The Case for the Minority

Abstract

Most readers will be disappointed not to know more about Yeats’s feelings, which were, if we can believe Miss Horniman’s Account, quite as strong as hers. Fortunately, for the record, we have preserved among his papers the typescripts of four open letters or essays which reveal the intensity of his emotions. The first, ‘To the Twelve Seniors’, is dated 2 February 1901, the day after the tempestuous Council Meeting. Since the salutation to ‘Care et V H Fratres & Sorores’ is in a hand other than Yeats’s, I imagine that it was distributed by someone else¹ and that it may have gone to the entire membership of the Second Order. At any rate, he probably wanted all the members to be aware of his stance. ‘I do not know’, he begins, ‘whether it would be your wish to nominate me as a member of the Executive Council. But I think that it may save you trouble if I asked you not to do so, you will have no difficulty in understanding my decision when I have brought to your attention a very remarkable scene which took place yesterday at a meeting of the Executive Council.² The scene Yeats described is the wrangle over the election schemes.

I ask you to examine this Resolution carefully, and to ask yourselves whether it has come from the Powers who represent the Personality of this Order, its Constitution, its Tradition and its future, or whether it has come from powers that could see, with indifference, the dissolution of this Order, its Constitution, its Tradition and its future. All that we do with intensity has an origin in the hidden world, and is the symbol, the expression of its powers, and even the smallest detail, in a professedly magical dispute may have significance.

Yeats, ‘A Final Letter to the Adepti of R.R. et A.C. on the Present Crisis’ (21 February 1901)