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The Celtic Influence on W. B. Yeats
(A précis of points made by W. B. Yeats in his essay, The Celtic
Element in Literature (from Essays and Introductions).
It may be worth categorising the aspects of the Celtic influence on Yeats
in the following way:
i) The Celtic passion for Nature
ii) The Celtic imagination
iii) Celtic melancholy
OVERVIEW
The Celtic passion for Nature.
Yeats begins the essay referring to the words of Ernest Renan who wrote
of how the Celts had "a love of nature for herself, a vivid feeling
for her magic, commingled with the melancholy a man knows when he is face
to face with her, and thinks he hears her communing with him about his origins
and his destiny." The paradox at the heart of this statement
sums up much that is important about the Celtic view of nature that Yeats
admired: a) the love of nature, and b) the sense that nature, as well as
giving, also takes away: our `natural' destiny is to die. This view is what
Renan calls a "realistic naturalism".
Yeats adds, summarising the views of Matthew Arnold, that "The Celtic
passion for Nature comes almost more from a sense of her `mystery' than
of her `beauty'.
The Celtic imagination.
Renan concludes that, at the heart of the Celtic imagination, is the dilemma
of "the infinite contrasted with the finite". The Celtic
imagination recognises the infinity one might experience in the face of
nature's mystery and plenitude. At the same time, and because of this, the
Celtic mind is, imaginatively, in conflict with everyday fact and
what Arnold calls "the despotism of fact".
For Yeats the Celtic tradition was part of a deliberate challenge on his
part to the modern mind or spirit and its belief in rationalism and materialism.
The spirituality of the Celtic imagination was of great importance to him.
Celtic melancholy
Celtic melancholy, then, is the result of our sense of the conflict between
the infinite and the finite; between our capacity to imagine a greater,
larger whole, such as nature can represent, and the facts of actual life,
the daily routines, duties and realities of a time-bound existence within
which we decline, age and decay.
DETAIL
a) Consider this imaginative reconstruction of the mind of the Celt:
"Once every people in the world believed that trees were divine, and
could take a human or grotesque shape and dance among the shadows; and that
deer, and ravens and foxes, and wolves and bears, and clouds and pools,
almost all things under the sun and moon" were equally "divine
and changeable. They saw in the rainbow the still bent bow of a god thrown
down in his negligence; they heard in the thunder the sound of his beaten
water-jar, or the tumult of his chariot wheels; and when a sudden flight
of wild ducks, or of crows, passed over their heads, they thought they were
gazing at the dead hastening to their rest". They dreamed of "so
great a mystery in little things".
When the Celtic poet then says that "I have learned my songs from the
music of many birds, and from the music of many waters" he speaks of
the inspiration that comes from nature as a source.
b) Folk beliefs.
The `natural magic' that runs through Nature, in the mind of a Celt, is,
says Yeats, "the ancient religion of the world, the ancient worship
of Nature".
"All folk literature .... delights in unbounded and immortal things".
Example: the lover in (an) Irish folk song bids his beloved come with him
into the woods, and see the salmon leap in the rivers, and hear the cuckoo
sing, because death will never find them in the heart of the woods.
"All folk literature has indeed a passion whose like is not (seen)
in modern literature and music and art...".
c) Ancient and modern views of nature.
Yeats proposes that we should be aware of the different view of nature that
ancient peoples possessed. Modern people look on nature "without ecstasy,
but with the affection a man feels for the garden where he has walked daily
and thought pleasant thoughts". The ancients, however, were "Men
who lived in a world where anything might flow and change, and become any
other thing; and among great gods whose passions were in the flaming sunset,
and in the thunder and the thunder-shower... They worshipped Nature and
the abundance of Nature". They carried out "dance(s) among the
hills or in the depths of the woods, where unearthly ecstasy fell upon the
dancers, until they seemed (like) the gods....and felt their souls overtopping
the moon...".
d) Love.
"Love was held to be a fatal sickness in ancient Ireland...".
An old Irish song speaks of how "It is she ruined my heart and left
a sigh for ever in me...". There is another song that goes: "The
Erne shall be in strong flood, the hills shall be torn down, and the sea
shall have red waves, and blood shall be spilled, and every mountain valley
and every moor shall be on high, before you shall perish, my little black
rose".
e) Celtic melancholy.
Yeats writes: "And so it is that all...sorrowful persons of literature,
Cassandra and Helen and Deirdre, and Lear and Tristan, have come out of
legends and are indeed the images of the primitive imagination".
Arnold is quoted referring to the "mournfulness of being born and dying.."
as part of the Celtic tradition.
Yeats refers to Oisin, a legendary figure in Celtic folk literature,
who, old and miserable, "remembers the companions and the loves of
his youth...." and how "all dreams wither in the winds of time".
Matthew Arnold refers to the lamentation of Liywarch Hen as a type
of Celtic melancholy: "O my crutch....behold, my age, which makes sport
of me, from the hair of my head and my teeth, to my eyes which women loved.
The four things I have all my life most hated fall upon me together - coughing
and old age, sickness and sorrow. I am old, I am alone, shapeliness and
warmth have gone from me...".
f) Celtic Literature and passion.
Yeats writes: "...literature dwindles to a mere chronicle of circumstance,
or passionless fantasies, and passionless meditations, unless it is constantly
flooded with the passions and beliefs of ancient times". "the
Celtic alone... has again and again brought the "vivifying spirit"
"of excess" into the arts of Europe".