In January of the following year, John Butler Yeats returned to the matter of his own value as a teacher of playwriting to his son. ‘I sometimes wish,’ he wrote, ‘that it had been possible for you to have consulted with me about your plays. I think I have a playwriting instinct, and that my play… proves it. And if it is simple it is without pretences, unaffected and easy, and yet fresh and new as a morning in June.’
Later that year, John Butler Yeats wrote another story and a letter to his son displaying his confidence in it. ‘I have just completed what I think is a very pretty story, a tale of magic that will be said or sung I think many times by many people. You see how confident I am.’ A week later, he wrote again: ‘I have just written what I do not hesitate to call a lovely story which Spenser would not have been ashamed to have contrived. I never saw greater enthusiasm than Colum’s when I read it to him. I am sure it will sell. There are several other stories which I have written. There is money in these.’ Two weeks later the euphoria about his stories remained: ‘Yesterday, I was at Quinn’s and read to him two stories just finished, one from the land of phantasy, “The Wizard’s Daughter”, the other out of real life. He did not [know] which to prefer but was enthusiastic about both. Colum heard the wizard one and wanted then and there to carry it off to a magazine.’ The following day, John Butler Yeats decided to deliver the stories to a magazine himself. ‘Yesterday,’ he wrote to his son, ‘I left at Harper’s my two stories, and I am very hopeful.’
Despite his work on the stories, his interest in plays did not fade. On 5 November 1917 he wrote to his son: ‘It is my belief that if all of these years you had seen more of me you would have written quantities of plays.’ On 25 January he referred once more to his own play:
You will remember that I have for a long time been meditatively at work on a play. It is now finished and typed (it cost 6 dollars)… I am certain you will like it and perhaps be moved to re-write some lyrics I have written. They had to be written, but are of course quite amateurish. I think when you have read the play you will be inspired, yes inspired, to write real lyrics. I am certain there is money in the play, and that it will hold the boards, and perhaps return to them many times.
Two weeks later, the play had been sent. ‘I hope by this time,’ he wrote, ‘you have seen my play sent in a reg. Letter by John Quinn to Lilly [sic] and Lolly [Yeats].’ Twelve days later, on 21 February 1918, he wrote again on the matter: ‘I am waiting to hear what you think of my play. If I find you like it I will be moved to write another scene (about which I have thought a great deal).’ Still there was silence from the other side of the ocean. ‘Why don’t you tell me about my play?’ he wrote in June. ‘You need not be afraid to praise [it]… I feel quite sure that someday [it] will be acted and be a success.’
4
Four days later, from Ballinamantane House in County Galway, where he was staying while Ballylee was being restored, W. B. Yeats, now fifty-two, wrote to his father, who was seventy-eight. ‘My dear Father,’ his letter began,
I have never written to you about your play. You choose a very difficult subject and the most difficult of all forms, and as was to be foreseen, it is the least good of all your writings. I have been reading plays for the Abbey Theatre for years now, and so know the matter practically. A play looks easy, but is full of problems, which are almost a part of Mathematics — French dramatists display this structure and 17th century English dramatists disguise it, but it is always there. In some strange way, which I have never understood, a play does not even read well if it has not this mathematics. You are a most accomplished critic — and I believe your autobiography will be very good, and this is enough for one man. It takes a lifetime to master dramatic form.
In March 1918 John Quinn received a letter from W. B. Yeats in which the poet arranged a matter that had been previously discussed by them: in exchange for Quinn’s financial support for Yeats’s improvident father in New York, Yeats would send Quinn manuscripts. Yeats went on:
Do you know is he going on with his autobiography? If he would finish that I might be able to get a very good price for that indeed from Macmillan, and would illustrate it with reproductions of pictures by himself, by Potter, by Nettleship etc. I hear with some alarm that he is writing a play, in which, as it is the most highly technical of all literary forms, he will most certainly not succeed while he certainly can succeed in the autobiography, and may do one of the finest that there is.
John Butler Yeats was not greatly disturbed by his son’s view on his playwriting. On 8 July 1918 he wrote to him:
Your opinion of my play does not alter my opinion. I am quite sure that it will ultimately reach the boards and the public, although doubtless it will need alterations. But these will be superficial. The germ idea will remain. I have no doubt you are overanxious, the play being by your father. That is only natural. Percy MacKaye, a man of some expression, was of all my critics the one that gave me the most encouragement. He did not see the actual play, but I told him all about it.
Having invoked the spirit of Percy MacKaye, who had not read the play, Yeats the father clearly saw no difficulty in invoking the spirit once more of Synge, now dead almost ten years. ‘When I told Synge that you had discouraged my writing the play, and that you spoke a good deal about Rules etc he said “Ask him if he himself obeys the rules.” Synge praised my dialogue. “You at any rate can write dialogue” were his exact words and as you know praise from Synge was rather a rarity.’
The significance of the phrase ‘You at any rate can write dialogue’ would not have been lost on Yeats the son. It suggested that there were others who could not write dialogue and it implied that among them may have been W. B. Yeats himself. His father went on:
In my play there is phantasy. The old man made young is a creature of phantasy, and being good phantasy and consistent with itself is quite credible. I think he is a dear old man, and my heroine is right to love him even when he falls into sinfulness. The Colonel is the germ of my play, and the public won’t miss it. I laugh to scorn all the croakers. But I must be careful, for you yourself are my only croaker.
It would be very easy to misinterpret John Butler Yeats’s letters to his son about his own writings, to see them as merely foolish or boastful. They represent, it should be said, a tiny fraction of his concerns. He was mainly interested in the vocation of the poet, and he wrote with very great range, originality and energy on that subject; he was also fascinated by the meaning of life and was an astute observer of America. But unlike Henry James Senior, who was reduced by a crisis to a state of helpless infancy, John Butler Yeats did not need a crisis; he sought that state as an aspect of freedom, a way of living easily and hopefully and unsuspiciously in the world. He expressed this view often in his correspondence, most eloquently, perhaps, in a letter to W. B. Yeats written on 27 February 1916, where he pitted his own humility and his intense optimism against his son’s grand majestic spirit:
I think there is always with me a residuum, a something at the bottom of the cup of my sorrows, and that something is a conviction, an intuition inseparable from life — that nothing is ever really lost, and that if we could see our world and all that takes place on its surface, and see it from a distance and as if from the centre of the sun, we should find it to be a fine piece of machinery working to certain ends with an absolute precision. I had in my only philosophy a faith founded like that of Socrates upon the basis of my conscious ignorance — it is a sort of sublime optimism, and I am very satisfied with my ignorance as my betters are with their knowledge — and I call it sublime because it soars to such heights, and these logical people cannot reach it with their arrows, and I believe if the truth were known and confessed that this doctrine of a conscious ignorance is, at this present moment, the abiding
