‘Dark cognition’: W.B. Yeats, J.G. Herder and the imperfection of tradition

Abstract

In this article I connect Revivalist politics in nineteenth-century Ireland to Enlightenment epistemology by exploring how the ideal of the Irish – or Celtic – folk tradition is embroiled in the problematic of theoretical modernity. I dispute Seamus Deane's ideological characterisation of the Irish tradition, emerging from his encounters with the work of Edmund Burke and Matthew Arnold, and propose an alternative characterisation using Johann Gottfried Herder's theories of the Volk and the origin of language. I show how, at a crucial point in European history, the folk tradition modelled a view of cognition and modernity, which stood apart from analytic rationalism and based itself upon a positive evaluation of the obscurity of sensation. Finally, I read this literary-aesthetic model of what Herder called ‘dark’ cognition into Yeats's early folkloric works of the 1890s, especially The Celtic Twilight; and I make the argument that this often-neglected text does not represent a degeneration of folkloric integrity into Celtic mysticism but a comedic trait of folk modernity.

Keywords:

• Yeats
• Herder
• folklore
• Celticism
• the Irish Revival
• Seamus Deane

Notes

 1. Seamus Deane and W.J. McCormack are both strongly critical of Yeats's hieratic, and specifically Anglo-Irish, idealism. Deane, Celtic Revivals; McCormack, Blood Kindred and From Burke to Beckett. The benignancy of the postcolonial idiom in Yeats studies, on the other hand, is exemplary: see Kiberd, Inventing Ireland; Said, ‘Yeats and Decolonisation’.

 2. Watson, Irish Identity and the Literary Revival, 98.

 3. Yeats, Explorations, 401.

 4. Garrigan Mattar, Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival; Kinahan, Yeats, Folklore and Occultism; Thuente, W.B. Yeats and Irish Folklore; Chaudhry, Yeats.

 5. Garrigan Mattar, Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival, 2.

 6. Indeed, although the rise of ‘scientific’ anthropology towards the end of the nineteenth century has often been marked out as a significant paradigm shift in terms of how knowledge of ‘primitive’ cultures was created, there is little reason to think of the romantic tradition which preceded it as unscientific. Characteristically, there is a strong bond between scientific naturalism and nature poetry; and the tradition of Celticism to which Yeats was most closely affiliated early in his life was exemplarily romantic, in so far as it combined antiquarian science with emotional identification. As Garrigan Mattar points out, Yeats was enthralled by the unscientific mythography of Standish O'Grady and the scientific cachet of La Revue Celtique equally (Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival, 39).

 7. Diarmuid O'Giollain states that ‘Folklore is predicated on the death of tradition’, underlining the context of Enlightenment scientism and political modernity from which the study of folklore emerged: ‘“Folklore” was conceptualised towards the end of the eighteenth century, coined as a word in 1846 and institutionalised from the end of the nineteenth century on’ (O'Giollain, Locating Irish Folklore 8, 32).

 8. I will be using two substantially different editions of this text: Yeats, The Celtic Twilight: Men and Women, Dhouls and Faeries, 1893 (CT 93); and Yeats, The Celtic Twilight, 1902 (CT 02). The Celtic Twilight was, and remains, a controversial text for folklorists: Irish folklorist Kevin Danaher considered Yeats an artistic blunderer, ‘far from the clear black and white of folk tradition’, the American Richard Dorson called it ‘a musing, introspective diary playing with the shadowy folk beliefs of fairy powers’ (qtd in Thuente, W.B. Yeats and Irish Folklore, 123). Yeats, however, ‘excepted’ it from his general criticism of his early prose works, suggesting that he held it in some regard (Yeats's 1933 ‘Preface’ to Letters to the New Island , 5).

 9. Deane, Celtic Revivals, 28–50.

10. It has been suggested that Deane displays a naive belief in the possibility of disentangling Yeats's mythical sensibility from historical actuality here (see McDonald, Serious Poetry, 151); and certainly I would agree that it marks a limit of Deane's project that he prefers to consider Yeats's myth-making as politically suspicious. His occasional failure to recognise this limit leaves him open to over-assertive statements about romanticism and aesthetics. For instance, he notes that romanticism (which he nominates as the tradition of Coleridge, Blake, Carlyle and William Morris) considered history as ‘essentially engaged with the imagination and, therefore, almost indistinguishable from aesthetics’ (Celtic Revivals, 30). This is a problem, according to Deane, because it puts historical reality in the service of myth. In the specifically Irish context he notes that John Millington Synge and Austin Clarke, as well as Yeats, created ‘imaginatively useful’ rather than ‘historically accurate’ ideas about Ireland, ‘yielding a sense of the artist's enterprise in a world which, without these metaphorical suasions, would remain implacably hostile’(Celtic Revivals, 32). As a consequence of trying to expose this historical ‘inaccuracy’, Deane ends up impoverishing Yeats's whole aesthetic into an ideal obligation ‘to despise the modern world, and to seek rescue from it’ (Celtic Revivals, 33), which raises a reflective question about Deane's own apparent access to the material of history.

11. Deane, Strange Country.

12. Deane, Strange Country, 19.

13. In the 1760s Macpherson claimed to have uncovered ancient Gaelic manuscripts of poems by a third-century bard Ossian on a tour of the Highlands and Western Islands of Scotland, which he then translated into English and published in Edinburgh. As it turns out, these ‘original’ manuscripts were never produced and the source of these ‘found’ Scottish epics was a combination of oral folklore, a sixteenth-century manuscript The Book of the Dean of Lismore, and Macpherson's own imagination. Deane is not the only critic to point out the precedent of Scotland in respect of the rise of cultural nationalism in Ireland; Fiona Stafford, Luke Gibbons and Howard Gaskill have all noted it. Gaskill, Ossian Revisited and ‘Herder, Ossian and the Celtic’, 257–72; Stafford, The Sublime Savage; Gibbons, ‘The Sympathetic Bond’, 272–92.

14. Yeats certainly did have access to broader European ideas of the folk and folk art through his contact with William Morris in particular, but also through the cultural influences of Carlyle, Ruskin and Pater.

15. Herder, ‘Excerpt from a Correspondence on Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples’, 229.

16. Herder, ‘Excerpt from a Correspondence on Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples’, 229 Herder's correspondence on the subject of Ossian with the Irish soldier Harold raised his suspicions about the authenticity of the poems, yet his enthusiasm for them exceeded mere antiquarian doubt. The reasons for this are, as we shall see, philosophical. For a fuller discussion of this topic, see Betteridge, ‘The Ossianic Poems in Herder's Volkslieder’, 334–8.

17. See Barnard, Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History, 18.

18. Critics have long abandoned the idea that Herder was an irrationalist simply opposed to the ideas of the French Enlightenment. As Barnard is quick to point out, Herder's idea of nationhood was not an atavistic retrenchment in the face of intellectual revolution:

Herder was undoubtedly among the first to acclaim the French Revolution not as a cataclysmic lapse of continuity but as the most continuously significant occurrence since the Reformation. Similarly, despite pioneering the idea of nationhood in its modern sense, he was fully awake to the dangers of racist variants and ethnic imperialism. (Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History, 4–5)

R.E. Norton makes a similarly succinct case for considering the sophistication of Herder's response to Enlightenment rationalism: ‘This traditional view of Herder as an irrational iconoclast, as the irresistible opponent of a moribund Enlightenment, has by now lost much of its argumentative force and integrity’ (Herder's Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment, 1).

19. Herder, ‘Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind’, 233.

20. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 275.

21. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 275

22. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 275

23. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy find in German Romanticism the birth of literary theory (The Literary Absolute, 12). This ‘literary absolute’ suggests a fruitful way of thinking about the theoretical provenance of the folk and also of disrupting strictly rationalist conceptions of theory.

24. He articulates this cultural making through the term Kraft. Kraft, meaning ‘force’ in English, originated as a fairly rarefied philosophical concept for Herder, signifying a means of synthesising ‘traditionally irreconcilable antitheses’ such as ‘mind’ and ‘body’. However, its later association with traditional folk practices of art should give us a sense of how it was generally applied to the acts which create or express a coherent form of culture. See Nisbet, Herder's Scientific Thought, 8–9.

25. J.G. Herder, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan, vol. IV (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1877), 21; qtd in Norton, Herder's Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment, 2.

26. ‘… all of my representations are sensate – they are dark – sensate and dark were long ago proven to be synonymous expressions’ (Herder, ‘Essay on Being [Versuch über das Sein]’ Werke, 11). Norton provides an excellent close reading of this essay (Herder's Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment, 11–50). For a discussion of the positive valuation of obscurity and its relation to the science of aesthetics see also Jeffrey Barnouw:

There are many passages in Herder's writings where ‘dark’ or ‘obscure ideas’ take on a particular power and resonance. Is this part of an irrationalist reaction against Enlightenment epistemology? I will argue, on the contrary, that Herder's positive evaluation of the obscure carries forward a main theme of Leibniz's insight into the virtues of confused ideas. (‘The Cognitive Value of Confusion and Obscurity in the German Enlightenment’, 29)

The terrain set out by Barnouw suggests why Herder, though possessing a critical impulse to bring obscure truths to distinctness, begins to formally recognise mankind's habituation in darkness, and the indistinctness of man's original consciousness which ends up having to be excavated from under the blaze of clear and distinct objects.

27. Herder, ‘Essay on the Origin of Language’, 87.

28. Herder did not reject the divine metaphysic outright but he did grant a kind of divine agency to the poet. Instead of imitating what the transcendent God had already created – static nature – the poet genius is endowed with the ability to imitate the act of creation itself. ‘In giving names to all, and ordering all from the impulse of his own inward feeling, and with reference to himself, he becomes an imitator of the Divinity, a second Creator, a true poetes, a creative poet’ (Herder, ‘The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry’, 240). This is the philosophical antecedent to Yeats's famous metaphor of the lamp: ‘that soul must become its own betrayer, its own deliverer, the one activity, the mirror turn lamp’ (Yeats, ‘Introduction’, xxxiii).

29. Herder, Essay on the Origin of Language, 92.

30. Herder, Essay on the Origin of Language, 92, 127.

31. Herder, Essay on the Origin of Language, 92

32. Herder, Essay on the Origin of Language, 92, 109.

33. Herder, Essay on the Origin of Language, 92, 96–7.

34. Herder, Essay on the Origin of Language, 92, 132.

35. Stith Thompson's Motif Index of Folk Literature (1932–7) is perhaps the most well-known folk grammar.

36. I deeply regret when I find that some folk-lorist is merely scientific, and lacks the needful subtle imaginative sympathy to tell his stories well … I object to the ‘honest folk-lorist’ not because his versions are accurate, but because they are inaccurate, or rather incomplete. (Yeats, ‘Poetry and Science in Folklore’ (1890), in Uncollected Prose, 174)

37. Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland, 3. This volume includes Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) and Irish Fairy Tales (1892).

38. Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland, 401–6.

39. Yeats, Representative Irish Tales, 25.

40. The collection included tales from writers with varying degrees of association and/or sympathy with Ireland, including William Carleton (Yeats's avowed favourite), Maria Edgeworth, Samuel Lover, T. Croften Croker, Chares Lever and Charles Kickam.

41. Yeats, Representative Irish Tales, 26.

42. Chaudhry, Yeats, 173–4.

43. Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland, 7.

44. Garrigan Mattar, Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival, 50.

45. Yeats, ‘Review of Beside the Fire: A Collection of Irish Gaelic Folk Stories by Douglas Hyde’ (1890), in Uncollected Prose, 187.

46. Yeats, ‘Review of Hyde's The Story of Gaelic Literature’ (Bookman, 1895), in Uncollected Prose, 359.

47. Chaudhry, Yeats, 60.

48. When their respective movements gathered momentum in the latter half of the 1890s, Hyde and Yeats diverged somewhat, but their efforts continually reinforced each other's. Even if one noted only those activities that are recorded in Foster's biography of Yeats, their record of mutual aid is impressive: Yeats speaking at Gaelic League functions in 1897, 1899, 1900, 1902, and 1910; Hyde joining in the luncheon that celebrated the launch of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899; Hyde intervening on Yeats's behalf with Irish-Ireland newspaper editors in 1899 and 1901; Yeats, Hyde and Lady Gregory collaborating on the controversial play Where There is Nothing in 1902; Yeats including review comments on Irish language drama in issues of Samhain from 1902 to 1904; and Yeats speaking on behalf of the language revival while touring the United States in 1903 and 1904. (McMahon, Grand Opportunity, 31)

49. Yeats, ‘The De-anglicising of Ireland’ (United Ireland, 17 December 1892), in Uncollected Prose, 254–6.

50. Yeats, Uncollected Prose, 255.

51. Yeats, Uncollected Prose, 255

52. Chaudhry, Yeats, 108.

53. Chaudhry, Yeats, 108, 147.

54. Chaudhry, Yeats, 108, 156.

55. Yeats, Mythologies, 1.

56. It is difficult for the modern reader to know which edition or amalgam of editions she is reading. For example, the edition edited by Kathleen Raine (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1981) claims to be the 1902 edition, but, in fact, is an edited version of 1902 (closer to the 1925 edition found in Mythologies) with several of the sections having been foreshortened and deprived of their more reflective and meta-textual moments. For example, at the end of the section ‘The Golden Age’, after a reflection upon peasant beliefs, both the 1893 and 1902 editions end with ‘We were now getting into the big glass-roofed terminus, and the fiddler put away his old blacking box and held out his hat for a copper, and then opened the door and was gone’ (93, 185; 02, 175). This is missing from Raine's edition, which is a pity since it establishes the importance of the narrative frame, especially the modern, urban image of the rail terminus intruding upon, but also encompassing, the folkloric material.

57. Thuente suggests that this footnote appears in the 1902 edition (Thuente, W.B. Yeats and Irish Folklore, 141), but I can only find it in a later 1905 edition (Dublin: Maunsel, 15), which is in most other respects identical to 1902. In 1902 the line with respect to Russell's poetry is simply omitted.

58. Thuente, W.B Yeats and Irish Folklore, 124.

59. Herder, Essay on the Origin of Languages, 109.

60. Yeats, Uncollected Prose, 284.

61. Borges, Collected Fictions, 334–5.

62. Bakhtin's theory of ‘heteroglossia’ – conflicting varieties of speech within a single linguistic code – privileges the novel form. My argument here, emphasising the essential imperfection and multiplicity of the folk, infers the theory to the question of poetry in Herder and Yeats.

63. Sagala, Buffalo Bill on Stage. There has been some attempt to discuss the specifically Irish co-ordinates in the myths of the American West. Marguerite Quintelli-Neary, for example, points to the Irish heritage of Mary Jane Cannary, (otherwise known as Calamity Jane) and speculates as to mythic affinities between Billy the Kid and Fionn MacCumhaill (The Irish American Myth of the Frontier West). We know that Yeats was an avid reader of Western fictions later in his life and the echo of this can certainly be found in his Crazy Jane poems.

64. The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757, by James Fenimore Cooper, was published in 1826.

65. Regan, ‘W.B. Yeats and Irish Cultural Politics in the 1890s’, 76.

66. See note 53 above for an example of this crossing from country to city.

67. We might detect an early and unconscious affinity between Yeats and his ‘strong enchanter’ Friedrich Nietzsche in this conception of folk style. In his notebooks Nietzsche wrote: ‘The damned folk soul! … What is German as a quality of style – that is yet to be found, just as among the Greeks the Greek style was found only late: an earlier unity did not exist, only a terrible mixture’ (The Portable Nietzsche , 41). According to the legacy of Herder, this search for style is not contra the folk tradition; it is rather an expression of that tradition's essence.