1—
The Making of Meaning:
Yeats and The Countess Cathleen

The first performance of W. B. Yeats's The Countess Cathleen , the 8th of May 1899, was the Irish cultural event of the decade. Seated in the hall of the Antient Concert Rooms in Dublin, on that night or during the following four nights of performance, were representatives of nearly every section of the social and political life of the country. The play had been the subject of a debate in the letter columns of London papers between the producer William Archer and the novelist George Moore on the feasibility of literary drama (Archer said The Countess Cathleen would make a boring and expensive production; Yeats and Moore replied that it need not be expensive).^[1] Consequently, the Saturday Review had sent Max Beerbohm and Arthur Symons from London to cover the play; no doubt, their courtesy tickets placed them toward the front of the hall, where English actors took the stage.^[2] Also present, and probably in the first rows, were people of title that Lady Gregory had persuaded to put up their names as guarantors of the

[1] Yeats joined the controversy in the Daily Chronicle with a letter to the editor on 27 January 1899; see Allan Wade, 308–11. Later in the year, in Beltaine , a journal promoting the performances, Yeats made the aggressive concession that Irish literary dramatists appealed to "that limited public which gives understanding," and would "not mind greatly if others are bored" (Beltaine , May 1899, 8–9, rpt. in Frayne and Johnson, 2: 159–62).

[2] Symons came over before the performance for a rehearsal, and then pumped the play in a review of Poems (1899) and The Wind among the Reeds (1899) in the 6 May 1899 Saturday Review , rpt. in W. B. Yeats: The Critical Heritage , ed. A. Norman Jeffares (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), 109–13. Beerbohm's complimentary review, "In Dublin," appeared in the 13 May 1899 Saturday Review .

Irish Literary Theatre, a blessing that seemed to consecrate Yeats's adventure as more literary than nationalist. But nationalists made the largest part of the crowd, not only officially apolitical nationalists like Douglas Hyde, the Gaelic League's president, but political ones too, like Arthur Griffith, editor of the United Irishman and future president of Sinn Fein. He came to show himself in favor of what Cardinal Michael Logue had said no Catholic should see: a play that presented the Irish as a people eager to sell their souls for gold, that said souls came at different prices, and that illustrated as features of Irish life some peasants who stole, some who committed sacrilege, and one woman hell-bent on fornication.^[3] Perhaps huddled up in the corner of an aisle was the intriguer who had raised the alarm about the play—F. Hugh O'Donnell, author of the pamphlet Souls for Gold that had incited the cardinal to instruct the faithful to shun this heretical entertainment. A group of Catholic students sat together close to the back of the theatre just to make sure that Yeats learned that "the people of the Catholic capital of Catholic Ireland" could not be "subjected to affront with impunity."^[4] But not all the students there came to defend the honor of Ireland or the holiness of the Catholic Church; James Joyce, for instance, came to bear witness to the independence of Art. Finally, lined up along the back wall, a deployment of Dublin policemen stood ready at the request of Yeats to protect the players in case "the mob" got out of hand.

Yeats was often quick to call his opposition a "mob," and any protest a "riot."^[5] How many young men came to pro-

[3] WBY, "Dramatis Personae, 1896–1902," in The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats (1935; New York: Macmillan, Collier Books, 1965), 278–79, and id., Memoirs , ed. Denis Donoghue (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 119–23.

[4] Daily Nation , 6 May 1899; rpt. in Hogan and Kilroy, vol. 1.

[5] In connection with this episode, Elizabeth Cullingford argues that Yeats was "careful to distinguish between 'the mob' and 'the people'" (Yeats, Ireland and Fascism [New York: New York University Press, 1981], 49). While it may be doubted that he was always careful to do so, in "The Galway Plains," as Cullingford notes, Yeats did envision the existence of "a people, a community bound together by imaginative possessions." Great poetry, he believed, "always requires a people to listen to it" (Essays and Introductions [New York:Collier, 1961], 213). But it appears that those who make up "the people" should exist silently out on the plains as an ideal audience; when they became visible, strenuous, articulate, and off their leaseholds, they were, in Yeats's usage, a mob.

test on different nights during the week is a good question: Joseph Holloway, the diarist of Dublin theatre, says there were twenty, all beardless idiots;^[6] T. W. Rolleston, president of the Dublin Irish Literary Society, makes their number only twelve, and says they expressed their hostility without malice or ignorance.^[7] Riot, ruckus, protest, civil demonstration of hostility, clerical bans, debate: whatever the appropriate term for the type of controversy aroused, the play was the center of excited discussion for weeks before and after its performance. In the Dublin press, through privately issued pamphlets, through student petitions against the play, at academic debates held by Trinity College's Historical Society, and in speeches after the Daily Nation 's celebratory dinner, Ireland discussed the play's theology, plausibility, and symbolic meaning.^[8] Without doubt, The Countess Cathleen is a fundamentally significant document in the coming to consciousness of the Irish nation.

And yet the play is now as insignificant a piece of drama as a press keeps in print. The modern reader observes the obvious: it is short, but boring; trivial and bad. Critics who write books on the drama of Yeats try to put a little life into the chapter on this, his first play for the Irish Literary Theatre, by explaining it in terms of A Vision , the love of Yeats for Maud Gonne, his poetic development, the significance of the five major revisions of the text (1892, 1895, 1900, 1912, 1919), or some law of dramaturgy.^[9] In many ways, these critics have

[6] Holloway, 6.

[7] T. W. Rolleston, letter, the Freeman's Journal , 10 May 1899, 6; Hogan and Kilroy, 1:40.

[8] There is a generous sampling of the controversy in Hogan and Kilroy, 1: 38–52.

[9] See Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 102; Peter Ure, Yeats the Playwright (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 9–42; David R. Clark, "Vision and Revision: Yeats's 'Countess Cathleen,'" The World of W. B. Yeats , ed. Robin Skelton and AnnSaddlemyer (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967), 140–60; Balachandra Rajan, W. B. Yeats (London: Hutchinson, 1965), 24–27; Alex Zwerdling, Yeats and the Heroic Ideal (New York: New York University Press, 1965), 75–76, 122–23; Harold Bloom, Yeats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 118–19; A. S. Knowland, W. B. Yeats: Dramatist of Vision (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1983), 10–16; Richard Taylor, A Reader's Guide to the Plays of W. B. Yeats (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984), 24–29. Two critics focus on the historical and political elements of the play and its context, one apologizing for Yeats, the other not: Elizabeth Cullingford interprets the play as an allegory of Maud Gonne's work among the peasantry, which vindicates such political service, but was generally misunderstood by the audience because of unintentional offense given Catholic religious sensibilities (Yeats, Fascism, and Ireland , 47–49). My own approach to the play is closest to that of G. J. Watson's Irish Identity and the Literary Revival (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979), which focuses on the matrix of class conflict in which the play developed.

used the play well to give life to their interpretations, but no one has succeeded in finding an interpretation that gives life to the play. We tend to assume that meaning lives in the relation between texts; in signs of literary craft; in the comment of work on life, life on work; or in a vision of humanity; but from whatever source we draw meaning, we have found little of what the original audience found and nothing so exciting. Where did The Countess Cathleen get the meanings it once had? If we could find that out in this remarkable case, we might know something about how any work comes to have significance. Certainly, what once seemed an answer both obvious and good—the right words in the right order make great works great—now appears as a truism that is not always true.

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Of course, not all those in attendance at the Antient Concert Rooms found the same significance, or, for that matter, any significance at all. When George Moore arrived for the second night, he says, he took the noise inside the hall for "the true caoine from Galway," a stage effect to make the death of the countess more authentic, but it turned out to be the audience, howling against the play.^[10] Afterwards Yeats explained to him

[10] George Moore, Hail and Farewell! vol. 1, Ave (1911; London: William Heinemann, 1937), 76–77.

that having been so long outside of Ireland, Moore might not understand that it was a serious matter to bring over a play that shocked people's feelings. And Moore adds in Hail and Farewell: "Of course, the play shocks nobody's feelings, but it gives people the opportunity to think that their feelings are shocked." True, Moore was accustomed to living in a literary beau monde, Paris or London, but he was Irish and Catholic—what does he mean that the play shocks no one's feelings? To us, it may be nothing but dress-ups, pretty poetry, and legendary cartoons, but surely to anyone who was there it had a greater impact?

Not, apparently, to everyone—neither to all Irishmen, nor to all Catholics, nor to all who knew the play well. Lady Gregory says in Our Irish Theatre that the actors themselves, being English, could not understand the excitement when there was booing and hooting from the gallery.^[11] To them it was a simple morality or mystery play about a time in Ireland's legendary past when famine raged and the peasants were starving. The beautiful Countess Cathleen, attended by a poet and nurse, offers her charity to a peasant family down to her last coin in the first scene. Then two devils appear, disguised as merchants, offering gold to buy food in exchange for the souls of the peasants, many of whom accept the offer. When the Countess Cathleen learns of this horrible commerce across the countryside, she empties her larder, sells her land, and finally barters her own soul in exchange for the return of the peasants' souls. The devils accept and the peasants are freed. After the sudden death swoon of the countess, an angel appears to announce that she too is saved, because God looks on the motive not the deed. With coaching from Yeats himself, the actors had learned the lines, mastered the movements of the characters, and carried this charming play to its conclusion: what, then, did they not know that made them miss the meaning of the play?

They didn't know, according to Lady Gregory, that F. Hugh

[11] Lady Gregory, Our Irish Theatre (1913; rpt., New York: Capricorn Books, 1965), 24–25.

O'Donnell was a master provocateur, a hater of "everything decent in Ireland," such as Yeats and the Anglo-Irish, and probably anyway in the pay of the Crown; or that Cardinal Logue was the supreme authority in Ireland for the majority of its population, and that he, provoked by O'Donnell, had condemned the play. Without this knowledge, no one could find anything objectionable in the play, Lady Gregory concludes, because it is all quite harmless and lovely.

Robert Hogan and James Kilroy allow that the mischief of O'Donnell may have been the first cause of the controversy, but they add that one has to take into account two other necessary conditions, characteristics of the Irish people: first, Ireland, still in the grip of a hyperpuritanical public morality, was quick to sense slights to religion and that morality; second, Ireland, though still a colony, was largely nationalist, and quick to sense slights to its patriotic pride.^[12] Once again, there is nothing in the play that makes it significant, but something about the backward Irish. It is possible, however, that where the audience took offense, offense was given.

3

Granted, without the agitation of O'Donnell, the tone of the debate might well have been more gentlemanly: he screamed at what seemed to be small wounds, if wounds at all. His pamphlet Souls for Gold is, indeed, as Lady Gregory suggests, hysterical, distorted, and propagandistic. But O'Donnell makes some just observations, though in unjustly inflated language.^[13] It is true that WBY shows peasants "crouched in degraded awe" before sowlths, sheogues, and demons; true that in a small cast he introduces one Irish thief, one Irish adulteress, and one Irish iconoclast.^[14] Neither O'Donnell nor

[12] Hogan and Kilroy, 1:30–31.

[13] F. Hugh O'Donnell, Souls for Gold (London: Nassau Press, 1899); selections rpt. in Hogan and Kilroy, 1:31–33.

[14] The Countess Cathleen , in Alspach, lines 178, 182e, 535z, 543r, 543cc, 732, 777. The acting text is a revised version of the one appearing in Poems , (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1899). These revisions, and others, were incorporated in Poems (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1901).

Cardinal Logue were far from the mark when they asked, "Is this Irish?"^[15]

But one might well ask, how much does it matter if the play is Irish? To an extent plays are meant to be read on their own terms, not by comparing them with some phantom called "reality." It mattered a great deal to that audience in 1899, however, because WBY had told them beforehand that for the first time on stage, he was going to show the Irish people who they really were. In the formal statement of purpose for the Irish Literary Theatre, Yeats and Lady Gregory concluded: "We will show that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and of easy sentiment, as it has been represented, but the home of ancient idealism. We are confident of the support of all Irish people, who are weary of misrepresentation, in carrying out a work that is outside all the political questions that divide us."^[16] The howls in the gallery when The Countess Cathleen was staged showed just how little representation was outside the political questions that divided loyalist and nationalist, Protestant and Catholic, aristocrat and democrat. The advertisement by the founders was, in fact, likely to divide them more, because it makes contradictory promises: the authors will show the real Ireland and the ideal Ireland. The Countess Cathleen certainly disappoints one of these expectations: an ideal Ireland would not be so richly populated with sinners.

The real Ireland may or may not have the particular vices—and virtues—the play attributes to it; that depends on what we call "vice" and on how the Irish people behaved in the nineteenth century. Then (as later in controversies over the works of Synge and Joyce) Irish nationalists claimed that their

[15] It is difficult to accept Elizabeth Cullingford's characterization that opposition to the play, while expressive of "genuine religious feeling" can be laid to "artificially manufactured bigotry," or even to agree with her opinion—drawn from Yeats's own account—that "those who attacked 'The Countess Cathleen' were motivated more by religious than political fervour" (Yeats, Ireland and Fascism, 48). In the Irish context of theological politics and political theology, of class conflict determined by religious affiliation, the drawing of this distinction has the effect of dismissing the force of both the play and the opposition to it.

[16] Lady Gregory, Our Irish Theatre, 20.

men were brave, their women pure, and their people pious. Scholars have usually followed the writers in mocking these claims, saying that the nationalists were puritans, chauvinists, and philistines. Whatever their stock responses to drama, in order to judge The Countess Cathleen as a representation of reality, we need to know something about the general moral conduct of the Irish: whether the women were characteristically chaste or adulterous, the men courageous or cowardly and thieving, the people strong or weak in their faith.

First of all, it is a fact everywhere in evidence and by all acknowledged that the Irish of the last half of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth were remarkably reserved in their sexual behavior. Up to the Famine, apparently, they played more, married younger, and scamped about a bit; after the Famine, the average age of marriage rose to about thirty-nine for men, thirty for women.^[17] The Famine came in a fashion that seemed to many a punishment for having too many children, and, with the help of Jansenist theology and Victorian morality, brought about a blessedly virginal nation. By the end of the nineteenth century, the purity of Ireland's women had become a plank in the nationalist program: every crown colony is bound to be thought of as a slut, used at the pleasure of the Empire—Ireland alone, though poor, is pure. Critics may mock the status of chastity as a virtue, but one cannot deny its importance both to Irish nationalist thought and in Irish behavior.

As for the second and third sins representing the faults of the Irish in the play—robbery and sacrilege—they are even less characteristic than adultery. No doubt, some Irishmen at some time stole property, but for cultural reasons the Irish of

[17] In the 1830s, 28 percent of Irish women who married did so before their twenty-first year; only 11 percent of English women in that decade did so. After the Famine, the rate of marriages declined severely, and the age at which people married increased, until in 1951, the average age at which farmers married was thirty-nine for men and thirty for women, while a quarter of the men remained unmarried. See K. H. Connell, The Population of Ireland, 1750–1845 (1950; rpt., Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975), 39; and F. S. L. Lyons, Ireland since the Famine (1971; rpt., London: Fontana, 1973), 45–46.

the nineteenth century did not make much use of the small opportunities for larceny a poor country provides. To steal a sheep in Ireland was not just to make yourself one sheep richer; it would quite possibly have been to starve your neighbor. For this reason, the Irish queerly regarded assault and even murder (of certain persons) as less heinous crimes than theft. (This peculiarity is, of course, one basis of Synge's ironies in The Playboy of the Western World: because he is believed to have killed his father, Christy Mahon is a good man to guard the shop of Michael James from thieves; in fact, he is an all-around hero.) As for sacrilege, Yeats included a spectacular scene in which a peasant kicks a shrine of the Virgin Mary to pieces just after struggling with his wife.^[18] The audience did not object to his browbeating his wife, but they did not at all like seeing the man crush a statue of the Virgin under his boot. It was not that the Irish did not commit sins, but that they typically did not commit those sins singled out in the play—lechery, robbery, and iconoclasm.

The plot of The Countess Cathleen called for sins of some sort in act 3, during which the demon-merchants price the souls of the peasants by adding up their sins. The playwright might have provoked less reaction from his audience if he had made one sinner a miser, another an incendiary, and a third a believer in faeries—typical vices of the people in nineteenth-century Irish novels and in the eyes of the Church. But for Yeats, superstition was not a sin but a strength of the peasant; incendiarism suggested the possibility of peasant anguish and revolt, which he tended to ignore; and miserliness contradicted his thesis that the Irish, unlike the English, were a spiritual people, caring little for material gain.

4

The Catholic "mob" that objected so much to the sort of vices Yeats gave the Irish masses did not much mention the virtues he assigned to the play's representative of the Irish classes,

[18] Alspach, 31; line 182e.

but it could have. The picture of the countess was so flattering, and that of the peasants so amusing, that the ladies of the Chief Secretary's Lodge—Lady Balfour, the countess of Fingall, and others—begged Yeats to let them perform the work as nine tableaux vivants six months before the performance scheduled for the Antient Concert Rooms. Yeats wrote his sister that of course, as a nationalist, he could not go anywhere near the residence of Britain's representative in Ireland, much less take part in the performance, but as a gentleman he did not refuse to meet the ladies in Betty Balfour's house to advise them about costumes.^[19] Their performance was a complete success: it was such fun for the gentry to act the peasants, who must have seemed like fabulous talking beasts out of Grimm. The chief secretary, Arthur Balfour, also found a pleasant satisfaction in the graceful way the countess of Fingall, as Countless Cathleen, died to save the peasants who could not save themselves.^[20] Certainly, the chief virtue in the ethical scheme of the play is generosity, a quality most accessible to the rich.^[21] The main virtue to which the poor may aspire is gratitude—as in the one blameless peasant character, Maire, who shows exaggerated respect and thankfulness to the countess, then dies of starvation.^[22]

These differences between the "quality" (Anglo-Irish word for the upper classes) and the peasants did, however, attract the attention of theological critics. A rather sensible Catholic reviewer for the Daily Express concluded that Yeats, though "a king in Fairyland," was completely ignorant of the way an Irishman thought: "the central conception of the excessive value of the beautiful Countess's soul" was "foreign to any-

[19] WBY to Lily Yeats, 25 December 1898; Wade, 306.

[20] Elizabeth, countess of Fingall, and Pamela Hinkson, Seventy Years Young (London: Collins, 1937), 234–35.

[21] Malcolm Brown correctly judges that Yeats's "attention to Irish grievances"—such as the Famine—"was always slight and sustained only with difficulty"; his real aim in the play was "a more congenial theme . . . the exaltation of the supernatural benevolence of the Irish aristocracy toward the deserving poor" (The Politics of Irish Literature: From Thomas Davis to W. B. Yeats [Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1972], 144).

[22] Alspach, 15–25; lines 69–138; 728b.

thing" that could be called Irish "in spiritual outlook."^[23] In the play, the highest price brought by the soul of a peasant—that of an ugly old woman—is a thousand crowns; but for the soul of the countess, the demons are glad to give five hundred thousand.^[24] When Yeats was attacked on this score, he claimed the opinion belonged to the devil, not to him. But actually, as the Daily Express reviewer notes, the entire play is constructed on this conception. Not only do the demons assay certain values, they pay the gold pieces. And the peasants show no surprise that one soul is worth more than another, or that the soul of the countess is worth many times more than all others. Indeed, at the end of the play, God himself, deciding that the countess is too valuable a property to go down to the house of hell, repossesses her soul.

Yeats's kinder critics, such as T. P. Gill and the reviewer for the Daily Nation, charitably assumed that he had a poor grip on the theological principles of Catholicism, but the real problem lay in his powerful hold on certain beliefs about society, not about God, beliefs the majority of his audience could not accept. The weakest claim for the countess, necessary to the working of the plot, is that this particular individual is simply good, in a selfless and absolute way. But the contingencies of social casting permit, and indeed invite, a stronger claim: that those of the countess's rank and station in life are naturally more noble than others. To cite a later poem, there are "loftier thought, / Sweeter emotion working in their veins, / Like gentle blood."^[25] The fact is, Yeats believed some people to be more valuable than others—more beautiful, thus more noble, thus more virtuous; or, in the idiom of the peasant Maire,

[23] Daily Express, 9 May 1899; Hogan and Kilroy, 1:42.

[24] Alspach, 117, line 586; 145, line 774. G. J. Watson also notes that "these going rates seem entirely appropriate to Yeats's peasants." Concerning the play as a whole, Watson makes the valuable point that "The Countess Cathleen expresses a consciousness in many ways alien to that of its audience" and "the gap between 'Ascendancy' and 'native' ensured its hostile reception" (Irish Identity and the Literary Revival, 66–67).

[25] "To A Shade" (29 September 1913), in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1956; 1968), 108.

more wealthy, therefore more wise.^[26] Catholic members of the audience could no doubt see for themselves that beauty, wealth, and status were important facts of life, but they did not take them as facts of the afterlife as well. For them, the values of this world stood opposed to those of the other world; for Yeats, they seemed sometimes to be the same. This belief in a natural social hierarchy was the very reason he hated democracy.

In the debate over the play, Yeats denied that it had any proper historical setting or said anything about the social character of the Irish people: "His play, of course, was purely symbolic, and as such it must be regarded"—the countess just a symbol of subjective life, the bad peasants and demons of material life.^[27] But Yeats's revisions of the folktale actually made the countess and the peasants more identifiable as historical Irish types, if not accurately representative of them.

For example, one oddity often noticed in the play's action is the entrance of the countess into a peasant's cottage.^[28] First, she comes in for the queer reason that she is lost, though she is in her own demesne, not far from the immense castle the peasants mention in awe. Many take this as clumsy dramaturgy, but there were plenty of Irish lords and ladies, either largely absent from Ireland or garrisoned in great houses, who could not have found their way around their own property, had they ventured into it.

Second, when the countess comes into the cottage, she arrives accompanied by a lutanist and other musicians, which causes the "bad peasant" Shemus to rumble, "They are off again: some lady or gentleman . . . in the woods with tympan

[26] To be precise, Maire's words are as follows: "When wealthy and wise folk wander from their peace / And fear wood things, poor folk may draw the bolt / And pray before the fire" (Alspach, 27, line 146).

[27] "Irish Literary Theatre: Dinner at the Shelbourne Hotel," Daily Express, 12 May 1899, 5–6; Hogan and Kilroy, 1:50.

[28] Alspach, 15, lines 69d–121. Peter Ure notes that the scene is "a trifle grotesque" and says it can be "justified" by the "economies" of Yeats's revision and by the effective "pictorial stage-contrast between real rags and gorgeous livery" (Yeats the Playwright, 21).

and with harp."^[29] After all, his family is starving, and all he has in the kitchen is a dead wolf. Thematically, this seems a heavy-handed way for the playwright to establish that the countess suffers a spiritual sorrow only music can soften, while the best the peasants can do is suffer a physical hunger. But once again, there is a kind of historical accuracy: the immense social distance between the Protestant Ascendancy of Ireland and its Catholic peasantry appears in the highly cultured loneliness of the rich and the brutal, ignorant suffering of the poor.

Third, here, for the first but not last time in the play, we notice how little there is for the heroine to do. She wanders in, empties a few last coins from her purse, and wanders out, sorrowful she cannot do more. She does not struggle for anything, against anyone. In the end, of course, she offers herself for sale, and in her highest act signs her last will and testament (with a quill from the cock that crowed when St. Peter—the first pope—betrayed Christ!). Here too the play idealizes the life of a class of landlords that had little to do but leave smaller fortunes behind at their deaths. Yeats's subsequent defense that the characters were "purely symbolic," because "literature is the expression of universal truths," seems in this instance to have been offered to obstruct an inquiry into the more particular truths—and untruths—embodied in the play. The aesthetic argument, in other words, was offered for a political purpose.

5

In fact, there was a political purpose to The Countess Cathleen , over and above the eulogy on the landlord and libel on the peasants that appear in the characterization. The purpose is found in the setting and plot of the play: in a famine, peasants sell their souls until they are saved by their landlord. George Moore reports a conversation with T. P. Gill, editor of the Daily Express , in which the latter said that the setting and plot

[29] Alspach, 15, lines 58–58a.

of The Countess Cathleen were "calculated to wound the religious susceptibilities of the Irish people." Gill, Moore says, "while stroking his beard, . . . continued to speak of the famine times and of proselytizing by Protestants: memories like these were too deep to be washed away by mere poetry."^[30]

Memory indeed is too weak a word to express how the Irish psyche was convulsed by the Famine that began in 1845—by its end, the population was cut in half, millions dying, millions emigrating. Meanwhile, Protestant landlords offered to give them soup if they changed their religion. Not many changed it, however, and those who did are remembered and ridiculed today—"soupers," they are called.

Though Yeats denied the association between the setting of his play and the Irish Famine, his adaptation of the source, "The Countess Kathleen O'Shea" (collected in WBY's Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry ), actually enforces it.^[31] In the original, a "dearth" is mentioned, but only a few times, and then not until almost half the tale is done. In the play, Famine is the premise from start to finish. What Yeats had done was to transvalue the greatest national experience of the Irish, turning a Protestant moral catastrophe into a miracle of benevolence, and one of the world's remarkable cases of a people's devotion to a faith into wholesale infidelity.^[32]

This transvaluation of the historical roles of the classes is

[30] Moore, Hail and Farewell , 1:95. A leading article in the 9 May 1899 Irish Times also complained that the play "offends against the tenor of Irish history in regard to the Theological connection and against the position of the Irish peasant in the face of physical pain" (Critical Heritage , ed. Jeffares, 114).

[31] W. B. Yeats, ed., Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland , rpt. of Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (London, 1888) and Irish Fairy Tales (London, 1892) (Gerrards Cross, Bucks.: Colin Smythe, 1977). Yeats later discovered that the tale was translated from the French Les Matinées de Timothe Trimm ; the actual source was named in the 1895 and following editions of Poems (Alspach, 170–77).

[32] The transvaluation by Protestants began even in the midst of the deaths and forced emigration of the famine years. Malcolm Brown sharply observes that Sir Robert Peel's ineffective relief measures during the 1846 Famine—in which finances were left to the voluntary impulses of local landlords—incited "in the donors a maudlin self-congratulation by which they read their niggardliness as heroic benevolence, in the manner of Yeats's 'Countess Cathleen'" (Politics of Irish Literature , 89).

cunningly worked into the plot. Fredric Jameson's explanation of Vladimir Propp's morphology of the folktale elucidates the changes Yeats made in his source.^[33] Propp, the firs to break folktales down into their signifying elements and to define the rules of combination for those elements, found that most tales begin with a situation of lack in the home. The hero is then driven out by this initial problem either to do battle with a malignant enemy or to carry out a series of perplexing tasks. Jameson observes here that the main reality of a world of scarcity is not just that one cannot meet one's needs without work, but that one's very existence—as one who eats and strives to gather food—is a threat to the existence of others. One is therefore given the bleak choice of either competing with others (doing battle with the villain) or working (carrying out the perplexing tasks). Both ultimately have the same meaning: the war of man upon man. The fairy tale reflects this world of scarcity by making the Other, the figure outside the family circle, appear as a primal enemy or supernatural friend, there being no such thing as a natural friend. The great value for societies of this popular form is in the sturdy hope of the standard denouement. As Bruno Bettelheim emphasizes, folktales teach self-reliance: the hero who sets out at the start always in the end brings home the boon that fills the initial lack, even if he has a bit of heavenly help along the way.^[34]

In The Countess Cathleen the initial situation is typical: there is no food in the home, and the father is out foraging. When he returns, he tells his wife of his failure to find anything to eat, except for the wolf he killed before their door. At this time, half a scene into the play, the countess enters with her "fantastically dressed musicians." Now, in this situation of famine, and a war of man upon man, the starving peasants, having made depredations upon one another's flocks, then

[33] Jameson, The Prison-House of Language (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 68; Propp, The Morphology of the Folktale , trans. Laurence Scott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968).

[34] Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Knopf, 1976).

having turned to violence against one another, at last recognize that the estate of the countess offers a way through to the next harvest. In act 2, Cathleen learns from the gardener that peasants are stealing her apples, and from the herdsman that they have rustled her sheep.^[35] This recognition that her wealth can save them is only a short step from another perception for the peasants: the countess creates the Famine—her immense wealth causes their poverty. But before this perception can break upon the mind, Yeats turns the tale so that the countess is not the villain, but the supernatural donor, and, then, more than the donor, the tale's one true hero. The shape of the play's plot makes a compelling depiction of the masses as helplessly dependent.

In Yeats's source, "The Countess Kathleen O'Shea," this message of peasant helplessness does not come through, because in that version there is no peasant family at the start, just a generalized Irish town populated with unspecified townspeople; the first named and individualized character is the countess, who is thus seen from the start as the heroine.^[36] But in The Countess Cathleen , Yeats puts Shemus, the father of the family, in the position of hero—the first character developed, the first to journey forth, and the first to struggle with the demons—and then makes him fail, allowing the countess to take over the role of hero. In this way, rather than being the natural enemy of the peasants, the landlord becomes their supernatural savior. Furthermore, the demons are suggestively transformed from being the supernatural villians to appearing like the natural enemy of the Irish, the British—strangers with good manners who operate on principles of Free Trade even in times of Famine.^[37] A social contradiction

[35] Alspach, 61, lines 365–66d; 65, lines 378rr–78ss.

[36] Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland , 213.

[37] Andrew Parkin believes that in the early version of the play the devils "display a bitter, brutal streak" "giving the impression that they are melodramatic caricatures of ruthless landlords," not just of specifically English commercialism (The Dramatic Imagination of W. B. Yeats [Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1978], 71). I follow Malcolm Brown (Politics of Irish Literature , 89) in associating them more strictly with English Free Trade policies during the Famine, and in general with the English mercantile character; thus I see the play as using xenophobia as a distraction from class hatred.

(harmony of aristocracy and peasantry in time of scarcity) is turned into an imaginary unity by means of gathering the potentially opposed classes together against an external enemy: under the leadership of the Protestants, Ireland will be saved from England. Yeats can thus be seen to have colonized a typical narrative expression of the poorer classes, altering its plot and thus its social meaning, with the apparent goal of uniting Ireland against England and subordinating the peasantry to the landlords. One must remember that Yeats was a nationalist but not a democrat.

6

We now know something of what the play meant to different parts of the audience (nationalist, Catholic, and Ascendancy), what it means in relation to Irish history and its folklore basis; we must next consider if the political statements implied in the play are what Yeats himself meant to say. In addition, we need to decide whether such statements are the main blow the poet wished to deal, a passing side-swipe, or just an unintentional, if bruising, collision with the sensitivities of a part of his audience. In either of the first two cases—as a main, or a subordinate intention—such statements would be intentional propaganda—writing that aims to shape opinions and attitudes, and in the last, it could nonetheless be propaganda, though unintentionally so. Yeats himself declared many times that his work was not propaganda, but art, and that he was not interested in forming the opinions of people.

This distinction between art and propaganda may be a useful rhetorical trope in certain kinds of political argument, but logically it is false. Any work of art can become propaganda if it is used in a certain way; any work of propaganda can become art if viewed in the right light.^[38] Pope's "The Rape of the Lock," for instance, becomes propaganda if a minister of propaganda sends it to British troops on the Somme to

[38] This availability of one work of art to many conflicting political uses is a major theme of A. P. Foulkes in Literature and Propaganda (New York: Methuen, 1983), esp. 105.

show them the light grace and cultural refinement they are fighting for. And works can take on quite contradictory functions as propaganda in different settings: The Playboy of the Western World in its first production was antinationalist propaganda about the Protestant virtues of wildness and extravagance, about the falsity of prim Gaelic League views of the peasant, and even about the freedom of the Protestant artists from political interference. Many years later, produced at a state-owned Abbey Theatre, the same play becomes nationalist propaganda about the tolerant union of hearts in the new nation and about its modern, sophisticated view of its own past. In its 1899 production, Yeats's play is certainly propaganda as well as art; the questions are what sort of propaganda and for what purpose.

Jacques Ellul has made the best classification of propaganda.^[39] In his terms, Yeats's play would be "sociological" rather than "political propaganda." In political propaganda, an organization uses techniques of influence to achieve a specific change in society; in sociological propaganda, an individual who has assimilated a dominant ideology uses it to form what he takes to be spontaneous, natural, and right judgments of value, with the expectation that his work will, among other things, confirm the audience in a set of values it already honors. In particular, Yeats picked up certain attitudes from a group of upper-class nationalists—figures like Standish O'Grady, Lady Gregory, and the younger Edward Martyn—about the value of tradition, noble manners, and the whole feudal way of life. He gave expression to such values as if they were universal truths rather than the beliefs of a class.

Yeats offered his dramatization of these values as what Ellul calls "integration propaganda" rather than "agitation propaganda." Agitation is subversive work opposed to the status quo; integration tries to conserve the status quo and create contentment with it. One way to describe the clamor over The Countess Cathleen is to observe that what Yeats of-

[39] Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes , trans. Konrad Kellen and Jean Lerner (1966; rpt., New York: Vintage Books, 1973). Foulkes develops the ideas of Ellul in Literature and Propaganda , 12–13, passim.

fered as integration and sociological propaganda was taken by the nationalist part of the audience as political and subversive propaganda. They had become accustomed to a nationalist view of the Irish people as valiant, pious rebels winning a war against an unjust land settlement (in which a few thousand largely Unionist and Protestant landlords lived off the rents of millions of predominantly Catholic and nationalist tenants), and Yeats's idealization of the status quo ante bellum struck them as a move by a powerful minority to recapture control of the political momentum in the country. They refused to assimilate the values of the aristocracy as their own. Furthermore, because the setting of the Famine became the key by which they interpreted the play, they did not give Yeats credit for the progressive side of his nationalism: his suggestion that the landlords could increase their glory by serving their tenants and even selling off a part of their estates to enlarge peasant smallholdings.

The political meaning Yeats gave the play appears in a comparison of the picture of Irish society Yeats painted and the picture most of his countrymen saw before them. They looked upon an Ireland with an irresponsible aristocracy and a rebellious tenantry struggling for equality and independence; he exhibited for their admiration an Ireland with a conscientious aristocracy and a suffering, misguided tenantry at last happy to settle back down into their position in the hierarchy. But the audience did not admire his utopia: the world of The Countess Cathleen was neither what Ireland really was nor what they wanted it to be. Yeats certainly produced propaganda, but the first production did not succeed completely because it was recognized to be propaganda.

Not a complete success at first, in the end it became one. During the controversy after the first production, and even before it, Yeats argued (a) that every civilized country should permit free artistic expression, (b) that every work of art deserved a fair hearing from a tolerant audience, and (c) that his play was a work of art and should be appreciated, or at least tolerated, as one. If Yeats could get the public to come to his play, sit quietly through it, and comment principally upon its dramatic verse, scenery, and acting, then he could achieve a

situation in which sociological and integrationist propaganda could work. The political values of the play might then be assimilated by part of the audience simply through the habit of aesthetic suspension of disbelief. When the case was argued on grounds of artistic freedom, Yeats found his supporters and made his brief. Lady Gregory proudly declares that they won that battle because the play was produced several times later at the Abbey and no one made any protest at all.^[40] Of course, it has to be added that when the significance the audience first found in the work is excluded from discussion, there is little left in the play to resent, and less to admire; it has become a thing to tolerate.

In 1899, those who saw The Countess Cathleen as the object of an argument between artists asking for freedom and clerics requiring censorship came to the defense of Yeats. Joyce, seated in the gallery on the first night, for instance, liked the lyric "Who Goes with Fergus," didn't mind the depiction of peasants as ignorant and superstitious (he thought they were too), and clapped vigorously at the end of the play.^[41] James Cousins—another young Catholic intellectual—also came to root for writers: "In the duel of hiss and cheer, cheer won. I give my word for the victory, for I was one of the victors, and possessed as spoils of conquest a hat with a broken rim through which I had clenched my fingers when waving it in wild applause at nothing in the play but something in the rising spirit of the Arts in Ireland as against the spirit of obscurantism and dishonest censorship," he says.^[42] With such foot soldiers, Yeats and Lady Gregory indeed had their victory, but at a price: people cheered at nothing in the play; their "wild applause" was for "Art" in the abstract.^[43] In fact,

[40] Lady Gregory, Our Irish Theatre , 25.

[41] Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 68–69.

[42] James H. and Margaret E. Cousins, We Two Together (Madras: Ganesh, 1950), 57.

[43] In declaring his victory over Cardinal Logue and the Catholic Celtophiles, Yeats also pointed to the applause as proof: "The applause in the theatre has shown what party has the victory" (WBY to the editor, Morning Leader , 13 May 1899; Wade, 320).

from this report, it is a wonder that anyone made anything of the play itself, the room being filled with hisses, cheers, boos, verse-speaking, and musical interludes. But ultimately what mattered, and perhaps what always matters, is the argument over the work of art, not simply the argument in it.

7

One who saw him in action in the Playboy row, Mary Colum, said that she never saw a man fight so hard as Yeats fought, nor one who had so many weapons in his armory.^[44] But by fighting for his work as art and only art, and winning that fight, Yeats began the unmaking of the meanings made out of The Countess Cathleen . The critical tradition that finds in this work only verses, gestures, eternal emotions, and allegories of the spirit begins right here with Yeats's own argument against the nationalists. A play or a poem is not essentially an artifice, and what it stands for is not eternity. In the case of this play, the result of splitting the aesthetic from the political, and the philosophical from the historical, is a general erasure of significance. The meanings Yeats put into the play and provoked around it he himself dispelled.

Yeats was a great genius, and remains one, because of his magisterial ability to create and control the interest of his readers. Some of that management of interest occurs through figures of speech and the hosts of other literary effects within the work, but more of it occurs in the activities of the poet around the work—in manifestoes, charters for committees, newspaper editorials, press releases, prefaces, lists of guarantors, costume designs, actresses, musical interludes, symbolic treatises, folklore collections, and so on. And once he has directed our attention to certain things he says are in the work, and away from others, the ways in which the work is discussed are changed forever. This is the perpetual conundrum of the inside and the outside, one every magician and

[44] Colum, The Life and the Dream (1958; rev. ed., Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1966), 121.

symbolist must master: to make a thing that is nothing in itself signify many things, to make the swan "a concentration of the sky."

An encomium on Yeats in a 1912 work on theatre by Edward Martyn illustrates how much Yeats's work as public figure adds to his stature as phrase-maker. Martyn is trying to understand why his own literary career aborted after The Heather Field was produced on that opening night with The Countess Cathleen , whereas Yeats's dramatic career became so prominent. The decline in his own fortunes must have been especially puzzling to Martyn because his own play received much kinder, if shorter, notices than Yeats's did. Looking at the success of the Abbey from 1904 to 1912 before considering how to take up a new theatrical plan for himself, Martyn apologizes: "I am humbly conscious of my inferiority as an impresario to the two experts [Yeats and Lady Gregory] whose feats I have the temerity to imitate."^[45]Impresario is the correct word for the type of artistic genius Yeats so grandly is. And not only Yeats: if Martyn could not excite interest in his work—through being fashionable, controversial, or somehow relevant—he could not be a good writer. For a work to make an impression, the impresario has to create the ways in which the work is perceived, not simply the work itself, which may well remain invisible until one is taught how to see it.

Indeed, the very materials of the work—the words of the language—always already belong to a polity of discourse about many topics that seem external to the work, and using those words, the writer is performing an act of power over others, defining how they are seen, and how they see themselves, just as in receiving those words from others, the writer is an effect of the way others have constituted a world and him out of words.^[46] From the first word that is written, then,

[45] Denis Gwynn, Edward Martyn and the Irish Revival (London: Jonathan Cape, 1930), 156.

[46] For an excellent discussion of the "polity of discourse," see J. G. A. Pocock, "Verbalizing a Political Act: Toward a Politics of Speech," in Language and Politics , ed. Michael J. Shapiro (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 27–43.

the author enters upon a long conversation that continues until the last word is said, a conversation that is continuous with other acts of language and acts of power in the society. The immense volume, scope, and ambition of Yeats's activities in every aspect of this polity of discourse is one main reason his plays and poems have such great meaning for us.^[47] Discussion of the work of art, in a simple sense, makes the meaning of the work, if not its capacity for meaning.

This conclusion may seem debunking, but that is not my purpose. The public relations work of Yeats had a greater result than raising an audience or increasing sales figures for his books. It made his writing an enduring object of our attention. We may refuse to discuss the work in the terms he proposes, but we shall continue to discuss it. Looking back over the poetry of Yeats some years ago, Denis Donoghue decided with coy judiciousness that there were five or six excellent poems out of the lot; the rest were period pieces, inchoate symbolic ruminations, or exercises in personal mannerism. The reason Yeats had been taken for a great poet on such small achievement, Donoghue said, is that he had mixed his poetry up with a legendary biography (especially the unrequited love for Maud Gonne) and with the history of his nation.^[48] I think Donoghue is right at least in this—Yeats did enhance his poetry by giving it a backdrop of Irish history and a cast of noble-looking figures. But that does not make him less a poet; that makes him a great poet. A jar in Tennessee, a mirror in the roadway, or a swan in the sky: what is in the work comes from what we make of it with what lies around it.

[47] Hilton Edwards, formerly co-director of the Gate Theatre, Dublin, made a similar observation about the Abbey's plays in general: "When you come to think of it the Abbey's reputation . . . has been built up upon, I would say, five plays, and I would have great difficulty finding the fifth. . . . The reputation of the Irish theatre . . . depends more on . . . the brilliance of the various people that have been writing about her than on what the Irish theatre has done" (Journal of Irish Literature , 2, no. 3 [May 1973]: 87).

[48] Donoghue, "The Hard Case of Yeats," New York Review of Books 24, no. 9 (26 May 1977): 3–4. In regard to Yeats's dramatic efforts, Donoghue says, "I cannot see any good reason for staging . . . most of the early plays, which are interesting only to students of Yeats."