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Title: Early memories; some chapters of autobiography

Author: John Butler Yeats

Author of introduction, etc.: W. B. Yeats

Editor: Elizabeth Corbet Yeats

Release date: August 9, 2020 [eBook #62893]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Laura Natal Rodrigues at Free Literature (Images
        generously made available by Hathi Trust.)


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Produced by Laura Natal Rodrigues at Free Literature (Images
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EARLY MEMORIES; SOME CHAPTERS
OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY

BY JOHN BUTLER YEATS.

THE CUALA PRESS
CHURCHTOWN
DUNDRUM

MCMXXIII




PREFACE


My father died in New York on February 2nd, 1922, at the end of his
eighty second year. He died after a few hours illness brought on, as it
seemed, by a long walk in the cold of a New York winter. He awoke in the
middle of the night to find his friends Mrs Foster and Mr John Quinn
sitting beside his bed and after a few words of pleasure at the sight
said to Mrs Foster 'Remember you have promised me a sitting in the
morning.' These were his last words for he dropped off to sleep and died
in his sleep. He had gone to America some ten or twelve years before to
be near my eldest sister who had an exhibition of embroidery there, and
though she left after a few months he stayed on. 'At last' he said 'I
have found a place where people do not eat too much at dinner to talk
afterwards'. As he grew infirm his family & his friends constantly
begged him to return, but, though he promised as constantly and would
even fix the day of sailing, he would always ask for a few weeks more.
He lived in a little French hotel in 29th Street where there is a café
and night after night sat there, sketch book in hand, surrounded by his
friends, painters and writers for the most part, who came to hear his
conversation. He seemed to work as hard as in his early days, and drew
with pen or pencil innumerable portraits with vigour, and subtlety. He
painted a certain number in oils, & worked for several years at a large
portrait of himself, commissioned by Mr John Quinn. I have not seen this
portrait, but expect to find that he had worked too long upon it and, as
often happened in his middle life when, in a vacillation prolonged
through many months it may be, he would scrape out every morning what he
had painted the day before, that the form is blurred, the composition
confused, and the colour muddy. Yet in his letters he constantly spoke
of this picture as his masterpiece, insisted again and again, as I had
heard him insist when I was a boy, that he had found what he had been
seeking all his life. This growing skill had been his chief argument
against return to Ireland, for the portrait that displayed it must not
be endangered by a change of light. The most natural among the fine
minds that I have known he had been preoccupied all his life with the
immediate present and what he thought his growing skill, but began
towards its end, as I suppose we all do, to compare the present to the
remote past. When I noticed how often his letters referred to long dead
relations and friends, 'those lost people' as he called them in one
letter, I persuaded him to begin his autobiography. He wrote, though
with difficulty and a little against the grain, the biographical
fragment in this book. When his account of friends and relations had
come to an end the difficulty increased, and finding it more amusing to
put the present into letters, or conversation, he put off the next
chapter from day to day. Everything that happened, the death or marriage
of an acquaintance, the discovery of a new friend, stirred his
imagination; and his letters, now that his conversation can be heard no
more, are indeed the fullest expression of a wisdom where there is
always beauty. Yet this biographical fragment has its measure of wisdom
and beauty, and I am pleased to think that when my son has reached his
eighteenth birthday he will be able to say 'Though my grandfather was
born a hundred years ago, and I have never seen his face, I know him
from his book and think of him with affection'.


W. B. Yeats.

June, 1923.




EARLY MEMORIES
SOME CHAPTERS OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY
BY JOHN BUTLER YEATS.


Why I became an artist is a question which every artist must sometimes
put to himself. It was my father who made me an artist, though his
intention was that I should become a barrister, and I did become a
barrister, but soon left it to follow my destiny and be an artist. Had I
remained a barrister, in all probability both my sons would have taken
to the law and would not now be one a poet and the other a painter.

When I was a little child, like other children I took to drawing, and my
father being very appreciative of his children admired what I drew. In
those days there was a heavy tax on paper as a defence against cheap
journalism, & the radical movements which it was bound to foster, and my
mother, being, as are most mothers, careful of expenditure, and not very
sympathetic toward my artistic strivings, was always reluctant to give
me paper on which I could draw. However, my father was an Irish
gentleman of the old school and not at all thrifty; from him I could
always get as much paper as I wanted. At that time there were no
illustrated magazines and only one illustrated paper which I saw very
occasionally at a friend's house. The only newspaper which came into my
father's house was the London 'Times' and it had a picture of a clock.
It was I think a rough wood-block. There is no child who will not really
subscribe to Aristotle's doctrine that art is imitation, and in this
case the imitation was roughly rendered so that it might be described as
imitation with selection.

I was the eldest of the family and my brothers were much younger, for
which reason my childhood was without companionship. Ah, the loneliness
of such a childhood and the blessedness of it! Whether inside the house
or out in the grounds I was always by myself, therefore I early learned
to sustain myself by revery and dream. Years afterwards I suffered a
good deal from the reproofs of my elders, for my habit of
absentmindedness. Of course I was absentminded and am so still. In those
childhood days I discovered the world of fantasy, and I still spend all
my spare moments in that land of endearing enchantment.

I think as a child I was perfectly happy; my father my friend and
counsellor, my mother my conscience. My father theorized about things
and explained things and that delighted me, not because I had any mental
conceit but because I delighted then as I still do in reasoning. My
mother never explained anything, she hadn't a theoretical faculty; but
she had away of saying 'Yes darling' or 'No darling,' which, when put
out, she would change into a hasty 'Yes dear' or 'No dear' that was
sufficient for all purposes. There was a servant in the house whose name
was Sam Matchett. As is the way in the country, he was butler and
coachman, land steward and gardener. He had been in the army and he
several times told me that he had been the strongest man in the
regiment. I admired him more than I did anybody else, and he enjoyed my
admiration as much as Achilles did that of Patroclus. I think he did
very much as he liked with my father, but my mother was made of firmer
material. My mother had a great belief in exercise in the open air, and
when Sam wanted to do a little shooting on his own account, he would
approach her artfully and say that he knew where there was a pheasant or
a hare and that he thought of going to get it, and that he would like to
take 'Master Johnny' with him; and off we two would go. My father, was
six feet two inches in his stocking feet and well-built, famous in his
college days as an athlete and racket player, and Sam Matchett to excite
the admiration of the women servants would induce my father to stand on
the palm of his hand, and he would raise him with arms outstretched to
the level of the kitchen table. It was no wonder that I admired Sam, and
it helped no doubt in my artistic education and started an appreciation,
which still exists, for muscular well-made men. Of course I picked up
all Sam's words and modes of expression, and my mother didn't quite like
it; but as these referred to horses and cattle and fields and game, in
my own mind I was convinced that Sam knew a good deal more about it than
she did. I remember he used to wonder that I did not prefer my father to
my mother. I think he was an exceedingly good influence upon my life. He
bestowed a great deal of care on my manners, which is not surprising
when one remembers that however it be with the upper classes, the Irish
peasant has the instincts of a gentleman. My father was a Rector of a
very large parish in County Down, Ireland, & there were no boys' schools
anywhere within reach. A village school-master taught me to read, after
which I read Robinson Crusoe diligently. In the evening after dinner my
father would sit beside his candle reading, and my mother would sit by
her candle sewing, and I would nestle beside her reading Robinson
Crusoe, and I can remember that at certain critical passages in this
history I would tremble with anxiety, and that I was most careful lest
my elders should discover my excitement and laugh at me. These candles
needed to be snuffed incessantly, and it was my ambition to be allowed
to snuff them; but when I tried I snuffed the candle out, and never
again got the chance, my mother was inexorable. We were a large family,
boisterous, full of animal spirits & health, sometimes very friendly
together while at other times we would quarrel. Yet I never remember a
single instance of corporal punishment or indeed any kind of punishment
but once, and then I was the victim. My mother induced my father to
commence my education, and he began by something in arithmetic, and I
failed miserably as I would at the present moment. Up to that moment I
had been the pride of my father: not only was I his eldest son and the
heir to the family property, but he was convinced I was exceedingly like
his brother Tom, who in his course at Trinity College, Dublin, had never
been beaten in mathematics. When therefore I failed in arithmetic the
blow was too much for his fond hopes, and he gave me a box on my ear. He
had no sooner done so than he shook hands with me and hoped I was not
offended, and then glided out of the room. I was not offended but very
much astounded. I wonder if he told my mother. At any rate, years
afterwards when I was a full grown man, I heard her regretting that she
could never induce my father to teach any of us. He said he had no
patience.

At last I went to school. It was a boarding-school at Seaforth,
Liverpool, and was kept by three maiden ladies: it was a very
fashionable school. We were nice little boys with short jackets and wide
white collars. Never was any boy so happy as I was in the prospect of
that school. My uncle took me to Liverpool; and when he suggested that I
stay with him a day longer I would not, I wanted to get into that
school. I was not ten minutes inside the walls when I think I was about
the most miserable boy in all England, and believed the cloud would
never, never lift. I looked at all the other boys and wondered again and
again how they could be so cheerful.

My father was evangelical as was then fashionable in the best
intellectual circles. He must have said something about hell in my
hearing, yet, I did not make any real acquaintance with that dismal and
absurd doctrine till I went to Miss Davenport's school. The school was
managed upon the highest principles of duty, no prizes were ever given
for all must work from sake of duty, and we slept with our Bibles under
our pillows with directions to read them as soon as we awoke in the
morning; but hell was the driving force. Miss Emma Davenport, who was
the chief of the school, often spoke of it.

In the early mornings I read my Bible with assiduity, but only the Old
Testament never the New. It was the age of faith; I believed every word
to be the word of God, of that mighty God of whom our school-mistress
was always speaking. I had always believed also that Robinson Crusoe was
an equally veracious history; and when the nurses and servants told me
ghost stories and fairy tales, I accepted all they said with an
unfaltering credulity. There were certain cabins in our neighbours said
to be haunted one in particular covered with ivy which I never passed
without a shiver of fear and curiosity. I did not tell my elders, I was
too wise: instinctively I knew that they would have robbed me of my
ghostly thrills. Now-a-days people are brought up in a world of reason
and science: is it any wonder that intricate and delicate and difficult
verse should give way to the poetry of rhetoric and a moral uplift?
People used to amuse themselves by bracing or relaxing their souls in
the vast and shadowy world of solitary fantasy: now we do better--at any
rate it is easier--we set about reforming our neighbours. When I first
arrived at that English School I was greatly surprised by English
mispronunciation. Emma, the Christian name of our headmistress was
invariably called 'Emmer,' just as to this day in London clergymen of
all denominations pronounce the name of our late Gracious Majesty as
'Victorier,' whereas every Irishman knows that her name is 'Victoria.'
Among the trio of ladies governing the school Emma was the ruling
spirit, but she had a sister Betsy who if she could do nothing else
could apply the cane with sharpness and decision. One day the only other
Irish boy in the school and myself climbed for a few feet on one of the
trees. There was a sharp tap at the schoolroom window: it was Betsy. She
told us to stand in the dining-room until the boys came in for tea. We
stood there and waited and would have been dull but for my friend. He
produced out of the recesses of his pocket a piece of wax kept for the
purpose and diligently applied it to the palm of his hand, & I followed
his example. Afterwards we rubbed our hands as hard as we could along
the iron top of the fire-screen. Thus we prepared for what was coming.
When the boys entered for tea, Betsy came with them and sat down at the
head of the table, we standing in the centre of the room. After a moment
or two she arose and I still hear her voice as she said, 'Tandy, (Tandy
was my friend's name) fetch me the cane.' Tandy had been longer in the
school than I and knew all about that cane and found it easily. We
received three strokes on each of our hands; it was very painful and I
was very much astonished, and when I went home for the holidays I was
glad to find that the blood blisters were still there, and I very
eagerly showed them to my father who to my surprise only laughed, being
neither sympathetic nor impressed. Years afterwards when I saw the
portraits of Queen Elizabeth I recognized the resemblance to Betsy. She
dressed elaborately with a high collar that reached over her ears and
was very tall & meagre, and was, as I remember, like the Queen in that
she was a faded beauty. Lonely spinsters sometime suffer from the
thought that they've lived wasted lives. It must have soothed Betsy's
last moments to remember how she could raise blood blisters on little
boys' hands.

My conscience once played me a very nasty trick. As you may suppose the
greatest crime next to setting the school on fire, or running away, or
something of that sort, was to tell a lie. If a little boy told a lie he
was birched for it, and possibly went to hell hereafter. Telling a lie
is sometimes a little boy's greatest temptation, and the elders have
decided that it is the greatest crime. I was reading a novel called 'The
Children of the New Forest,' and had got far on into the second volume
and was so interested that I insisted upon telling all about it to the
drawing-master, and he told me novels were lies, and was so emphatic
that my conscience compelled me to shut that book. I still remember that
I had just reached page 224 in the second volume. Yet that master who
was such a fanatic for truth always touched up our water-colour
drawings, and made them look like master-pieces, for the edification of
our parents and for their deception. To my non-puritan eyes man's
inconsistency is always a charm and it has often been his safe-guard.

The great Queen Elizabeth used to spit and swear when the foreign
ambassadors crossed her temper, yet I doubt whether she had
distinguished nerves. Cecil said of her that she was sometimes greater
than a man and sometimes less than a woman.

At twelve years old I left that school and I think I left happiness
behind me: ever since I've lived under cloudy skies. I went to a school
in the Isle of Man kept by a Scotchman. That Scotchman brushed the sun
out of my sky. I remember, as yesterday, how my father talked about him.
He had never been to school himself, having been educated by his father
who was a scholar; and it was his conviction that if he had only gone to
school and had been efficiently flogged he would have risen to the
highest eminence; therefore, he talked of this Scotch school-master with
an enthusiasm that was infectious: so that I who shared all his ideas
went to my second school, my mind alive with the most pleasant
anticipations. When we reached the Island and Athol Academy we were
ushered into the library, and I saw my school-master. My father had
already tactfully interrogated him about his flogging propensities, so
that when he brought into our presence a class of small boys in order
that my father and uncle, who was of the party, might test their
proficiency, he suddenly asked each boy how many times he had been
flogged. As I remember not a boy had escaped. What my uncle thought I
don't know, but I know that my courage oozed out at the end of my
fingers. My mother had arranged that we three boys should sleep in a
room by ourselves. That night when we were going to bed, the
housekeeper, a very nice woman who came from Ireland, & I daresay felt a
little sorry for her compatriots, by way of distracting our thoughts
pulled up the blind and we looked out and there, quite close to the
front of the house, we saw the wild waves tumbling under a stormy moon.

The next morning between nine o'clock & twelve I saw three boys receive
what the master called 'Three capital drubbings.' That night as we lay
in our little room we three brothers had become very sober boys.

Among the Beatitudes is one which is not in the Bible, but nevertheless
is in every Scotchman's bones: 'Blessed are they who expect not, for
they shall not be disappointed.'

Among the boys was one from the County Limerick who saw the grotesque in
everything, and my brother who was the leader in all the games and the
handsomest and merriest boy in the school, who lived to be the success
of the family and who had never known illness until he died when fifty
six years of age. Fortune seemed to have showered on him every kind of
good luck except that of growing old. Another boy was my dear friend,
George Pollexfen, whose sister I afterwards married. Unlike my brother,
George was the most melancholy of men. He was melancholy as a boy and as
a man. I think it was his melancholy that attracted me, who am a
cheerful & perennially hopeful man. It always mortifies me to think how
cheerful I am, for I am convinced it is a gift which I share with all
the villains: it is their unsinkable buoyancy that enables these
unfortunates to go on from disaster to disaster and remain impenitent.
My old friend and school-mate always saw the worst side of things. On a
summer day he would remember that winter was coming, and if prosperity
came to him, as it did all his life, he made elaborate preparations for
the arrival of misfortune. He was very tender-hearted and humane, & so
out of his prognostications of evil he would extract a kind of sad
humour that made him infinitely tender and pitiful. Out of sorrow he
would extract mirthfulness as the scaffold echoes with a jest. In the
vehemence of good spirits and hopefulness we grow careless of other
people's feelings, as do the rich of the poor men at their gates: not so
my sad-hearted and much-burdened old friend. He had also great gifts of
expression. What he felt and thought and what he smiled at, for he never
laughed, he could tell you in long detailed narratives of men and
things. Although slow and tedious in all his movements--and in
conversation that tedium was delightful--he afterwards became famous as
a steeplechase rider. He was exceedingly well made, and of proved nerve
and courage. Sometimes both as boy and man he would throw off some of
his melancholy and then his gaiety had the charm of the unexpected, like
rare sunshine on a gloomy mountain. The head-master disliked him because
of his irresponsiveness which is always trying to the autocratic temper.
He said that he looked at him with the face of a horse, which indeed was
not an inaccurate description. Had it been possible for our head-master
to conceal himself for one night in the large dormitory, where George
slept with nine or ten other boys, he would have been wiser. Night after
night he would keep these boys wide awake & perfectly still while he
told them stories, made impromptu as he went along. Silence was
commanded in all the bedrooms, therefore these had to be told in
smothered whispers. I did all I could--and my father helped me--to
persuade him to come to Trinity College. Had he done so, he would
doubtless have been a writer of extraordinary spontaneity & force, and I
should not be writing now these boyish recollections. My friend was
because of his family and their traditions puritanic, but his puritanism
was of a peculiar sort; he wasn't in the least aggressive like the
Belfast man, nor was he conceited nor inquisitorial as the Scotch are;
it was merely that he saw human nature sorrowfully, and with little
hope. It only enhanced his tenderness, which was like that of a nurse by
the bedside of a sick man, and veritably there were times when thinking
about this benighted and lost human nature he was like a tender mother
with a fractious child: yet never did he lose his sense of proportion,
or his sense of fact, or his mirthfulness. At first in any company he
would be a perfect wet blanket, and an embarrassment, so that
conversation would flag; presently he would begin to talk and then
people would discover that he knew more about the subject than, as it
seemed to them, anybody else that had ever existed, and that he knew it
all as a man of feeling and imagination. They would also discover that
he was a listener, whose attention you would woo as that of a king on
his throne. He died possessed of a good deal of money: but as he himself
told me, with characteristic veracity, the money was made for him by a
clerk whom he kept from drink. It never entered into his head to give
any of the money to the clerk; it was his by the law, and by the law he
kept it. Why puritans are thus tied up and bound and handcuffed and
padlocked in the prisons of the law is not for me to say. I have always
distrusted puritanism, in that respect I am a genuine Irish Protestant
and believe with Christ that the law was made for man and not man for
the law. So did not believe my melancholy friend. At the command of the
law he would have given you everything he owned and not harboured a
regret. What he was ready to give he would exact of others. His life was
a long imprisonment. Yet human nature is never more interesting than
when undergoing this kind of ordeal. To meet a man in the pleasant ways
of acquaintanceship is interesting and exciting, to visit him in prison
may be painful, but it is enthralling; for which reason, though I hate
puritanism, I don't think I would like it to be entirely removed from
the world, unless it be the Belfast variety, which like the east wind is
good for neither man nor beast. There was a phrase sometimes on my
father's lips, forced from him by sudden annoyance: 'Nothing can exceed
the vulgar assumption of a Belfast man.' The root of my old friend's
puritanism was self-immolation, the other sort is the glorification of
self-assertion. When I think of my friend and others like him, I say to
myself that the prison pallor on a fine face is more interesting than
the ruddy cheeks of the warden or turnkey or the Governor of the gaol,
who all live in the open air.

George Pollexfen was not popular at school nor was he popular as a man.
He never talked except upon some subject which long meditation had made
his very own, and though a good listener, it was with a perfectly
impassive face. Yet though never popular he came to be loved by a few,
and as the years went by these few who had discovered him for themselves
talked about him to others. There are people who come to us and there
are people to whom we go: he was of the latter kind. There are people
who go out into the streets, along the roads and gather in their friends
in armfuls. These are the popular people, they are irresistible, they
are as stimulating as the winds of Spring, wherever they appear opinions
are formed and conceit grows. My friend had no conceit and no opinions,
and therefore could impart none, but he was as rich in natural fertility
as a virgin forest: and though logicians and theoretical people could
make nothing of him, poets--my son, for instance--were at ease in his
company. The question arises, did he himself love anybody? Though I have
known him all his life, I am not sure. He leaned upon my daughter, and
perhaps he had some affection for her. He constantly came up from Sligo
to Dublin, though the exertion was irksome, to consult her. He would say
'She has a head! she has a head!' and then he would shake his own. His
feeling for my son was a kind of enthusiasm; for your genuine puritan
has a profound respect for worldly success, in that respect being a Jew
of the Old Testament rather than a Disciple of the New. I have already
said that if he knew anything about a subject he knew everything: and
one of his subjects was racing. Sligo was full of racing men, they are
swarming all along the West of Ireland. If a party of these came to see
him, they would find him wrapped in his habitual gloom, and they would
rouse him by asking some adroit questions about his nephew; and then
they would talk about the horses. He himself, I know for a certainty
never risked more than ten shillings on any race, but he knew all about
the horses. Many years ago I went to Punchestown Races with him: he knew
not only everything that was to be known about the horses, but all about
the jockeys and their curious histories, & what he knew he presented
without philosophy, without theories, without ideas, in a language that
recalled the vision of Chaucer and the early poets. On that occasion as
always he talked poetry though he did not know it.

George on a race-course, above all if mounted on a wild and splendid
race-horse, was a transformed being. Puritanism was shattered, torn
away, a mere rag of antediluvianism. Then he loved all men, he loved
humanity, he loved even himself: a natural man, such as he was meant to
be, a pleasant self-esteem, without aggressiveness, smiling from every
gesture. I never saw any man on horseback to compare with him, horse and
man made a unity of grace and strength. Yes, at such times he was a
lovable man, and you never forgot it. I've heard old jockeys talk with
enthusiasm of his skill as a steeplechase rider, especially when it came
to the 'finish.' These old warriors of the race-course didn't care much
about poets and artists, or even successful men of business, but they
knew what they were saying when they talked about steeplechasing. I
speak of the old days, when the jumps were so high on an Irish
race-course that every time a jockey rode he took his life in his hands,
and when after every race we were pretty sure to hear the crack of a
policeman's rifle sending some gallant steed to his doom because of a
broken leg or some such accident, and when a celebrated surgeon would
come down from Dublin prepared with all his instruments--at any rate it
was so at Punchestown.

From time immemorial the Irish have had a passion for horses. A friend
of mine once said to an old man past his work 'Tom what are you always
thinking about?' 'Sor,' said he, 'I do be thinkin' of horses.' Six weeks
before George died my daughter arrived in Sligo for her annual visit;
and to her surprise found him in bed. He said to her 'Lily, I think I'm
going,' and made no further allusion until two days before his death,
when he gave her elaborate directions as to where she would find, in
various pockets of his coat, certain sums of money, for the distribution
of which he gave her further directions. While awaiting the inevitable
event he read diligently during those last weeks, my daughter hunting
everywhere among neighbours' houses for novels of a kind to interest
him. He died just as dawn was breaking, while the Banshee was crying
around the house. As soon as this crying began one of the nurses came
and awakened my daughter because another nurse, who had arrived the day
before from Dublin, was very much alarmed. The three women heard that
crying. At first the nurses had thought it an old woman in distress: at
least the new nurse thought so. Then they knew, and one of them went for
my daughter. In his solitary musings, and he was always solitary, he had
discovered for himself some kind of religious faith neither Protestant
nor Catholic which enabled him to look on Death and Eternity with a
tranquil mind. As he never went to church and had no sociable impulses
and never dealt in opinion his religion remained inarticulate,
incommunicable. This curious solitariness was characteristic of the
whole family. I myself am eagerly communicative, and when my son first
revealed to me his gift of verse 'Ah!' I said, 'Behold I have given a
tongue to the sea-cliffs.' It should never be forgotten that poetry is
the Voice of the Solitary Spirit, prose the language of the
sociable-minded. Solitary feeling is the substance of poetry. Facile
emotion, persuasion, opinion and argument and moral purpose are the
substance of prose, and belong to the sympathetic side of our nature,
reaching out for companionship.

This portrait of my old friend would be incomplete if I did not mention
his skill as an astrologer. Through my son's influence, astrology became
one of his subjects. In his horoscopes he never failed. He was eager for
them. At all times he had an unsleeping industry. A horoscope cost him
two days of continued effort. Give him the date and place of anyone's
birth and in two days' time he would present you with a paper
written out in a most attractive archaic language telling you
everything--everything at any rate that was essential, past, present and
to come in the life of the unknown 'native.' I say unknown, because he
did not care to draw the horoscope of any person whom he knew.

Still the question occurs, why did some men love this man without asking
his love in return? The answer is simple: he had an interesting mind and
revealed it to us. For one thing, in the matter of what I call opinions
his mind was a blank, he had no opinions. A man richly endowed with
instincts as countless as the threads in a piece of embroidery, each
with its own intelligence as true as the instinct of a nesting bird, and
yet no opinions, no more than if he were a visitant come from a distant
star! And oh, the blessedness of it! It was like the peace of early
morning after a night of sorrow. Sometimes here in New York I have
wandered into apartments and among people where they were running some
great factory for the production of opinion, anarchist, socialist,
pacifist, I know not what. The din seems that of the trenches, only that
instead of heroism and the sobering effect of great issues on which men
stand face to face with death itself, we have small antagonism and
vanity and temper, always temper; and instead of intensity, vehemence;
and the pitiful mental and moral squalor of men trying to dominate, and
with that end in view quite content to be shallow in feeling as in
thought; quite willing, also, to insult with ugliness and to make
themselves ugly--in fact, anything for effect! To be with my old friend
was like entering a shaded parlour, its quiet only broken by the
rustling noise of a fire burning briskly on the hearthstone.

You see, he knew so much that no opinion and no theory could cover what
he knew. Doubtless, had he liked he might have denied what he knew and
rushed into the fray and been as clamorous and vulgar as anybody. This
did not tempt the solitary man, nourishing himself on the indwelling
spirit of brooding truth. When I think of him and others of his sort I
have known in Ireland, Synge, for one, I am reminded of the great
Russian writers. In old age Tolstoi made strange incursions into the
world of opinion, and found what he wanted in the New Testament, and
Dostoïevsky, if I remember rightly, fell back on the Orthodox Greek
Church. For this kind of futile industry neither had any aptitude. I
suppose their sensitive minds heard the call of the spirit of the age.
Had George taken to opinions he would have been just as credulous and
unskilful as these mighty men. Living all his days in the West of
Ireland, far from books and from leaders of thought, the spirit of the
age did not come his way. And how does Shakespeare figure in the world
of opinion? Did he ever take lance in hand to fight on behalf of any of
the opinions of his day? I fancy that like Hamlet he had too much mind
to make up! Is it not a fact attested over and over again that poets
always know too much to give entertainment to any system of opinion,
however loudly it clamours for admittance.

These men have to live in the hermitage of their own minds. The poet
always is solitary and never more solitary than when most sociable, and
it is because it lacks the fervour of heated opinion that good
literature avoids emphasis. I am perfectly alive to the value of the
fighting man when in the ranks and under strong discipline, or
self-appointed, as he often is, to subordinate tasks, as when an artist
produces the hideous to excite the crowd and to interest them in some
good cause that without the stimulus of hatred would not appeal to them.
Hatred so difficult to a full mind is so easy to an empty one. I don't
believe there was ever a great man that was a fighting man--not
Cromwell, he lived surrounded by fighting men but was himself
conciliatory to a degree; not Napoleon, of him a contemporary wrote, 'A
larger soul hath seldom dwelt in a house of clay:' his gift was that of
vision and purpose and an amazing talent for organisation. Had the
French demanded peace his genius would have devoted itself to organising
'the victories of peace.' Luther struggled hard to remain within the
Church, it was the fighting men inside its fold who drove him out. These
great men had purposes and had visions and were never fighting men,
though these were the tools with which they worked.

Poets must not meddle with opinions. The poet who becomes a fighting man
circumscribes his activity and coarsens his mind. Milton's poetical
genius never recovered the six political pamphlets he wrote. When I
think of the poetical mind I think of an oak tree that all night and all
day is drawing nourishment from the earth about its roots. A tree not so
nourished, and with its roots not pressed deep down into the earth,
would soon be overthrown soon laid prostrate by the storms of the upper
air. Had his attachments sunk deeper, pushing their intricate &
sensitive roots into kindly Mother Nature, Shelley, being kindly as well
as fine, would not so easily have been overthrown by Godwin's stale
philosophy--that man with a large head full of cold thought--and the
Harriet episode would have been more human.

I sometimes think that all of us mortal men, are companionable, but that
commerce and progress and a false civilization have put weapons into our
hands and taught us subterfuge and evasion, flight or attack. The poets
and artists are in revolt and would have none of this, at least in their
poetry, whatever they may do in their foolish logic. This is the unique
charm of poetry and the inspiration of what, from time immemorial,
people have agreed to call love, which is the true bond between man and
man that will survive all others. Its perfect and complete expression is
beauty, as ugliness is the expression of hatred or contempt or fear.

Goethe said of himself that he could not hate, and was ill-advised
enough to think it a blemish. If a poet hates, as sometime happens, love
is not far away. We have the invention of the Sirens, who, though they
have fish tails, are beautiful women; I think Homer was sorry for
Thersites.

Poets, being all compact of imagination and dream, are attached to the
quiet of the soul; and ugliness is exhausting, while love and beauty
replenish the wells. I think that but for some accident every great poet
would have attained to length of years, and every minor poet also, while
artists and poets of hate died young. My old school fellow, though
delicate both as a boy and a man, lived to be long past seventy. He
steered his course clear of opinion, hating no one and without
contention. One never knew what he thought. One did know abundantly what
he felt. Does anyone know what was Shakespeare's opinion of Juliet? Did
he know himself? Milton would not have kept silent.

Such people are a continual novelty. Had intellect been the dominating
thing in this personality, I should soon have grown tired. Intellect is
always the same. There are not two ways of doing the fifth proposition
of Euclid or of stating the theory of rent. You just know it or you
don't know it. But when it comes to a matter of feeling and of the
instincts and desires and the multitudinous sensibilities, no two men
are alike. They differ as a leaf on the tree differs from every other
leaf. In each is concealed a lovely surprise, if only someone would draw
the curtain. Change is the law of life; we desire it as we desire the
morning and sniff the morning air, a desire that will get us into
strange scrapes sometimes and be a pitfall to the innocent. A friend of
mine found Rossetti doing a study of a woman model, and painting the
nostrils with ultramarine. 'Well' said he wearily, 'I am so tired of
painting them always with madder brown.'

Search for novelty was quickening his imagination when he created the
Rossetti woman--I would that he had created many--it is like the lamp
set in the cap of the miner when he works underground. At that time
those of us young artists who aspired after imaginative and poetic art
were all agog about Rossetti. His poems had not then been published, nor
had any one seen his pictures outside his immediate friends. But by all
accounts he was a man of wonderful presence, keeping open mind and open
house for kindred spirits. Swinburne was one of the circle; I was told
Rossetti would not admit him without Whistler who knew how to keep him
from drinking too much. Rossetti seldom went to picture exhibitions; by
rare chance he did go to the Dudley, and saw there a picture of mine
which he liked so much that he sent to me by three messengers, one of
whom was his brother, an invitation to come and see him. I did not come.
I regret it very much. I think I was afraid of the great man; diffident
about myself and my work. To be afraid of anything is to listen to the
counsels of your evil angel. I used to hear a great deal about Rossetti.
I think that he exercised so much ascendancy because of a personality
which was naked and unashamed. A personality encased in the armour of
opinion arouses or calls for adherents & followers. Thoughts, fancies,
surmises, the whole army of guesses, which are the airy children of hope
and affection, present themselves to be liked or disliked without any
power of argument. Opinion challenges assent and submission as of right,
and is quite indifferent as to whether or no it is hideous in all men's
sight. Rossetti would not go to his brother's wedding because he said he
would meet all the bores of London. These bores were the men with
opinions and contentions. I sometimes meet a man all cased in the armour
of opinion, even as was John Knox--but raise his visor, let me see his
personality shining in his eyes, and how fascinating it is! Rossetti
never wore this kind of armour and did not need to raise his visor. He
was neither conventional nor unconventional. He immersed himself in art
and poetry, letting opinion go by the wind. How often I regret that I
did not go to him. Perhaps at a single bound I should have escaped
forever from this entangling web of grey theory in which I have spent my
life. There was another great poet that I missed. Browning had seen a
design that I made for a picture of Job's wife bidding him curse God and
die, and he came to see me. Unfortunately I was not in my studio when he
called.

I am sometimes asked what is it that artists & poets aim at. I answer,
it is the birth, the growth, and expansion of ever living personalities.
That is the value or the charm of a picture or poem. I read a poem or I
look at a picture; these, if they be works of art embody a personality.
A personality is a man brought into unity by a mood, not a static unity,
(that is character) but alive and glowing like a star, all in harmony
with himself. Conscience at peace yet vigilant; spiritual and sensual
desires at one; all of them in intense movement. In contact with such
picture or poem, the mood enters into my mind, pervading soul and body,
so that for the moment I become a living personality, with, for dominant
note, joy or sorrow, or hope or love. I become the personality I create.
When I read Rossetti's poems or look at his pictures, I fall under the
spell of his art. Had I met Rossetti in the flesh I think I should have
cast out forever this questioning intellect which has haunted me all my
life like a bad conscience--as indeed it does most men in these uneasy
days--and lived the imaginative life.

Going to see Rossetti must have been like a visit to the tropics. A
friend often asked me to go with him to see George Meredith. I threw
away also that chance but by no means with so keen a regret. In George
Meredith is no wild luxuriance, no risk of self-abandonment. He is
pervaded through and through with the conventions of upper middle-class
English society. The other stood aside from all conventions, even from
those of unconventionality. Naked we come into the world, and naked we
should remain if we retain personality and have the wizard's spell.

That school was in many things an image of life. All the nicknames and
jokes and daring comments sprang from the obscurity of the lower forms
and were anonymous. We elder and upper boys had a certain sobriety that
preserved us in staid decorum. If one of us in class was laboriously
translating an indecent passage in Lucian's Fables; from the lower end
of the class, which never even tried to translate anything, would come a
suppressed chuckle that would make our form teacher very uneasy. I fancy
it is these idle boys, with their preternatural acuteness for life and
reality, and the confidence that results, who afterwards become the
successful men. Most of their jokes were innocent enough. One morning
before breakfast in the playground when it was very cold, I found a
little gathering of them round a big burly boy in an aggressively thick
overcoat, and all were busy ostentatiously spreading out their hands and
rubbing them as if before a good fire, the big boy looking very sheepish
and helpless. An impudent Irish boy called out 'Heat by radiation,
Yeats.' The day before the head-master had given us a chemical lesson on
the properties of heat. And the nicknames! One boy was known as 'King.'
He had red hair and at first was called the 'Prairie on fire.' That was
too long and it became 'King Rufus' and finally 'King,' and he went by
no other name. Another was called 'Sin' which changed to 'Satan,' and
'Satan' he remained: a quiet dull boy, ugly and kindly, hulking in all
his ways and movements. It arose in this way. Every week the
neighbouring clergyman came to spend an hour in teaching us religion,
and when he asked what Judas carried in his bag this boy answered 'Sin.'
There may have been mines of sensibility in that boy. It was a bold idea
for a schoolboy to suppose Judas had carried Sin in his bag; but he
belonged to the commercial side of the school where they learned nothing
and had an easy time. We who worked at Latin and Greek went through much
suffering. In those days the classics were taught after the crudest
methods. Having learned some grammar, the declensions, and verbs, and
done a few sentences in Delectus, the Life of Hannibal by Cornelius
Nepos was thrust into our hands and the tribulation began. Without the
constant menace of the cane no healthy minded boy would have faced the
difficulties of our task. To fit the verb to the noun, and the
adjectives to the noun, and worry through all the participles, and
prepositions, and concords, and these through a long sentence in which
every word seemed to be wrongly placed, without any help, all alone by
yourself, under a rule of silence, so that you could not consult your
neighbour, was no end of a puzzle. Henry James' sentences are difficult,
but the difficulty is nothing to the difficulty of a young boy with a
Latin sentence. And we were all young boys not in the least interested
in the fortune of Hannibal, the Latin mind being as strange to us as the
mental processes of a futurist poet; but there stood our head-master
cane in hand, watchful to strike if a single mistake was made. Just as
in life, time and fate wait for human error! I can tell you we
worked--those of us at any rate who feared the cane. At the lower end of
the class were boys who never learned anything, and had, as it seemed to
me, grown habituated to the cane.

Novels were strictly forbidden. A very handsome boy of eighteen from the
Highlands was one day sitting in front of the school-room fire, basking
in its heat and comfortably reading a novel called 'The Romance of War.'
Our head-master stole in with cat-like tread in his noiseless slippers
and looked over his shoulder. I was nearby at the time, and saw that
book being slowly consumed in the red centre of the fire. We watched it
till it was in ashes the head-master, myself, and the boy who owned it!
Within twelvemonths that boy was fighting in the Crimea. He was one of
five or six boys being prepared for the military entrance examination.
None of them ever worked or were expected to work. They did, indeed, do
some mysterious things with solid cubes, which meant, I suppose,
instruction in methods of fortification. They always kept together and
were considered wild and wicked.

In those far off days, travelling was expensive. My parents lived deep
in the country, only to be reached by a four-horse coach, and Christmas
holidays were short at all schools, at ours only ten days. Therefore we
saw our families only once a year, during the summer holidays which
lasted six weeks. My father, mother, sisters and all the countryside
would exert themselves to give us a good time. The first week of that
holiday was enjoyment without alloy. Such sudden happiness would admit
companionship only with itself. After that came, like a creeping shadow,
growing darker and denser, the ever-nearer approach of the day when we
should have to return to school. Until the last week came, we brothers
scattered, each bent upon his own particular enjoyment. When that week
came, we went about together, made good companions by an identical
mournfulness; and our mother was as sad as we were.

Is a boarding-school a good institution for any boy? Certainly it is a
complete antidote to home influence, and is that desirable? A
boarding-school develops selfishness. Every boy for himself. Does one
acquire self-control? In such a school as mine the discipline from
without was too searching and too constant for that other discipline
from within to have a chance. When I left that school for good, I felt
myself to be empty of morals. There was avoid within. The outer control
had gone and it was a long time before the inner control grew up to take
its place. My legacy from that school was a vivid and perfectly
unconscious selfishness. From my short, far separated, loving holidays I
carried away memories of affection and what it might be for me. And I
think my history ever since has been the conflict between these two
principles. But I was not self-indulgent.

Some remnants of the old superstitions, assiduously poured into my soul
by Miss Emma Davenport, still hung about me, and I used to pray to God
for letters from home. I could, in all seriousness, debate with myself
whether there was any sense in praying when I knew that the time had
passed for posting that particular letter that I hoped for. My mother
wrote constantly, but could not write often enough to keep pace with my
longings. Occasionally my father wrote in his eloquent and intellectual
way and fired me with enthusiasm, so that I walked as if I had wings to
my feet. The Sun stands for ambition and intellect and power, and the
Moon for the poetry of affection, which being insatiable, brings regret
and the consciousness of a forced resignation. In those days if my
mother was the Moon my father was the Sun, shining aloft in my sky. It
was my father who made me the artist I am, and kindled the sort of
ambition I have transmitted to my sons. My wife, once meeting an old man
who in his youth had associated much with my father, judged it a good
opportunity to ask about him, and whether he was a good preacher. The
answer came promptly: 'Yes, good--but flighty--flighty.' I do think that
romance, which is pleasant beauty, unlike the austere beauty of the
classical school, is born of sweet-tempered men. My father was
sweet-tempered, and affectionate, also he constantly read Shelley, and,
no less, Shelley's antidote, Charles Lamb. To be with him was to be
caught up into a web of delicious visionary hopefulness. Every night,
when the whole house was quiet, and the servants gone to bed, he would
sit for a while beside the kitchen fire and I would be with him. He
never smoked during the day, and not for worlds would he have smoked in
any part of the house except the kitchen; and yet he considered himself
a great smoker. He used a new clay pipe, and as he waved the smoke aside
with his hand, he would talk of the men he had known--his
fellow-students--of Archer Butler the Platonist, and of a man called
Gray who was, I think, an astronomer, and of his friend Isaac Butt, that
man of genius engulfed and lost in law and politics. And he would talk
of his youth and boyhood in the West of Ireland where he had fished and
shot and hunted, and had not a care. Of how he would, on the first day
of the grouse shooting, climb to the top of a high mountain seven miles
away, and be there in the dark with his dogs and attendants, waiting for
the dawn to break.

There are men with a social gift who must dominate their company,
expecting others to woo them. This was not my father's way. Rather would
he lure you on till you believed, not in him, about which he did not
care, but in your own self. It was he who wooed his company not they
him. Naturally I found his conversation enthralling. His country
neighbours round about and his own friends & relations, would complain
that he used strange words; and so he did, and for that reason I was the
more pleased. A new word was to him, as to me, a pearl of discovery,
fished up out of some strange book he had been reading, and we would
enjoy it together. My mind often goes back into that wide kitchen, and
again I sit with him beside the fire, a little table for his tobacco and
whiskey at his side and on it a single candle throwing a feeble light.
The kitchen is the best room in the house. To compare it with a
drawing-room is to remember the difference between a fishing lugger
built and rigged and shaped for storm and angry sea, and a spic and span
yacht which never leaves the harbour except in the summer time when the
seas are safe and the winds gentle.

If the sweet-tempered men keep romance alive, it is the cross-tempered,
contentious men without affection who grub into the secret places to
find the poison and infection of ugliness. These people desire to
destroy everywhere the vision of happiness, and to make war on its
prophets and champions. Among such people my father was silent and
helpless. I think I am more venturesome.

Everybody was happy in Shakespeare's time. When the French Revolution
had spent its force, and Napoleon was at St. Helena, unhappiness was in
Paris, and from out of its thick cloud came the realistic wave. Of
course I know that there are cheerful people who adore ugliness. Such
people have so much animal spirit that they are like many schoolboys who
want to frighten their maiden aunt, but ugliness of the intense and
passionate kind comes out of the entrails of the angry and the unhappy.

When cheerful artists revel in the ugly what they write or paint is
purely mechanical, but whether an artist has the genuine passion and
can't help himself, or is only pretending to it, such men are a
weariness to any man with any tincture of a romantic imagination. I have
seen drawings & read prose done with an appetite for the ugly that
reminded me of the dogs that licked the sores of Lazarus.

My father was as forgiving as Shakespeare in the Sonnets, and he could
forget. The artist within him incessantly arranged and rearranged life,
so that he lived in fairyland. Sometimes my father's and another man's
account of the same incident would widely differ; but I always preferred
what my father said. William Morris told my son that Kipling when a boy
would come home from a days walk with stories of the day's adventures
which were all fiction. I wonder if Shakespeare would always cleave to
the truth in the common matters of every day. At no time did I lose
respect for my father, I knew with him it was only the gentle sport of
'make believe' without which life would be intolerable to men who live
by their affections. Saints and lovers and men governed by affection,
poets and artists, all live in phantasy, its falsehood truer than any
reality. By such falsehood we got nearer to truth. His charm to me was
his veracious intellect. He would lie neither to please the
sentimentalists nor the moralists. What talent I have for honest
thinking I learned from him.

Like every Evangelical clergyman of his kind, he regarded the Catholic
Church as the Enemy, yet he never disliked it, I am convinced, as he did
the Presbyterian. On leaving the University he became Curate to a
clergyman in the North of Ireland. His Rector was a learned man who had
published translations in verse from some early Italian poet. He was
also a very bad-tempered man. I have noticed that this kind of man finds
a great attraction in men who are of sweet and placable temper, as
perhaps the evil angels love the righteous whom they incessantly torment
and tempt but cannot persuade. The first quarrel arose because my father
rode all about the parish on a spirited horse and refused to desist. The
Rector wrote to him that he had hired a Curate and not a jockey. The
next quarrel was about my father's preaching. Evangelicism was at the
time fashionable among men of intellect, & the Rector hated
Evangelicism. My father gave me an amusing account of the quarrel. He
was staying, as he often did, in the Rector's house, and it was Sunday
morning. There was a rapid interchange of letters beginning at six in
the morning, and the argument was continued at breakfast, the ladies all
on my father's side. Finally the Rector said he would preach himself
that morning. As luck would have it, choosing at random among his stock
of ready-made sermons, he took with him a sermon tainted with the
abominable doctrine. My father described the smile that went round the
Rector's pew.

The Rector did, as I have said, after his hot-tempered way, love my
father, and when my father told him that he had lost some of his income
and could no longer stay in the parish, where he was, paid but a
pittance, the Rector worked himself into a rage and refused to bid him
good bye. Yet, some years afterwards, when my father preached in some
Cathedral, he saw his old Rector coming towards him with outstretched
hands, to suggest that he have the sermon printed and published.

The letters of English women are mostly dull, they are too ceremonious
for the ease and freshness of letter writing. Irish women take life
gaily & themselves lightly, with no latent puritanism and its suggestion
of self-importance, to retard their pens. My mother's letters were a joy
to all her family, and my father wrote copiously and eloquently. I
remember every letter by either of them would end with the words 'burn
this,' and the injunction was too well carried out. I don't think that
of all these letters there is even one extant. Nothing delighted my
father more than to write speeches and letters for his friends.
Sometimes they were business letters, but more often speeches for some
family gathering--perhaps there had been a quarrel, and all the clans
were to meet at a marriage. The difficulty was to make a speech that
would offend nobody and might reconcile their differences. My father
would undertake the task with the greatest animation, and as he would
not go himself to the wedding, others would come and tell him of the
wonderful cleverness of the speaker, and how surprised they were, and of
the blessed effects, and he and my mother would keep the secret.

All my father's life he lacked companionship, and he of all men the most
companionable. There was no one with whom he could exchange ideas. He
was surrounded by good men and good women, but for a man of intellect
that is not enough. I think that, though but a boy, I was nearer being
his companion than anybody else; I at least had mental curiosity. All
the grown-up people lay fast bound in the sleep of comfortable
orthodoxy, anxious about this world, but persuaded that the less they
thought about the world to come the better. Was it not all set out in
the Bible and quite clear to those having faith?

Romantic temper and high vitality had endowed my father with a natural
intrepidity. When therefore cholera came to Ireland where it attained a
mortality higher than anywhere else in the Kingdom, he went fearlessly
among the people, consoling them with religious hope and comforting them
also in many secular ways. I have been told that again and again he
would take the sick man in his arms, and hold him up, as he prayed and
administered the Sacrament, and this at a time when cholera was supposed
to be virulently infectious. This was never forgotten to him in the
parish. The poor have long memories.

To be fond of fishing ran in the family, but my father I think preferred
grouse shooting. Arthur Corbet, my mother's brother, a big athletic man
with a short temper, had because of a very bad stammer become a clerk in
the Bank of Ireland which all his life he regarded as an insult
inflicted upon him by cruel destiny. He would walk fourteen Irish miles
to a pretty sequestered village high up among the mountains, fish all
day, and at night return walking all those miles carrying a load of
fish. I don't think my father would have endured that fatigue for a
day's fishing, and my uncle would sometimes say that he had not the true
zest. The friends of my youth used to measure a man by his taste in
shooting, fishing, or hunting, and there were noisy and dismal circles
where men were measured by their capacity for drinking. When I was asked
by the people compiling 'Who's who' what was my favourite pastime, I
replied that I had none, but would like a little fishing. It was not
inserted, being considered, I suppose, too frivolous for the solemn
emptiness of that useful book. I do not like fishing with bait because
of the nauseous handling of the worms; and in shooting the sight of the
bird alive and wounded in one's hand is painful for the nerves. But no
one minds the flapping and writhing of the fish taken out of his
element. The fish is too remote; we cannot guess its thoughts, it
inspires no curiosity. To wander along a river bank and with your utmost
dexterity cast your flics lightly here and there over the surface of a
deep pool and watch for the yellow gleam of the fish as it rises, is
there anything so fascinating as this gambling in dark waters? I knew a
man who died an enviable death. He was a distinguished Dublin barrister,
a man of imagination, and he loved salmon fishing. He had just hooked a
salmon and was playing it when he had a heart seizure. As he lay in a
friend's arms, with his dying eyes he watched that fish being played and
landed. He went to his death charioted to the next world in a
fisherman's dream.

Mr. F. B., my cousin, had a very pretty country house and demesne on the
banks of Lough Dan, County Wicklow, and was the Squire of the district,
a sort of County Wicklow Sir Roger de Coverly. He had a little flock of
children and a wife upon whom he depended a good deal. Every day she
took the children for a walk, and if she stayed away a long time, as
would occasionally happen on a fine day, and he missed her, he would
bring out the dinner-gong and beat it, sending its mellow voice rolling
among the hills. And his wife would say 'We must return, my dears, I
hear your father calling.' Everyone liked that house and its
despotically indulgent master and gentle mistress and the happy children
who are now old people. Everything about that house partook of a sort of
civility not to be found every where. The coachman, when required to
yoke the car, would come out of the stable yard to the front of the
house and give a loud halloo, and having done so would go back, and you
would hear presently from far away down in the valley of the demesne the
rapid hoof-beats of a horse, a handsome grey horse I remember, and like
rushing wind he would gallop past you into the yard behind the house,
eager to leave the solitude of his pasturage for the open road. There
were other horses, and there were dogs and cats, all pleasant and
friendly. And there were beehives that made a pleasant hum in the summer
air, and there was a pony which no one in the house, not even the
coachman, could catch. 'Herself', the mistress of the house, would have
to come out on to the lawn, and he would let himself be taken and she
would lead him to the coachman. There was also a wise old donkey, who,
when we dined, would thrust his head through the window and ask to be
fed. Dining there, I said 'Don't give him any thing and see what he will
do.' 'He will come into the hall' they said, and when we heard him
blundering about in that not particularly spacious place, I wanted them
to try him further, but they said 'No, for he will bray'.

Why did people like staying in that house? Partly because of the great
natural beauty by which it was surrounded, and partly because of the
great cordiality of your welcome from all that numerous company of men
women and children. And yet there was something else. It was that they
were a quaintly interesting people, not modern at all, just mediæval,
who stirred the historical sense and made you think of some golden age
when no one was in a hurry and so all had time to enjoy themselves, and
for the sake of enjoyment to be courteous and witty and pleasant. There
was an old butler and an old French woman who did the cooking. Indeed
everything flavoured of 'tanned antiquity' except the brood of pretty
children, who, as I remember, did on my first visit keep all together,
bright and gay, with a life of their own, and rather silent. I was at
the awkward age when a boy becomes self-conscious and is at his ease
with no one.

Certain sour-faced socialists would explain everything by the economic
situation--yet surely here was poetry pure and simple--nothing but
poetry. It was on Lough Dan I caught my first trout, just under a dark
cliff rising straight out of the water. And many a fish I've caught in
that spot. I was staying there with my father and mother when my father
was seized with rheumatic fever, further aggravated by gout, and I
helped my mother to nurse him. Some years afterwards I myself had that
fever. I know all about it. Your soul turns to blackness, wrath
overpowers you and fills you with a sort of devilry. For a few days I
was as Swift or Carlyle at their fiercest. I hated everyone. I had such
insight and gift of utterance that I knew how to wound anyone who
approached me. It is not surprising, therefore, that my father,
suffering from this fever, should for once have been unreasonable. He
asked me to move him in bed. In a great flutter of fear and anxiety I
tried to do so. If you touched him he groaned, and though I tried my
very best I could not satisfy him. Beside himself with pain and with my
awkwardness, he called out impatiently 'Place me diagonally in the bed.'
The word 'diagonal' I knew only in Euclid. Yet he would only repeat
'Place me diagonally.' Afterwards, amidst all his pain, he laughed and
apologised, and said that he got the word, not from Euclid at all but
from Tristram Shandy, where years afterwards I found it. When they had
retired behind their bed-curtains, Mrs. Shandy said to Mr. Shandy 'I
think Uncle Toby is going to be married.' Then said Mr. Shandy 'He won't
be able to lie diagonally in bed any more.'

It was always an annoyance to Mr. Shandy that he could not puzzle Mrs.
Shandy, because she never bestowed a further thought upon anything that
she did not understand at once. But my father, when he flung at me the
word 'diagonal,' knew that he was inflicting on me the pain of puzzledom
and that was a passing satisfaction to him, even though the effect was
to increase my awkwardness and prolong his own discomfort. Is it because
of the sociable instinct that when we are ourselves in pain we desire to
share it with somebody else? A man worried about his business doesn't
like his smiling wife to go on smiling, and yet if she doesn't smile, it
is a breach of all the proprieties that should control a wife's
behaviour.

People will sometimes say that religious conversion effects a change of
heart. I very much doubt it. Under religion people remain what they were
before only they are more so. The influence of Wesley reached the middle
and lower classes among the English; & commercial before, they became
more commercial. The commercial instinct of selfishness was able
henceforth to call itself a duty, and took on religious airs; and a
large part of the religion of Belfast may be stated in a single sentence
'The man who sells his cow too cheap goes to Hell.' But when Wesleyism
affected the Irish leisured class, gentlemen before, they remained
gentlemen, only with more refinement of heart and a more subtle
sympathy. The wild men, described by Charles Lever, who cared for
nothing except romance and courage and personal glory, now walked in the
footsteps of their Lord and Master. In my youth I would sometimes hear
people say with self-complacency that there was no gentleman the equal
of an Irish gentleman. The boast was not altogether foolish. We all know
the type of Christian and Saint who has no manners. These men had
manners and cultivated them as part and parcel of the Christian ideal.
Back in the misty past I can see those quiet figures of a now forgotten
civilisation, whose gentility differed from that of the English as light
from darkness, and one especially, Sir Andrew Hart, who was Vice-Provost
of Trinity College Dublin, and a learned mathematician. I painted his
portrait, and one day, as I looked at him and admired his proud and
distinguished profile, I said 'Sir Andrew, I am sure nature intended you
to have been the leader of a tribe of insurgents in the Caucasus.' His
laugh did not repudiate the suggestion. Yet he had the gentlest manners,
imposing restraint on others by the restraint he imposed on himself. My
father sometimes said that if a man is rude to you it is always your own
fault, and I remember a bumptious man from Belfast, a cousin of my own,
who would complain that he could not get men to be civil to him. Sir
Andrew was a man singularly handsome, very tall, with great strength and
endurance. He told me that on the night of the great storm of 1839 he
walked thirty miles, the weather being so dreadful that no one would
lend him a horse.

He lived to be over eighty years of age, and his daughter-in-law told me
that he died because of some inadvertence, some chance neglect. There
are men who ought to live to be as old as Methuselah. It is some
accident, some chance of a window left open or a window kept shut, that
makes inevitable the shears of Clotho.

One of my greatest friends was a son of Sir Andrew Hart, George Vaughan
Hart. I painted his eldest daughter when she was a beautiful child, and
it was my delight afterwards to paint her when she had grown a beautiful
woman. She had a fascinating precipitation of thought and action that
recalled her mother, together with the beauty derived from both father
and mother. I've painted all sorts of people, but I think Ethel Hart was
my most difficult subject. She herself was indulgent and easy to please,
and her family did not much mind, but I could never please myself. I
think that it was because she was an enigma to herself and to me that
she tantalised me, being, as she was, just between girlhood and
womanhood. I lived in that house many days, perpetually failing and
perpetually hopeful.

One day stands out very distinctly in my memory. George Hart was at
home, working over law papers which he had brought into the
drawing-room, and all the family were there, and by good luck there came
that day, to enliven us and add its background to the happy scene, a
tremendous thunder-storm. And by further good luck there was present
Hart's maiden aunt who was very much afraid of thunder-storms. The house
was on the top of Howth Hill, a wild peninsula of mountain and heather,
jutting out into Dublin Bay. All around the house the lightening played
incessantly, the flames seeming to lick the windows of the room, and the
thunder was continuous, while the maiden aunt grew more and more
alarmed. She was pious also, which I have always noticed makes people
more afraid of thunder-storms. 'Dear, Dear,' Hart would say, after a
particularly frightful crash shaking the whole house. 'Dear, Dear! I
hope those lightening rods are well oiled.' And again after another
crash 'Well, Well, I should not like a volcano on Ireland's Eye' which
was a little rocky islet just outside the harbour. Knowing that Hart was
a geologist, I foolishly asked if Ireland's Eye had ever been a volcano.
'Not in my time' came the answer in his deep voice. The storm lasted for
a long time and through it all we talked and listened and were merry and
afraid, except the maiden aunt who was only afraid, while I pursued
steadily the painting of my beautiful model. I pity anyone who is not
afraid of a thunder-storm. Terror is a delightful feeling if beauty be
added to it. The Hebraic conception of Jehovah fascinates the
imagination, because it combines terror with its beauty. If children are
frightened by a thunder-storm, take them to a window and bid them watch
the lightening play among the clouds, and their fears will change into a
kind of exultation more delightful than listening to a fairy tale.
Beauty cleanses feeling. What more distressing, what more profoundly
disturbing than the ache inspired by sex passion; yet add romance and
beauty, and while the feeling remains, the ache is gone. It has been
cleansed. A tragedy acted on the stage inspires pity and terror, but if
that play be written by Shakespeare these feelings are cleansed--they
remain, but the ache is gone. Laughter also, like beauty, cleanses the
feelings. Its special value, I think, is as a cure for anger. Yet it
does not destroy the anger. The energy is still there, but changed into
merriment. There is the sunshine of beauty and the sunshine of laughter,
and in the great writers they often mingle and become one. All through
the beauty of 'Romeo and Juliet' laughter vibrates so that we do not
know whether to laugh or to cry.

Of this mirthfulness my friend George Hart had an ample supply. He was a
barrister and often engaged in important cases. When contention ran high
and everybody was very angry. Hart would still some portion of the
troubled waters by a comment, audible only to the barristers immediately
about him. My friend was not a wit, he was something infinitely better,
he was a humorist. Your wit is an aggressively sociable fellow who makes
his thrusts at other people, getting his fun out of their confusion, or
alarm, or astonishment. He wants a social success. Your humorist is only
amusing himself and surprising himself, getting enjoyment out of the
absurdities of life, and is quite as solitary as a poet or nightingale.

Beside his house was a lovely garden. I never saw so many flowers
crowded together in so small a space. All his spare time was given to
that oasis among the rocks and heather. He was tall and spare & for
hours together would work very quietly, making deliberate movements lest
he should break a stem or petal. Mrs. Hart told me that more than once
she had seen a robin alight on his head, and she insisted that, perched
on that eminence, one of them sang its thin little song. Every thing
that Hart knew he knew accurately, so that whether it was flowers or law
or practical business his judgement was infallible. What he did not
know, or could not know accurately and thoroughly, he put away from him,
and for that reason was a rigid conservative. A buoyant American full of
courage with the key of the future in his pocket was to him only another
absurdity in an amazing world. My own politics, which are akin to those
of American hopefulness, I never uncovered. I was afraid of that ironic
smile. Hart called his house Woodside, since it was close to a little
wood. Doctor Mahaffy, the late Provost of Trinity College, renamed it
'Heart's Ease' and so addressed his letters. Probably he did not quite
approve of that easy unambitious life. Adam in the Garden in the age of
Innocence, before Care had entered, would not have seemed an impressive
figure to a modern advocate of the strenuous and the progressive. My
friend ought to have been gardener and botanist always, but care entered
& drove him out into a world of malodorous Law Courts down beside the
river Liffey.

When I left school I entered Trinity College, and for the next four or
five years the man most dominant in my life was my uncle Robert Corbet.
I think of my poor uncle as a man of generous impulses who lived up to
his creed of being a gentleman, a worldling and a club man, nor did he
forget that he was a citizen of Dublin, of the type that flourished in
the eighteenth century. If he suspected his Catholic neighbours, all the
same he liked them; and if he had a certain respect for Englishmen, no
less he disliked them. Before I was born, he bought or leased, I never
knew which it was, Sandymount Castle, and then began creating all around
him beautiful gardens. Of business he knew little or nothing, and
probably neglected it, but he did not neglect his gardens. Every morning
he rose early, and would wander all over the grounds, sometimes with a
small saw and hatchet, making among the trees what he called 'vistas.'
He employed four or five gardeners, and as long as I knew Sandymount
Castle, none of these men ever left him and no one ever interfered with
them. So treated, they were gentle, pleasant and diligent, and the
gardens were lovely. There was a piece of water called the 'pond' on
which we boys did much boating, and there were plenty of wild ducks and
swans, and there was also an island on which was a one-roomed thatched
cottage, in which was a collection of souvenirs and relics brought back
from India and the Colonies by my uncle's brothers who had all been
soldiers. Outside the cottage were two chained eagles. As a child I
feared these eagles, and when I was a man they were there still, and
when my uncle, an old man, left Sandymount for good, they were sent to
the Zoological gardens, where for all I know they may still shriek and
flap their wings as was their habit on the Island. In and about
Sandymount Castle were various relics of departed worthies, among them a
wicked looking sword with a very long handle which my uncle Pat had
wrested from an enemy when leading the Forlorn Hope at the taking of
Rangoon. This uncle became Governor of Penang. All these things have
disappeared and no one remembers them but myself, and I mention them
now, not because I think they're likely to interest anybody, but because
I think it will please my old uncle to know that I have done so.

My father because of ill-health had retired from active work in his
parish and lived in a pretty house (it is at present the Presbyterian
College) surrounded by a high wall and separated from the Castle grounds
by a wicket-gate. All through my College days I lived the Sandymount
Castle life. It was my Capua and only too welcome after my school life.
I had been braced too tight, now I was braced too lightly:
self-abandoned to a complete relaxation. I left that school, weakened
morally by its constant discipline and vigilance, to live all my College
days in that pleasant Capua. I did not think, I did not work, I had no
ambition, I dreamed. Week after week went by, and no one criticised. As
far as the demands of that sympathetic circle went, I satisfied
everybody, and was well-behaved. The only thing that ever troubled my
uncle was my habit of going long walks in the mountains, all by myself.
His old-fashioned, eighteenth century gregarious worldliness was shocked
that I should walk all by myself, it seemed to him abnormal and he
distrusted the abnormal.

At school I had been well grounded as regards Latin and Greek, therefore
the ordinary college examinations gave me no trouble. In my last year I
read for honours in metaphysics and logic, but on the days of the
examination I was ill with rheumatic fever. Possibly had I read sternly
for these courses I should have turned away to the abstract side of life
and deserted, for good and all, the concrete world of colour and of
images. After taking my degree I won a prize in political economy, and
became acquainted with the works of J. S. Mill, and I began to think;
but though Capua vanished, I do not think that I thereby became a better
man. Certainly I was more disagreeable, for I wanted to quarrel with
everyone, making the mistake, common among polemical minded people, of
thinking that when I was severe to other people and the world generally,
I was severe to myself, although in reality I was acquiring the most
disagreeable of qualities, picking up the habits of dictatorial emphasis
& dogmatism, which I shall now never get rid of. This was not due to
Mill's teaching. Mill must have been the most persuasive man, while I in
my crudeness must have been the most dissuasive. Never would he have
allowed any authoritative self-conceit to come between him and the
truth. I once had the good fortune to hear him make a speech to
workingmen, and I thought that both as a speaker and a man he was of all
men the most winning. His audience did not cheer, they laughed as with
an intensity of enjoyment. At the time I compared the laughter in my own
mind to the sound made by the stringing of Ulysses' bow when he was
about to shoot the suitors, which Homer likened to the singing of
swallows. My own excuse for myself is that I lived for six years under
that severe Scotch school-master, who was all authority and
self-assertion, and that man is essentially an imitative animal. When I
began to think for myself I walked in the footsteps of my school-master.

With my uncle lived three old ladies, his mother who died when ninety
three, and her two sisters who lived to be over eighty. After the death
of these old people he continued to live alone in Sandymount and hoped
to die, as they did, in the odours of a well approved and well-tested
worldliness, but fickle and cruel fortune ruled otherwise. He lost his
money. How it went I don't know, I don't believe he himself knew, and
when he died an old man broken by creeping paralysis, there were some
debts whereof his assets sufficed to pay fifteen shillings in the pound,
his assets consisting of a collection of pictures, china and silver,
very valuable had Dublin only known it.

A sort of incrustation of legend had gathered about my uncle. One was
that he was an old Peninsular officer who had seen battles and sieges.
As a fact, his nearest approach to actual war was that, when quartered
in Hastings, he had had living with him a prisoner of war, a French
officer. Very pleasantly they lived together, going to a great many
parties and picnics, neither knowing the other's language, so there was
no possibility of disputes. Of that friendship the only trace remaining
was that my uncle always pronounced the word 'presentiment' with a
French accent.

Perhaps in the councils of the Eternal, or whatever you call the
Providence who shapes our ends, no time is lost and nothing whatever
wasted. Looking back on my uncle's long and pleasant life, ending in a
close so sombre, I will pass no judgement on the ways of Providence,
beyond saying that he was by nature a good man and deserved to be happy
to the end. He was fond of his friends, and wished to be only good to
them, and with his money he benefited hundreds. There are people who if
they do anything for you do thereby fix a hook in your jaws which you
can never get rid of. I think when he did you a kindness he forgot about
it and wished you to forget it. Of course his sympathies were extremely
narrow and did not extend beyond his relations and friends.
Humanitarism, which I had learned from Mill's philosophy, I would not
have dared speak of in his presence. Theory was my uncle's aversion; an
old Tory, he regarded theory as the Enemy. He was extraordinarily fond
of children. When we lived in the North of Ireland, his advent among us
was a radiant event. I can remember that one late winter's evening, when
with my mother and father he had just left for the mail coach that was
to take him to Dublin, out of pure affection and loneliness I went over
to the table and drank out of his tea-cup.

Having now spoken of the master of Sandymount Castle, let me now speak
of one whom my eldest sister called the Deputy Master, old Michael, who
for more than forty years was my uncle's butler. It was my mother who
hired him when he was a young man with black hair and blue eyes. Some
weeks afterwards he was found drunk. He at once, at my uncle's demand,
took the pledge, and never after broke it, even though we youngsters,
out of pure mischief, often tried to tempt him. I remember him as a man
of white hair with an amusing resemblance to John Stuart Mill--I say
amusing because Michael was short in stature and sturdily built, whereas
we all know J. S. M. was tall and slender. Before coming to my uncle he
had been butler to an English general whom he left because 'the Mistress
had insulted his religion,' which so distressed the general that he had
insisted on Michael driving from the house in the family carriage.
Michael himself told me this, and that when he had got to some distance
from the house, he transferred himself to a Dublin jaunting-car. He was
a perfect servant, yet I never knew a man of greater self-respect. The
Irish make good servants and their gentry make good masters, because
both are still mediævalists, and belong to an age when it was accepted
by everybody from the king to the peasant that to serve is honourable.
My uncle's manner with all his servants was brief and authoritative, as
though he could still send them to the guardroom, and these relations
with Michael never relaxed during all the forty years. All the same
Michael was Deputy Master. Sometimes when we were at dinner and Michael
attending us, he would say 'Mr. So-and-So called to day' & my uncle
would invariably reply 'Did you ask him to dinner?' 'Yes Sir'. My Uncle
came to see me in London, a few years before his death, and after he had
left Sandymount, and said 'When I told Michael of my intention, I
declare to God I don't know which of us should have been most pitied.'
When last I saw Michael he was ill and visibly failing. He came from his
bed-room with a blanket around his shoulders but his bright blue eyes
were the same as ever and he told me one of the old stories.

'Did I ever tell you, Mr. Johnnie, the story of Mr. O'Connell and the
officer?'

I had heard it at least fifty times, but I said it was new to me. The
officer was a witness called in some law case in which O'Connell was
employed.

'Mr. Soldier' said O'Connell, 'what do you know of this matter?'

'I am not a soldier, I am an officer' said the witness. 'Then' said Mr.
O'Connell 'Mr. Officer and no soldier, what do you know of this matter?'

Shortly before I left Ireland and law, to go to London and study art,
and while my uncle was still at Sandymount, Michael told me a
conversation he had with Butt. He said he was standing at the side door
when he saw Butt at a distance, and that Butt came over to him and shook
hands with him, and that he brought Butt into the oak room, and gave him
luncheon and wine, and that Butt talked to him of many things and that
finally Michael had said 'Now Sir, Mr. Johnnie is a Barrister, and you
ought to do something for him,' and Butt answered 'Michael, I will.' And
he did, in a way that, because of my resolution to go to England, was
vain, but it would have been a substantial help to me.

At that time my uncle and Butt had not been on speaking terms for some
years. In Butt's magnanimous mind and imagination were tides of feeling
and of old memory connected with Sandymount and with those that had been
its inmates that no quarrel could stand against. That was Butt all over.
In the old days he and his family constantly came to Sandymount, and
while his wife & children would scatter over the gardens and ground, he
would stay inside talking to the old ladies. They liked especially
playing backgammon with him. His reckless way of leaving blots
stimulated their imagination and made them feel that he really was a man
of genius. At this time he was the opponent of O'Connell and the hope of
the Tories, and Disraeli had walked in the lobby of the House of Commons
with his arm through his and said, 'Butt we must get you into the
Cabinet.' Afterwards, when Butt had gone over to the Nationalists, my
grandmother would say, 'I have a sneaking regard for Isaac Butt,' and
her sister would say, 'Indeed I know you have.'

There was a something in Butt, was it poetical genius or intellectual
power, was it the head or the heart, or was it merely primeval goodness,
that no one could resist. It followed him everywhere, and it followed
him into Court. I have seen a jury listening in constrained attitude of
painful attention, with the air of men resolved to do their duty at any
cost. Then the other Lawyer would cease to speak, and Butt would rise,
and every man of them would smile, like watchers by a sick bed who at
last saw arrive a great doctor who could work miracles, and Butt would
explain things in a language so simple that the dullest brain among them
would understand. It was part of his genius that he understood simple
people. It was well-known among solicitors that in a case in which his
feelings were not concerned he was no better than any other barrister,
but that where they were concerned he was irresistible. My father was
present at a dinner where there were assembled all the magnates of the
Irish Bar, and one and all declared that they never knew how a case
would go until they had heard Butt's speech, and, if I remember rightly.
Butt at this time was not over thirty years of age. There had been a
murder in County Donegal of which Butt was a native, and the family did
not wish him to take a part in the defence. Friends of the accused
called on him and, to put them off, he asked what he thought was an
impossible fee. They went away disappointed. Butt's imagination caught
fire from what they told him, and all night he walked his library
thinking about it, and when, contrary to his expectations, the men
called in the morning with the money, he had convinced himself and
undertook the defence, and so moving was his speech, that the jury, all
of them Presbyterians, when they left the Court and entered the Jury
Room, fell on their knees and prayed for guidance and help. The man was
acquitted. A friend of mine living in London, who had been a Dublin
solicitor in large practice, told me the following story. The Dublin
Corporation at the time he spoke of was composed of Protestants, and in
a very important case, for which my friend was solicitor, wanted to
employ Butt. He and his clients sought him everywhere and could not find
him. There was Sir This and Sir That--men whose names he spoke with a
kind of awe, yet neither he nor they could find Butt. Then, receiving
certain hints and rumours, they took cars and cabs and drove many miles
out of Dublin into the country & did at last find Butt, down on his
hands and knees in a field, studying a water-course, all on the behalf
of the poor ragged man who was standing beside him--a case, said my
friend, for which he wouldn't get five pounds, and at this time Butt was
a Tory politician, pledged to the service of the rich and powerful. My
friend was a big, heavily-built man, with a wheezy voice and irritable
eyes, punctiliously honest and truthful. He hated Home Rule and he
loathed the Catholic Church, a bitter Protestant of the Cromwellian
type, yet he liked to talk about Butt, and would rail against the people
who deserted him. I have often heard him say 'Of all the men I've ever
known. Butt had the best qualities.' The relation between these two men
was like that between Timon of Athens and his steward. With Flavius my
friend might have said:


'O Monument
And wonder of good deeds evilly bestowed'


Archer Butler, in his day a famous Platonist, once said in my father's
hearing, 'Butt, I leave you to the God who made you.' And so said all
men, the reason being, I think, that in Butt himself was such a fountain
of naturalness and humanity that people said 'This is the thing itself,
compared to which our moral codes are only the scaffolding.'

Archer Butler had just been appointed, by the Board of Trinity College,
Professor of Moral Philosophy. Butt knew that he had written an erotic
poem, very mild for these days but very terrible in those Victorian
days, and he went to congratulate him, bringing a copy of the Dublin
University Review with this identical poem inserted. Butt said to him
'Why on earth did you do such a thing as publish this poem?' Butler was
in consternation and believed himself lost. At this time the magazine
was very famous and widely read, publishing, as it did, the stories of
Lever and Carleton. It was of course a joke, for the copy showed to
Butler was the only one that contained the poem, and all contrived by
Butt who at that time was editor of the magazine. When Butt was Member
for Harwich, and the hope of the Tories, being as yet untouched by any
Irish heresies, Mrs. Butt, my father and mother, uncle Robert Corbet, a
cousin and I, all went in a body to visit Madame Tussaud's Wax-work
Exhibition. As we passed along among these figures, ghastly by an
imitation of life which seemed to be its sad mockery, Butt constituted
himself our guide, telling strange histories, partly true but mostly
imaginary. At all times Butt shone in this kind of inventions. A crowd
of strangers drew near, among them a little Clergyman particularly
active and vociferous in his applause and encouragement, and Butt was in
his element. Mrs. Butt at this time was young, as were all the party,
and the situation amused her so much that she sat down on a chair, the
better to enjoy her laughter. Seeing this Butt made pointed and
appealing allusions, and the crowd gave her black looks, which only
increased her merriment. My matter of fact cousin did not know that a
joke was in progress, and when the little Clergyman approached him and
said 'What a remarkable guide they keep in this establishment' he was
shocked and said 'He's not a guide, he is the member for Harwich.' The
crowd melted away, and Butt was indignant. 'Why' he said 'I meant to
have got sixpence apiece all round.'

The Irish spurn convention and are called cynical, and the English make
of it a religion and for their pains are called hypocrites. The fact
being that, while the English like the beaten way, we prefer the
untrodden way that leads to the surprising.

Trinity College Dublin did very little for me, which is entirely my own
fault, neither did Trinity College Dublin inspire me with affection, and
that was the fault of Trinity College Dublin. One night, in the College
park, walking under the stars with that brilliant scientist George
Fitzgerald, I saw him look round at some new buildings just erected and
with a snap of satisfaction he said, 'No ornament, that is one good
thing.' I made the obvious retort 'How is Trinity College Dublin to
inspire affection, if it is not made beautiful in its buildings, its
quadrangle, its trees and its park.' He gave a grunting assent. Had he
not been in a controversial mood, and ascetic for severe science, he
would have responded generously; for he was a true scientist, that is, a
poet as well. Trinity College inspires no love; outside what it has done
for learning and mathematics and things purely intellectual it has a
lean history. Still youth is youth, and the time of youth is pleasant to
look back upon. Fitzgerald, I have said, had a poetical mind, and that
means among other things that he took humanity in the lump. Indeed I
never knew any of that distinguished family that did not love the sinner
as much as they deplored the sin, & in this surely they showed
themselves to be Irish of the Irish. I leave it to others to explain,
for it is a quality which is not English or Scotch. Think of it, to love
the sinner! What a reach of mind it demands and what patience and long
practice in the right kind of sensibilities; remember Thomas Carlyle and
how he hated the sinner, being a sort of Public Executioner everywhere
and anywhere. I recall that when he died in the fullness of his glory
and success, and we all praised him, it was old Baron Fitzgerald, the
uncle of George Fitzgerald, who shocked us by calling out at his
dinner-table. 'The great Sham is dead, what is to be done with the great
Sham?' Yet Carlyle's hatred for the sinner was not sham but an active
quality of fierce anger for the encouragement of which and its
sustenance he had ransacked history and philosophy. I once saw him in
the flesh in London, in the Chelsea district, an old man, tottering
along very rapidly, wearing a blue frock coat with a large red rose in
his buttonhole. Instantly I saw who it was and stopped and turned round
to watch him as he receded, and he also turned round and looked at me,
and I saw his face, his ruddy cheeks and blue eyes, charged I thought
with a smouldering irascibility, and yet I could see the benevolence
that, had it not been Scotch and further infected by Prussian rigours,
would have brought pity and tenderness to drown that wrath. Yet it was
wrath, and bore no resemblance to the cold and treacherous cruelty of
Froude, in whose long horse-face was neither irascibility nor pity.
While I stood there watching the old sage, a British workman passed, his
bag of tools over his shoulder, and said in an aside--'A rare old file
that!'

There was a man named Thomas Allingham, a brother to the poet who
mentions him somewhere, as a man who had won a great reputation in
Trinity College Dublin but who was without any creative ability. If he
could not create he could write imitations of his brother's poems and
publish them with the poet's initials in the country newspaper of
Ballyshannon where these brothers were born. The poet was extraordinary
fastidious and exacting in all matters of style, never satisfied with
anything he wrote, and he was much the elder brother, claiming all the
rights of an elder brother who is fastidious about style. I knew Thomas
and was often in his rooms and very soon became aware of the spirit of
mischief that dwelt behind his gray eyes and half-closed heavy eyelids.
A Ballyshannon paper was declining, and its editor was a friend of
Allingham's. Allingham returning to College sought out a congenial
spirit named Green, and together they started to revive the paper by an
acrimonious controversy over the words 'telegram' and 'telegraph.' One
wrote a letter to that paper saying it should be 'telegraph' & the other
that it should be 'telegram.' I've seen them sitting together over
Allingham's fire, concocting lying paragraphs and offensive epithets to
be used against each other. Returning to Ballyshannon for his vacation
Allingham sowed in the general ear whispers and rumours as to impending
law suits. His next transformation was to become evangelical and pious.
He was a man of extraordinary mental power and this was all that he made
of it. Perhaps too much education is as bad as none at all. The poet
probably had none but what he picked up for himself. A well-stored
memory is something like too much orthodoxy. It captures the whole man
and arrests the dreaming faculty and inhibits initiative.

There is yet another memory which comes to me from Trinity College and
comes pleasantly. I lost my orthodoxy. I was reading Butler's Analogy,
that delectable book which, by my fathers account he, and some other man
alone understood, when I suddenly amazed myself by coming to the
conclusion that revealed religion was myth and fable. My father had
himself pushed me into the way of thinking for myself; and my Scotch
school-master, who had lived on his own resources since he was twelve
years old, acquiring thereby a bold and independent spirit, had
unconsciously assisted in the process. Thus it came about that I had the
courage to reject the Bishop's teachings, drawing an entirely different
conclusion from the premises he placed before his reader, and with it
went also my worldly-minded uncle's hope that some day I should be a
respectable, Episcopalian clergyman. Everything now was gone, my mind a
contented negation. At school my ethics had been based on fear of the
school-master and now was gone fear of God and God's justice. I went to
Church when I couldn't help it, that is once every Sunday. I do not know
how it is now-a-days, but at that time Churches were so crowded that
young men, unable to find a seat, remained the whole service through
standing in the aisle. This exactly suited my inclinations, especially
in one of the Kingstown churches down by the sea, for there I could
stand all the two hours at the front door, half within and half without,
so that while listening to the clergyman I could at the same time
comfort my eye and soothe my spirit by looking toward the sea and sky.
The Reverend Hugh Hamilton, Dean of Dromore, reckoned the most learned
man in the Diocese, had determined that my father should, on presenting
himself for ordination, be rejected because of his love for hunting,
shooting and fishing and I may add, dancing, but was so impressed by his
profound knowledge and understanding of Butler's Analogy that he became
and continued from that hour on his constant friend. Yet this book that
made my father a proudly orthodox man had shattered all my orthodoxy, so
that I preferred sea & sky and floating clouds to the finest pulpit
oratory of the Reverend Richard Brooke, father of the brilliantly
successful Stopford. Yet I dared not say so, poetic and artistic
intuitions not having reached at that time the dignity of any sort of
opinion, theory, or doctrine. The finest feelings are nothing if you
cannot bulwark them with opinions about which men wrangle and fight.
Looking back I am convinced that I might have talked with my father,
that he would have met me and come with me half way, but only half way.
On a perilous journey one is more apt to quarrel with the man who
accompanies you for part of the way and then stops, than with him who
refuses even to set out on the journey. My father, a rector of the
Episcopalian Church and at one time an eloquent preacher of the
Evangelical form of doctrine, could not have come all the way. My aunt,
dear old Mickey, would not have said a word in opposition, but would
have been greatly distressed and prayed her hardest in secret communion
with God. My uncle Robert, would have been amused and, on worldly
grounds, somewhat alarmed.

I used to know pretty well an intellectual and cultivated priest and we
had many talks together. I said to him that I liked so much. Catholic
philosophy and was so attracted by his Church's stupendous history, and
high pomp of good and evil that I would join it but for one difficulty;
and when with some eagerness he asked what that was, I answered: 'How
could I ever believe in the supernatural? Give that up,' I said, 'and I
will join you.' I was much amused to notice that he seemed to hesitate,
as if he thought there was something in what I said, and that with some
adroitness a concession might be granted. Then he threw up his arms and
shouted in his deep Kerry voice: 'No, impossible; we should collapse
altogether.'

Some weeks after this conversation I was lunching with my friend John
Dowden and told him of what I said to the priest. 'What did he reply?'
he asked looking very much alive. 'That it was impossible, for without
the supernatural you would collapse altogether.' 'Of course we would, of
course we would,' he repeated in a musing, grumbling kind of voice; & to
myself I laughed thinking many things which I did not utter aloud.

Now and again I went down to the pretty village of Monasterevan in
County Kildare, thirty miles from Dublin, to stay with my uncle John
Yeats, the County Surveyor. There was a house full of children,
blue-eyed fair-haired, all gay and all lively, like a crystal fountain
welling out of a rock, for there was little money and no pleasure and
excitement. All these little people had just to depend on themselves for
instruction and amusement and were yet happy, being like canaries in a
cage who, having been born there, know no other life; partly also
because of a certain inexhaustible vitality and its natural
accompaniment, good temper and kindness. I loved to be with these
people, little and big: merely to be in the same room with my uncle or
to be in the same field (for he was a sort of amateur farmer) was
happiness. He was very clever and, if he was ever unhappy, it was when
he remembered that no one knew how clever he was: but I knew all about
his cleverness and relished his laconic and fragmentary talk on men and
things. In his eyes to be happy was to be good, and yet he had some
reasons for being uneasy.

The County Grand Juries will not hold an honoured place in Irish
history, particularly when, as in Kildare, made up of rich men. One of
these landlords wrote to my uncle, asking him to pass the account of a
certain contractor engaged in mending the road, stating frankly that if
that account was not passed the landlord's rent would not be
forthcoming. This letter was written politely, addressed on the envelope
to 'John Yeats, Esq.' commencing with the usual 'Dear Mr. Yeats.' The
work was not well done and my uncle did not pass the account. Thereupon
my uncle received another letter addressed to 'Mr. Yeats,' the letter
itself commencing with the formal unfriendly 'Dear Sir' and containing
an angry complaint that the trees near the writer's park gate were not
kept pruned, so that his coachman's hat had been knocked off. The rich
Irish landlords were a banditti whom the laws safe-guarded, since it was
supposed that upon their allegiance depended the safety of the English
connection, and if some were good and kind from the spirit of order many
of them were like the man who wrote that impertinent note to my uncle;
some indeed were good and kind in themselves but forced to be rapacious
and cruel because of the mortgagees who had them in their grip. These
mortgagees themselves were often kind old ladies who read their
Protestant Bibles and were as gentle as their necessities and piety
would permit them to be.

Not for worlds, not for anything you could reasonably offer would I
revisit Monasterevan. The stones in the walls and the very twisting of
the roads would bring back to me all that lost happiness & my Uncle and
Aunt & all the little children so innocent and so clever. Perhaps their
cleverness was of little avail because of their innocence. To be cut off
from sin and evil is to be cut off from so much that, entering into our
intricate being, is necessary to mental power and effectiveness. These
people lived for other people. To be with them was to find yourself
among those to whom your happiness was all that mattered. And I may add
that they had great nervous energy, an incessant activity, as the law of
their existence. I remember also that they were physically intrepid. The
eldest son would ride the wildest horses over the biggest jumps, each
time taking his life in his hand, for he never learned to ride well, had
some natural incapacity for it which nothing would overcome. The four
sons are all dead and gone, happy to the last and unsuccessful. One of
the girls is now an old maid, shut away from everyone by some kind of
religion of which no one but herself can make head or tail. All these
people were merry because they asked nothing for themselves. Yet asking
nothing for themselves they got nothing, for so are things constituted.

Civilization is always putting people into positions where no one can
remain good except by becoming heroically virtuous. No one expected our
Irish landlords to be heroes. For one thing they had no country. England
disowned them and they disowned Ireland. There are so many bad angels
that one needs all the good angels to fight against them, and one of
these good angels has always been for Irishmen a love of his native
land. The Englishman is proud of his empire on which the sun never sets.
The good Irishman loves Ireland as in Shakespeare's day the Englishman
loved England, affection not vanity the essence of the relation. The
historic sense, which is so fatally lacking in America, abounds among
the Irish peasants when they gather in their cottages and talk together
and scheme, and hope intensifies this affection. The American, like the
Englishman, is very proud of his vast country, its wealth and its
millions of people. The Irishman has nothing to boast of except that his
country's history is sorrowful and lovable. In life there are a few
great rhythms; there is friendship and domestic affection, and conjugal
love and the feeling of a youth for a maiden; sovereign over all is
patriotism, compared to which internationalism is cold and abstract like
a mathematical formula, intelligible only to the ideologue, who is
himself a bloodless person, a Rousseau dropping his five children into
the foundling basket. I think the Irishman, unspoiled by too much
contact with the Englishman, has the charm of being natural. Sir Walter
Scott, after making amusing comparisons between him and the English and
the Scotch, wrote that, given his chance, the Irishman would be 'the
best of the triune.' Of course it was this naturalness, this constant
and most potent spontaneity that won the heart of the great writer. It
is our second thoughts that lead us astray; first thoughts in conduct
are right, as Blake says they are in art.

There is one idealism always present and alive in the Irish
peasant-heart, war with England. The soil is volcanic with it, so that
if you scratch the surface it is ready to blaze forth. When my
brother-in-law and I were out shooting, we met an old man, and looking
into an empty barn, my brother-in-law asked how many men it would
accommodate as sleeping quarters? He gave us a sharp look and said,
'When you bring yer men, we will find a better place than that for
them.' I think this anecdote would please Sir Walter Scott and be a mere
foolishness to George Bernard Shaw and his teacher Sam Butler. I am now
writing of the Island that used to be, when poverty, conversation, and
idleness kept company with each other around the turf fire in the
winter, or on the hillside in summer, an ancient spirituality was always
present there and a kind of humour, sometimes gentle like Goldsmith's
and often, especially in the cities, iconoclastic like Swift's, or like
Tim Healy's when he was first in Parliament. The soul of Ireland was
partly pagan and that was good for lovers and for sensuous poetry;
partly Catholic and Christian and that was good for the sorrowful and
for lovers also; and partly patriotic and that was good for the
courageous, whether young or old.

My niece writes to me of the 'appalling commonness of the Australian
mind.' The Irish peasant mind is not common, is indeed so interesting
that the peasants in the west of Ireland can enjoy themselves in
solitude, poetized, if I may use such a word, by their religion, by
their folk lore, and by their national history, and by living under a
changeable sky which, from north to south and from west to east is a
perpetual decoration like the scenery in some vast theatre. Synge,
spiritually the most fastidious man I ever knew and the proudest, who
turned away from modern French literature, told me that he preferred
their society to the comforts of the best hotel. They are so happy in
themselves and in each other's conversation that they are conservative,
as conservative as the people behind the barriers of privilege. It is,
the people with 'common minds' who quarrel with themselves and with
life, and are a homeless people and seek for change, for experiment and
for progress. It is the unhappy people who make the world go round. Yet
these happy people might also help progress if the impossible should
take place and we could teach them the technique of the arts. Perhaps
they might not think it worth the trouble? Yet it is among people of
this sort, whose imagination is vivid and whose will has been broken by
dreams & visions, that the arts have always flourished. And remember if
these peasants have not the will power which has made the dull people of
Belfast such an edifying success, all the same they have their own
intensity, and I myself and there are more like me, would rather listen
to a Mayo man whistling a tune, or telling a fairy tale or ghost story,
than to the greatest man out of Belfast or Liverpool, talking of his
commercial triumphs. Synge spoke of their poetical language, and ranked
it above any written in his plays. I heard of a servant girl who on her
master the priest's return from America told him that she was glad to
see him back for there had been the 'colour of loneliness' in the air. I
fancy that in Shakespeare's age I can find three things: conversation,
freedom of thought and idleness, and there was a fourth--the soul of
romance and of laughter. In my youth, Ireland possessed all of these
except freedom of thought. The last she now has; may she be allowed to
keep it. The others are under sentence to quit, if they are not already
gone, the passion for material success, and the remorseless logic it
inculcates, will have none of them. It is as if a flower garden, enjoyed
by women and children and simple souls had been turned into a cabbage
patch. I suppose the change is pleasing to G. B. Shaw and to reformers
generally. Reformers must work with public opinion and public opinion
has gross appetites.

Let me now tell a story of the city and therefore unlovely. Before the
police came, Dublin and towns generally were in the guardianship of
watchmen nicknamed 'Charlies', and a state of war existed between them
and the young men. My uncle, Arthur Corbet, has told me some of the
tricks he and his friends used to play on these old rascals, such as
bundling one of them into a cab and carrying him off into the country
and leaving him there to find his way back, and to explain to his
superior why he was absent from his post. But the old rascals could
sometimes retaliate. One morning before dawn my uncle was walking with
dog and gun through the quiet streets toward the open country for a
day's shooting. As my uncle hurried through the dark, noiseless morning
mist, he was confronted by a 'Charlie,' and the 'Charlie' flung himself
down on the pavement & sprung his rattle & roared for help. My uncle was
well aware of the diabolical nature of the 'Charlie' mind; he himself
and others had done the best to make it so, therefore he did not delay,
but without a word ran with his dog by another street, parallel to the
one where he was stopped, until he got away a good distance and then in
the foggy misty light cautiously crossed the street. At its far end he
could see the 'Charlie' standing among a crowd of other 'Charlies.' My
uncle indulged in many such escapades in his youth. It was considered
good style and was no doubt a tradition; but I think these things
afterwards burthened my uncle's memory when he was old and was trying to
comfort his chilly and solitary bachelor existence with Bible
Christianity. He was a disappointed man. He stammered in his speech. All
his brothers became officers in the Army. For him this was impossible
because of his stammer. He became a clerk in the Bank of Ireland, yet
could not be promoted because of his stammer. Luck in every way was
against him. He had great gifts as a caricaturist, and would sometimes
compliment his friends by doing pictures of them which turned them into
enemies. I think he disapproved of me, yet on fishing or shooting
expeditions he was the pleasantest of companions. He was both
affectionate and cranky, but in the open country, the day fine and the
fishing good, he was companionable and affectionate and no longer
cranky.

In my post graduate year I won the prize in Political Economy. It was
ten pounds and my first earnings, and with that money in my pocket I
visited Sligo and stayed with my old school friend, George Pollexfen. At
that time you reached Sligo by taking the train to Enniskillen and then
by public car to Sligo. To catch that train I had to rise early, and on
such occasions the family trusted in my father, he was our alarm clock,
which never failed. I remember that on that morning he said to me 'I see
you are very sleepy, I will return a little later,' and his tall, white
figure flitted from the room. When dressed and ready I sat for some time
at his bedroom door, and as he lay in bed he talked of Sligo, which he
had not seen since his father died in 1846, and of how he would like to
go there, and take a car early some morning, and visit all the places
that he had known and then get away before any one was awake. Only thus
would he visit a place where he had been so happy and young, his heart
of course too full for company.

I have never forgotten the first evening of my arrival in Sligo. Five
miles from the town, at the mouth of the river, is a village called
Rosses Point, and the Pollexfens were staying there for the summer.
George and I walked on the sand hills which were high above the sea. The
sign of happiness in the Pollexfens has always been a great
talkativeness,--I suppose birds sing and children chatter for a similar
reason. George talked endlessly--what about I forget, excepting that he
several times sang one of Moore's melodies, which he had lately heard at
a concert. Indeed, I think the talk was mostly about that concert. The
place was strange to me and very beautiful in the deepening twilight. A
little way from us, and far down from where we talked, the Atlantic kept
up its ceaseless tumult, foaming around the rocks called Dead Man's
Point. Dublin and my uneasy life there & Trinity College, though but a
short day's journey, were obliterated, and I was again with my school
friend, the man self-centered and tranquil and on that evening so
companionable. I had been extraordinarily fond of him at school where I
was passive in his hands. I have sometimes an amused curiosity in
thinking whether he cared for me at all, or how much he cared, but it
has been only curiosity. I was always quite content with my own liking
for him.

In my family, and in the society which I frequented in Dublin, the
master desire was for enjoyment. Yet do not mistake me; it was not
pleasure, which is animalism efflorescent. By enjoyment I mean the
gratification of the affections and the sympathies and of the spirit of
hopefulness. We lived in the sunlight and did our very best to keep
there. It was demoralizing but all the same delightful, and from a moral
point of view it had its good side. We solved all our doubts in matters
of conduct by thinking well of our fellow creatures, which is exactly
the opposite of what the puritans do, and we prided ourselves upon it;
we considered it a gentlemanly trait. Our censorious neighbours, who
thought badly of each other, we dismissed from our minds as vulgar
people. Or rather we considered that the puritan conception of human
nature was admirably adapted to the kind of people who believed in it,
but was never intended for us or for our friends. It was a shock to pass
from a society, where people enjoy themselves and laugh gaily, not being
at all concerned about moral issues, to a society where no one thought
of enjoyment, and if they laughed did so with a grim humour that was not
always good-natured, where the air itself was heavy with moral
disapprobation of the world generally and of themselves in particular.
Yet in my bones I felt it to be something salutary. At home and among my
friends everyone did as they liked, provided that they were tactful and
sympathetic with each other. We were a city without rules, and might
verge at times into being a city of misrule. Here on the contrary was
rule and strictest order.

A man, suddenly come amongst my wife's relations, would think that they
were a people of strong primitive instinct, and great natural
kindliness, all smothered in business. I very quickly came to a
different conclusion for I had known intimately my old friend George.
The master principle in that family was what I may describe as
self-loyalty, each member of that family a concrete embodiment of
Shakespearean teaching:


'To thine own self be true;
And it must follow as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.'


In my society we were loyal to the social principle. We lived for
society and worshipped its pleasant needs, and for reward we had our
social conceit. This conceit was a feather in our caps, which we wore
gallantly and lightly, not at all flauntingly. In this, and in all
matters, we escaped the vice of pretension. Our wit and humour for
instance, and that of Dublin society generally, was wit for wit's sake;
and with delighted superiority we thought of the English, who would
incorporate their dull morality into the most trivial actions and words.
We ridiculed and criticised each other with great freedom, and with
French malice, but since we had no mission to reform anybody we would
keep the joke to ourselves, the victim knowing nothing of it. Thus we
spared his feelings and the joke was all the better. It was, perhaps,
demoralizing, because in our pursuit of enjoyment we put aside what did
not quite suit us; we never, for one thing, looked into the lower
abysses of human nature. We did not absolutely deny that there were such
things as hatred and rage and unbridled appetite and lust, but we forgot
all about them. Indeed, it was not good form to mention such things.
Thus we lived pleasantly, but falsely, and yet we did believe in human
nature, at least in _our_ human nature, in parental affection & in
conjugal faith and loyalty between friends. On this matter we had a
trustfulness that was at once romantic and robust. Parents and children
and husbands and Wives and friends and comrades, at least in our
circles, would have stood by each other to the death. As regards Ireland
our feelings were curious, and though exceedingly selfish not altogether
so. We intended as good Protestants and Loyalists to keep the papists
under our feet. We impoverished them, though we loved them, and their
religion by its doctrine of submission and obedience unintentionally
helped us, yet we were convinced that an Irishman, whether a Protestant
or Catholic, was superior to every Englishman, that he was a better
comrade and physically stronger and of greater courage. My mother's
family had been for generations officers in the English army and I fancy
drew that strong faith from their experience in many military campaigns.
I might in my youthful impudence have sneered at many things and nobody
would have taken the trouble to contradict me, but I did not venture to
doubt the superiority of Irishmen to everybody in England.

At Sligo, I was the social man where it was individual man that counted.
It is a curious fact that entering this sombre house of stern
preoccupation with business I for the first time in my life felt my self
to be a free man, and that I was invited by the example of everyone
around me to be my very self, thereby receiving the most important
lesson in my life. The malady of puritanism is self-exaggeration,
'self-saturation' is the medical term. Even Shakespeare had experience
of it, if we interpret as personal and literal the first line in one of
his sonnets: 'Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye.'

That is the malady, the excess, and there's plenty of it in puritan
middle-class England, but the good side is that the puritan belongs to
himself, whereas the votary of the religion of social enjoyment belongs
to his neighbours and to society, so that not even on his death-bed can
he return to himself. The Pollexfen charm was in their entire sincerity,
John Pollexfen the seaman once told me, he was greatly troubled because
it took him so long to make up his mind. Napoleon might have made a
similar admission. This slow vacillation is always characteristic of
entire sincerity. The man of society possesses a quick facility in
making up his mind. He does not belong to himself, and the rules of
society are written on his heart and brain. He is what is called
well-bred. The individual man of entire sincerity has to wrestle with
himself, unless transported by rage or passion; he has so much mind to
make up, with none to help him and no guide except his conscience; and
conscience after all, is but a feeble glimmer in a labyrinthine cavern
of darkness.

I think it was Shakespeare the poet, and not the thinking Shakespeare or
the wise Shakespeare, who made that discovery about the importance of
self-loyalty, for it is the root of every kind of poetical distinction,
and without distinction poetry is of little avail. It is reported that
Swinburne in some fit of petulance said that he and Shelley were better
poets than anybody else because they were gentlemen. My criticism is
that both these poets are lacking in the entire sincerity of the
greatest poets, that because Keats has this entire sincerity he is
better than either. I find, indeed, in Shelley and Swinburne activity,
animation, eloquence. I find in Keats force as of mother nature. 'What
man,' says the Bible, 'by taking thought can add one cubit to his
stature?'

Yet let any young poet stay for a while among the puritans and practise
all the restraints of self-loyalty, and he will turn his sociable
activity and animated sympathy into something which is much better,
namely force. It is a foolish question, yet I wonder did Shakespeare
undergo that kind of discipline?

It is evident from what I have written that to live amongst my people
was pleasanter, but that to live amongst the Pollexfens was good
training. Which of these two civilizations was best for the human
product I have never, in my own mind, been able to decide. What we all
seek is neither happiness nor pleasure but to be ourselves through and
through. The man born or made sorrowful would go on being sorrowful, and
the man who is joyous would be more joyous, & the spiritually minded man
more spiritual, and the materialistic more materialistic. Thus like the
plants & the animals we would grow, each after its own kind. It is
obvious that the puritan doctrine of self-loyalty is serviceable to this
kind of growth. Yet the puritan doctrine would cut off the sunshine of
enjoyment and pleasure and easy relaxation, and the poet or artist,
though self-loyalty be the condition of every excellence, must have
enjoyment. He must have tears and laughter & romance and vision and
relaxation and ease, otherwise his soul for poetry and beauty withers
and dies away. Among my friends and in their type of civilization we
made enjoyment of first importance, and for that reason we were eager
for art and poetry, which are all made of enjoyment. Yet it was bound to
come to nothing, because we had not that deep sincerity, which is
another name for what may be indifferently called human force or, better
still, genius. Inarticulate as the sea cliffs were the Pollexfen heart
and brain, lying buried under mountains of silence. They were released
from bondage by contact with the joyous amiability of my family, and of
my bringing up, and so all my four children are articulate, and yet with
the Pollexfen force.

Commerce is war, each man watching to take the bread out of his
neighbour's mouth, and puritanism with the doctrine of the inherent
badness of human nature is well calculated to hearten the fighters.

My old friend George, as full of human nature as an egg is of meat, held
the puritan doctrine. He condemned all his neighbours impartially; he
had not however like the ordinary man any self-complacent acrimony, no,
that was not his way. He was an indulgent and compassionate puritan,
because a consistent puritan. If he condemned others he condemned
himself also, and he sadly saw himself in those predestined sinners and
transgressors and backsliders. Now he was a chief of story tellers. I
remember the late York Powell, that Savant who by some strange accident
was also a man of genius, praising one of his stories, saying it was the
best he had ever listened to. He would tell a story that would take at
least two hours in the telling and it would be about nothing at all, yet
as it grew and developed, the mere nothing became everything, because he
would mass together such richness of significant detail. Long ago at
school he slept in a room known as number twelve, and in it slept all
the bigger boys of the school. There was a rule that every boy should
keep perfectly silent once in bed and the gas turned out. George would
keep all that room awake--sleepy schoolboys though they were--telling
them in a whisper long stories made in the fashion of Dumas & Fenimore
Cooper. All his life he delighted compassionately in the foibles of
dandies from the time of Dumas down to our own times, especially if they
were military. He had a gift for every kind of indulgence. He never
showed capacity for any religions or poetic ecstasy. I could not
conceive his reading Shelley with understanding, yet Keats would have
pleased him. He was pitiful for men and women and animals and the very
plants in the garden. He was as pitiful as St. Francis of Assisi. In
this I do not in the least exaggerate. A convinced puritan, holding the
doctrine as profoundly as he held all his beliefs, he was naturally a
melancholy man. His doctor said of him after his death that he was by no
means a delicate man, 'but very low spirited.' The ordinary puritan, in
the buoyant strength of high animal spirits, reacts against every kind
of depression. He is pessimist as regards other men, as regards himself
a confirmed optimist. My old friend, because of his uncheered solitary
existence in a small town under a rainy sky beside the sad sea wave,
suffered in some degree from what I have called the puritan malady
self-exaggeration. He was full of himself and that self all doubt and
dreariness, yet among genial friends who loved him it soon passed away.
When he came to my house he would invariably dedicate the first evening,
or part of it, to this kind of sorrowful personal preoccupation, sighing
and shaking his head, complaining aloud of everything, and we who knew
him would wait, and be outwardly sympathetic, while inwardly we smiled.
At hand grips with hard times we were naturally a little incredulous of
the sorrows of an old bachelor who was exceedingly well off and knew how
to take care of his money. He had small eyes, very blue, and straight
eyebrows and a long skull stretching far back such as I have always
found in conjunction with a marked capacity for detail. He was at the
same time an exceedingly good listener, and well as he talked I think he
preferred listening. Had the destinies permitted he might have become a
great student and a recluse and buried himself in a university. His
expression was strangely wistful, his eyes seemed to peep at you like
stars in the early twilight. Although a successful trader he said that
his success and I believe him--_was_ due entirely to his chief clerk and
an elder brother's advice. He did not look as if he belonged to the
actual world. Indeed he had become the denizen of another world. My
stammering uncle tried to comfort his latter years with Bible
Christianity and an occasional prayer meeting. George chose better, he
studied books on magic and he practised in the ancient science of
astrology. It was my son W. B. Yeats who put him on the track of these
wonders, and what was in some degree only occasional with my son was to
my friend the passion of his life. I think my son looks a poet; I know
George looked an astrologer. His eyes were the eyes of second sight. I
think indeed he knew the future better than he knew the present and the
past. He had a scared look, as if he saw ghosts that no one else could
see, & his horoscopes as many can testify were verified. He foresaw and
predicted almost to the day, and certainly to the week, when my friend
York Powell would die, and he did this more than a year before, when
York Powell was in perfect health. When the London 'Times' announced
that York Powell was making good recovery, 'No' said George 'the stars
are still there.' The last weeks of his life were characteristic. My
eldest daughter always spent her summer holidays with him. Arriving one
evening she was surprised to find him in bed and he at once said to her,
'Lily I think I am going'. He lived on for six weeks spending his time
calmly reading novels for which she searched the country. He would read
only what is called serious fiction, and not once again did he speak of
death till two days before the end, when he gave her minute directions
as to certain things she was to do after his death, how she was to
distribute certain small sums of money which she would find in his
pockets. He died at day-break while the Banshee, heard by my daughter
and two nurses, was wailing around the house. Business men cried when
told of his death; they said he had an attractive personality.

Puritans claim to be fervent Christians who draw all their wisdom from
the Bible. In my mind they have no Christianity at all. They cling to
their creed of the badness of human nature, because it helps them in
their unnatural war of commercial selfishness. As you would get the
better of your opponents, and to the commercial mind all the neighbours
are opponents except here and there a fellow conspirator, it is a mighty
encouragement to be able religiously to believe the worst of them; that
is why puritanism flourishes among traders. This combination of
selfishness and religion results in the belief, implied rather than
expressed, that a successful man is a sort of a secular saint, and it
lay like a heavy stone on George's conscience. He tried to cast it from
him; he expressed his scorn of it; I've heard him do so again and again;
yet he could not altogether get rid of the obstruction. At any rate I
cannot otherwise account for the fact that I myself, who was his oldest
and indeed his only friend, was in the latter years of his life an exile
from his affections. But my son was the pride of his life. (Ah, if he
had only been called Pollexfen instead of Yeats.) An applauded poet is
better after all than a rich trader, a more conspicuous success. He
would have liked to have kept him always with him, that he might watch
over him as he did over his race-horses. My son tells me that dining
with him was like taking a doctor's prescription, so careful was George
that he should eat the right food and chew it properly. The racing men
of Sligo, when in the evening they visited the old bachelor to benefit
by his knowledge of the racing world, always opened operations by
inquiring about the nephew, & when he had exhausted this subject which
took some time and must have bored them terribly, those poor fellows who
cared as much for poetry as they did for Sanscrit, would artfully lead
him to the other subject of his affections. After which they would
depart and make their bets. He himself never made a bet. I think indeed
he once lost or won, I forget which, ten shillings. He has told me with
perfect sincerity, indeed with shame and contrition of spirit, that he
disliked making money because it put him to so much trouble, and yet he
was most careful of it, and though he would lend money to a friend and
ask no security, he had to be perfectly satisfied in the most meticulous
way as to the nature of the demand so that he might lend on some
ascertained principle. The same sense of order, the same physical moral
and mental neatness kept him a lonely bachelor. In his eyes marriage and
domestic entanglements were things disorderly, all chance and change, a
sort of wild experiment. More than once he had expressed to me his
wonder, that sensible men would incur such risks.

Now what would have happened had this man been born into conditions that
were not puritanical? It is my belief that he would have become a writer
of note and power. At school his education was backward. His commercial
family and he himself had attached no importance to things of the mind.
When I entered the university I implored him to remain on at school, and
prepare himself for Trinity College, and I remember that my father
became greatly interested, but _Dis aliter visum_--he entered his
father's office and began his dreary and uncongenial pilgrimage remote
from books & intellectual companionship.




Here ends 'EARLY MEMORIES: SOME CHAPTERS OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY BY JOHN BUTLER
YEATS.' Five hundred copies of this book have been printed and published
by Elizabeth C. Yeats at the Cuala Press, Churchtown, Dundrum, in the
County of Dublin Ireland. Finished in the last week of July nineteen
hundred and twenty three, the second year of THE IRISH FREE STATE.








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