early with the enforced emigration of his family to London, in order that his artist-father could pursue an already-flagging career. "Here you are somebody", said a Sligo aunt to the nine-year-old departee, "there you will be nobody at all". 5 It was a fall from a pastoral landscape into a world of urban blight, war and treachery, as he would recall in the later poem "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen":
We too had many pretty toys when young:
A law indifferent to blame or praise,
To bribe or threat. . . 6
The deeper the world plunged into the chaos of imperial wars and freedom struggles, the more necessary did it become for the poet to secure the Sligo idyll against accusations of naïveté, and the harder. The more he sought to recapture the dream, the more it seemed to elude
him. When the much older man finally brought his newly-wed English wife on a boat-trip across Lough Gill, he failed ignominiously to locate, much less land on, the lake isle of Innisfree: a sign, perhaps, that the past in that simple-minded version was not easily recoverable.
Some of the less sophisticated texts of the earlyYeats were attempts to deny civilization and its discontents by escaping to the Happy Islands of Oisín andTír na nÓg, the land of the forever young. Similarly, the short stories ofPatrick Pearse often stressed the redemptive strangeness of the child, bearing to fallen adults messages from another world. The paradox was that these texts, which so nourished Irish national feeling, were often British in origin, and open to the charge of founding themselves on the imperial strategy of infantilizing the native culture. What was lacking in them was what Yeats would later call the vision of evil, without which art was merely superficial, unable to chronicle the tragedy of growth and change.
It was just such an unreal state of changlessness which the writer seemed to endorse in his 1894 play TheLand of Heart's Desire. Here a young man still in his twenties used a fairy-child to voice his disenchantment with the ageing process:
But I can lead you, newly-married bride,
Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise,
Where nobody gets old and godly and grave . . . 7
It is significant that when the young wife dies in the play, the child leaves the stage: experience has not so much been confronted as denied in this Celtic version of Peter Pan. All this is in keeping with the tendency of British authors of the late nineteenth century to confuse innocence with inexperience, whereas the earlierromantics Blake andWordsworth had taught that the root-meaning of innocence ( in - nocentes) was openness to the injuries risked in a full life. In the judgement of one critic, after the novels ofCharles Dickens in the mid-century, "children no longer grow up and develop into the maturities of Wordsworth's Prelude . . . The image is transfigured into the image of an innocence which dies ... of life extinguished, of life that is better extinguished, of life, so to say, rejected, negated at its very root". 8
This is a fair account also of the landscape of early Yeatsian desire, where childhood is surrounded by a cordon sanitaire of nostalgia and escape. It is a world neither of change nor of growth: intense, unpurged feelings for childhood are not submitted to the test of adult life or, for that matter, of childhood itself. What the child actually is or wants means nothing in such literature, for this is the landscape of the adult heart's desire. Just as a sexist portraiture depicted women not as they are but as men wish them to be, so here the child is reduced to an expendable cultural object. The inhabitants of Tír na nÓg do not grow up, and this is not because they don't want to but because their adult creator (for the time being, anyway) prefers to keep them and his readers ignorant of a world based on sexual suffering and social injustice. This early Yeatsian attitude is based on the widespread but false assumption mat childhood exists outside the
We too had many pretty toys when young:
A law indifferent to blame or praise,
To bribe or threat. . . 6
The deeper the world plunged into the chaos of imperial wars and freedom struggles, the more necessary did it become for the poet to secure the Sligo idyll against accusations of naïveté, and the harder. The more he sought to recapture the dream, the more it seemed to elude
him. When the much older man finally brought his newly-wed English wife on a boat-trip across Lough Gill, he failed ignominiously to locate, much less land on, the lake isle of Innisfree: a sign, perhaps, that the past in that simple-minded version was not easily recoverable.
Some of the less sophisticated texts of the earlyYeats were attempts to deny civilization and its discontents by escaping to the Happy Islands of Oisín andTír na nÓg, the land of the forever young. Similarly, the short stories ofPatrick Pearse often stressed the redemptive strangeness of the child, bearing to fallen adults messages from another world. The paradox was that these texts, which so nourished Irish national feeling, were often British in origin, and open to the charge of founding themselves on the imperial strategy of infantilizing the native culture. What was lacking in them was what Yeats would later call the vision of evil, without which art was merely superficial, unable to chronicle the tragedy of growth and change.
It was just such an unreal state of changlessness which the writer seemed to endorse in his 1894 play TheLand of Heart's Desire. Here a young man still in his twenties used a fairy-child to voice his disenchantment with the ageing process:
But I can lead you, newly-married bride,
Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise,
Where nobody gets old and godly and grave . . . 7
It is significant that when the young wife dies in the play, the child leaves the stage: experience has not so much been confronted as denied in this Celtic version of Peter Pan. All this is in keeping with the tendency of British authors of the late nineteenth century to confuse innocence with inexperience, whereas the earlierromantics Blake andWordsworth had taught that the root-meaning of innocence ( in - nocentes) was openness to the injuries risked in a full life. In the judgement of one critic, after the novels ofCharles Dickens in the mid-century, "children no longer grow up and develop into the maturities of Wordsworth's Prelude . . . The image is transfigured into the image of an innocence which dies ... of life extinguished, of life that is better extinguished, of life, so to say, rejected, negated at its very root". 8
This is a fair account also of the landscape of early Yeatsian desire, where childhood is surrounded by a cordon sanitaire of nostalgia and escape. It is a world neither of change nor of growth: intense, unpurged feelings for childhood are not submitted to the test of adult life or, for that matter, of childhood itself. What the child actually is or wants means nothing in such literature, for this is the landscape of the adult heart's desire. Just as a sexist portraiture depicted women not as they are but as men wish them to be, so here the child is reduced to an expendable cultural object. The inhabitants of Tír na nÓg do not grow up, and this is not because they don't want to but because their adult creator (for the time being, anyway) prefers to keep them and his readers ignorant of a world based on sexual suffering and social injustice. This early Yeatsian attitude is based on the widespread but false assumption mat childhood exists outside the
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