Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century by Peter Watson Read Free Book Online

glimpse of what civilisation can evolve into: food, poetry, ritual, love, sex, drink, language. They can be found anywhere, Joyce is saying. They are what peace – inner and out – is.
    T. S. Eliot wrote an essay about
Ulysses
in the
Dial
magazine in 1923, in which he confessed that the book for him had ‘the importance of a scientific discovery,’ and indeed part of Joyce’s aim was to advance language, feeling it had dropped behind as science had expanded. He also liked the fact that Joyce had used what he called ‘the mythical method.’ 37 This, he believed, might be a way forward for literature, replacing the narrative method. But the most revealing difference between
Ulysses,
on the one hand, and
The Waste Land, Jacob’s Room,
and
Henry IV
on the other, is that in the end Stephen Dedalus is redeemed. At the beginning of the book, he is in an intellectual and moral wasteland, bereft of ideas and hope. Bloom, however, shows himself throughout the book as capable of seeing the world through others’ eyes, be it his wife Molly, who he knows intimately, or Dedalus, a relative stranger. This not only makes Bloom profoundly unprejudiced – in an anti-Semitic world – but it is, on Joyce’s part, a wonderfully optimistic message, that connections are possible, that solitude and atomisation, alienation and ennui are not inevitable.
    In 1922 Joyce’s Irish colleague W. B. Yeats was named a senator in Ireland. Two years later he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Yeats’s fifty-seven-year career as a poet spanned many different periods, but his political engagement was of a piece with his artistic vision. An 1899 police report described him as ‘more or less of a revolutionary,’ and in 1916 he had published ‘Easter 1916,’ about the botched Irish nationalist uprising. This contained lines that, though they refer to the executed leaders of the uprising, could also serve, in the ending, as an epitaph for the entire century:
    We know their dream; enough
    To know they dreamed and are dead;
    And what if excess o f love
    Bewildered them till they died?
    I write it out in a verse -
    MacDonagh and MacBride
    And Connolly and Pearse
    Now and in time to be,
    Wherever the green is worn,
    All changed, changed utterly:
    A terrible beauty is born. 38
     
    Yeats recognised that he had a religious temperament at a time when science had largely destroyed that option. He believed that life was ultimately tragic,and that it is largely determined by ‘remote … unknowable realities.’ 39 For him the consensus of life, its very structure, will defeat us, and the search for greatness, the most noble existential cause, must involve a stripping away of the ‘mask’: ‘If mask and self could be unified, one would experience completeness of being.’ 40 This was not exactly Freudianism but close and, as David Perkins has shown, it led Yeats to a complicated and highly personal system of iconography and symbols in which he pitched antitheses against one another: youth and age, body and soul, passion and wisdom, beast and man, creative violence and order, revelation and civdisation, time and eternity. 41
    Yeats’s career is generally seen in four phases – before 1899, 1899–1914, 1914–28, and after 1928 – but it is his third phase that marks his highest achievement. This period includes
The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer
(1921),
The Tower
(1928), and the prose work
A Vision
(1925). This latter book sets out Yeats’s occult system of signs and symbols, which were partly the result of his ‘discovery’ that his wife had psychic powers and that spirits ‘spoke through her’ in automatic writing and trances. 42 In anyone else such an approach might have been merely embarrassing, but in Yeats the craftsmanship shines through to produce a poetic voice that is clear and distinctive, wholly autonomous, conveying ‘the actual thoughts of a man at a passionate moment of life.’ 43 Yeats the man