Yeats’s Use of Axël

Yeats’s Use of A x e l Marilyn Gaddis Rose Yeats’s well-known enthusiasm for Villiers de 1 ’Isle-Adam’s Axel (1872-94) was in the long run only that.l The Symbolist play was not so much an influence as an example, one which reenforced some of his techniques and served as a point of departure for some of his speculations. He found it truly congenial only when he was an im­ pressionable young man living amidst Pre-Raphaelites and Art nouveau innovators and hearing from his contemporaries reports of the work of the French Decadents. Indeed, Axel could not have changed the direction of Yeats’s work. Although Yeats was always fascinated by the Beyond, he was at the same time always aware that there were joys to be found only in daily living. Even in so early a poem as “The Stolen Child” (1886) where the fairies bewitch the child with promises of gladness in fairy­ land and threats of sorrow in the world, Yeats in his last stanza presents an appealing picture of the ordinary pleasures which the child must forego: “He’ll hear no more the lowing/ O f the calves on the warm hillside/ Or the kettle on the hob/ Sing peace into his breast,/ Or see the brown mice bob/ Round and round the oat­ meal-chest.’^ By 1888, when he was preparing this poem for publi­ cation, he criticized himself for having made the lure of fairyland as strong as he did. He wrote to Katharine Tynan, “. . . it is almost all a flight into fairyland from the real world, and a summons to that flight. The Chorus of the ‘Stolen Child’ sums it up— that it is not the poetry of insight and knowledge, but of longing and com­ plaint— the cry of the heart against necessity. I hope some day to alter that. . . .” 3 Villiers’ work, on the other hand, consistently dis­ parages life, altogether intolerable if not lived in seclusion and cush­ ioned in luxury. The charm of his work is at best otherworldly, like the charm of a heroine of Poe or Wagner, to mention two authors whom Villiers made cult objects. Yeats read and saw AxeW at a time when he was particularly receptive to it, but once the spell was dis­ sipated, he saw the play for what it was. If we examine Yeats’s acquaintance with Villiers’ masterwork with a few remarks about the milieu endorsing it, we shall be pre253 254 Comparative Drama pared for the ground shared by Axel and The Countess Cathleen ( 1892) and the vignette trilogy Rosa Alchemica (1896-1897). He went through an Axel phase, and some of its effects stayed with him. The prematurely disillusioned Axël spoke for him and his friends. And he found in Axel a use of conventional symbols and an example of his own theory that drama should be liturgical. In the five years following the composition of “The Stolen Child” Yeats systematically cultivated his interest in the esoteric. In the section of the Autobiographies entitled “Four Years 1887-1891” Yeats tells how he sought out Madame Blavatsky and became acquainted with MacGregor Mathers, who initiated him into the Hermetic Stu­ dents Society in 1887. It was at this period also that he belonged to William Morris’ Socialist supper club and helped organize the Pre-Raphaelite Rhymers Club. From George Moore and Arthur Sy­ mons, chiefly the latter, he learned the names and aims of French Symbolism. In the section of the Autobiographies entitled “The Tragic Generation” he identifies both Symons and Lionel Johnson with Axël himself. It was Symons who helped him study Axel, for his knowledge of French was less than rudimentary. Remembering the early years of their friendship, Yeats says, “ I had read Axel to myself or was still reading it, so slowly, and with so much difficulty, that certain pas­ sages had an exaggerated importance, while all remained so obscure that I could without much effort imagine that here at last was the Sacred Book I had longed for.” 5 They saw Axël together, and Symons helped him with his review of it for the B...