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305 JOYCE, YEATS, AND THE SHORT STORY By John A. Lester, Jr. (Haverford College) The first task of a brief comparative study of Joyce and Yeats as writers of the short story is to resist the temptation to compare the men themselves. The temptation is strong; we are bringing together surely the two major figures of the Irish literary movement, artists who throughout their lives - "on this side idolatry" - held each other in sincere respect. And the contrasting temperaments and aesthetic commitments of Joyce and Yeats have a direct effect on the strikingly contrasting forms which the short story took in their hands. Joyce is the self-made exile, Yeats the exile maigre lui, and at heart and at last the creator and the hierophant of all that is noble in his Irish heritage.l For Yeats it was the past that provided the legends and stuff of his imagery, and his Greece he found in the folklore and myths of ancient Ireland; for Joyce the past implies but "a fluid succession of presents," and his Greece is found in the streets here and now of dear, dirty Dublin.2 For Yeats, the bearing of the aristocrat , and the imagination of the peasant close to the earth: "Dream of the noble and the beggarman"; for Joyce, the clutter and the moil of lower middle class city life, and a disinterest in anyone "worth more than a thousand pounds."3 Such contrasts in themselves promise contrast between the Joyce and Yeats stories we are about to consider. But there is a further and more specific contrast which must be drawn before looking at the stories themselves, to sharpen our discrimination between these two creative temperaments. Yeats, as we shall see, was recurrently diffident and doubtful about the real quality of his short stories; and it comes as a surprise to find that James Joyce - not by nature a hero-worshipper - learned by heart the twenty-two pages of Yeats's "The Tables of the Law," and seems to have been a primary agent in persuading Yeats to republish this story and "The Adoration of the Magi" in 1904.^ How are we to account for this surprising affinity? The answer lies in part in the style of Yeats's work, a consciously Paterian prose which both Yeats and Joyce admired and which both were to renounce; but the strong point of attraction for Joyce must have been the searching idealism, spiritism, of these two stories. Every story Yeats was to write was to be in some sense mystical and evocative of an other world behind the world of the senses¡5 Joyce, in Ulysses, was to twit such mysticism when it draws its strength from Theosophy and from folklore; but in the early 90's, and in these stories in particular, Joyce must have found in Yeats a search closely allied to his own. Where old faiths had fallen, Catholic manque and Protestant manqué could meet, in a search for new divinities, and a world in which epiphanies might still occur.° Yet for our study of the short stories of Yeats and Joyce it is the distinction between their modes of search, rather than the affinity, that needs to be stressed. For Yeats·s spiritism is quite radically dichotomous, and Joyce's is not. Yeats's is a world of opposites and polarities; Joyce's is the world of the real and the commonplace; he will not alter or deform a thing that he had seen or heard - but he 306 will labor to convert "the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own. . . ."7 It is easy to simplify and to overstate the case, to imply that in their search for epiphany through art Yeats builds insistently from two worlds, and Joyce insistently from one; but the distinction in emphasis is a real and a needed one. Yeats's Sidhe leave their haunts to join mortals , because "Only the changing, and moody, and angry, and weary can love";° his immortal gods insistently love what passes, his mortals aspire to be singing birds of hammered gold. For Joyce the theme must be the actual, worked...

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