The Project Gutenberg EBook of Early memories; some chapters of autobiography, by John Butler Yeats This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Title: Early memories; some chapters of autobiography Author: John Butler Yeats Contributor: William Butler Yeats Editor: Elizabeth Corbet Yeats Release Date: August 9, 2020 [EBook #62893] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EARLY MEMORIES *** Produced by Laura Natal Rodrigues at Free Literature (Images generously made available by Hathi Trust.)
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.
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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