Yeats's fairies have conditions too
It is a dreadful thing to say that Mr. W.B. Yeats does not understand fairyland.
The immediate target is Yeats's The Land of Heart's Desire (first published 1894), the play behind the preceding quotation. Yet its dramatic action complicates Chesterton's charge. In the 1894 Stone & Kimball text, Maire longs to escape household duties; the fairy promises release, but power depends on particular transactions and boundaries. Gifts of milk and fire give the fairies power over the household for a year; a crucifix protects the house; enchanted primroses become a barrier; and departure requires Maire's death. This is hardly a world without dangerous conditions. Even the description of the fairies as lawless belongs to Father Hart, a character warning against them, rather than to an unqualified authorial declaration. Yeats, 1894 text, speeches beginning with Bridget's warning about milk and fire and the concluding confrontation.
Chesterton's stronger distinction concerns the desired good: Yeats's bride seeks escape from ordinary obligations, whereas Chesterton's fairy-tale ethic makes accepting a prohibition part of enjoying a gift. But that distinction should not erase the play's own costs and constraints, or treat the wishes of a dramatic character as simply Yeats's doctrine. This is an interpretive qualification of Chesterton's polemic, not evidence of Yeats replying to him.
Edition matters here. The readily available Gutenberg text is the seventh, revised edition of 1912, later than Orthodoxy (1908). It replaces the primrose barrier with a boundary created by the fairy's dancing and includes a different account of her power. The earlier witness supports the qualification without projecting those revisions backward. 1912 edition, edition statement and confrontation after the child's identity is revealed.
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