1906年におけるYEATSの位置

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In 1906, when the Irish Dramatic Movement was at high tide, Yeats, still full of hope for its future, almost believed that he could make an 'average audience' understand his 'vision' through some practical devices. The movement might have turned out, after all, not exactly as he expected, for in an essay under the title, "A People's Theatre" (1919), he is seen intimating Lady Gregory his wish to create an 'unpopular theatre' for a chosen audience. An ardent passion for 'vigorous and simple men' seems to have been utterly frustrated and replaced in his heart with the feelings of bitter contempt and cold anger toward the 'people'. His effort to connect himself with the theatre audience was, however, not made for nothing. It opened up a new vista in the sphere of poetics and made, in a sense, a new poet of him, whose figure is to be ultimately embodied in the epistle dedicatory of Responsibilities (1914). And Discoveries, his 'spiritual diary' in Autumn, 1906, shows us how the idea took its embryonic shape in the slow and complicated process of reasoning. One of his discoveries was that 'oratory', rather than 'music', should be 'the type of all the arts'. We might at first sight take this assertion as a fairly radical change from his former poetical beliefs. Oratory is a means of persuasion. It can hardly be doubted that the oratory must have meant for Yeats a way of communication more direct than the 'wavering, meditative, organic rhythm' or 'sound, colour, and form... in a musical relation'. So he seems to be weighing the discursive element in the language against the evocative one. But his idea of oratory was a far more complex one. It resulted less from a drastic change of attitude than a very careful and subtle readjustment of earlier poetic beliefs to a new need for persuasion. First of all, his 'oratory' was quite different from a mere 'rhetoric', which he detested persistently all his life. 'Rhetoric' means for him nothing more than a reflection of the desire of the crowd, whereas what 'oratory' suggests is fundamentally a way of communicating a personal vision to them. Secondly, it does not really reject the musical element of words. In 1900, in fact, 'the noble art of oratory' had meant for him mainly the art of 'half-chant', its aim being to evoke an exhausting emotion 'that comes with the music of words'. Thirdly, it must necessarily presuppose the existence of an acting bodily form, because it means also a persuasion by 'laughter' and 'tears'. It needs a bodily function, a gesture, of an orator, who, in turn, has to be a speaker, a singer, an actor, and a poet all at once, as the Irish ballad-singers were. To put it in another way, the poet as an orator must make an organic being of himself by unifying all the apparently contradictory functions of 'oratory'. Thus the idea of 'oratory' comes to be closely connected with the idea of 'personality', of 'the whole man-blood, imagination, intellect, running together'. To be a 'personality' was not quite the same thing as that which Verlaine might have meant by 'd'etre absolument soi-meme'. Yeats' 'personality' was not a thing to be ascribed to nature. It was an achievement of a deliberate effort, or rather, an ideal that could not be attained except by a kind of dissembling. It was a 'fictitious personality', a persona. It was an idea that could live, if at all, only in a poem.
1967-03-30

1906年におけるYEATSの位置

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