Abstract
Studies of the sources for Yeats’ s characters Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne have been few: critics have, perhaps understandably, been more interested in what Yeats did with these two masks in his works. Another reason for this neglect is the seeming obviousness of sources close to hand; Michael Robartes surely contains aspects of MacGregor Mathers1, and Lionel Johnson has been suggested, at least as long ago as 1959, by Michael Fixler2, as a source for Owen Aherne. Lionel Johnson by no means exhausts the subject, though many critics have echoed Fixler’s suggestion in later works.
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Notes
Michael Fixler, “The Affinities between J. K. Huysmans and the ‘Rosicrucian’ Stories of W. B. Yeats,” PMLA, 74 (1959): 464–69.
The Complete Poems of Lionel Johnson, ed. Iain Fletcher (London: Unicorn Press, 1953), hereafter cited as Fletcher.
See Fixler, pp. 466–67. Richard Ellmann, in Yeats: the Man and the Masks (London: Macmillan, 1949), p. 86, conflates these two figures as that “mask” of Yeats which is the counterpart to the Robartes “side of a penny”.
See also Robert M. Schuler, “W. B. Yeats: Artist or Alchemist?” R.E.S. New Series, 22, No. 85, (1971): 37–53.
Also in A Treasury of Irish Poetry, ed. T. W. Rolleston and Stopford A. Brooke (London, 1900), pp. 465–67.
R. S. Hawker’s Reeds Shaken with the Wind (London, 1843) could not be said to be apocalyptic in tone.
F. G. Lee (Memorials of the late Rev. R. S. Hawker [London, 1876], p. 191) quotes a letter from Hawker’s wife to this effect.
See also The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allen Wade (New York: Macmillan, 1955), p. 869.
“Ways of War” was later published in Poems of the I.R.B., ed. Edward J. O’Brien and Padraic Colum (Boston, 1916).
He is not the revolt of the multitude” (Memoirs, ed. Denis Donoghue [London: Macmillan, 1972], p. 138).
Peter Porter, “The Historians call up Pain”, in Penguin Modem Poets (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), II: 100.
For example, see H. Denifle, “Das Evangelium ætemum und die Commission zu Anagni”, Archiv für Litteratur- und Kirchengeschichte, I (1885): 49–142.
Allen Wade, Bibliography of the Writings of W. B. Yeats, 3rd ed., rev. and ed. Russell K. Alspach (London: Hart-Davis, 1968), p. 43, Item 24. Subsequent citations from the Bibliography, indicated as B, will be inserted in the text.
See Yeats’s preface to H. P. R. Finberg’s translation of Axël (London: Jarrolds, 1925), p. 7.
J. H. Todd (Discourses on the Prophecies relating to Antichrist in the Writings of Daniel and St. Paul [Dublin, 1840], p. 454).
A. N. Jeffares (A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968], p. 321) has a compendium of cognate images in Yeats’s poems.
The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allen Wade (New York: Macmillan, 1955), p. 280.
Phillip L. Marcus, in Yeats and the Beginning of the Irish Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), p. 49, comments upon the historical ordering of the Secret Rose stories.
For example, see Virginia Moore, in The Unicorn: William Butler Yeats’ Search for Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1954), p. 402.
Giorgio Melchiori, in The Whole Mystery of Art (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), p. 51.
Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy (London, 1650), II: 153–54.
Joseph Wright, Dialect Dictionary (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), III: 147.
See also Edward MacLysaght, Irish Families, Their Names, Arms and Origins (Dublin: Hodges Figgis, 1957), p. 49.
For details of the Aherne family, see Jeremiah King, County Kerry Past and Present (Dublin: Hodges Figgis, 1931), p. 5, where it is stated that the Ahemes were descended from the brother of Brian Boru.
See also Robert E. Matheson, whose Varieties and Synonymes of Surnames and Christian Names in Ireland etc. (Dublin, 1890) provides a contemporary source.
John P. Frayne, ed., The Uncollected Prose of W. B. Feats (London: Macmillan, 1970), p. 329.
Curtis B. Bradford, Feats at Work (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962), pp. 317–18.
Allen R. Grossman, Poetic Knowledge in the Early Yeats (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1969), pp. 125–39.
William H. O’Donnell, ed. The Speckled Bird (Dublin: Cuala Press 1974), I:2.
An interesting possible source for the name Aherne is to be found in Rhys’s lectures On the Origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated by Celtic Heathendom (London, 1888), p. 334. Rhys gives, as a possible meaning for the name Aitherne, “procuring knowledge and wisdom from the powers of the nether world by stealth”.
(Richard J. Finneran, ed., John Sherman and Dhoya [Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1969], p. 85).
Yeats’s term “marchland is almost echoed by Maud Gonne in A Servant of the Queen (London: Gollancz, 1974), p. 88, who writes of “the tearing of the veil which separates those in the flesh from the inhabitants of the borderland”.
R. Barry O’Brien, ed., The Autobiography of Theobald Wolfe Tone 1763–1798 (London, 1893), hereafter cited as Tone.
Richard F. Hayes, Biographical Dictionary of Irishmen in France (Dublin: M. H. Gill, 1949), p. I.
See also Hayes’s other works on the same subject: Ireland and Irishmen in the French Revolution (London: Benn, 1932).
Alfred Franklin, Histoire de la Bibliothèque Mazarine (Paris, 1860), p. 147.
Ernest Renan’s Nouvelle Etudes are published in English as Studies in Religious History (London, 1886).
Patrick Boyle, The Irish College in Paris from 1578–1901 etc. (London, 1901), pp. 59, 77.
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© 1975 Robert O’Driscoll and Lorna Reynolds
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Gould, W. (1975). “ Lionel Johnson Comes the First to Mind”: Sources for Owen Aherne. In: Harper, G.M. (eds) Yeats and the Occult. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02937-2_12
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