The strength of character that saw her through her difficult youth and her impossible marriage made Edith Wharton a dis- ciplined and hard-working writer who achieved both popular and criticai success. Of her many excellent novйis (and I find it hard to choose), I recommend especially The Custom of the Country (1913), whose heroine, the ambitious Undine Spragg, finds none of her conquests satisfactory; The Age of Innocence (1920), the story of an irresolute young man in the New York of the i88os, caught between his feelings for his fiancйe and his rekindled passion for an earlier lover; and her first best- seller, The House of Mirth (1905), whose heroine Lily Bart, in my view, is Wharton^ finest character. Like Becky Sharpe [76], Lily finds little she will not do to win a place in society; but whereas Thackeray tried to suppress his own and the readers potential affection for his spunky adventuress (by making her a bad mother), Wharton clearly has every sympa- thy for Lily, but nevertheless finds no way to avert the doom that a rigid and censorious society reserves for her.
In these novйis, and in ali of her work, Edith Wharton viewed the world with a sympathetic but unsparing eye.
J.S.M.
103
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
1865-1939
Collected Poems, Collected Plays, Autobiography
Exclusive of Shakespeare [39] and Chaucer [32], the Plan sug- gests for extended reading a small number of English and American poets. Among these, posterity will assign Yeats his proper rank. That he will not be at the bottom of the list we may be sure.
Yeats offers difficulties. He was a complex man who offers inadequate satisfaction when read in anthological snatches. Also, he is more than a poet. Among his tremendous output are poems, plays, memoirs, essays, literary studies, folk and fairy tales, mysti- cal philosophies, letters, speeches, translations from Sophocles [6]. Like Goethe's [62], his long life comprised a series of evolu- tions. There is a vast space between the aged poet of the Last Poems and Plays (1940) and the young Celtic dreamer of The Wanderings of Oisin (1889). To bridge this space the reader must absorb a great deal of Yeats and also know something about the Ireland whose soul he tried to find and form.
That is why I suggest his Autobiography, a one-volume omnibus. It contains reminiscences of his life through 1902, together with extracts from a diary kept in 1909, some notes about the death in 1909 of the fine Irish dramatist Synge, and an account of his reception in Sweden, which he visited in 1923 to receive the Nobel Prize.
Yeats grew and changed and deepened; his life was not simple, any more than his thought. We may identify a few influences: his early childhood in the beautiful Sligo country; his readings in the romantic English poets; the mythology and folklore of Ireland, together with the Irish literary revival that he led; theosophy, spiritualism, occultism, astrology, and Indian philosophy; the beautiful Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, whom he loved in vain for twenty years; the psychic powers of his mediumistic wife; and toward the end such cycli- cal theories of history as are to be found in Vico, Spengler, and Toynbee.
The major movement of his creative life is away from the delicate, suggestive, vague but often beautiful lyricism of the early verse toward the hard, spare, condensed, intellectual, tightly passionate, often obscure poetry of his later years. The change was already apparent in a poem called "September 1913," with its plain statement: "Romantic Ireland^ dead and gone." Yeats's development is exactly polar to Wordsworth^ [64]: aging, he became greater as man and artist. The growth was fed by deep conflict, not only personal but political and social, for he despised much of our world ("this filthy modern tide") and used it as nourishment for his noble rage.
The bias of his mind is aristocratic (even feudal), mystical, symbolical. Though the symbols are not as wildly private as in Blake [63], who greatly influenced Yeats, they cannot be understood without a considerable knowledge of his work and life. Unless this is frankly admitted, the reader is apt to be at first puzzled, then irritated, finally antagonistic.
Yeats often seems esoteric, remote, impersonal, wrapped up in a world of strange images drawn from antiquity or the
East or his own occult thought system or Irish legend. But the more one lives with him, the more clearly one feels his unflinching closeness to reality. He may be taken in by visions; but he is not taken in by illusions. In his mature work there is a bracing tragic bitterness:
Whatever flames upon the night Man's own resinous heart has fed.
His wisdom is not for children, optimists, or the comfortable: I must lie down where ali the ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
In the final lines of one of his last poems, "Under Ben Buiben," he compresses his seeming arrogance, his patrician elevation of spirit, his horror of self-pity. He is leaving instruc- tions for his own gravestone:
No marble, no conventional phrase; On limestone quarried near the spot By his command these words are cut: Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman; pass by!
C.F.
104
NATSUME SOSEKI
1867-1916 Kokoro
Commodore Matthew Perry's unwelcome arrival in Edo Bay in 1854 ended a period of more than two centuries during which Japan had almost no contact with the outside world. The "opening" of Japan by the West provoked fifteen years of irres- olution, and even a civil war between proponents of different responses to the crisis; the issue was settled when advisors to the young Emperor Meiji (reigned 1868-1912) embarked upon a program of modernization and aggressive diplomacy designed to beat the West at its own game. Japan's effort to catch up with the West bore results with astonishing speed, perhaps in part because of the unusual homogeneity and discipline of the Japanese people. One effect of the modernization effort was to create a generation of young people educated in Western studies and equipped to guide their country from a traditional, feudal past into a hopeful new future. Among them was Natsume Soseki.
He was born into a minor samurai family in 1867, a year before the Emperor Meiji took the throne, and was one of the first Japanese students to come up through the newly reformed educational system. After graduating from Tokyo Imperial University he was sent to study in England in 1900. On his return in 1903 he became Lecturer in English Literature at his old university, succeeding his mentor, the noted American Japanophile Lafcadio Hearn. In 1907, however, he gave up his academic post to work as a full-time writer; he was already beginning to feel afflicted by the anxiety and cultural alienation that made him unable to stay in the front lines of Westernization in Japanese education, and that was to make his fiction steadily darker in tone and less hopeful in the years before his early death in 1916.
He achieved national celebrity with his first two novйis, I Am a Cat (1905) and Botchan (1906), both of which are still widely read and admired in Japan; both are satirical novйis that puncture the pretenses of Japan's new Westernized urban elite. In my view, however, the first suffers from an excess of cuteness, the second from an excess of sentimentality; neither seems to survive the translation process very well, nor to cross cultural frontiers with any success. Where the tone of these early novйis is one of comic irony, that of Kokoro (1914) is somber and elegiac.