In The 1890s: British Literature, Art, and Culture,
ed. G. A. Cevasco (New York and London: Garland
Publishing Co., 1993)W. B. Yeats's Talismanic Book: The Secret Rose
W. B. Yeats's collection of 17 short stories, The Secret Rose (1897), illustrated by the poet's father J. B. Yeats and published by Lawrence and Bullen, is one of the most striking volumes in a decade of ornately-styled books. Much of the text is in the elaborate style of Walter Pater that Yeats himself later deplored. Cover designs in cabalistic iconography, fitting the book's content to create a "talismanic" work, are by Althea Gyles, whom Yeats knew as a fellow student of the occult as well as an artist and poet.
The best-known binding of this cover (the second issue, with A. H. Bullen's name on the spine) is deep blue, stamped in gold gilt. On the front, the tree of life grows from a knight's skeleton and culminates in three crowning roses. The stylized foliage forms symmetrical coils that give rise to the shapes of a kissing couple, directly below the topmost roses. In the tree's center, uniting its upper and lower hemispheres, a "rosy cross" hints at the Rosicrucian element in some of the stories, in which Yeats projects (without fully revealing) occultist mysteries learned from the London Theosophical Society, the Order of the Golden Dawn, and such savants as Madame Helena Blavatsky and MacGregor Mathers.
The tree's intertwining roots and branches simulate the knotted Celtic interlace of medieval manuscripts, pointing to Yeats's nineties' vision of Ireland as the site for a "castle" of Celtic heroes and visionaries. The volume's spine shows a lance (probably that of the Irish god Lugh), arabesqued to resemble a caduceus; standing in a grail-like receptacle, it may suggest the male principle in harmony with the female as well as signifying a quest motif. The back design features a mandala in which a central "rosy cross," surrounded by broken and pointed spears, represents the intersection between time and eternity, the object of both failed and ongoing quests.
Dedicated to the mystical Irish writer A. E. (George Russell), the book bears two epigraphs underlining its aestheticism and preoccupation with beauty, but the second touches upon another theme as well--the ravages of time. First is a quotation from Villiers de L'Isle-Adam's Axel: "As for living, our servants will do that for us." Next is a passage from Ovid's Metamorphosis XV, as cited by Leonardo da Vinci, in which Helen, in old age, realizes her loss of beauty and wonders that men had "twice carried her away." In his dedication, Yeats states the book's theme of "the war of spiritual with natural order," a conflict translated in the stories into the entanglements of transcient mortals with unattainable immortals.
Protagonists are priests, lovers, and martyrs of the "secret rose," the elusive ideal that Yeats elsewhere identifies, variously, with Ireland; with the Sidh or Sidhe (fairies); with beautiful women; with Dante's beatific vision and Percy Bysshe Shelley's and Edmund Spenser's intellectual beauty (modified by Yeats to interact and "suffer" with mortals).
The first eight stories feature Irish legends and pseudo-history, and the next six, the Red Hanrahan tales, are partly based on the life of the eighteenth-century "peasant" poet Owen Ruadh O'Sullivan, a belated heir to the declining bardic tradition. The last story is set in late nineteenth-century Ireland, where Michael Robartes transports the narrator to an occultist temple. An apocalyptic theme pervades the volume, in which several historic epochs pass away, from early pagan Ireland through 1890s Christendom, shown in a late stage in "Rosa Alchemica." The Secret Rose originally omitted two stories intended to form a "triptych" with "Rosa Alchemica"; these two, "The Tables of the Law" and "The Adoration of the Magi," printed together privately (but with the Lawrence and Bullen fluoron) later in 1897, complete the apocalyptic design in "Joachimist" prophecies of a new epoch and in a report by three Irish "magi" of the return of ancient gods. These last two stories appear in most but not all subsequent publications of the collection.
The volume's Irish emphasis should not obscure influences from the Anglo-French Decadence. In "The Adoration of the Magi," a Paris prostitute is the oracle of the new age, explaining how to summon the gods by concentrating upon their essential "colours . . . sounds . . . odours." Even the protagonist of the first story, Aodh, while apparently based on a legendary Irish figure, is also indebted, as Yeats later states, to the beheaded John the Baptist in Oscar Wilde's Salome. The fin-de-siecle is perhaps most evident in the peacock tapestries, heavy incense, "glimmering" mosaics, and black lilies of "Rosa Alchemica." This tale has been read as both an example and a parody of nineties' aestheticism since its narrator and Robartes seek beyond art for supernatural experience--the former clinging cautiously to Roman Catholic orthodoxy and the latter promoting the new pagan order. The inmost sanctuary of the Order of the Alchemical Rose forms a circle or mandala with a great rose centering both ceiling and floor--a rose whose petals transform themselves into immortals who dance with mortals, thus creating in live three-dimensional forms the previously static mandala pattern. A flouted cross in the midst of the dancers completes the design of the "rosy cross" and defines the outgoing Christian era.
Fire is a significant symbol in many of the tales, and art itself is cast as a torch-like agent for setting fire to the existing order, presumably as the alchemist's fire may calcine the world on the last day. A "sacred book" is also a recurring motif. Texts-within-the-text range from a jewel-cased medieval manuscript in "Where There is Nothing, There is God" to examples of the grimoire, one bringing a curse to Hanrahan in "The Book of the Great Dhoul and Red Hanrahan" and another detailing the esoterica of Robartes's new pagan order in "Rosa Alchemica." In "The Tables of the Law," the monkish but heretical quester Owen Aherne introduces yet another text-within-the-text, a book purported to be by the historic Abbot Joachim of Fiore, its "medieval" Latin passages composed by Lionel Johnson. These passages project the imminence of a final era in a strangely exotic form unimagined by the real-life abbot. But it is Robartes's rose-stamped vellum book on spiritual alchemy, in "Rosa Alchemica," that apparently resembles The Secret Rose itself, the ultimate example of the "golden book."
Stories occur in the following order: "The Binding of the Hair," "The Wisdom of the King," "Where There Is Nothing, There is God," "The Crucifixion of the Outcast," "Out of the Rose," "The Curse of the Fires and of the Shadows," "The Heart of the Spring," "Of Costello the Proud, of Oona the Daughter of Dermott and of the Bitter Tongue," "The Book of the Great Dhoul and Hanrahan the Red," "The Twisting of the Rope and Hanrahan the Red," "Kathleen the Daughter of Hoolihan and Hanrahan the Red," "The Curse of Hanrahan the Red," "The Vision of Hanrahan the Red," "The Death of Hanrahan the Red," "The Rose of Shadow," "The Old Men in the Twilight," and "Rosa Alchemica."
These stories appeared earlier in periodicals like The Savoy and The National Observer. Later collections, until the recent publication of the variorum edition, omit "The Binding of the Hair" and "The Rose of Shadow" and substitute a new story, "Red Hanrahan," for "The Book of the Great Dhoul and Hanrahan the Red." The variorum contains the first publication of proofs corrected by Yeats in l932. Other publications of the collection, besides one limited to the revised Hanrahan stories in 1905, are in Collected Works in Verse and Prose (1908), both editions; Stories of Red Hanrahan: The Secret Rose: Rosa Alchemica (1913 and 1914); Stories of Red Hanrahan and the Secret Rose (1927); and Mythologies (1959).
Yeats's prose has never been as highly esteemed as his poetry. Moreover, Bullen once told Yeats that he was controversial among booksellers (too "heterodox," as Yeats mildly put it) because of The Secret Rose. Nonetheless, the volume was well-received in the main. The Academy reviewer was typical, hailing the "glamour of the Celt" and preferring the Red Hanrahan tales above all. A. E., while praising "Rosa Alchemica," congratulated Yeats (perhaps with dubious justice) for not having fallen under the spell of Arthur Symons and The Savoy crowd, especially when writing of Hanrahan. Fiona MacLeod (William Sharp) declared that no other prose of the day was "so fine, so subtle, so seductive" as Yeats's but found "Rosa Alchemica," unlike the Hanrahan tales, "too highly wrought." Similarly, the Saturday Review critic twitted the poet for the "uninteresting" black lilies of "Rosa Alchemica" but admired Hanrahan's vision of roses floating in water. And The Athenaeum affirmed what is still clear--that Yeats's greater medium is poetry.
The Secret Rose forms a meeting ground for Yeats's early aestheticism, his increasing research into the occult, and his interest in folkloric sources. His most popular book of prose, it introduces not only the favorite Hanrahan but also Aherne and Robartes, important in "The Phases of the Moon" (1918), Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends (1931), and A Vision (1925, 1937). Thus it looks forward philosophically to Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917) and A Vision, establishing a context for understanding many of the early poems. The poem "To the Secret Rose," heading the stories, links the collection with The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), in which it reappears (as "The Secret Rose"), as do versions of several other poems and characters (turned personae) from the stories. Yeats's early cosmology and "vision" are later greatly elaborated but show many of their major characteristics in this 1897 volume.
Virginia Hyde
Washington State University