Yeats, Nietzche, and the Aristocratic Ideal

Author(s): Rosemarie A. Battaglia

Source: College Literature, Vol. 13, No. 1 (1986), pp. 88-94
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25111688
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YEATS, NIETZCHE, AND
THE ARISTOCRATIC IDEAL

by Rosemarie A. Battaglia

Yeats made no secret of his reading of Nietzsche, and his poetry shows
that influence. Nietzsche, from his earliest writings until his last, advocated
a belief in the ?bermensch, a superior being whose characteristics and
values were opposed to those of the herd. Although Yeats does not mention
the word ?bermensch, he puts in place of him the aristocratic hero whose
prototype is the ideal, noble Renaissance man of thought and action. A
comparison of Yeats and Nietzsche?particularly on the subject of aris
tocratic versus democratic values?does much to illuminate Yeats' poetical
thought.
In Nietzsche's early works, as A. H. J. Knight indicates, ideal types were
referred to as "oligarchs of the spirit," "the perfect wise man," "the good
European."1 In his middle works, Nietzsche considered the Greeks as best
conforming to this ideal. As early as Human, All Too Human, he had
theorized that there should be a system of morality for the strong, for the
rulers, and another for the weak, the slaves (119). Here he insists upon the
"ordering of society in classes," and "higher and lower culture" (124). For
Nietzsche, all moral codes are arbitrary and the strong can ignore them.
Ethics are needed for the weak majority, but such morality is not binding on
the few strong or great (124). The noble type of man, according to
Nietzsche, creates values, determines values for himself.
In aphorism 26 of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes that every
choice human being strives for a "citadel and a secrecy where he is saved
from the crowd, the many, the great majority."2 Yeats believed this as well.
According to Alex Zwerdling (in Yeats and the Heroic Ideal), on Yeats' first
visit in 1897 to Lady Gregory's Coole Park residence he was exposed to the
way of life of a select group, which represented as Protestant Irish
88

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THE ARISTOCRATIC IDEAL 89

Ascendancy where the unity of culture of the Renaissance could be achieved

for a small circle.3
Yeats' belief in the value of sprezzatura?an attitude of nonchalance or
recklessness, a characteristic of Castiglione's The Courtier, where "what is
done and said is done without effort and almost without thought"?is also
found in Nietzsche. Castiglione advises the courtier to shun the ignoble
crowd, and indicates that sprezzatura separates the older and true
aristocracy from the arrivistes, or self-made men. Castiglione's true
aristocrat shows this grace in all he does. It may be, of course, that Yeats
was only finding confirmation of his own views in both Nietzsche and
Castiglione. At any rate, the influence of Castiglione on Yeats reinforced
his growing contempt for the mass of men.
Nietzsche and Yeats believed in a spiritual nobility that accompanies
natural aristocracy. Levelers, whom Nietzsche opposes to the noble man,
are dangerous to society because they strive for a security which would re
sult in a depletion of great or noble productions. Nietzsche declares that the
levelers strive for?
the universal green-pasture happiness of the herd, with security, lack of dan
ger, comfort, and an easier life for everyone; the two songs and doctrines
which they repeat most often are "equality of rights" and "sympathy for all
that suffers"?and suffering itself they take for something that must be
abolished.4
Yeats (highly influenced by Ezra Pound's uncompromising belief in an
intellectual and political aristocracy) learned from experience the values
held by the mob. He found apathy in respect to his plans for cultural unifi
cation in Ireland; he was disillusioned by the stupidity of the audience at the
Abbey Theater and the riots over Synge's The Playboy of the Western
World. Disillusion, of course, may have been preordained in his per
sonality, but he eventually placed his hopes in an aristocratic culture.
In the poem, "On Those that Hated 'The Playboy of the Western
World,' 1907," he shows how the weak despise the strong, how?
Eunuchs ran through Hell and met
On every crowded street to stare
Upon great Juan riding by:
Even like these to rail and sweat
Staring upon his sinewy thigh.5

The "Eunuchs," who are the weak, are contrasted with Juan, who is a
strong and solitary hero. His "sinewy thigh" is a sign of his strength, posed
against the gelded "Eunuchs."

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90 COLLEGE LITERATURE

Both Nietzsche and Yeats looked back into history for an example of a
better society than that which the modern world offered, and both con
cluded that a society led by aristocrats was preferable to one led by the
masses. Of course the point is debatable; there are arguments to be mus
tered on both sides. But Nietzsche's position resulted from his historical
view; he had insight into the erosion of cultural and artistic ideals which ac
companies (but which does not necessarily accompany) the movement
toward democracy. Yeats had the same historical perspective; he felt that
only the aristocracy could preserve cultural and artistic values, which belief
his bitter experience in Ireland seemed to validate. For Yeats, values would
inevitably crumble, given his historical pessimism.
In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche's position regarding good and evil is
that both are defined by the herd. He speaks of the
rabble that sees nothing in bad actions but the unpleasant consequences and
really judges, "it is stupid to do what is bad," while "good" is taken without
further ado to be identical with "useful and agreeable." In the case of every
moral utilitarianism one may immediately infer the same origin and follow
one's nose: one will rarely go astray. (293)
Deplored by Nietzsche and Yeats, this instinct to preserve the communi
ty's values at all costs is typical of the middle class. In the poem "September
1913" Yeats attacks the financial greed of the middle class:
What need you, being come to sense,
But tumble in a greasy till
And add the half-pence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone?
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone.
It's with O'Leary in the grave. (106)

Against the greed of middle-class spirit, Yeats sets the great heroes of the
Irish past, whose sacrifices were not measured in financial terms. In a line
that runs "They weighed so lightly what they gave," Yeats provides an
example of the sprezzatura he so greatly admired.
The aristocracy's feeling for custom and ceremony is lamented as lost
by Yeats in "The Second Coming": "The ceremony of innocence is
drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of pas
sionate intensity" (185). The "best" referred to in these lines are members
of an aristocracy. Their order, Yeats laments, is dying in the chaos of the
modern world while the "worst," the rabble, are gaining ascendancy.

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THE ARISTOCRATIC IDEAL 91

Yeats' admiration for the aristocracy's feeling for custom and ceremony is
further illustrated in the poem, "A Prayer for My Daughter," where he
writes
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony's a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree. (187)
He also celebrates the custom and ceremony of the aristocracy in the poem
"In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz." The two girls in
silk kimonos at Lissadell, a great house, are depicted in their past and
present situations.
The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle. (229)
These lines represent the women as they were in the past, in a gracious,
aristocratic setting. Yeats then writes that a "raving autumn" had
demolished the aristocratic serenity. The older "drags out lonely years /
Conspiring among the ignorant." The younger dreams of "Some vague
Utopia." At the end of the first stanza, Yeats states that he seeks to recall
"That table and the talk of youth," as if in a dream. In the last stanza, he
presents the image of the gazebo (an epitome of old, aristocratic values)
which, unfortunately, was misinterpreted by the herd as a sign of wealth
and social privilege. Like the phoenix, the gazebo and what it represents can
be restored to life only after it is destroyed. "We the great gazebo built, /
They convicted us of guilt; / Bid me strike a match and blow" (230).
In the poem "The Statesman's Holiday," Yeats laments the replacement
of rank, the old aristocratic order, by riches and the world of the arrivistes.
I lived among great houses,
Riches drove out rank,
Base drove out the better blood,
And mind and body shrank. (333-34)
As a result of this displacement, the world suffers because the values of the
arrivistes cause "mind and body" to shrink. The largesse of the aristocracy
cannot be replaced.
Emotional reticence was also a characteristic of the ideal aristocrat. In
"An Irish Airman Foresees his Death," the speaker, Lady Gregory's son,
anticipates his death without the fear and ranting which would characterize
the herd:

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 92 COLLEGE LITERATURE

I know that I shall meet my fate

Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love,

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,

Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death. (133-34)

Sprezzatura can be seen in the very lightness and thoughtlessness with which
Gregory contemplates his death. The poem "Shepherd and Goatherd" por
trays the emotional restraint of Lady Gregory after her son's death. When
asked how she bears her grief, the Shepherd replies:
She goes about her house erect and calm,
Between the pantry and the linen chest,
Or else at meadow or at grazing overlooks
Her laboring men, as though her darling lived,
But for her grandson now; there is no change
But such as I have seen upon her face
Watching our shepherd sports at harvest time
When her son's turn was over. (141)
The active intellectual life of the aristocracy is evident in "Coole Park
and Ballylee." In this poem Lady Gregory is invoked as an upholder of
aristocratic values; all else is declining.
Sound of a stick upon the floor, a sound
From somebody that toils from chair to chair,
Beloved books that famous hands have bound,
Old marble heads, old pictures everywhere;
Great rooms where travelled men and children found
Content or joy; a last inheritor
Where none has reigned that lacked a name and fame
Or out of folly into folly came. (239)

In this poem Yeats mourns for "all that great glory spent" and identifies
with the people at Coole Park: "We were the last Romantics?chose for
theme / Traditional sanctity and loveliness / . . . But all is changed. ..."
The "high horse riderless" can be said to represent society without its aris

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THE ARISTOCRATIC IDEAL 93

tocratic leaders. The poem ends in an apocalyptic vision of darkness,

"Where the swan drifts upon a darkening flood."
In the poem "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory," Yeats again depicts
aristocratic virtues. Major Gregory was a type of perfect Renaissance
gentleman, a man of art, thought, and action.

Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,

And yet he had the intensity
To have published all to be a world's delight.

And all he did done perfectly

As though he had but that one trade alone. (132)
Yeats thus depicts Robert Gregory as an ideal example of Castiglione's
courtier; the last two lines quoted above exemplify his sprezzatura.
Yeats' admiration for Nietzsche's higher type of man can be seen in his
"Meditations in Time of Civil War," section I, "Ancestral Houses," where
the aristocracy is symbolized by the fountain and the sea-shell. In the first
stanza, Yeats writes of the fountain:
Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns,
Amid the rustle of his planted hills,
Life overflows without ambitious pains;
And rains down life until the basin spills,
And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains
As though to choose whatever shape it wills
And never stoop to a mechanical
Or servile shape, at others' beck and call. (198)
In the third line, Yeats may be referring to his own ambition, which con
trasts with the easeful, overflowing life of the symbolic fountain.
Sprezzatura can be seen in the fountain's activity. In the second stanza, the
fountain, as "abounding, glittering jet," a symbol of abundant life, is re
placed by "some marvellous empty sea-shell flung / Out of the obscure
dark of the rich streams," becoming the "symbol which / Shadows the in
herited glory of the rich." The sea-shell is "marvellous" but "empty," a
dead reminder of the past. The two symbols displayed here conflate two
meanings associated by Yeats with the aristocracy: sprezzatura (the foun
tain) and a dead past (the sea-shell). In the democratic society Yeats was
coming to know, the sea-shell no longer has any significance. Yeats here
clearly laments the passing of an old order that cannot, for him, be re
placed. The recurrence of the subject in his poetry testifies to its
melancholy, often despairing, significance for him.

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94 COLLEGE LITERATURE

Nietzsche's admiration for the largesse of the noble man is applicable t

the brave men in Yeats' "September 1913," in which he laments, as indi
cated above, the passing of Romantic Ireland. Nietzsche praises men muc
like those celebrated in Yeats' poem?those romantic heroes who "weighe
so lightly what they gave," who were not afraid of the dangers of rebellio
against an intolerable social order. Herd morality, Nietzsche and Yeats say
provides no heroes, no noble men, no higher types of men because the her
is content with the security they find in materialistic comforts.
It seems to be the peculiar result of modern egalitarianism that great
Modernist writers become increasingly distant from the majority in their
works. Certainly Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and James Joy
did not write for the general public; they considered themselves as artist
striving to save art from demolition by the masses. Nietzsche's and Yeats
solution to the problem of the destruction of idealistic values and art by t
herd was to attack herd mentality and attempt to preserve ideal values by
supporting the aristocracy. It can be argued that such an attempt is escapi
in nature; but the fact remains, plain to see in the works of these two men of
different times and backgrounds.

NOTES
1 A. H. J. Knight. Some Aspects of the Life and Work of Nietzsche. Ne
York: Russell and Russell, 1967: 119.
2 Friedrich Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil. Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Tran
Walter Kaufman. New York: Random House, 1968: 227.
3 Alex Zwerdling. Yeats and the Heroic Ideal. New York: New York UP
1965: 66.
4 Nietzsche, 244.
5 William Butler Yeats. The Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats. New
York: Macmillan, 1956: 109.

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