists,

[38] See WBY's letter to Moore of January 1901, complaining that he has "continually given up motives and ideas that I preferred to yours. . . . Remember that our original compact was that the final words were to be mine" (Wade, 347), and Moore's answer: "If it was your intention all along to be supreme in command I wish you had taken the scenario and written the play. . . . For me to hand over a play the greater part of which is written by me, for final correction is an impossible proposal" (Finneran, Harper, and Murphy, 1:78).

and, finally, even to write the plays he signed.^[39] With all this lost, there was little left in the Irish Literary Theatre that could be called the free expression of the poet's individuality.

During the same period, Yeats began to look beyond Ireland for the fulfillment of his hopes for individual expression in drama. In his theatre journal Samhain for the final season of the Irish Literary Theatre, October 1901, Yeats went over the plans others had made for continuing the movement in Ireland: Moore and Martyn wanted a touring English company, endowed by the Dublin Corporation, to do foreign and Irish plays, and train new Irish actors; W. G. Fay and Frank Fay wanted a resident amateur company of Irish actors, free to "touch on politics, the most vital passion and vital interest of the country."^[40] Outside the circle of the Irish Literary Theatre, there was much activity—both practical and theoretical—in Irish theatre. Amateur societies, many of them organized by the Gaelic League, performed nationalist plays, and intellectual leaders discussed the shortcomings of the Irish Literary Theatre in light of what a national theatre ought to be. Douglas Hyde thought it might be a Gaelic theatre; Standish O'Grady thought it should not deal with heroic myths, because they were too lofty and aristocratic a subject for common people; Æ thought it should be spiritual and beautiful; John Eglington thought it should deal with the modern, mostly economic, facts of urban Ireland.^[41] But as for

[39] According to Lady Gregory (Our Irish Theatre , 27), WBY said: "The financial question touched on in 'The Bending of the Bough' was chosen, because on it all parties are united," chosen, therefore, for the sake of the audience, although WBY added that it was "the cause nearest each of our hearts." Yeats called the play, upon its completion, an "intricate gospel of nationality" that might prove "almost epoch-making in Ireland," words that well describe agitation propaganda (Wade, 332). Lecky, of course, was the Unionist friend forsaken; Diarmuid and Grania was the play Yeats signed but over which he had difficulty asserting authorship (Wade, 347).

[40] WBY, Explorations , 76.

[41] See the exchange of articles from the Dublin Daily Express republished as Literary Ideals in Ireland , John Eglinton, W. B. Yeats, AE, and W. Larminie (London: Fisher Unwin, 1899; rpt., New York: Lemma Press, 1973), and Letters from AE , ed. Alan Denson (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1961), 40–41, for a discussion of O'Grady's objections to saga material in Irish drama.

Yeats himself, he said he did not care what happened. He was going off alone to write his plays in poetry about old stories, and he did not care who acted them as long as they acted them well (meaning, just as he liked) or how many saw them (as long as they were his friends). Frustrated in his search for fame or beauty in national drama, Yeats turned back to an austere hope for a "Theatre of Beauty" suitable for the few.^[42]

The Samhain of 1901 could have been Yeats's farewell as a leader of the Irish theatre. In May 1901 he was disturbed by how little welcome his publisher A. H. Bullen received in Ireland: no one wanted Yeats's books, not his mystical Secret Rose or even his lyrical drama The Shadowy Waters . He wrote to Lady Gregory that the Catholic priests and the nationalist D. P. Moran did not like him because of his "heterodox" mysticism, and the Trinity College bookseller and the men of the Ascendancy Constitutional Club did not like him because they suspected him of revolutionary designs: too Protestant for one group, too Irish for the other.^[43] All this news, Yeats went on, "only confirms the idea I had at the time that 'The Countess Cathleen' would make a very serious difference in my position." His plunge into radical politics had separated him from his own class without winning over the Catholic nationalists. Finally, he planned to "withdraw from politics"; indeed, he undertook to withdraw from Ireland altogether.

[42] William M. Murphy reads this "strange farewell" as "in fact a maneuver by WBY to set Moore ashore and continue his voyage with new companions"—W. G. and Frank Fay (Prodigal Father , 229). This reading has much in favor of it, aside from WBY's capacity for mutinous conspiracies and his ambition always to be captain of his soul, not to mention the souls of others. He had seen the Fays act in the summer of 1901, and he had dreamed of the play Lady Gregory wrote, Cathleen ni Houlihan , more suitable to the Fays than to either the Irish Literary Theatre or the London literary societies. However, I think at the time, Yeats was keeping all options open—the Fays' group, the London societies, and even the Irish Literary Theatre. As late as January 1902 he was still trying to raise money for the Irish Literary Theatre, getting ready to send a play to Martyn for his approval, and hoping that Martyn would not pull out of the project (see WBY to Lady Gregory, 14 and 20 January 1902; Wade, 363–64).

[43] Wade, 349–51.

6

Information from unpublished papers of Sturge Moore, Gilbert Murray, and Charles Ricketts, brought to light in an article by Ronald Schuchard, shows to what degree Yeats turned his theatrical ambitions from Ireland to London in 1901.^[44] After all, his first play, The Land of Heart's Desire , had been produced in London in 1894, his sole residence was there, and even when the plans for the Irish Literary Theatre were under way in 1898, Schuchard points out, Yeats and Florence Farr were also looking for "a little theatre somewhere in the suburbs" of London.^[45] A month after the quarrelsome committee of authors brought Diarmuid and Grania to a close in December 1900, Yeats set in motion plans for a London "Theatre of Beauty" by gathering a group consisting of Florence Farr, Sturge Moore, and Lawrence Binyon, to be called "The Literary Theatre Club." When Yeats said farewell to Irish theatre in the Samhain of October 1901, he went off to London to join efforts with this group.

The great importance of Schuchard's article is that it shows that things might well have been otherwise: the Irish Literary Theatre did not lead inevitably to the Irish National Theatre Society of 1902 or the Abbey Theatre of 1904; furthermore, one can infer from the information Schuchard gives that Yeats was committed, not to nationalist drama centered in Dublin, but to literary drama laid in Irish scenes, and that his identity as a writer defined by the full Irish context was not determined by an unflagging individual principle. Wilde found his fortune on the London stage in the 1890s; Shaw followed the same path as Yeats through alternative London theatre societies and ended in the limelight with the 1903 Court Theatre production of John Bull's Other Island ; Yeats might well have done as they did and ended as a London author from Dublin (although specializing in Irish scenes and colors).

Yeats's path, however, followed a detour back to Dublin.

[44] Schuchard, 415–46.

[45] Lady Gregory, Our Irish Theatre , 2–3; Schuchard, 416.

The way to theatrical success in London that appeared to open in 1901 and 1902 closed in 1903 for a variety of reasons. Yeats did well in recruiting and drilling a battalion of verse-speakers, writers of literary drama, fund-raisers, and set-designers, but once in the field they marched off in all directions. The campaign, however, failed for reasons of money, organization, and the labyrinth of human fortuities; not from any diminishment of Yeats's ambition for a London literary triumph.

7

Two other major developments during this period determined the direction of Yeats's ambitions. The first was his relationship with Annie Horniman, to whom he looked to fund his future; and the second was his developing relation to Frank Fay and to his brother W. G. Fay's group of Irish actors, out of which grew the Irish National Theatre Society. There was no similarity, no basis for sympathy, and no connection between Horniman and the Fays—not in personal ability, aesthetic taste, social class, national identity, or political conviction—except that both knew Yeats. It shows the remarkable versatility of Yeats's identity that he played a part (half foil, half hero) in the lives of both. It is as if one character were placed in both a West End closet drama of intrigue and a rebel peasant play, a casual, but successful, improvisateur along the general hodos chameleontos , with a view to some distant denouement, unknown but impending in the future, for which these were subplots. For when Yeats brought Horniman and Fay together, the Irish National Theatre Society had a troupe, a theatre, money, and a host of unaddressed misunderstandings.

Horniman was best described by Lady Gregory: "Miss Horniman is like a shilling in a tub of electrified water; everybody tries to get the shilling out."^[46] Of all those who tried and were burned, none showed more perseverance or had greater

[46] Repeated by WBY in a July 1907 letter to Florence Farr (Wade, 490).

success than Yeats. He became acquainted with Horniman in that peculiar London demimonde of nineties magical societies, particularly the Order of the Golden Dawn. Macgregor Mathers, chief wizard of the Golden Dawn, managed to get £420 a year out of Horniman between 1892 and 1896, but when his subsidy was stopped, he exiled Horniman to the outer darkness, saying that if she was not insane, she was so arrogant, self-conceited, and narrow-minded that she was about to go insane. Mathers in turn was expelled from his own order for saying that its original mystical manuscript in cipher was a forgery by his fellow leader, Dr. William Wynn Westcott. (As George Harper puts it, this was like Moses saying Aaron wrote the Ten Commandments.)^[47] Yeats immediately invited Horniman back into the Second Temple with all her seniority restored and an important new position as "Scribe" added. That was in April 1900, the same month of the same year he told Lady Gregory he thought he could get money for the theatre from a "Miss ——."

It did not take long for the reinstated Miss Horniman to quarrel with everyone. She was "appalled" at the informality of the society under the leadership of Florence Farr; older members like herself did not receive their due respect. Minutes had not been well kept. Secret groups for the study of Egyptology had sprung up around Farr in Horniman's four-year absence.^[48] Horniman immediately set about to put a stop to all these irregularities. She did not wish to accuse the new members of Evil, she said, but she could only judge their works by their fruits, which were "ignorance, selfishness and discourtesy." She expected that the members would show "gratitude for [her] forbearance" in merely "hushing up the scandal" of the recent departures from the regulations of the order. It is no surprise that the other members were ungrateful; they thought her just what Mathers had thought her—arrogant,

[47] For information on Horniman, Yeats, and the Golden Dawn, I rely upon George Mills Harper's Yeats's Golden Dawn . The figures for Horniman's subsidy to Mathers are from a personal communication from Ellic Howe to Harper (Harper, 163).

[48] Harper, 32ff.

narrow-minded, and dangerously domineering. At her first official meeting with the executive council, the members opposed every suggestion she made—all the members save one, W. B. Yeats.^[49]

It is difficult to understand why Yeats stood by Horniman in the Golden Dawn quarrels, why he kept up a friendship with her, or how he got through hours, days, and years sitting in a parlor with this wealthy, but unbeautiful and unwitty, woman. He worked with her on internal reports on the future of the "Order of R.R. and A.C."; he read her his plays; accepted little gifts; permitted her to shake the dustballs from his clothes' drawers and comment on the state of his under-shorts; he dictated letters, and as a last resort, picked up a book.^[50] One can see she loved him; one cannot easily see what he saw in her if it were not that bright shilling at the bottom of the electrified tub.^[51]

[49] Harper, 42–44, for the "Record of Executive Difficulty."

[50] See Annie Horniman to WBY, 10 December 1906: "When you get back I must have a number of questions answered, I'll remove all reading matter within reach & you will have to give me your full attention whether you are bored or no"; and Annie Horniman to WBY, 7 July 1907, for a record of Horniman's house-cleaning attentions at 18 Woburn Buildings (ms. 13068, NLI).

[51] While the simplest explanation of their relationship is pure exploitation, George Harper, the best scholar on the Golden Dawn, has a more interesting and complex explanation of his defense of Horniman in the quarrel over discipline. Harper claims that Yeats's countercharge to those members who opposed and insulted Horniman reflects his basic beliefs about the world. The document in which the countercharge appeared—"Is the Order of R.R. and A.C. to remain a Magical Order?"—argues that if the sacred text is a sham, all that makes the order a possibly valid entity, even "an Actual Being," is the hierarchy of members, which is established by seniority, intellectual mastery of ritual doctrine (certified by formal examinations), and the authority of regulations made in the past. This hierarchy, Yeats supposes, may form "a link with invisible Degrees," and make possible future intuitions of "higher knowledge." The elitist society of the magical order rests on beliefs remarkably similar to those that underpin Yeats's conception of an "aristocracy of art," made up in part out of members of the former, now discredited, aristocracy, but based on values that have lost their social and economic basis. Yeats showed in his countercharge to the members of the Golden Dawn a rich belief in the power of pure self-assertion, in the claim of something being the same as the possession of the thing, reflecting a characteristic mystical habit of thought, a belief that to prophesy meant one had had a vision, and that to look down on others meant that one was elevated.The difference between Horniman and Yeats may be no more than the difference between one who was nakedly arrogant and another who said it was important for the masses to believe in clothes, between, that is, visceral and theoretical pride. While Yeats may not have sold out on any principle in a bid for the "freedom" Horniman could grant him, his treatise on the magical order shows the extraordinary lengths to which he went to reconcile his beliefs and Horniman's deeds. See Harper, 259–68, for the text of Yeats's essay, and 69–91 for Harper's interpretation that it embodied "his profoundest religious and philosophical convictions about man's place in the universe" (69). Harper stresses WBY's "faith in order, authority, and degree" (74); I stress his skepticism about everything but order, authority, and degree.

Out of the Horniman-Yeats alliance in the Golden Dawn came the offer of Horniman money for a Yeats theatre venture. Horniman had previously shown signs of a desire to patronize the theatre: she had for years been an ardent Wagnerite, undertaking the annual pilgrimage to Bayreuth; she had funded the first performances of Yeats and Shaw at the Avenue Theatre in 1894; and lately she had taken an interest in the Florence Farr/W. B. Yeats verse-speaking classes. Whatever the basis for a common interest in theatre, in the letter cited at the beginning of this chapter, WBY writes that he thought he could get money from a woman, who could only have been Miss Horniman; by January 1901, after the completion of Diarmuid and Grania and Yeats's turn to London, he knew he could get the money. Although the letter is not dated, Harper thinks that it was in January that Yeats wrote to Florence Farr,^[52] leader of the rebel group of Egyptologists, and verse-speaker, and told her that if she behaved herself in the Golden Dawn, he would give her a big part in a new theatrical project he planned. The letter is marked in Horniman's hand, "Demon's letter about the compromise to Sapientia," DEMON EST DEUS INVERSUS being WBY's secret motto in the Order, and SAPIENTIA Farr's. Harper thinks this big new theatre project was the performance of Diarmuid and Grania; Schuchard thinks it was Yeats's London literary theatre societies.^[53] It turned out, at last, to be the Abbey Theatre.

Not until April 1902 did Horniman pen the letter in which

[52] Harper, 34–35.

[53] Schuchard, 415–16.

Yeats made a veiled offer of an endowment for Fay's company if he promised to work hard for a year "along the lines" of Yeats's "rigorous" "theories of the stage."^[54] And only in October 1903 did she say she was going to buy a Dublin theatre for them.^[55] But after January 1901, the shilling was out of the tub, ready to spend.

8

In his history of the Abbey Theatre, W. G. Fay claims with some cause that the National Theatre Society was "first and foremost a theatrical, not a literary movement."^[56] When Yeats was turning his attention to London, Fay and his brother Frank were chief players in the vastly popular amateur theatre activity that grew out the ruins of the Literary Theatre. For if the Yeats-Martyn-Moore venture failed to create plays of lasting interest, to stage successful performances, or to grant the authors the satisfactions of self-expression, it succeeded in stirring others to create a National Theatre. This movement was not led by authors and did not aim to create great literature.

The last year of the Irish Literary Theatre, 1901, saw two main results of the enterprise: Yeats gave up on theatre in Ireland, and Ireland took up the theatre on its own in a large

[54] Horniman was the amanuensis for WBY's letter of 21 April 1902 to Frank Fay, which mentions a wealthy friend with an interest in Yeats's plays. The letter says that after a year's work by the company, this wealthy friend would consider an appeal "for capital to carry out [Yeats's] idea" (Wade, 371–72). Horniman's identity is concealed under a masculine pronoun, but it is clear that she was the "wealthy friend."

[55] James Flannery reproduces the letter of 8 October 1903 from Horniman to Yeats in which she decided on the cast of Tarot cards to subsidize the Irish National Theatre Company in Miss Annie F. Horniman and the Abbey Theatre (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1970), 9. Flannery also discusses three other letters in which Horniman interpreted the Tarot to predict Yeats's theatrical success. The earliest of these letters is dated 1 March 1903; it concludes that "work for love [would] bring Divine Wisdom."

[56] W. G. Fay and Catherine Carswell, The Fays of the Abbey Theatre (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935), 106. Fay drives his point home by saying, "We of the Abbey made our theatre first and then got plays to suit it."

way. Padraic Pearse, future leader of the Easter Rebellion, reported that more than a dozen Irish dramas in Gaelic were presented in 1901 and 1902.^[57] There were plays in Gaelic at the Pan-Celtic Conference in Dublin and at the Feis in Galway during August 1901. The plays were, in some sense, authorless: at the request of amateur acting companies, and to meet the demand of massive and enthusiastic audiences, they were put together by priests, teachers, and patriotic women. Literary quality was irrelevant to their success. They formed the occasion for practicing Gaelic speech, singing Gaelic songs, wearing traditional clothes, and in general manifesting national enthusiasm. In scale, this dramatic activity amounted to a mass movement. Not only did the audiences run to 3,000 at the Dublin Rotunda, but the theatre movement had become part of an immense political network, the Gaelic League. With chapters in every village, town, and city, with a large bureaucratic organization, with the power to produce regular newsletters and booklets, the Gaelic League incited demand for plays, disseminated them throughout the population, organized their consumption, and spelled out their purpose: to educate Irishmen in the lost art of being Irish. Drama now was under way in Ireland, under the control not of a few Anglo-Irish authors but of a vast national apparatus.

Irish history during this period provides an instance of a literary movement leading to a social and industrial movement for self-reliance, which contradicts the vulgar Marxist assumption that the cultural superstructure will always echo the base. Not only did Yeats and Hyde's National Literary Society give utterance to the shift to cultural nationalism in 1892,^[58] but for another ten years literary and cultural societies continued the de-Anglicization of Ireland. For instance, in

[57] Hogan and Kilroy, 2:21.

[58] John S. Kelly in The Fall of Parnell and the Rise of Irish Literature: An Investigation , Anglo-Irish Studies, 2 (1976), 3, shows that Yeats in prophesying "that a political lull would mean a literary revival . . . was doing no more than voicing generally received opinion," but nonetheless the literary movement led to a political and economic movement of self-reliance; in effect, to the policy of Sinn Fein.

1903, the "Cork Celtic Literary Society" formed the "Cork Industrial Development Association" to regain the Irish market for Irish goods.^[59] And various nationalist clubs and newspapers aggressively carried forward the social revolution to make Ireland Irish. There were Irish cycling clubs, Irish singing groups, Irish hurling associations. The journalists worked to embarrass "shoneen" Irishmen into buying the caps, wearing the boots, eating the jam, spreading the mustard, speaking the language, playing the games, and naming their children according to the customs of their country. For instance, the peckish D. P. Moran, editor of the Leader , posted himself outside Catholic churches in Dublin nationalist districts in order to report on "the truly National congregation" emerging with "their recreant skins" clothed in a foreign covering.^[60] The message, more than implied, was that any Irishman not in Donegal tweeds and Ulster linens should walk in shame. In the United Irishman Arthur Griffith exposed those Dublin businesses that advertised abroad for work that could be done by Irishmen, as when he indignantly reported that Browne & Nolan, "which has gained more from the Irish revival than any other printing firm in Ireland," had advertised in the Glasgow Herald for a printer's case room foreman when scores of Irish compositors were out of work.^[61] Finally, both Moran and Griffith printed lists of Irish names, so that parents could at least "put an Irish name on every boy and girl born to the country." The great number of theatrical societies, carried forward by the momentum of this many-sided social revolution, themselves served the valuable propaganda service of representing on stage an ideal, spiritual, and militant version of that revolution as already achieved. Its slogan was Today, on the stage; tomorrow, on the streets .

These nationalist theatrical groups, even the most artistic ones such as "W. G. Fay's National Dramatic Society," were not only independent of Yeats; they were also profoundly op-

[59] United Irishman 11, no. 273 (21 May 1904): 4.

[60] Moran, "The Clothes We Wear," Leader , 20 October 1900, 117.

[61] United Irishman 10, no. 242 (20 November 1903): 5.

posed to him in their conception of drama. It is often noted that Yeats and the Fays had much in common. The Fays were actors in search of an author and capital; he was an author with capital in search of actors. Frank Fay and Yeats shared an interest in elocution, in grave and simple acting, and in "sincere" dramatic writing, by which both Fay and Yeats meant writing that was not commercial.^[62] It is also true that in his series of theatre reviews and essays for the United Irishman , Frank Fay made an obvious public appeal that Yeats should write plays for Ireland to be performed by amateur Irish actors, actors like those his brother directed. Yeats was, after all, Ireland's greatest poet and a famous man; they wanted his talent. But the Fays had their own conception of drama and nationalism, and they wanted Yeats only if he would take up the trade of playwright on their terms.^[63]

Frank Fay makes clear in his United Irishman articles just what those terms were. In the issue dated 4 May 1901, Fay wrote a criticism of Yeats's dramatic ideals as Yeats defined them in an essay on "The Theatre of Beauty" published in Poems (1901). A national theatre, for Fay, was first not a theatre of English plays about Ireland; second, not a theatre for the few; third, not a theatre acted by English professionals. It should ideally be an Irish language theatre with Irish actors, serving the "marvellously sympathetic, intelligent, and refined audience" who attended recent commemorations of Thomas Davis and Robert Emmet, the Gaelic League Oireachtas, and the Leinster Feis Concert—in short,

[62] See Fay's 23 November 1901 United Irishman article on "The Irish Literary Theatre" for a statement of Fay's belief that interesting writing was writing that was "sincere" and "uncommercial" (Frank J. Fay, Towards a National Theatre: The Dramatic Criticism of Frank J. Fay , ed. Robert Hogan [London: Oxford University Press; Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1970], 83–86). Yeats most often opposes "sincerity" to "morality" rather than commercialism, as in "The Freedom of the Theatre" (Frayne and Johnson, 297–99).

[63] James W. Flannery does an excellent job of treating Frank Fay as a dramatic thinker in his own right, rather than simply as an elocutionist in Yeats's plays (W. B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre: The Early Abbey Theatre in Theory and Practice [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976]). I depart from his account in emphasizing the populist-socialist grounds for Fay's antipathy to commercial theatre.

nationalists from the Gaelic League, the Gaelic Athletic Association, and the United Irish League. These people, Fay tells Yeats, want more "vigorous themes" than those the poet finds in the land of faery. His plays may be charming, but "they do not send men away with a desire for deeds." If Yeats wanted to be an Irish playwright, he had to write what the Irish people needed, not what he might desire to write. If they were to be his audience, he had to be their voice.

Fay frankly stated his reservations about the literary products of the Yeats-Martyn-Moore combination. Their works, he says, show little "familiarity with the footlights"; written "in the study," they "won't act" on the stage. Ultimately, Fay allowed, Ireland might have a need for the more subtle effects of a theatre dedicated to art; but first it must begin as all national dramas had begun, with simple folk plays—miracle, morality, and mystery plays—that would feed the new popular appetite for native drama.

More important even than Fay's beliefs about the subjects and style of national drama was his belief about its economic basis. Both Fay and Yeats hated commercial theatre, but for different reasons. Yeats complained it had little use for fine writing, being a theatre of big stage effects, coarse oratory, and grandiose scenery. Fay disliked these features as well, but he had another reason for hating commercialism. When John Whitbread's popular theatre company took up a powerful political issue, like the land agitation in The Irishman , it turned the subject into a sideshow, with the conventions of melodrama and the circus tricks of the stage spectacular in the center ring.^[64] Fay said he wanted to jump the orchestra pit and murder the virtuous persons of such melodramas, and he lamented the popularity of the sensationalist trick of introducing the dreaded battering ram on stage during the climactic scene of eviction when bailiffs knocked down the doors of peasant cottages. This type of theatricality, in Fay's view, was just a way for English money to enable "Saxon swine" to fatten on the Irish by turning a colony into a cartoon.^[65] For Yeats,

[64] Fay, Towards a National Theatre , 27–29.

[65] Ibid., 53.

commercialism spoils the subtle aspirations to beauty of the individual artist; for Fay, it diverts the entire people from a recognition of their real oppression.

Fay discovered a dangerous affinity between business and amusement: the purpose of both is to defend the status quo. For an audience to be amused at the land question, to enjoy its conversion to a commodity, is to say yes to its settlement, while making a flight not just from reality, but from any thought of resistance to that reality. When letters to the press suggested that a national theatre could be formed by subscription from patrons or by floating a company for stockholders, Fay was furious: "We don't want any of the financial gang, who would run the Universe, Limited, if they could, in connection with an Irish National Theatre."^[66] The capitalist syndicates, he said, were "the real authors" of the plays seen in Dublin: the measure of a commercial play's merit was the amount of conspicuous expenditure on its production; its meaning was just business turned into an ideology.

The Irish culture industry, run by foreign investors, had been the subject of a public investigation by the indefatigable D. P. Moran in the pages of the Leader ,^[67] to which Fay and Yeats were regular subscribers. To its three theatres and two music halls, Dublin paid out £200 a working night, or roughly £60,000 a year. In addition, Dublin doubled the expense by importing "jingo panoramas, travelling circuses, merry-go-rounds," "Bray coons," and "dancing Grenadiers." The total for Dublin was again doubled for the country as a whole, so that Ireland, Moran calculated, paid out £250,000 a year for entertainment. What it got in return was "a regular night-school of Anglicization," and "powerful propaganda of the lowest . . . moral standards." Moran, a puritanical Catholic nationalist, was especially worried about the moral effect of a theatre in which "religion is besmeared; idling is glorified; cadging and thieving are presented as 'smart' arts; the heroes are cads and the heroines are—well, the modern theatre has a name for them—'women with a past.'" He described part of

[66] United Irishman , 11 May 1901; Fay, Toward a National Theatre , 56–58.

[67] Leader , 15 September 1900, 40.

the program on a typical evening at a Burgh Quay music hall: "One of [the comedian's] songs, which excited great applause, described . . . how he got seasick, another how he collected in church and went off with the proceeds, and a further 'lyric' was partly about a girl who falls off a bicycle, with the usual low jokes . . . which are invariably the point of such incidents."^[68] To Fay, such stuff was not only vulgar and ethically undignified, as it was to Yeats; and not only demoralizing and sinful, as it was to Moran; it was also an opiate of oppression administered by foreign capitalists, both exploitative and profoundly alienating. If there were to be an Irish National Theatre, Fay argued, it must be created outside the capitalist culture industry, without the help of "financial bounders or aristocratic patrons." Basically, the difference between attitudes of Yeats and Fay on commercialism is that Fay, a naive socialist, sought freedom from money;^[69] Yeats, a naive aristocrat, sought freedom through money; Fay sought freedom by giving himself up to a political movement; Yeats sought freedom from political movements by achieving control over them.

9

Early in his series of articles, Fay shows that he suspected Yeats of being too popular with wealth. But after Yeats had "killed an Egyptian" (W. H. Lecky), attacked the queen, and finally, in the Samhain of October 1901, restated Fay's own view that a theatre to be free to speak of politics must be amateur, Fay (mistaking Yeats's restatement of his views as agreement with them) wrote with relief "that Mr. Yeats has at last

[68] Leader , 1 September 1900, 2–3.

[69] It is certain that Frank Fay came in contact with socialist thinkers. James Connolly was in Dublin running the Irish Workers' party and publishing a Marxist propaganda paper. Connolly was a friend through Maud Gonne of Arthur Griffith, Fay's editor at the United Irishman . If Fay did not know Connolly (who did not have a large following), he certainly knew Fred Ryan, the secretary of the Irish National Dramatic Society, and author of the radically socialist Laying of the Foundations , first performed 29 October 1902.

cut himself adrift from the so-called 'upper' classes and . . . he recognizes that an Irish theatre would be worthless if it were in the hands of people who could in any way prevent it from acting outspoken plays."^[70] As badly as both Fays wanted a theatre and the work of well-known playwrights, Frank Fay insists again and again that the work must be popular and political, and the theatre cannot be compromised by the form of its support—no money "made out of the misery of millions."^[71] And Yeats, even as he turned toward London and toward Horniman, allowed Fay to receive the impression that he agreed with his aims. The extraordinary mobility of Yeats's political identity—something Cullingford calls his "freedom" and Conor Cruise O'Brien his "cunning"—is really, I think, his uncertainty. He sought individual success, but the achievement of individuality depended on a host of factors outside his control. Paradoxically, he had to keep his political identity in a state of flux in order to keep alive any possibility of realizing some individual identity. Fenian agitator, defender of the poor, initiate of the Golden Dawn, régisseur of the London "Theatre of Beauty," guru of the amateur arts of London ladies in "cantillation": one can see the Masks, but one must infer the existence of the Man.

From the start of his direct correspondence with Frank Fay, Yeats cultivated the character of a like-minded nationalist seeking to stir up a popular political movement. His first direct communication with Fay followed from a letter Lady Gregory urged him to write Arthur Griffith, editor of the United Irishman , asking for some help in increasing his popularity in his native land.^[72]The Land of Heart's Desire had been given a successful American performance, and Yeats wanted

[70] United Irishman , 26 October 1901; Fay, Towards a National Theatre , 25–26.

[71] Fay, Towards a National Theatre , 85.

[72] Wade, 352–53. It is in this letter that WBY says, "I always write for my own people though I am content perforce to let my work come to them slowly." He also gossips to Griffith about an attack on the Ascendancy professor J. P. Mahaffy, "which is certain to be amusing." Altogether, an astutely nationalist performance.

to know if Griffith would have the press notices Lady Gregory copied out turned into a little article. The job was given to Frank Fay, theatre critic for the United Irishman . Fay offered a small paragraph of praise for the "beautiful little play," but asked why the author could not write plays for his own people to act.^[73]

Yeats tried to do just that: he set out to meet all the terms Fay set down. He laid aside a treatment of the Cuchulain legend in Shakespearian blank verse on which he had been working and turned to a simpler and more directly nationalist theme. On 21 April 1900, after his attacks on the forthcoming visit of Queen Victoria to Ireland, he had published "Noble and Ignoble Loyalties," an essay comparing the loyalty of people to Queen Victoria, based on egotism and greed, to loyalty to Cathleen ni Houlihan, based on self-sacrifice and love of country.^[74] Now he dreamed of writing a play on the popular nationalist theme of the Rising of '98 and the poor old woman who is Ireland, and while he could not manage to write realistic dialogue for the peasants, or to work out action among the characters, Lady Gregory was equal to the task. Cathleen ni Houlihan —the result of Yeats's dream and Lady Gregory's first writing for the stage—perfectly answers to the demands Frank Fay had been making of Yeats and Irish playwrights: it is a miracle play, in realistic dialogue, about a major political issue, that drives men to deeds.^[75]

[73] Fay, Towards a National Theatre , 69–70. WBY wrote to Frank Fay shortly after publication of the notice, claiming to be "altogether pleased" with it. He went on to disengage himself from the antinationalist Anglo-Irish: "The ordinary theatre-going person in Dublin, of the wealthier classes, dislikes our movement so much" the director of the Gaiety Theatre wants to hide from the public the fact that Yeats and Moore are the authors of a play set for performance at the Gaiety. Yeats concludes the letter with a remarkable statement that he wishes his work were in the Irish language (Wade, 355).

[74] Frayne and Johnson, 2:211–13.

[75] The fact of Lady Gregory's authorship of Cathleen ni Houlihan casts light on the question of why Yeats never repeated the popular success of that play. He could not repeat what he had never done once. Lady Gregory, however, could, and she did with The Rising of the Moon, The Gaol Gate , and other works of broadly nationalist propaganda.

Yeats's next play, under way a week after the production of Cathleen ni Houlihan on 6 April 1902, was just as deliberate an attempt to show himself an obliging servant of the needs of the Irish theatre. In a letter of 10 April 1902, Yeats describes what was to become The Hour-Glass as "a little religious play in one act with quite as striking a plot as Kathleen—it cannot offend anybody and may propitiate Holy Church" (presumably for the heterodoxical sins of The Countess Cathleen ). With Cathleen ni Houlihan , he provided nationalist credentials; with The Hour-Glass , he wished to prove his religious ones. Even Frank Fay was taken aback by the piety of the play's morality. Whatever the quality of the writing (really "very fine," Fay allowed), Fay was "not in favor of holding an unbeliever up to the scorn . . . of this pretentiously pious country."^[76] Yeats had hoped if he ridiculed an atheist, he would seem to the audience an orthodox believer. In fact, the audience appears to have regarded the play as a very suspicious offering. "Chanel," reviewer for the Leader , thought Yeats had "composed a satire on himself," but considered that he must have done so unconsciously, while working at some "inner-guard significance" outside the audience's reckoning.^[77] Yeats tried to explain to Fay why, after he had done his best to please the people, they still withheld their enthusiasm: "Some of them felt that because I had written it, it must contain some hidden heresy, while others, finding it impossible to believe I really thought those things, supposed . . . it was a mere literary experiment."^[78]

Yeats's later doubts about The Hour-Glass , and his subsequent revisions, reveal the distaste he felt while writing to Fay's instructions, working for the movement, and having a daily bath in what he called "the gutter." In the original play, a wise man who can persuade anyone to believe anything convinces an entire land that there are no gods, angels, or

[76] Hogan and Kilroy, 2:30–31.

[77] "Broken Soil," Leader , 12 December 1903, 266–67.

[78] WBY letter to Frank Fay, 30 December 1903; rpt. in Gerard Fay, The Abbey Theatre: Cradle of Genius (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 69.

spiritual worlds. An angel then appears and promises him eternal pain in death unless in his last remaining hour he can find one believer. The only remaining believer turns out to be a fool, before whom the wise man must kneel and do penance in order to obtain salvation. When he watched the play, Yeats said, he "was always ashamed" to see the wise man abase himself by kneeling before the fool.^[79] He had put in the play his own meanings—that the invisible world is true, the visible an illusion—but others just saw the meaning of the action: educated people are cowards, and the Church is a true guide. Surely, Yeats watched himself on stage, his own "propitiations" of the priests and nationalists, and he found the sight intolerable. Consequently in 1914, he revised the play in such a way that the wise man never receives salvation, and finally declares that men never see the truth, but God sees the truth in men; and when the mind is broken, that truth comes through like "peas from a broken peascod."^[80] With this close, the wise man becomes a truly tragic, Lear-like figure. Through disbelief, he finds understanding; through suffering, an extreme joy. The main character of the play is thus transformed from a butt of satire to a hero of tragedy, and Yeats from one who is told the truth to one who declares it.

10

Altogether, Yeats gave the Fays three plays designed to meet their requirements: Cathleen ni Houlihan, The Pot of Broth (both largely written by Lady Gregory), and The Hour-Glass . With these works, Yeats won the trust of the company, saw it gain some skill, and obtained its presidency. Now was the time, after a successful London tour in April 1903, to introduce the money to the company and Horniman to the Fays.

For the fall 1903 season of the Irish National Theatre Society, when Horniman was to come to Dublin as costume designer, Yeats was faced with a real difficulty. He had no power

[79] Alspach, 645–46.

[80] Alspach, 634.

to carry out his desire to write romantic, mystical verse drama in England, because the London theatre societies had by then disintegrated. He had no power to do so in Ireland, because the Irish theatre society was still dictating to Yeats the terms of the playwright's trade. Horniman, he hoped, would free him from such work through her capital. But Horniman liked plays only without politics; and the Fays liked only plays free to do politics; moreover, they did not want money from "aristocratic patrons or financial bounders."

In the play that Yeats wrote for this occasion, The King's Threshold , the several parties could see, not their contradictory demands fulfilled, but some personal preferences gratified.^[81] It has a part for Frank Fay with fine elocutionary opportunities,^[82] elaborate antique costumes for Horniman to design, and a romantic legendary Irish setting for the audience. The profound demands made by Yeats himself are those in the plot of the play. Seanchan, the chief bard of Ireland, denied his privilege to sit with the markers of law at the King Guaire's table, has gone on hunger-strike at the palace doors. On the third day, the king calls together the bard's students, town mayor, old family retainers, and beloved, as well as the king's own chamberlain, soldier, and princesses, each of whom tempts Seanchan to break his fast and submit to the king. The bard, however, spurns every offer tendered, ready to die rather than give up a right "established when the

[81] A few months after the performance of The King's Threshold , during a tour of the United States, Yeats penciled in the margins of Thomas Common's selections from Nietzsche his agreement that one has obligations only to one's equals, that "the lower . . . cannot make obligations to the higher." Nonetheless, "in the last analysis the 'noble' man will serve the weak as much as the 'good' man, but in the first case the 'noble' man creates the form of the gift, and in the second the weaker." In The King's Threshold (a play in many ways showing the first flush of WBY's Nietzscheanism), Yeats gives not what is asked but what he is disposed to give. See Cullingford, Yeats, Ireland and Fascism , 74, and Frances Nesbitt Oppel, Mask and Tragedy: Yeats and Nietzsche, 1902–10 (University Press of Virginia: Charlottesville, 1987), 94–101, for discussions of Yeats's annotations to Common's Nietzsche as Critic, Philosopher, Poet, and Prophet .

[82] The play is dedicated "IN MEMORY OF FRANK FAY AND HIS BEAUTIFUL SPEAKING IN THE CHARACTER OF SEANCHAN" (Alspach, 256).

world/Was first established."^[83] At the play's end, Guaire is brought to kneel before Seanchan, putting his crown in the hands of the bard, who in turn places it again on the head of the king. In this play, one message at least is clear: ancient Irish tradition declares that the poet rules; patriots, take note.

The King's Threshold spread a banquet of ghostly food, a special course for each guest. Horniman thought she got what she wanted, a deep-laid promise that art would be free from politics; as a result, she unloosed her purse-strings. The Fays thought they got what they wanted, an offer of the free use of a theatre for Irish audiences, on national subjects. Finally, Yeats thought he got what he aimed for, freedom from control and freedom to control.

All would soon find out that their separate understandings were a collective misunderstanding and that none was free from the others. However, what is important to this chapter is that in the moment in which Yeats might well be thought to have at last found his freedom of expression in a romantic verse-drama—with his patron, by his players, and in his country—the form of that play was determined down to points of characterization, costume, setting, and theme by a network of relations outside the poet. Yeats sought freedom and power, and he did not much care if the only way to get them was to take them from others. But he did not consider that freedom and power may not be commodities, things that can be appropriated for individual consumption. Power may perhaps be better conceived after the metaphor of Foucault: "Power exists as a network,"^[84] or rather as groups of interwoven networks. In this case, the network included Horniman, her money, and her investments in British ventures in Hudson Bay (income from which paid for the Abbey Theatre); it also included the Fays, their players, nationalist organizations, the radical press, and the Gaelic League, which spon-

[83] Alspach, 259. The 1904 text of The King's Threshold is used throughout.

[84] Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–77 , ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972; rev. ed., 1980), 130, passim.

sored massive participation in national theatre. An individual or group could colonize a political organization for aesthetic purposes, or a cultural organization for political ones, but when an "individual" such as Yeats grants expression to this network, in doing so he is constituted as one of its effects, one singing string at the center of a web of tensions. Once Yeats was funded by Horniman, aided by Lady Gregory, committed to folk plots and Irish traditions, acted by the Fays, and performed for Irish nationalists, we know him, not as an autonomous being, but as a vivid cloud of potentialities, his individuality indeterminate outside its appearances in a letter, poem, or play, when it is made actual as the point of intersection of oblique forces always outside him and beyond his compass.^[85]

[85] Years later, when writing Discoveries , the poet began to conceive the self much in this fashion, though expressed in the language of alchemical pursuits. Once, he says, he thought of himself as "something unmoving and silent living in the middle of my own mind and body," then one day he suddenly understood that he was seeking something "always outside myself, a Stone or Elixir that was always out of reach, and that I myself was the fleeting thing that held out its hand " (WBY, Essays and Introductions [New York: Macmillan, 1961], 172; emphasis added).