W. B. Yeats: An Introduction by Balachandra Rajan (review)

398 LETTERS IN CANADA him, tried their hand at plays, short stories, novels, verse, criticism, and quantities of miscellaneous journalism. Out of this heterogeneous production that was demanded of them, some (Maupassant, Zola, Huysmans , Valles, Villiers, a few others) turned out some fine work in certain prose genres for which they had talent; some (P"ladan, Gyp, Catulle Mendes, Jean Lorrain, innumerable others) have sunk out of sight. But all of them wrote in the same atmosphere and for the same market, and produced the same variety of literature. And if Professor Sachs is right in some measure; if Daudet did, mOre than the others, fail to realize what his best medium was, I wonder whether there isn't another possible explanation than the one based on Daudet's hypothetical personality problems. Maupassant had some personality problems too (don't we all?), and his output is more impressive. I suspect that Daudet unwisely died a bit too soon, at a moment when his natural medium was just getting invented. If he had lived long enough to hear a recording of Fernandel (or somebody born to an earlier generation, but with Fernande!'s superb gift for translating print into speech; or perhaps even a recording of Daudet himself) reading L'Arlesienne or L'Elixir du Reverend Pere Gaucher, wouldn't Daudet have known instantly-for he was a sensitive artist, as Professor Sachs sayswhat things he did best, and wouldn't he perhaps have left us some more of those perfect miniatures? The book has a good short bibliography and a useful index. Professor Sachs quotes Daudet in the original and then adds his own English translations, most of which are accurate; but I still can't convince myself that Mon Dieu (p. 127) ought to be translated "My God".... (JOHN A. WALKER) Professor Balachandra Rajan's book On W . B. Yeats (London: Hutchinson [Toronto: Nelson, Foster & Scottl. 1965, pp. vii, 200, 455., $3.00) has as its modest subtitle, A Critical Introduction. Yeats's poetry, his plays, A Vision, the autobiographies, critical writings, and mythologies are examined, and the book ranges in its analysis from TiT na n-og, the sold souls, and the dream-burdened will of the early work through his work with the theatre, his movement towards "responsibilities," and his successful synthesis of A Vision; then through the central symbols of swan, dancer, tower, and stair to the severed heads of the later plays and the final poetic productions of an old man's frenzy. To cover so much in 192 pages is a remarkable achievement, and perhaps one may HUMANITIES 399 suspect that Professor Rajan has sacrificed depth to scope. Yet the book is as incisive as it is inclusive, as deep as it is broad. Professor Rajan's chief critical concern is with the poems, and his focus is fixed firmly on the poems themselves rather than on the materials from which they have been created. While realizing that they remain "obstinately superior to the sum of everything that can be said about them" (p. 124), he recognizes that poems must live by their own logic, that poetry is not thought but the "embodiment" of thought, and that esoteric interpretation, though sometimes helpful and sometimes necessary , has to be controlled by a firm sense of the poem. The role of the System-that blend of philosophy, mythology, and expository symbolism which constitutes the substance of A Vision-is clearly identified. Professor Rajan wisely recognizes that it represents the climax of a thirty-year search for synthesis, and the critic who takes poetry as seriously as Yeats must also take the System as seriously as he did. What it presents, he argues, is not as bizarre, as esoteric, or as extremely individual as is commonly supposed: several of its ingredients "are wholly conventional and the massive attempts made to rehabilitate it only break down what should be an open door" (p. 89). But it must, perhaps, be "imaginatively rather than literally received." Unlike many critics of Yeats, Professor Rajan is not content with an analysis of manuscripts, with bio-literary criticism, with tracing the pictorial and philosophical sources of the poems, with uncovering obscure references that...