W. B. Yeats and Georgian Ireland by Donald Torchiana (review)

BOOK REVIEWS w. B. YEATS AND GEORGIAN IRELAND, by Donald Torchiana, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois, 1966, 378 pp. Price $10.95. During the first fifteen years of his poetic career Yeats's most urgent inspiration came from Irish patriotic writers of the nineteenth century-Davis, Mangan, Ferguson, Allingham, and Carleton. By 1902, when he was beginning to have second thoughts about his earlier enthusiasms, he acknowledged his somewhat uncritical admiration for such writers. "We had no Gaelic but paid great honor to the Irish poets who wrote in English and quoted them in our speeches.... I knew in my heart that the most of them wrote badly, and yet such romance clung about them, such a desire for Irish poetry was in all our minds, that I kept on saying not only to others but to myself, that most of them wrote well, or all but well." But his early enchantment by the writers of Young Ireland, as Mr. Torchiana points out, was never entirely unqualified. Mr. Torchiana perceptively dates the beginning of a change in attitude shortly after the turn of the century in Yeats's repeated disparagements of Daniel O'Connell-O'Connell was a politician , not a patriot, he divided Ireland, exaggerated the value of expedience and exalted the practical at the expense of the imagination. By 1910 as Mr. Torchiana points out, even O'Connell's opposition-the writers of Young Ireland-had similarly begun to incur his displeasure. They were didactic, and they made current "the false coin of a glittering or noisy sincerity." Not even Thomas Davis was spared. The Playboy riots in 1907, Yeats now believed to be a natural effect of the work of such writers-"a patriotic journalism" had destroyed the Irish people's interest in imaginative literature. Indeed, Parnell seems to be the only nineteenth-century patriot Yeats continued to admire. But Parnell, Yeats argued, was the heir of Swift and the eighteenth century. Thus, after 1912, Yeats looked to the eighteenth century when he had hopes for the future of Ireland. Yeats's actual introduction to Georgian Ireland was embodied in the persons of the Gregories, that is to say Lady Gregory, her son Robert, and her two nephews, Hugh Lane and John Shaw-Taylor. To Yeats Lady Gregory and her relations embodied the virtues which Protestant Ireland retained as a natural heritage of its Georgian Ancestory. Lady Gregory's house itself, Coole Park, with its library, its heirlooms and its history epitomized for Yeats all that was noble in Protestant Ireland. Oliver St. John Gogarty observes that "the house was magnified by his imagination into an ideal Irish mansion full of the courtliness of a century it may not have seen at all. His imagination endowed it with the traditions of the period he most admired, that century in which the Anglo-Irish mind flowered, and the 'salt of the earth,' as he called them, 'enunciated opinions liberal for their period and since unexcelled.' " The qualities which the Gregories embodied were the aristocratic will, the power of making an instinctive choice, stern conscience, "passion and precision." Like Swift, Grattan, and Burke, the Gregories were "strongly refractory, aristocratic Protestant types," as Mr. Torchiana writes. Yeats believed that when the Free State was established in 1922 the tradition of Ireland and what survived of it in people like the Gregories might provide a model for the values to be preserved and perpetuated in the new state. Mr. Torchiana quotes an interesting sentence 336 1968 BOOK REVIEWS 337 from an essay Yeats published in 1932, ten years after the establishment of the Free State and at a time when he was able to look back with dissappointment on the blighted hopes he had held in 1922. "Now that Ireland was substituting traditions of government for the rhetoric of agitation our eighteenth century had regained its importance." The new Ireland, born out of revolution and bloodshed, could look at itself and see the concrete manifestations of the culture it had inherited-the great country houses like Coole, Lissadell, Carton and Castletown. Above all there was Dublin itself, a Georgian city with its wide streets and spacious squares-Merrion Square, Fitzwilliam Square...