Yeats the European

ELT: VOLUME 34:4, 1991 to scholars than Ricketts's books. Those, however, who want to enhance their love, understanding, and appreciation of painting will turn to Ricketts." Delaney gives full attention to trips to the Continent, Egypt, and Tunisia, of which Ricketts usually left a literary record. As a lecturer on art, Delaney shows less interest in Ricketts's literary experiments. From affinities with Wilde, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Renan, Anatole France, and Marcel Schwob, and as an avid reader of Greek and Roman poetry and history, Ricketts, in his last years, cast Beyond the Threshold in the form of a prose poem incorporating dialogues of the dead. With stylistic mimicry of the speakers involved, he retold with ironic reversal biblical episodes and, for example, the account of the origin of love attributed to Aristophanes in the Symposium. Both the prose and his illustrations, which revive with further ironies the style of his designs for The Sphinx by Wilde, are more openly homoerotic than he had been in earlier years. Unrecorded Histories, rehearsing such characteristics as fascination with the decadence of Nero and Heliogabalus and amusement at sadism, relies less on dialogue than on Flaubertian narrative, but again corrects the received versions of historical events. The illustrations, in tintless silhouette , repeat one of the themes: the decline of European society into the simply crass. Both books demonstrate Ricketts's mastery of the history of costume, begun as a way of dating pictures, continued for theatrical costuming, and lasting on its own. After sharply focused monographs such as Eric Binnie's on Ricketts's costumes for the stage, Michael Barclay's on the Bottomley collection, Joseph Darracott's on the Ricketts-Shannon bequests to the Fitzwilliam Museum, and some splendid picture books, Delaney's comprehensive biography arrives as a capstone. Carl Woodring Columbia University Yeats the European A. Norman Jeffares, ed. Yeats the European. Savage, MD: Barnes and Noble; Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire: Colin Smythe, 1989. xv + 340 pp. $30.00 THE TWENTY-ONE ESSAYS in this important collection were originally among papers presented in May 1987 at the third annual conference sponsored by the Princess Grace Irish Library in the Principality of 480 Book Reviews Monaco, not that far, by a felicitous choice of locale, from Hôtel Idéal Séjour on Cape Martin where W B. Yeats himself passed his final weeks in January 1939. This lively four-day academic seminar and social programme was jointly moderated by series editor C. George Sandulescu, who says he had long been haunted by the idea like an "obsessive dream," and conference chairman A. Norman Jeffares, who serves likewise as President-for-Life of the International Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature. With a global network of scholarly contacts, Jeffares was obviously the right person to solicit contributions from such prominent Yeatsians as Denis Donoghue ('Teats and European Criticism"), Jacqueline Genet ("Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and Yeats"), Warwick Gould ("A Crowded Theatre : Yeats and Balzac"), John Kelly ("Caelum Non Animum Mutant"), Peter Kuch ("A Few Twigs From the Wild Bird's Nest"), William M. Murphy ("Lily Yeats, W B. Yeats, and France"), Ronald Schuchard ('Teats the European"), and Ann Saddlemyer ("Géorgie Hyde Lees: More Than A Poet's Wife"). Conspicuously absent, however, was Roy Foster of the University of London, who is presently undertaking the new authorized Yeats biography following the untimely death of F. S. L. Lyons. These (along with a number of other almost equally provocative pieces) all endeavor to trace the complex influence on Yeats of European novelists, playwrights, philosophers, painters, and poets like Balzac, Ibsen, Jarry, Nietzsche, Manet and Villiers, as well as the reciprocal influence the Irish poet exerted, in turn, on his counterparts in France, Germany, Italy and Sweden. Thus, Yeats the European can be read as the carefully edited transcript of a rather serious effort on the part of contemporary scholarship to define the larger place occupied by Yeats as a major European, instead of only a relatively minor late English Romantic or merely provincial Irish Nationalist writer. In his opening address, Jeffares invited his distinguished audience to enlarge their habitual outlooks so that they might better contemplate precisely how, at the...