The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts (review)

Ron Schuchard is a great scholar, and a serious scholar. His Eliot’s Dark Angel (1999) won the Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism. His work with John Kelly on The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, Volume 3 (1994) and Volume 4 (2005) won the MLA’s Morton N. Cohen Award for a Distinguished Volume of Letters. Those editions of letters would “put a fear” on anyone contemplating an attempt to meet the same standard in succeeding volumes. To have a new monograph from Schuhard is an event

The Last Minstrels takes seriously a preoccupation of W. B. Yeats’s that was sometimes a subject of ridicule in his own time, and has been more or less forgotten since. Well might you wonder, which of his many preoccupations is that? Yeats had several interests that fit the bill: ghosts, magic, theosophy, peasants, lords and ladies, etc. But it is none of those; it is “speaking to the psaltery,” a style of verse performance that also went by the names of cantilation; chanting; regulated declamation; lilting; droning; and rhythmical speech.

Unlike Yeats, George Bernard Shaw was wickedly scornful of the whole business: “The fact is that there is no new art . . . Yeats only thinks so only because he does not go to church. Half the curates in the kingdom cantilate like mad . . . there is no novelty, no nothing but nonsense.” But was novelty, really, what Yeats was after? He believed himself to be recovering a lost art. The cover art for Schuchard’s volume is quite telling: it features a portrait by J. B. Yeats of his youthful son as the deliriously mad King Goll of his own poem, strumming a harp, his hair wreathed in what must be laurel leaves. The dress-up fantasy of the portrait revealed a serious ambition on Yeats’s part to be a bard, to have the authority of a bard, to chant like a bard, and, by God, to have his own bardic harp, too. Yeats meant to restore in modern time an ancient dignity for those who wrote verse by means of ceremonies of public declamation.

The harp in question turned out to be not quite a harp. At first, Yeats tested an Eastern European instrument, a one-stringed lute. With his signature high ironic ridicule of himself and others, Yeats said he was delighted with the instrument, which, given its shortage of strings, would not only be easier to play, but would “do much to restrain the irrelevant activities of the musician.” The musician’s skill level was in part irrelevant to the performance because the point of the accompaniment was to provide relief between poems and to underline the rhythmic line within poems. Words were not to be stretched in their utterance to fit a preconceived melody. For this “recovered”—though actually, reinvented—art, music was not really what was needed from the musician, nor acting from an actor—though voice and music had to be married to one another and each had to be trained.

Instead of the one-stringed lute, Yeats had the world expert on ancient instruments, Arnold Dolmetsch, create a pseudo-archaic thing with twelve strings and sounding box, the psaltery. ªPretty girls in California—they were always pretty—were strumming something similar, dulcimers, in California when I was a studient in the 1960s.) But the psaltery was plucked and the dulcimer tended to be strummed. The pretty girl in Yeats’s case—he never meant to try to learn to play the thing himself, was Florence Farr. A wonderfully intelligent person, she took it very seriously indeed. One would have liked to have heard her performances, not just of Yeats’s poetry, but of her whole varied repertoire, down to the maxims of Nietzsche. D. H. Lawrence made fun of her: “Did any of you hear Florence Farr do her ping-wanging?” he asked Brigit Patmore and...