The House of Tradition and the Threshold of Sanctity

Abstract

As a raw youth, Yeats thought art was ‘tribeless, nationless’, sufficient by and to itself. But he had outgrown such an outlook by the time he started out with The Wanderings of Oisin as a writer with a deliberate Irish aim. In inventing the character of Aileel—who has no warrant in the French original—he in a sense made this change the central theme of The Countess Cathleen. The heroine is fascinated by the overtly poetical world of Ailed, but it is only by rejecting it as insufficient that she becomes a poetic subject more powerful than any of which her poet could sing. Yeats explored the problem of life and art in The King’s Threshold from the opposite end. Art in and by itself may not be enough; yet a condition of life which denied its centrality was doomed to impoverishment:

If the arts should perish, The world that lacked them would be like a woman That, looking on the cloven lips of a hare, Brings forth a hare-lipped child.

I condemn all that is not tradition…

We have arrived at that point where in every civilisation Caesar is killed, Alexander catches some complaint and dies; personality is exhausted….

[The poet] contemplates even his own death as if it were another’s and finds in his own destiny but, as it were, a projection through a burning-glass of that general to men. There is in the creative joy an acceptance of what life brings, because we have understood the beauty of what it brings, or a hatred of death for what it takes away, which arouses within us, through some sympathy perhaps with all other men, an energy so noble, so powerful, that we laugh aloud and mock, in terror or the sweetness of our exaltation at death and oblivion.—W. B. Yeats

Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night,… Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress.—W. H. Auden