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JOHN BULL'S OTHER ISLANDYEATS AND SHAW IN 1932, YEATS WROTE TO Shaw about the founding of an Irish Academy of Letters. Characteristically, Yeats was managing the affair and involved in "impassioned debate."! In trying to persuade the founding committee to nominate for the Academy what he called "the list I wanted," Yeats was almost wholly successful. By skilful manoeuvring in committee, he managed to get all but one of his nominees accepted. The occasion was one of those on which the election or rejection of individual men would convey a sense of values: a commentary on Ireland's past and a declaration of intention for Ireland's future. It was in some ways surprising that Yeats's candidate for the Presidency was Shaw. In other ways it was the fitting culmination of the relationship that Yeats should fulfill the political and Shaw the honorific role in the creation of the new Irish pantheon. The relationship of Yeats and Shaw-or should it be Shaw and Yeats?-has been no more than touched on by the biographers; and this is not, I believe, because it is of trivial importance but because of its very nature. Despite the substantiality of their long-lingering presences as individuals, Shaw and Yeats become shadowy figures when recalled together in their joint appearances, as on the occasion of the performances of The Land oj Heart's Desire and Arms and the Man as a double-bill, or in competition for the prime place in Florence Farr's affections, or at \Villiam Morris' home, or in the accounts of the Irish performances of The Showing Up of Blanco Posnet and O'Flaherty V. C.: Yeats's letter to Shaw, given below, and its context, may help to present a more substantial view of the two men in a pas de deux~ for the episode which it recalls is, I believe, the most telling of all in their literary relationship. In the smaller within small worlds of letters, Anglo-Irish writers of letters and AnglO-Irish dramatists, there had to be, through sheer propinquity, some kind of relationship. In question for Shaw and Yeats was the degree of intimacy that might develop without bringing about, prematurely, a struggle for supremacy. The warm, thin AngloIrish wax would take one impression well, but only one; there could be no question of superimposition. On the part of the younger man, the question was particularly acute. At the time of their first semous encounter, Shaw was emerging as the greatest of the English Ibsenites. 1 From unpublished correspondence from Yeats to G. B. Shaw. 245 246 MODERN DRAMA December Had Shaw followed George Moore's example (as he sometimes seemed to threaten) and occupied a Dublin platform, there would have been too narrow room for Yeats. However much they may now seem complementary geniuses, in the early stages of their careers a taste for one would seem to preclude an appetite for the other. The "stillborn poet," as Shaw has too unnlercifully been called, saw, when others were still blind to it, the enduring poet in Yeats. He could mock Yeats but he had the wit to see that his fellow-countryman had the birthright of a poet, and that his own work might, for all its utility, become as "flat as ditchwater." In character, as in background, the two men had much in common: beginning as diffident yet ambitious youths, disciplining themselves on the platform and in the drawing-room, depending on kind women, they both became, in their distinct ways, self-assured, oracular and pontificial. The masks of hierophant and of Punchinello were the different products of a similar manufacture. Intellectually there was, of course, a great gulf fixed between them; and yet Shaw, the creative evolutionist, enters Yeats's territory, as it were from the rear, in Back to Methuselah, and Yeats, in Responsibilities, is as Shavian in spirit as he is unShavian in manner. But perhaps these ulterior territories , where they meet, should not be accounted the domain of either. They belong originally to the literary ancestor whom both Shaw and Yeats honoured as the begetter of the indignant spirit and its linguistic medium, Jonathan Swift. Yeats...

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