Yauhahu
A spirit. (See American Indians.) Yeats, William Butler: Irish Author and Mystic. William
Butler Yeats was born at Dublin in 1866, his father being
John Yeats, a talented portrait-painter whose works include a fine likeness of Synge; and during his boyhood the future author lived chiefly at his native town, and occasionally with his grandparents in County Sligo. At first he intended to make painting his life's work, and accordingly he entered the Dublin Art School; but he soon left it, having realised that his true bent was for Literature; and in 1887 he went to London, where he became intimate with Mr. Arthur Symons, and subsequently with Mr. George Moore. Prior to this Mr. Yeats had issued a little play, Mosada; and now his gifts began to develop apace, the result being sundry volumes of beautiful poetry, notably The Wanderings of Oisin and The Wind among the Reeds. At this time, also, the author began to show himself an eminently thoughtful critic of literature; while in 1870 he published a collection of Irish folk tales, and in the preface thereto he observed in relation to his compatriots that " a true literary consciousness-national to the centre-seems gradually to be forming out of all this disguising and prettyfing this penumbra of half-culture. We are preparing likely enough for a new Irish literary movement. ." Nor was the prophecy unfulfilled, for, during the closing decade of the 19th century, the intellectuals of Ireland began to manifest a tense interest in their country's legendary lore, while simultaneously it transpired that the rising generation of writers in Ireland included many men of fine promise. Most of these last regarded Mr. Yeats as their leader, they rallied round him, he returned from London to Ireland, and anon he achieved the founding of the Irish Literary Theatre in Dublin, its raison d'être being the staging of plays by the new school of Hibernian authors.
This is not the place to detail the Irish artistic revival of the nineties of last century, and the reader may be referred to the monograph thereon by Mr. H. S. Krans, and more especially to Mr. George Moores' Hail and Farewell: Passing to speak of Mr. Yeats' contributions to the literature of Mysticism, these are mostly contained in a volume of collected essays, Ideas of Good and Evil; and prominent among them are studies of the mystic element in Blake and Shelley, while another notable paper is one concerned with "The Body of the Father Christian Rosencrux." But still more important than these, perhaps, is a long study of "Magic," contained in the same volume, and here the author begins by bravely stating his creed: "I believe in Zabulon: A demon who possessed a lay sister of Loudon. Zachaire, Denis : Alchemist. This French alchemist is chiefly remembered by his book, Opuscule de la Philosophie de Metaux, traitant de l'Augmentation et Perfection de ceux, and in the preface thereto he gives some account of his life, yet fails to state the precise date at which he was born. However, the event is commonly supposed to have taken place about 1510; while it is known that Denis was a native of La Guyenne, and that his parents were comfortably off, if not actually rich. As a young man he studied at Bordeaux, and subsequently at Toulouse, intending to become a lawyer; yet he soon became more interested in alchemy than in legal affairs, and in 1535, on Zachaire, Denis the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, and what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed......"
After this declaration he tells how once an acquaintance of his, gathering together a small party in a darkened room, held a mace over " a tablet of many coloured squares, at the same time repeating "a form of words"; and straightway Mr. Yeats found that his " imagination began to move of itself, and to bring before me vivid images....." He goes on to descant on these visions, while in the remainder of his essay he offers some details about superstitions in remote parts of Ireland; and also furnishes sundry examples of thought-transmission and the like, most of them fresh and interesting.
But the author's interest in the supernatural does not transpire only in his prose, and, turning to his poems, one finds them permeated by a curious kind of mysticism which is perhaps essentially Celtic. For Mr. Yeats, it would seem, is only incidentally interested in holding communications with the dead, or with the spirit-world; yet, like old bards of his native Ireland, he seems to find inanimate nature a living reality, he seems to have a strange intimacy therewith. A dreamer of dreams and a beholder of visions, he frequently crystalises these in his verse; but the mystic element in his output consists pre-eminently in this, that he appears to hold actual converse with all those things which to ordinary men are no more than lifelesswith flowers and trees, with rivers, lakes and mountains. W. G. B. M.