G. J. Watson, ed., The Short Fiction of W. B. Yeats (Penguin 1995) - Editorial Notes & Intro.

Textual & Editorial Note
[. T]he Secret Rose] was far more than a random collocation of unrelated stories. Putzel and Martin are among the critics who have demonstrated its structural unity “based on history, locale, theme and symbolism” (n.: Augustine Martin, ‘The Apocalyptic Structure in Yeats’s The Secret Rose’, in Studies, 64, 1975, pp.24-34); the stories move from pagan Ireland through the monastic era, into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and finish with a richly wrought fin de siècle triptych. The careful arrangement of the 1897 volume may prove not prove that Yeats had anticipated Joyce’s Dubliners, but it is useful evidence of his early love of design.

‘There is also the question of style. Yeats referred back in the 1918 poems “The Phases of the Moon” to his fictional characters of the nineties and to “that extravagant style . learnt from Pater” in which he had created them. [.] While some of Yeats’s more ornate [x] flourishes do not come off, especially in circumlocution and periphrasis, there is much to regret in his exclusions and excisions - this sentence, for instance, from the 1897 version of “The Old Men of Twilight”: ‘When he came close enough to hear the signing of the rushes in the outermost pool, the morning was grey over the world, so that the tall rushes, the still waters, the vague clouds, the thin mist lying among the sand-heaps, seemed carved out of an enormous pearl.’ More is involved than personal taste. Our understanding of the development of Yeats’s attitudes to Ireland and to his audience are hindered if new are not aware of the deliberate distancing of himself from “the folk” involved in his choice of “Paterian” style for Secret Rose. (Intro., p.xi-xii.)

Introduction
‘Though Yeats writes in his dedication of The Secret Rose to his friend AE (George Russell) that he “wrote these stories at different times and in different manners”, he immediately offsets any implication of casualness by stating that “they have but one subject, the war of spiritual with natural order.” From the perspective of the modern reader, the sense of unity and design is very marked - at least if we are allowed to encounter the stories as they appeared in 1897 rather than in the somewhat chaotic arrangement of Mythologies [1959]. The “war of spiritual with natural order” takes different aspects in the rich variety of the stories, but it is [xxv] always apparent. Some stories focus the clash between heroism and pragmatism, while others stress the incompatibility of vision with the affairs of the world. One story depicts the demonic and violent intrusion of the supernatural world into our world, and a significant number deal with the conflict between the spiritual quest and orthodox Christianity. / Two fine stories deal with the antagonism between the values of an archaic but heroic and more expansive Ireland and an Ireland compromised by materialism or utilitarianism. The gleeman in “the Crucifixion of the Outcast”, which Oscar Wilde thought “sublime, wonderful, wonderful” (Autobiographies, p.287), is the last of a dying breed, a wanderer whose “eating and sleeping places were the four provinces of Eri” (p.xxvi)

'The Gleeman and Costello [”Of Costello the Proud”] are mortals who have raised themselves to the level of visionaries, even in unpropitious times and circumstances.’ (p.xxvii.) ‘”Out of the Rose” is one of the clearest statements of the volume’s central theme [.] The old knight who is the protagonist of the story does not physically partake of the world beyond in the manner of the hawk-king, but on him too the service of that world beyond is binding. There is no choice for the recipient of the vision, even if the service required is the helping of a group of ungrateful peasants to recover some rustled pigs. The natural world is indeed “infected”, and the gap between it and the world of the Rose is emphasised by the fact that the dying knight must recount his story to a lad to half-witted to comprehend any of it.’ (p.xxviii.)

'In “Rosa Alchemica” and “The Tables of the Law”, the perilous attractions of heterodoxy and the conflicting claims of orthodoxy are treated with extra force, since in both of these longer stories there is a first-person narrator who is deeply drawn to the mystical question for a genuine spirituality, while terrified of the loss of individuality and personality that this may require of him. The beautifully judged conclusion of “Rosa Alchemica” encapsulates a particularly intense, ironic, and complex version of the “war of spiritual with natural order”: “There are moments even now, when . the indefinite world, which has but half lost its mastery over my heart and my intellect, seems [xxx] about to claim a perfect mastery; but I carry the rosary about my neck, and when I hear, or seem to hear them, I press it to my heart and say: ‘He whose name is Legion is at our doors deceiving our intellectual with subtlety and flattering our hearts with beauty, and we have no trust but in Thee’; and then the war that rages within me at other times is still, and I am at peace.”

'The unity of the volume is not simply due to this high level of thematic congruence between the stories. There is a tight geographical focus on the West of Ireland [.] The 1897 volume carefully arranges the stories in a coherent historical pattern . stories of pagan Ireland . late fourteenth century .. seventeenth century . Finally, the stories in the mystical triptych with which Yeats intended to round off the volume are all of the contemporaries nineties. The contrast with the ad hoc arrangement in Mythologies is striking.’ (p.xxxi.)

'The narrator figure in “Rosa Alchemica”, “the Tables of the Law” and “The Adoration of the Magi” might at first seem an anti-type to the “rough-clad peasant” we have just been discussing. He is a sophisticated aesthete who attempts to abolish the dichotomy between the material and the spiritual simply by banishing the external world completely, closing his tapestried doors on it [xxxix] and retreating into his palace of art, to his collection of paintings, ornaments and books. [.] Life and art remain stubbornly separate, however, and the narrator inevitably experiences that sense of division which is the lot of Hanrahan, of Yeats himself and, perhaps, of all of us.’ (p.xl)

'The war of the spiritual with the material continues - very literally in this case [”Rosa Alchemica”, since the enraged fisherfolk destroy the temple and its inhabitants. It continues at the psychological level also, however, for despite the narrator’s dedication of himself to orthodoxy, the concluding sentences confirm that the “indefinite world” has “but half lost its mastery over my heart and intellect.”’ [.] The Secret Rose is for all its stylistic formality, a surprisingly moving volume, which also permits us to see the formation of some of a great poet’s lifelong obsessions.’ (p.xli; end.)