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.